“Sleep here,” Jim said. “I won’t crush you.”
Patsy went to look at Davey and came back scratching her head.
“Maybe I’ll change back tomorrow night,” she said. “The couch is already made up.” She gave him a sleepy kiss and went to the couch and turned out her reading light. Jim still had his light on. He was watching her.
“You’re a funny girl,” he said. “You don’t act the way you used to.”
“Well, I’m a mother now,” Patsy said, taking off her robe. It was all she could think of to say. She looked at him. He seemed to be in a kind of reverie.
“Can I ask something?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Did you really make a pass at Eleanor Guthrie?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, surprised.
“You did?”
“Sure. I told you so over the phone.”
“You just said you hadn’t gone to bed with her. You could have not gone to bed with her and never so much as winked. I just wondered.”
“I said I had a crush on her but didn’t go to bed with her,” he said. “I kissed her.”
Patsy was startled. Somehow she had convinced herself that nothing physical had taken place. There was a long uneasy silence. She had asked the question unemotionally. It had occurred to her to ask him that several times. She had been certain he hadn’t made a pass, but he had. It bred not only more questions, but a strange stirring of emotion. She felt puzzled and offended. Her body had been ready for sleep, but her emotions crossed it up.
“What did you think happened?”
“I don’t know,” Patsy said, wishing she had gone to sleep and not asked.
Jim sighed. It was a misdemeanor that belonged to the remote past. But he was much more relaxed than she was in regard to it.
“There isn’t any mystery,” he said. “I guess she loves Sonny. Maybe she sort of got interested in me too for a few days. I didn’t realize it in time. It doesn’t matter now. She loves him and I love you. I guess she gets pretty lonely there on the ranch.”
“Poor thing,” Patsy said. “I wish you wouldn’t compare us.”
“I wasn’t. How did I compare you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Patsy said angrily. “Maybe you didn’t.”
“Then why sound so hostile? Nothing happened. She wasn’t hostile about you.”
“A kiss isn’t nothing,” she said.
“Well, it’s not much, either. It wasn’t so earth shaking.”
Patsy wiped tears of anger on the pillowcase. She was aware that she was utterly in the wrong to be angry, and hated the illogic of her own emotions. An hour ago she would not have supposed she would care if Jim had taken Eleanor Guthrie and gone to Majorca with her. Yet she was hurt that he had kissed her. It was stupid and humiliating. Everything she did or felt was absurd, it seemed to her—everything except what she did with Davey. Only taking care of him made sense.
“I don’t see why you’re upset,” he said. “It was just one pass and it seems like years ago. Besides, I like to kiss you better.”
“I don’t know how you’d know. We haven’t done it in years.”
“That’s not my fault,” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, feeling sullen and stubborn. Every word she said put her more clearly in the wrong, but the fact that she was in the wrong didn’t seem to affect what she felt.
“I don’t either, especially,” Jim said, opening the Eric Ambler book. “I do like to kiss you, though. I’d like to right now.”
“No. I don’t feel like being compared to an aging heiress.”
“Screw you,” Jim said angrily. “Will you quit making up cute little categories? She’s not that old and the fact that she has money has nothing to do with it.”
“From where I sit it does,” Patsy said.
“Then come and sit over here. You seem to want to keep yourself twenty yards from me these days.”
“I’m sleepy and I’m going to sleep.”
“You’re full of excuses. Have you stopped loving me or something?” His voice sounded worried, for the first time all evening.
Patsy was ashamed of herself. “No,” she said, more meekly. “It’s just a difficult time. Please let me go to sleep.”
It was confusing to realize that he still wanted her to love him. Half the time she believed it didn’t matter to him; the discovery that she was wrong always subdued her for a while, but it didn’t really make anything simpler. Jim soon turned off his light. She stayed on the couch, sleepless, silent, and so stiff with nervousness and guilt that it felt as if her joints had hardened. She didn’t cry. More and more, it seemed, she only cried in anger. Sorrow and confusion left her dry.
