Moving On Page 13

  “Different sides of town, of course,” Pete said. “Different sides of the track.”

  “We’re both from Dallas,” Jim said. “Same side of the track, worse luck.” Patsy was irked by the remark but said nothing. Boots’s father owned a big Dodge agency but spent most of his time racing horses in Colorado. Pete volunteered no information on himself.

  They dried and changed and walked down the street to a diner and ate fried ham sandwiches and chocolate icebox pie. Boots thought Jim’s occasional small witticisms were uproariously funny. She laughed so loudly at them that Patsy was at first annoyed and then a little touched. Pete looked at Boots fondly when she laughed and occasionally made some dry response of his own. Once he reached up with a napkin and wiped a bit of mayonnaise off her cheek. Boots was talking to Jim and scarcely noticed, but Patsy observed it and found herself liking Pete more and more. He seemed like a watchful, gentle, very trustworthy sort of man.

  When they had eaten, Boots and Jim wandered up the street together, talking about Fort Worth, and Patsy waited for Pete. He had stepped back into the diner to get a toothpick and emerged smiling, the toothpick held between his teeth. To the west the sky was changing color. The two of them walked quietly along the sidewalk for almost a block, hearing Boots’s light rapid voice ahead of them in the dusk.

  “You have a nice bride,” Patsy said, though it was not exactly what she had wanted to say. Walking beside him made her realize that he was several inches taller than she was. His appearance was a little contradictory: he was tall and at times seemed lanky, but he had a heavy belly.

  “Nicer than I deserve,” he said, glancing at her. Patsy was used to people who put themselves down as a matter of course, but Pete was not putting himself down at all, which made it a very nice thing to say about Boots, she thought. She felt slightly uneasy. Pete did not seem unusually bright and she was used to using brightness as a standard in judging men. There was something to him, even if he wasn’t unusually bright. His walk was not like most men’s. It appeared to be a slouch, but it had a springiness too, so that when he moved he seemed both slow and quick. Walking beside him, she could well understand Boots’s habit of hanging on to him: he looked easier to touch than to talk to. If she could put her arm around his waist as they walked along, there would seem less need for talk.

  It did disconcert her that she was so at a loss for small talk with him; it was for her a very rare thing. Since childhood everyone had always made much of her because she said interesting, slightly unusual things; and yet she couldn’t think of a thing to say to Pete that he would be likely to find interesting. Casting about, she thought of Sonny Shanks’s party.

  “Will you and Boots be at the party tonight?”

  “No. We don’t party much. Who’s having one?”

  “Sonny Shanks.”

  “Yeah, I forgot. He invited us, sort of.” He frowned and tilted the toothpick down. “Sonny and I can do without one another,” he said.

  They stepped off the curb at a corner and just as they did two high school boys in a red Mustang cut sharply around the corner, so close that they had to step back. The car squealed away into the dusk. In stepping back to avoid it, they touched, her arm against his arm. The brief contact startled Patsy and she forgot what she had been about to say. Then she remembered Sonny.

  “I don’t like him either,” she said. “He seems to have made a better impression on my husband. Why don’t you like him?”

  She had not meant the question to be bold, or probing, but saw at once that it was a mistake. “Oh, it ain’t worth talking about,” he said. His tone was not unfriendly, but there was a strong note of reserve in it. Patsy felt she had accidentally put him off, and she didn’t know how to remedy the matter.

  “He used to go with my Aunt Dixie,” she said.

  “Dixie McCormack?” Pete asked, surprised. He looked at her with friendly astonishment, and Patsy immediately felt lighter.

  “None other. You know her too? Everyone seems to know her.”

  “I worked for her husband for about six months one time. Never would have picked you for her niece.”

  “Sonny Shanks said exactly the same thing,” she said.

  The street lights came on as they were walking. Pete glanced at her and Patsy caught the glance and was a little unsettled. He did seem to like her, and she was glad, but she had no idea why he liked her, or what aspect of her he liked. It was confusing and not altogether pleasant, and she was glad when he and Boots were in the Thunderbird driving away.

