“Were you glad about the baby?” she asked, looking at him. It struck her that he could scarcely be expected to be glad about it, since it had taken him from so much that he was part of: the West, all that country, those drives he and Boots loved, and rodeo, horses and bulls, the whole movement of the arena. For all that it was dumb and dull to her, it kindled something vital in Pete. He matched with it in some way. So did Sonny. Even Peewee matched with it, in his way. On the zoo train he was just a sad uneducated kid in a big city, doing a silly job. Pete would look just as sad on a car lot, it seemed to her. It had already taken something away from him. He no longer looked like a man who could move faster than a bull.
“Oh, yeah, I was glad enough,” he said. “It was time for Boots to settle down. I didn’t want her barrel racing forever. Just as well now as later.”
Patsy didn’t know. She went in and put Davey to bed and came back and made coffee. She felt a little askew thinking about it. Boots grown up? Settled down? PTA? Dresses like other mothers wore? A husband who sold secondhand cars, like other husbands? She told Pete her story, over three cups of coffee, and wasn’t dramatic about it. Her mind wasn’t on her problem. It was on Boots and Pete and their problems. They were going to become people she wouldn’t know, or even want to know.
When they went into the other room Pete saw the flowers from Sonny and an unhappy look crossed his face. Patsy saw it. He said nothing, but the look stayed on his face and the tone of the visit changed. What she had very faintly feared the moment she saw him on the doorstep became so: he wanted her. Her husband was far away and she was alone; there was no natural check to his wanting her and the awkwardness showed in his face. His wife was in Fort Worth, almost ready to bear him a child, but it didn’t change it. The want was there.
Patsy felt it and tensed against it at once. In Cheyenne his desire had surprised her; she hadn’t known what to think about it and could only flutter uncertainly in response. But things were different, and she was different. She knew many things to think about it. At once she began to try and talk him past it, and she failed. They had told their stories, they had little more to talk about, and her small talk only exposed his desire the more clearly. She asked questions about Boots’s pregnancy, about her doctor, about whether they were hoping for a boy or a girl, all in hopes of bringing his mind back to his wife. He answered, but underneath it he was wanting her.
They had stopped looking at each other’s faces. She looked past his face; he looked past hers. She kept forming a sentence in her mind: “Look, old friend, you have to go—I can’t sleep with you.” But she couldn’t get the sentence from her mind to her lips. Pete stood up and moved indecisively about the room looking at things. Patsy stood up too, hoping he was about to say he had to be going. But as she moved past him to turn on a little lamp he stepped toward her quickly and caught her with one arm. She was surprised and embarrassed. She didn’t want to struggle and didn’t want to speak, so she put her face against his shoulder and her arms around him lightly, trying to pretend it was a friendly hug. But they had never hugged, in friendship or otherwise, and her pretense was awkward. She was not in front of him but beside him, her hip against his hip. He tried to turn her, to shift her in front of him, but she stiffened hard. “Un-uh,” she said. He bent his face toward her but she kept hers hidden. She could not get angry. All she felt was a deep dreadful embarrassment that would not let her look at him. She was cold with embarrassment and didn’t want to see his face. He pulled but she only stiffened the more, and then, with a sigh that made her wish he were a thousand miles away, he let her go. “I’m sorry,” she said, quickly stepping away. “It’s the last thing I need.” Davey cried out and she went to the baby bed. He had twisted himself into a corner, very uncomfortably. She straightened him out and he rolled onto his back and grunted, as if complaining in his sleep. She put her hand under his pajamas for a second, on his hot little stomach, and smiled when he made another small grunt.
Pete was sitting on the couch, his head down. He clearly felt wretched. The tension had gone away, and she wanted to see his face. She went over and squatted down in front of him. “Come on,” she said. “Forget it. It’s not like you had committed a major sin.”
