16
THE SECOND AND MUCH OF THE THIRD VOLUME of Proust Duane took in gulps, between long and often tiring sessions in his garden. The spring and summer were both as harsh as he had expected them to be. No rain fell in April; only a little fell in May. Duane was forced to lay a more extensive irrigation system and be vigilant with his hose and his watering can. Thanks to his attention, many of the new vegetables he planted flourished. He had become interested in the Native Seeds movement—some of the varieties of corn he planted, as well as a few root vegetables, probably hadn’t been grown in that part of the country since the time of the Kickapoos. The fact that he had brought back crops that hadn’t been grown in or around Thalia in more than one hundred years was something he felt very good about.
By now his garden had become almost too famous. Many more people stopped than had stopped the year before, some of them knowledgeable gardeners who had come specifically in hopes of talking to him. Scarcely a day passed without his having to spend an hour or more in conversation with some passerby. People from ag schools began to show up, intense young agronomists from Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and the University of Oklahoma. Often their questions were so technical that Duane couldn’t answer them. At times his own ignorance left him abashed—he even toyed with the idea of enrolling in school, in order to take a few courses in botany. He didn’t, probably because it was just the day-to-day gardening that he liked most.
With the garden occupying most of the daylight hours he had less and less time for the long book about spoiled and finicky people in Paris. He imagined them to be much like the people whose photographs Karla had studied so closely in the pages of W. He found little to interest him in their quarrels and their peculiarities. Only now and then a description of a garden or a park would catch his attention.
He considered simply abandoning the book and also the notion of going back to see Honor Carmichael. When he did leave his garden it was mainly to pedal to Wichita Falls and flirt with Maria. Their flirtation was pleasant, but it was also slowly growing more intense. Duane asked her once about her husband—he wanted to know if there was a rival he should be aware of.
“Husband? Which one?” Maria asked. “I’ve had three and you know how I feel now? No más, that’s how I feel now. No más.
“Doesn’t mean I don’t like fun,” she added, leaning closer to him. “Husbands, no—fun, that’s always good if you can get it.”
Duane knew that he and Maria were moving steadily closer to the moment when all that would be left to do would be to take each other to bed. He had begun to think about it a lot—so, clearly, had Maria.
And yet he kept on, irregularly, with Proust, gulping down thirty or even forty pages in the hot afternoons when to be in the garden was to risk sunstroke. He had read more than two-thirds of the books by then—he didn’t want to give up. Nor had he stopped thinking about Honor. His consciousness seemed to be saturated with plants and with women. When he wasn’t thinking about one, he was thinking about the other. In fantasy he switched restlessly back and forth, between Honor and Maria.
“Come by, you know,” Maria said, one day. She had a small house near the café. “My kids are grown. Come by—we could watch TV, you know.”
Duane was ready to take her up on it, but before they fixed a date Maria’s mother died and she had to rush back to Sonora, to look after her old father and an equally aged aunt. A month passed, and she had not returned. When Duane asked about her the people she worked with were vague.
“Oh yeah, she’s coming back,” they said, but one month stretched into two.
Meanwhile his garden, in only its second year as a public garden, had changed into something Duane didn’t really like. It became too famous. Poor people still came and took food, but the easy attitude they had about it the first year changed. Some came and picked their vegetables defiantly, as if they were robbing the rich. Only rarely could he persuade them to try any of the new vegetables—they rejected anything that smacked of the exotic. They just grabbed a few beans, a few tomatoes, a little corn. The more unusual vegetables went to travelers or to the more knowledgeable gardeners who stopped by. Duane began to be troubled by the local people’s attitude toward the garden. Why did the poor people slink away so meekly if he happened to be there when they came to do their picking?
“Because you’re the squire,” Ruth said. “Nobody wants to risk upsetting the squire.”
“But I’m not a squire,” Duane protested. “Those people know better than that. They know me. I’ve lived here with them my whole life.”
“Don’t care, you’re still the squire,” Ruth insisted.
“If it’s going to be this way, then I won’t plant a garden next year,” Duane said. “I didn’t set out to be a famous gardener. Maybe I’ll go see the pyramids next summer. Let somebody else plant a damn garden.”
“Go ahead,” Ruth told him. “Maybe you’ll find a girlfriend over there in Egypt.”
“Ruth, I’m going because I want to see the pyramids,” he reminded her. “I’m not going halfway around the world just to look for a girlfriend.”
“I don’t know that you need an Egyptian but you do need to get married,” she told him. “You weren’t meant for solitude.”
“I think I’ve been doing pretty well with it,” he said.
“No you haven’t, you’re still in love with that gay shrink,” she said. “That’s never going to come to anything.”
Duane dropped the subject—in fact, he didn’t disagree.
As the summer waned, so did the number of pages he had left of Proust. When he dropped below two hundred he began to feel a little sad and also a little anxious—the anxiety arose from the knowledge that it would soon be time for him to call Honor Carmichael and request an appointment. Much of Proust he didn’t remember at all, but he did remember how anxious the young boy telling the story had become at the thought that his mother would soon come up and kiss him good night—kiss him good night and then be gone. Duane felt some of the same mixture of anticipation and apprehension when he thought of visiting Honor Carmichael again. He remembered how swiftly his hour with her passed, so swiftly that, like the boy in Proust, he would begin to miss her before she even arrived. Just a few words, a few moments, and he would be out on her front steps again, faced with a long gap of time before his next appointment.
