Texasville (6 page)

“You don’t need to go all that way to look for temptation, in case you’ve missed the point of my T-shirt,” she said.

Duane was becoming a little irked at having to read a message every time he looked at his wife.

“There’s not enough temptation in Thalia,” he said.

“There’s me,” Karla said. “That’s all the temptation you get, Duane.”

Only Sonny Crawford had really seen Jacy since her return. Once in a while she would show up at his little convenience store in the middle of the night and look through the few magazines that Sonny stocked.

“Is she as beautiful as ever?” Duane asked.

“She never takes off her dark glasses,” Sonny said. “She’s beautiful, but she’s older.”

Just after they graduated from high school Duane and Sonny had had a terrible fight over Jacy, a fight that cost Sonny an eye. Since then they had tried to tread lightly where she was concerned—it wasn’t hard, since she had been out of both their lives for thirty years.

Duane had glimpsed her only once since her return. He had been parked at a light in Wichita Falls and her Mercedes crossed in front of him. He had only a glimpse, but even a glimpse made him feel strange. He had been very in love with Jacy once. After glimpsing her he felt rather withdrawn—a fact that Karla noticed.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“Nothing—more of the same,” Duane said, though it wasn’t more of the same, nor was it nothing. He was aware that he probably wouldn’t know what to say to Jacy if they did meet. She was like a local Garbo—it was hard to imagine having a conversation with her.

Looking at the distressed Junior Nolan, Duane reflected that he had not really had a conversation with Suzie Nolan in thirty years either, though she had been right there in Thalia all the
while. She was one of the loveliest women in town, but for some reason had made no mark on his imagination until her husband asked the question about sex.

He remembered someone, Karla probably, saying that Suzie had no personality, which probably just meant that she wasn’t like Karla. If there was such a thing as personality glut, Karla had it. The night before, she had worn a T-shirt that said,
LIFE’S TOO SHORT TO DANCE WITH UGLY MEN
, a motto that dated from the days when Karla had first learned of the concept of open marriage. She read about it in
Cosmo,
the source of many of her concepts.

She had immediately opened theirs up by having an affair with the carpenter who was redoing their kitchen. Then she griped at Duane because he wouldn’t go out and start a reciprocal affair.

“You’d rather sit there and make me feel guilty,” Karla said.

The main result of that episode was that sloppy work got done and nothing in the new kitchen really worked right. The garbage disposal functioned more like a fountain, spewing chicken bones and watermelon rind all over the place.

“I guess Richie was so in love he couldn’t even put in a garbage disposal right,” Duane said, on occasions when he felt aggrieved.

“Duane, he wasn’t supposed to do the plumbing too,” Karla said.

The open marriage concept remained popular for several years, during which time Duane often irritated Karla by his refusal to find a girlfriend. But when he finally started the affair with Janine, Karla accused him of being out of step with the times.

“Duane, all that stuff was popular in the sixties,” she said. “How come you’re doing it now? If you’re planning to have a midlife crisis you should have done it sooner, because you’re already past the middle by several years.”

“I’m just forty-eight,” Duane pointed out. “If I live to be ninety-six, then I’m right square in the middle this year.”

“I hope I’m not around when you’re ninety-six, grumpy as you are now,” Karla said.

“You’re the one that started all this,” Duane reminded her. “Why couldn’t you just have picked a better carpenter?”

“We’re supposed to be rich, why can’t we just buy a new garbage disposal?” Karla countered.

Duane didn’t answer, but the fact that he hated Richie’s kitchen was one reason he had agreed to the building of the new house.

CHAPTER 7

J
UNIOR NOLAN HAD NOT TAKEN HIS EYES OFF THE
saltshaker since asking his unexpected question—a question which had given his tablemates a bad surprise. The specter of female need had been raised, and the response of most people at the table was to look discreetly away.

Junior himself abruptly decided not to wait for opinions, since none had been forthcoming in almost a minute.

“Mitch, we better hit it,” he said. “It ain’t getting any cooler outside.” He got up and headed for the door, carrying his hat in his hand. Duane saw him toss it in his pickup.