Pete raised his head and looked at her. They looked into each other’s faces for the longest they had looked since the minute under the waterspout in Cheyenne. Their faces had changed, Patsy’s hollowed by the worries of her fall, Pete’s fattened by the worries of his. He saw in her the girl he had always seen, the girl who reminded him of his first wife, and tried to smile at her, but the constant smile of his profession was costing him his true smile, the wry smile that had once made him so appealing. Patsy saw in the smile and the look a man who was more depressed than he knew; soon he would have to learn to call his depression happiness in order to endure it. But he was not gone. His face was thickening but it was still a face she liked. There was not just a problem in his face, there was still Pete, only so close to the end of what he had been that she felt she might never see him again. And stupidly she had never touched him. She put her arms around his neck and pulled his head against her shoulder. He had not shaved and she felt the slight rasp of his beard against her throat.
“Snap out of it,” she said. “You’ve got to hit the road and beat the stork home. I’m not going to have you driving along thinking it’s the end of the world because you made a small pass at me.”
“I feel like I ought to be shot,” he said.
“No, just kicked. And me too, for not telling you to get the whole notion out of your head the minute I saw you had it in your head. But not shot.”
Pete looked again at the roses Sonny had sent her, and again he frowned. “What is it?” she asked. “He’s not that bad, is he? He certainly never got anywhere with me.”
“He got somewhere with my first wife,” he said. “It was just her bad luck to grow up in his home town. They broke up and she married me and we broke up and she took up with him again, for a while.”
“Oh,” Patsy said. “That’s why you had the famous fight I’ve heard about.”
Pete sighed. “Partly. He bought me a dirty movie, one night in Juárez when we was drunk, and gave it to me and told me the reason I never got along with Marie was because I didn’t know anything about screwing. I was supposed to watch the movie and learn. I threw it in the Rio Grande and we had the fight on the bridge.”
“For god’s sake,” Patsy said.
In a few minutes she sent him on. She did her best, in the few minutes, to get his spirits up, but for all her efforts he went away depressed, and once he was gone she too became depressed. She sat on the couch for a long time holding a magazine but not reading it. Somehow, all along the way, they had missed each other, had only really come close to each other for a few ambiguous minutes in Wyoming, and even then timidly, uncertainly. Whatever possibility there had been was finished, Pete was gone for good, and it seemed a shame that they had drawn so near only to miss. She told herself that it was sentimental to think of things that way, but it made her feel no less strange. She couldn’t see the pages of the magazine. The story of his old trouble with Sonny stuck in her mind and haunted her. Perhaps Sonny had been right; perhaps Pete’s confidence had always turned to awkwardness with Marie, just as it had with her. It was a gloomy thought, and while she was thinking it the phone rang. It was Hank, calling from Lubbock. He had got the message from his aunt. Patsy felt suspended. She was in no mood at all. She told him Jim was gone but didn’t ask him to come back. She didn’t want anyone. Hank had got a job at a tiny art-film house in Lubbock.
“Why, that’s perfect,” she said. “Antonioni and sandstorms. We’re going to Dallas day after tomorrow and won’t be back until after Christmas.”
Hank tried to make her promise to see him, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t get angry, she just wasn’t promising anything. She cried a little when she hung up, out of general depression. She found she couldn’t remember him very well, and wondered
as she was going to bed why it had been him instead of Pete. The next morning she decided proximity had made the difference. Hank had been at the drugstore, where she could find him, just often enough. The conclusion made her feel shallow, but it remained her conclusion.
Dallas was far worse than it had been the year before. Miri was still not home. Patsy tried several times to reach her on the phone and couldn’t. Her father had been out to see her and had been so shaken by the circumstances he found her in that he could scarcely describe them. He was sure it would only be a matter of time before she went crazy or ended up in jail. He had never imagined he would have a daughter who would go two years without coming home. The whole problem baffled him. He drank and watched football games. Patsy employed Davey in the manner that would do most to cheer up her mother. She also promised to go out and see about Miri herself, once she got moved, and she called Boots and found out there was no baby yet. Jim called on Christmas day but the connection was terrible and they did little more than shout assurances that they were well. Patsy kept herself cut off. The only times she cut on were late at night, when her mother and father were asleep. Then she lay on the couch in her parent’s den and watched the latest possible movie on TV. It didn’t matter how bad the movies were. They were all at least as real and as amusing as her life.
