IT WAS A PLEASANT DRIVE to Dallas, the pleasanter because there was no Davey squalling and no Juanita fidgeting and sucking in her breath every time they passed a car. In almost every little town along the way there was a roadside antique shop, and Patsy stopped to poke in almost every one of them. All she bought was a few funny turn-of-the-century postcards, but it was fun to stop and poke. She stopped in a town called Decatur and walked around a huge grotesquely ugly old courthouse. She pretended she was in France looking at cathedrals, and the old men spitting and whittling on a bench on the courthouse lawn looked at her as if she were an invader from a century they did not want to live in. Mostly she stopped in order to walk. She felt extraordinarily good, light and loose and fresh, and she kept smiling as she walked. It had been so long since she had had sex that she had forgotten what it could do for her, and she felt several twinges of regret that she had not stayed at the ranch another day. The minute Hank had driven away she had begun to miss him. But as she got closer to Dallas she began to develop a strong desire to be in her own house, and she determined to bundle up Davey and Juanita and drive straight on.
She discovered, however, that in her absence another mission had been prepared for her.
The first person she saw when she walked in was her mother, and the look on Jeanette’s face was so awful that it sent a current of shock and weakness through Patsy. Jeanette looked past tears, as if something had happened from which there could be no possible recovery. Patsy immediately assumed it had happened to Davey.
“Where is he?” she said. “What’s happened?” Then she heard his voice babbling from another room, and she stepped past her mother and there he was, in blue overalls, as merry and healthy as ever. She grabbed him up and kissed his neck and, holding him, went back to her mother.
“Thank god you’ve come,” Jeanette said. “I wanted to call but Garland didn’t want me to. He said you’d be back today.”
“What is it, mother? What is it? Is somebody dead?”
Jeanette sat down on a sofa shaking her head. “It’s Miri.”
Patsy was impatient. “Well, what? Is she dead or sick or in jail or pregnant or what?” When she said pregnant her mother’s blank pained face twisted and she began to cry.
“She’s pregnant,” she sobbed. Davey was twisting, trying to get to the floor, and Patsy squatted down and watched his blue bottom as he rapidly crawled into the other room.
Jeanette was sobbing so wrenchingly that Patsy could do nothing until she quieted. She sat by her on the couch and put her arms around her. Finally Jeanette grew calmer.
“Come on, dear. It’s not the end of the world,” Patsy said. “Where’s Daddy?”
“Oh, it is, it is,” Jeanette insisted.
“No. We’ll just have to get her back here where we can take care of her. Who’s the boy?”
It turned out they didn’t know. Indeed, they knew next to nothing. A daughter of an old family friend had seen Miri and reported that she was pregnant—that was all. They could not get her on the phone. Garland had started to go out and find her but had decided to wait for Patsy’s return. He came in an hour later, red-faced and not very coherent. He too regarded it as the end of the world and had been drinking heavily. It made Patsy angry. He had a reservation on a six o’clock flight to San Francisco. Once the facts were known to all and they had speculated fruitlessly about the possible father and what ought to be done, a silence fell over the room. Patsy was very angry at her sister for not having called, but then she had not been calling Miri and couldn’t really complain. But she was even angrier at her parents, an anger she tried hard to curb, because she felt sorry for them at the same time. It was plain that they were beaten. Their only plan was to find Miri and the boy and force them to marry. It was the only approach to such a problem that they knew. Even in her irritation with them Patsy kept away from stating some of the more awkward possibilities, such as that Miri might not know who the father was, or that he might be Negro, Arab, Chinese—there was really no telling. She decided that the first order of business was to block any confrontation between her parents and Miri. She had better go herself and find Miri and get the facts.
Once she made up her mind to go, she wasted no time. Garland surrendered his reservation with clear relief. “I guess it would be better if I stayed here to look after Mother,” he said, sighing.
“I think you two can use some mutual looking after,” Patsy said and left them and went to see Juanita. She got a report on Davey and took him out in her parents’ large sunny back yard and played with him for an hour and a half before she had to bathe and leave. While she was bathing she began to have apprehensions. Perhaps she was not up to the job she was taking on. She didn’t know California, and what she had read of the hippie scene made it seem rather different from the one camping weekend she had spent in Yosemite years before. But it was not really the thought of a strange city that scared her; it was the thought of a strange sister. They had never been the sort to exchange every confidence, but neither of them had supposed when Miri left for Stanford that such a time would elapse before they saw each other again. Miri had simply not come back, and Patsy couldn’t help wondering what sort of girl she would find when she found her.