“How come Junior only wears a hat inside?” Eddie Belt asked.

“He’s always been a little eccentric,” Sonny said.

Mitch Mott got up and ambled out, trying to walk bow-legged. He affected the walk of a lifelong cowboy, but for most of his life he had been a short-order cook who rodeoed a little on the side. Junior had gone up to the Panhandle to buy some calves, had met Mitch at a small rodeo, mistaken him for a cowboy and hired him on the spot.

Since he had lived in Thalia for a mere ten years, Mitch was not deeply versed in its lore, which only a lifetime’s residence could make intelligible—and sometimes not then.

Duane had spent a lifetime there and still found much of what went on to be incomprehensible, but he didn’t care. He was beginning to find the thought of Suzie Nolan interesting. After all, as he knew better than most, what looked demure from one angle might not look so demure from another. Janine Wells sat just behind him looking like the woman who invented Sunday school, while in fact possessing the heart of a slaver.

“Maybe Junior should call up Dr. Ruth,” Sonny suggested.

One reason Sonny’s little Kwik-Sack did such a booming business at night was because he took the night shift himself and kept the radio tuned to Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s popular call-in show,
Sexually Speaking.
He kept the radio turned up loud so that all the customers could hear it, even if they were back in the far corner by the detergents. Roughnecks and truck drivers, stepping in to buy cigarettes or beer, would fall under the spell of Dr. Ruth’s brisk Central European voice; often they lingered for fifteen or twenty minutes, piling up item after item they didn’t need, while Dr. Ruth discussed the pros and cons of anal intercourse or offered helpful tips on how not to drip too much spit into one’s partner’s mouth while tongue kissing.

“Hell, let’s get the women in on this,” Duane said, suddenly feeling in an impish mood for the first time in months.

“They’re the ones who know the answer,” he added.

Sonny smiled when he said it. Sonny could smile without looking one bit less sad, a fact that had bothered Duane slightly during all the years of their friendship.

Elsewhere around the table the suggestion met with something akin to panic. Bobby Lee nearly swallowed the toothpick he had been masticating for the last ten minutes.

“I don’t think we ought to ask them,” he said. “They’re women.”

“Well, wasn’t Junior asking about women?” Duane said.

Eddie Belt, who rarely agreed with Bobby Lee about anything, agreed with him this time. “If Junior wants to know, let
Junior ask them,” Eddie said. “I ain’t gonna ask one of them nothing.”

He started to shut up, but then remembered the many injustices he had suffered at the hands of women.

“I wouldn’t ask one of ’em for a Dr. Pepper if I was dying of thirst,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask them to connect the hose if my house was burning down. If both my legs was broke and one offered me a wheelchair I wouldn’t take it.”

“What’s he raving about?” Janine said. She and her friends, Charlene Duggs and Lavelle Bates, were on their way out, but Eddie’s outburst had been delivered in such a loud voice that they all stopped. Janine had the bold urge to chat with Duane a minute and felt that Eddie Belt, whom she couldn’t stand, had provided her with a sufficient excuse.

“I wasn’t raving about nothing, and if I was, it was none of your business,” Eddie said. His memories had raised him to such a pitch of outrage that he forgot for a moment that he was talking to his boss’s girlfriend.

“That’s not very polite,” Janine said crisply. “I just asked.”

“You girls sit down,” Duane said, jumping to his feet. He was not willing to be cheated of his first impish mood in months. Who knew when he would see another?

He secured chairs so quickly that the women were nonplused.

“Duane, we just got up,” Charlene said. “We got jobs to do. We ain’t allowed to sit back down.”

“Yeah, you ought to been doing the jobs all this time instead of sitting there telling lies,” Eddie said. Once he got up a headful of outrage, it took it a while to drain.

“What’d he do, take an ugly pill this morning?” Janine asked.

Some years earlier she and Eddie had been engaged for three months. Over the years Janine had indulged in a number of engagements, complete with rings and the selection of wallpaper. She had been responsible for some of the very episodes Eddie was remembering with such ire, but Janine had undergone two years of very helpful therapy with a psychologist in Wichita Falls. The therapist had taught her how unproductive it was to dwell on past mistakes.

