Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Have to look Texas over sometime,” he said. “Sounds like a fine place for a novelist manqué. Lots of frustration. Hardly anybody screwing readily. There’s too much ready screwing out here—it drains off the poetry of it all.”

  “You can have the poetry of it all,” Eleanor said. “You’re going to work, I take it.”

  “I have to,” he said. “I’m an underling, comparatively. But I could take you to dinner at an even better restaurant, if you care to hang around.”

  “Nope,” she said. He went back to his room and when she had put on a robe she went in. He was dressed in a conservative blue suit. On his dresser was a picture of a woman, a brunette in an off-shoulder dress. Her hair style belonged to the forties. She caught a glimpse of herself in Joe’s mirror—she looked full, even a little overblown. She certainly looked her age.

  “God,” she said. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go to bed with either of us. That’s a nice suit.”

  Joe Percy turned from tying his tie and looked at her fondly. “Maybe not me, but certainly you,” he said. “Of course, out here you might have problems. Out here you need to be sixteen and weigh about ninety-eight pounds to be considered prime.”

  “Your wife was lovely,” she said.

  Joe sighed. “Some old girl she was,” he said. “A serial queen, if you can imagine it. She could swing through trees and fall over waterfalls with the best of them. I truly haven’t been the same since she died.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cancer,” he said. “About ten years ago.”

  She looked out the window again. The hills were brown and the smog white as the white houses. It would be nice to arrive home, to fly through the clear plangent evening, with the whole of the Red River Valley spread out below her. She would exchange the neuter smell of Hollywood for the smell of alfalfa and mesquite and perhaps have a word with the cowboys if she got home in time.

  “You really won’t stay?” he asked. “I’ll be so bereft without you that I’ll have to get drunk.”

  “No,” she said. “I have to go. Anyway, you failed me. I wanted to feel low and wicked. Now I just feel fat and carnal and a little goofy.”

  “So?” he said.

  “Well, damn,” she said. “You’re too domestic, Joe. You make me feel like I might have made somebody a nice middle-class wife. I don’t want to feel that way now.”

  “High romance just ain’t my metier,” Joe said. “I’ve written too many bad situation comedies.” He looked in the mirror and could not help smiling a dapper smile. He turned his irresistible dapper smile on her.

  “Quit,” she said. “I don’t want to get comfortable with you. I might marry you. That would throw my directors into a tizzy.”

  “You’ve got directors too?”

  “Certainly. Daddy never figured I’d have enough sense to run the estate myself. I don’t have much trouble, though. They’re all scared of me.”

  They ate the breakfast Joe had fixed, chatting pleasantly. “You really will have to visit,” Eleanor said. “I want you to meet Lucy, my maid. The two of you ought to be exposed to one another. She has a wit not unlike yours.” After breakfast Joe put on a driving cap and they kissed lightly at the door, as if they had been married ten years and had just remembered that they were fond of each other. He drove off in a Morgan with red seats, and Eleanor had more coffee and drank it while looking at his pictures and his books. She made the guest-room bed, called a cab, and when she got home that evening the bullbats were swooping over the long lake in the horse pasture, the cowboys were unsaddling at the barn, and her two dairymen were just turning the Jerseys into the oatfield for the night. She ate some cold shrimp while Lucy solemnly filled her in on the doings of the week. They prated awhile and Eleanor went to bed with the magazines that had accumulated in her absence. She didn’t leave the ranch again for almost three months.

  14

  “YOU’RE GETTING SEXIER,” Jim said, kissing her shoulder. Her shoulders were freckled from much sitting around swimming pools. Patsy glanced at him. She was in bed filing a nail. He had just showered and was suddenly there at her side, sexually aroused.

  “I’m busy,” she said pleasantly. “Take it away.” But Jim went on kissing her shoulders—it was really more ticklish than sexy. “A minute,” she said as he was turning her toward him to really kiss her. Just before he did, she managed to burp. She had been next door to a drive-in and had had a vanilla milkshake. Her burp tasted of milkshake and she could not really enjoy the kiss because she needed to burp again and was afraid she would. Still, matters went pleasantly enough. Jim had been off visiting a ranch for three days, rising early and working hard, and passed quickly from coming into sleep. Patsy made it belatedly and not very strongly—a short quiver of pleasure, quickly gone—but Jim was not awake to resent anything and she calmed quickly and didn’t care.

  She slipped from beneath him and lay with her chin on her arms and her arms on Jim’s back, looking across him. Through the window she could see the green neon sign of their motel and the shallow end of a swimming pool. She was in no turmoil but felt vaguely bothered by the feeling that nothing in her life was ever going to be terribly intense. She would have liked sex better if it made her drowsy more often. She disliked being awake afterward, alone and thinking. She had always supposed she would lead an intense life, one way or another, but it just wasn’t working out that way. She wasn’t starving, but neither was she feasting. Her sensations weren’t very intense, her emotions weren’t very intense, even her imaginings had ceased to be very intense. As usual at such times, her thoughts turned to babies. A baby would surely make for joy. She rubbed her hand fondly up and down her sleeping husband’s back, for he had agreed two weeks before that they should have one. She might be pregnant already. And conditions for parenthood seemed very opportune. She was convinced that Jim was about through with photography—his enthusiasm was waning visibly. By the end of the summer he would be ready to try something more settled, and he was always at a peak of enthusiasm about life when he was starting something new. It would be a good time to be starting a baby. Besides, it had begun to seem to her that fatherhood might be what he was best at.

