Moving On (37 page)

Jim was a little jolted. “It hasn’t been that long,” he said. “You always exaggerate. I don’t think it’s been that long. Anyway, your being pregnant has nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, I don’t care how long it’s been,” she said. “It would just be nice if you wanted me once in a while. I don’t know. It’s that bastard Duffin.”

“He’s not a bastard and he has nothing to do with it.”

Patsy snorted and went and got a dishtowel with which to dry her eyes. “It’s him,” she said bitterly. “You’ve got to be somebody’s disciple, don’t you? I wish I could understand why you invariably pick bastards.”

Jim put the copy of
Howl
on the pile of books. Patsy was staring dully out the window. A couple of late tears had leaked out of her eyes and were caught beside her nose. It was Saturday afternoon, darkening and wintry.

“I don’t want to argue about him,” Jim said. “We’ve argued that a dozen times already. I don’t know why he adopted me but he did and that’s that. You’re not realistic. He hasn’t done anything but help me so far. You’re more paranoid than Flap.”

“Flap and I can tell a bastard when we see one,” she said. “That’s not paranoia, that’s just good sense.”

“It is
not
good sense,” Jim insisted. “I’m going to be a scholar, right? Duffin is a famous scholar. If I work under him and do well he can help me get a good job. I’ve got to work under somebody—why not him? Anyway, I’d rather read moderns than anything else. You’re just being irrational.”

“I know it,” she said, more quietly. He could always convince her she was being irrational if he tried.

“Maybe he’s not so bad,” she added. “I don’t know. It doesn’t strike me as particularly rational to spend forty dollars for a book you already have. A hundred and forty dollars for how many books? Nine? My god.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “Please hush.”

They both hushed and sat silent, brooding. Patsy scratched her hair, which needed washing. Saturday afternoons depressed her, and they had nothing at all doing for the weekend. In a moment Jim came over and tried to make her stand up so he could hug her. She did, finally, but she was stiff in his arms.

“I’m not rational about money,” he said. “I’ve admitted it before. I tell you what, I’ll change. We’ll spend all the money we want to. There’s no point in pretending I don’t have it when I do. We could even buy a house if you still want to.”

Patsy kept silent, but she softened enough to rub her nose against his shirt. Her nose itched. It was a breakthrough, in a way. He had never offered to try and change before. Yet something in her was still disquieted and unappeased, and she didn’t raise her face to him.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have bought air conditioners. I just feel strange about being rich when the Hortons are so poor. Flap’s my best friend.”

“They could eat for two weeks on what that Ginsberg book cost,” Patsy said, but not angrily. It was a problem she could understand, for she had often gone shopping with Emma and felt so guilty that she had not bought things she really wanted. Usually she snuck back and bought them later. It was particularly wrenching to watch Emma shop, because Emma loved things, objects, clothes, furniture, and had good taste and was always finding things she yearned for and couldn’t buy. What made it even more wrenching was that Emma’s mother had money and never gave Emma any.

“You’re just afraid it will be like my dictionaries and my cameras,” he said. “Just a new hobby. What if it is? It’s nothing to get upset about. The books will get more valuable as time goes on. They’re a kind of investment.”

“You don’t give a damn about investments,” Patsy said. “You could buy municipal bonds if you wanted to invest. It’s just a way of impressing William Duffin and showing him you want to be like him. I hate him. I don’t want you to be like him. I like you because you’re
not
like him.”

“Okay, okay,” Jim said. “I’m not going to argue about it.”

“I wish you didn’t have your money, anyway,” Patsy said. “I wish the Hortons had half of it, or something. I would like for Emma to have new dresses. She doesn’t fix herself up very well.”

“Well, we can’t do anything about the Hortons,” Jim said. “What would you really like to do? We’ll do it right now.”

Patsy thought he meant make love, and she didn’t want to, not just because her tears had made him contrite. But when she looked up at him she saw that he meant something else.

“I mean like go out or something,” he said.

“Oh, yes, let’s do. Maybe we could go to Galveston. We haven’t been in months.” She brightened at once, and the tense look left her face.

