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THE SADNESS WAS STILL with her that afternoon when she made her way through the sullen, sticky heat to Hank’s apartment. To her intense annoyance he had chosen an apartment only two doors from his old apartment, on the same dead-end street. Except for a slightly less faded couch and a noisy old air conditioner it was exactly like his first apartment. The sight of it made her angry, and had continued to make her angry every time she stepped into it.
“I knew you weren’t perfect,” she said the first time she went there. “You have an utter lack of exploratory zeal. You can survey the whole goddamn Panhandle but when it comes to finding a decent apartment you won’t even drive around the block. Did it ever occur to you that there are apartments in Houston that aren’t on Albans Road?”
“I was tired from driving all night,” Hank said. “I didn’t feel like looking very hard.”
“Oh, sure,” she said, flinging open the closet and sniffing as if she expected to smell a dead animal. “You could have stopped at a motel and slept and then arrived at a normal hour. You drove all night so you could sneak in on me when my defenses were down. Then you’re too tired to drive around five minutes until you passed a pleasant apartment. I can’t stand lazy men. I’m going home to my son.”
“I don’t think this one is so bad,” he said. He didn’t think it was bad at all, but he watched her closely to see if she really planned to go. Evidently she didn’t. She was striding around the room, growing more and more furious.
“It’s awful,” she said. “Stark, dusty, and awful.”
“I didn’t know it mattered. I’m not especially attached to it. I can get another one next month.”
“Where, next door? No, thank you. I told you it mattered, five minutes before you left to go look. You just stay right here and find a girl who likes ugly furniture and dust.”
“Maybe it can be fixed up,” he said.
“Never, it’s hopeless,” she said moodily, sitting down on the couch. “I’m going in a second and you’ll never see me again. It’s a pity—you might have won me if you had better taste.” But he sat down beside her and hours passed before she left.
When she came up the back stairs and into the room, Emma on her mind, Hank saw at once that she was unhappy. She didn’t frown at the apartment, or look in the icebox, or come to him to be kissed; she walked into the bedroom, took off her clothes, and got in bed without speaking a word. She pulled the sheet up to her chin and lay looking at the ceiling, her mouth curved down sadly. “What’s wrong?” he asked, sitting on the bed.
Patsy shook her head. “I’m just low,” she said. “Emma’s not happy. I think we’re all done for—I really do.”
He tried to kiss her but she wouldn’t let him, so he stood up and began to take off his clothes. “I don’t feel done for,” he said.
“You aren’t married,” she said and looked at him hostilely when he slipped into bed beside her. “If I were married to you I’d do for you soon enough.”
Hank had already learned that he could not talk to her moods. The few times he had tried he had only made matters worse and got sliced to ribbons in the process. He didn’t like to talk to her unless she was in extremely good spirits; otherwise he kept silent and relied on his one constant asset: his physical presence. He lay beside her and held her as closely as she would let him, and Patsy’s spirits began to rise, almost imperceptibly. She was not as sad as she had been when she undressed. It was pleasant to lie with her cheek against his shoulder, his arm across her breasts. After a time she turned her head and bit his shoulder, thoughtfully but hard. “I ought to be whipping myself with nettles,” she said. “Poor Emma. She’s miserable all the time now because she’s good. I’m not good and I’m too shallow even to stay sad two hours out of sympathy.”
Hank had no interest in Emma or her troubles; what he wanted was to make love. But the intensity of Patsy’s moods had already taught him caution, and he waited until her spirits had risen to a safe level before he turned to her and asserted himself. It was very successful. They dozed, and Patsy awoke first, feeling calm and happy. She was quiet and very tender to the touch, and she lingered past the time when Juanita was expecting her home. When she finally got up and put on her panties and bra Hank was still on the bed and she could not resist going back to lie down for a few more minutes, to rub her cheek against his shoulder. It was only in the alley, as she was making her way home in the heat, that she thought of Emma again and felt guilty. Somehow the thought of Emma made her feel guiltier than the thought of Jim. The horns of the five o’clock traffic sounded on Bissonnet, as virtuous wives and husbands made their way home to their equally virtuous mates. She had just been reading Anna Karenina, and for a moment saw herself as the Anna Karenina of Albans Road. Perhaps someday, instead of the railroad track, she would fling herself under the five o’clock traffic and be laid out dead in the driveway of the filling station. A crowd from the Seven-Eleven would gather to view her remains, grocery sacks and beer cans in their hands.