  After they were gone she stood on the driveway a little while making patterns in the gravel with her foot. Jim put his arms around her waist.

  “You see, they’re nice,” he said. “You were just being unfair to them this afternoon.”

  “Of course I was,” she said, stepping away from him. It irritated her for him to remind her of it. “I’m a very unfair person. If you haven’t learned that about me yet, what have you learned?”

  Jim went in without answering and she stood where she was, watching a white airliner slice gracefully down through the blue evening air.

  11

  “I WISH I HAD the will power to stay here,” Patsy said, twisting in front of the mirror so she could see the back of her dress. “I don’t think this dress is right, but then I have no idea what would be right for a party Sonny Shanks is giving. If the place is swarming with cowgirls I’m going to look odd.”

  “That’s never bothered you before,” Jim said. He wore a red sports shirt and his gray sports coat and had been ready to go to the party for fifteen minutes. He was sitting in a chair leafing through an issue of Playboy.

  “Hush. Whatever my faults, I seldom look odd.” She had put on a green cotton dress. She liked it but decided it made her look a little too much like a college girl attending a lecture by a famous lecturer. That struck her as being the wrong look for the evening ahead and she shucked the dress off and selected a simple brown sleeveless blouse and a skirt. She had been experimenting with her hair again and as she was bent over taking her slip off one of the slip straps caught on a small hairclip. She struggled for a moment but could not get an arm free to loosen it.

  “Help, please,” she said, walking over to where Jim sat. He was actually looking at the Playmate of the Month, not with desire or even admiration, but when he looked up and saw Patsy peering at him trustingly from deep within her slip he felt a little guilty and at once closed the magazine and stood up to help her.

  “Looking at cows again,” she said. “No wonder you like rodeos if those are your ideal.” She turned her back and stood waiting for him to free her.

  “I was looking at that picture out of professional curiosity,” he said. “Yours are my ideal.” And when he had undone the slip so she could remove it he put his arms around her, his hands on her bosom, and held her against him for a minute. They swayed a little from side to side. It made her feel nicely wanted, nicely touched.

  “You’re nice,” she said. “I’d really rather you photographed rodeo cows than Playboy cows, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” Jim said.

  Sonny’s motel was a vast network of two-story structures made of sand-colored brick and arranged in what appeared to be a great square. “It’s a walled city,” Patsy said. She sat in the Ford while Jim went in to get the number and approximate location of Shanks’s room. Three large fountains spurted colored water thirty feet in the air. The water was now orange, now yellow, now blue. When Jim came back he was puzzling over a large sheet of paper.

  “His room is about two miles from here as the crow flies,” he said.

  It proved to be a corner suite on the upper story, not so hard to find as they had feared. When they rang, a tall expressionless middle-aged man opened the door for them. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit, set off by a neat pink tie; he nodded but didn’t speak when they said hello. He simply left the door open and turned and went across the room to a white chair near the large picture
window.

  On a rack not far inside the room was the enormous ornate saddle they had glimpsed in the hearse. The saddle horn appeared to be gold-plated and the pommel was covered with silver inlays. The saddle clashed grotesquely with the rest of the suite, which was roomy, nicely lit, and nicely furnished. The picture window looked out on a central courtyard and a large curved pool. There was a double bed in the room, a very large one covered with a blue bedspread. Sonny sat on it cross-legged, a drink in his hand. He was barefooted and wore Levi’s and a red satin shirt. A short, stolid young cowboy sat in a chair nearby and looked at them resentfully when they came in. Sonny uncurled himself from the bed and made Patsy a half-bow.

  “The party’s made,” he said. “Never expected you to forgive me.”

  “I can’t resist parties,” she said somewhat stiffly.

  “You’ll have a Coke and Jim will have what?”

  “I’ll have a gin and tonic, if you don’t mind. I can’t stand being predicted.”

  “Well, just keep telling me what you can’t stand and little by little I’ll improve,” Sonny said, grinning.

