The next day she straggled back to Hank’s, still pale and chastened, determined to tell him she was never going to see him again. That was clearly what was called for. Let him go away. She tried to tell him as much, but it didn’t work well. He kissed her into a daze. It was because he had been in the army, she had decided. She was no match for anyone who had been in the army. He could always kiss her and it always worked. It was only when he began to undress her that her resistance awoke, and it awoke later every time. But in the struggle he accidentally hurt her breast and the moment of pain left her rational and cool again. She shook out her hair and ticked off a dozen reasons why it could never be.
Quite accidentally, in conversation, as they were getting friendly again, Hank mentioned that he had had lunch with Clara Clark. Rumor had it that she was sleeping with William Duffin, he said. Patsy went from cool to hot in seconds; she had never gone through so many revolutions of feeling in so short a time. First she cried because his having lunch with Clara made her feel betrayed, then she stormed because he had had anything to do with such a slut, then she fell on the bed and cried again because she realized that her emotion were out of control. She couldn’t sleep with him, but it made her burn with indignation that he would have anything to do with Clara Clark, and she quailed before the thought that Clara would probably be only too glad to sleep with him—might have done so, in fact. In an attempt to placate her Hank mentioned that he had dated Clara for a time during the fall and was obliged to be at least courteous to her. At that confirmation of her fears Patsy went blind with anger and turned and hit him in the face. It surprised them both. She strode around the small room shaking. She had never hit anyone before. In a minute she felt cold and forlorn and went to the couch and curled up beside him, as best anyone her size could curl.
“I must be mad,” she said. “What am I doing? Did I hurt you?”
“Of course not,” he said, amused and rather pleased.
“Don’t laugh at my frenzies,” she said. “I meant to hurt you. I’ll hit you again. I enjoyed it.” Then she sniffed and pressed her face against his arm.
He tried to touch her and she shoved his hand away.
“Look, be logical,” he said. “Sooner or later we’re going to sleep together.”
“I don’t happen to be especially logical,” she said. “Don’t preach logic to me. Besides, I’ve read Norman O. Brown. People don’t have to do all that. We can just be polymorphously perverse. Non-orgasmic love is supposed to be pretty great.”
“I’m not oriented to it,” Hank said. Sometimes the fact that she read a lot made him very discontented with her.
“I’m not oriented to adultery, either.”
There they stuck for three days, the complexities multiplying, the pressures at each meeting becoming more intense. A weekend came and Patsy’s parents were in town. She thought it would be a relief, not seeing Hank for two days, not having to struggle with the dilemma; but it turned out to be almost intolerable. All surroundings but his apartment had become a little bit unreal, and all concerns except the struggle toward or away from him had become irrelevant. It might be painful, being with him; blood might flow and ruin might follow, but at least something essential was happening, something better than the insubstantiality that attended her everywhere else. The dinner she and Jim had with her parents seemed one of the emptiest, most vapid occasions of her life. Her parents’ familiar phrases and mannerisms irritated her so much that it took all her control merely to be polite.
Jim was exemplary during the weekend. He was solicitous and nice to her and adroit at handling her parents. Patsy decided that for some reason she had not noticed him in several months; she took note and found little lacking and attacked Hank fiercely on Monday for betraying a comrade-in-arms. The attack was vitiated somewhat by the fact that she was lying in his arms at the time, but for that very reason it was all the more violent.
“Your own colleague,” she said.
To her intense annoyance he refused to defend himself or try to justify what he was doing. “A man in love will do anything,” he said, trying to kiss her.
“Ethics,” she said. “Principles. The Judeo-Christian tradition. Western civilization. The marriage oath. What about all that?”
“I wish you’d shut up,” he said. “I can’t help it. It’s a fact, even if it’s catastrophic for Western civilization.”
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I knew you were fallible. Too bad. I’ll never be seduced by a man with an inadequate moral philosophy.”
“Yes you will,” he said.
A little later she almost was. A kiss turned into a bite. Everything got sharper—she was almost overwhelmed. But some deep stubbornness gripped her and held her despite her own response. The same thing happened the next day.
“Maybe if I wasn’t pregnant,” she said, crying. “But never like this.”
“All right, I’m going away,” Hank said. He was rumpled and very aroused.
It made her furious. “Are you issuing threats?” she said. “I hate threats. Go away if you want to.” She felt as if she had been slapped; she hurt so much for a time that she couldn’t cry.
“I can’t see you and not sleep with you,” he said. “I’ll drop out for a semester. The school won’t care. I can come back next summer.”
“Why come back?” she said, still angry.
“You won’t be pregnant.”
“I’ll be just as stubborn. All this will have gone away.”
When he calmed down he looked very solemn. Patsy found she liked him, after all. She put her finger on the little dent on the bridge of his nose. “You won’t go away,” she said. “You won’t abandon me.”
“Yes I will,” he said. “You’ve got to calm down and have your baby. I really better go.”
