Duane's Depressed

by Larry McMurtry

  “Was it because I fell in love with you?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps that played a part. It’s generally when people are touched unexpectedly but powerfully that their defenses suddenly crumble completely, as yours did yesterday. Being with someone who doesn’t judge you, or at least doesn’t judge you conventionally, can sometimes bring that about.”

  They were silent. Duane had stopped crying, but his hands still trembled and he knew that if he stood up he wouldn’t be very steady on his legs.

  “I’m glad you trust me,” Honor said. “I’ve tried rather hard not to play you false—I hope you know that. I didn’t sock you in the kisser when you tried to kiss me, and I didn’t run you off, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that if you really want to be my patient, I’m ready to begin,” she said. “We’ve only skirmished and feinted a little, so far. This is only the third time you’ve trusted yourself on my couch. We’ve a very long way to go together, if you’re ready to make the trip.”

  “Four times a week, maybe for years?” he asked.

  “Four times a week for however long it takes,” she said.

  “What do I know, that’s worth years of talk?” he asked. “I don’t even have much of a memory.”

  “Memory isn’t really the measure of what we’ll do,” Honor said. “A good analysis will take you to places you don’t know are there. You didn’t know your tears were there, but they were.”

  Duane didn’t respond. The thought of being able to see Honor four times a week for several years was appealing. Even though he no longer felt that he was in love with her there was no other woman whose company pleased him so much. Seeing her regularly in the afternoons, in private, would be, in a way, like having a love affair. It would be a love affair only of the mind, it seemed, but that was not necessarily a reason to cast it away. He smiled to himself, at the thought of a love affair of the mind, and Honor saw the smile.

  “What’s so amusing?” she asked.

  “Just a dumb thought,” he said.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What’s dumb to you might seem eloquent to me.”

  “Yesterday I was in love with you and today I don’t guess I am,” he said, sheepishly. “I was thinking that coming to see you nearly every afternoon for several years would be kind of like keeping a girlfriend.”

  Honor considered the comment. She didn’t seem offended.

  “It’s more like keeping a call girl—isn’t that what you were thinking?” she said. “Because of the money involved?”

  Duane saw the point. Men paid Gay-lee for the use of her body—he would be paying Honor for the use of her mind. But he thought it was a dumb point. Laying on a couch in a room with an attractive woman wasn’t much like keeping a call girl. It was like seeing a doctor who also, in a way, happened to be a friend.

  “Let’s work a little, shall we?” Honor said. “I don’t want those tears you shed yesterday to be wasted. If you could choose one word for the feeling you felt when you parked your pickup and started walking, what would it be?”

  Duane couldn’t come up with a word. He could no longer really remember what he had felt at that time.

  “I’m just the patient,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “I think the word would be ‘disappointment,’” Honor said, without delay. “The reason I made you read Proust is because it’s still the greatest catalogue of the varieties of disappointment human beings feel.”

  Duane felt a little irritated by the comment.

  “I don’t know what I have to be so disappointed about,” he said. “I had a good marriage. I raised a nice family. I even did well enough in my business.”

  “Yes, I know all that,” Honor said, a little angrily. “But the point you’re not considering is that you didn’t get to choose your life. You had your father only for five years. Your mother was very poor—you had to work from the time you were old enough to work.”

  “Thirteen,” Duane said.

  “Thirteen,” she said. “You made it through high school but college was out of the question, right?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “My mother was in poor health. I thought I ought to see after her, a little.”

  “That’s right—you did the decent thing,” Honor said. “You took care of your parent but you didn’t really take care of yourself. You were born with a good brain but you didn’t train it. Then one day you noticed that you were sixty-two and you and your good brain had spent a lifetime riding around in pickups, not thinking about much. You haven’t been to Egypt. You haven’t been anywhere. What you ended up with was hard work and family life. That’s enough for some people but I don’t think you really feel that it was enough for you, Duane.”

  There was a silence.

  “People who realize they had the capacity to do more than they’ve done usually feel cheated,” she said. “Even if they mainly have only themselves to blame, they still feel cheated when they come around a curve in the road and start thinking about the end of their life.

  “I think you feel profoundly cheated, Duane,” she added. Then she stopped.

  There was a long silence, but it was a restful silence, as far as Duane was concerned. He was trying to think about what Honor had just said, and it seemed to him she had just said a lot. It was a surprise—in their other sessions she had hardly talked at all.

  “You’ve never talked that much to me,” he said.

  “No, and there are people who have been coming to me for five years that I haven’t talked that much to,” she said. “Some of them are fairly disturbed, too, but none of them ever cried as hard as you cried yesterday. I figure if I say something maybe I can keep you coming in.”

  Duane didn’t know how much of what Honor said was true, but he did know he wanted to keep his mind away from his father. He was afraid to think of his father: the hard crying might start again. His father had not even lived to see him into the first grade.

  “It would be a big expense,” he said, thinking out loud about the therapy she was proposing.

  “You’re right—it would be a big expense,” she said.

