“There was nothing stupid about it. I asked Duffin and he said it was a good buy and a good book to start with,”
“To start what with?”
“A collection of the Beats.”
“Oh, shit,” Patsy said and began to weep. She put her face on her fists and tears ran down her wrists and arms and off the crease of her elbows onto the blue tableloth. Jim watched bitterly.
“What are you crying about?” he said. “So I bought some expensive books. Why not? I’ve got the money. Why shouldn’t I spend it?”
“We haven’t even paid the doctor for the baby,” she said, sniffing. “We sweltered all fall without an air conditioner. You don’t even want me to buy new dresses. We don’t even go out and eat. We don’t even go to the movies. And you spend forty dollars on a book we’ve already got, just to please William Duffin.”
The book was a first edition of Howl, a copy that had belonged to a friend of Ginsberg’s, for whom he had written in the words that had been censored out of the original text. Jim had bought it from the catalogue of a book dealer in Florida and had patiently explained to Patsy what an important, unique copy it was; but the minute she had heard the price she became furious.
“I don’t care what edition it is,” she said. “Why should you squander forty dollars just to get the word f-u-c-k written a time or two in Allen Ginsberg’s hand? I could have written it in our old copy for nothing.”
“You won’t even say it,” Jim said. “Fat chance you’d write it.”
“You shut up,” she said, slinging tears off her face.
There was a neat pile of books on the table, a hundred and forty dollars’ worth in all, and when she slung the tears Jim reached over and moved the books. Patsy looked at him contemptuously.
“Maybe I’ve forgotten what the word means,” she said. “We haven’t done it in months. Even if I am pregnant I don’t think I’m that ugly. You just don’t like to touch me any more.”
Jim was a little jolted. “It hasn’t been that long,” he said. “You always exaggerate. I don’t think it’s been that long. Anyway, your being pregnant has nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, I don’t care how long it’s been,” she said. “It would just be nice if you wanted me once in a while. I don’t know. It’s that bastard Duffin.”
“He’s not a bastard and he has nothing to do with it.”
Patsy snorted and went and got a dishtowel with which to dry her eyes. “It’s him,” she said bitterly. “You’ve got to be somebody’s disciple, don’t you? I wish I could understand why you invariably pick bastards.”
Jim put the copy of Howl on the pile of books. Patsy was staring dully out the window. A couple of late tears had leaked out of her eyes and were caught beside her nose. It was Saturday afternoon, darkening and wintry.
“I don’t want to argue about him,” Jim said. “We’ve argued that a dozen times already. I don’t know why he adopted me but he did and that’s that. You’re not realistic. He hasn’t done anything but help me so far. You’re more paranoid than Flap.”
“Flap and I can tell a bastard when we see one,” she said. “That’s not paranoia, that’s just good sense.”
“It is not good sense,” Jim insisted. “I’m going to be a scholar, right? Duffin is a famous scholar. If I work under him and do well he can help me get a good job. I’ve got to work under somebody—why not him? Anyway, I’d rather read moderns than anything else. You’re just being irrational.”
“I know it,” she said, more quietly. He could always convince her she was being irrational if he tried.
“Maybe he’s not so bad,” she added. “I don’t know. It doesn’t strike me as particularly rational to spend forty dollars for a book you already have. A hundred and forty dollars for how many books? Nine? My god.”
“Okay,” Jim said. “Please hush.”
They both hushed and sat silent, brooding. Patsy scratched her hair, which needed washing. Saturday afternoons depressed her, and they had nothing at all doing for the weekend. In a moment Jim came over and tried to make her stand up so he could hug her. She did, finally, but she was stiff in his arms.
“I’m not rational about money,” he said. “I’ve admitted it before. I tell you what, I’ll change. We’ll spend all the money we want to. There’s no point in pretending I don’t have it when I do. We could even buy a house if you still want to.”
Patsy kept silent, but she softened enough to rub her nose against his shirt. Her nose itched. It was a breakthrough, in a way. He had never offered to try and change before. Yet something in her was still disquieted and unappeased, and she didn’t raise her face to him.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have bought air conditioners. I just feel strange about being rich when the Hortons are so poor. Flap’s my best friend.”
“They could eat for two weeks on what that Ginsberg book cost,” Patsy said, but not angrily. It was a problem she could understand, for she had often gone shopping with Emma and felt so guilty that she had not bought things she really wanted. Usually she snuck back and bought them later. It was particularly wrenching to watch Emma shop, because Emma loved things, objects, clothes, furniture, and had good taste and was always finding things she yearned for and couldn’t buy. What made it even more wrenching was that Emma’s mother had money and never gave Emma any.
