Moving On Read online

  “It’ll be great when I’m bigger,” she said. “Hippie maternity clothes. I wonder if Miri’s become a hippie?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Jim said. He was dressing to go to an indoctrination meeting for graduate students and felt generally sulky. Patsy’s frivolity clashed with his mood. “I wish those books had come,” he said, selecting a dark tie.

  Patsy struck a few poses in the doorway, hoping he would tell her she looked nice in the shift, but he didn’t. “I’m sorry I bitched at you,” she said. “You weren’t really rude to the postman.”

  But Jim’s mind was on the books that hadn’t come, and when she looked into the living room she felt a sinking of the heart. On the floor by the red couch were sixty dollars’ worth of quality paperbacks, almost all of them criticism or scholarship. Jim had bought them the night before at a paperback store downtown. He had got in a conversation with several graduate students and a famous newly arrived professor and had bought every book that he could remember having heard mentioned. She had been with him and had wandered about the bookstore, feeling more and more frivolous and small-time, and had finally bought a copy of Bonjour Tristesse, which she had never read. When they were home she read it in half an hour, sitting on the bed in her nightgown while Jim sat at their desk carefully writing his name and the date in each of the new paperbacks. He read a few sentences from each one before putting it on a pile on the other side of the desk. She had felt a sinking of the heart then too, for it reminded her of the night in Phoenix when he had rearranged his photographic files, all of which were presently in a closet, forgotten. He had taken to ordering every book Flap Horton mentioned, it seemed to Patsy. Even Flap was taken aback when he found out that Jim had ordered a set of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.

  “My god,” he whispered to Patsy. “A beginning graduate student with the Cambridge Bib. The professors here don’t even own the Cambridge Bib”

  “It’s your fault,” Patsy said fiercely, though it wasn’t. “Just quit mentioning books to him. He even wants to order the OED and that costs three hundred dollars. If he asks you, tell him he won’t need it. I don’t want this apartment buried in unread books.”

  “The OED?” Flap said, staggered. “His first week in graduate school? He’s either a genius or a fool.”

  “I don’t care to vote,” Patsy said.

  When Jim had come to bed and noticed Bonjour Tristesse he asked her how it was, but he asked a little condescendingly, as if he already knew. The condescension irked her. She had just told him that afternoon about being pregnant and had hoped they could talk about it once they got to bed. She wanted to be made over. But Jim wanted to talk about William Duffin, a prize modernist that Rice had managed to hire away from Ohio State. All the graduate students were in a dither about him. Patsy was in a mood to think a baby more important than a modernist, even one who had written eight books, and she was glad when Jim went to sleep so she could at least think about the baby and be glad about it herself.

  “Listen,” she said, watching Jim knot his tie. “Emma needs to get away from those kids. Let’s take them for Mexican food tonight. Maybe there’ll be some interesting new graduate students to bring along.”

  “Maybe,” Jim said, but he was too nervous about the meeting to really listen, and he kissed her as he departed without really looking at her. He would have been surprised to know that after he left she went out into the hot back yard and sat in a lawn chair crying for twenty minutes. Though it was early September, the heavy air and the moist earth seemed to hold all the fecundity of spring or early summer. Patsy remembered Emma and the boys going up to the garage where Flap was fixing his bicycle, and how glad he had looked to see them; in her breast she felt a bitter loneliness, as if she would be left to do everything she did alone. She had heard that pregnancy might make her draw apart from her husband, but instead she felt the reverse. She had wanted him to hold her and hug her before he left, and she felt very hurt that he had not noticed, or had not wanted to. When she had finished crying she went in to write her sister, thanking her for the lovely shift.

  Jim need not have worried about the graduate meeting. It was pointless but not unpleasant and was in no way threatening. Outside the room where it was held he could see the formal hedges and bright green lawns of Rice University. Mexican gardeners worked at the hedges with long electric hedge clippers. The gardeners wore khakis and straw hats and looked very out of place in the quiet academic quadrangle. They looked as if they belonged on some remote hacienda shearing sheep.

