FOR THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of the New Year Patsy kept a guilty secret hidden in her closet. After the walk with Hank, she did not see him for several days. Either he avoided the drugstore or they simply missed each other. It preyed on Patsy’s mind. One moment she felt he must think her disgustingly brazen, the next she felt he must think her disgustingly shy, or frivolous, or shallow, or immoral, or whatever bad thing she herself felt herself to be at the time. Then she had a dream in which she decorated his drab apartment with posters and prints and curtains, and she awoke from the dream feeling extraordinarily cheerful. It occurred to her that there was really no reason why she couldn’t brighten up his apartment a bit, as she had in her dream, so she drove Jim to school, took the Ford, and went out to a quaintsy-posh shopping center called Westbury Square. Usually when she went to Westbury she took Emma, but for once she felt like going alone. Driving out, she envisioned everything she would buy, and once she got there was rather disappointed not to find everything she had envisioned. She ended up buying two posters, one a London Transport poster and one a bright poster of a droll blue cow. She also bought a lovely red bottle—it was just what she saw the apartment as needing. As she was about to pay for it she suddenly felt very guilty about Jim and bought him a beautiful leather-covered journal with a little steel clasp and a key. He loved the idea of notebooks and journals and would be delighted. It was a very well made journal and cost twelve-fifty, much more than the posters and the bottle. She felt it squared matters, and she rushed right home, meaning to take Hank’s posters and his bottle right over to him.
It was not one of his class days, and she assumed she would catch him home. She freshened herself a bit, put on bright headband and a short jacket, put the posters and the bottle in a bag, and started out for Hank’s as briskly as her stomach would allow.
It was a bright lovely day, and she felt happy with herself. He would undoubtedly like what she had bought. It was not until she passed the drugstore that she began to feel a little nervous. It was really a rather odd thing for a pregnant woman to do, and as she approached Albans Road her nervousness increased and she walked more slowly. Then, just as she was about to turn the corner she saw Kenny Cambridge coming up the street. She was suddenly breathless with shock and turned quickly to the right rather than the left. If she had met him he would undoubtedly have known where she was going. Kenny was a little conceited, but not conceited enough to think she was going to his apartment with a shopping bag full of presents. It was annoying, and also scary. Kenny turned toward the drugstore rather than toward school, which meant that he might return to his apartment any time and catch her leaving Hank’s. It was a dreadful let-down.
She walked moodily to the park and sat on a bench, depressed. The whole social fabric, for a time invisible, had suddenly sprung into view, set up as if by demonic will and design to prevent her from doing the one small innocent thing she wanted to do, which was to give Hank Malory some posters and make his apartment nicer. She bit her nail and looked with vexation at a dirty-faced child in the sandbox. His birdy mother stood nearby, clearly hoping for conversation, but Patsy was in no mood to make any. She was irritated with the world and also with herself. If she had any gumption at all she would march right over to Albans Road and knock on the door and go in and tack the posters where she thought they ought to go, and accept a word of gratitude and walk out. If she met Kenny or Lee Duffin or Emma or Flap or Jim she should have the courage of her innocence and say, “All right, so there, so what?” He needed some posters and a bottle.
But she knew she wasn’t going to do anything of the sort. She was not sure, once she thought about it, that she would have had the nerve to knock on the door and give him the posters even if she hadn’t met Kenny. She had a slightly comic vision of herself knocking, saying, “Here’s some posters,” and fleeing at once. It was absurd. She hated the birdy mother and the dirty little boy; she hated Hank Malory for being too dumb or too tasteless to fix up his own apartment; most of all, she hated herself for being so cowardly and stupid and extravagant and contradictory.