In any case, as she packed, the desirability of some masculine help began to seem more and more clear. It occurred to her that while she was out there she might as well see Jim. It was absurd to go on allowing him to be a sort of floating man in her life. “You know,” she said, “maybe I ought to go see Jim first. If we can work something out he might come help me with Miri. If we can’t then I have an old friend in Los Angeles who might help. Let’s see if I can switch my flight.”
Her parents were cheered. They welcomed any effort toward reconciliation, on any front. The switching was no problem; the two flights left within minutes of each other, and in a very short time Patsy was flying west. It was a beautiful flight, with the sun setting just ahead of them for two and a half hours. Almost at once, it seemed, they were over the desert. Patsy had a seat by a window and looked down at the brown land and brown lakes and tiny towns whose names she didn’t know. She had a vague idea they must be flying over Lubbock and thought how strange it would be if Hank were still driving on one of the highways she was flying over. The only town the pilot mentioned by name was Las Vegas, and she was on the wrong side of the plane to see it. She had a gin and tonic for the sake of her nerves. The fields of clouds were made beautiful by the setting sun. She dozed for a little and awoke with a sense of pressure and a sense of disorientation. She felt very unprepared. Only a few hours before she had been in her bathrobe, being hugged, Hank’s arms around her and her back against his car, with the silent house and the clear morning and the still pastures around them. The sun that had risen while the two of them lay snugly in the bed had beaten her to the coast and dropped into the Pacific clouds. The land below was no longer bright with evening but was gray, sprinkled with faint lights, and soon, before she could clear her head, the plane had banked and was descending into the white smog of Los Angeles. Just before they landed she glimpsed a freeway below and rows of cars with their lights on.
As the plane taxied in among the strange smog-hidden terminals of the L.A. International and her fellow passengers gathered up purses and briefcases, Patsy became very oppressed by the hastiness of what she had done. The desire to keep her father in Dallas had wiped out her judgment, she felt. She had not called Jim, she had no hotel reservations, she didn’t know where Altadena was, or even where to find her luggage.
She found the latter with no real difficulty, but when she had carried her suitcase to a phone she found she could not call Jim. A course of action that had once been natural had become impossible. She had already put in her dime, but she could not imagine what she would say if she got Clara, so she got her dime back instead and stood for several minutes in a state of tense dejection. The longer she stood by the phone the less clear she felt about everything.
Finally she wrestled her suitcase into a locker and in a kind of torpor wandered into the main terminal and stood in a travelers’ shop looking at overpriced stuffed animals for Davey. She felt like going back to Texas and had to exert an effort of will to go check on flights to San Francisco, thinking she might as well go on there. But everybody wanted to go to San Francisco, it seemed. The length of the waiting line dejected her still more and in order to give it time to shrink she called Joe Percy. The sound of his voice saying hello was one of the most welcome sounds she had ever heard. It was amazing that one of the two people she knew in the whole city should be at home when she called. It was very cheering.
“Help,” she said. “Help, help, help. I’ve come to be a burden.”
“Why, Patsy Carpenter,” Joe said, with no surprise. “I knew you’d call if I sat by the phone long enough. I hope you’ve come to see me and not that fugitive husband of yours.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He buzzed me about a job. It was about the time Sonny got killed. I haven’t heard from him since, but I assume if you’re here he must be too.”
“He’s in someplace called Altadena. It’s a long story. Could you come and get me?”
“Not there,” Joe said. “It would take hours. What you should do is take a limo to the Ambassador. I’ll meet you there.”
“A what?”
“Limousine. And please plan to stay here. I have a nice guest room.”
“Okay,” she said, relieved. “Gee, I’m in Hollywood.”
“No, you’re at the airport,” he said. “Hollywood is another country.”
The fact of having found Joe cheered her up and she found her limo and squeezed in between two stone-silent businessmen. The lights and the speed and the heavy enclosing presences of the businessmen lulled her again; she felt already that she had slipped out of the normal stream of time and event. Anything was apt to happen. She rather expected the limousine to run all night through the freeways, for she had no idea how distant the hotel might be and the traffic around them was so fast and thick it was hard to imagine really getting out of it.
