Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  Also in Kearney Flap fell in love. It was prosperous country, relatively speaking; and also it was more remote from the twentieth century than Des Moines. The students there got crushes on him still, but it was not so easy for him to march them off to bed. The town was too small for that, and the girls too inexperienced. One of them would have gotten pregnant, and Flap would have been finished as a department head.

  To avoid that danger he began to see a woman only ten years his junior, a young woman who taught drawing. She was liberated, for Kearney; she had studied in San Francisco, had been married and run out on. She was a local girl of good family—indeed, the best family in town—and the community had long ago granted her the right to a mild bohemianism. She painted; she taught the life class. She and Flap were on three faculty committees together which gave them ample reason for meeting. She was intense, didn’t talk much, and withheld herself for six months. She had studied modern dance and taught a local Yoga group; her figure was admirable and she moved well. Her name was Janice, and Flap would have left Emma in order to sleep with her, had it been necessary. Janice didn’t require that, but she did require that he be in love with her. He told her he had been in love with her for a year, which was as true as not; three weeks after the affair was consummated he was so in love with her that he confessed it to Emma. Melanie was in his lap at the time drawing blue circles on a napkin with one of his felt pens.

  “Why are you telling me?” Emma asked quietly.

  “But you must know anyway,” Flap said. “Can’t you tell by the way I act.”

  “Don’t let her draw on the tablecloth, please,” Emma said. “You always let her ruin my tablecloths.”

  “I mean it,” Flap said. “Can’t you tell by the way I act?”

  “No, if you must know,” Emma said. “I can tell you don’t love me by the way you act. That’s not necessarily anything I can hold against you. Maybe you just loved me as long as you could—I don’t know. But knowing that you don’t love me is not the same as knowing that you love someone else instead of me.

  “It’s a different hurt,” she added, snatching the pen from Melanie just before she started on the tablecloth. Melanie looked darkly at her mother; it was astonishing how dark her eyes became when she was angered. She didn’t howl, having learned that it did no good to howl at her mother. She had inherited her grandmother’s talent for silences, and she got off her father’s lap and marched silently out of the room. Flap was too distracted to notice.

  “Well, anyway,” he said. He was growing a mustache, to please Janice, and it made Emma feel the more contemptuous of her taste. With a mustache and his bad clothes he looked awfully seedy.

  “Tell me what you want,” Emma said. “You can be divorced, if you want to. I’m not going to stand in the way of anyone’s passion. Go live with her if you want to. Just tell me what you want.”

  “I don’t know,” Flap said.

  Emma got up and started making hamburgers. The boys were due home soon.

  “Well, will you tell me when you decide?” she asked.

  “If I can decide,” he said.

  “You better decide,” Emma said. “I’d rather not start hating you, but it might happen. I think I’m going to need a decision.”

  Flap never made one. In truth, he was more scared of Janice than he was of Emma. She had a capacity for hysteria that Emma lacked, and he mistook hysteria for conviction. When she screamed that she would kill herself or him if he stopped seeing her, he believed it; and in any case, he had never had any intention of stopping. Janice knew that well enough, but she liked to create scenes. She wasn’t in love with Flap and she didn’t particularly want him to leave his wife; but she wanted all the rituals of passion, and scenes were necessary. In time their passion became dependent upon her attacks.

  In contrast, Emma withdrew. She expected to be left; after a few months she even hoped to be left. If nothing else, it would be nice to have more closet space. But then she realized that Flap wasn’t going to leave unless either she or Janice forced him to. He was being very polite and rocking no boats. Emma gave up on him then. She allowed him his house and his children; he didn’t want her, so that was no problem. She generally watched the Late Show and went to sleep on the couch anyway. She made no scenes. Scenes upset the children too much, and in any case there was nothing left to make a scene about. What had been, for a time, a marriage was lost; the fact that two long-related people were continuing to share a house meant little.

  She knew she should probably force him out, but he was so sluggish, so entrenched in the children, so possessive of his habits, that to do so would have taken a major commitment of fury and energy. Emma didn’t have it. The kids took all her energy, and she seemed to have no fury. She had exhausted her capacity for disappointment in Des Moines; what Flap was doing seemed cowardly, but it was right in character. She no longer wanted the bother of trying to make him better than he was; she just wasn’t that involved.

