“YOU COULD HAVE BEEN a little more polite,” Patsy said, coming out of the bedroom. She was still in her bra and shorts.
“I was polite,” Jim said. “What was I supposed to do, ask him in for a drink?”
“You could have asked him if he wanted a drink of water. He walked all the way up those stairs. Who’s the package for?”
“For you, of course,” Jim said, handing it to her. “It’s from Miri. For a minute I had hopes it would be my Cambridge Bib.”
Miri was her younger sister, in school at Stanford. Patsy tore into the package and discovered that it contained a sort of psychedelic shift, very bright and long and rather fetching. She shook it to see if there was a note from Miri but there wasn’t, and she put it on.
“It’ll be great when I’m bigger,” she said. “Hippie maternity clothes. I wonder if Miri’s become a hippie?”
“Undoubtedly,” Jim said. He was dressing to go to an indoctrination meeting for graduate students and felt generally sulky. Patsy’s frivolity clashed with his mood. “I wish those books had come,” he said, selecting a dark tie.
Patsy struck a few poses in the doorway, hoping he would tell her she looked nice in the shift, but he didn’t. “I’m sorry I bitched at you,” she said. “You weren’t really rude to the postman.”
But Jim’s mind was on the books that hadn’t come, and when she looked into the living room she felt a sinking of the heart. On the floor by the red couch were sixty dollars’ worth of quality paperbacks, almost all of them criticism or scholarship. Jim had bought them the night before at a paperback store downtown. He had got in a conversation with several graduate students and a famous newly arrived professor and had bought every book that he could remember having heard mentioned. She had been with him and had wandered about the bookstore, feeling more and more frivolous and small-time, and had finally bought a copy of Bonjour Tristesse, which she had never read. When they were home she read it in half an hour, sitting on the bed in her nightgown while Jim sat at their desk carefully writing his name and the date in each of the new paperbacks. He read a few sentences from each one before putting it on a pile on the other side of the desk. She had felt a sinking of the heart then too, for it reminded her of the night in Phoenix when he had rearranged his photographic files, all of which were presently in a closet, forgotten. He had taken to ordering every book Flap Horton mentioned, it seemed to Patsy. Even Flap was taken aback when he found out that Jim had ordered a set of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.
“My god,” he whispered to Patsy. “A beginning graduate student with the Cambridge Bib. The professors here don’t even own the Cambridge Bib”
“It’s your fault,” Patsy said fiercely, though it wasn’t. “Just quit mentioning books to him. He even wants to order the OED and that costs three hundred dollars. If he asks you, tell him he won’t need it. I don’t want this apartment buried in unread books.”
“The OED?” Flap said, staggered. “His first week in graduate school? He’s either a genius or a fool.”
“I don’t care to vote,” Patsy said.
When Jim had come to bed and noticed Bonjour Tristesse he asked her how it was, but he asked a little condescendingly, as if he already knew. The condescension irked her. She had just told him that afternoon about being pregnant and had hoped they could talk about it once they got to bed. She wanted to be made over. But Jim wanted to talk about William Duffin, a prize modernist that Rice had managed to hire away from Ohio State. All the graduate students were in a dither about him. Patsy was in a mood to think a baby more important than a modernist, even one who had written eight books, and she was glad when Jim went to sleep so she could at least think about the baby and be glad about it herself.
“Listen,” she said, watching Jim knot his tie. “Emma needs to get away from those kids. Let’s take them for Mexican food tonight. Maybe there’ll be some interesting new graduate students to bring along.”
“Maybe,” Jim said, but he was too nervous about the meeting to really listen, and he kissed her as he departed without really looking at her. He would have been surprised to know that after he left she went out into the hot back yard and sat in a lawn chair crying for twenty minutes. Though it was early September, the heavy air and the moist earth seemed to hold all the fecundity of spring or early summer. Patsy remembered Emma and the boys going up to the garage where Flap was fixing his bicycle, and how glad he had looked to see them; in her breast she felt a bitter loneliness, as if she would be left to do everything she did alone. She had heard that pregnancy might make her draw apart from her husband, but instead she felt the reverse. She had wanted him to hold her and hug her before he left, and she felt very hurt that he had not noticed, or had not wanted to. When she had finished crying she went in to write her sister, thanking her for the lovely shift.