But when she arrived at the Ambassador, Joe Percy was there, having a conversation with one of the doormen. He came over and hugged her, and the businessmen hurrying to register bumped them with their briefcases.
A few hours later they were at his house and Patsy was drunk. Joe was apologetic, because he had helped her get drunk without meaning to. They had eaten at a quiet restaurant and he had had a natural number of drinks. Patsy was telling her story and had seemed to want a few drinks too, and he had let her have them, assuming she knew her capacity. When they finished eating and he saw she couldn’t walk straight he realized she had been drinking out of relief, or out of distress, and got her to his house, hoping she wouldn’t get sick. She was pale, and had cried a fair amount, and was talking around and around the same questions, which were when and how to give up a person one was married to, and how to know if a person one loved or liked was a good bet to marry. On the latter point Joe had no advice, but he did make it clear that he thought the time had come for her to give up on Jim. Patsy agreed, and soon came back to the question again, a little paler and a little sicker. Joe gauged it beautifully and got her to the bathroom just when she needed to be there. Then he put her to bed.
She slept, but not well. She didn’t want to have got drunk. Irritation with her own stupidity kept her awake. She felt too bad to move. She heard the sound of television from the other room, just loud enough that she could not stop hearing it and go to sleep. When she did finally sleep she had a vague fitful dream involving Hank and Roger’s ranch house. She felt weak and wretched when morning came, but was glad, nonetheless, that the night was over.
Joe Percy insisted that she get up and sit with him while he breakfasted. He made himself a good breakfast, but the sight of it did not please her. She sat in a chair across from him and sipped a little orange juice.
“I look awful,” she said. “It’s nothing to how I feel, though.”
“You look like you were drunk last night,” he said. “I didn’t know you couldn’t drink or I would have watched you better.”
“I can’t do anything like that,” she said. “I’m unsuited to all but the most basic wickedness. Even my milkshakes have to be vanilla.”
“About noon you’ll feel like living again,” he said.
“But I was supposed to do things! I was going to be brisk today. I was going to clear that girl out of Jim’s life and we were going to San Francisco to rescue my little sister from a bad end. That was the general plan.”
“You really want him back? I never thought you two were all that interested in one another.”
“We must have been at one time. We got married, didn’t we?”
Joe shrugged. He was wearing a light green pullover sweater and looked in top spirits.
“Maybe you stopped being, then.”
“I was raised not to accept reasons like that.”
Joe shrugged again. “Screw raisings,” he said. “You’ve got fifty-odd years to live.”
“I agree,” Patsy said. “I agree completely.” There were many windows in his house, some looking out on the bare brown shoulders of the Hollywood hills, but most looking out on the houses beyond and below. It seemed to be a sunny day, but the white smog diluted the sunlight and made it paler. The paleness made the outside look too cool and rather uninviting. She felt chilly even in her bathrobe.
“I know just the thing for you,” Joe said, “but unfortunately it will have to wait until lunch.”
“If it involves much action on my part it had better wait until lunch tomorrow.”
“No, today. You stay here and take it easy while I go work awhile.”
“What are you creating?”
“A TV script about a hippie who becomes a cop. It’s a shitty idea, but who knows?”
He left and she devoted the morning to recovery, most of it spent in the comfortable guest-room bed watching the hills outside her window become browner and more distinct as the sun burned through the smog. She read the L.A. Times and an issue of Variety and recovered to the point of wanting coffee. She made some and wandered around the living room looking at Joe’s books and magazines. Most of the books in his bookcases were upside down for some reason, but a fair number of them were interesting books, once they were turned over.
On impulse she went and dialed Jim’s number and let it ring seven times, her heart pounding. Then she decided she was silly and took a hot bath. Since her general plan had been destroyed, she felt at a loss. She had no secondary plan, but her weak feeling went away, at least. She had not really drunk so much. When Joe came back she felt somewhat like seeing the town. They climbed in his Morgan and he took her at once to a mod dress shop on the Sunset Strip and insisted that she buy herself a wild dress. As he had predicted, it was just the thing for her spirits. She bought a short bright yellow dress, with no back at all, wondering all the while what possible occasion she could have to wear it. The shop was full of teenage girls, their hair as long and as beautifully kept as the manes of show ponies, and they glanced at her from time to time with a certain hostility, as if she were far too old to be in their dress shop. Joe Percy they regarded with frank contempt, and he was relieved when Patsy finished and they could leave.
