Moving On (96 page)

“They couldn’t very well be less clear,” she said, and she meant it. The thought of herself and Davey having to move into the huge house alone was appalling. It was all wrong. It spoiled everything.

But Jim refused to talk about it. He didn’t want any more fights. He was relieved that Patsy remained as composed as she did and he wanted to leave her composed. They chatted a little longer, sitting at the kitchen table, with Davey fretting and trying to open one of the lower doors of the cabinet. He could never get it open and it bugged him. Patsy asked Jim when he was thinking of leaving and Jim said he didn’t know. Possibly that weekend, he added. There was no point in hanging around. Patsy said she supposed not, though without conviction. Jim stayed long enough to distract Davey from the frustrating cabinet and then left.

After he left she began to hurt. She could not understand it, could not believe it. That he would sleep with Clara, yes; but that in the space of four days he would simply leave her and go somewhere with another woman? It didn’t seem real, didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem like Jim. They had hurt each other in all sorts of ways and perhaps they didn’t love each other in the right ways but still such an action chilled her and hurt her in the breast. It didn’t seem possible.

She spent the afternoon as she had spent the morning, except that she took Davey for a short walk in his stroller. She contemplated the Hortons but didn’t turn in their direction. She had a feeling she would collapse if she went there. She walked a few blocks and went home again.

The next day Jim came again. Classes were out on Friday and he and Clara had decided to leave that night. He felt in a terrific state of tension and wanted to leave before something exploded. Clara had been ideal during it all, quiet and comforting, not pushing and not pulling. She was a steady girl and she was fond of him. He felt very guilty but made no move to back out. It seemed to him he had done Patsy an irreparable wrong. There was no use in doing something equally bad to Clara.

Patsy was no longer so composed, but she had broken in the direction of tears rather than anger. She couldn’t understand it and despite herself kept weeping.

“I don’t see what’s so hard to understand,” he said. “You know how we’ve been.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “But it all seems so minor compared to this. I mean, four years. Haven’t they meant anything to you?”

“Of course they’ve meant something.”

“Then I don’t understand. Don’t I mean anything to you? Are you really all that in love with her?”

“I never said I was in love with her,” Jim said.

“Oh, please make more sense. Why are you leaving me to go to California with her if you don’t even love her?”

“Because I have to leave you, anyway,” he said. “We just do one another harm. I have to leave so we’ll stop. I’d just as soon go to California as anywhere else. It makes just as much sense.”

“It doesn’t to me,” Patsy said, sobbing. “It doesn’t at all. Not right at Christmastime.”

Jim saw the argument was getting nowhere, so he got a few more of his things, mostly cameras, and got ready to leave. He decided in the end not to take any books, a bit of whimsey that turned Patsy abruptly from sorrow to fury.

“All right, don’t take them!” she yelled. “You better be back and do something about them before I have to move or you’ll never see a goddamned one of them again. I’m not going to move your goddamned books for you. If you think you can leave me to cart around the results of your stupid hobbies while you’re off screwing that bitch you can think again.”

Jim left her raging. He came back once more, on Friday afternoon, and stayed half an hour. They were desperately superficial the whole time; they didn’t feel they dared be themselves. Though Jim was going, he felt terribly undecided; once out of the house and in the new Mustang he had bought for the trip he felt that if only Patsy had given him some sign that she wanted him he would have broken with Clara and stayed. Patsy, once he had shut the screen door, sat and cried. She felt she had been beseeching him the whole time he was there, and yet he had ignored her. Two days later, when he called from Phoenix to find out how they were, all they did was disagree about their last meeting. Each felt the other had done the spurning.

The afternoon he left, Patsy put aside her pride and went to the Hortons’. The Hortons were prepared. Flap had had it from Jim, and Emma had been sitting by the telephone for two days waiting for Patsy to break down and call. Flap had tried to get Emma to call her, but Emma stubbornly refused. She knew Patsy would call when she was ready. Flap was irritated at both of them.

“God damn it, what are you?” he said. “Why don’t you call her?”