Half an hour later they were in the Ford, slipping onto the Gulf freeway. Patsy was curled against her door, wearing jeans, a sweater, and an old trench coat of Jim’s. The warm car and the straight even highway calmed and almost mesmerized them both. As they sped out of Houston across the flat coastal plain, Patsy realized how much she had missed driving since the summer. In four months and more they had not been out of the city of Houston. All fall Jim had read at home at night or gone to the library, and she had read at home or gone to the library with him, the only break in the routine being an occasional hour or two of beer drinking with the other graduate students. She had even begun to avoid the beer drinkings, not because she didn’t enjoy them but because she had discovered in herself a latent competitiveness in regard to Jim that was rather awful. The talk was always of books, and she had read many books and had a good memory for them, much better than Jim’s. All too frequently she was unable to resist showing off how bright she was. It discomfited Jim, but the other graduate students appreciated her memory and her wit and she couldn’t help responding to their appreciation. When the conversations got lively she became almost demonically inspired and could remember quotations and incidents in novels and bits of biographical minutiae that impressed the other graduate students mightily. Jim grew moody and told her from time to time that she ought to be getting the Ph.D., not him. Sometimes his moodiness merely made her worse. She became quite unable to shut up, and it was only later, remembering the conversations, that she found her aggressiveness distasteful. When she watched Jim study, saw him methodically reading scholarly books in order to get their theses clear, she would feel ashamed of herself and resolve to try and be a help rather than a discouragement, but the next time there was a literary conversation she invariably forgot her resolve. Flap Horton sometimes grew irritated with her, particularly when she came up with some oddment of information that spoiled his own theory on a given author or book. He told her she was a brilliant amateur, but essentially belle-lettristic, and she told him she considered that more of a compliment than a put-down.

The real trouble was that Jim was an amateur too, and a cautious one. He had been at work for three weeks on a paper on
The House of Fame
and was still far from satisfied with it.

It was a relief to be going somewhere where there were no graduate students. For once there would be no talk of books. There was nothing to see beside the flat road except an occasional filling station and, in the distance, the wavering orange flares from the giant oil refineries that lay along the ship channel. She looked at Jim, who was in a brood of his own. He had had his hair cut that afternoon, irritatingly short, she felt. It made him look too boyish. It seemed to her that the two of them had been living together almost all their lives, and that consequently it was time Jim stopped looking so much like a boy. She was growing heavier, her breasts were larger, she was changing, but when she looked for some development in him to match the development in her she could see none. The fact that they would soon have a baby left him unchanged, and almost unaffected. It worried her deeply. She wanted to feel that she could depend upon him taking care of her when the baby came, and she couldn’t feel it. He had gone away, further away than he had ever gone before—into the library, into the coffee conversations of graduate school, into a world that didn’t involve her at all, and she had no confidence in her ability to draw him back. His face was not happy—she had a feeling he would really rather be reading articles on
The House of Fame
. The drive to Galveston was just a duty, something he was doing to be courteous.

They crossed the high bridge over the coastal waterway and curved down onto Galveston island, drove up Broadway, passed the cemetery where the victims of the great flood were buried, and on past the few blocks of old turreted many-porched houses, virtually all that was left to suggest the Galveston of the past. Imperious dowager aunts should live in such houses, Patsy thought, though she had never been quite sure what made a dowager aunt. When they came to the ocean Jim turned right and they drove along the sea wall, passing the hotels, the arcades, the pier pavilion, and the seafood houses. They went on a mile or more south, past the old military embarkments, and parked and got out.

The gusty salty wind immediately blew Patsy’s hair into her face. The tide was in and flecks of spray hit them. They looped arms and silently walked along the sea wall, the gusting wind causing them to weave a little. They walked far on, until they came to the last of the sea-wall lights. It was very foggy. They heard a ship’s horn from the dark Gulf. The patterns of white foam and dark water repeated themselves and repeated themselves as they walked. They stood at the last light on the sea wall a minute or more, reluctant to go back; but the foggy darkness beyond the light seemed uninviting and they turned. “Hart Crane’s washing around out there,” Jim said. William Duffin had got him interested in Crane.

