He chuckled. “Oh, honey,” he said. “I don’t really need an erection. After all, I’ve had a million or two.”
I stopped listening to him and lay numbly, stroking his balls. There was nothing else to stroke. Then he suddenly became garrulous and started telling a long story about Ben Hecht and a whorehouse in Burbank. At least he was talking again. Actually I didn’t really listen—I was thinking of my son. I had begun to miss him acutely, and it wasn’t guilt, either. I just wanted to go see him. I wanted to find him and sneak into his room while he was asleep and just look at him for a bit. Also I wanted to hear him talking to me, although, since he only talked to me about guitars, my mind always wandered during our conversations. My ignorance irritated him slightly. But I had a very clear vision of him in New Mexico, and if Joe and I ever got out of bed and went on with life, that was where I meant to go, to see Johnny.
While I was thinking about it the sun shone into the room and onto the foot of the bed. It warmed my legs. Then I noticed that Joe’s penis had come out of its nest a little. It wasn’t hard, but it had lengthened some. It was no longer just a head. Joe was still talking about whores in Burbank. I had lived in Burbank and had never known there were any there, or much of anything else there except Warner Brothers. As the sun got warmer on our legs I played with Joe’s cock as delicately as I could. I didn’t want it to go away again just yet.
“Flaubert knew about whores,” Joe said. “He left some remarks in his letters. I used to know the best parts of his letters by heart.”
Then, to my happiness, Joe’s penis stopped being a sort of cool, floppy worm and became that thing that men are so devoted to. When I had first touched it, it had been only a tiny head, hardly thicker than my thumb, but it had thickened so that it and my hand didn’t fit into the underpants any more and I had to lift them so it could straighten itself and lie up against the base of his belly. I could feel the pulse of a vein.
“There,” I said. “That ought to make your morning.”
Joe was delighted. Rather shyly, he lifted his underpants and stared at himself—I didn’t want to look. I’ve not found them a visual treat, though some men seem to. Owen would stand in front of a mirror for minutes at a time, I guess to see if his was hanging in a manner to suit him.
When Joe got tired of admiring himself I put my hand back on it—it seemed a good idea to make it last.
I put my face down on the warm sheet and Joe gently ruffled my hair and stroked my cheek.
“You put that well,” he said. “You really have made my morning.”
“Not sure it was me,” I said. “The memory of the whores of Burbank was probably what did it. I’m not sure I would have wanted to be married to you, Joe.”
“You’re very special,” he said, still stroking my hair. “You’re really somewhat unusual, you know.”
At that—the inadequacy of it—we both laughed, a laugh that rang like bells in both of us, bringing back our friendship. It was like beginning together at the Warners commissary again, only better, because in those days I was too awed and inhibited to do much more than giggle. And in those days, no doubt, after awing me with his reading and his worldly wisdom, Joe had probably gone right out and got fucked by a Burbank whore.
I felt joined to him again, by the knowledge that we, at least, still saw the humor in our errant lives. I scooted a little nearer to him and got comfortable under his arm. In a few minutes, as Joe was dozing, his penis sank back through my fingers and I put it back in its soft nest and covered it with my hand. Then I dozed, too, slept until the sheets became so hot that Joe grumbled and got up and pulled the blinds.
WE HAD LEARNED OUR lesson, though neither of us could have recited it, and we were good to one another after that—though except in that one regard our habits didn’t improve.
About three years later I came home from doing a picture in Europe, for Carl, and found Joe dead in his chair, with a girlie magazine in his lap. He had died the night I got home, which would seem like tragic timing but wasn’t actually. We had straightened out our timing once and for all, in Austin, and I had talked to him from London a day before his death. He had seemed content and even told me he had a girl, someone more beautiful than Page, and richer. I never corroborated that—most likely that last debutante was a nice lie, something he could twit me with on the overseas telephone. I didn’t go see him the night I got in because I had a lover tagging along—a ski instructor, of all classic things. He was from Mississippi and had had a minor part in Carl’s picture. His name was Jackson, and he wouldn’t be left in Europe. Jackson was a wonderful, graceful young man, all sweetness and Southern manners and uncertainty, whom I had said yes to because I had grown very very tired of saying no. Later, not long after Joe’s death, Jackson decided he was more gay than not, and ended up selling underwear in San Diego.
I felt rather guilty for taking Jackson away from all that nice snow, but I didn’t feel guilty about Joe. I don’t think he would have rushed down the hill to my house if he had come home from Europe with a big insecure debutante.
I did, however, take it as my prerogative to remove the girlie magazine before I called the police. The cops who came were big boys, too, and while they were standing around staring at Joe’s flowerpots I finally began to cry—crying just to keep from laughing, I think. They were so big and awkward and well-meaning and dumb—boys who should not have been sent to deal with such a delicate thing as the death of Joe Percy. They kept holding their helmets in their hands and looking at me and shuffling.
“How was he employed?” one asked.
“He wrote for the screen,” I said.
Then, blushing before he even spoke, one of the cops—it was an Officer Harrison—came over to the couch where I was modestly weeping, and sat down beside me. He was so big I expected the couch to tilt like a seesaw, but it didn’t.
“Uh, how were you connected with him, ma’am?” he asked.
We would have laughed at that question like we laughed that morning in Austin. Perhaps our lesson had been that we had learned to laugh at everything important that didn’t make sense, which was almost everything important. From the look on his broad, solemnly anxious face, Officer Harrison hadn’t learned that lesson yet.
“I don’t know, Officer,” I said. “I don’t know. I never figured it out.”
BY LARRY MCMURTRY
The Last Kind Words Saloon Walter Benjamin at the
Dairy Queen
Custer Duane’s Depressed
The Berrybender Narratives Crazy Horse
Hollywood:
A Third Memoir Comanche Moon
Literary Life:
A Second Memoir Dead Man’s Walk
Rhino Ranch The Late Child
Books:
A Memoir Streets of Laredo
When the Light Goes The Evening Star
Telegraph Days Buffalo Girls
Oh What a Slaughter Some Can Whistle
The Colonel and Little Missie Anything for Billy
Loop Group Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
Folly and Glory Texasville
By Sorrow’s River Lonesome Dove
The Wandering Hill The Desert Rose
Sin Killer Cadillac Jack
Sacagawea’s Nickname:
Essays on the American West Terms of Endearment
Paradise All My Friends Are Going
to Be Strangers
Boone’s Lick Moving On
Roads In a Narrow Grave:
Essays on Texas
Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West,
1950 to the Present The Last Picture Show
Leaving Cheyenne
Horseman, Pass By
BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA
Pretty Boy Floyd Zeke and Ned
Copyright © 1978 by Larry McMurtry
Preface copyright © 1987 by Larry McMurtry
First published as a Liveright paperback 2018
All rights reserved
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W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
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purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales
at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Production manager: Lauren Abbate
Cover series design by Steve Attardo
Cover photograph © Laura Wilson
Author photograph © Diana Lynn Ossana
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978-1-63149-345-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-63149-346-1 (ebk.)
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Somebody's Darling Page 34