  Though there was a liquor table with a Negro barman standing behind it, Sonny went over personally to fix their drinks. The two of them felt stranded. The gray-suited man stared out the window with an expression of quiet boredom. “Well, no cowgirls, at least,” Patsy said. As she said it a lady they both instantly felt they ought to know emerged from the other bedroom in conversation with a short, slightly chubby, grizzled man in a Hawaiian sports shirt. As soon as the woman saw them she came over.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone else had come. I’m Eleanor Guthrie. In a sense I’m the hostess.”

  “My goodness,” Jim said. He had brightened the minute she walked over.

  “Come now,” Eleanor said, smiling at Patsy. “If you weren’t from Texas you would never have heard of me. It’s just my bad luck to be the last cattle queen.”

  They walked over with her to meet the man in the sports shirt. There was a phonograph in the far corner of the room, and a Beatles album was on, turned rather low. Patsy was a little surprised. The man in the sports shirt was quietly snapping his fingers and doing a slow dance step by himself. He stopped and shook hands firmly when they were introduced. He had a merry, slightly rakish look, for all his chubbiness, and a mustache and a good smile.

  “This is Mr. Vaslav Percy,” Eleanor said. “He’s a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter.”

  “Vaslav Joe Percy,” he said, smiling cheerfully at Patsy.

  “It’s an awful nom de plume,” he added. “Don’t take it seriously. Joe will do. You got tagged with names like that in Hollywood in the thirties. I picked the Vaslav because I liked ballet and it was Nijinsky’s first name. Dance with me, Eleanor?”

  “Oh, I better pass,” she said. “There will be people to greet.” Sonny brought Jim and Patsy their drinks and immediately left to answer the door.

  Joe Percy began to move again with the music. “You two in college?” he asked. “Young revolutionaries of some kind?”

  “We’re graduates,” Patsy said. “We’re both very inactive. What are the names of your books? Maybe I’ve read some of them.”

  “My books?” he said. “Be serious. Eleanor was flattering me. I’m a screenwriter. I wrote a couple of books long ago but kids nowadays don’t know them, thank god. They read enough junk without reading me. Terrible books, as I remember them.”

  “Come on,” Patsy said. “Tell me. I never met a published writer before, I don’t think.”

  “Good god,” he said. “Have you been living in an egg or something? I’ve met six thousand novelists in the last year alone. You dance with me—maybe we can put on something a little more raucous. I never reveal the names of my books to a woman unless I’ve fucked her, beaten her, or danced with her.”

  Patsy was quite shocked, but the shock didn’t linger long. Mr. Percy had said the word too casually and in too merry a tone, with no evident intention of shocking anyone at all. She was used to hearing the word used at semi-bohemian student parties where everyone was exaggeratedly drunk or genuinely high, but she was not used to hearing it in the company of someone like Eleanor Guthrie. Fortunately Joe Percy was one of those men who could make the frankest speech sound innocent. His good nature was so obvious that it would have been almost impossible for him to sound obscene. Patsy decided that the essence of sophistication was the ability to absorb such shocks with a gay smile, so she accompanied Mr. Percy to the phonograph table and they looked through the records together.

  “Actually, for you I’ll make an exception,” he said, for he was also perceptive and had noted the shock he had given her. “If you’ll excuse my crudity I’ll reveal the names of my books right now and we can dispose of the subject. You won’t believe what they’re called.”

  “I will too,” she said. “I’m gullible.”

  “Okay,” he said, lifting his drink in a kind of salute. “My novel was called The Opalescent Parrot and my book of poems was called The Final Albatross. The thirties were as unbelievable as my titles, at least where I was. Everybody had their bit and mine was bird imagery. All my screenwriting buddies were writing proletariat crap about the wretched of the earth, so to be different I wrote Firbankian crap about tubercular degenerates. If you happen on either of the books, love me a little and don’t read it. I’d do as much for you if you wrote a book.”

  “I believe you,” Patsy said. “I promise.”

