Author: Larry McMurtry
Category: Literature
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“You-all come to the party tomorrow night,” he said to Jim. “My place, at the Ramada. You can come too, Peter, if you bring your girl friend. You ain’t much fun stag.”
“I got to train my mule tomorrow night,” Pete said, walking off.
“See if you can train him to fuck,” Sonny said, grinning at Jim. “A fucking mule is what the circuit needs.”
Jim promised to be at the party and followed Pete to the trailer house. Boots was sitting on the steps and had a can of beer for each of them between her legs. She sipped at hers, and Pete stood with one hand on his hip, draining his. When it was empty he threw the can under the trailer and reached down to hold Boots’s head against his leg for a minute.
“I got to be goin’,” he said. “Come on, shake off that fall. Everybody in rodeo falls sooner or later. See you, Jim.”
He left. His attempt to cheer Boots up had not worked. She still looked very disconsolate.
“We’re going to get married next week,” she said. “That’s why Pete acted embarrassed. He thinks he’s too old for me.”
Jim squatted down so he could see her better. Her nose was a little too blunt but otherwise she was pretty, in an open, energetic, unself-conscious way. Her straight white hair framed her face nicely. He found her immediately likable and was glad to be relieved of the necessity to be a photographer every minute.
“How long have you been married?” she asked.
“A year and a half.”
“I wish we had,” Boots said wistfully. “I’ll be glad when Pete and I have been married ten years. Then we won’t have any problems like this.”
Jim was a little surprised. He thought she was sad about her fall, not about her marriage. He looked around for a place to put his empty beer can. Throwing things on the ground seemed sloppy to him, and he was always trying to break Patsy of the habit.
“Oh, just pitch it under the trailer,” Boots said. “It gets messy around a rodeo whatever you do. That’s one thing I like about it. I’ve always been messy.”
It was really a one-man trailer, and so small that Jim could scarcely imagine how two people could even get in it, much less live in it; but its smallness and simplicity appealed to him. He loved the thought of being able to live on next to nothing—on the bare essentials. In his imagination he often stripped his life of all extras, all luxuries, everything wasteful. The difficulty was Patsy. He could not have persuaded her to live in the largest trailer ever made. In Houston they had the whole top floor of a large three-car garage, and she was not content even with that. She wanted a house and had threatened to buy one with her own money—she had just about enough. It was insane; she didn’t particularly want to live in Houston, but she continually complained about not having a house, and he could never be quite sure she wouldn’t just go out some morning and buy one. The value of keeping stripped down to essentials was lost on her, and his attempts to explain it did not impress her. When he quoted Thoreau she yawned. Boots was clearly more amenable to the simple life than Patsy would ever be.
“It’s tiny, all right,” she said, noticing that he was looking at the trailer. She giggled a little and looked happier. “Pete keeps talking about trading it in on a Volkswagen, so we’ll have more room to screw. I guess we’ll end up getting a station wagon.”
“You ought to get a hearse, like Sonny has.”
“He’d kill us. Us or anybody else who gets one. He’s as proud of that hearse as he is of his dong. Want the rest of my beer? I feel like I may throw up. I get so excited running the barrels that I’m always throwing up.”
Jim would have liked to talk longer, but she did look a little drawn. He stood up and said he had to go. Except for Peewee she was the only rodeo person he had met that he really liked to talk to. He was a little intrigued by girls who came right out with words like screw and dong. Patsy was more inhibited than he felt she ought to be where talk of sex was concerned.
“Bring your wife by tomorrow,” Boots said. “I’d love to meet her.” Jim said he would.
When he left, Boots went in and set her half-can of beer in the icebox and then went out and began to unsaddle the Appaloosa, whose name was Sprinkles. The dachshund had been run over the week before. She missed him, and now she laid her cheek against the horse’s neck.
“It wasn’t your fault, sweet thing,” she said. “It was all my fault.”
8
PATSY HAD GONE to see Lolita and was delighted with it. For some reason she had missed the film when it first came out, though she had read the book three times and thought it beautiful. James Mason had been a perfect Humbert Humbert too. Still, the movie left her annoyed—vaguely annoyed.
