Moving On Read online

  “Maybe they’ll let you do a dissertation in couplets,” Flap said.

  “I guess I ought to write, if everybody else does,” Patsy said, draining her beer. She had had three glasses of beer and felt light.

  “Sure you should,” Flap said. “It’s something everybody starts doing at a certain age, like sex. If you’re old enough to be pregnant you’re old enough to write.”

  At the mention of Patsy’s pregnancy Jim suddenly cheered up. He had been feeling very indefinite, very unestablished. But Patsy was pregnant, so he was not completely unestablished. And she looked very fresh and lovely. He put his hand on her shoulder to let her know he liked her. She noticed he was smiling at her and was glad. When they all got up to go to the car she walked with her arm around his waist.

  Two hours later, at the Carpenters’, the evening was running down. Kenny Cambridge was mumbling to himself over a bilingual edition of Lorca. He had smoked some pot and was pretending he was reading Spanish. Emma sat spraddle-legged on the floor, burping and wishing fervently that she hadn’t eaten so much. Jim and Flap were looking at all the paperbacks Jim had bought, and Flap was going on about C. S. Lewis and trying to make clear to Jim the difference between drab poetry and golden poetry. They were drinking whiskey, as was Hank Malory. He was idly looking through their record collection. Patsy sat by Emma on the floor.

  “I wish he would put something on and dance with me,” Patsy said. “I feel like dancing before I get big.”

  “He’s got a nice loose build,” Emma said. “We’re all going to like him. Kenny likes him because he doesn’t write poetry. Flap likes him because he doesn’t look academic. Jim likes him because he doesn’t seem like competition.”

  “And you and I like him,” Patsy said, giggling. “Why do you and I like him?”

  Emma shrugged. “Because he’s got a nice loose build,” she said.

  Patsy decided she must dance, though she was a little unsteady and wove slightly as she crossed the room. “Find anything we could dance to?” she asked.

  Hank smiled and lifted his glass cavalierly. “One more little swig and I can dance to anythang,” he said.

  “Paul Newman really does that better than you,” she said. “I saw Hud too.”

  He held up a Hank Williams record that Jim had bought on sale at a drugstore for a dollar ninety-eight. The cover picture showed Hank Williams in a white suit and white hat.

  “Oh, not that,” Patsy said. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those intellectuals who get sentimental about hillbilly music.”

  Hank was silent for a moment, as if he genuinely didn’t know how to answer her question. “It’s about the only kind of music I can dance to,” he said.

  “Okay,” Patsy said. “Better that than nothing.” They danced to “Jambalaya.” Patsy soon discovered that she was a little too tight to dance enjoyably, though Hank danced well. Jim and Flap looked up at them with disbelief. Flap was talking about Yvor Winters. Their plane of discussion was so lofty that it was difficult for them to conceive of people dancing to Hank Williams.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, but I was named for Hank Williams,” Hank said at some point while they were dancing. It took a while for it to soak in, but when Patsy realized what he had said she asked him if it were true and he said it was. “My daddy was a hillbilly musician,” he said. “Not very famous, but he knew Hank Williams.”

  Emma had allowed herself to collapse sideways on the tiny little blue rug in front of the couch. Patsy noticed and was a little worried. But Emma was awake; she watched their feet as they danced. Patsy was barefooted, Hank in rather worn loafers. “I wish I were dancing,” Emma said, but no one heard her. She could see Kenny Cambridge’s knees pointed at her from across the room. He still sat cross-legged peering at the Lorca poems.

  Patsy was sweating and suddenly became dizzy. Hank had to hold her up for a moment. The room was very still and hot and she felt nauseated. “This was not a good idea,” she said, holding his shoulder. She stumbled to the bathroom, filled the basin with cold water, and splashed her face for several minutes. It made her feel better, although the bathroom itself was close and hot. She opened the door, her face and throat and temples still wet, and reached for a towel. When she looked out she saw Hank standing across the foyer, just inside the screen door that led out. His suede coat was slung over one shoulder.