10
ELEANOR SPENT HER CHRISTMASES at the ranch, dispensing the sort of largesse which was traditional. The cowboys all got cash bonuses and sides of beef. There was an ascending scale of presents to be given, scaling up to Lucy, whom she always gave something for her house. Lucy owned a house in town, to which she planned to retire on some mythical and distant day when her mistress no longer needed her. Some of her boys lived there. Eleanor gave her a color TV, knowing they would all enjoy it.
It was a cold winter day; there was a light snow just before Christmas and a keen wind all day. She had a dinner invitation in Dallas and had rather meant to go, but finally decided not to. She spent Christmas evening on her leather sofa in front of a huge fire of mesquite logs. The logs crackled and burned beautifully. She was reading Valley of the Dolls without enthusiasm and talking off and on to Sonny on the telephone. He was in Las Vegas, judging a Miss Rodeo America pageant. He kept calling every few hours and badgering her to go somewhere with him for New Year’s. She felt lonesome for him and was quite willing but they could not agree on a place. He wanted to go to Acapulco and she didn’t, and the only compromise he had offered was Mexico City, which she didn’t favor either.
The sixth or seventh call of the day came at midnight, when she was in bed but not asleep. They picked the argument up where they had left it two hours before.
“Why won’t you go anyplace where there’s not a Hilton hotel?” she asked.
“It wouldn’t have no airport.”
“What do you do between these calls? You either gamble or else you’ve got something brewing with Miss Rodeo America. Which is it?”
“I generally watch TV,” he said.
“You could have spent Christmas with me.”
“I wish I had, now. If you’d get over not liking Acapulco we’d go and have a happy New Year. I thought that was where you jet-set types hung out this time of year.”
“I’m too old to be jet set,” she said. “I’m a sedate middle-aged woman and I don’t want to go to any tacky resorts. Why don’t we go to the Orient? We could spend New Year’s in Tokyo. I’ll get the tickets if you’re too tight.”
“Too much air time,” he said. “I hate long plane rides. I don’t want to go noplace we can’t get to in four hours in the air.”
“Well, South America, then. Peru. I’ve never been there.”
“Nope. If you ain’t been there it’s bound to be too far.”
“You’re impossible,” she said. “I want to go to sleep. It’s a mistake to decide anything on Christmas Day, anyway. We’ll argue sometime in the morning.”
“Not too early, we won’t,” he said. “I was thinking of heading back to L.A. tonight. I’ve fucked around here long enough.”
“This late?”
“It ain’t any special time here. I feel like driving. Anyhow, Coon’s here. If I don’t feel like driving he can drive. That’s what I keep him around for.”
“Well, what time will you call?”
“Whenever I wake up. Tomorrow afternoon.”
“I miss you,” she said. “Holidays always make me lonesome for you. Why don’t you come here?”
Sonny considered it. “I ain’t got enough pills for that long a drive,” he said. “And I don’t like to drive that far with Coon. I’d kick him out before we got to Albuquerque. I may kick him out, anyway, but if I do I can get to L.A. with no trouble.”
“I wish you’d get off those pills.”
“Naw, I was thinking of getting on more of them,” Sonny said. “I was just thinking, maybe what I need to do is let my hair grow and take lots of speed and LSD and turn into a cowboy hippie. Maybe it ain’t too late for me yet. I could sort of be the Joe Namath of rodeo, you know.”
“Who?” she asked, mildly amazed by the picture he was drawing and yet mildly disturbed too, for she knew he was just as apt to do it as not, if the mood to do it persisted.
“He’s a quarterback,” Sonny said.
“Even you couldn’t get away with long hair around a rodeo,” she said. “Half the drunks in the West would be wanting to fight.”
“That’d be okay. I could whip a few of them and the publicity wouldn’t hurt. They might even make me into a television series.”
“Well, you just be careful tonight, speedy.”
“Be nice if I was where you could rub my back,” he said thoughtfully.
“Wouldn’t it, though. You wouldn’t have to drive here, necessarily. I could send the plane in the morning. Your young friend could take the hearse back to L.A.”