“Those kids looked at me as if I embodied the System,” he said. “Imagine it. Me embodying the System.”
“You embody more of it than they do,” Patsy said. They had lunch in a large dark-paneled restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, and she had a chance to observe her escort closely. The closer she looked, the more she was inclined to feel that his high spirits were superficial. He looked tired. It made her feel odd, for she had just begun to feel good again. She had the strange feeling that she had somehow passed him her sorrow.
“Will the movie you made with Sonny ever be released?” she asked.
“Nope,” Joe said. “If it was ready now, it could be, but they’re still screwing around with it. Now that he’s dead and forgotten it would bomb. It makes a good tax write-off.”
“He’s not entirely forgotten,” Patsy said. “I remember him.”
“Me too,” Joe said. “For a nut he was a good poker player.”
The Boulevard was warm and sunny when they went outside, and they walked a bit. “I want to go to Altadena,” Patsy said.
“I know.”
“IBM is just over on Wilshire. It’s a lot closer.”
“No, Altadena.”
He got her a cab and went back to work, and Patsy rode with a silent Latin cabbie down the Hollywood freeway, out the Pasadena freeway, beneath slopes and tall brown palms, and then north up a long street almost to the foot of a mountain. When the mountain was very close the driver turned off and parked beside a vast apartment building. The apartments were terraced and spread over a whole block, sunk into the gentle slope that spread back toward Los Angeles. She didn’t want to be stranded in Altadena and asked the driver to wait. There were no cars at all in the empty street, and it was strange that it should be so empty. All the cars were back where she had come from, in L.A. The sidewalks that ran into the maze of apartments were just as deserted as the streets. It was almost frightening. She encountered an old lady in shorts and sneakers walking a poodle. The old lady was taken aback. “We don’t live here,” she said. “We’re just walking through.”
“It seems nice,” Patsy said, for the old lady was a bit belligerent and seemed to expect a reply.
“It’s not fit to live in, if you’re lookin’,” she said. “They won’t take you if you’re over fifty, and they won’t take no children and they won’t take no pets. We live down the street. Homosexuals everywhere too.” With that she went on, tugging the poodle away from a faucet he was licking.
Patsy went on too, and almost immediately encountered two well-tanned young men. They were having a lovers’ quarrel by one of the swimming pools and they looked up as she passed and for a moment both focused their hostility on her. They didn’t speak, but it frightened her. She had seldom run into faces that said so clearly that they disliked her and resented not only her presence near their swimming pool but her very existence as well. She felt they might have grabbed her and drowned her if she had dared to speak.
When she found Jim’s apartment all she did was stand in front of it a few minutes feeling silly. It was curtained, and though she peeped as best she could all she could see was the end of a sofa with some newspapers piled on it. The curtains were off-white and the sofa brown. Very quietly, as if she were a spy, she tried the door, but it was locked. The apartment, like all the others, was done in a rough unpainted shingle, vaguely English. There was really nothing more to do. She could not imagine what kind of lives Jim and Clara led, inside the door, and she found that she had little curiosity and even less possessiveness in regard to Jim. She had just wanted to see the place, and was not sure she would have rung the doorbell even if she had known he was there and alone. She walked back through the winding sidewalks, among the heavy glossy shrubs, not even bothering to avoid the pool. The young men had settled their quarrel and were stretched out side by side, both on their backs, both in heavy sunglasses, taking the sun. Neither moved a muscle when she walked by; the only sound was the sound of her heels. She would not have supposed it could be so silent anywhere in L.A. The cab driver was listening to Mexican music on his radio and seemed displeased that she was back. She told him to take her to the IBM building on Wilshire Boulevard.
The one thing she felt certain about was that she no longer had any inclination for a big scene about Clara Clark. Too much time had passed. The issues had grown vague, and her feelings had grown vague also. All she wanted in that regard was to avoid Clara completely. But Jim was different. Avoiding him completely did not seem right. The best plan that came to mind was to wait outside his office building and surprise him when he got off work. Once she got to Wilshire and scrutinized the building, curiosity began to nibble at her. Perhaps, as Joe suggested, she wasn’t very interested in Jim, but she was nonetheless curious to see what he looked like and who he had become. She tried to project the man she had known who had sat around for two years fiddling with cameras and scholarship into the IBM building, and it was hard. She walked down Wilshire for almost a mile and sat for a while in an Orange Julius bar. The men there were talking about the Lakers, all except two hippies. The hippies of L.A. had fantastic hair; it made her realize what an inferior breed of hippie she had been exposed to in Texas.