  “Hey,” she said. “You’re not leaving, are you? I’m okay. I was just woozy for a second.”

  “I just need air,” he said.

  Patsy patted her damp temples with the towel. “Let’s go out,” she said. There were drops of water in her eyelashes. They went out and sat on the steps for a while, neither of them very talkative. Patsy felt a little sleepy, but also very comfortable. Hank had his back against the screen and the light from the foyer shone on his rumpled brown hair. The air was muggy but cooler than it had been inside. “You don’t seem very Rice-like,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Maybe I’m not,” he said. “I can’t tell yet. The only other place that offered me a fellowship was Indiana and I didn’t feel like going there.” She was sitting below him, and when she looked up, the light from the doorway struck her face. Once she straightened one leg and put her foot on the railing of the steps and Hank saw the white movement of her leg. Kenny Cambridge suddenly appeared behind the screen. He looked at them a moment and then disappeared into the bathroom.

  “Do me a favor and take him with you when you go,” she said. “Jim’s no good at getting rid of people and I don’t want to listen to Lorca all night.”

  They heard the occasional low rustle of tree limbs on the roof, the keen of an ambulance to the east, and the screech of the brakes of a city bus stopping a block away on Bissonnet. “Do you ever see stars down here?” he asked.

  “Not very often,” she said. She remembered the evening of the first rodeo, in Merkel, when she had sat watching the long sunset and had seen the first stars appear. She remembered the evening drives across Wyoming and the clear whinnying of the horses at dusk as she sat on Roger Wagonner’s porch. The summer had had its loveliness, after all. She had stopped feeling high and tight—she felt very clear in the head and very relaxed and for a few moments was a little nostalgic for summer evenings in the West. She looked at Hank Malory, but his face was in shadow. All she could see well were his hands, which were crossed over his knees. They were large long-fingered hands, with prominent veins. She knew he was older than she was by three or four years, but somehow he gave the impression of not having attained his full growth physically. He had large bones that seemed to need more flesh than they carried. But he was a very comfortable person to sit with, even if his clothes didn’t really fit him.

  “How was Vietnam?” she asked.

  He was silent for so long that she was afraid she might have offended him by asking. “Oh, very unpleasant,” he said. Patsy didn’t press him; she was sorry she had asked. For a moment she was afraid of finding out that they were on opposite sides where Vietnam was concerned. Kenny Cambridge came out of the bathroom and stood in the foyer pondering his alternatives.

  “Ready to go?” Hank asked him, standing up. Kenny was, more or less. Patsy walked down the driveway with them to see them off. Kenny was still muttering.

  “It boils down to Allen Ginsberg,” he said by way of good night. He wandered into the street, bumped into a parked Mercedes, and proceeded on fairly steadily. Hank and Patsy stood watching him.

  Patsy lined her big toes up on the curb and hunched her shoulders. “Good luck with him,” she said.

  “Enjoyed it,” Hank said and strolled off after Kenny, his suede coat over one shoulder.

  Patsy felt a little dissatisfied. He could have stood and talked for a minute. Kenny didn’t need that much watching. She didn’t want to go back inside—it would have been pleasant to sit on the curb and talk. Hank Malory might have a nice loose build—did, in fact, though he handled it a little awkwardly—but he didn
’t have especially good manners. She had not even got enough out of him to know if he was bright. She almost regretted not walking along with them. There was no one to talk to inside. Emma would have passed out and Jim and Flap were either talking poetry or graduate-school politics. She didn’t feel like sitting on the curb by herself, so she went back in.

  Emma had her cheek propped on a palm and was listening sulkily to Flap, who was lecturing to Jim.

  “Feeling bad?” Patsy asked.

  “I’m thinking of the morning,” Emma said. “Teddy is apt to get up at six and if he does, all this isn’t going to seem worth it. Not in retrospect. You’ll know what I mean someday.”