18
“OF COURSE WE KNOW THEM,” Lee said. “Jim’s one of your father’s best students. He just had a bad accident—a horse threw him. We’re going to visit them tomorrow. Is her sister nice?”
Bill had been reading, but he stopped to listen. Lee was talking to Melissa again. He could have listened on an extension but he hated three-way phone calls. And he and Melissa were always getting angry with each other on the phone. She had as much temper as he had.
“I don’t like anything I’ve heard about that drug,” Lee said. “And I don’t think mixed couples really further the cause of civil rights. Besides, they don’t usually work out. Is she seeing a psychiatrist?”
“Ask her about her sisters,” Bill said. “Tell her to ask them to write, if it isn’t against their principles, or if they haven’t forgotten how.”
“Hush,” Lee said. “I don’t have a very good connection.”
“Is who seeing a psychiatrist?” he asked when she hung up.
“Patsy Carpenter’s sister. She’s living in the same house with Melissa.”
“Small world.”
“Kids drift around too much out there. Melissa has a boy friend who sets up light shows. She says he’s very good and he makes money.”
“That’s a novelty,” Bill said. “A hippie capitalist. What’s wrong with Patsy’s sister?”
“Lots of LSD and a Negro boy friend who’s mean to her. So Melissa says.”
She sat down at her dressing table and began to clean her face. “Melissa and her boy friend are peace-marching tomorrow,” she said.
“Did we ever march in anything?”
“We were in the Fourth of July parade, the year we were in Milwaukee.”
“I’ve suppressed that year. I’m glad I was born without a social conscience. It leaves more time for basics like reading and fucking.”
“Especially reading,” she said with a small smile. “I can remember years when you’ve had almost unlimited time to read.”
“Ah, but those years are past. You’ve taken bloom again. It’s been years since you’ve looked so lovely.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had faded so,” Lee said, but she was aware that she was looking especially good. Her hair shone, her face was untroubled. She had taken to playing tennis twice a week at the River Oaks Country Club. They didn’t belong, but she had a friend who did. The pro admired her; she played good tennis for a woman her age. And she had Peter, an affectionate and adoring young man, not very strong but that was all the better. He was just the sugar she had been needing. He had never dreamed he could seduce anyone as lovely as herself. They drove to Galveston often and took long walks along the beach. He had a neat apartment on Dunlavy, as clean and uncluttered as his psyche. He could not believe that he was actually getting away with a love affair, and with her, a professor’s wife. She was gay and protective and reassuring, but he lived, nonetheless, in constant terror of Bill. It was an understandable terror, for Bill was formidable. But Peter was wholly and hopelessly in love with her, and the terrors which, for him, attended their meetings gave his ardors a kind of trembling eagerness which she found delicious.
“You certainly aren’t faded now,” Bill said. “Look, I’ve laid aside my book, and it’s the best book on
Joyce since year before last. What more in the way of passion could you ask?”
She took up her brush. “Would you even lay aside Joyce himself?”
“Don’t be coquettish,” he said, turning off his bed light. “No modernist worth his salt would lay aside James Joyce just for a woman, least of all his wife. Lesser men, yes. In your present state of bloom I’d lay aside Ford Madox Ford for you without a moment’s hesitation.”
“There have been those who thought me worth more than a minor novelist,” Lee said. “Friends of yours, I might add. John Groton would have laid aside not only his specialty but his job and Mary and the kids if I had offered to let him unstring my bodice.”
Bill chuckled. “That’s a pretty phrase,” he said. “It wasn’t your bodice that won John, it was more likely your derrière. Your bodice has never required stringing.”
“Oh, all right. The point still pertains.”
“Sure, but it can take some amplification. For one thing, his speciality is Wilkie Collins, and Mary Groton is dull of body and dull of brain. In comparison to her you’re Greta Garbo.”
Lee gave him an austere smile, went in the living room and found the novel she had been reading, and came to bed.