She saw that he meant it—it was not a cruel joke or a trick to get her to come through. He looked very firm about it. She was not used to such firmness and it shocked her a little that a man could be so decisive about a matter of feeling. He had no right to be so positive about a matter that involved her feelings too. The rest of the afternoon she indulged in a glut of emotion or, rather, an assault by emotion. She tried everything: silence, coldness, tears, fury, name calling, joking, argument, logic, tenderness, wistfulness, helplessness, finally even wantonness, determined to break the decision. He would put her first—he would not go away. All it did was almost get her seduced. She broke free and had a final writhing crying fit; it ended with her in a state of shamed collapse, feeling cheap and scared. He didn’t change his mind but she left him anything but calm. He had never faced quite so much emotion and it unnerved him without making him any less stubborn. Patsy left without apology and went home feeling broken, her self-esteem gone, her feelings uncertain. She spent an awful, tearful night, but Jim worked late at the library and didn’t notice.
Hank stayed four more days. Once Patsy saw that he was really going she accepted it and made no more real fuss. She sniped and made small petulant fusses, and there were times when she hurt inside and felt betrayed, but she was scared of her own emotion and tried to contain it. Once or twice she challenged him, trying to get him to change his mind. But he was adamant.
“Portales or you,” he said when she pressed him.
“Why are you so goddamn absolute?” she said. “Can’t you realize that life isn’t that way? You have to make concessions. Compromise is supposed to be the law of life. What will I do without you?”
“Sleep with me if you’re so worried.”
“No,” she said furiously.
The last two meetings were quiet, except for Patsy’s tears. She accepted, finally, that he had a fairly good reason for leaving. It was even a little noble, since he was interrupting his career for her sake. It made her feel valuable, if not exactly worthy. On the last morning she saw with a pang that his old Oldsmobile was loaded. The nice bedspread she had bought him was off the bed where they had wrestled and kissed to no conclusion. She felt as bare herself,
though all morning she never took off her coat. They lingered for two hours. She could not remember later that anything was said. She spent the afternoon rocking silently, listening to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Jim was at the library until midnight, and Hank was driving toward New Mexico, over the darkened plains. In the days that followed she avoided Albans Road. Where she missed him most was the drugstore; a time or two, eating, she could not quite keep her tears back. Eddie Lou, recognizing a broken heart and no woman to hold a grudge, began to take some care with her cheese sandwiches again.
17
FOR PATSY the two weeks after Hank went away were not only bad but strange. She had never in her life missed anyone and she found it a wretched, weakening experience. She had never supposed that anyone she really wanted would go away from her, and for a time she could not get over feeling betrayed. She knew it was as much her fault as his that he was away, but it didn’t keep her from hurting or feeling betrayed.
Never before in her life had she felt so completely at a loss. Suddenly there was nothing to do. When she went to the drugstore she found she wasn’t really interested in any of the magazines; the world had suddenly become dull. The improvement in her sandwiches was quite lost on her. When she went to the library all the books seemed inessential. Even Emma was spoiled for her for a time. She tried going there a time or two in the afternoons, but the boys somehow irritated her with their bright questions and their fighting. Emma irritated her a little too, by not being prettier, or more ambitious, or less slovenly, for being so snug in her domesticity. They went out shopping and it still didn’t work; she didn’t feel like herself, and their chatter didn’t mesh. Finally she decided it wasn’t Emma’s fault; it was just that she didn’t want to spend that much time with a woman. It was more pleasant to spend time with a man. It seemed incredible to her that she could have become addicted to Hank so quickly. It was as if with him she had acquired a new self, only to be forced back to her old self just as she was ready to give it up forever. When she tried staying at the apartment she did literally nothing. She sat and stared and thought about him or about the baby. That was the one good thing left—there would soon be her baby. It was the only thing she felt happy and expectant about, the only thing that kept her from feeling completely empty. With the time so short and her breasts filling, it was impossible to feel completely empty. She only felt desolate. She decided that if she had only known how much she would miss him before he left she would have gone ahead and surrendered her virtue, for it had come to seem a paltry and sodden thing, anyway. She decided that she had only put him off because she was cowardly, or else too vain to want him to see her so heavily pregnant; in either case her withholding was hardly worthy of being called virtue. That was dreary enough to have to think upon, but it was made drearier still by the fact that she missed him physically. Three or four days after he left she felt more restless and irritable than she ever had before, and provoked a screaming fight with Jim. Later she decided it was all sexual; she was frustrated; she should have slept with him, pregnant or not; but it was too late. He was gone, and it was all uncertain. He might never be back.
Then one day she got a letter. The sight of it shocked her, but it was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, and was a quite innocuous note telling them that he had a job on a surveying crew and that they were to say hello to everybody for him. The only real purpose of it was to give her his address, she knew, and she was miffed when Jim assumed it was mostly to him and filed it away in a huge letter file of his own. She knew he wouldn’t look at it again for years, if ever, so she immediately stole it out of the file and hid it in a drawer of her dresser.