One mistake nobody could ever accuse her of dwelling on
was Eddie Belt. She had traded in his engagement ring for a bracelet she liked, and when they met she treated him with cool formality. The one time he reproached her for this coolness she pointed out that she had only been practicing good mental health, and recommended that he try to do the same.

“You never cared no more for me than a bug,” Eddie had said bitterly.

“We’ll both get over it quicker if we try to keep a positive attitude,” Janine said.

“I been over it for years, you whore!” Eddie said.

Janine realized then that he was a man on whom tact was wasted, and had refrained from wasting another ounce on him after that.

Therapy was the one thing she had in common with Sonny Crawford, who had driven to Fort Worth once a week and seen a psychiatrist. No one could tell that he was the least different as a result; the general view was that he would have done better to try and get a girlfriend.

Karla had gone to a psychiatrist twice and concluded that he was too bossy, which didn’t surprise Duane.

“You won’t take my advice either,” he said.

“Why should I pay ninety dollars an hour to be griped at when you’ll do it for nothing?” Karla said.

Since Duane had pulled up chairs, the ladies from the courthouse all sat down. All of them had worked there since graduating from high school. It occurred to Charlene and Lavelle that it was a fine opportunity to see how Duane and Janine behaved toward one another in public. At the very least it would provide meat for analysis.

Luthie Sawyer nodded to the ladies, got up and left, a hurt look on his face. The fact that his plan to bomb OPEC had bombed in Thalia was clearly a letdown.

“We hurt that old boy’s feelings,” Duane said. “He had a scheme cooked up to keep us from all going broke.”

“Oh, you ain’t going broke, you just like to feel sorry for yourselves,” Janine said.

She knew that a person in good mental health didn’t dwell on the bad things that might happen. Her view was that the oil
business was just in a lull between booms. By the time she and Duane got married he would be richer than ever.

“What was you men talking about that’s so important we have to neglect our jobs to hear about it?” she asked.

Bobby Lee had recovered from his moment of panic. He was one of the few men in town who had not been engaged to Janine. He felt she was nowhere near smart enough to get Duane away from Karla—therefore he had little to fear from her.

“We was talking about sex,” he said.

“We knew that, we ain’t dumb,” Charlene said.

“Junior Nolan was wondering whether women want more sex than men,” Duane said. “When I was growing up the boys all wanted it and the girls didn’t. Now it’s the other way around. I wonder why that is.”

Charlene laughed. She had been married three times, but all three husbands had died after only modest use.

“We’ve got prettier and you’all have gotten uglier,” she said.

It was certainly true that Charlene had gotten prettier. She had been overweight and sloppy as a teenager, but had turned into a good-looking woman.

“Men are all wimps anyway,” Lavelle Bates said. She was a tall, raw-boned brunette who had recently become the first employee of the Thalia courthouse to go to a Club Med on her vacation. It gave her a slight aura of mystery, and even a slight aura had proven enough to intimidate local suitors. The Club Med had not been very eventful romantically, but at least she had got to snorkel. Since coming back she hadn’t got to do anything.

“If any woman wants much she’s out of luck around here,” she said, looking pointedly at Bobby Lee, who had been flirting with her for the last several years in his languid fashion.

Janine tried to look thoughtfully aloof. It was the first time since the affair began that she had sat in public with Duane unless they were out of town. She found that she liked being in public with him. It was good for her self-esteem, the thing she had had to work on most assiduously with her therapist. The men she had been engaged to thought she had far too much self-esteem, while her therapist thought she had much too little.

“I think they should need it equal, the males and the females, don’t you, Duane?” she asked.

Being able to sit in public with him raised her self-esteem to the highest pitch in her memory.

“There ain’t a man alive that can think up as much dirt as a woman,” Eddie Belt said.

“He must have taken two ugly pills this morning,” Janine said. “Ugly as he is, he isn’t usually
this
ugly.”

Janine had a sense that she was finally getting the situation to swing her way. The sense was so strong that she casually put an arm across Duane’s shoulder, a move not lost on anyone in the Dairy Queen. Even the cook was watching from behind a stack of taco shells.