  But it seemed to Patsy that it would be a long time before she learned anything important, much less anything about babies. When the Hortons left, her mild discontent became a real depression and she wandered aimlessly about the apartment feeling almost sick. Jim was sitting on the bed cutting his toenails—he was also reading the first page of a book by Leslie Fiedler. Patsy went and sat by the open window in her favorite chair. It was a nice cane-backed rocker with a red cushion. She felt like crying and crying, and for no reason that she knew except that Jim was reading and seemed to be in another world from her. The snick of the toenail clippers was an irritating sound. There would probably be toenails in the bed unless she remembered to do something about them. It would have been more fun to sit on the curb talking to Hank Malory—assuming he could have been made to talk. Even talking to Kenny Cambridge would have been better than listening to Jim cut his toenails. She put her hands to her face and caught her tears in her fingers, being very silent, for she knew that if Jim had to turn his attention from a serious paragraph to her vague vapors and glooms it would not help matters.

  But Jim noticed anyway. He got up to drop his toenail clippings into the wastebasket and knew from the way Patsy’s head was bent down that she was crying. Normally her tears made him feel pressured and annoyed, but just then he was feeling pressured from another direction, namely graduate school. There was a vast country of knowledge on whose rim he stood, and he didn’t feel at all confident about entering it. Flap Horton and a good many of his fellow students had already explored it and seemed to know everything about it: the height of each mountain, where the desert areas lay, which guides to trust and follow. In comparison, Jim felt lost. Listening to Flap made him feel hopelessly behind, but being behind was better than being lost, and lost was how he felt when he wandered alone in the English stacks of the library pulling out books that looked interesting and putting them back in order to pull out others.

  In comparison, Patsy and her tears seemed so familiar as to be almost comforting. When he had put his clippings in the wastebasket he went over and stood behind her rubbing her shoulders. He lifted her hair and rubbed the back of her neck. Patsy gulped back her tears and turned in the chair, trying to kiss his hand, but it was too awkward and she stood up and went into his arms, sniffing. She had felt so alone and worthless for a few minutes that it seemed the kindest and most thoughtful thing in the world that he would want to come and rub her neck.

  “Party depress you?” he asked. “I guess Flap and I weren’t too convivial. He’s the only one I can talk to these days.”

  “It wasn’t that,” Patsy said, giving his throat and cheeks many grateful kisses. “I just got blue. I’m probably not very stable. There are times when I just get scared. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next in my life.”

  “Well, you’re going to have us a baby next,” Jim said, putting his nose behind her ear.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes I am.” She was irrationally happy that he had used the word “us,” for he often went for long periods without seeming to consider them a unit of any kind. She kept her face pressed against his and they stood rocking a little on their feet in the middle of the room. Patsy’s tears dried and the look of delight came back into her eyes. “I need a shower,” she said when they broke apart. She went and showered and in the shower remembered that Hank Malory had said he was named for Hank Williams. She didn’t know whether she should tell Jim or not. It might be something Hank didn’t want everyone to know. But when Jim came in to brush his teeth she told him anyway.

  “Oh, really?” he said. “He seems like a nice guy. Who will we name our child after?”

  “I don’t know,” Patsy said, a little grave. Jim went out and she dried herself and brushed her teeth and then sat on the john for several minutes. They had a tiny bathroom bookshelf beneath the window, with a couple of Pogo books in it, Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, a paperback of The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, a Modern Library edition of Eudora Welty stories and a green Ginger Man which had come from Paris. Patsy pulled out the first volume of The Greek Myths and read a myth or two, rubbing herself with the towel. She shoved the book back in its place and contemplated The Ginger Man a moment but left it be. She had tried twice to read it and had been put off both times.

  She went into the bedroom, still drying herself. It was not easy to get dry in a town as humid as Houston.

  “Listen,” she said, “we really have to get air conditioning before next summer.” Emma had been telling her about the boys’ bronchial troubles and it seemed more and more absurd to her not to have air conditioning. They would certainly need it with a baby. But Jim was already asleep, the light right in his face and the Fiedler book open on his chest.