Going back, the wind was colder and stronger. Once it almost pushed them into the street. Between the wide-spaced lights were rows of parked cars, with lovers in them, mostly students and nurses from the nearby medical school. Every few feet or so there was a car, its windows rolled up, as private in the salty fog as if the lovers were on another planet. Patsy could not resist peeping a time or two, but even near the lights all she could see were vague shapes.

“Ah, young love,” Jim said, and Patsy nodded, but as they passed more cars and remembered their own parking days—comparing them silently with the present—the thought of young love became more painful than pleasant. Jim regretted saying it. When they came to the Ford the door handles were sticky with salt spray.

“Do you envy those kids?” Patsy asked, once they were in the car. Jim took her cold hand and they tried to play with each other’s fingers but didn’t feel like it.

“I guess,” Jim said. “Our folks still think of
us
as kids, you know.”

They were silent, thinking about it, and then moved closer together and tried, out of mutual nostalgia, to be young lovers kissing. The attempt turned Jim hot and Patsy cold. When she put her hand behind his head she felt his newly barbered skull instead of the fine thick blond hair she liked to twist with her fingers. The kissing didn’t warm her: she felt loose and indifferent and languid. Her hair was damp with the spray and the strands got between their mouths. Patsy sat carelessly, her eyes shut, while Jim patiently picked the strands away and smoothed them back. As he grew eager she grew more uncaring and idly looked past his head at the salt-smeared windshield as he kissed her. Whatever pleasure there had once been when their mouths touched was gone and she cared so little and at that moment remembered it so dimly that she did not even feel sad or like crying about it. She let him have her cold tongue, but it meant nothing. She just wished he would grow tired of kissing her. It was distasteful to be cold in a kiss and she wished he would realize from the slackness of it that she didn’t want to kiss him any more.

But it was only when he began to kiss her that sex returned to Jim from its three-month leave. Somehow it had been absorbed by school, or killed by the worry about whether he would do well in school. There were always books and talk, one more chapter to read, one more authority to consider, one more text to scan. What was important was being bright, being alert, being informed. What he had done in three months was to become more adept at concealing his ignorance, and it had taken all his energy. Patsy had been a wife, which was enough; he had had no eye for her as a woman. But when he kissed her, sex came back, and he scarcely noticed that she was without tenderness or interest. He became too horny too quickly. His breath grew heavy and he worked a hand under her sweater. All he could reach was her heavy stomach, which had begun to curve with their child. He could not work his hand under her brassiere, nor under the waistband of her pedal pushers. She was slumped with her ankles crossed and her head back against the car seat, and he couldn’t touch any of the places he wanted to touch. When she grew tired of being kissed she turned her head and her breath tickled his neck.

“Fine place you picked to come alive,” she said. Her hair was a sticky tangle, she felt flat, and Jim’s pressing eagerness made her feel removed and remote. The male was a curious creature, she decided. She had slept by his side in a thin nightgown for six or eight weeks and he had not so much as rubbed her belly.

“We could manage here, I think,” he said, rubbing her just above the top button of her pedal pushers.

Patsy abruptly straightened up. “No, sir,” she said. “Nobody’s getting me in a car, not now. You might have managed it when we were younger, but you missed your chance.” She turned and watched the ocean roll in.

“I don’t want to drive home like this,” he said, still stroking her under her sweater. “Let’s go to a motel.”

“There’s a great suggestion,” Patsy said, not meanly, but with a yawn. “Spend ten bucks to do what we could have been doing in our own bed all this time. You can make it home. If you’ve gone this long you can go another hour.”

“Oh, quit,” he said, stabbed by the indifference in her tone.

Patsy looked at him and saw that he was hurt and that he did want her, just as she had been wanting him to. She took his hand and tried to turn herself warm, but nothing in her would turn. Holding his hand was the best she could do. She didn’t feel hostile, just very uncaring.