Eventually she went home and hid the posters and the bottle in a closet, far back behind some blankets. They stayed there for two weeks, a constant source of annoyance and trepidation. She became passive and could not bring herself to attempt to deliver them again. She had daydreams of Hank dropping in someday when she was alone, so she could surprise him with them. They met again at the drugstore and the mere fact of having the presents made her feel awkward. She talked fast and furiously. Several times she got scared that Jim might find them, and on one occasion she almost panicked and put them on her kitchen walls. But she didn’t want them on her walls—her walls were fine. So far as she could see they were likely to rot in the closet. She could not imagine putting them in a shopping bag and walking over to Albans Road again, and in time could not remember why she had been so bold as to buy them in the first place. They were a conundrum, always there. She bitterly regretted not having taken Emma on the shopping trip; she could then have innocently suggested getting Hank some posters to cheer him up. Emma would have thought it a great idea. They could have taken them by together, and that would have been that. Still, it wouldn’t have been quite the same; she didn’t want Emma in on it particularly. She wanted to take the posters in and put them up herself.
After two weeks of brooding she gave up on everything and supposed she would just be the permanent possessor of two rolled-up posters and a red bottle. It depressed her very much to have them in her closet. One morning Jim had to teach a class for a friend who taught a class, and he awoke grumpy and bawled her out for not fixing him toast the minute he wanted it. The postman came just at that moment, delivering sixty dollars’ worth of rare books Jim had ordered. When Jim yelled at her about the toast she yelled at him about the books and to his horror kicked the package, which almost went into the open oven. The books were undamaged, but Patsy wasn’t glad. She went raging into the bedroom and sobbed until he dressed and left; then, feeling terribly lonely and ugly, she climbed up in the closet, got the posters, and tore them to shreds. She stuffed the shreds in a wastebasket and sat on the couch crying and holding the red bottle. She had never felt so irrational—it was all she could do to keep from getting the beautiful leather-covered journal and tearing it to shreds too. Jim had only written in it once. But after she had cried awhile she put on an old green coat that she liked and went to Emma’s.
Emma was sitting on her couch idly reading the want ads. She liked to go to garage sales. She was smoking and playing “Sergeant Pepper” on the phonograph and Teddy was sitting under a card table with a purple mouth from drinking grape Kool-Aid. Tommy was in nursery school. They had been trying to get Teddy to drink from cups, but he hated them and Emma had eventually put his Kool-Aid in a bottle. When Patsy came in, Teddy, who liked her, came over and said, “Um,” and offered her such Kool-Aid as was still in the plastic cup he had rejected.
“Thanks, sugar,” she said, politely taking a tiny sip. The Kool-Aid was awful—lukewarm and with an orange seed floating in it.
Teddy merrily held up his bottle, gave it an inimitable little flick with his wrist to assure himself that the level of the contents was still adequate, and went cheerfully off to try and fire Tommy’s Johnny Eagle Crackfire rifle.
“You’ve been weeping,” Emma said. “What’s the matter with you?” Teddy, very curious about the emotions of adults, temporarily abandoned the rifle and came back to stare at Patsy, wondering if she was going to cry some more. He patted her on the knee sympathetically.
“I’m in despair,” Patsy said. “I’ll never rise again.”
“Neither will I,” Emma said. “Look at this room. The car pool was late and Tommy made play-dough dinosaurs to while away the time. Look at that. If there’s anything I don’t need on Monday morning it’s an acre of play dough to clean up. That’s not a bad stegosaurus, though.” She pointed at a blue lump. Teddy went over and plucked off what must have been the stegosaurus’ head.
“You ought to smoke,” Emma said. “Despair is easier to take if you smoke.”
“My kind wouldn’t be. Where’s Flap?”
“Sleeping, the lazy bastard. Finals are approaching and he stays up and reads all night. Want to do the laundry?” Sometimes the two of them did their laundry together at a sort of lower-class laundrymat on Bissonnet. It was called the Sudsy-Dudsy.
“No,” Patsy said. “I’d drown myself in the washing machine. Jim said I was frivolous and lazy.”
“Well, so you are,” Emma said. “I hope you are, at least. I am, and I don’t want you being better than me. It would ruin our friendship. You should learn to cuss. When Flap insults me that way I tell him what a dumb prick he is and it sets him back on his heels long enough that he gets confused. Learn a few coarse insults and your marriage will go much better.”
“Maybe,” Patsy said, not enthusiastic. The clutter on the Hortons’ living-room floor was truly appalling: play dough, sheets of newspaper, an orange, splotches of spilled Kool-Aid, plastic pants, tinkertoys. If that was what motherhood entailed, she wouldn’t be able to stand it.