A few days later Jim came home looking blue and introspective, as if he were feeling sorry for himself. Patsy felt slightly more in touch with the world that day and badgered Jim cheerfully through supper, trying to perk him up. She had written Hank a long letter in which she felt she had succeeded in being witty and noble and compassionate and several other good things, and had mailed it that afternoon. Mailing it made her feel better. Then, after some questioning, Jim told her that he had had coffee with Clara, who was gloomy. She had confided in him that the reason for her gloom was that Hank had been her lover during the fall; with him gone she didn’t know where to turn.
“I sort of suspected it all along,” Jim said sagely.
Patsy felt for a moment like she had been kicked. The kick caught her in a soft, vulnerable spot, and came just at the moment when she felt least deserving of a kick. She was standing at the sink in her fuzzy yellow slippers and a baggy brown dress, fixing to wash a dishpan full of dishes. Jim still sat at the table drinking coffee and looking at a publication called The Book Collector. He had subscribed to it on Duffin’s say-so and his first copy had just come that day.
Patsy stood in shock, looking at him. Had he not been there, hurt might have come before anger, but when her emotion broke it broke as anger.
“Oh, goddamn,” she said. “You goddamn men. Stupid, crazy . . .” And she choked for a moment on the violence of what she felt.
Jim looked up, very surprised at her words and even more surprised by her tone.
“Don’t look at me like that!” Patsy said. “So that’s why you’re so gloomy. You wanted to be her lover and you got stuck with being her sympathetic confidant. You’re envious of him!”
Jim was taken aback. It was uncanny the way her most irrational thrusts sometimes hit dead center. That had been what he was feeling. He had been secretly wanting Clara, not rabidly but steadily. He didn’t feel stuck with being a confidant, though. From Clara’s manner he felt it quite possible that he could become her lover, and his desire to do so added to a predicament of conscience that he had already acquired. All during the fall he had tried to keep himself in the notion of being eternally faithful to Patsy, but despite himself he kept wanting Clara. Patsy’s raw voice stunned him for a moment.
“Shit!” she said. “Stupid, vile, promiscuous! I’m going to break something.”
And to his surprise, crying bitterly, she lifted the dishpan full of dishes and heaved it awkwardly at the window. The heave was unsuccessful, the dishpan struck the windowsill and fell to the floor with a loud clatter. All the dishes spilled. Only a saucer and two glasses broke but Patsy had dashed out of the kitchen. She was going to her dresser to tear the letter to shreds, but Jim caught her before she got the right drawer open. She was in a fury and wrestled and tugged until she broke loose.
“Get your goddamn hands off me,” she said. “Go read your goddamn magazines in her house, maybe she’ll let you screw her while you read. Then you’ll have everything you want. Keep your hands off me. I hate you and I hate her.”
“Stop it,” Jim said. “You’re nuts. I haven’t slept with her.”
“You will,” she said, crying. Her hair was down in her eyes and her hands were still wet and soapy. “You’ll sleep with her. Everybody will sleep with her. Why should I care? I won’t stay in this house. Go on. Turn me loose.”
“Patsy, you’re mad,” he said.
She was, virtually. She had been kicked and there was no way she could kick back, not as she would have liked to.
Jim dragged her by main strength to the couch, but before they got there her anger turned to hurt and she stopped fighting and sat crying.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“Do you need a doctor?” he asked. “You threw the dishpan. You can’t do things like that. You’re going to have the baby soon.”
“Oh,” she said, realizing how awful she had been. “I can’t, I can’t.” And she hurried to the kitchen and knelt sobbing on the wet floor, among the soapy dishes, trying to sort out the broken pieces, still sobbing and talking.
“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Jim came and helped her but she wasn’t talking to him. She didn’t know who she was talking to.
He had meant to go to the library that evening, but he felt uncertain that he should. He had never seen
her so wild and scarcely knew what to do. If he left she might think he was going to Clara’s. But once the mess was cleaned up Patsy washed her face and seemed to come back to herself.
“No, go on,” she said. “I’m all right. I just have an irrational dislike of that woman. I’m very sorry I was so crazy just now.”
“I don’t understand why you dislike her so,” he said. “She’s not married. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t have lovers.”
Patsy felt awkward and frightened; she was afraid she had given herself away and was relieved when he left. She felt sure that once he thought about it he would figure out why she had been so upset. She dreaded his coming home, sure he would have figured it out by then. She cried all evening, miserably and intermittently, well aware that she was entirely in the wrong in feeling the way she did. Hank and Clara had had every right to sleep together in the fall; she had no claim on Hank, anyway. She realized that in any fair estimate of matters she would come out much worse than Clara Clark. Clara was single and perhaps thought Hank would marry her—she was married and pregnant. Clara had had every excuse for sleeping with him, including that he was attractive—she had none, for she already had someone attractive. And, worst of all, Clara had actually slept with him, while she had merely flirted and teased. Clara had behaved legitimately, perhaps generously, at least honestly; she had been dishonest, selfish, and cowardly. She didn’t have the right even to want a right; and yet her lack of a right changed nothing. She felt just as lonely, just as wounded, just as sad—and just as angry. She hated him for leaving. That was his cowardice. He could have stayed and waited, or made her into something better if he had really tried. He had done a weak, incomplete job, and jealousy of Clara continued to gnaw at her.
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