THE CARPENTERS WENT BACK to the motel to await Boots and Pete, and as the afternoon lengthened and they didn’t come Patsy grew terribly annoyed. She had wanted them to come right away, and when they didn’t her sociable mood soured, her spirits dropped, and she soon reached a point where she didn’t want them to come at all.
“He’s no better than any other cowboy,” she said, moping. “I hate cowboys, clowns, rodeo, and the whole business of cowboyism.”
“What’s cowboyism?” Jim asked lightly. He was sitting on the floor putting his pictures back in the file cases.
“I beg your pardon?”
“For shit’s sake,” he said, though still lightly. “You hardly know them. They may not be great minds but they’re perfectly likable. Just because they didn’t show up the minute you wanted them to, you make up some vague bitchy label that doesn’t really mean anything, even to you. Maybe they wanted to make love or something. Maybe he really did have to train his donkey. You told them to come any time, so what difference does it make?”
He was sitting with his back to her as he spoke, and Patsy considered his back gravely, wondering how it would really be to plunge a knife into someone’s back. But she knew that Jim was right: she was merely bored and being bitchy, and she didn’t want a quarrel, at least not wholeheartedly.
“So I’m bitchy and smarty,” she said. “You have no right to complain now. Besides, what I said about them was true—it was just fallibly put. I do like them. I’m no snob. You’re the essence of vagueness yourself and you have no right to criticize my terminology.”
“Boodly-boodly,” Jim said. “I’ll criticize all I want to.”
Patsy felt it was surely not possible for life to be any vaguer and duller than it was at moment. She lay on the bed with her chin on her wrists staring at the little brown dressing table. Through the open door of the bathroom she could see the white end of a motel towel that had been dropped in the shower. Jim had the annoying habit of drying himself while still in the bath or the shower, and he invariably got at least the ends of the towel wet, if not the whole towel. If he was going to go through life getting all their towels wet what was there to hope for?
“Feel like doing perversities?” she asked with no change of tone.
“What?” Jim asked, not looking around. “Want to do what?”
“Perversities,” Patsy said. “Per as in persimmon, versities as in universities. You know, unconventional activities, like people do in pornography.”
“Oh,” Jim said, sliding pictures into envelopes. “I don’t think you’re serious.”
Patsy didn’t answer. How could she blame him for dismissing the invitation? They had only made love the night before and she had seldom been inclined again so soon. It embarrassed her a good deal even to have said what she said, because she had been more or less serious. While Jim was at the rodeo pens she had peeked into Sexus and it had affected her. If life was just going to be a matter of dullness and wet towels and waiting and reading, such things might be worth trying. She was in a mood to accept almost any diversion, and besides she was curious. For him to dismiss her so cursorily, without even glancing around, annoyed her. It was certainly not an invitation she intended to issue twice.
“Why are you so completely vanilla?” she asked.
“Because that’s the way you want me,” he said, not turning around.
“I did to begin with, but maybe I’m changing,” she said. It was true that she had repulsed some experimental attempts on his part early on in their marriage, when she had been easily embarrassed, but it annoyed her that he thought her so static.
“I’m going to be new, dynamic, debased,” she said gloomily.
“You might get a chance tonight. Shanks is giving a party.”
“Oh, god.” She reversed herself instantly. “We’re not going, surely. At least I’m not.”
“Be a great opportunity for the new you,” Jim said.
“Oh, quit baiting me,” she said with a little heat. “I know I’m duller even than you. I give up. I don’t want to go. He’s awful. He’s cowboyism personified. I want to stay home and read.”
“Suit yourself. I’m going. Maybe some cowgirl will seduce me. Then we’ll have some guilt to work with. What our marriage needs is a little guilt.”
“I said hush,” she said. “Don’t talk to me in that vein.”
But they continued to talk in exactly that vein throughout the afternoon. They kept up a running low-grade argument of a sort they were expert at. They couldn’t seem to drop it, but neither did it flare high. When Boots and Pete finally came, Patsy was relieved and quickly forgave them for their tardiness. Pete looked sort of comical in his snipped-off jeans. The late afternoon heat was terrific and the water felt good. Boots dove a lot, not gracefully, but with great energy. She wore a two-piece green suit, not quite so skimpy as Patsy’s bikini.
After a while they all got out and sat on the cement letting themselves drip. It was obvious that Boots at least was very, very happy to be getting married. She sat by Pete and hung on to his arm or his shoulder constantly. Once she kissed him shyly behind the ear. Patsy was amused and a little envious—she would never have kissed Jim behind the ear in public. Pete was relaxed and quiet. He scarcely looked at Patsy and took Boots’s affection gracefully, now and then circling her waist with his arm. It turned out that both of them were from Fort Worth.