  Jim sat with Flap Horton and listened as Flap genially dissected the new batch of graduate students. Various more or less meaningless sheets of paper were passed out and studied with deep earnestness by all the budding scholars. Jim felt a little overdressed and mentioned as much to Flap, who wore a blue tee shirt and old slacks.

  “No, rookies have to dress up,” Flap said. “I have to hang loose myself—otherwise I feel like a suck-ass. Next year you can just wear slacks. Two years from now you’ll probably wear Levi’s. Three years from now you’ll have to come naked, to show you’ve still got your self-respect. Four years from now you either won’t be here or you’ll be a member of the establishment and self-respect will be a moot question.”

  A very good-looking redheaded girl was sitting in the front row. She wore white net stockings. “She won’t last,” Flap said, “but it’ll be fun while she does. The guy in Bermuda shorts, with the beard, he won’t last either. His name’s Kenny Cambridge. I kinda like him.”

  “Why won’t he last?”

  “He had never heard of Northrop Frye,” Flap said. “Or Maynard Mack. Or F. R. Leavis. Or anybody I mentioned, come to think of it.”

  “Neither have I,” Jim said, a little apprehensive.

  “No, but you will,” Flap said with a reassuring grin. “You’re just illiterate. Kenny seems to be anti-literate, or at least anti-scholarly. You have to be really brilliant to get away with that.”

  Jim was depressed and remained so throughout the meeting. Nothing at all happened. A few polite questions were asked, and politely answered. William Duffin, the new modernist, came in for a few minutes but said nothing. He was a tall heavy man, very sure of himself, and there was a slightly devilish cast to his countenance. His black hair was a little longer than the professorial norm.

  After the meeting Jim and Flap fell in with a new graduate student whose name was Hank Malory. Flap had met him already and liked him, and Jim found that he liked him too. He was almost as tall as William Duffin but was lank rather than heavy. His nose had a kind of dent in it, as if it had been broken, and his jaw was strong. In talking with him, Jim found out that his nose had been broken, and in Vietnam. He had survived a stint as a helicopter pilot and had broken his nose in a car wreck in Saigon the last week he was there. It turned out that he had trained at the training school near Mineral Wells, where Jim and Patsy had seen all the helicopters. His sports coat was old and a bit too short at the sleeves and he took his tie off and stuffed it in his coat pocket as soon as the meeting was over. He came from Portales, New Mexico. The three of them walked off the campus and up the tree-hung streets toward the nearest drugstore, talking of New Mexico, of the redheaded girl in the white net stockings, and of William Duffin. Flap had just checked out Duffin’s latest book, which was on Samuel Beckett, and they passed it from hand to hand as they walked.

  They stopped in at the drugstore on the corner of Bissonnet Street and to Jim’s mild embarrassment there was Patsy, barefooted and still in her psychedelic shift, sitting at the soda fountain eating a thick chocolate malt with a spoon and idly reading an issue of Seventeen. She had come to the drugstore to mail her letter, and because she was feeling gloomy had gone in to have a malt. She knew most of the soda fountain habitués and could usually find someone to chatter with. If there was no one to chatter with she could at least read magazines free. When she looked around and saw the three men she brightened immediately.

  “Gosh,
you look great, Patsy,” Flap said. His eyes began to shine. He could never restrain his enthusiasm for her, and Patsy could not help responding to it. She spun half around on the stool, her clean face coloring beautifully and her hair loose at her shoulders—so delighted with their presence that both Flap and Hank Malory were smitten by her and smiled without quite knowing what to say. Jim’s reaction was the opposite. He could not quite look at her and could not help but be a little embarrassed by the fact that she was reading Seventeen. It clashed, somehow. The three of them had been talking about Duffin and Beckett and Northrop Frye, though only Flap had actually read the three men, and suddenly there sat Patsy, undetectably pregnant and looking like a schoolgirl on her way home from school, her lips stained a little by the chocolate malt she was eating. Jim was discomfited, but he quickly introduced her to Hank Malory.

  “Hi,” Patsy said and immediately began telling Flap about the conversation she had had with Tommy that morning regarding the devil.