  Her mood, which had been rising, dipped again, though only a little. She turned off all the lights except her reading light and made sure the door was locked and sat on the bed with her legs pulled up and her chin on her knees, feeling balked and restive. Just as she had been feeling outward again she had been left alone, awake, and had no way to be but inward. She felt very peevish toward Jim. He had ceased to know his business as a husband, it seemed to her, for she was very much in the mood to be made, and had been three or four times since she had been made. She mused about it and became nostalgic for the time when Jim had been a suitor and had known his business better.

  It was easy to be nostalgic for their courtship. It had been lovely to park at night and kiss a lot, with spring breezes blowing through the car. In a few weeks kissing and breezes and much talk had led them to the act of love—about which, it seemed to her, no nomenclature said anything accurate. It had seemed more an act of daring, or of curiosity, or of coming of age. Certainly it had not been, at first, so comfortable or convenient a way to express her feelings as kissing, in the days when she had really liked to kiss Jim. But kissing had got lost somewhere. She felt nothing to put into it any more except occasional gratitude for some small kindness or other, and it seldom made her feel warm in the way it once had. It was a pity, she felt, and it was almost as if sex had destroyed it, for the act called the act of love had led around to itself such a number of times that it had grown more major than kissing. At least it had gotten major enough that she was greedy for it; and for kissing she was only nostalgic. She touched herself for a moment and tightened her mouth angrily at Jim. If he had not been so dumb as to go to sleep, they could have had a good time. She got up and sulkily put on her nightgown and then reached over and got the Fiedler book, heavy, orange, its spine wrinkled and broken from the manglings of avid graduate students, and lay on her stomach, restively waving one heel and then the other in the air, and read, before she slept, one hundred and fifty pages on love and death in the American novel.

  3

  DIXIE MCCORMACK HAD A TERROR of parking lots, particularly large ones. They had fled into the store and were fleeing back to the car, Dixie well in the lead. She was carrying five packages in bright package bags. Patsy had only one package, a Jackson Pollock puzzle which she intended to send to her sister Miri. They were crossing a vast suburban parking lot and though it was late October it was still much too warm to be sprinting across large stretches of asphalt. Patsy slowed and walked at her usual pace and her aunt drew farther and farther ahead.

  When they finally got to the blue Cadillac her
aunt had dumped her five packages in the back seat, fastened her seat belt, turned down the sun visor, and was combing her dark well-dyed red hair. The minute Patsy was in the car Dixie pushed a button and Patsy’s door locked.

  “That’s absurd,” Patsy said. “We’re perfectly safe.”

  “We are now,” Dixie said. “Nobody’s yanking me out of my own Cadillac.”

  “That rape was a month ago and she was just a high school girl,” Patsy said. “Between us we could beat him off if he showed up. Just because it was in this parking lot is no reason to panic.” Her window was remotely controlled, and she looked around to see it going up.

  “We might inspire him,” Dixie said. “Two sexy things like us.” As soon as the windows were up she started the air conditioner and cold dry air blew against their legs.

  “Between us we could scream loud enough to scare an army,” Patsy said, arguing only for the sake of form.

  “They use chloroform,” Dixie said as the car shot backward. “You don’t get time to scream. Let’s go to Neiman’s.”

  They whirled out of the parking lot onto the frontage road in front of a giant gravel truck, made a tire-screeching U-turn, and were soon on the freeway heading toward town at a clip so rapid it inspired Patsy to fasten her seat belt.

  Dixie was driving with only the heel of one hand on the wheel, cutting smoothly from lane to lane and passing whole schools of cars. There was a look of delight on her face, which forty-five years of life had left plump and virtually unwrinkled. The skyline of downtown Houston appeared ahead of them, indistinct in the hot mists. The inside of the car had become chilly.

  “Why must you pass everyone?” Patsy asked.

  “The more you pass the more you’re ahead of.”

  “I see why you liked Sonny Shanks. The two of you drive alike. On the other hand you hate rapists and I think he’s probably a rapist. I told you what he did to me.”