But by the time she got across the street she had stopped feeling guilty, and when she got home to Davey she was quiet and cheerful and very calm. The feeling that suffused her was something new—it had not come immediately. Her beginning, with Hank, had been so nervous and weak that she had almost given the whole thing up at the outset. Nothing had been wholehearted. Clothed, they seemed close, but naked they were strangers—awkward strangers. Patsy was terribly disappointed. She could hardly believe she had fallen from virtue for so little pleasure. Months she had been without sex, and yet at first she had to strain very hard for even a small tweak of orgasm, and that left her so flat that she could not even cry whole-heartedly. It had been lovely discovering him, and even lovelier letting him discover her. Love was the only word she knew to use for the feeling it gave her. And then the seduction reduced it, made it all small. Hank too was low. Patsy went home, the first time, and showered and fed Davey and found herself even without remorse. She could not feel remorseful for having done something she hadn’t enjoyed. For a few hours she felt a kind of dull relief. To have found adultery so piddling and unattractive made her feel clearheaded about marriage. She had got less pleasure than she had had with Jim, and she considered it a lesson well learned. It was trivial, really trivial. She had learned the hard way and need have no more foolish hopes.
That evening when Hank came over, she let him in without nervousness, thinking there was no longer any reason to be nervous; surely he would not want her again after she had been so depressed and so depressing. She fell deep into self-pity, waiting for him to arrive; it seemed she was not meant to have a very sexy life. But when he came in both of them ceased feeling depressed. They forgot the dismal afternoon and lounged around together, watching a hilarious Peter Sellers movie on TV. The warmth came back and they felt cheerful again and, to her surprise, sexy again as well.
She went back to him the next day and the next and soon knew that she was not going to stop going, even if she wasn’t finding it as wildly sexy as she had thought it would be. If she wasn’t, Hank at least was; no one had ever wanted her so badly, and his desire drew her back. He made her feel so wanted that she couldn’t stay away; her own feelings seemed almost irrelevant. He was so greedy that it left her shaken. He was not especially considerate about it, either. He was so keen for her at first that he rushed over her own feelings and gave her little chance to catch up with him. Nothing went quite right for her at first. Their bodies did not behave in classic fashion, as bodies were supposed to. Graceful beginnings gave way to amazing awkwardnesses; they found themselves snarled in tangles of garments and bedclothes from which passion alone could not extricate them. Sober cooperation was often necessary. Such things deflected her, sometimes completely, but nothing seemed to deflect Hank for long. She came back day by day to the place where she was wanted, and gradually the fact that she was off pace in the lovemaking ceased to disturb her. Apparently it didn’t disturb Hank at all; he had not even mentioned it, an
d she was grateful. His silence on the subject made her feel the more prized. She stopped feeling self-conscious. His own desire was blind—it was for her, but it took little account of her, except as a body, and once she got over being shaken by it she found she liked it that way. It was also mute, his desire. There was no talking to it, and she found she liked that too. Once she relaxed and accepted the new terms on which she was desired, she began to respond, and soon responded more strongly than she ever had. In the hot afternoons, in the dim apartment, questions of heart got blurred; they seemed secondary. For all she knew of them Hank’s emotions were in his penis, or his hands. She realized she scarcely knew him, but she didn’t care. The focus of her curiosity shifted suddenly and became physical. She was more curious about how it felt to touch him or be touched by him than she was about what he was thinking or what his emotions might be. She concentrated on his body and hers, and for whole afternoons was almost as silent as he had always been.