“You’re just afraid it will be like my dictionaries and my cameras,” he said. “Just a new hobby. What if it is? It’s nothing to get upset about. The books will get more valuable as time goes on. They’re a kind of investment.”
“You don’t give a damn about investments,” Patsy said. “You could buy municipal bonds if you wanted to invest. It’s just a way of impressing William Duffin and showing him you want to be like him. I hate him. I don’t want you to be like him. I like you because you’re not like him.”
“Okay, okay,” Jim said. “I’m not going to argue about it.”
“I wish you didn’t have your money, anyway,” Patsy said. “I wish the Hortons had half of it, or something. I would like for Emma to have new dresses. She doesn’t fix herself up very well.”
“Well, we can’t do anything about the Hortons,” Jim said. “What would you really like to do? We’ll do it right now.”
Patsy thought he meant make love, and she didn’t want to, not just because her tears had made him contrite. But when she looked up at him she saw that he meant something else.
“I mean like go out or something,” he said.
“Oh, yes, let’s do. Maybe we could go to Galveston. We haven’t been in months.” She brightened at once, and the tense look left her face.
Half an hour later they were in the Ford, slipping onto the Gulf freeway. Patsy was curled against her door, wearing jeans, a sweater, and an old trench coat of Jim’s. The warm car and the straight even highway calmed and almost mesmerized them both. As they sped out of Houston across the flat coastal plain, Patsy realized how much she had missed driving since the summer. In four months and more they had not been out of the city of Houston. All fall Jim had read at home at night or gone to the library, and she had read at home or gone to the library with him, the only break in the routine being an occasional hour or two of beer drinking with the other graduate students. She had even begun to avoid the beer drinkings, not because she didn’t enjoy them but because she had discovered in herself a latent competitiveness in regard to Jim that was rather awful. The talk was always of books, and she had read many books and had a good memory for them, much better than Jim’s. All too frequently she was unable to resist showing off how bright she was. It discomfited Jim, but the other graduate students appreciated her memory and her wit and she couldn’t help responding to their appreciation. When the conversations got lively she became almost demonically inspired and could remember quotations and incidents in novels and bits of biographical minutiae that impressed the other graduate students mightily. Jim grew moody and told her from time to time that she ought to be getting the Ph.D., not him. Sometimes his moodiness merely made her worse. She became quite unable to shut up, and it was only later, remembering the conversations, that she found her aggressiveness distasteful. When she watched Jim study, saw him methodically reading scholarly books in order to get their theses clear, she would feel ashamed of herself and resolve to try and be a help rather than a discouragement, but the next time there was a literary conversation she invariably forgot her resolve. Flap Horton sometimes grew irritated with her, particularly when she came up with some oddment of information that spoiled his own theory on a given author or book. He told her she was a brilliant amateur, but essentially belle-lettristic, and she told him she considered that more of a compliment than a put-down.
The real trouble was that Jim was an amateur too, and a cautious one. He had been at work for three weeks on a paper on The House of Fame and was still far from satisfied with it.
It was a relief to be going somewhere where there were no graduate students. For once there would be no talk of books. There was nothing to see beside the flat road except an occasional filling station and, in the distance, the wavering orange flares from the giant oil refineries that lay along the ship channel. She looked at Jim, who was in a brood of his own. He had had his hair cut that afternoon, irritatingly short, she felt. It made him look too boyish. It seemed to her that the two of them had been living together almost all their lives, and that consequently it was time Jim stopped looking so much like a boy. She was growing heavier, her breasts were larger, she was changing, but when she looked for some development in him to match the development in her she could see none. The fact that they would soon have a baby left him unchanged, and almost unaffected. It worried her deeply. She wanted to feel that she could depend upon him taking care of her when the baby came, and she couldn’t feel it. He had gone away, further away than he had ever gone before—into the library, into the coffee conversations of graduate school, into a world that didn’t involve her at all, and she had no confidence in her ability to draw him back. His face was not happy—she had a feeling he would really rather be reading articles on The House of Fame. The drive to Galveston was just a duty, something he was doing to be courteous.
They crossed the high bridge over the coastal waterway and curved down onto Galveston island, drove up Broadway, passed the cemetery where the victims of the great flood were buried, and on past the few blocks of old turreted many-porched houses, virtually all that was left to suggest the Galveston of the past. Imperious dowager aunts should live in such houses, Patsy thought, though she had never been quite sure what made a dowager aunt. When they came to the ocean Jim turned right and they drove along the sea wall, passing the hotels, the arcades, the pier pavilion, and the seafood houses. They went on a mile or more south, past the old military embarkments, and parked and got out.