“I just better not,” Emma said. She really didn’t know whether she was right not to or not, but she kept sitting by the phone waiting.

“Then why doesn’t
she
call?” Flap said. “You called her when I shot myself. Why can’t she call you now?”

“Oh, shut up!” Emma yelled at him. “They aren’t the same kind of emergencies. Not at all.”

“No, but they’re both emergencies. In an emergency you call your best friend.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Emma said.

So they were both terribly relieved when Patsy and Davey showed up at the doorstep and Patsy was relieved she had come, once the first moments were over. She cried a little but remained mostly composed and sat and talked with them for almost an hour at what normally would have been the boys’ suppertime. The boys sensed the seriousness in the air and were model children for once. They took over Davey and amused him highly by making faces at him. Emma and Flap were very quiet about it all. They didn’t say bad things about Jim, or offer any advice, though Flap told her she ought not to do anything hastily.

“Like seeing a lawyer or anything,” he said. “Give it some time.”

“Oh, I will. I don’t feel like divorcing him. I don’t feel like doing anything drastic.”

“Eat supper with us,” Emma suggested, and Patsy went in the kitchen with her and helped fix it. It was chicken spaghetti and they had some wine with it. Their tensions loosened and the three of them became a little high. The children ceased to be models at once. Teddy was insecure and belligerent because Davey was in his highchair, and Tommy was repeating TV commercials in a very loud voice. After supper Flap took her home. He was very kind and carried Davey’s stroller up the stairs for her.

“How’s your dissertation coming?” she asked, taking real note of him. She had been lost in the swirl of her own problems and remembered that only a few weeks before he had had problems just as bad.

“I’m grinding at it,” he said. They could think of nothing more to say; he said good night awkwardly and left. Just as he did, Emma called.

“Want company?”

“Sure.”

She came after a while and they sat and talked until midnight. The wine and the company had lifted Patsy above the really bad feelings; she knew they were there and that she would have to feel them again, in some hour when she could not draw comfort from the Hortons. But she was not melancholy with Emma. They talked about their Christmases, small disasters that they could remember, fun Christmases, disappointments, what Emma and Flap were getting the boys, what Patsy might get them, whether it was worth it planning a New Year’s party. Finally they got around to Clara.

“I don’t know—it was just such a surprise,” she said. “But it shouldn’t have been. I hurt
him
.”

“You didn’t go to New Mexico,” Emma pointed out mildly.

“Do you know her?”

“No. I picked her out right away as someone who would screw husbands and took pains to keep Flap out of her way.”

“Oh, hell,” Patsy said. “That guy loves you. He wouldn’t cheat on you.”

“Yeah, I know he does,” Emma said. She was compulsively unraveling the sleeve of her green sweater. Patsy hated the sweater and was thinking she would be glad when Emma got it completely unraveled. “He’s just human, though. I doubt he could resist a new body if one were dangled in front of his eyes often enough.”

“Maybe not,” Patsy said. “I swear I feel like I’ve been a child up until this week. I don’t understand people at all, I guess.”

“Well, you’re just human too,” Emma said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t calculate all the time, like I do,” Emma said.

“I think I’m ready to start. Only now I don’t have anyone to calculate about.”

“She doesn’t strike me as the permanent type,” Emma said. “Jim will come back if you let him.”

Patsy sighed. “I probably would,” she said. “I would if he approached me nicely, I guess.”

They dropped it and talked about places where Flap might get a job. The most likely possibilities were in the Midwest. “Picture me in Des Moines,” Emma said, growing glum suddenly. “Or Lincoln, Nebraska. What’ll I do? You won’t ever come and see us.”

“Oh, I will. Sure I will. I’ll always come and see you.”

“I wouldn’t come and see you if you were there,” Emma said, yawning. “You’d have to make the best of it.” She stood up to go.

“You haven’t finished unraveling your sweater,” Patsy said. “Why hurry off?”

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” Emma said, looking at her sleeve. “I should give it to the poor. They’re having a toy drive at Tommy’s school and he’s very puzzled as to who the poor are. Flap and I consider that we’re the poor, and it’s confused him.”