  “He’s a Miltonist who can’t read yet,” Flap said, sitting down next to her. Jim sat on the other side of her and Hank Malory took the stool just around the corner of the counter. Patsy knew Jim was displeased with her for some reason. He exuded waves of stiffness at such times. To avoid them she turned toward the other men, feeling for a moment disconcerted and slightly hectic. She was caught between the cold rays of annoyance coming from Jim, who was pretending to scan the Beckett book, and the somewhat breathy gusts of Flap’s admiration. Hank Malory had already finished his Coke and was poking with his straw at the ice in his empty glass. He seemed quiet and relaxed and was easier to look at than either Jim or Flap, so Patsy focused on him.

  “I bet you’re from the West,” she said. “You’ve got a Western jaw. Months of rodeos taught me to recognize them. You probably even smell from the West.”

  Her own remark embarrassed her—it was hardly an appropriate thing to say to a stranger—but he didn’t seem to mind. “I probably do,” he said, grinning as if there were something ironic about what she had said. She found she didn’t like his sports coat, which was suede, and old, and far too hot for Houston.

  “A year from now he’ll smell like a bound volume of PMLA,” Flap said. “So will Jim. Ever smell one?”

  “I’ve smelled all sorts of books,” Patsy said. She looked quickly at Jim and saw that he was ignoring her and gave the two men a confiding smile, helpless but happy, as if to let them know that even though her husband was ignoring her she was glad they had come. Flap spilled his coffee. He had ached for Patsy for years, and being with her when she was in a good mood made him fidgety with lust. He knew it was hopeless, but he ached, anyway. What he could do was yak with her, and yak they did, Patsy very animated and chattery and quick on the comeback. Hank Malory couldn’t keep his eyes off her—he could not remember when he had seen anyone so lovely or so immediately delightful. They all left the drugstore together and walked down Bissonnet Street, Flap and Patsy ahead, still yakking. Patsy skipped quickly across the hot street and stood cooling her feet on the well-shaded sidewalk, leaving the three men to wait for the next break in the evening traffic. Jim gave Flap the Duffin book before he went to join her.

  “Jim was born lucky,” Flap said, noticing that Hank was watching them walk away.

  “Must have been,” Hank said. “There sure weren’t any like her in Vietnam.”

  When they got home Patsy reminded Jim that they were taking the Hortons out for Mexican food, and evening found the four of them and Hank Malory and Kenny Cambridge, of the beard and Bermuda shorts, at a Mexican restaurant on Alameda Street. It was Jim’s idea to ask Hank, and since Kenny had an apartment two doors from Hank’s they asked him too. The restaurant had a patio with heavy tile-topped tables, excellent food, and huge cool pitchers of beer. The six of them drank lots of beer and enjoyed themselves enormously. As they were eating, it began to rain, softly and levelly, graying the summer evening, blurring the city and the green neon lights across the street. Flecks of rain touched them as they ate. Trucks rumbled by on the street beneath the patio, their tires swishing on the wet pavement. Alameda Street bordered the city’s largest ghetto and lay on an ambulance route, so frequently all conversation had to cease as ambulances screamed by.

  “Dead and dying from the bars,” Flap said. “First thing to learn about being a graduate student here is which bars to stay out of.”

  “Which ones?” Kenny asked. His beard, like his hair, was reddish brown.

  “All of them,” Flap said. “They’re all potential deathtraps. Even if you found one that was empty and went in for a beer someone would probably follow you in and shoot you.”

  “Flap’s a little cowardly,” Emma said. She had spruced up a bit and looked pink and pleased and very glad to be out of the house.

  Patsy was pleased too. She was wearing her gray dress. Nothing was much pleasanter than company, particularly company that was part old and part new. Part of the fun would be talking over the two new men with Emma at the park next day, but even more of the fun was being there and being the object of two new pairs of admiring male eyes—as she definitely was. Both Hank and Kenny apparently regarded her as a woman worth looking at, for both of them looked at her frequently over their beer or their forks of Mexican food. Jim had forgiven her Seventeen and was happier than he had been in the afternoon, but he was still a little put off by the general insouciance and kept trying to steer the talk into literary channels. He wanted to talk about books and scholarship and graduate school. Flap kept trying to needle him out of it.