The gusty salty wind immediately blew Patsy’s hair into her face. The tide was in and flecks of spray hit them. They looped arms and silently walked along the sea wall, the gusting wind causing them to weave a little. They walked far on, until they came to the last of the sea-wall lights. It was very foggy. They heard a ship’s horn from the dark Gulf. The patterns of white foam and dark water repeated themselves and repeated themselves as they walked. They stood at the last light on the sea wall a minute or more, reluctant to go back; but the foggy darkness beyond the light seemed uninviting and they turned. “Hart Crane’s washing around out there,” Jim said. William Duffin had got him interested in Crane.
Going back, the wind was colder and stronger. Once it almost pushed them into the street. Between the wide-spaced lights were rows of parked cars, with lovers in them, mostly students and nurses from the nearby medical school. Every few feet or so there was a car, its windows rolled up, as private in the salty fog as if the lovers were on another planet. Patsy could not resist peeping a time or two, but even near the lights all she could see were vague shapes.
“Ah, young love,” Jim said, and Patsy nodded, but as they passed more cars and remembered their own parking days—comparing them silently with the present—the thought of young love became more painful than pleasant. Jim regretted saying it. When they came to the Ford the door handles were sticky with salt spray.
“Do you envy those kids?” Patsy asked, once they were in the car. Jim took her cold hand and they tried to play with each other’s fingers but didn’t feel like it.
“I guess,” Jim said. “Our folks still think of us as kids, you know.”
They were silent, thinking about it, and then moved closer together and tried, out of mutual nostalgia, to be young lovers kissing. The attempt turned Jim hot and Patsy cold. When she put her hand behind his head she felt his newly barbered skull instead of the fine thick blond hair she liked to twist with her fingers. The kissing didn’t warm her: she felt loose and indifferent and languid. Her hair was damp with the spray and the strands got between their mouths. Patsy sat carelessly, her eyes shut, while Jim patiently picked the strands away and smoothed them back. As he grew eager she grew more uncaring and idly looked past his head at the salt-smeared windshield as he kissed her. Whatever pleasure there had once been when their mouths touched was gone and she cared so little and at that moment remembered it so dimly that she did not even feel sad or like crying about it. She let him have her cold tongue, but it meant nothing. She just wished he would grow tired of kissing her. It was distasteful to be cold in a kiss and she wished he would realize from the slackness of it that she didn’t want to kiss him any more.
But it was only when he began to kiss her that sex returned to Jim from its three-month leave. Somehow it had been absorbed by school, or killed by the worry about whether he would do well in school. There were always books and talk, one more chapter to read, one more authority to consider, one more text to scan. What was important was being bright, being alert, being informed. What he had done in three months was to become more adept at concealing his ignorance, and it had taken all his energy. Patsy had been a wife, which was enough; he had had no eye for her as a woman. But when he kissed her, sex came back, and he scarcely noticed that she was without tenderness or interest. He became too horny too quickly. His breath grew heavy and he worked a hand under her sweater. All he could reach was her heavy stomach, which had begun to curve with their child. He could not work his hand under her brassiere, nor under the waistband of her pedal pushers. She was slumped with her ankles crossed and her head back against the car seat, and he couldn’t touch any of the places he wanted to touch. When she grew tired of being kissed she turned her head and her breath tickled his neck.
“Fine place you picked to come alive,” she said. Her hair was a sticky tangle, she felt flat, and Jim’s pressing eagerness made her feel removed and remote. The male was a curious creature, she decided. She had slept by his side in a thin nightgown for six or eight weeks and he had not so much as rubbed her belly.
“We could manage here, I think,” he said, rubbing her just above the top button of her pedal pushers.
Patsy abruptly straightened up. “No, sir,” she said. “Nobody’s getting me in a car, not now. You might have managed it when we were younger, but you missed your chance.” She turned and watched the ocean roll in.
“I don’t want to drive home like this,” he said, still stroking her under her sweater. “Let’s go to a motel.”
“There’s a great suggestion,” Patsy said, not meanly, but with a yawn. “Spend ten bucks to do what we could have been doing in our own bed all this time. You can make it home. If you’ve gone this long you can go another hour.”
“Oh, quit,” he said, stabbed by the indifference in her tone.
Patsy looked at him and saw that he was hurt and that he did want her, just as she had been wanting him to. She took his hand and tried to turn herself warm, but nothing in her would turn. Holding his hand was the best she could do. She didn’t feel hostile, just very uncaring.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess there isn’t any point in my being penny-pinching about it. Suit yourself. I’d probably just as soon get screwed in a motel as anywhere else.”