The elevators were busy when Patsy went in, but soon they became even busier. Every time one reached the ground floor a score of young men and women stepped out and hurried toward the street. The building began to empty itself of its hundreds, of its thousands. At first Patsy watched each elevator load intensely, expecting Jim to be in each one. She was very nervous. But by the time twenty elevator loads of people had poured out before her eyes her nervousness had changed to confusion and then to a kind of light discouragement that was akin to her feeling of silliness as she stood in front of the apartment in Altadena. She felt like she didn’t know what she was doing. It was hard to believe that Jim, any Jim she knew, would come out of one of the elevators. All the young men looked rather alike, their suits gray or blue or brown. Almost in unison, when the elevators opened, they began to fish sunglasses from their pockets and put them on. Those who didn’t already had them on. And the elevators kept coming, emptying hundreds of nice-looking young men, some with their hair short, some with their hair longish; and girls with their hair longish, in short skirts and colored stockings, all heading for the street. After ten or fifteen minutes Patsy’s discouragement deepened. It occurred to her that in such a throng she might not notice Jim, or might not recognize him. His face could be turned the wrong way. Several times she had thought she had seen him, only to find that it was merely someone who resembled him slightly. It occurred to her that she might have missed him already. He might have passed within twenty feet, wearing sunglasses and a suit she wouldn’t recognize. Finally she simply let go of it, the whole plan, the whole pursuit, stepped into the departing rush and was back on Wilshire Boulevard, no more enlightened than when she went in. With some difficulty she got a cab and went to Joe Percy’s. He was there having a martini. Patsy took some sherry and listened meekly as Joe told her she was going about things in a very silly way.
“This is the age of appointments,” he said. “You use the phone. Doctors, lawyers, ex-husbands, it doesn’t matter. Wait an hour and a half and call him.”
“Okay,” she said listlessly.
“Look,” he said. “Make up your mind. Are you here to rescue your sister or to get your husband back. If it’s your sister, I can help you. I’ve got the whole weekend, and I know San Francisco. Jim probably doesn’t.”
She shook her head, genuinely uncertain. “I don’t much want him back. It’s just so messy, being married in absentia. I guess I think he ought to do something about it, if he wants us to be together again.”
She dialed Altadena, but no one was there. “Let’s do something wild to take my mind off it,” she said. “Why don’t you take me dancing? We could go to the Whiskey Au Go-Go or someplace extremely wild and I could wear that dress you bought me.”
Joe frowned. “Aren’t I supposed to wear it?” she asked.
“I was frowning at the thought of the Whiskey Au Go-Go,” he said. “I think it’s sort of had its hour. But we can go see.”
The dress was absolutely backless and she had no bra she could wear with it, which made her feel both shy and very daring. She smiled at the thought of what her mother would think if she knew that, instead of rescuing Miri, she was going off to a night club wearing no bra. Joe praised her lavishly and she blushed.
“My goodness, I feel odd,” she said. “I’m not sure I could wear it if I were going with anyone but you.”
Joe, seeing her blush, was all the more delighted with his purchase. She looked a girl again, looked like she had in Phoenix the night they met—only something had been added.
“Look, it’s six hours too early to do anything,” he said. “Why don’t I show you a little of the town.”
He did, and Patsy loved it. They went in the Morgan and her hair blew wildly. They went to Santa Monica and drove along the beach. Then he took her up the Miracle Mile and then to the Beverly Hills shopping center, where they got out and walked awhile. As they were passing a drugstore a dark beautiful woman came out adjusting her sunglasses. She was dressed in white, and she said hello to Joe, who said hello in return. “Who was that?” Patsy asked, feeling she ought to remember.
“Dolores Del Rio,” Joe said, taking her arm. She was still shy about her dress, though no one seemed to pay her the slightest mind.
As it grew dark he drove her into the hills and gave her a view of the lights of Los Angeles. Still early, they went to the Go-Go and danced amid a thin motley crowd of youngsters. Though colorfully dressed, most of them looked stoned, and the looks on their faces didn’t fit with the frenetic music. Patsy had never danced without a bra and could not get over being self-conscious about the movement of her breasts. A young man in a red shirt open to the navel, with a black armband on one arm, kept ogling her, though he was with a tall lovely girl who looked part Indian and part Negro. Patsy felt constrained and they soon left.