Then one day, snooping, she opened the tiny little broom closet and discovered that there was an old guitar in it. It had not been there the week before, when she had looked in the broom closet. She was naked; they had made love and Hank was dozing. She felt cheerful, loose, and hungry. She had gone to the kitchen to make herself a peanut butter and honey sandwich. As she was looking at the guitar some of the honey dripped out of the sandwich onto her hip. She wiped it off with a finger, ate the sandwich, drank some milk, and went back to bed. She lay on her stomach, looking at Hank for a while. Her hair covered her shoulders.
“Whose guitar?” she asked when he awoke. “And where have you been hiding it?”
“Oh. It was Daddy’s,” he said. “It was in the back end of the car.”
“Why hide it?” she asked. All he had ever said about his father was that he was a small-time hillbilly musician.
He didn’t answer her question. Instead, he put his hand on her and began to play with her gently, but as he did he looked past her, over her shoulder, avoiding her eye. It bothered her badly. She wanted him to look at her, not over her shoulder, when he touched her. For the first time in days she felt alone. Though they didn’t talk much, she felt completely open to him, and the look chilled her, for it made him seem very closed somehow.
“Well, are you ashamed of him, or what?” she asked. “If you have some kind of father hang-up I’d like to know it. Don’t look away from me.”
Instead of telling her what she asked, Hank told her his life story. It was an unpleasant life story and unpleasant to listen to because he didn’t look at her while he was telling it. His face had a sulking look, as if she had insulted him by asking him a question. In the days ahead she was to discover that he hated to be questioned and always sulked if she persisted in pursuing some point about his character or his feelings or his past. All she was to remember about his life story was that his father and mother had been killed when he was six; their station wagon collided head-on with a truck full of oil-field equipment on a bridge over Red River while they were on their way to a dance at an army base in Oklahoma; that he had been raised by a mean aunt in a trailer house in North Fort Worth; that she had once whipped him with a clothes hanger because she caught him masturbating over a picture of Esther Williams; and that once he and a gang of boys had found a dead Mexican baby in a warehouse they broke into on Christmas morning. From time to time, when he wanted sympathy, he told her more about his past—sad, wretched details from his loveless adolescence, usually—but only the first recital really touched her and even then she didn’t like the tone in which he spoke. She took him in her arms afterward and petted him and kissed him, and her sympathy was genuine. She was moved that he had at last spoken to her about himself. But the self-pity with which he spoke bothered her, even the first time. She didn’t like it. She had no doubt that she would pity herself if she had lived such a life, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t like self-pity in him. She was sorry, going home, that she had found the guitar and asked about it, for she didn’t feel as secure or as happy as she had been before she asked.
Still, she was happy. That he occasionally pitied himself was, at the time, a very small erosion. They had three lovely weeks of mutual discovery, the weeks stretching themselves as weeks never had for Patsy. Time stretched as she stretched on his bed, and she seemed always to be stretching, turning lazily, stretching as she dressed, as she turned to check the time or turned to check him. The act in the bed took on an importance it had never had and that she had never expected it to have. For a time only Davey held his place with it. Everything else moved to the perimeter of her life. The Hortons scarcely saw her; Juanita got little out of her. Jim had almost ceased to figure, since he had almost ceased to call. There was Davey in the morning and the late afternoons, and Hank in the morning, or the afternoon, or at night, whenever it could be managed. The days had suddenly become complete—there was nothing more to want, nothing missing at all. She was too happy in body even to lament the loss of her virtue. Occasionally, late at night, combing her hair before her mirror, she would remember that she was adulterous and would brood for a time, but she could not feel really remorseful. Her body made it impossible; she simply felt too keen to be able to feel bad. Everything she did, with Davey or with Hank, was really pleasing. Her future, her position, what would happen when Jim returned—those were things she seldom thought about. Her days were a constant motion, and she could not disengage from the motion long enough to do much thinking. She awoke when Davey insisted she awake. He was charming in the morning, once she had taken him out of his bed. She fed him and dawdled