She had never used the word “screwed” before in reference to them, but she felt too generally uncaring even to use polite language. It startled Jim a little, but he saw that that was all the encouragement he was going to get, and he started the car. There was something coldly exciting about going to a motel solely for sex, and as they passed the sea lights he kept glancing at Patsy, hoping she would scoot over by him. Each light showed her face differently—one petulant, one a little frightened, one aged somehow, so that she looked older to him than she ever had. She did not scoot over, and she looked at the sea instead of him.
The first four motels he tried were full, and when he finally found one that wasn’t, it was a dismal place with green and pink walls lit by green and pink neon. Patsy had been lulled again by the warm car and had all but fallen asleep against the door. When he stopped at the motel she looked at it once and then closed her eyes. The mood of emptiness was passing—she felt some emotion gathering in her, but it was a vague emotion. She was not sure what she felt, except that the motel looked dismal. Life seemed generally dismal too. When she saw Jim coming out with a key she kept her eyes closed and let her chin sink into her sweater, curious to see how far his own mood would take him. She was not sure he would actually wake her up and take her inside the drab place and make love to her. She felt willing to abide by his decision, but she refused to help him decide, and she didn’t open her eyes when he got in the car.
He got in and sat looking at her. “Patsy,” he said.
She yawned, knowing he wasn’t fooled. “What?” she said.
“Do you really want to come in?”
“I don’t want to decide,” she said, closing her eyes again.
“You’re a cheat,” he said and got out and went and pitched the room key to the desk clerk, who looked up in astonishment from the wrestling match he had been watching.
Patsy had no quarrel with the judgment he had passed on her, and even felt slightly more kindly toward him for saying it. He was sullen during most of the drive to Houston. It had started a drizzling rain and streams of mist spewed up from the tires of the cars they passed. They swirled into Houston on the wet freeway, the lights indistinct in the mist. Patsy sat up. She felt freshened and glad they had gone, and much friendlier toward Jim.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m a cheat. I’m very spoiled. Hungry too. I’ll fix us a nice sandwich when we get home. Guess what?”
“What?”
“I wish we’d gone in. I’d like to know what that place looked like on the inside. It must have been awful.”
“Great,” Jim said bitterly. “Maybe we ought to go back.”
“Please don’t be sour,” she said. “I know you have a perfect right to be but I wish you wouldn’t. Houston’s lovely when it’s drizzling.”
At home she turned and lifted her arms to him, offering herself, but Jim ignored her and peed and got a book, and Patsy happily washed her hair and made them both pâté sandwiches with pickles and hard-boiled eggs. She took him a sandwich plate and some beer. Jim was still aggrieved, but he ate hungrily. Patsy stood by his chair a long time, all clean in her robe and gown, reading Lumiansky on Chaucer over his shoulder and wishing he would touch her and forgive her her bitchiness. But he ignored her until thirty minutes later, when she was kneeling on the bed, her behind in the air, reading and fingering the drying ends of her hair. He sat across from her and saw down the front of her gown. Her breasts were heavier. She was quietly reading The Rights of Infants, her face calm. She seemed to him very sexy. His annoyance seemed silly—she was the same old Patsy, only a little sexier. She was not at all the distant stranger she had seemed in the car. He left his book and quickly circled the apartment turning out lights. When all but the bed light were out she looked up at him, wondering, slightly surprised, a strand of hair curled round a finger. He sat beside her and put his hand inside her gown, on her warm breasts, and desire pushed at him immediately, as strongly as it had pushed at him on the beach. Patsy was quiet and cooperative, but they had been off pace with each other for hours, perhaps for days and weeks, and off pace they remained. Jim was in a great hurry and Patsy simply never turned on. She was not angry, though. “Don’t worry about it, just don’t skip so long next time,” she said, patting his arm.
Later, when he had gone to sleep, she felt itchy and a little raw and was annoyed, though at herself rather than at Jim. In earlier months, when he had worried so much about pleasing her, she had longed for him just to forget her, to approach her in blind desire and take what he wanted without worrying about her. But that was in earlier months. He had just done precisely that and instead of being carried away by it, it had just made her itchy. He had learned to be impetuous just as she had reached a stage where she would have liked some leisurely attention. She sighed and went to the bathroom, wondering if they would ever be at the same stage at the same time. When she was back in bed she shyly got Jim’s book on Chaucer off the bedside table, glad that he was asleep. He had grown defensive about her reading scholarship—he seemed to feel that it was something she would steal from him if she got the chance. She watched him a minute, to be sure he was really asleep, and then turned on her side and covertly read about the Marriage Group to satisfy her curiosity, peering over her shoulder at her husband from time to time to be sure he didn’t catch her at it.