“I feel like agreeing with every bad thing Jim says,” she said.
“Of course. That’s where they put it to us. We naturally tend to agree with their low opinion of us. You have to train yourself to disagree.” Emma wore an old housecoat, and her hair was as disarrayed as usual.
“You know what I did?” Patsy said. “I bought Hank Malory some posters because I think that apartment of his looks awful, and then I lost my nerve and didn’t give them to him. This morning I tore them up. It’s insane.”
“I thought you had a small crush on him,” Emma said kindly.
“I don’t think I do,” Patsy said, worried. “I just like to talk to him. My god, look how pregnant I am. I can’t go having crushes on people.”
“I’m the mother of two and I wish I could find someone to have a crush on,” Emma said. “I’d be too cowardly to do anything about it too, but at least it would be good for daydreams.”
There was a loud, realistic pa-cheew from the Johnny Eagle Crackfire rifle. Teddy had at last succeeded in firing his brother’s gun. Patsy jumped.
“Sounds real, doesn’t it?” Emma said.
There was a crash from the bedroom, and the sound of breaking glass. They looked at each other wonderingly. Silence followed the crash. In a minute Flap slopped in in gray pajama bottoms and a tee shirt and barefooted. His hair was tousled and he looked abashed.
“Hi, Patsy,” he said. “How about that? I fell out of bed.”
“What’d you break?” Emma asked.
“Just the bedside lamp,” Flap said. “I think I was dreaming and that goddamn rifle went off and scared me. I must have been right on the edge.”
Teddy ran over and his father hoisted him onto his hip. Teddy was jubilant and delivered a sentence of rapid uums, the gist of which was that he could shoot Tommy’s gun.
Flap lay down on the couch and set Teddy on his stomach. Emma went to get her husband some coffee. Flap scratched his head. “Hate Mondays,” he said. Teddy turned around on his father’s stomach until he was facing his feet and began to fiddle with the tie string of Flap’s pajamas. Flap had picked up the paper and was peering at the front page but without his glasses. “Our President,” he said in a sleepily critical tone. He was a Johnson hater.
“Want coffee, Patsy?” Emma called.
“I don’t think so,” Patsy said. She was sitting in a deep armchair that still smelled slightly of a dog the Hortons had had months before. She felt like staying. There was something comforting and cozy about the Hortons, even when they were at their most disheveled and disorganized; but on the other hand she also felt slightly like an outsider, a disruption in the family’s morning. There was a rather mashed-up library copy of Lionel Trilling’s Matthew Arnold lying on the floor by the chair and she picked it up and read a few pages without much interest.
“I could make toast if anybody wants any,” Emma called, but neither Flap nor Patsy answered. In a minute Emma came in, a cup of coffee in each hand.
“Oh, god!” she yelled. “Teddy! Oh, shit!” She had sloshed hot coffee out of both cups onto her hands and had to set the cups hastily on a windowsill. Patsy was scared—she couldn’t imagine what had happened. She sat up and saw that Teddy had untied Flap’s pajama string, Flap having gone back to sleep. He was exposed, and Teddy had been blissfully trying to make a loop in one end of the pajama string, the meanwhile eying his father’s apparatus and occasionally peeking into his diapers to check on his own. He knew that his mother’s shriek meant real trouble and instantly rolled over between Flap and the back of the couch, seeking cover.
“Aaah,” Emma said, wringing her stinging hands. She flung a section of newspaper over Flap, who awoke looking hopelessly perplexed. When he discovered the trouble he was mortified and turned red. Patsy tried to pretend she was reading Lionel Trilling, but it was no good. She rolled her head in horrified sympathy with Emma, feeling neither offended nor shocked. It was only the second penis she had seen in her life and she was secretly rather grateful to Teddy for making it possible. She felt like giggling, but didn’t feel it was a good time to giggle.
“This ain’t my day,” Flap said, trying to retie the knot while looking innocently at the ceiling.
“Oh, none of your fucking understatements,” Emma said. “Give me that kid so I can beat him.”
Teddy had anticipated such an impulse and had managed to burrow under his father’s arm. Emma ran over and grabbed his leg, but Flap decided he had better not surrender his son while Emma was so angry. He held on, grinning resignedly at Patsy.