  What she did do was retreat completely from campus activities. She refused all invitations, ignored all functions, spurned all faculty wives. Since she was a department chairman’s wife, that made awkwardnesses for Flap, but Emma didn’t care. When speakers came to the campus, she didn’t go hear them; when teas were held, she didn’t attend.

  “Go to these parties with your mistress,” she said. “It’ll titillate people, and God knows they need it here. I hope I never see a plate of goddamn chicken macaroni again.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Flap wanted to know.

  “Why, it’s been the great staple of our social life, honey. Can’t you remember?” she said. “Cheap wine, cheap prints, cheap furniture, dull talk, depressed people, tatty clothes, and chicken macaroni.”

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “That twelve years as a faculty wife is enough,” she said. “You’ll just have to forge ahead without me.”

  In that mood she made a bad mistake. Flap had a colleague who seemed to hate academics as much as she did. His name was Hugh; he was a youthful forty, cynical, a Joycean. He was recently divorced, and Flap brought him home from time to time. He liked to drink and talk about movies, and Emma rediscovered that she too liked to drink and talk about movies. He had a dry wit, and his put-downs of fellow academics and of university life in general were hilarious. When Hugh was around, Emma found it possible to laugh herself out. Some of all that she was holding back got laughed away. It was an immense relief. Hugh had a cold twinkle in his blue eyes and a pouty lower lip; one day he showed up in the middle of Melanie’s nap—he was a father himself and had a fine sense of domestic timing—and seduced Emma in Teddy’s bunk bed. Emma had suspected it was going to happen, but she was not prepared for the aftermath. Hugh coolly informed her that she hadn’t satisfied him.

  Emma was very startled. “Not at all?” she asked.

  “No,” Hugh said. “I think you’ve forgotten how to fuck.” He said it pleasantly while lacing his sneakers. “Let’s have a cup of tea,” he added.

  Instead of throwing him out, Emma fell for it. She took his criticism to heart. After all, how long had it been since she’d given sex any real attention? Flap had been largely indifferent to her for many years, and Sam Burns had been too much in love to require much polish. Besides, she had long been accustomed to repressing both her hopes and her physical feelings; the maintenance of her home life required it.

  Still it was a startling criticism; she was very flustered by it.

  “Don’t let it worry you,” Hugh said, still pleasantly. “It’s all there. Things will pick up.”

  The picking up was done at his house, which was only three blocks away and on a perfectly reasonable route for walks. His wife had fled to the east. In time—not much time—Emma knew why. Hugh’s eyes never lost their cold twinkle. Emma wanted out almost before she was in, but for a time she was caught. It wasn’t right, but it was something. She soon saw that Hugh’s contempt for the university was only a pose; he
fit in perfectly. Sex was his real study, and the university provided him a comfortable base. His bedroom was a kind of classroom. He trained Emma critically, as if she were a dancer. For a time it seemed rewarding; she accepted the fact of her ignorance and was an eager pupil. Then it stopped seeming rewarding; she felt taken over. Her orgasms were so hard they felt like blows. Hugh often got phone calls from people to whom he was curt. He didn’t want Emma listening, and he didn’t like it if she lingered past a certain hour. She began to feel shamed. She knew it was masochistic to see a man who had no affection for her, and yet she did it. After a time she felt she was practicing a form of hatred instead of a form of love. Hugh had turned pleasure into humiliation. She didn’t know how he had done it, nor how to get away from him either.

  Cautiously she attempted to talk to her mother about it.

  “Oh, Emma,” Aurora said. “How I wish you’d not married Thomas. He’s not been adequate. My lovers have not been geniuses, by any means, but at least they’ve all meant me well. Who is this man?”

  “Just a man. A teacher.”

  “You’ve got those children to raise, you know,” Aurora said. “You just get out of it. Things that are truly wrong never get better. They inevitably get worse. The only way to stop anything is to stop at once. Deciding to stop next month means you haven’t decided to stop. Why don’t you bring the children and come here?”