Jim need not have worried about the graduate meeting. It was pointless but not unpleasant and was in no way threatening. Outside the room where it was held he could see the formal hedges and bright green lawns of Rice University. Mexican gardeners worked at the hedges with long electric hedge clippers. The gardeners wore khakis and straw hats and looked very out of place in the quiet academic quadrangle. They looked as if they belonged on some remote hacienda shearing sheep.
Jim sat with Flap Horton and listened as Flap genially dissected the new batch of graduate students. Various more or less meaningless sheets of paper were passed out and studied with deep earnestness by all the budding scholars. Jim felt a little overdressed and mentioned as much to Flap, who wore a blue tee shirt and old slacks.
“No, rookies have to dress up,” Flap said. “I have to hang loose myself—otherwise I feel like a suck-ass. Next year you can just wear slacks. Two years from now you’ll probably wear Levi’s. Three years from now you’ll have to come naked, to show you’ve still got your self-respect. Four years from now you either won’t be here or you’ll be a member of the establishment and self-respect will be a moot question.”
A very good-looking redheaded girl was sitting in the front row. She wore white net stockings. “She won’t last,” Flap said, “but it’ll be fun while she does. The guy in Bermuda shorts, with the beard, he won’t last either. His name’s Kenny Cambridge. I kinda like him.”
“Why won’t he last?”
“He had never heard of Northrop Frye,” Flap said. “Or Maynard Mack. Or F. R. Leavis. Or anybody I mentioned, come to think of it.”
“Neither have I,” Jim said, a little apprehensive.
“No, but you will,” Flap said with a reassuring grin. “You’re just illiterate. Kenny seems to be anti-literate, or at least anti-scholarly. You have to be really brilliant to get away with that.”
Jim was depressed and remained so throughout the meeting. Nothing at all happened. A few polite questions were asked, and politely answered. William Duffin, the new modernist, came in for a few minutes but said nothing. He was a tall heavy man, very sure of himself, and there was a slightly devilish cast to his countenance. His black hair was a little longer than the professorial norm.
After the meeting Jim and Flap fell in with a new graduate student whose name was Hank Malory. Flap had met him already and liked him, and Jim found that he liked him too. He was almost as tall as William Duffin but was lank rather than heavy. His nose had a kind of dent in it, as if it had been broken, and his jaw was strong. In talking with him, Jim found out that his nose had been broken, and in Vietnam. He had survived a stint as a helicopter pilot and had broken his nose in a car wreck in Saigon the last week he was there. It turned out that he had trained at the training school near Mineral Wells, where Jim and Patsy had seen all the helicopters. His sports coat was old and a bit too short at the sleeves and he took his tie off and stuffed it in his coat pocket as soon as the meeting was over. He came from Portales, New Mexico. The three of them walked off the campus and up the tree-hung streets toward the nearest drugstore, talking of New Mexico, of the redheaded girl in the white net stockings, and of William Duffin. Flap had just checked out Duffin’s latest book, which was on Samuel Beckett, and they passed it from hand to hand as they walked.
They stopped in at the drugstore on the corner of Bissonnet Street and to Jim’s mild embarrassment there was Patsy, barefooted and still in her psychedelic shift, sitting at the soda fountain eating a thick chocolate malt with a spoon and idly reading an issue of Seventeen. She had come to the drugstore to mail her letter, and because she was feeling gloomy had gone in to have a malt. She knew most of the soda fountain habitués and could usually find someone to chatter with. If there was no one to chatter with she could at least read magazines free. When she looked around and saw the three men she brightened immediately.
“Gosh, you look great, Patsy,” Flap said. His eyes began to shine. He could never restrain his enthusiasm for her, and Patsy could not help responding to it. She spun half around on the stool, her clean face coloring beautifully and her hair loose at her shoulders—so delighted with their presence that both Flap and Hank Malory were smitten by her and smiled without quite knowing what to say. Jim’s reaction was the opposite. He could not quite look at her and could not help but be a little embarrassed by the fact that she was reading Seventeen. It clashed, somehow. The three of them had been talking about Duffin and Beckett and Northrop Frye, though only Flap had actually read the three men, and suddenly there sat Patsy, undetectably pregnant and looking like a schoolgirl on her way home from school, her lips stained a little by the chocolate malt she was eating. Jim was discomfited, but he quickly introduced her to Hank Malory.
“Hi,” Patsy said and immediately began telling Flap about the conversation she had had with Tommy that morning regarding the devil.