  They were in Ogden, Utah, after almost a month of lonely circling through the West. The tying-up incident in Phoenix had scared them both. Jim had come in rumpled and guilty-looking from his night on Sonny’s couch, and when Patsy told him about what Sonny had done he grew very depressed and they drew together and decided to split off from the pro rodeo circuit for a time. They started to Provo, Utah, where everyone else was going, but after several inconclusive arguments about whether or not Sonny was really dangerous they turned and went to Idaho instead. Jim was gloomy and troubled the whole trip. He liked Sonny and hated the complications of it all. They decided that the best thing to do was hunt out small amateur rodeos for a time and avoid the anxiety that having Sonny around would be sure to produce.

  They went north through Idaho as far as Coeur d’Alene, then cut back through Montana to Missoula, went up to Great Falls, down to Billings, on down to Jackson, Wyoming, then up again to Miles City, to Bismarck, North Dakota, down again through South Dakota to Mobridge and Pierre, cut through a corner of Nebraska and slowed for a time in Colorado. Whenever they saw a rodeo poster they made a side trip if necessary. To her surprise Patsy found that she liked the country they were traveling through. Except for one childhood trip to Yellowstone she had never been in the high West, and she liked it. The towns they stayed in were another matter, for once they left the circuit, Jim developed almost an obsession for staying in the smallest towns he could find, towns even the chain motels had not heard of. They stayed in Grangeville, Mobridge, Killdeer, Swift Current, Cody, Belle Fourche, Pagosa Springs, St. Onge. Accommodations tended to be weird—it was Patsy’s word. “Don’t call this primitive,” she said one night. They were in an old railroad hotel in Nebraska and a train had come through and had seemed to pass right underneath them. “Primi
tive life was never this noisy.”

  Some places had no movie theaters, and such theaters as there were seemed to belong so totally to the forties that it was a little incongruous to see sixties movies in them. Patsy took walks and got stared at. She read the box of paperbacks from top to bottom, got dangerously far into the third volume of Gibbon, and began to ration herself and subsist on what she could pick up at drugstores.

  They decided to go to Calgary, mostly because Patsy wanted to see the Canadian Rockies, but the Ford picked that week to throw a rod and they spent two days in Lewiston, Montana, waiting for a part to come by bus from Great Falls. The country they drove through was cool and high, gray distance in the mornings, brown distance at noontime, blue distance in the evenings. Patsy came to love the distances and often sat for long periods watching the wavering horizon. Jim’s picture-taking grew increasingly lackadaisical and they had little to do but talk, read, drive, and eat.

  It was a month-long period of calm. The argument they had had in Phoenix left them both feeling chastened and a little ashamed. Each determined to be more considerate sexually and the next time they made love they were more considerate than enthusiastic. After that the driving seemed to sap them. They lived and slept together in placid, friendly chastity for three weeks, neither bothered, neither discontent. Jim had been very taken with Eleanor and had fantasies of her for a while, but he had only seen her the once and her memory soon began to fade.

  The period of calm ended abruptly one night in a small town in northern Colorado. Jim went out to mail some postcards to their folks and completely forgot to bring back some cold cream Patsy had requested. He had also forgotten magazines—an essential of life. Patsy had suspected he would forget, since he often did, and had written him a little list, but he stuck the list in his shirt pocket and thought no more about it until he walked in the door of the motel room and saw her look up at him expectantly.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I completely forgot what you wanted.”

  “I knew it,” she said coldly. “Just give me the car keys. I’ll get them myself.”

  Jim offered to go, but she left without another word as he was apologizing. It was a tiny town, just one drugstore and a couple of grocery stores and one or two other small-town enterprises. Patsy got her stuff and drove restlessly back and forth through the little town, fuming. Dogs ran out to bark at the car. The town was in a flat valley, with mountains to the west, just visible in the dusk. There was really no place to linger, and after ten minutes she gave up and went back to the motel, the only accommodation the town boasted and one that was not to her liking. The walls were peeling, the neck of the shower hung crookedly, so that she practically had to stand in the bedroom to get wet, and there was no air conditioning. The room was cool in the morning, but the sun shone on it all afternoon and in the evening it was hot.

  Jim looked up guiltily when she came in and he tried again to apologize. “Oh, quit apologizing,” she said. “I forgive you. I knew you had a bad memory when I married you. What I didn’t know was that you’d take me to towns like this, with no warning.”

  “What do you mean, no warning? We’ve been staying in towns like this for weeks. You’re getting soft.”

  The remark infuriated her. “Of course I’m soft,” she said. “I was born soft. I’m not going to lead a crusade or anything. I’m just a woman.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Jim said, annoyed by her tone. “I mean soft in the wrong way. You like luxuries too much.”