with him a bit and then fed herself, rather amply usually, French toast and Canadian bacon and orange juice, reading the paper from the headlines to the auction notices while Davey sprawled on the clean kitchen floor at her feet, amid balls and plastic blocks, sometimes grasping her toes or the hem of her nightgown. She had decided that estate auctions might be fun to go to, but she somehow never got around to going to one. Her son and her lover left her no time. After breakfast she bathed Davey and they lounged on the bed, talking to each other in their different languages until Patsy began to feel energetic. Then she would dress and pop him into his car seat and off they would go. Davey would be admired by her grocer, her druggist, or whoever happened to be in the park. She had found a nice garage man who had given the Ford a good going over, and it got them wherever they were going. Juanita came at noon and Patsy gathered a few notebooks for cover and strolled off to pursue her studies, generally stopping at the Seven-Eleven to buy whatever sandwich makings appealed to her. Then she went to Hank’s apartment. Sometimes he would be at the library, pursuing real studies, which was okay with her. She snooped, made herself a sandwich if she was ready for one, listened to his records, most of which she disapproved of, or lay on the couch reading Middlemarch, her long book of the month. Hank had a somewhat soiled Riverside edition that he had read as an undergraduate in a course in the novel. It had his annotations in the margins, most of which Patsy thought extremely dull. Occasionally she wrote in counter-annotations.
His books were mostly paperbacks and mostly shabby, which she found pleasing after watching Jim pile up impeccable copies. Some of Hank’s marginalia were so solemn that she penciled in expressions of despair beneath them. He had so little to say to her, about literature or anything else, that she could not really imagine him teaching, but she did not particularly care what he did or planned to do. She was quite content to seize the day.
Sometimes she undressed and got in bed and slept until he came. He liked to tiptoe in and awaken her by putting a cold bottle of Fresca between her breasts; when he did Patsy generally sat up and drank half of it, and the small ring of moisture the bottle had made would dissolve and trickle down her stomach. She felt a kind of bodily luxuriousness she had not known before. Everything she did seemed simpler. Her former self, in so far as she could remember it, seemed frantic in comparison with her new self. She was silent more and could sleep almost any time she found herself on a bed. Na
kedness no longer made her feel awkward or scared. There was no knowing what the horn of carnality might yield on a given day—anything from a cool touch to a rough, sweaty excitement. All she knew when she went to his apartment was that it would be hours before she left. Finally, after the luxuries of the afternoon, she would dress and stroll home and take Davey for a walk down South Boulevard, under the great arched trees. When he was put to bed she made sandwiches and Hank came and they ate and drank beer or iced tea. She read magazines; he might read Jim’s books; they watched television and sometimes made love again, on the floor, safely out of view of the baby bed. Patsy found she liked it on the floor, and Hank liked it anywhere. When he left she was so sleepy she had only to crawl in bed to be asleep, but Davey had no trouble waking her in the morning. Morning was welcome. Davey had never been better, and the greens of Houston had never seemed lovelier. She had developed a fondness for Bob Dylan and often cooked breakfast to wild harmonica.
Their first real fight was over something very minor. Hank had gotten into a long conversation with Kenny Cambridge and was very late in getting to the apartment. Patsy was petulant. When she found out it was Kenny he had been talking to she became furious. He never talked to her at all; what could he have had to say to Kenny that was so important. Hank couldn’t remember—it had merely been a conversation. She became furious. In her furies she was always silent, for a time. Hank, like Jim, was very unnerved by her cold silences. He tried to kiss her—the only tactic he knew—and she became volubly angry and tried to leave. Hank wouldn’t let her go. He blocked the door and dragged her back to the couch. Patsy succumbed, coldly, and when she got a chance tried for the door again. He dragged her all the way to the bed. It was as hard a contest of wills as she had ever fought. She would have jumped from the second-story window if she could have; she stood up in bed to see if it was feasible, but Hank dragged her down again. She fought until she simply wore out. She was very rumpled, her chest heaved, she was out of breath and bedraggled and felt herself ruined and wretched and messy, a disgrace and ugly.
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