“That guy was an American Nazi,” Joe said. “Thus the armband.”
“Goodness. I supposed someone in his family was dead.”
They went back to Joe’s place and he fixed them a great, exotic omelet, with Patsy helping and advising. Between them they made short work of it and then sat in Joe’s living room having coffee. His living-room window did not look out on all L.A., but it did have a nice view of the Hollywood hills, with enough lights to make the night lovelier. It was an intimate vista, very different from the dazzling one he had shown her in Beverly Hills.
Patsy felt quiet and relaxed, as if her head had just cleared after a long stretch of fogginess. She felt as if she had gone through some kind of crisis, of a sort she did not understand; all she knew was that she felt she was through it. In such moods it was possible for her to notice other people in ways that she didn’t when her mind was hazed with her own problems. She noticed once again that her host looked melancholy.
“You make a good omelet, Joe,” she said. “Why are you depressed?”
“Me?” he said.
“Don’t kid me. I’ve seen you depressed before.”
“Oh, yes, the night Dixie raped me. How is she, by the way?”
“Fine. I remember you telling me she would always be fine, and why.”
“I was talking through my hat. Dixie could take a tumble any time.”
“Don’t beat around the bush,” she said. “I tell you my troubles constantly. Why are you depressed?”
“I’m trying to keep from falling in love inappropriately,” he said. “That’s the sum of it. It’s very hard not to let yourself love when you see someone lovable, you know.”
“Who is she?”
“The wife of an English screenwriter. Married about a year. She’s something like you, only a little younger. As lovely a woman as I’ve seen in years.”
“Uh-oh,” Patsy said. “What about her husband?”
“He’s queer and she doesn’t realize it. She knows something’s wrong but it’ll be a long while before she realizes it’s that simple. On the surface he’s the opposite of queer. I shudder to think how much she’ll have to take before she figures out that he really doesn’t like her at all.
“I see a lot of them socially, and she likes me,” he added. “That makes it tricky. It would shock her out of her mind if she thought I was in love with her, and I almost already am.”
“You already am,” Patsy said. “No almost about it. What endless messes. I’m going to call Jim while I feel sensible.”
She dialed, and Clara Clark answered. “Could I speak to Jim, please,” Patsy said.
“Uh, who’s calling?”
“Mrs. Carpenter,” Patsy said very matter-of-factly.
“Oh.”
“Hi,” Jim said cautiously, after a moment. “Where are you?”
“In Hollywood.”
There was a silence and Patsy could picture the two of them making startled faces at each other and trying to figure out what it meant. Despite her matter-of-factness the sound of Clara’s voice had irked her.
“What brings you?” he asked. “Are you going into pictures?”
He sounded defensive—as if her proximity made it necessary for him to maneuver in some way. It irked her more.
“Don’t get in a panic,” she said. “I’m not here to make trouble for you. I’m here to do something about Miri. She’s pregnant.”
“In L.A.?”
“In San Francisco. I stopped here thinking we might ought to see one another and straighten some things out. Since your companion is there I guess it would put you on the spot to ask if you wanted to see me?”
“I guess it would,” Jim said, sounding very conscious of the spot he was on. “Where are you?”
“At Joe’s.”
“Why are you staying with him?” he asked, as if it irked him.
“Why not? He’s the only friend I’ve got in this part of the world.”
“You pick strange friends.”
Patsy sighed. Nothing much had changed. “Okay,” she said. “Don’t let’s go into that. I was thinking you might want to go help me with Miri. I hate to be blunt but what else can I be. Do you want to or not?”
Jim was silent.
“I realize this is probably a bad time to call,” she said. “I’ve called before and missed you. Several times. Roger Wagonner died the other day. I went to the funeral and then came right out here.”
“Goodness,” Jim said. “I wish you’d got me. What did he die of?”
In telling about Roger they grew a little friendlier and less edgy, but when the subject was exhausted they were left with the same question: Did he want to go, or not?
“I can’t manage it right now,” Jim said. There was a tone of regret in his voice and Patsy softened a little.
“Could you manage it if I were calling at a better time?”