The next afternoon they visited the Carpenters. Jim had improved to the point of being able to get around on crutches, which fascinated Davey. Jim and Bill talked book buying while Lee and Patsy sat by, both feeling slightly left out and slightly bored. They chatted unoriginally about babies and then about houses.
“You ought to buy ours,” Lee said. “It’s the darkest of secrets yet, but the odds are we’ll be moving next year. We’ve never even touched the third floor. It would be perfect for your son.”
“I wish we could buy it,” Patsy said, “but I don’t think we can survive here until next summer.” She did like the Duffins’ house. It was large and solid and rather understated, and had good floors and a large fenced back yard.
Bill had perked up his ears. “The problem of timing might not be insurmountable,” he said. “Lee and I could take an apartment for the spring semester.” And he and Lee began to discuss various possible arrangements. Jim and Patsy listened, both skeptical, neither terribly eager, but neither willing to close the possibility completely. In the end, as the Duffins were leaving, Patsy promised to come by and look at the house more closely in a day or two.
Lee and Bill walked home feeling buoyant. “What a relief that would be,” he said. “I’d rather sell a semester early than two semesters late, like the Indiana house.”
“Patsy’s the one to sell to,” Lee said. “She’ll do the deciding.”
“I think we better clinch the deal before they fall apart,” he said. “They look like losers to me.”
“You’re always so knowledgeable. It’s too bad marriages can’t be edited like texts. Think how good you’d be at spotting influences and borrowings. She didn’t look so bad.”
“A little sage counsel and a few good bangs wouldn’t hurt her.”
They stopped at the drugstore for Cokes and tried to remember how much the painting had cost them, and the landscaping and the upstairs plumbing, and by the time they got home had settled on $28,000 as the figure at which they would quote their house to Patsy when she came.
19
“UH-OH,” EMMA SAID. “Of all times.”
“Oh, no!” Tommy yelled. “Oh, no!” Then, from the living room where the boys were, came the sound of something being beaten.
“Don’t do that, Tommy!” Emma yelled. She and Flap were at the supper table having coffee.
“But it’s Flipper” Tommy said. “I’ve got to make it come back on.”
“Don’t beat the TV,” Flap said. “We’ve told you about that.”
But the beating continued. “What’s he beating it with?” Flap asked.
“His stick horse, I think. I’ll go fiddle with it. It is Flipper, after all.”
“So what?” Flap said. “Stop that!” he yelled at Tommy. The beating had not stopped.
The Hortons, Emma and Flap, glanced at each other over the remains of supper, which had been sphagetti, as was more or less customary on Saturday night. Normally Tommy whopping the TV set would not have discommoded them much, but it had been a dreary rainy Saturday, the boys inside all day, prelims less than a week off, and Emma fearful that somehow, in defiance of modern chemistry, she had gotten pregnant again. She would not have minded especially, except that if Flap passed everything and got a job they would be moving just as the baby was due, and she had dreary visions of herself having a baby in someplace like Nebraska, where they knew no one, no doctors, no nurses, no one to take care of the boys. Flap had spent the day having dismal visions too, visions of pages full of questions, none of which he had any idea how to answer; visions of disgrace and a job teaching Sanskrit drama at Houston Baptist College, a fate that sometimes befell terminal M.A.s. All in all they were in no mood to hear the sound of a stick horse whopping a TV set repeatedly. When the boys had departed the table and trouped in to watch Flipper it had seemed to both their parents that they had been given a small blessing, thirty minutes’ respite from questions, grievances, decisions, talk of any kind. Thirty minutes of silence and coffee was something to live for, and at that moment neither of them could think of anything else.
Now, it seemed, even that was being taken away. Emma pushed back her chair and got up. She didn’t like the look on Flap’s face. It was the look of a man who was about to go wallop a child, and she didn’t want Tommy spanked, not just then. She didn’t want any spankings, any tears, any scenes. Maybe she could clear the picture, somehow.
But the picture, when she got there, was hopelessly dim and snowy. Tommy stood by the set with his stick horse in his hand, tears of fury on his cheeks. Teddy sat on the floor directly in front of the set, too appalled even to cry. He was very fish-oriented and Flipper was the high point of his week.