  “Hush, you hypocrite,” she said, shucking off her dress. She flopped across the bed in her bra and panties, with Cosmopolitan, the only semi-readable magazine the drugstore had had. She felt more like arguing than reading.

  “It’s steaming in here,” she said. “I’m sweating. You’re heartless and a hypocrite. You like money more than I do. You love being able to spend hundreds on cameras and stuff any time you decide your lens is inadequate, but then you think you can make up for it by staying in sleazy motels and living on corn dogs. I’ll never eat another corn dog as long as I live.” She had just eaten a corn dog for supper.

  “I didn’t make you eat that corn dog,” he said. “The drive-in had other things. You can eat what you damn please.”

  “Corn dogs are just my rallying point,” she said. “It’s the principle I’m attacking. I should never have married you.” She flipped the pages of the magazine angrily.

  “You’re a puritan and a hypocrite and you wear your goddamn underwear three days in a row,” she said. “I always thought I’d marry a man with the decency to change his underwear every day. Squalor is all I have to look forward to, squalor and neglect.”

  Jim felt guilty for having forgotten the things, and he let the accusations break over his head. She didn’t sound seriously angry. Since he was directly behind her, sitting at a little lampstand that was all the room had in the way of a desk, her spleen was actually being directed at the headboard of the bed. He was writing in a journal that he had decided to keep. Sometimes he felt that he was more of a writer than a photographer, and the journal might come in handy. Besides, there was nothing else to do until bedtime.

  Looking up, he caught an exciting hind view of Patsy as she lay on the sheets of the thin bed. Her legs were wide and she held one foot in the air, waving it erratically as she talked. A small tuft of dark hair showed beneath the edge of her panties. He ceased writing in the journal and began to doodle, and he looked at the rear view of Patsy again and got up and locked the door.

  “I wish I had read Helen Gurley Brown sooner,” Patsy said. “I’m sure she has some very practical ideas. Probably I should have been promiscuous when I was younger. I might have learned about men who don’t change their underwear. According to this magazine, sex is everything.”

  “It would be everything if you lived in a town like this,” Jim said. He sat down by her and ran his hand up her leg and underneath her.

  “Quit,” she said. “That was not a cue. I was merely remarking on a cultural phenomenon. I’m really glad I wasn’t promiscuous and I don’t feel sexy right now.”

  But Jim kept on rubbing her through her panties, intent on changing the way she felt. Patsy kept reading, feeling irritated, impolite, and stubborn. Finally she wrenched her bottom away from his hand.

  “Stop,” she said. “Go take pictures of small-town emptiness, or something.”

  “You’re getting sexier,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not getting any more inventive. You’ve used that line for six months. Go away and suffer. You can’t afford luxuries like sex. It would only weaken you as an artist. Sublimate. I’m reading and I don’t feel sexy.”

  “I’m your husband,” Jim said, annoyed.

  “I’m your husband,” she mimicked. “I’m sweaty and this bed is lousy and I have to read this and find out why sex is everything. I have the right to abstain if I want to and I choose to abstain.”

  “All you ever want to do is abstain,” he said, trying to roll her panties down her hips. Patsy thwarted him by rolling off the bed. She went in the tiny bathroom, shut the door, and sat on the commode to read. When she came out fifteen minutes later, soaked with sweat, Jim was in bed looking aggrieved.

  “You certainly don’t seem to find me very attractive,” he said. “I doubt you really love me any more.”

  “Don’t lie there pitying yourself,” she said. “It just makes me worse. I wish I had a milkshake. With all the cows around here you’d think there’d be milkshakes available.”

  But after a time she grew contrite and decided she was mean and bitchy and worked it so she got seduced. Jim was grateful and sweet, but also uncharacteristically slow. They were very sweaty and the bed was creaky and not at all firm. After a time, wondering what was wrong, Patsy turned her face toward him and saw from the rather strained look of pleasure on his face that he was considerately holding himself back, waiting for her.

  “Oh, don’t look like that,” she said. “I’d rather you beat me than to
look like that.” She felt suddenly furious and hopeless.

  Jim was startled, stopped moving, and then began again uncertainly. Patsy felt contrite at her outburst and gripped his shoulders, trying to get with him. But they had both become self-conscious and slipped further and further out of rhythm. Jim came and hardly felt it and Patsy simply gave up. She threw her arms wide on the bed and lay panting, shaken with a combination of frustration and hopelessness. Jim was silent and very depressed and Patsy cried a little and when he said nothing began to feel angry.

  “Move,” she said, just as he was about to. “I’m drowning in sweat. You can give me the silent treatment after I’ve showered, if you insist.”

  “I’m not giving you any kind of treatment,” he said.

  “Not the kind I thought I’d get when I married you,” she said, going to the bathroom. The shower was cold and left her feeling edgy and more wrought-up than ever.

  When she came out Jim was dressing, as if he meant to go somewhere, and it crossed her mind for a moment that he had stopped loving her—probably with justice—and was about to abandon her in a miserable little town in Colorado. He was looking for a sock that had been kicked under the bed. All he had on was a brown short-sleeved sports shirt and one brown sock.