“Well, next year there’ll be no confusion. You’ll be solid academic middle class.”

“Yep, in goddamn Des Moines,” Emma said.

8

F
OR ALMOST THE WHOLE
distance to California Jim had the feeling that he was going the wrong way. He had had the feeling before on drives, when he had missed a turn or something and would realize it or suspect it and yet drive on, half knowing he was driving in the wrong direction but never quite sure. There was always a chance that the place he was looking for would appear somewhere ahead.

But he had never had the feeling of going the wrong way so strongly, or for so long a time. It was a strange feeling and it took his appetite. Everything about the trip was strange, including the car. He could not take the Ford and leave Patsy carless. He could have left her the new car but there was no certainty the Ford was up to a trip to California and he didn’t like the prospect of being broken down somewhere in the desert on his first trip with Clara. It seemed more sensible to leave the Ford and get a new car. He talked it over with Clara, who had no strong opinion. A car was a car. He got a red Mustang because he had always liked red, and he felt good about it until Patsy saw it one day when he was carrying down some of his clothes. She didn’t say anything but he knew from the look on her face that she didn’t like the car or the color. It affected him. Once he and Clara were on the road he realized he didn’t really like the color either. He would have been better off with dark green or even black.

They left at dark on Friday, intending to drive all night. But something depressed them both, and right away, almost before they were out of Houston. They didn’t admit depression—to themselves or to each other—it was just some late-afternoon malaise. But three hours later, when they got to Austin, it was still with them. They stopped for coffee and decided they didn’t want to drive all night.

“Jesus, it’s six hundred miles to El Paso,” Jim said. “I didn’t realize it was that far.”

They were at a stoplight on the western edge of Austin. The thought of the six hundred dark and almost empty miles didn’t help their malaise. They felt strangers to each other suddenly. What were they doing, setting off across the country together? Clara had never driven between Texas and California before. She looked at the road map glumly. Six hundred more miles of Texas seemed incredible.

Jim suggested they stop and get a motel, and they did. It cut the malaise a little. They got in bed immediately and watched television. It made them feel better. It was little different from being in Clara’s apartment watching television. Naked in bed, they were familiar to each other again, and the strangeness went away. Jim decided it had been a temporary thing. Seeing Clara’s clothes in the car instead of Patsy’s, no car seat for Davey, and the car itself brand-new—it had all disoriented him. In bed he was not so disoriented. The motel was on Town Lake and they had a view of downtown Austin across the water.

He dropped into pockets of moody regret, thinking about Patsy and Davey, but Clara didn’t let him stay in them long. She had felt miserable all afternoon. It occurred to her, once they actually left, that she might be getting into something that would be hard to handle. In Houston she and Jim got on fine. There was nothing to keep them from it. They talked and watched TV and ate and balled. But in California there were complications—her family for one. They were a tolerant bunch, but still, Jim would have to be explained. And there was the time after Christmas—what would happen then? She had gotten out of the habit of thinking ahead, and could scarcely remember when she had been a zippy career graduate student. Jim not particularly knowing what to do hadn’t mattered in Houston, but it might in California. Clara felt a little nervous. She might have let herself in for a difficult scene.

But in the motel she didn’t have to think about it. What to do was obvious again. They watched TV and then balled. It was Clara’s word but Jim had taken it up. It took care of them for the night.

But the next day, crossing the gray wastes of West Texas, the feeling of going the wrong way pulled at Jim hard. It was a long six hundred miles to El Paso, and he and Clara both felt flat the whole way. She leaned against the car door and smoked and they listened to what they could get on the radio and said very little to each other. She saw he was having bad thoughts and left him alone with them. She smoked and listened to the radio and waited to see how he moved. If he had decided to put her on a plane in El Paso and go back she would not have been very surprised, nor blamed him much, nor been very upset. If he really wanted to, that would be okay with her. If he didn’t want to, that was okay too. Once they got to California, things might pick up.