Moving On (98 page)

The following evening, just after she had had a long and harrowing telephone conversation with her mother, in which she had agreed to come to Dallas for Christmas, a knock came at the door and Pete Tatum stood on the landing. For a moment she was dumfounded.

“Good evenin’,” he said. “Tried to call but your line was busy.”

“You cowboys,” she said. “Peewee’s at the zoo, Sonny calls—you had to be next. Where’s Boots?”

She held the door open and Pete came in. He looked heavier than he had; his face was too fleshy. When she looked at him closely she saw that he didn’t look well. He went straight over to Davey, who had stopped in mid-crawl when he saw a strange man enter. Pete squatted down and said hello to him. Davey was as dumfounded as his mother had been, and he looked to her for reassurance.

“No Boots?” she asked again.

“No,” he said. “She’s in Fort Worth, pregnant as hell. We may get the stork this year instead of Santy Claus.”

“Oh, good,” Patsy said, delighted. “Will it really be that soon?”

“It may be sooner. I just hope I get home in time. Where’s old Jim?”

“Well, it’s a long story,” she said. “If I can keep your mind off the stork long enough to feed you, let me go fix some dinner and I’ll tell you while we eat.”

“Okay,” he said. “While you’re cooking I’ll get acquainted with your son.”

As she cooked, she heard the low sounds of Pete’s voice talking to Davey. She had not been eating much and her larder was not too well stocked, but she decided against running out to replenish it. She had canned soup, a green salad, and sandwiches of peppered beef and cheese. Fixing the meal brought her spirits up. She didn’t like to cook just for herself and it was not yet possible to cook for Davey. Jim and the whole situation slipped out of her mind and she hummed as she set the table.

Once Davey accepted someone, he accepted them without reservations, and he had accepted Pete. It was difficult to talk during supper, he accepted him so well. He kept banging spoons and spluttering and otherwise trying to keep Pete’s attention. Patsy didn’t try to tell the long story; they chatted. She felt cheerful, but it was not the blind cheerfulness she had once been prone to, and watching Pete across the table troubled her. Though he had kept his presence and his small ironic smile, he was not quite the same man. The heaviness of his face bespoke a sadness, a disappointment, and it was particularly evident when he dropped into silence for a moment. He told her he had quit clowning, or almost quit. Although he was returning to Fort Worth from working a rodeo in Harlingen, it was the only show he had worked in three months. He had finally accepted a job as a car salesman for his father-in-law in Fort Worth.

“It was about my best out,” he said. “Traveling wasn’t no fun for Boots, once she got big, and she don’t like for me to go off and leave her. I wasn’t making enough money at it, anyway, not really.”

“I’m glad you quit,” Patsy said. “It was a ridiculous profession, anyway, and you know it. It’s okay for a nut like Sonny who’s got no dependents. He sent me those flowers in the living room when he heard Jim left me. It was high time you quit rodeo.”

But part of her could not believe her own words, not when she looked at him. He was dressed as she had always seen him dressed, in Levi’s and a faded Western shirt. It was hard to imagine him in a white shirt, a tie and a cheap suit, standing on a windy car lot in Fort Worth. It would only be dull for him, and empty, and the dullness and emptiness were already settling in his face.

“Still, I guess you miss it,” she said, remembering the night he had taken her so firmly by the arm to lead her in to her unconscious husband. And the day they stopped to eat breakfast together on the drive to Laramie. And the time they had held hands in the park in Cheyenne. And he and Boots leaving Amarillo, with Boots in tears because Joe Percy had given her a box of candy.

“Were you glad about the baby?” she asked, looking at him. It struck her that he could scarcely be expected to be glad about it, since it had taken him from so much that he was part of: the West, all that country, those drives he and Boots loved, and rodeo, horses and bulls, the whole movement of the arena. For all that it was dumb and dull to her, it kindled something vital in Pete. He matched with it in some way. So did Sonny. Even Peewee matched with it, in his way. On the zoo train he was just a sad uneducated kid in a big city, doing a silly job. Pete would look just as sad on a car lot, it seemed to her. It had already taken something away from him. He no longer looked like a man who could move faster than a bull.

“Oh, yeah, I was glad enough,” he said. “It was time for Boots to settle down. I didn’t want her barrel racing forever. Just as well now as later.”