“Different sides of town, of course,” Pete said. “Different sides of the track.”
“We’re both from Dallas,” Jim said. “Same side of the track, worse luck.” Patsy was irked by the remark but said nothing. Boots’s father owned a big Dodge agency but spent most of his time racing horses in Colorado. Pete volunteered no information on himself.
They dried and changed and walked down the street to a diner and ate fried ham sandwiches and chocolate icebox pie. Boots thought Jim’s occasional small witticisms were uproariously funny. She laughed so loudly at them that Patsy was at first annoyed and then a little touched. Pete looked at Boots fondly when she laughed and occasionally made some dry response of his own. Once he reached up with a napkin and wiped a bit of mayonnaise off her cheek. Boots was talking to Jim and scarcely noticed, but Patsy observed it and found herself liking Pete more and more. He seemed like a watchful, gentle, very trustworthy sort of man.
When they had eaten, Boots and Jim wandered up the street together, talking about Fort Worth, and Patsy waited for Pete. He had stepped back into the diner to get a toothpick and emerged smiling, the toothpick held between his teeth. To the west the sky was changing color. The two of them walked quietly along the sidewalk for almost a block, hearing Boots’s light rapid voice ahead of them in the dusk.
“You have a nice bride,” Patsy said, though it was not exactly what she had wanted to say. Walking beside him made her realize that he was several inches taller than she was. His appearance was a little contradictory: he was tall and at times seemed lanky, but he had a heavy belly.
“Nicer than I deserve,” he said, glancing at her. Patsy was used to people who put themselves down as a matter of course, but Pete was not putting himself down at all, which made it a very nice thing to say about Boots, she thought. She felt slightly uneasy. Pete did not seem unusually bright and she was used to using brightness as a standard in judging men. There was something to him, even if he wasn’t unusually bright. His walk was not like most men’s. It appeared to be a slouch, but it had a springiness too, so that when he moved he seemed both slow and quick. Walking beside him, she could well understand Boots’s habit of hanging on to him: he looked easier to touch than to talk to. If she could put her arm around his waist as they walked along, there would seem less need for talk.
It did disconcert her that she was so at a loss for small talk with him; it was for her a very rare thing. Since childhood everyone had always made much of her because she said interesting, slightly unusual things; and yet she couldn’t think of a thing to say to Pete that he would be likely to find interesting. Casting about, she thought of Sonny Shanks’s party.
“Will you and Boots be at the party tonight?”
“No. We don’t party much. Who’s having one?”
“Sonny Shanks.”
“Yeah, I forgot. He invited us, sort of.” He frowned and tilted the toothpick down. “Sonny and I can do without one another,” he said.
They stepped off the curb at a corner and just as they did two high school boys in a red Mustang cut sharply around the corner, so close that they had to step back. The car squealed away into the dusk. In stepping back to avoid it, they touched, her arm against his arm. The brief contact startled Patsy and she forgot what she had been about to say. Then she remembered Sonny.
“I don’t like him either,” she said. “He seems to have made a better impression on my husband. Why don’t you like him?”
She had not meant the question to be bold, or probing, but saw at once that it was a mistake. “Oh, it ain’t worth talking about,” he said. His tone was not unfriendly, but there was a strong note of reserve in it. Patsy felt she had accidentally put him off, and she didn’t know how to remedy the matter.
“He used to go with my Aunt Dixie,” she said.
“Dixie McCormack?” Pete asked, surprised. He looked at her with friendly astonishment, and Patsy immediately felt lighter.
“None other. You know her too? Everyone seems to know her.”
“I worked for her husband for about six months one time. Never would have picked you for her niece.”
“Sonny Shanks said exactly the same thing,” she said.
The street lights came on as they were walking. Pete glanced at her and Patsy caught the glance and was a little unsettled. He did seem to like her, and she was glad, but she had no idea why he liked her, or what aspect of her he liked. It was confusing and not altogether pleasant, and she was glad when he and Boots were in the Thunderbird driving away.
After they were gone she stood on the driveway a little while making patterns in the gravel with her foot. Jim put his arms around her waist.
“You see, they’re nice,” he said. “You were just being unfair to them this afternoon.”
“Of course I was,” she said, stepping away from him. It irritated her for him to remind her of it. “I’m a very unfair person. If you haven’t learned that about me yet, what have you learned?”
Jim went in without answering and she stood where she was, watching a white airliner slice gracefully down through the blue evening air.