Author: Larry McMurtry
Category: Literature
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“I thought you were going to drown yourself,” he said. He was in good spirits, and he was always sly at such times and infectious.
“My bosom wouldn’t let me sink,” she said. “Want to drive out into the desert and watch the sunrise? It’s supposed to be great.”
Jim ignored the question—it was his way of handling impulsive suggestions of hers that didn’t appeal to him at all. Instead of answering he swam up to her, looked friendly, and began to kiss her. Kissing when their faces were both dripping wet was a bit of a novelty—it was slippery and his skin smelled differently and she compliantly kissed with him awhile, lightly and in fun, the water from her wet hair running off her eyelids and down her cheeks. She was holding on to the edge of the pool with her hands, her arms spread. Jim gradually began to kiss a little bit more than in fun. The bikini had done it again, she supposed. He put his hands on the pool side and wiggled between her legs, bumping at her suggestively while he treaded water.
“Quit,” she said, not annoyed, but at the same time not wishing him to embark on any underwater gymnastics, none involving her, at any rate. She could tell from the bumps that he was feeling sexy and as usual that confused her a little, for while she was approving and a little glad she was also slightly reluctant. And anyway, cars were still passing on the street and the street was only yards away. And anyway, underwater sex was ridiculous even to think about, but Jim had read pornography and thought everything ought to be tried.
“Quit bumping me, please,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t be seduced in a swimming pool even if it were anatomically feasible, and I have a hard enough time keeping this suit on without you bumping me. Just desist for a bit.”
“You have no pioneer spirit,” Jim said. “I like to bump you.”
Patsy put her legs around him and let him hold her up. She sank until only her head was out of the water, her eyes on a level with his chin. “You really don’t want to see the desert sunrise?” she asked.
“Perhaps we can make a trade,” he said, nudging her from below; but it was the sort of remark that didn’t work with her and she ignored it as blithely as he had ignored the original suggestion.
“I saw the clown you like,” he said. “Met his wife, too. She’s a lot younger than him. They want us to come and see them tomorrow.”
“Why not?” she said, not very enthusiastic. She had all but forgotten Pete Tatum. He had been very nice, but the circumstances had been unusual and she had the feeling that under ordinary circumstances they would have little use for each other. She remembered her embarrassment when he had come up to the car without his shirt on as she had been leaving to drive to Abilene. There was no reason why she should have been embarrassed, but the memory of it lessened her enthusiasm for a visit.
“His wife is a barrel racer. Boots is her name. She’s very friendly. Even you might like her.”
“So I might,” Patsy said, still skeptical about Tatum. Names like Boots brought out the snob in her. Her chin was on the water and water got in her mouth. She tightened her legs around Jim to keep from slipping farther. Their loins were pressed together but in a position that was rather uncomfortable for both of them. Patsy unclasped her legs and ducked under his arm.
“Damn it, I forgot a towel, and you did too,” she said. “I was angry with you when I came out here and you didn’t even realize it.” But Jim had started swimming across the pool and didn’t hear her. It was not a remark that was worth repeating. She clung to the side, a little cold, contemplating a drippy dash to the bathroom.
“No towels?” Jim said when he swam back. “I’ll get some. He left a little trail of wet tracks across the gravel and came back with a large green towel. “Damn it, I dripped on some pictures,” he said.
Later, after she had dried and gone in and sat in the small warm bathroom awhile filing her nails, and was stretched on the bed in her green nightgown turning through an issue of Vogue, Jim left his pictures and came silently to the bed and began to rub her back. The ends of her hair were still damp. He folded her hair into two parts and tucked it around her throat, so her shoulders and the back of her neck were bare. “If you’re through with your pictures turn off the overhead light, will you?” she said. He did and came back and massaged her shoulders and the base of her skull a bit. Tiring of that, he began a little timidly to move his hands under the loose straps of the gown, down her rib cage and around toward her breasts. Patsy knew she was being caressed but felt a slight catch of stubbornness in herself and kept reading the Vogue with concentration for a few minutes, until Jim’s silent urging made her feel guilty. She turned on her side so he could reach a breast and then with a little excusing yawn dropped the Vogue off the bed and turned on her back acquiescently.