Patsy didn’t know. She went in and put Davey to bed and came back and made coffee. She felt a little askew thinking about it. Boots grown up? Settled down? PTA? Dresses like other mothers wore? A husband who sold secondhand cars, like other husbands? She told Pete her story, over three cups of coffee, and wasn’t dramatic about it. Her mind wasn’t on her problem. It was on Boots and Pete and their problems. They were going to become people she wouldn’t know, or even want to know.

When they went into the other room Pete saw the flowers from Sonny and an unhappy look crossed his face. Patsy saw it. He said nothing, but the look stayed on his face and the tone of the visit changed. What she had very faintly feared the moment she saw him on the doorstep became so: he wanted her. Her husband was far away and she was alone; there was no natural check to his wanting her and the awkwardness showed in his face. His wife was in Fort Worth, almost ready to bear him a child, but it didn’t change it. The want was there.

Patsy felt it and tensed against it at once. In Cheyenne his desire had surprised her; she hadn’t known what to think about it and could only flutter uncertainly in response. But things were different, and she was different. She knew many things to think about it. At once she began to try and talk him past it, and she failed. They had told their stories, they had little more to talk about, and her small talk only exposed his desire the more clearly. She asked questions about Boots’s pregnancy, about her doctor, about whether they were hoping for a boy or a girl, all in hopes of bringing his mind back to his wife. He answered, but underneath it he was wanting her.

They had stopped looking at each other’s faces. She looked past his face; he looked past hers. She kept forming a sentence in her mind: “Look, old friend, you have to go—I can’t sleep with you.” But she couldn’t get the sentence from her mind to her lips. Pete stood up and moved indecisively about the room looking at things. Patsy stood up too, hoping he was about to say he had to be going. But as she moved past him to turn on a little lamp he stepped toward her quickly and caught her with one arm. She was surprised and embarrassed. She didn’t want to struggle and didn’t want to speak, so she put her face against his shoulder and her arms around him lightly, trying to pretend it was a friendly hug. But they had never hugged, in friendship or otherwise, and her pretense was awkward. She was not in front of him but beside him, her hip against his hip. He tried to turn her, to shift her in front of him, but she stiffened hard. “Un-uh,” she said. He bent his face toward her but she kept hers hidden. She could not get angry. All she felt was a deep dreadful embarrassment that would not let her look at him. She was cold with embarrassment and didn’t want to see his face. He pulled but she only stiffened the more, and then, with a sigh that made her wish he were a thousand miles away, he let her go. “I’m sorry,” she said, quickly stepping away. “It’s the last thing I need.” Davey cried out and she went to the baby bed. He had twisted himself into a corner, very uncomfortably. She straightened him out and he rolled onto his back and grunted, as if complaining in his sleep. She put her hand under his pajamas for a second, on his hot little stomach, and smiled when he made another small grunt.

Pete was sitting on the couch, his head down. He clearly felt wretched. The tension had gone away, and she wanted to see his face. She went over and squatted down in front of him. “Come on,” she said. “Forget it. It’s not like you had committed a major sin.”

Pete raised his head and looked at her. They looked into each other’s faces for the longest they had looked since the minute under the waterspout in Cheyenne. Their faces had changed, Patsy’s hollowed by the worries of her fall, Pete’s fattened by the worries of his. He saw in her the girl he had always seen, the girl who reminded him of his first wife, and tried to smile at her, but the constant smile of his profession was costing him his true smile, the wry smile that had once made him so appealing. Patsy saw in the smile and the look a man who was more depressed than he knew; soon he would have to learn to call his depression happiness in order to endure it. But he was not gone. His face was thickening but it was still a face she liked. There was not just a problem in his face, there was still Pete, only so close to the end of what he had been that she felt she might never see him again. And stupidly she had never touched him. She put her arms around his neck and pulled his head against her shoulder. He had not shaved and she felt the slight rasp of his beard against her throat.

“Snap out of it,” she said. “You’ve got to hit the road and beat the stork home. I’m not going to have you driving along thinking it’s the end of the world because you made a small pass at me.”

“I feel like I ought to be shot,” he said.

“No, just kicked. And me too, for not telling you to get the whole notion out of your head the minute I saw you had it in your head. But not shot.”