“He’s a Miltonist who can’t read yet,” Flap said, sitting down next to her. Jim sat on the other side of her and Hank Malory took the stool just around the corner of the counter. Patsy knew Jim was displeased with her for some reason. He exuded waves of stiffness at such times. To avoid them she turned toward the other men, feeling for a moment disconcerted and slightly hectic. She was caught between the cold rays of annoyance coming from Jim, who was pretending to scan the Beckett book, and the somewhat breathy gusts of Flap’s admiration. Hank Malory had already finished his Coke and was poking with his straw at the ice in his empty glass. He seemed quiet and relaxed and was easier to look at than either Jim or Flap, so Patsy focused on him.
“I bet you’re from the West,” she said. “You’ve got a Western jaw. Months of rodeos taught me to recognize them. You probably even smell from the West.”
Her own remark embarrassed her—it was hardly an appropriate thing to say to a stranger—but he didn’t seem to mind. “I probably do,” he said, grinning as if there were something ironic about what she had said. She found she didn’t like his sports coat, which was suede, and old, and far too hot for Houston.
“A year from now he’ll smell like a bound volume of PMLA,” Flap said. “So will Jim. Ever smell one?”
“I’ve smelled all sorts of books,” Patsy said. She looked quickly at Jim and saw that he was ignoring her and gave the two men a confiding smile, helpless but happy, as if to let them know that even though her husband was ignoring her she was glad they had come. Flap spilled his coffee. He had ached for Patsy for years, and being with her when she was in a good mood made him fidgety with lust. He knew it was hopeless, but he ached, anyway. What he could do was yak with her, and yak they did, Patsy very animated and chattery and quick on the comeback. Hank Malory couldn’t keep his eyes off her—he could not remember when he had seen anyone so lovely or so immediately delightful. They all left the drugstore together and walked down Bissonnet Street, Flap and Patsy ahead, still yakking. Patsy skipped quickly across the hot street and stood cooling her feet on the well-shaded sidewalk, leaving the three men to wait for the next break in the evening traffic. Jim gave Flap the Duffin book before he went to join her.
“Jim was born lucky,” Flap said, noticing that Hank was watching them walk away.
“Must have been,” Hank said. “There sure weren’t any like her in Vietnam.”
When they got home Patsy reminded Jim that they were taking the Hortons out for Mexican food, and evening found the four of them and Hank Malory and Kenny Cambridge, of the beard and Bermuda shorts, at a Mexican restaurant on Alameda Street. It was Jim’s idea to ask Hank, and since Kenny had an apartment two doors from Hank’s they asked him too. The restaurant had a patio with heavy tile-topped tables, excellent food, and huge cool pitchers of beer. The six of them drank lots of beer and enjoyed themselves enormously. As they were eating, it began to rain, softly and levelly, graying the summer evening, blurring the city and the green neon lights across the street. Flecks of rain touched them as they ate. Trucks rumbled by on the street beneath the patio, their tires swishing on the wet pavement. Alameda Street bordered the city’s largest ghetto and lay on an ambulance route, so frequently all conversation had to cease as ambulances screamed by.
“Dead and dying from the bars,” Flap said. “First thing to learn about being a graduate student here is which bars to stay out of.”
“Which ones?” Kenny asked. His beard, like his hair, was reddish brown.
“All of them,” Flap said. “They’re all potential deathtraps. Even if you found one that was empty and went in for a beer someone would probably follow you in and shoot you.”
“Flap’s a little cowardly,” Emma said. She had spruced up a bit and looked pink and pleased and very glad to be out of the house.
Patsy was pleased too. She was wearing her gray dress. Nothing was much pleasanter than company, particularly company that was part old and part new. Part of the fun would be talking over the two new men with Emma at the park next day, but even more of the fun was being there and being the object of two new pairs of admiring male eyes—as she definitely was. Both Hank and Kenny apparently regarded her as a woman worth looking at, for both of them looked at her frequently over their beer or their forks of Mexican food. Jim had forgiven her Seventeen and was happier than he had been in the afternoon, but he was still a little put off by the general insouciance and kept trying to steer the talk into literary channels. He wanted to talk about books and scholarship and graduate school. Flap kept trying to needle him out of it.
“For god’s sake,” he said, “you’ve got four or five years in which to sit around analyzing the graduate malaise, not to mention all the particular malaises of this department. Who cares about William Duffin, or his reputation? Screw him, for the moment.”