She liked the way he massaged her neck and shoulders and had begun to feel genuinely acquiescent, but Jim didn’t know it. He was never quite sure when she wanted him to go on and when she didn’t. As it was, he felt his desire to be something of an intrusion and became hasty about it. “Hey,” Patsy said. She sat up, shrugged her gown off, and threw it on the floor with a quick gesture of resolve. The green gown billowed as it settled and Jim saw the line of Patsy’s ribs as she stretched an arm to turn off the bed light. When she turned back to him in the sudden darkness he was not quite where she thought he was and their heads bumped. It took them a moment to realign their bodies.
“I’m sorry,” Jim said, though it was just a slight bump. Patsy was silent. It seemed always just at that moment, at the beginning of lovemaking, that she was most silent, most mysterious to him. At that moment he had no sense that he knew what she really wanted, or really liked, and she gave no clues at all. He could not even hear her breathing, and he felt, as he always felt, that he must hurry or she would cease to be interested—perhaps already had. So he did hurry, feeling himself an imposer until he reached a point where his own pleasure became stronger than any thought of Patsy. With his face close to her throat and her hair against his mouth he could hear her breathe and knew that he was not imposing and moved at ease for a time. A faint light from the street came in through the window, enough so that when he raised up he could see Patsy’s face, her eyes closed and her face tensed a little, pleasantly. It made him feel very close to her. Things were going to be lovely for them both, finally. She was idly, unconsciously stroking his back with one hand and without meaning to stroked too low. It touched Jim too keenly, he was suddenly past waiting. He wanted not to be, but he was, it was too sharp. And when he was done coming, the sense of closeness he had felt for a moment was replaced almost immediately by a sense of disappointment, a feeling that was brother to his earlier feeling of awkwardness.
It soon became kind of anger at Patsy, who was going on, moving very little but moving in her own deliberate way. He didn’t want to communicate the sudden resentment that he felt, and he rested, his face in her hair, merely staying put. As he waited, some of his irritation passed away, he all but forgot Patsy and was thinking of pictures and picture books when her pace increased suddenly and he found it hard to stay put. She put her legs over his and flexed so rapidly that he was afraid he would slip out, but after a moment of straining high against him, she came, her legs loosened, and he felt her fast hearbeat beneath him. Filled with affection then, she began to rub her face against his throat. Her hair still smelled faintly of swimming-pool water. Jim remained where he was, but his irritation came back, and became anger. It was a cheat, somehow, and it seemed to him Patsy’s fault; after two years of making love with him, she ought to have quickened. He wanted her passionate at the beginning, not silent and quiet; he wanted the affection and the nuzzling at the beginning, not long afterward when he felt detached and spent. He knew if he spoke of it he would speak angrily, so he merely lay as he was, sullen, resentful, and wanting to scratch.
Patsy knew he was not happy with her but tried not to know. Her pleasure had a short noon but a long evening if all went well; and though she felt selfish for wanting
the evening to linger she was greedy and did want it very much, and she put her hands on Jim’s hips to keep him where he was. She pressed him against her gently and appreciatively, but then for a moment felt briefly avid again and began to kiss his shoulders and rub her face against him. He didn’t raise his face to her and her avidity quickly subsided. In a few minutes, without a word, Jim lifted himself off her and went through the dark to the bathroom.