  “For god’s sake,” he said, “you’ve got four or five years in which to sit around analyzing the graduate malaise, not to mention all the particular malaises of this department. Who cares about William Duffin, or his reputation? Screw him, for the moment.”

  “His favorite expression,” Emma said, licking her lips.

  “Screw you too,” Flap said. “You’re drinking more than me. I’m worried I’ll have to cook breakfast. You shouldn’t drink more than me. It’s bad for our relationship.”

  Emma ignored him and poured herself more beer. Kenny Cambridge plucked at his beard and sighed, as if already the rigidities of the graduate life were weighing heavy on his soul.

  “There must be safe bars,” he said. “I can’t stand this unless I can get potted regularly. That was a shitty meeting we had today.”

  “Sure, but we’re counteracting it right now,” Flap said.

  “I’m thinking of quitting already,” Kenny said. “It’s no atmosphere for a writer.”

  He struck Patsy as funny and she laughed out loud. Jim looked embarrassed. Hank Malory had said very little. He seemed somewhat remote and a little melancholy, but when Patsy laughed he looked up and smiled. Kenny gulped his beer defensively. Had it been anyone but her he would have been offended, but as it was he was just nervous.

  “What do you write?” Patsy asked, to make up for laughing.

  “Poems,” Kenny said shyly, looking hopeful. “Do you?”

  “No. I just read.” She felt pretty certain she was going to get a chance to read some of Kenny’s poems before very long.

  “I don’t think it’s such a bad life for a writer,” Flap said. “You get lots of time to yourself. Of course, I spend all mine drinking coffee with my confreres, but if I didn’t do that I could write. Maybe you’ll have more strength of will than me.”

  “Flap used to be a writer too,” Emma said, taking the last tortilla. “He wrote short stories. I was even a writer myself. I wrote short stories. But Flap sent his out. I never sent mine out. For all anybody knows, I’m better than him. If I’d sent mine out somebody might have bought them. Who knows?”

  Patsy started to mention Jim’s novel fragment but didn’t. She didn’t think he would want to be counted, somehow.

  “Boy, do I like to eat here,” Emma said.

  “Houston smells like a crotch,” Kenny said, sniffing the wet air quizzically.

  “Male or female?” Flap asked.


  It was a novel question. They all tested the smell of Houston against their memories of the smell of crotches. “Female, I think,” Kenny said.

  “How about you, Hank?” Patsy asked. “Are you a writer too?”

  Hank shook his head, tilting his chair back. It annoyed Patsy a little that he didn’t talk. She had been prepared to like him, and it was hard for her to like someone who didn’t talk. Hank seemed quite content to listen.

  “Hemingway wouldn’t have gone to graduate school,” Kenny said glumly. “Norman Mailer wouldn’t either. Can you imagine Norman Mailer in graduate school?”

  “Sure,” Emma said. “He’d seduce us all. Us girls, I mean. Me and Patsy, I mean. That would be kicks, eh, Pat?”

  “That would be kicks,” Patsy said. She and Emma lifted their glasses to each other. Often they pretended they were Lady Brett. When slightly tight it was a charming thing to pretend. She smiled at Jim, hoping he would start liking the evening better. She wanted him to be in the mood everyone else was in; but he wasn’t really in that mood and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Emma patted Jim’s shoulder. She wanted him to be happier too, for Patsy’s sake. “This is fun,” she said. “Let’s go some place and continue it.”

  “Sure, come to our place,” Jim said, trying to shake himself out of his feeling of withdrawal. He felt like being alone and reading, actually, but he saw that Patsy was flushed and happy and delighted with the company and he made an effort to change his mood.

  “How come you like Norman Mailer?” he asked Kenny. “He’s no poet.”

  “I don’t like him so much,” Kenny said. “It just occurred to me that he wouldn’t go to graduate school. I don’t much like prose, actually. It’s all wasteful. I tried to write a paragraph of a novel once and it was all just ordinary words and sentences. It didn’t have any specialness. No élan, no brio, no joie, no flair—” and he stopped, embarrassed. He had a habit of reeling off synonyms like a human thesaurus.