  “Momma, the boys are in school. I can’t come there.”

  Aurora controlled herself, but not easily. “You’re not a balanced person, Emma,” she said. “You’ve always had this self-destructiveness. I don’t think you’ll get out. Perhaps I ought to come there.”

  “And do what? Tell the man he has to stop seeing me?”

  “I quite well might tell him just that,” Aurora said.

  Emma realized she quite well might. “No, stay there,” she said. “I’ll do it-Emma did get out, but it took another three months. She destroyed it by meeting Hugh’s standards sexually—she trumped him with his own card. An equal was not what he wanted, and as her head cleared and her confidence came back she felt less and less need to please him. His response to her became more and more sardonic, more and more contemptuous. He kept himself in perfect shape; his cabinets were full of health foods and vitamins and he scorned Emma because hers weren’t. At first he chose an easy target for criticism, namely her figure. He reminded her that her behind was too big, her breasts too small, and her thighs too flabby. Emma shrugged it off. “I’m not a narcissist like you,” she said. “Even if I exercised ten hours a day my figure would be indifferent.”

  She knew he was working his way up to dumping her, and she felt relieved and also quite content to let him do the work. He was waiting to hurt her in some way, she knew, so she was on her guard. It was clear from his eyes that he had every intention of leaving a scar. One day while they were dressing she mentioned something about her children. “God you have ugly brats,” Hugh said. Emma was bent over and his large sneaker lay just in front of her hand. She whirled and hit him in the face with it as hard as she could. His nose smashed and blood immediately flooded onto his beard and began to drip down his chest. She threw the sneaker down. Hugh couldn’t believe it. “You’ve broken my nose, you crazy bitch,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  Emma said nothing.

  “You’ve broken my nose,” Hugh repeated as blood continued to flood out. “I have to teach tonight. What do you think I’m supposed to tell people?”

  “Tell them your girl friend hit you in the nose with a tennis shoe, you conceited little drip,” Emma said. “Don’t ever criticize my children.”

  Hugh began to hit her and she was almost as bloody as he was before she got out, though most of it was his blood. She had to leave her shoes, but fortunately she managed to get into her bathroom without any of the kids seeing her. She lay in the bathtub and soaked out the whole affair. Feeling the sneaker connect had been very satisfying.

  For a few weeks after the fight she was able to look at life with a clear eye. It was as if she had been purged, temporarily. Flap, she knew, was of no further use to her. He was too lethargic to change, and Janice had become dependent on him. He would never muster the strength it would take to break off the affair—not that Emma really wanted him to. He had forced her to remove herself from him, and she had. She didn’t mind making him breakfast and attending to his laundry; it was far easier than keeping him up to snuff emotionally. She was glad to leave that task to Janice; there would be no problem with Flap unless Janice for some reason decided to dump him.

  For a time Hugh made himself obnoxious. He hated Emma for breaking his nose, but he hated her even more for breaking off the affair. He had been ready to get rid of her, but it seemed that she had gotten rid of him first, and that was intolerable. It felt like rejection, and he couldn’t stand rejection. He wanted her back so he could dump her properly. He began to call and to show up on her doorstep at odd times. Emma refused to let him in, but he succeeded in rattling her. His calls were mean—he was looking to hurt her if he got the chance. It was midwinter, and Hugh’s sullen persistence made her claustrophobic. On impulse, she persuaded Flap that she needed to get away, and not to see her mother, for once, but her friend Patsy—now living in Los Angeles and evidently quite happy in her second marriage. Her husband was a successful architect.

  Flap agreed, and Emma went. Patsy had become Patsy Fair-child. Her husband was a very good-looking and apparently nice man: tall, tense, hardworking, and witty on the rare occasions when he spoke. Patsy’s son by her first marriage was eleven, and she had two lively daughters by her second. She herself looked great, and she had a wonderful modern house in Beverly Hills.

  “I knew it would turn out this way,” Emma said. “As Momma would be the first to point out, your life is everything mine isn’t.”