  “What good would it do to talk about the past that much?” he asked. “No matter how much you talk, you can’t get it back. My life’s been what it’s been.”

  “Yes, but it hasn’t been what it might be,” Honor said. “You still have two decades to live—maybe three.”

  Then she fell silent again, pondering the same issues he was pondering.

  “I suppose it depends on what value you place on understanding, and its power to heal our wounds,” she said. “Obviously, I place a lot, or I wouldn’t have chosen to do this. But I’m not you. I don’t know how interested you are in understanding your own life, or whether you think it would help you do more satisfying things with the time you have left.”

  Duane saw that his time was up. He stood up to leave and Honor stood up too.

  “Still have your passport with you?” she asked, as he stood at the door.

  “Yep, still got it,” he said.

  “Then use it,” Honor said. “Take your trip to Egypt. If you like Egypt, go to Greece. See some old places.”

  “I’d like to,” Duane said.

  “Yes, and you should,” Honor said. “This place is all present—it’s barely a hundred years old. Go take a look at some of the places where human beings have been living together for three or four thousand years. Or more. I visited a couple of places in China where people have been living for about six thousand years.”

  She paused and looked out her window—two grackles were walking around in her yard.

  “There’s a grace that you find in some of the old places that you won’t find here,” she said. “Even though the people may be very poor, there’s still that grace. They’ve lived together long enough to figure out a thing or two.”

  She drew out a couple more Kleenex and handed them to Duane—despite himself he was still
dribbling out tears, as if, somewhere inside him, there was a faucet that wouldn’t turn off properly.

  “When you come back I’d like to see you,” Honor said. “Maybe by then you’ll have figured out whether you want to be my patient.”

  She walked him to the door and held out her hand. He shook it.

  “Good-bye, Duane,” she said. “I hope you have a good trip, and I hope you come to see me when you get back.”

  Then she closed the door.

  23

  DUANE’S BLUE-HAIRED TRAVEL AGENT was just about to close her shop and go home when Duane came pedaling up.

  “Why is it that it’s always the people who want to go around the world who show up at ten till five?” she asked. “People like you deserve to end up in Mongolia.”

  Nonetheless, in a very short space of time, she issued him a ticket for the next day. The ticket would take him from Wichita Falls to Dallas to London to Cairo.

  “That’ll get you to the pyramids,” she said. “How did you want to come back?”

  “I hadn’t got that far with my planning,” Duane admitted. “Is it out of the way to come back through India?”

  The woman looked at him as if he were a complete dolt.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a globe?” she asked.

  “Not in a while. I think the kids had one when they were in school.”

  “If you’re that ignorant I don’t know what to think of you,” the woman said. “Of course it’s out of the way. Texas is west of the pyramids. India is east.”

  “Okay—what’s an old place I could stop at on my way home?” he asked.

  “How about Rome?” she asked.

  “Which is better, Rome or Paris?” he asked.

  “I like ’em both, myself,” she said. “You’re taking this trip, not me. I was hoping to go hit a few golf balls before the sun sets but I won’t get to if you don’t make up your mind.”

  Duane decided on Rome and, in a very few minutes, left with his ticket in his pocket.

  On impulse he cycled back to the street where Honor lived. He thought he might just stop in for a moment, to tell her he had made up his mind, not just about where to go on his trip but that he had decided to be her patient when he returned. He knew that the opportunity to have that much of her company and counsel was something he didn’t want to miss.

  Riding back toward Honor’s house he felt a sudden surge of optimism. He had his tickets, he was going to see the pyramids, the big step had been taken. Although Honor had already said good-bye to him and told him to have a good trip he had an impulse to let her know he was actually going, leaving the next day, to be gone almost a month.

  As he turned into the shady street where Honor lived he saw two women ahead of him, walking along the sidewalk under the great shade trees, their arms companionably linked. Duane immediately braked. He got off his bike and removed his hot helmet. Ahead of him Honor Carmichael and Angie Cohen were taking a stroll in the cool of the evening. Honor had put on tennis shoes, Angie had her cane. He could just hear the low murmur of their conversation, hear Honor’s pleasant voice and Angie’s growl. Horrified at the thought that Honor might turn and see him, he quickly pulled his bicycle behind a shrub. The sight of the two women walking arm in arm, in harmony, stirred some old memory of a revival meeting he had gone to when just a boy. His grandmother and her only sister had walked arm in arm like that, when they went to church. In the years since he could not remember seeing two women stroll along so happily, arm in arm.

  Honor and Angie went on past their house, still talking. Finally they were so far down the sidewalk that Duane could no longer distinguish them, one from the other; they became a moving dot—their voices, too, merged into one sound, soon lost in the general hum of a summer evening, of distant cars, of children yelling from a nearby ball field, of cicadas in the trees. When Duane could no longer see them, as they walked deep into the dusk, he put his helmet back on and pedaled away.

  24

  DUANE RODE OUT TO HIS CABIN and spent most of the night sitting in his lawn chair, enjoying the starlight. He had read that the early Egyptians were fine astronomers. He wondered if the stars would be different in Egypt, or if they would be the same. One of the big questions he hoped his travels would answer was how much would be different, in the old places of the earth, and how much would be the same.