“Let go of him,” Emma said, giving Teddy an ineffective splat on the behind. She burst into tears.
“Oh, sit down and enjoy life,” Flap said. “Patsy’s reading Trilling.” He grabbed Emma by the waist and tugged her onto the couch, holding on grimly until she had exhausted her capacity for struggle and merely sat crying. Patsy sighed and after a time Emma sighed too. Flap continued to hold her, just in case. Patsy dropped the book and stood up.
“I’m going,” she said.
“Who could blame you?” Emma said. “Take me with you. I’ll go anywhere. Just get me away from these men.”
“Come and see us more often, Pat,” Flap said. He was all but buried under his wife, his son, his uncombed hair, and the morning newspapers. “You add a note of sanity to the morning.”
“Don’t flatter her,” Emma said. “She’s lucky enough as it is. Let’s do laundry tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay,” Patsy said. “Please be careful with one another. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
And she walked down their driveway crying, for no reason or for too many reasons. The day had clouded over and rain was coming. Perhaps she should have numbers of boys and live amid clutter and never be lonely, only she didn’t know if lots of kids would appeal to Jim. He had gotten very fond of order. There was really no knowing what might work with Jim.
By noon it had begun to drizzle and the apartment was lonely and she put on her nice lined raincoat and walked to Rice, meaning to find Jim and have lunch with him and the other graduate students. But she went to the library first, to a corner where she often found him, and missed him and sat in a big leather chair reading Punch and watching it rain until she had missed lunch. She realized it when she looked up and saw Jim go past the wet window with Clara Clark and Flap on their way to the Eliot seminar. It made her immediately blue. There was a whole afternoon ahead and it was raining and cold and she was tired of sitting and reading and she didn’t want to go back to the apartment. Jim had looked very happy, walking along with Clara and Flap. It was only a glimpse but it convinced her that he was always happy when he was away from her; he was so nice-looking, so personable and confident when he was away from her. She had never realized it until then, but he had another life, a life in which he was merry and pleasant and open, instead of nervous and sulky and reserved as he was with her. It upset her. She didn’t have any life at all, except him, and suddenly it seemed to her that she didn’t even have the best of him. If he stuck with graduate school he would surely get better and better at it and would surely have less and less use for her, for she didn’t know anything much and wasn’t even very pretty or sexy any more. She remembered what Lee Duffin had said would happen, and it no longer seemed like malicious neurotic raving but like very sane clear-headed prophecy. Perhaps it had already happened, perhaps Lee had already seduced Jim, perhaps that was why he looked so cheerful. Lee Duffin probably knew all sorts of things about being a good lay, things she didn’t know or was to inhibited to do, or something.
Feeling utterly miserable, already deserted and forlorn, she wandered down into the basement of the library, where the English graduate students had a large communal office. Jim had promised to bring her some Evelyn Waugh books and she wanted to see if he had checked them out. She might as well go home and be forsaken and read Evelyn Waugh.
The first person she saw when she got down the stairs was Hank Malory, asleep on one of the long green leather couches that were scattered through the basement, relics of a day when the basement had been a student center of sorts.
Patsy was startled. She had not expected to see him there, and she hastily and a little nervously tiptoed around the couch and went to the office, which, to her annoyance, turned out to be locked. What was even more annoying was that she could see a pile of Evelyn Waugh books on Jim’s desk, four or five of them. She turned the doorknob a time or two and then turned and wandered irresolutely around the basement. She had never felt quite so anchorless, so adrift. She couldn’t get in the places she wanted in, and didn’t particularly feel like doing anything. Hank had a key to the office, of course, and if she just had the nerve to wake him up and ask him for it she could at least get the books she wanted.
