Duane, though, knew that he wasn’t pretending to be smarter than he was, because often he would sit with the book for two hours and come away with almost no sense of having understood what he read. Sometimes he would sit down with the best of intentions—even with a little pleasurable anticipation; he liked the sense that he was being faithful to his chore—and yet be almost totally unable to concentrate on the page in front of him. He would start one of Mr. Proust’s long, looping sentences only to have his mind simply drift off before he had read even halfway down a page. Sometimes he would have to start a given page over six or seven times; his concentration just kept slipping, and he grew lazy about looking up words that he didn’t really understand. Sometimes he would spend most of his hour and a half on the first three or four pages and then hastily scan the last several pages, eager to be free of the book for the day. The minute he finished, if he happened to be at the cabin, he would take a long walk, meandering along one of the creek beds with his twenty-two.
At first he was consciously resentful of the book he was reading, and consciously resentful of Honor Carmichael for forcing it on him. He wanted her—perhaps she realized that, perhaps she didn’t—and she had given him Proust as a substitute.
Of course, she couldn’t really force him to read the book. He had had no appointments with her since the death of his wife—though she seemed to consider that he was still her patient, he himself wasn’t too sure about it. But if he wasn’t her patient, then he wasn’t in her life at all—which was not what he wanted. Her insistence that he read the three books was not unlike Karla’s insistence that he take the speed-reading course, or yoga lessons, or a course in Latin dancing. Both women seemed determined to improve him in ways of their own choosing, a similarity that annoyed him when he thought about it, and he did think about it from time to time.
Still, in a way that he could not have described, he eventually developed a more welcoming attitude toward the reading. Having to sit down and concentrate his mind for an hour or two every day came to seem like a positive thing. His resentment toward the task wore off sooner than his resentment toward the book itself. Very gradually, his reading improved. There were still many days when he took nothing from what he read—those days were, in fact, still the majority—but on the whole his mind wandered less and, now and then, he would have a moment of recognition, of the sort he had had when the old man mentioned that he thought of his dead wife, but not for long. Often his recognition would involve no more than a description of weather, or of some natural or social condition that he had observed himself, though without grasping what he had seen as intelligently as Proust grasped it. The reading was not wholly barren, though the people that Proust described were mostly as foreign to his own experience as people could be.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the very foreignness of the material was what had prompted Honor Carmichael to prescribe it to him. He had told her he wanted to travel to foreign places and she had supplied him with a book that was definitely about a foreign place. Practically the only things he could relate to in the whole first volume were the plants and foodstuffs; he thought that might be because he was paying such close attention to his own garden when he began to read. He was surprised by the care Proust took in the description of asparagus; Duane happened to be particularly fond of asparagus himself. He had grown some asparagus as fine as any described in the book, and yet he had had to urge them on the local people, many of whom had never eaten asparagus and didn’t know how to cook them. Some of his own asparagus went to waste, which clearly would not have been the case if he had been growing it in France.
Still, most of what he read as he did his daily ten pages was tedious stuff. Few of the people interested him and most of the conversation seemed pointless. The maid and the old aunt interested him a bit, the latter because her pickiness reminded him of Ruth Popper; but then the old woman died and the family went back to Paris. It was soon obvious that social life in Paris was a thousand times more complicated than social life in Thalia, but Duane didn’t care. Once in a while he felt amazement that people would go on so about such trifles; but then he would remember that Karla had been almost as bad, when it came to obsessing about trifles. Some days he wished she were still alive so he could tell her that she really ought to move to France.
In the winter, when he finished the first volume, he immediately developed a resistance to opening the second. The book he had just finished was by far the longest he had ever read in his life. He had made his way through more than a thousand pages, only twenty or thirty of which had anything in them that really interested him. Though he liked devoting an hour and a half a day to reading, he resented having to read that particular book. His work in the garden had given him a renewed interest in botany, something about which he had a great deal more to learn. He owned a plant dictionary and several books on shrubs, weeds, and grasses; an hour and a half with any of those books would have taught him more that he could use than anything he was getting out of the French books.
Also, he knew that he was being foolish to base so much of his life on Honor Carmichael. Even thinking about Honor had become painful to him. Once, cycling home from a trip to the dentist, he glanced over and happened to notice her in a parking lot. It was a windy day. Honor’s long hair was loose; bending to get in the Volvo she had trouble controlling her skirt—Duane caught a quick glimpse of her legs. Then she was in the car and gone—yet the little that he had seen haunted him for two weeks. It produced the kind of excitement that stray glimpses of women had produced when he was a teenager.
But he wasn’t a teenager. He was a sixty-four-year-old man. What was he doing obsessing about the fact that he had seen a little ways up a woman’s skirt as she was getting into a car? It was absurd, and he knew it. He knew that his momentary glimpse of Honor Carmichael’s legs was the kind of thing that Mr. Proust could have written two hundred pages about. But he wasn’t Mr. Proust. He was a retired oilman who happened to still be horny. Why didn’t he just go and seduce Maria, a nice woman who liked him and would readily have taken him into her bed? Why was he hung up on a woman he couldn’t have when there was a nice woman right there in the same town who was hoping he would make a move? Why had he bound himself into such a circle of frustration? In earlier life he had not been one to frustrate himself in that way.