Patsy lay with her arms and legs spread, feeling sleepy, but when the shaft of light from the bathroom cut into the darkness it also cut into her languor. She turned on her side and pulled the sheet up over her modestly. Jim turned off the light and came back, and she got up, fumbled on the floor for her gown, and went to the bathroom too. He hadn’t spoken, and she felt lonely, as if she’d done something very wrong and was being punished for it; but she had begun to feel cold and stubborn too. In such a mood the bathroom light made life seem impossibly sloppy and dreary, and after flipping it on briefly she flipped it off again and made do in the dark.
When she returned to the bed, Jim was awake but silent as a stone and she got carefully into her part of the bed, silent too and determined not to cry. She had forgotten both noon and evening and felt low. It was a cheat and it was his fault, for if he could bring himself to say two or three kind words or even give her an affectionate pat she could melt and love him again and come close to him and go to sleep, and they would be like people were supposed to be after making love.
But Jim said nothing and they each kept carefully to their separate sides of the bed, and though there was the mutual pretense that they were going to sleep, they were both wide awake and tight as wires. The bed was none too wide, but they were careful not to touch. Patsy’s urge to cry alternated with a terrible cold anger; despite herself some tears leaked out and the anger spilled with them.
“You haven’t got a generous bone in your body,” she said, choking. “You could say something. Even if you’re mad at me you could say something. I’d rather you say you think I’m awful than for you just to lie there waiting for me to break down. It’s just because you know I always break down, sooner or later. If you had any kindness you’d speak to me.”
“I speak to you lots of times,” Jim said, his voice quite firm and controlled. One of the things she disliked most about him was that he was always sure of himself at such times, sure he had a right to be angry, while she herself was never sure of anything.
“Not first,” she said. “You never speak to me first. You know I’ll cry when I’m wretched enough and you won’t say a thing to help me. You like for me to cry.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said, not sorry at all. “There’s lots of favors you could do me too, if you wanted to.”
“Oh, don’t sound like that,” Patsy said. “I hate you when you’re smug. What have you got to be so smug about? Don’t you ever touch me again.”
“Okay,” he said in the same firm tone. “I hope the next person I touch likes sex better than you do at least.”
“Oh, Jim quit!” she sobbed, but then anger hit her again. She sat up in bed, distraught, her eyes very wide. In all their arguments about it he had never said that.
“If I don’t it’s because of you,” she said, and though she felt many angry words crowding into her head only those words came out.
“Sure, sure, I know it’s all my fault,” he said, but his tone broke and his voice became ragged and hurt.
Patsy was glad—it released more of her anger. “I’m not a camera, you know,” she said. “You can’t just click a few things on me at the right time and get a nice picture of yourself in action, or me in action, or whichever one of us you like looking at.”
“I don’t click things,” he said, guilt taking the place of his own anger. He sounded even more hurt.
“I love you,” he said. “I’m no master of control—I can’t help it if it takes you six hours to come. It just makes me mad at you sometimes. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, please don’t exaggerate about it,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to say that,” he said, truly abashed. “It was just accidental hyperbole. I’m sorry.”
“Well don’t hyperbole about it,” she said. “I can’t help it. If you want me to be different you have to figure out how to make me your own self. Only don’t let me see you clicking things, because then it doesn’t work. And speak to me, anyway, please, just speak to me, whether it works or not. I can’t stand not being spoken to.”
And with that the last anger washed out of her on a new burst of tears and she lay down and without another word snuggled close to him and cried, and he put his arm around her and stroked her hair and wiped the tears off her cheeks and apologized and told her he loved her and asked her not to cry. “Just speak to me next time,” she sobbed, and Jim said, “I will, I will.”
After a while, lying against each other, they both relaxed. Jim quickly went to sleep, his arm across her, but Patsy lay awake for half an hour, feeling very dry and a little ashamed of herself. The quarrel wouldn’t leave her mind. If such quarrels got worse, as they were said to, what would they do to each other when they were forty?