The Ford was in a parking lot only a block from the theater, and as she walked down the wide sidewalk by the even wider street she tried to put her finger on what had bothered her. She passed a shop that seemed to sell nothing but sunglasses; there were hundreds in the window, with all sorts of strange frames, and as she loved sunglasses and liked to have numerous pairs in reserve, she stopped and peered in the window. A carload of boys passed in the street and let out a chorus of whistles. Alarmed for a second, she turned and looked. There were five of them in a new convertible, soldiers probably, all of them wearing the gaudy short-sleeved sports shirts that soldiers seemed to adopt for their nights on the town. When she looked at them they cheered and whistled and made it obvious they thought she was luscious, but they also seemed inoffensive and even a little shy, and they moved rapidly on down the street.
Normally, being whistled at embarrassed her, but this time it perked her a bit instead. As she walked on to the parking lot she reflected on the movie and decided that one reason she was annoyed by it was because she had been no nymphet herself, no Lolita, when she was that age. She had been thin and inhibited and had had no bosom at all and, as well as she could remember, no flair at all. She had had no trouble getting a respectable number of dates, but that was because she had always been pretty in the face, as the saying was in Texas. She would certainly not have attracted a Humbert Humbert, and except for one occasion when a boy had bumped his penis against her hand nothing memorably lascivious had happened on any of the dates. The movie left her all the more convinced that as a teenager she had been a complete stick-in-the-mud.
The question was, had she really changed? She had grown prettier, and had more bosom, and thought of herself as knowing the facts of life, but she was still not convinced that she was all a woman ought to be. She had always wanted to be beautiful and had always been slightly contemptuous of girls who just wanted to be sexy, but being sexy had begun to seem more important to her or, at least, important in a different way. Jim was not much help. It was a vague problem and he was vague himself half the time. He was often eager to make love to her, but that fact alone never seemed too convincing. His life, so far as she could tell, was one great interlocking structure of fantasies involving himself, and it was probably just necessary to the overall fantasy for him to think of her as sexy. In a way, being whistled at by a earful of boys was more convincing than Jim’s attentions. At least the soldiers were something objective.
She started the Ford and drove slowly out Broadway, looking a little wistfully at the giant motels. Probably it was vulgar, a streak of Aunt Dixie in her, but she would much rather have been at a giant motel. She liked carpets and big bathtubs and good coffee shops and huge well-lit pools and television sets so there would be movies to watch at night. There would probably even be interesting people at a big motel. The only interesting person in theirs was a long-retired minor actor. He had a grenadier mustache, a chubby talkative wife, and a magnificent white Afghan so aristocratic that the whole motel seemed scarcely fit to be his kennel.
Around the pools of the big motels there were people sitting and drinking, some even swimming, though the night was cool. Patsy would have liked to be among them, and she felt a flash of annoyance at Jim. It was unfair, because if they had been at a big motel she would probably have been inside r
eading, but it was a strong annoyance, nonetheless. She had money and was glad of it and he had many times as much and his attitude toward it had been the cause of many fights, all of which she lost. From time to time he insisted on pretending they were poor, driven to earning their living from month to month, and when he set a budget at such times nothing could make him exceed it. Patsy pointed out in the wittiest possible terms that such budgets were ridiculous, but of all his fantasies the poverty fantasy was the one he was stubbornest about, and he never gave a foot of ground.
She pulled into the motel and locked the Ford. In contrast to the pools she had been passing, theirs seemed a small and uninviting fishpond. The old actor and his wife were just returning from walking the Afghan and said hello to her pleasantly. She felt depressed the minute she stepped into the room. The small room, the bare floor, the poor light, all seemed so confining in contrast to the wide streets and deep sky outside; and to make matters worse, Jim was already back. He sat on the floor with his shirt off, happily engaged in his favorite task, which was the rearranging of his files. She had seen it coming that afternoon when he had lugged the two small green cases of files in from the car. All of the hundreds of pictures he had managed to take were in piles on the floor, along with several stacks of folders, manila envelopes, pencils, felt pens, paper clips, and tabs of various kinds. He had even bought a bottle of bourbon—a pure affectation, it seemed to her—and had some, in a motel glass, sitting by his leg.