“Me TV broken,” he said pathetically, looking at his mother.
“I’ll see,” Emma said. “Maybe I can make it come back on.” But she had little heart. Apparently a tube was going. When it got snowy it had to be turned off and left to refresh itself in some mysterious way.
“Fiddle with it,” Tommy said frantically. “Fiddle with it. We’re missing something. I know we are. We’re missing a dangerous part.”
“I’m fiddling,” Emma said, wanting to cry. The best she could get was a blur in which the moving figures were just discernible as moving figures. That was awful. She liked it better completely blank, but the boys didn’t. They clung to hope that the blurs would turn back into the people they had been watching.
“I can’t get it, honey,” she said finally. “We’ve just got to get it fixed, that’s all there is to it.”
“But you said you would,” Tommy said. “You said you would the morning we missed the cartoons, remember? That was a long time ago. Why haven’t you got it fixed yet?”
“I just haven’t,” she said, feeling criminal. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, we’re missing minutes of it,” Tommy said, jumping up and down. “Maybe if I hit it just once, real hard.”
“You do and I’ll hit your spanker real hard,” Flap said from the doorway. His look bespoke severe exasperation.
“But you hit it and it came on,” Tommy said. “Remember?”
“I guess that was luck,” Flap said. “Anyway, I hit it with my hand, not with a stick horse.”
Teddy wandered over to his father, thinking that perhaps it was a matter that took masculine attending to. “Me TV broken,” he said, looking at Flap.
“Well, I can’t help it,” Flap said.
“Why don’t you try hitting it?” Tommy said. “We’re missing minutes.”
“You might as well,” Emma said. “It did work once.”
Flap went over and hit the TV set five or six times with the heel of his hand. Only the Sunday before, during a pro football game, he had made it come on that way. But it didn’t work a second ti
me. The snow changed to waves while he was hitting it, then to wrinkles, then back to snow. He hit the turn-off button and the set went dark. “No soap,” he said.
“Now we’ll miss it all,” Tommy said. “It might have come back on.”
The boys took it in their different ways. Teddy began to cry loudly, standing where he was. Emma reached over and grabbed him and pulled him into her lap. He fought for a bit and then sat there crying. Tommy flung himself on the couch and began to kick it. His face gathered, as if he would cry, but his angers were deeper and colder than his brother’s, and though his mouth trembled he didn’t cry.
“I won’t watch it next Saturday night,” he said. “I’ll never watch it again.”
“Sure you’ll watch it again,” Flap said.
“I won’t ever watch TV again,” Tommy said, cold and sure. “I won’t watch cartoons either.”
“Tommy,” Emma said, “don’t be that way. It was my fault for not getting the set fixed. That’s like saying you wouldn’t ever eat candy again if I didn’t give you a piece just when you wanted it.”
“Well,” Tommy said, “if I really wanted it and you wouldn’t give it to me I would never eat candy again.”
“Don’t argue with him when he’s sulking,” Flap said.
“Well, he has a right to sulk. Nobody likes to miss their favorite things.”
Tommy suddenly jumped up and without a word ran out of the room, his face pinched and furious. Emma looked at Flap helplessly, bereft of all spirit. Sometimes she could take Tommy’s angers calmly and sometimes they broke her up. She could feel herself breaking up. He had taken, when hurt, to running into the small pantry and crawling onto the lowest shelf, making a place for himself amid whatever canned goods were there. Once there, he was apt to stay an hour. Emma could never cajole him out; he did not want her to come into the pantry. Flap could drag him out, but he was loath to do it and she was loath to make him. Once Teddy tried to climb up in the same shelf and got a kick in the mouth; so when Tommy went to the pantry everybody left him alone, uneasily. Flap tried to make light of it. It was obviously a normal thing for a sensitive boy to do. But nothing he ever said made Emma feel less worried or less wretched. She did not think she could stand an hour of Tommy in the pantry, not just then.