“His favorite expression,” Emma said, licking her lips.
“Screw you too,” Flap said. “You’re drinking more than me. I’m worried I’ll have to cook breakfast. You shouldn’t drink more than me. It’s bad for our relationship.”
Emma ignored him and poured herself more beer. Kenny Cambridge plucked at his beard and sighed, as if already the rigidities of the graduate life were weighing heavy on his soul.
“There must be safe bars,” he said. “I can’t stand this unless I can get potted regularly. That was a shitty meeting we had today.”
“Sure, but we’re counteracting it right now,” Flap said.
“I’m thinking of quitting already,” Kenny said. “It’s no atmosphere for a writer.”
He struck Patsy as funny and she laughed out loud. Jim looked embarrassed. Hank Malory had said very little. He seemed somewhat remote and a little melancholy, but when Patsy laughed he looked up and smiled. Kenny gulped his beer defensively. Had it been anyone but her he would have been offended, but as it was he was just nervous.
“What do you write?” Patsy asked, to make up for laughing.
“Poems,” Kenny said shyly, looking hopeful. “Do you?”
“No. I just read.” She felt pretty certain she was going to get a chance to read some of Kenny’s poems before very long.
“I don’t think it’s such a bad life for a writer,” Flap said. “You get lots of time to yourself. Of course, I spend all mine drinking coffee with my confreres, but if I didn’t do that I could write. Maybe you’ll have more strength of will than me.”
“Flap used to be a writer too,” Emma said, taking the last tortilla. “He wrote short stories. I was even a writer myself. I wrote short stories. But Flap sent his out. I never sent mine out. For all anybody knows, I’m better than him. If I’d sent mine out somebody might have bought them. Who knows?”
Patsy started to mention Jim’s novel fragment but didn’t. She didn’t think he would want to be counted, somehow.
“Boy, do I like to eat here,” Emma said.
“Houston smells like a crotch,” Kenny said, sniffing the wet air quizzically.
“Male or female?” Flap asked.
It was a novel question. They all tested the smell of Houston against their memories of the smell of crotches. “Female, I think,” Kenny said.
“How about you, Hank?” Patsy asked. “Are you a writer too?”
Hank shook his head, tilting his chair back. It annoyed Patsy a little that he didn’t talk. She had been prepared to like him, and it was hard for her to like someone who didn’t talk. Hank seemed quite content to listen.
“Hemingway wouldn’t have gone to graduate school,” Kenny said glumly. “Norman Mailer wouldn’t either. Can you imagine Norman Mailer in graduate school?”
“Sure,” Emma said. “He’d seduce us all. Us girls, I mean. Me and Patsy, I mean. That would be kicks, eh, Pat?”
“That would be kicks,” Patsy said. She and Emma lifted their glasses to each other. Often they pretended they were Lady Brett. When slightly tight it was a charming thing to pretend. She smiled at Jim, hoping he would start liking the evening better. She wanted him to be in the mood everyone else was in; but he wasn’t really in that mood and there was nothing she could do about it.
Emma patted Jim’s shoulder. She wanted him to be happier too, for Patsy’s sake. “This is fun,” she said. “Let’s go some place and continue it.”
“Sure, come to our place,” Jim said, trying to shake himself out of his feeling of withdrawal. He felt like being alone and reading, actually, but he saw that Patsy was flushed and happy and delighted with the company and he made an effort to change his mood.
“How come you like Norman Mailer?” he asked Kenny. “He’s no poet.”
“I don’t like him so much,” Kenny said. “It just occurred to me that he wouldn’t go to graduate school. I don’t much like prose, actually. It’s all wasteful. I tried to write a paragraph of a novel once and it was all just ordinary words and sentences. It didn’t have any specialness. No élan, no brio, no joie, no flair—” and he stopped, embarrassed. He had a habit of reeling off synonyms like a human thesaurus.
“Maybe they’ll let you do a dissertation in couplets,” Flap said.
“I guess I ought to write, if everybody else does,” Patsy said, draining her beer. She had had three glasses of beer and felt light.
“Sure you should,” Flap said. “It’s something everybody starts doing at a certain age, like sex. If you’re old enough to be pregnant you’re old enough to write.”