Also, even though he only enjoyed about one page out of one hundred of the many pages he had read, he did not really want the reading to end. Reading Proust had become a habit—he didn’t want to lose it from his life. The feelings he had about the books were so complicated, so mixed up with feelings he had about Karla or Honor, that he could not understand them. He would sit in his lawn chair at night, watching the distant lightning flicker, unhappy, but not for any clear reason. Something was lost—he had not the skills to say what was lost, or how the loss had occurred, or whether he could expect to save or capture anything.
It struck him that perhaps Honor had wanted him to read that particular novel because it was so long and complicated that—if he stayed faithful to his task and finished it—it would arouse feelings in him so complicated that he would have to come to her if he sought explanations of those feelings.
Perhaps Honor Carmichael hoped to help him understand the kinds of things that Mr. Proust understood about the losses that come to one in life. Perhaps she thought he, particularly, needed to understand the nature of such losses—surely she didn’t ask all her patients to read such a long book about a foreign place. She had picked the book particularly for him and he hoped, when he saw her again, to ask her why.
Thinking about the matter in those terms made him feel a little more hopeful, although, within the hopefulness, his sadness still hung, like an old coat in a closet.
The evening when he finally read the last few pages of Proust was very hot. Thunder had rumbled all afternoon. He closed the book and took it with him outside. He wanted to sit a minute in his lawn chair. When the shower broke, the rain
drops at first were hot too, but they soon cooled. As the rain began to fall harder he rose and took the Proust book back inside. It had taken him more than a year to read the whole of the three books—he did not want the last volume to get wet.
Then he took his clothes off and went back to the lawn chair for a few minutes, letting the cool rain pelt him. It had been a sweaty day—it was nice to be showered by the fresh-smelling rain before he went to bed.
17
THE NEXT MORNING, his assigned task done at last, Duane rode into Thalia, meaning to water his garden and then call Honor Carmichael and make an appointment. He felt it was time to start again where he had stopped the day Karla was killed.
But he dawdled over his watering, did a little weeding, pulled up a few onions, chopped them with some tomatoes and a good cucumber, and had an excellent salad for breakfast. Several travelers stopped at the garden during the morning. Three frizzy-haired old ladies showed up from Anadarko, Oklahoma, chattery as birds. Duane indulged them, showing them this and that—something he rarely did, anymore. In only a year’s time the general public had come to irritate him. Mainly he hid in his trailer if a car showed up with an out-of-state license plate.
Though he had waited a long time for his chance to see Honor Carmichael again, he found himself unable to simply pick up the phone and make the call. He had been depressed when he had seen her before, but he didn’t consider that he was particularly depressed anymore. In fact, all that was depressing him that morning was the thought of seeing Honor in such a limited way. A patient-to-doctor relationship wasn’t what he wanted.
Around noon, the call still not made, he cycled over to Wichita Falls and ate at the diner where Maria had worked. Maybe, by a miracle, she had come back; maybe he could initiate a normal relationship with an appealing woman, rather than pursuing an expensive and ultimately futile relationship with a woman who didn’t want him and never would.
But Maria was not back. When he asked about her the young man behind the counter just looked vague. The cook, a wiry little woman, came out of the kitchen and gave him a shrewd look. She knew what he wanted, knew why he was always making inquiries about Maria.
“We don’t know,” she said. “She had to go home. She’ll be back, but we don’t know when. She can’t get no papers on her father.”
Thwarted at the diner, Duane pedaled out the Seymour highway to the Stingaree Courts. He thought he might rent the honeymoon suite again, just for one night. He could visit with Gay-lee and Sis and Shorty. Maybe being back at the Stingaree Courts would help him to decide whether to resume the life of a psychiatric patient again.
To his shock, the Stingaree Courts was closed. There was a For Sale sign in the window of the office—the gravel parking lot was empty of cars, except for an ancient Mercury with all four wheels missing, rotting in the weeds by the outer fence. There was no Sis, no Gay-lee, no Shorty. The line of low cabins seemed to be sagging already, sinking back into the earth.
Duane peered in the window of the office, but the windowpanes were so heavy with dust that he could see little. The office was completely empty—even the counter where guests had once registered had been removed.
He cycled back down the road to the bar where the man who had once played football for Iowa Park tended bar. But his former opponent was not there, or at least not there yet. Instead an old man with a cigarette dangling from his mouth was wearily pushing a mop across the floor.
“Do you know anything about the Stingaree Courts?” Duane asked. “I used to stay there sometimes but it looks like they’re closed for good.”
“Yep, closed for good,” the old man echoed. “The Meekses are gone. It’s the same old story. The old man died and the old lady left. That business about the fish got in the papers, though—it even made the television.”
“What business? What fish?”
The old man chuckled—when he did his cigarette fell out of his mouth. He bent slowly down, picked it up, looked at it, and flipped it in the general direction of a big trash can.