She slept for a few hours, but restlessly, not deeply, and awoke as the courtyard of the motel was turning gray. It occurred to her that there was no reason she couldn’t go and see the sunrise by herself. She got up, found a dress and her shoes, and combed her hair. When she slipped outside, Phoenix was gray and quiet, and she didn’t feel like starting the car and driving out into the desert. Walking would be better. She set out down the wide cool street. The quarrel came back to her mind. She felt it had been her fault, she was not a very good wife really and did not try hard enough to be like he wanted her to be sexually. She always meant to try, but when the time came she forgot to until it was too late, and it was easy to forget because she didn’t know very clearly what it was he did want.
The filling stations were opening; attendants in green uniforms played streams of water over the oily driveways. Patsy passed a drugstore and managed to extract a morning paper from a pile that had been tied with wire and left at the door. She had not brought her purse and had no way to pay for the paper, so she contented herself with scanning the headlines and looking at the movie ads. They would be there at least two more days and she was hoping the movies would have changed. But they hadn’t. Lolita was still the only good movie in town. She put the paper back and went on with her walk. Far down the street she saw cars with their headlights on coming into Phoenix, and when they passed her she saw that in almost every car only the driver was awake. A face or two peered out at her, sleepy and vague from a night of driving across the desert. The sky to the east had become rosy. She passed the filling station where they had let Peewee out and she found herself wondering about him. She had smitten him, she was sure, but would they ever see each other again? She turned off the main street and walked a block or two to the east, curious to see what houses in Phoenix were like; she found that they were not very interesting, not those near Broadway, at least. They were low houses, most of them, with sandy yards and a few dusty domesticated cacti on their porches. She soon lost interest and turned back to Broadway and, on her way along the street, saw the sun come up—not over the desert exactly, but over the filling stations, the little houses, and the quiet motels.
9
JIM EMERGED LATE that morning and found Patsy sitting by the pool in her bikini and the white robe, writing a long letter to Emma Horton, her one true friend. She seemed very cheerful and friendly, and he felt cheerful and friendly himself. Their quarrels seldom had a kickback, not even quarrels involving sex. Jim got his cameras and left for the rodeo grounds and when he looked back to wave goodbye he saw that Patsy was chatting happily with the actor’s fat wife, who was wearing a red bathing suit.
A score or so of contestants and a few sweaty spectators were idling around the rodeo grounds, most of them under the grandstand in the shade. A cowboy was shoeing horses, there was a card game in progress
—in which a saddle blanket served as a table—and several young men were lounging around with their shirts off, drinking beer and flirting with some local cowgirls. Jim would have liked to photograph the card game, but one of the players gave him a surly look and he decided he had better find Peewee and get his opinion before doing anything rash.
As he was walking toward the empty bucking chutes Sonny Shanks waved at him. He was standing in the sun, bareheaded, talking to three women. He wore a blue short-sleeved sports shirt, Levi’s, and a fancy pair of yellow boots. The women were all in their late thirties, bobby-pinned, bedraggled, and in pedal pushers.
“A hot place to talk,” Jim said sincerely, after he had been introduced.
“Oh, we’re talking about a hot subject,” Sonny said. “Sex-u-al intercourse, to be exact.” All the ladies abashedly looked down at the ground, and Jim did too, surprised. They seemed like honest lower-middle-class wives and mothers, not the types to be in that sort of conversation with Sonny in the middle of the day.
“Least it ain’t borin’, though,” Sonny said. “Boredom’s the root of all wickedness, way I heard it.”
“It’s money that’s the root of all evil,” one of the women said, as if to remind him of an eternal law.
“Now let’s get back to the point,” Sonny said, grinning at Jim. “If none of you ladies ain’t ever indulged with nobody except your husbands, how you know you’re gettin’ your dues? Looks to me like you’d need to make a comparison once in a while.” He gave them his most engaging grin.
Two of the women giggled and looked at each other as if it were the most daring remark they had ever heard uttered. They appeared to give it some weight as argument too, but the third looked at Shanks belligerently. She was a tall rawboned, somewhat weathered brunette.