“Naw, I’m too pepped up,” he said. “I want to drive and, anyway, I don’t want to fuck around here all night. I’ll see you in a day or two, soon as we make up our minds where to go for New Year’s. Want to get married?”
“I don’t know that I’m that lonesome,” she said. “You want to? You think I’d be better for you than long hair and LSD?”
“Hard to say,’ he said. “I guess it’s watching all this gambling that makes me ask. It wouldn’t be no more foolish than anything else.”
“You just remember what a good back rubber I am,” she said. “I knew you’d eventually begin to appreciate my domestic skills. You think we should sleep on it? We’ve only known one another fifteen years.”
“You sleep on it,” he said, “and I’ll run on over to L.A.”
“Proposals are usually accompanied by a declaration of love,” Eleanor said, smiling.
“I’m in too big a rush to get off to start in on anything like that,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind being snuggled up with you right now, though. You’re good to have around in a norther.”
“Okay,” she said. “Don’t strain yourself trying to think of compliments. I’m very fond of you too, and I’m going to sleep. Call me when you wake up, okay?”
“Yeah, sleep tight,” he said.
Coon was disgruntled that they were leaving. He thought Las Vegas was a great place, much better than L.A. In Las Vegas nobody looked down on him for dressing like a cowboy, at least no one did in the places he was allowed in. Being a cowboy in L.A. was increasingly unrewarding. Hippies with hair three feet long were treated better than he was, it seemed to him. Girls didn’t put them down, and in L.A. girls put him down constantly. None had put him down in Las Vegas, because he hadn’t spoken to any. He just looked. On the whole, from a looker’s standpoint, the girls of Las Vegas had it over the girls of L.A. Too many of the girls he ran into in L.A. had something wrong with them—crooked noses or something. Las Vegas girls didn’t seem to have discouraging defects. They were out of reach, but nice to look at.
Miss Rodeo America made him ache. Her name was Wanda Lou Rawlins and she hail
ed from Waxahachie, Texas. She was a petite brunette who never took her Stetson off. Coon ached, and Wanda Lou did her best to make up to Sonny, who was her official escort on a couple of occasions. She was tired of Waxahachie and wanted to live in L.A. and be in Sonny’s next movie, if there was one. She would have considered it an honor to sleep with him, and most probably a pleasure too. All Coon could do was watch. He had watched before, so often in fact that he had come to derive a kind of vicarious satisfaction from Sonny’s conquests. He dreamed about them while sleeping in the hearse, where he slept when he was driving for Sonny. He had watched Miss Rodeo America go around for three days with her tongue virtually hanging out and he gave her some thought at night while resting in the hearse and watching the lights along the Strip. Thus it was actually a disappointment when Sonny told him to bring the hearse around—they were leaving. He couldn’t understand why Sonny would just walk off from a piece like Wanda Lou without so much as a sniff. It made him restless. He felt doubly deprived. It was wasteful. Sonny could at least have screwed her once, if only for courtesy’s sake. Coon felt chivalric toward her. It was no way to treat a queen. After all, there was only one Miss Rodeo America.
Soon they were thirty miles into the desert, gliding toward Barstow at an easy eighty-five. Sonny had elected to drive, but he was not quite ready for the real speed. He was feeling his seat, meditating. He liked the desert, had crossed it at night endless times in his years of rodeoing. He had taken two Dexamyls and was feeling good. Eleanor stayed on his mind. It would be very pleasant to sit on the couch with her and drink bourbon in front of the mesquite fire. It was time he went to Texas; he hadn’t been there since the summer, when the movie production moved to L.A. For a few miles he considered possibilities, regretting that he had not taken the road straight south to Needles. Then he could have shot across to Texas on Sixty-six and been there in twenty hours. He could have doubled back, but the prospect didn’t please him. It wasn’t worth it. In fifty miles he resolved it in his mind and found his seat and moved up to ninety-five. He could fly to Dallas the next day and have Eleanor send the plane for him. She could send it all the way to L.A., for that matter. He was settling down to enjoy the run to Hollywood when Coon voiced his disgruntlement in regard to Wanda Lou.
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