  Most of the other records were hillbilly or pop vocalists and they ended up dancing to the Beatles after all. Patsy loved to dance, and it turned out that Mr. Joe Percy, despite his slight chubbiness, danced with flair. The room filled very suddenly, almost in one rush, as they were dancing. Patsy didn’t notice the people closely until they stopped to rest, but when she did she felt lucky to have got Mr. Percy to dance with. He was a very appealing man and he admired her and let her know it, but without giving her any more starts. Most of the other people who poured into the room looked depressing and slightly shabby. They looked like night-club announcers, or disc jockeys, or young restaurateurs, and their wives were mostly thin and had dyed hair. They would have made her feel depressed and lost and wretchedly out of place, but Mr. Percy, by dancing with her and treating her generally as if she were the loveliest woman around, kept her feeling pleasant. Now and then she caught glimpses of Jim and Eleanor Guthrie. They were sitting on a couch and seemed to be talking rather gravely.

  When Mr. Percy had had enough he stopped and led her to the window. “Boy,” he said. “You almost inspired me to a coronary. Excuse me. I’ve got to find the place.”

  “Come back,” she said. “I think you’re the only one here I want to talk to.”

  As he was leaving, Sonny Shanks came over. “See you’re having fun,” he said. “You don’t have to dance with that fat little writer all the time. I can do them dances too.”

  “All right,” she said, not enthusiastic. The minute Joe Percy walked away she had begun to feel out of place. Jim was still talking to Eleanor, and it was hard to blame him. In looks and dress and manner Eleanor was all she might have been supposed to be—a very lovely woman, rather grave and not at all vulgar. She wore a white dress and her dark blond gray-streaked hair was pulled to one side. Now and then her face lit briefly as she made some remark to Jim. She wore a gold bracelet and a green pendant of some kind, set in gold. Watching her, Patsy felt like the merest schoolgirl, like a college freshman and a prim and proper freshman at that.

  “I expected more cowboys,” she said to Sonny. They had moved to a corner where there was room to dance.

  “You got me down for a hick just because I rodeo,” he said. “I ain’t such a hick.”

  She really did not feel like dancing with him and was merely swaying with the music, moving her arms a little. Sonny followed suit, a yard away.

  “This is just how I had it planned,” he said. “OP Jim can keep Eleanor happy and I can dance
with you. She likes to have someone young and smart and up on this ’n’ that to talk to and I don’t know many people who can fill the bill.”

  “She could talk to Mr. Percy. He’s got a fine gift of gab.”

  “He ain’t young an’ en-tranced, though.”

  “No. He’s entranced with me.”

  “Ain’t we all?”

  She kept her eyes off him, looking at the dancers. Most of the male guests might have been chosen expressly to make Sonny stand out—thin-chested dull-looking men whose suits or sports coats didn’t fit. Joe Percy was the only one among them who seemed to have any character, or even any energy. He was dancing again. A silver blonde in green Capris had snagged him when he emerged from the john.

  Even without the red shirt and Levi’s and bare feet Sonny would have stood out. In such a crowd his confidence of movement was striking enough. And he was not so imperceptive as she had supposed. He very quickly figured out that she didn’t want to dance with him and stopped suddenly and dropped into a chair. He draped a leg over the chair arm and waved his bare foot in time to the music. From being gay he had become moody, and in her eyes the change improved him. His hostly gaiety was too superficial; it made his handsomeness seem brittle. When he frowned, as he was frowning at her, his face filled with hollows and shadows and became a more formidable face than it had been.

  “So what’s so good about you?” he said, looking her in the eye.

  “I don’t know,” Patsy said, startled by the question. “I never said anything was.”

  “Eleanor’s as good-lookin’ as you,” he said, as if arguing with himself, though he continued to look at her. “That redhead over by my saddle ain’t bad, if you set her in the right light. What do you think you got on ’em, hunh?”

  “Nothing,” Patsy said, disturbed. “Nothing. What are you talking about? I don’t have anything on anybody. My god, what a conversation.”

  “Nothing wrong with it,” Sonny said reflectively, waving for the barman to bring him a drink.