At the mention of Patsy’s pregnancy Jim suddenly cheered up. He had been feeling very indefinite, very unestablished. But Patsy was pregnant, so he was not completely unestablished. And she looked very fresh and lovely. He put his hand on her shoulder to let her know he liked her. She noticed he was smiling at her and was glad. When they all got up to go to the car she walked with her arm around his waist.
Two hours later, at the Carpenters’, the evening was running down. Kenny Cambridge was mumbling to himself over a bilingual edition of Lorca. He had smoked some pot and was pretending he was reading Spanish. Emma sat spraddle-legged on the floor, burping and wishing fervently that she hadn’t eaten so much. Jim and Flap were looking at all the paperbacks Jim had bought, and Flap was going on about C. S. Lewis and trying to make clear to Jim the difference between drab poetry and golden poetry. They were drinking whiskey, as was Hank Malory. He was idly looking through their record collection. Patsy sat by Emma on the floor.
“I wish he would put something on and dance with me,” Patsy said. “I feel like dancing before I get big.”
“He’s got a nice loose build,” Emma said. “We’re all going to like him. Kenny likes him because he doesn’t write poetry. Flap likes him because he doesn’t look academic. Jim likes him because he doesn’t seem like competition.”
“And you and I like him,” Patsy said, giggling. “Why do you and I like him?”
Emma shrugged. “Because he’s got a nice loose build,” she said.
Patsy decided she must dance, though she was a little unsteady and wove slightly as she crossed the room. “Find anything we could dance to?” she asked.
Hank smiled and lifted his glass cavalierly. “One more little swig and I can dance to anythang,” he said.
“Paul Newman really does that better than you,” she said. “I saw Hud too.”
He held up a Hank Williams record that Jim had bought on sale at a drugstore for a dollar ninety-eight. The cover picture showed Hank Williams in a white suit and white hat.
“Oh, not that,” Patsy said. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those intellectuals who get sentimental about hillbilly music.”
Hank was silent for a moment, as if he genuinely didn’t know how to answer her question. “It’s about the only kind of music I can dance to,” he said.
“Okay,” Patsy said. “Better that than nothing.” They danced to “Jambalaya.” Patsy soon discovered that she was a little too tight to dance enjoyably, though Hank danced well. Jim and Flap looked up at them with disbelief. Flap was talking about Yvor Winters. Their plane of discussion was so lofty that it was difficult for them to conceive of people dancing to Hank Williams.
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, but I was named for Hank Williams,” Hank said at some point while they were dancing. It took a while for it to soak in, but when Patsy realized what he had said she asked him if it were true and he said it was. “My daddy was a hillbilly musician,” he said. “Not very famous, but he knew Hank Williams.”
Emma had allowed herself to collapse sideways on the tiny little blue rug in front of the couch. Patsy noticed and was a little worried. But Emma was awake; she watched their feet as they danced. Patsy was barefooted, Hank in rather worn loafers. “I wish I were dancing,” Emma said, but no one heard her. She could see Kenny Cambridge’s knees pointed at her from across the room. He still sat cross-legged peering at the Lorca poems.
Patsy was sweating and suddenly became dizzy. Hank had to hold her up for a moment. The room was very still and hot and she felt nauseated. “This was not a good idea,” she said, holding his shoulder. She stumbled to the bathroom, filled the basin with cold water, and splashed her face for several minutes. It made her feel better, although the bathroom itself was close and hot. She opened the door, her face and throat and temples still wet, and reached for a towel. When she looked out she saw Hank standing across the foyer, just inside the screen door that led out. His suede coat was slung over one shoulder.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re not leaving, are you? I’m okay. I was just woozy for a second.”
“I just need air,” he said.
Patsy patted her damp temples with the towel. “Let’s go out,” she said. There were drops of water in her eyelashes. They went out and sat on the steps for a while, neither of them very talkative. Patsy felt a little sleepy, but also very comfortable. Hank had his back against the screen and the light from the foyer shone on his rumpled brown hair. The air was muggy but cooler than it had been inside. “You don’t seem very Rice-like,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Maybe I’m not,” he said. “I can’t tell yet. The only other place that offered me a fellowship was Indiana and I didn’t feel like going there.” She was sitting below him, and when she looked up, the light from the doorway struck her face. Once she straightened one leg and put her foot on the railing of the steps and Hank saw the white movement of her leg. Kenny Cambridge suddenly appeared behind the screen. He looked at them a moment and then disappeared into the bathroom.