The second volume of Proust lay unopened for ten days. Though it was winter, Duane set out on his bicycle to visit Julie and Nellie and his grandkids. Willy and Bubbles entertained him with their few words of French, and the chef at Goober’s new restaurant cooked some of the food Mr. Proust had been writing about. Duane bought bicycles for Willy and Bubbles, and then rode to Arlington and bought bicycles with training wheels for Little Bascom and Baby Paul. Zenas had decided to invest in health clubs. Nellie, the laziest of his children, had become an exercise professional, whose job it was to train exercise personnel in Zenas’s health clubs in Tulsa, Midland, Hot Springs, Tyler, and other cities.
Duane contemplated bicycling north to see Jack, who was living in a small trailer with three dogs and two horses, somewhere near the Wyoming-Montana line, still pursuing sheep rustlers when he wasn’t going to college. According to his sisters, who had flown up with their boyfriends to visit him, Jack was heavily armed at all times, even taking a saddle gun with him when he took them all horseback riding. The news didn’t surprise Duane, or bother him. Jack had always been happiest when heavily armed—if there was a part of the Wild West that was still wild, Jack would find it and live in it.
On the way back to Thalia from Fort Worth Duane ran into a February ice storm. A warm rain fell most of one night and then a freezing wind sliced down from the plains, dropping temperatures almost to zero. The roads acquired a glaze of ice. Duane, who had spent the night at a small motel in Jacksboro, took one look at the highway and concluded that it was not a good day for bicycling. A few vehicles crawled along the road, but not many. A few hundred yards to the south an eighteen-wheeler had ski
dded into a ditch and turned over. He had difficulty even walking to the motel office to request his room for another day. The wires of the barbed-wire fences along the roads were sheathed in ice.
Duane spent the day reading fishing magazines. The Weather Channel informed him that certain parts of Wyoming had received more than thirty inches of snow—more than enough snow to bury his bicycle but nothing his son Jack couldn’t handle. Jack had once gone to a survivalist camp above the Arctic Circle and learned to build an igloo. If he happened to be abroad in the thirty-inch snow, no doubt he had a snug igloo to camp in.
In view of the weather Duane decided that his visit to Jack could wait until summer. The winds were still gusting. That night he heard sleet peppering the window; the icy roads received a nice dusting of sleet. But the wind blew itself out and the sun came out warm the next day. The trees and the fence wires soon began to drip. Riding home, Duane tried to imagine how cold it must be in Wyoming.
When he got back to his cabin he built a good fire in the fireplace and spent some time studying a map of the western United States.
Then, reluctantly and resentfully, he opened the second volume of Proust.
15
IN MARCH OF THAT YEAR Sonny Crawford died. A roughneck coming into the Kwik-Sack to buy a six-pack found him slumped against the cash register, dead. He had not adjusted well to his prosthetic feet, or become adept at getting around on crutches. Often the shelves of the Kwik-Sack would be almost bare of foodstuffs, because Sonny simply neglected to restock them. He had been eating a bag of Fritos when he died. Cause of death was thought to be a heart attack.
“No, it wasn’t a heart attack; he died of discouragement,” Ruth said, when Duane walked over to chat with her, after the funeral.
Behind the big house the young farmer was once more plowing the big garden plot. It was time to think of gardening. Duane had ordered a great many seeds, some of them for vegetables that, so far as he knew, had never been planted in the county before. He was in a mood to experiment, and did not stint on seeds.
“I guess you’re right—but what was he so discouraged about?” Duane asked.
Ruth glared at him for a moment.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “You’ve never been discouraged.”
“The hell I haven’t,” Duane said. “Why do you think I stopped riding in pickups and started walking everywhere?”
“Just to show off,” Ruth said. “You’ve always been a vain person. You want everybody to know how different you are from them.”
“I don’t think I’m very different from ‘them,’ depending on who you mean by ‘them,’” Duane said.
“You should have kept going to that psychiatrist,” Ruth said. “I thought she was helping you a little, but then you stopped going.”
“I mean to start seeing her again this summer,” Duane said.
“Just because you’re in love with her and she’s gay is no reason to give up on your therapy,” Ruth said. “She’s your doctor, remember—just get all that other stuff out of your mind.”
“I’m trying to,” Duane said. “It’s not that easy to do.”
“It wasn’t easy for Sonny, either,” Ruth said. “He never got over Jacy—isn’t that sad?”
Duane didn’t answer. In his view it was not so much sad as self-indulgent, an excuse to give up young.
While they were chatting Bobby Lee came roaring up. He had been having bad back spasms lately and had been coming to Ruth for massages. She had once studied massage therapy and was good at unknotting muscles.
“Here comes a customer,” Duane said. “Bobby’s spasming again.”
Bobby Lee had his pager in his hand, the expensive pager Dickie had given him. It not only made him reachable, it gave him instant access to the latest news developments, not to mention sports scores and other odd tidbits of information.
“Did you hear?” he asked, when he came in the door.
“Hear what?”