She walked over and looked at him again, hopeful that he might be waking of his own accord. He wasn’t, but looking at him made her feel better. Men asleep were different from men awake. She had always thought Jim was at his best asleep—sleeping, he looked strong and stable. Hank was different. When he was awake he seemed so sure of himself that she was kept a little on edge; she didn’t know how to move in relation to such confidence and kept fidgeting and fluttering, seeking tiny clues that might reveal what he wanted her to be like. Asleep, he looked less confident and more vulnerable. He didn’t look so unreachable. One of his shoelaces had broken and was knotted in the second hole of his shoe, and the corduroy trousers he wore were almost worn through at the knees, like a little boy’s trousers. He had on a rather awful high school ring, and his suede coat had begun to tear at one pocket. Obviously he was no good at taking care of himself, and if he had female admirers they were obviously too lightheaded to inform him that his trousers were worn out and his coat not fit to wear. Asleep, he didn’t look at all formidable, and she was glad. It was a time when almost everyone in the world seemed more formidable than her. She leaned back against a pillar and watched him contentedly, glad to be around with him; she was thinking that it might be nice to be married to a man like Hank—a man who had problems with his clothes, things that even a simple girl like herself could remedy.
When Hank awoke she was standing by the pillar looking at him solemnly, her abdomen bulging under her raincoat. He blinked, embarrassed, and immediately tried to tuck his shirttail in. Patsy giggled. The gesture had reminded her of Peewee Raskin’s attempt to tidy himself when he had awakened to discover her staring at him on their trip to Phoenix. Getting their shirttails tucked in was apparently an instinct with Western men.
“Surprise,” she said. Hank swung his legs off the couch and rubbed his face.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she said, grinning. “Mumbling romantic endearments. Unfortunately I didn’t catch the name of the girl.”
“It was the Wife of Bath,” Hank said, yawning. “I was carrying on with her till four A.M.” He stood up, and his shapeless clothes fell into place around his body. His face kept a moody look, as if it troubled him that she had seen him sleeping.
“I’m starved,” he said. “Want to have breakfast with me?”
“Come to my place,” she said without thinking. “I’ll cook you some. I don’t have anything else to do. It’s a good day for hot chocolate.”
The invitation seemed to make him slightly more melancholy, but he didn’t protest. It was only after they left the library together that her heart began to pound at her own audacity. Their faces were wet by the cold rain. He was nice to walk with, and good at steering her around mud puddles. She began to think about what to cook and decided in advance that she would have to wash everything the minute he left. Jim would be outraged, and properly, if he came home and discovered that she had cooked a better meal for someone else than she had for him.
When she let Hank into the apartment she found that she had become too embarrassed to look at him. He seemed larger than she had thought him to be, taller and heavier. The whole apartment felt different with him in it. She kicked off her wet sneakers, skinned off her socks, and hastily waved him toward some magazines; then she went in and amazed herself in the kitchen. She was usually a rambling, digressive cook, prone to much singing and chattering as she cooked and not at all appalled by thirty-minute gaps between courses even if the courses were as simple as toast and bacon. But in a few minutes, beside combing out her damp hair, she put together a fine breakfast—orange juice, some apricots, toast, bacon and scrambled eggs, and some hot chocolate. She served it to him on bright blue plates.
“I ought to eat breakfast here every morning,” Hank said when he sat down to it, but he still looked strangely sulky. He ate her food to the last bite while she sat across from him in a chair, rather silent, looking out the rain-streaked windows at the wet back yard. She held her cup of hot chocolate in her two hands and looked everywhere but at his face. Quiet as he was, and lonely as she had been, she was not really enoying his company. Feeding him had been a pleasant, useful task, but he was almost done eating and she felt tight in her chest. She didn’t want him to leave, but neither did she want him to stay. What she wanted to do had been accomplished and she wished that he could be instantaneously transported back to the couch in the library, with not another word said. She didn’t have any words.
“I’ll be glad when the semester’s over,” Hank said. It was as conventional a remark as could be imagined.
“Why?” she asked. “I won’t. Another one will just start. Ever since I can remember, people have been saying they’ll be glad when a semester ends, or glad when one starts, when they really don’t particularly care one way or the other. The one nice thing about rodeo is that it doesn’t operate on the semester system.”