“I don’t think so,” he said finally. “Miri never liked me, anyway. I’d probably just make it more complicated.”
“That’s right,” she said, angered. “We don’t want to try anything hard or complicated, do we?”
“I will if you insist,” he said.
“I don’t. I’m very bad at arm twisting.”
“No you aren’t.”
“Well, I don’t like to do it, anyway,” she said. “If you don’t want to, forget it. Don’t you think we might as well start thinking about divorce?”
“I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Any conclusions?”
“None that I want to talk about right now. How long will you be in town?”
“Just tonight.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, the tone of regret in his voice again.
“Yes, it’s too bad,” she said. “I can’t help it. I should be in San Francisco now. We have no idea who she’s pregnant by, or how far along she is.”
“I see,” he said.
“Well, look, I’m sorry I bothered you and put you on the spot. It’s my fault. I should have planned better. Will you let me know when you come to some conclusions about divorce? I’ll probably be back in Houston by Monday or Tuesday.”
“I’ll let you know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she asked crossly.
“Generally, I guess.”
“Oh, screw,” she said. “I don’t like your being sorry. Just forget it. Good night.”
He said good night and she hung up. Joe was attempting to look noncommittal. “That’s that,” she said.
He nodded sagely. Patsy paced about the room, very dissatisfied. “I wish we were back at that place dancing,” she said. “Would you have let me dance with that Nazi if he had asked?”
“No,” Joe said.
“Why not? I think that’s small of you. I’m a free woman and can dance with whom I please. What if I had made a scene?”
“I’d have bawled you out.”
“Oh, I’m just mad at myself for being so bitchy with Jim,” she said. “I get so harsh when I talk to him. Do you suppose I could still love him?”
“No.”
“I don’t think so either.”
“It’s been my observation that resentment lasts longer than love,” he said, so pontifically that it amused her. She went in and changed out of the barebacked dress. She put on a gown and robe and came and lay on his couch; in a few minutes she recovered her good humor. Joe drank Scotch and she sipped wine and they watched old movies on TV until very late. First they watched Algiers, with Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer. “I guess you know them, don’t you?” Patsy said.
“I’ve seen them around.”
After Algiers, when they were both a little bit tipsy, they watched a strange, hilarious Italian superspy movie, with Terry Thomas and Marissa Mell. It was about a thief so talented that he gradually drove a small European country into bankruptcy. In the end the government was forced to melt all its remaining gold reserves into one giant twenty-ton ingot, something they assumed no thief could steal. But the thief, whose name was Diabolik, managed. As the ingot was being shipped out of the country on a special train, he dynamited a causeway. The train and the ingot fell into the sea. Diabolik then affixed giant balloons to the ingot and towed it to his secret hideaway. Joe and Patsy laughed and laughed. They had both been in a state of suppressed gloom, but under the impress of drink, each other’s company, and the ridiculous movie their gloom spent itself in bursts of hilarity.
“It’s a relief to know there are people making worse movies than us,” Joe said.
Patsy was lying full length on the couch, very relaxed, her head on a green pillow and her ankles crossed and propped on the end of the couch. She was barefooted and kept wiggling her toes. Joe was reminded several times of the girl he had fallen in love with, whose name was Bettina; she had nice legs and ankles too, but instead of being brunette she had ashy blond hair and was taller than Patsy, an awkward long-legged young beauty who had not yet learned to handle her body.
“Are you going to seduce her or aren’t you?” Patsy asked, divining the drift of his thoughts.
“I’m twice her age,” he said. “I don’t think I could really do her any good. Maybe I should hold off and let someone younger find her.”
“Don’t be so noble,” Patsy said. “She’d be lucky to get you.”
He got up and switched channels, but they were tired of movies. He turned the TV off and they sat looking at the lights of the Hollywood hills.
“It’s a miserable town for a girl, really,” he said. “Two thirds of the men are queer and the others are predatory. They’re not looking for anything but pussy.”
“I’d become a drunkard if I lived here,” Patsy said. “Does TV go on all night?”
“All night. It’s a bad town for girls but a great town for insomniacs.”
“You really want to go help me with my sister?” she asked, yawning.
“Absolutely.”
“Okay. Do we drive or fly?”
They couldn’t decide. Both of them were too sleepy. But when Patsy went to bed Joe was still sitting in the chair in his living room, drinking and staring somberly at the lights.