“There was a catfish in one of the water beds,” he said. “How it got in there, don’t ask me. What it lived on, don’t ask me. When the old boy who bought the water bed drained it, the next thing you know a catfish was flopping around on the ground.”
“That’s amazing,” Duane said. “Was it a big one?”
“No, it wasn’t what you’d call big,” the old man said. “How big could a catfish get, living in a damn water bed? But, like I said, it made the TV.”
18
THE NEXT MORNING, disgusted with his own wavery behavior, Duane picked up the phone and made an appointment with Dr. Carmichael for the next afternoon at three. Even if he only ended up seeing Honor once, at least he wanted to tell her he had done what she ordered him to do: he had read the Proust books.
That afternoon, after his work in the garden was done, looking at the three fat silver-and-black paperbacks piled up on his table, he began to grow nervous. He had read the three books—at least he had turned every page—but he had no confidence that he understood even a tenth of what he had read. What did Honor mean to do? If she started asking him questions about Proust he felt sure he would embarrass himself immediately. If she quizzed him about the characters he wouldn’t even be able to say the names correctly. It all seemed like folly. He had finished the book only two days ago, but already it was just a jumble of names, places, and descriptions in his mind.
That night he rode out to the cabin and sat in his lawn chair, wavering between excitement and despair. One moment he would decide he ought to just give up.
“There is a time to just plain give up, Duane,” Karla had said to him, many times. It was one of her maxims. “There’s times when you can’t move the world just by being bullheaded.”
Then he would remember his glimpse of Honor the day the wind blew her skirt and, despite himself, would grow excited. He told himself he ought to calm down. He was just making a visit to a doctor. But he couldn’t calm down and was relieved when he saw the headlights of a pickup coming across his hill. It was Bobby Lee, stopping for his binightly chat.
A few weeks before, Bobby Lee had impulsively proposed marriage to a young woman he had just met. The woman had been putting gas in her car at one of the local Kwik-Sacks, when Bobby Lee drove up to the pump just behind her. The young woman, whose name was Jennifer, had been humming “The Yellow Rose of Texas” while pumping gas. She had blonde hair and two babies in her car.
“The minute she set that nozzle back in the pump it was like I knew, Duane—it was like I knew!” Bobby Lee said. “It was sort of the way she was humming that got me.”
“Just because she can hum pretty tunes don’t mean she would make a good wife for a man your age,” Duane said, but his words of caution came too late—much too late. Bobby Lee had walked right up to Jennifer; there was no hesitation at all. He gave her a shy kiss and told her he wanted to marry her for life—all this before he even met her kids. What’s more, he got away with it—somehow the impulse worked. The girl had just been passing through on her way to Abilene, where she hoped to get a job working in an old folks’ home. She was twenty-six and had never been married—the two kids, as she put it, had just kind of arrived. Nobody in Thalia could call to mind a more striking example of love at first sight.
“He probably just liked her butt,” Lester Marlow speculated. “She probably had her cute little butt turned to him while she was pumping gas.”
So far, two weeks into the relationship, love had not dimmed—Jennifer seemed not to have experienced the slightest problem with the fact that one of Bobby Lee’s balls was a fake.
“As long as one of them’s yours, that’s fine with me,” Jennifer said—it was a statement that seemed likely to bind him to her forever.
Or, perhaps, not forever. The nuptials had yet to be celebrated and Bobby Lee had begun to exhibit traces of nervousness, which is one reason he had taken to showing up at Duane’s for binightly chats.
“What’s new?” Duane asked, when Bobby parked and got out.
“I’ve been thinking of driving off a cliff—what do you think of that option?” Bobby Lee asked.
“It would depend on the cliff,” Duane said. “If it was a low cliff you might just get crippled up for a while. That might be your best out.”
“Out from what?” Bobby Lee asked.
“Out from marrying a girl you just met at a gas station and don’t know from Adam,” Duane said. “Haven’t you ever heard about courtship?”
“I know, but I’m too old to date,” Bobby Lee said. “The minute I saw Jennifer I knew that was it, the whole question was settled.”
“If it’s so settled why are you running out here to bother me every other night?” Duane asked. “Why aren’t you home changing diapers?”
“Fuck, that’s the whole problem, I hate to change diapers,” Bobby Lee said. “I got two grown children. What am I doing starting over with two little pissers whose daddies have been lost track of?”
Duane said nothing.
“Do you think it’s a sign of loose morals that she didn’t bother to keep up with the daddies?” Bobby Lee asked.
“It could be,” Duane said.
“Her mother’s a Seventh-Day Adventist—that’s another bad sign,” Bobby Lee said.
“I’m not a marriage counselor,” Duane reminded him, in case he had forgotten that fact.
“I know, but I ain’t married yet either,” Bobby said. “I’m using you as a prenuptial counselor. Another thing that gets me is the thought of having to buy those kids braces. Then right after that they start getting girls pregnant.”
“Right, girls like Jennifer,” Duane said.
“You think I’m doing it because she don’t mind that I’ve only got one ball, don’t you?” Bobby said. “That’s what everybody thinks. I can feel it in the air.”
After that Duane refused all comment.