She suggested they go to the living room and they went. She sat in her favorite chair by the rainy window, and Hank sat on the couch and picked up a copy of Esquire but didn’t look at it. He looked at her strangely, as if he were waiting for her to say something. But she felt silent and still; something oppressed her. Sitting down in the chair had been the last act she felt capable of. Having him in the room was too much. Something dreadful was going to happen; she could no more stop it than she could stop the rain. He was gradually filling the room; he had been there too long. There was no way either of them could get out of the room without it happening. It seemed so inescapable that her hands began to tremble a little, and she wanted it to begin so there would not be such tightness in her chest. When Hank frowned and got up and came to the chair, she was not surprised, though when he turned her face up and kissed her she was surprised to see the planes of his face so close to hers. She felt no whirl of emotion, only a deep blankness, close to unconsciousness it was so deep. At first his kisses were soft and tentative; after a time she opened her eyes and came out of the blankness into a kind of dizziness. His position on the arm of the chair was uncomfortable. “Sit on the couch,” he said, his mouth so close to hers that she felt his words like breath.
She sighed very deeply. “My feet are freezing,” she said. When she got up to get her big fuzzy-wuzzy slippers she found that her legs were so weak she could barely walk. She was glad to reach the couch; she sank and he caught her comfortably. She felt overwhelmingly grateful to him; mixed with a kind of fear was a deep relief, as if she had just been saved from a bad fall, or had just missed being in a car wreck. She shut her eyes and let herself be kissed some more, melting into a deep and delicious blankness, a state not possible unless her mouth was on his. Occasionally she opened her eyes and saw things and said things, but the blankness was accessible, easy to sink back into. He was very soft and gentle with her, as she had known he would be, and she quickly let herself trust him completely. It was a mistake, for while she was dazed with pleasure, wanting only to be kissed, he put his warm hand inside her shirt, on her breast. The shock was like a burn. She sat up and began to cry. Hank drew back but she continued to sob. He didn’t go away, didn’t even seem much bothered by her tears, which disconcerted her.
“You mustn’t do that,” she said, knowing it sounded silly. Hank made her let him rub her neck. She felt disconsolate but after a few minutes she felt better and gave a little yawn of pleasure. She saw that he looked unhappy and reached up and put her hand on his cheek—it was a wicked but delicious thing to do. He started kissing her again, not so gently. She couldn’t immediately resist or make him quit, but when she finally did she felt miserable. He kept trying to put his hand on her, on her breast, on her body, anywhere. He had crowded her into a corner of the couch and when she looked at his face between kisses she felt lost and hurt. He had stopped seeing her, and only wanted her; his fumblings were impersonal and crude. But when he managed to catch her mouth she stopped caring. The kissing was what she wanted; she couldn’t help it. But his hands were strong, and having to fight them away finally upset her and she began to cry again.
“Quit, it’s all over,” she said, sobbing.
“What’s all over?”
“Us,” she said. “Jim’s seminar’s out in an hour and we can’t ever do this any more.”
“Sure we can,” Hank said. It irritated her; he really expected to see her again, touch her again. He looked smug, as if she had become his in some way. “I’m in love with you,” he said, and Patsy flushed. She had not been prepared for him to say it. It undid her and she let him kiss her again. He had given up on desire, for the day, and went back to gentleness, and when it was just time for the seminar to be out they were standing near the door, Patsy with her face against his chest, smelling his smell and the smell of the suede coat, which she detested, except that it did look sort of right on him. She felt grave. Another hour of kissing had borne in on her that he was not really going away forever; he was only going four blocks to an apartment where he would be that night, the next day, and probably for years. She didn’t know what was going to happen and was glad of the kisses, which made her feel trusting rather than scared. Just as he was about to step out the door she remembered something. She went to the closet and meekly presented him the lovely red bottle.
“It’s all I have left,” she said. “I had some posters but you didn’t make it possible for me to give them to you so I tore them up. I haven’t had a chance to tell you but your apartment is awful.”
When he actually left she felt like crying. She peeked out, and he stopped on the wet steps and looked up.
“You’re getting wet,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say.
When he was gone she went to the kitchen and piled the dishes in the dishpan and covered them with too many suds and stood at the sink letting the dishes soak, dabbling in the soapsuds with her hands and occasionally smiling to herself. It was scary, really, but with her hands in her own dishpan she could not be too scared. She decided to go back to Westbury and get some more posters. Before they parted forever she could at least see to it that his terrible apartment got fixed up.