“Hi,” he said, very cheerful. “Not much happening out there tonight so I thought I’d come home and straighten this stuff out. We’re invited to a party tomorrow night.”
“Ducky,” she said, unreasonably annoyed. He had barely glanced up, and the sight of the absorbed, contented way he piddled with the neat piles of pictures and neat stacks of envelopes sent her spirits straight down. He was sitting there dreaming of being Walker Evans or Cartier-Bresson or Ansel Adams, whatever kind of photographer he wanted to be for the moment, and it made her furious and also, somehow, scared. She felt like kicking the bourbon glass, or kicking the piles of pictures into complete disorder, and could hardly stop herself from doing it. Three months as a photographer and he was already arranging his own retrospective in his mind.
Instead of kicking the pictures she tiptoed over them with exaggerated care, her lips compressed. If Jim had looked up he would have seen she was furious, but he was looking instead at a picture of the marquee of an abandoned drive-in theater they had passed in Texas. The local kids had visited it one night and done their best to spell out an obscenity with the letters still left on the marquee. The best they could do was HORS SHIT. It was one of his favorite pictures.
Patsy got her black bikini and a white terry-cloth robe and went to the bathroom and put on the bikini. Going back through the room, she took less care and one of her heels knocked a pile of pictures out of line.
“Where are you going?” Jim asked, surprised.
“I’m going to drown myself,” she said hotly. “I’m feverish with envy because I don’t have a noble profession to practice, like you do.”
“What?” Jim said, puzzled. He had not really heard. The reverie he was enjoying had a strong hold on him, and he didn’t want to be drawn out of it even if Patsy was miffed about something. She poised at the door, ready to argue if he wanted to argue, but when he looked down at the picture again she shut the door and strode angrily across the gravel driveway. The gravel hurt her bare feet, but not as much as she would have liked it to. She would have welcomed a flow of blood, either his or hers, but the only real pain was the pain at her breastbone, from the pressure of all her feelings. She sat down on the cold pool edge, let her feet into the water, and watched her own wavering reflection. The black of her suit and the white of her robe were plainer than her features or even her skin.
After a minute she began to cry helplessly. Jim was doing everything over. When he had wanted to be a novelist he spent two months arranging for it. He bought an electric typewriter—it only took the notion of a new career to drive all thought of economy out of his mind, then he used his money as lavishly and unconsciously as if it were air—all kinds of paper of different colors and grades, dozens of pencils, standard pens and esoteric pens, a new dictionary and a fine desk lamp, lots of manila envelopes, and good editions of the best novels by forty or fifty masters of the novel. He even bought biographies of novelists and criticism of the novel. He wrote letters to twenty agents (no replies), applied for three fellowships, wrote slightly more than one hundred pages of a book about growing up in Dallas, stopped one day to make notes, then instead of making notes began an elaborate chart of what was going to happen in the novel, improved on the chart and the notes for another month, and then began to spend his time in bars with fellow students while she read most of the novels he had bought.
After he had bought all the pens, pencils, papers, dictionaries, directories, and guidebooks he could possibly need he stopped even piddling with the actual pages of his novel, accidentally read a book on languages one day, and decided he would rather be a linguist than a novelist. It was more his sort of thing, he felt: more exact, more precise. It took experience to make a novelist, but anyone with a good brain could become a linguist. Patsy agreed and was glad he had decided to change careers. During his last days as a novelist he had been very gloomy and hard to live with, and besides she had read the hundred pages of novel and hadn’t liked it much. Once the decision was made, she pitched in, helped him carry home books from the Rice library, applauded him when he tried to audit five language courses at once, and looked with interest into the grammars, dictionaries, journals, and books on linguistic theory that he ordered. The waiters at the local French restaurant smiled behind their menus when he tried to order in French, but Patsy didn’t care. She got rather interested in Benjamin Lee Whorf herself and was happy at the thought of being a linguist’s wife.