“Do me a favor and take him with you when you go,” she said. “Jim’s no good at getting rid of people and I don’t want to listen to Lorca all night.”
They heard the occasional low rustle of tree limbs on the roof, the keen of an ambulance to the east, and the screech of the brakes of a city bus stopping a block away on Bissonnet. “Do you ever see stars down here?” he asked.
“Not very often,” she said. She remembered the evening of the first rodeo, in Merkel, when she had sat watching the long sunset and had seen the first stars appear. She remembered the evening drives across Wyoming and the clear whinnying of the horses at dusk as she sat on Roger Wagonner’s porch. The summer had had its loveliness, after all. She had stopped feeling high and tight—she felt very clear in the head and very relaxed and for a few moments was a little nostalgic for summer evenings in the West. She looked at Hank Malory, but his face was in shadow. All she could see well were his hands, which were crossed over his knees. They were large long-fingered hands, with prominent veins. She knew he was older than she was by three or four years, but somehow he gave the impression of not having attained his full growth physically. He had large bones that seemed to need more flesh than they carried. But he was a very comfortable person to sit with, even if his clothes didn’t really fit him.
“How was Vietnam?” she asked.
He was silent for so long that she was afraid she might have offended him by asking. “Oh, very unpleasant,” he said. Patsy didn’t press him; she was sorry she had asked. For a moment she was afraid of finding out that they were on opposite sides where Vietnam was concerned. Kenny Cambridge came out of the bathroom and stood in the foyer pondering his alternatives.
“Ready to go?” Hank asked him, standing up. Kenny was, more or less. Patsy walked down the driveway with them to see them off. Kenny was still muttering.
“It boils down to Allen Ginsberg,” he said by way of good night. He wandered into the street, bumped into a parked Mercedes, and proceeded on fairly steadily. Hank and Patsy stood watching him.
Patsy lined her big toes up on the curb and hunched her shoulders. “Good luck with him,” she said.
“Enjoyed it,” Hank said and strolled off after Kenny, his suede coat over one shoulder.
Patsy felt a little dissatisfied. He could have stood and talked for a minute. Kenny didn’t need that much watching. She didn’t want to go back inside—it would have been pleasant to sit on the curb and talk. Hank Malory might have a nice loose build—did, in fact, though he handled it a little awkwardly—but he didn’t have especially good manners. She had not even got enough out of him to know if he was bright. She almost regretted not walking along with them. There was no one to talk to inside. Emma would have passed out and Jim and Flap were either talking poetry or graduate-school politics. She didn’t feel like sitting on the curb by herself, so she went back in.
Emma had her cheek propped on a palm and was listening sulkily to Flap, who was lecturing to Jim.
“Feeling bad?” Patsy asked.
“I’m thinking of the morning,” Emma said. “Teddy is apt to get up at six and if he does, all this isn’t going to seem worth it. Not in retrospect. You’ll know what I mean someday.”
But it seemed to Patsy that it would be a long time before she learned anything important, much less anything about babies. When the Hortons left, her mild discontent became a real depression and she wandered aimlessly about the apartment feeling almost sick. Jim was sitting on the bed cutting his toenails—he was also reading the first page of a book by Leslie Fiedler. Patsy went and sat by the open window in her favorite chair. It was a nice cane-backed rocker with a red cushion. She felt like crying and crying, and for no reason that she knew except that Jim was reading and seemed to be in another world from her. The snick of the toenail clippers was an irritating sound. There would probably be toenails in the bed unless she remembered to do something about them. It would have been more fun to sit on the curb talking to Hank Malory—assuming he could have been made to talk. Even talking to Kenny Cambridge would have been better than listening to Jim cut his toenails. She put her hands to her face and caught her tears in her fingers, being very silent, for she knew that if Jim had to turn his attention from a serious paragraph to her vague vapors and glooms it would not help matters.
But Jim noticed anyway. He got up to drop his toenail clippings into the wastebasket and knew from the way Patsy’s head was bent down that she was crying. Normally her tears made him feel pressured and annoyed, but just then he was feeling pressured from another direction, namely graduate school. There was a vast country of knowledge on whose rim he stood, and he didn’t feel at all confident about entering it. Flap Horton and a good many of his fellow students had already explored it and seemed to know everything about it: the height of each mountain, where the desert areas lay, which guides to trust and follow. In comparison, Jim felt lost. Listening to Flap made him feel hopelessly behind, but being behind was better than being lost, and lost was how he felt when he wandered alone in the English stacks of the library pulling out books that looked interesting and putting them back in order to pull out others.