  Patsy looked at her shapeless, dowdy friend and didn’t bother to deny it. “Yes, I like it here,” she said. “I owe it all to Joe Percy—you remember, my friend the screenwriter? He made me come out one time when I was miserable—you remember when I cut my hair? That was when I met Tony.”

  They talked most of the night, in a splendid room with a slanted roof. The lights of Los Angeles were brilliant below them.

  They talked, in fact, for three days as Patsy drove Emma around the city. She took her to the beaches, took her up the coast to San Simeon, and, on the night before Emma was to return to Nebraska, dutifully gave a party for her, complete with movie stars. Anthony Fairchild had built homes for some of them. In party clothes the Fairchilds were a brilliant couple-more brilliant than some of the movie stars. Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw were there, and Ali McGraw’s husband; there were several men in Levi’s who were apparently executives; there was a tiny French actor, and some man who seemed to be a neighbor. He and Anthony Fairchild talked politics while everyone else laughed at one another’s jokes. Emma had never been more conscious of her dowdiness, and spent the evening trying not to be seen, which was easy, because no one was looking. Except for the merest politeness, she was assumed to be a non-person and ignored. Peter Bogdanovich and Cybill Shepherd came in late, and Joe Percy, Patsy’s old screenwriter friend, got drunk early in the evening and fell asleep in the corner of one of Patsy’s vast couches.

  When the guests had gone Patsy brought a blanket and covered him up. He mumbled and she sat down and hugged him for a while.

  “I don’t remember him having such bags under his eyes,” Emma said.

  “No, he has no judgment,” Patsy said. “Women have ruined him. He has a room here, you know. The whole guesthouse, in fact. It’s just that pride drives him out once in a while. We’re one another’s company. You’ve seen what hours Tony works.”

  Flying back, Emma got lost in reverie, trying to imagine herself living as Patsy lived, in a grand house that was always clean, with kids that looked like they had been raised on toothpaste and soap. She worried about Hugh, but he stopped being a problem. He had taken a new girl frien
d. It was easier than dealing with Emma, who, after all, might only be perverse enough to reject him again.

  “How does Patsy look?” Flap asked. He had always been a fan of Patsy’s.

  “Better than all five of us combined,” Emma said, contemplating her shabby small-town brood. Only Melanie was going to make it into Patsy’s class, looks-wise; that much was clear.

  WITH HUGH no longer a problem, Emma felt more clear-headed than ever. By great good fortune, almost the greatest of her life, a nice person presented himself at her door, in the form of Flap’s young graduate assistant, a lanky, gentle boy named Richard. He was from Wyoming, not terribly intelligent but extremely sweet. Also he was very shy and honorable; it took Emma several months to get him in love with her. It was very difficult for Richard to believe that a grownup lady would want to sleep with him in the first place, and very hard to accept that he himself would sleep with somebody’s wife. It was a terrible fall from grace, and also, since Emma was Dr. Horton’s wife, he felt fairly sure it would result in his failing to get his M.A., which would upset his parents very much.

  Emma didn’t rush him. She was extremely careful, and waited out his many retreats and hesitations. If there was ever a person she didn’t want to hurt, it was Richard. He seemed not terribly older or more grown up than her own boys—in fact, Tommy could outread him—and she was painfully aware that she might not like it if an older woman such as herself suddenly laid hands on one of her own boys.

  Yet, for the first time since Sam Burns, she was immediately confident of her capacity to be good for someone. Richard was planning to teach high school in Wyoming. He had not seemed to have had much attention in his life and hadn’t learned to expect any; consequently he was all response. She coaxed him out of being intimidated by her; taught him to give his own enthusiasm a chance. Soon he would have abandoned his graduate studies, or anything else, to please her. They never quarreled—had nothing to quarrel about. He kept a certain meekness in regard to her, even after they had been lovers for over a year. It was a measure of his regard, and it made Emma feel her age. Watching Richard, she began to understand the appeal of youth. He had a shy smile, uncynical eyes, long tense legs. He was eager; he brought a freshness to any action. He had never been seriously disappointed, had not grown critical, and had no reason to dislike himself. To Emma he was fresh as dew—he never saw her as the sagging, heavily used woman she felt herself to be.