Then, after two months as a linguist, he bought a cheap camera to take snapshots with and within the next six weeks spent twelve hundred dollars on cameras and equipment and was thinking of setting himself up a darkroom. The way he meant to do it would combine writing and photography, he decided, and by the merest chance he got hot on cameras during the fortnight when the Houston rodeo was on. He went out to the stock barns, took a few pictures of the back ends of steers so pampered that their tails were kept in hairnets, and three days later decided they would spend the summer gathering pictures for a book on rodeo. It was only June, they were at their third rodeo, and Jim was already in the arranging phase and hadn’t taken more than ten pictures that she thought were worth looking at. She felt scared and had no idea what she would do.
But almost as soon as she ceased crying, the depression left her. She wiped her face on the hem of the terry-cloth bathrobe and looked across the empty street, where there was a Pontiac agency with three gleaming cars spotlighted on the floor. She could be all wrong about it, she decided. Jim was smart and sensitive, perhaps he would become a good photographer. Perhaps he really needed to rearrange the files. Even if he didn’t become a photographer he might hit on the field that suited him sooner or later. It was cowardly of her to become discouraged when he had had only three tries. It was all her own deficiency—she lacked faith in him. Even if he never found a field and just kept skipping from hobby to hobby, would that be so terrible? What would it mean for them? She didn’t know, didn’t know at all.
Sighing, she slipped off her robe. She hated the sense that she was becoming neurotic, slipping off into gloomy vapors; it was too silly and too self-pitying and she had nothing at all to pity herself for except that she wanted to have a baby and Jim didn’t, and even that would probably work itself out soon. When she was in such moods she longed for something to lift her out of them, some purely physical sensation: heat or cold, to dance, to eat. Beneath her was a literal swimming pool, full of cold water. Bracing her hands on the edge of the pool, she began to lower herself into it slowly, watching the water as it came u
p her white legs to her knees, her thighs, her hips. When her hips went under, the sluice of water over the bikini bottom was very chilling, and goose bumps came out all over her upper body. The waterline was just below her navel, and she stopped it there for a second, enjoying the sensation of cold even though she wanted to turn loose and swim to warm herself. It made her shiver.
The bikini she had bought in Houston, on a whim. She had always been, if anything, an overly modest girl, given to one-piece suits all through high school and college; but when she had seen the suit in a window in Westbury she had a sudden immodest desire to wear such a suit and had taken it right home and tried it on. It was clearly the sort of suit that went best with a tan, but still she liked it; it made her feel loose and grown up in some way. Jim had been tremendously turned on by it and had tried to take her to bed while she was trying it on. It was a chink in the wall of her modesty, and he welcomed all chinks. Somehow the thought that it was the bikini that had prompted the seduction attempt had offended her slightly, and she put him off.
When the cold water had driven all the gloom out of her head she turned and with her hands still on the edge of the pool lowered herself until the water came over her breasts; then she shoved out into the pool and began to swim. For a few minutes she swam back and forth across the little pool in a vigorous but awkward crawl. She had had a good swimming teacher, and a good tennis coach as well, but she still swam awkwardly and played tennis so haphazardly that Jim had several times, in doubles matches, come close to pounding her with exasperation. She liked pools more than she liked swimming.
By the time she had swum four or five lengths she was warm and stopped beneath the diving board to rest, breathing hard. She was not meant for exercise, she decided. As she was resting, Jim came out in his swimming trunks, an old pair of gray trunks that he had swiped from a gym class years before. She considered them as much an affectation as the bourbon, but she was in a more tolerant mood and watched him tiptoe across the gravel, a little glad that he had come to keep her company. When he got to the pool he jumped in feet first, came up, treaded water for a moment, and swam over to her in an even crawl. When he looked up, streams of water ran out of his blond hair onto his chest and shoulders.