  In the morning he tidied up his woodworking shed a little. His woodworking hadn’t really come to much—he hadn’t focused on it to the extent that he had planned to. The very best thing he had made was a nice redwood box, whose joints fit perfectly. It was just a plain box, but Duane was pleased with it. After some thought, he took the box inside, sat down with his tablet, and began to write a letter to his wife.

  Dear Karla:

  Well, honey, I’ve finally done it. Yesterday I bought my ticket for Cairo, Egypt. In a day or two I’ll be at the pyramids.

  As you know the pyramids are something I have always hoped to see.

  The kids all seem to be fine. Willy and Bubbles go to a private school in Highland Park. They have to wear uniforms—Willy even has to wear a tie, which doesn’t please him much. They are taking French, I guess they will grow up a lot different from how their grandparents grew up.

  I don’t see too much of the girls, they both have busy lives, and Jack has not come back from Wyoming since he went up there to live.

  I will try to bicycle up to visit him when I get back from overseas.

  I am happy to say that Dickie has been clean this whole time—he goes to his AA meetings religiously and would seem to be in fine health.

  Barbi had a poem published in a national magazine for schoolchildren—I guess she is our creative grandchild. It was a poem about cannibals... wouldn’t you know?

  The last two summers I have grown a good garden in your memory and given the produce away to the poor folks, or just whoever happened by. It has been a great success but of course a large garden is a big responsibility. Honey, so many times I have wished you were there to help me with it.

  I don’t know that I will have a willingness to take it on next year. It will depend somewhat on the rains.

  Well, Karla, it was a tragedy for me that you smashed into the milk truck—the BMW was a total loss too.

  After that I stopped seeing my doctor—there was just too much to do—but I am thinking of trying the therapy again when I get home from Egypt.

  Before I quit therapy Dr. Carmichael assigned this big French book for me to read. It was over three thousand pages long—you would laugh your head off if you saw me trying to read a book that long. I have been studying seed catalogues and reading a good deal about botany too.

  I have not ridden in a motorized vehicle since the day I parked that pickup that Dickie proceeded to ruin by driving it off the hill.

  Honey, I can’t explain why—it is one of those mysteries that will never be explained, but if I can’t get there walking I ride my bicycle.

  My cholesterol is low, probably it is the healthy exercise and diet—I eat whatever vegetables I can’t manage to give away.

  Honey, I believe this is the longest letter I have ever written, there is no more to say except that I miss you...I think of all those good years we had. I am going to leave this letter in this little box, it is the best I could do as a woodworker, at least the joints are tight.

  Your loving husband,

  Duane Moore

  P.S. Sonny died last summer, it was blood poisoning, he just wouldn’t exercise and his feet went bad. About the same time they found Jacy’s bones, an ice fisherman found her. So those two stories are ended.

  Duane put the letter in an envelope, put the envelope in the box, and sealed the box with a small nail. Then he rode into Thalia, to his garden shed, and got a trowel. He thought of stopping at Ruth’s to say good-bye, but saw that Bobby Lee’s pickup was there—no doubt Bobby was getting a back rub. Not wanting to hear the two of them bicker, Duane just decided to go. Ruth had already told him in no
uncertain terms that, if he did go, she expected him to hurry back in case she died.

  “You’re my head pallbearer, all the others are flakes,” she said. “You need to be there to keep them in line. I don’t want to be sliding around in my coffin, and I don’t want to be dropped, either.

  “Those pyramids are just tombstones, anyway,” she added. “It shouldn’t take you that long to look at a few tombstones.”

  Duane pedaled on through town to the cemetery, keeping to the backstreets. He didn’t want some garrulous gardener to stop him, in order to chat about Israeli melons or what variety of cabbage made the best sauerkraut. He wanted to deliver his letter, and be alone with his wife for a few minutes before traveling over the ocean.

  Nobody was in the cemetery except the elderly caretaker, who was puttering around with a spade at the far end of the burying ground. Only three days earlier an old farmer had been killed when his tractor flipped over on him—the caretaker was leveling the pale clods above the fresh grave.

  It was a hot noon, the sky white, the heat waves shimmering across the lands that stretched to the west.

  Duane knelt by the gravestone that said, Karla Laverne Moore, and, with his pocketknife and the trowel, dug a hole just large enough to contain the redwood box. Then, very carefully, he covered the box with earth and smoothed the earth with his trowel.

  “Duane, you be careful; they say there’s pickpockets in those airports,” he imagined Karla saying. He had never left, even on the simplest trip, without her warning him about the criminal element, which, in her opinion, was sure to be numerous wherever he went.

  “Honey, I’m always careful,” he said aloud, in response to the comment he felt sure his wife would have made, were she not dead.

  At the Wichita Falls airport he chained his bicycle to a sapling in the parking lot, and, the very next afternoon, he was able to look down on many, many white boats, all of them floating on the Mediterranean Sea.