In comparison, Patsy and her tears seemed so familiar as to be almost comforting. When he had put his clippings in the wastebasket he went over and stood behind her rubbing her shoulders. He lifted her hair and rubbed the back of her neck. Patsy gulped back her tears and turned in the chair, trying to kiss his hand, but it was too awkward and she stood up and went into his arms, sniffing. She had felt so alone and worthless for a few minutes that it seemed the kindest and most thoughtful thing in the world that he would want to come and rub her neck.
“Party depress you?” he asked. “I guess Flap and I weren’t too convivial. He’s the only one I can talk to these days.”
“It wasn’t that,” Patsy said, giving his throat and cheeks many grateful kisses. “I just got blue. I’m probably not very stable. There are times when I just get scared. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next in my life.”
“Well, you’re going to have us a baby next,” Jim said, putting his nose behind her ear.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes I am.” She was irrationally happy that he had used the word “us,” for he often went for long periods without seeming to consider them a unit of any kind. She kept her face pressed against his and they stood rocking a little on their feet in the middle of the room. Patsy’s tears dried and the look of delight came back into her eyes. “I need a shower,” she said when they broke apart. She went and showered and in the shower remembered that Hank Malory had said he was named for Hank Williams. She didn’t know whether she should tell Jim or not. It might be something Hank didn’t want everyone to know. But when Jim came in to brush his teeth she told him anyway.
“Oh, really?” he said. “He seems like a nice guy. Who will we name our child after?”
“I don’t know,” Patsy said, a little grave. Jim went out and she dried herself and brushed her teeth and then sat on the john for several minutes. They had a tiny bathroom bookshelf beneath the window, with a couple of Pogo books in it, Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, a paperback of The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, a Modern Library edition of Eudora Welty stories and a green Ginger Man which had come from Paris. Patsy pulled out the first volume of The Greek Myths and read a myth or two, rubbing herself with the towel. She shoved the book back in its place and contemplated The Ginger Man a moment but left it be. She had tried twice to read it and had been put off both times.
She went into the bedroom, still drying herself. It was not easy to get dry in a town as humid as Houston.
“Listen,” she said, “we really have to get air conditioning before next summer.” Emma had been telling her about the boys’ bronchial troubles and it seemed more and more absurd to her not to have air conditioning. They would certainly need it with a baby. But Jim was already asleep, the light right in his face and the Fiedler book open on his chest.
Her mood, which had been rising, dipped again, though only a little. She turned off all the lights except her reading light and made sure the door was locked and sat on the bed with her legs pulled up and her chin on her knees, feeling balked and restive. Just as she had been feeling outward again she had been left alone, awake, and had no way to be but inward. She felt very peevish toward Jim. He had ceased to know his business as a husband, it seemed to her, for she was very much in the mood to be made, and had been three or four times since she had been made. She mused about it and became nostalgic for the time when Jim had been a suitor and had known his business better.
It was easy to be nostalgic for their courtship. It had been lovely to park at night and kiss a lot, with spring breezes blowing through the car. In a few weeks kissing and breezes and much talk had led them to the act of love—about which, it seemed to her, no nomenclature said anything accurate. It had seemed more an act of daring, or of curiosity, or of coming of age. Certainly it had not been, at first, so comfortable or convenient a way to express her feelings as kissing, in the days when she had really liked to kiss Jim. But kissing had got lost somewhere. She felt nothing to put into it any more except occasional gratitude for some small kindness or other, and it seldom made her feel warm in the way it once had. It was a pity, she felt, and it was almost as if sex had destroyed it, for the act called the act of love had led around to itself such a number of times that it had grown more major than kissing. At least it had gotten major enough that she was greedy for it; and for kissing she was only nostalgic. She touched herself for a moment and tightened her mouth angrily at Jim. If he had not been so dumb as to go to sleep, they could have had a good time. She got up and sulkily put on her nightgown and then reached over and got the Fiedler book, heavy, orange, its spine wrinkled and broken from the manglings of avid graduate students, and lay on her stomach, restively waving one heel and then the other in the air, and read, before she slept, one hundred and fifty pages on love and death in the American novel.