Pete looked again at the roses Sonny had sent her, and again he frowned. “What is it?” she asked. “He’s not that bad, is he? He certainly never got anywhere with me.”

“He got somewhere with my first wife,” he said. “It was just her bad luck to grow up in his home town. They broke up and she married me and we broke up and she took up with him again, for a while.”

“Oh,” Patsy said. “That’s why you had the famous fight I’ve heard about.”

Pete sighed. “Partly. He bought me a dirty movie, one night in Juárez when we was drunk, and gave it to me and told me the reason I never got along with Marie was because I didn’t know anything about screwing. I was supposed to watch the movie and learn. I threw it in the Rio Grande and we had the fight on the bridge.”

“For god’s sake,” Patsy said.

In a few minutes she sent him on. She did her best, in the few minutes, to get his spirits up, but for all her efforts he went away depressed, and once he was gone she too became depressed. She sat on the couch for a long time holding a magazine but not reading it. Somehow, all along the way, they had missed each other, had only really come close to each other for a few ambiguous minutes in Wyoming, and even then timidly, uncertainly. Whatever possibility there had been was finished, Pete was gone for good, and it seemed a shame that they had drawn so near only to miss. She told herself that it was sentimental to think of things that way, but it made her feel no less strange. She couldn’t see the pages of the magazine. The story of his old trouble with Sonny stuck in her mind and haunted her. Perhaps Sonny had been right; perhaps Pete’s confidence had always turned to awkwardness with Marie, just as it had with her. It was a gloomy thought, and while she was thinking it the phone rang. It was Hank, calling from Lubbock. He had got the message from his aunt. Patsy felt suspended. She was in no mood at all. She told him Jim was gone but didn’t ask him to come back. She didn’t want anyone. Hank had got a job at a tiny art-film house in Lubbock.

“Why, that’s perfect,” she said. “Antonioni and sandstorms. We’re going to Dallas day after tomorrow and won’t be back until after Christmas.”

Hank tried to make her promise to see him, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t get angry, she just wasn’t promising anything. She cried a little when she hung up, out of general depression. She found she couldn’t remember him very well, and wondered as she was going to bed why it had been him instead of Pete. The next morning she decided proximity had made the difference. Hank had been at the drugstore, where she could find him, just often enough. The conclusion made her feel shallow, but it remained her conclusion.

Dallas was far worse than it had been the year before. Miri was still not home. Patsy tried several times to reach her on the phone and couldn’t. Her father had been out to see her and had been so shaken by the circumstances he found her in that he could scarcely describe them. He was sure it would only be a matter of time before she went crazy or ended up in jail. He had never imagined he would have a daughter who would go two years without coming home. The whole problem baffled him. He drank and watched football games. Patsy employed Davey in the manner that would do most to cheer up her mother. She also promised to go out and see about Miri herself, once she got moved, and she called Boots and found out there was no baby yet. Jim called on Christmas day but the connection was terrible and they did little more than shout assurances that they were well. Patsy kept herself cut off. The only times she cut on were late at night, when her mother and father were asleep. Then she lay on the couch in her parent’s den and watched the latest possible movie on TV. It didn’t matter how bad the movies were. They were all at least as real and as amusing as her life.

10

E
LEANOR SPENT HER
C
HRISTMASES
at the ranch, dispensing the sort of largesse which was traditional. The cowboys all got cash bonuses and sides of beef. There was an ascending scale of presents to be given, scaling up to Lucy, whom she always gave something for her house. Lucy owned a house in town, to which she planned to retire on some mythical and distant day when her mistress no longer needed her. Some of her boys lived there. Eleanor gave her a color TV, knowing they would all enjoy it.

It was a cold winter day; there was a light snow just before Christmas and a keen wind all day. She had a dinner invitation in Dallas and had rather meant to go, but finally decided not to. She spent Christmas evening on her leather sofa in front of a huge fire of mesquite logs. The logs crackled and burned beautifully. She was reading
Valley of the Dolls
without enthusiasm and talking off and on to Sonny on the telephone. He was in Las Vegas, judging a Miss Rodeo America pageant. He kept calling every few hours and badgering her to go somewhere with him for New Year’s. She felt lonesome for him and was quite willing but they could not agree on a place. He wanted to go to Acapulco and she didn’t, and the only compromise he had offered was Mexico City, which she didn’t favor either.