“They found Jacy—at least they think so,” Bobby Lee said. “They’re checking dental records now. She was in a snowbank. An ice fisherman found her.”
“The old gang is dying off,” he added, looking as if he might cry. Although the over-the-top PSA reading had turned out to be a mistake—a lab assistant had forgotten to insert a critical decimal point—Bobby Lee was still prone to ferocious outbreaks of self-pity. The slightest mention of sex, or groins, or anything below the waist would usually cause him to burst into tears.
“It’s typical that she was found on the day Sonny was buried,” Ruth said. “Even dead he can’t escape her, the hussy. He and I might have gone on longer if it hadn’t been for her.”
She looked coldly at Bobby Lee, who was experiencing a fierce back spasm. He was tilted so far to the left that it seemed he might topple over.
“If that pager of yours is so wonderful, why can’t it tell you what’s wrong with your back?” she asked.
“My pager don’t diagnose illnesses,” Bobby Lee said. “It just keeps up with things like dead movie stars.”
He sat down in front of Ruth and she began to knead his back in a professional fashion.
“I think I’ll go,” Duane said.
“You must feel odd, Duane,” Ruth said. “Sonny was your first friend and Jacy was your first girlfriend. Bobby’s right. The old gang is dying off.”
“Yes, but it hasn’t been a gang in a long time, if it was ever a gang,” he said.
“Don’t you be cynical—of course it was a gang,” Ruth said.
“It might have been a gang when I was about fourteen,” Duane said.
“I had my first car wreck when I was nine,” Bobby Lee said. He hated to be left out of any conversation, even momentarily.
“It’s about time for me to go,” Ruth said. “When you’ve lived as long as I have you don’t have much of anybody left. Just ghosts.”
Duane stood up to leave but didn’t leave. He had not read his Proust that day and also needed to go check on the plowing, but he felt reluctant to leave Ruth and Bobby Lee.
“If there was more of us left we could have a wake,” Bobby Lee said. “I might be able to scare up a few drinkers if I cruised by the Dairy Queen.”
“You need to practice meditation,” Ruth told him, kneading his shoulder muscles. “Your back wouldn’t knot up like this if you took time to do a little meditation.”
“All I’ve got to meditate about is the fact that I’ve only got one ball and it’s hanging by a thread,” Bobby Lee said.
Duane left them to their quiet bickering, checked briefly on the plowing, bought a bottle of whiskey, and walked out toward his cabin.
The cemetery was not much out of his way, so he veered by it, though to visit Karla, not Sonny—his grave was a raw scar near the west end of the cemetery. The twilight was lengthening; it would not be dark for a while yet. The air was unusually soft for March, though there was still plenty of opportunity for chilly weather.
He sat by his wife’s grave for an hour, getting quietly drunk, wondering what it might be that Karla would be happiest about if she were still alive. The fact that both her daughters had rich boyfriends would probably be one thing, presenting her, as it would, with fine trips in private jets as well as shopping opportunities on a world scale. The fact that Bubbles and Willy were taking French and wearing uniforms was more dicey—Karla had thought they were uppity even before they left Thalia.
“We’ll never be sophisticated, will we, Duane?” she asked him once, while she was leafing through an issue of W, a publication that fascinated her. “Just look at all these people having a party in Paris. Nearly every single one of them looks sophisticated.”
“It doesn’t mean they’re happy,” he said.
“It might not be total happiness but I’d be happier if I had a few of those clothes,” Karla said.
That conversation had occurred during the boom, when Karla had subscribed to many fashion magazines. She had even flown off to fashionable spas occa
sionally, once or twice with Jacy Farrow as her traveling companion.
“Planes fly from Dallas to Paris every day,” he pointed out. “I guess we could afford a few French clothes. Go, if you want to see Paris that much.”
“Duane, I can’t go, I don’t even speak the language,” Karla said. “Besides, Jacy says French people are snippy.”
“You’re snippy yourself, and so is Jacy,” he had pointed out.
“Just with you,” she said. “I’m nice as pie to the general public,” Karla said.
Karla had never gone to Paris. What French clothes she owned had been bought at Neiman Marcus, in Dallas. She had gone to New York several times, but mainly, when she left home, she went to Los Angeles or Santa Fe.
But she had kept up her subscription to W long after the boom ended, by which time French clothes were well out of their reach. To the end, though, Karla had loved to look at pictures of elegant people at fancy parties in the expensive cities of the world: beautiful people, rich people, titled people, famous people—they all fascinated her.
In the cemetery where she lay there were no such people—there were just the humble people who had lived their lives in a small country town.
Duane felt a sadness settle over him, as he walked home. He felt that he ought to have done more for Karla, ought to have seen that she got to Paris, even if the French were snippy. He had got as far as investigating it once. They could have flown from Dallas straight to Paris. But one of the kids got sick and the Paris trip fell by the wayside; it became just one of those things that they never quite got around to.
Of course, they hadn’t foreseen the milk truck hurtling around the curve.
When he got to the cabin he tried to get back to his Proust, but he was too drunk to make sense of the long sentences. Instead he sat in his lawn chair most of the night, watching the clouds.
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