Duane's Depressed (45 page)

On Christmas Eve Bobby Lee got the news that his PSA had soared. The news—understandably—plunged him into a deep depression. He arrived for the Christmas dinner so drunk he could barely stand up.

“I’ll soon be dead and up in heaven, where my other ball is,” he said, several times. Duane had bought him a deer rifle for Christmas, but began to regret the gift. In his present mood Bobby Lee might just shoot himself with it.

For the past several Christmases Ruth had spent the whole day telling everyone good-bye. She was fond of insisting that the present Christmas would undoubtedly be her last. She meant to do it this time too, but Bobby Lee’s bad news upstaged her.

The two of them bickered rancorously while Duane cooked the turkey.

“Why would you think your testicle would be in heaven?” Ruth inquired. “The Lord—if there is a Lord—is not going to waste his time storing people’s body parts—particularly not body parts from down there.”

“Down where?” Bobby Lee asked, very drunk.

“You know where I mean,” Ruth said. “I doubt you’ll get to heaven anyway, but if you do you can forget that other testicle being there.”

“Can’t we talk about something besides dying?” Duane asked. “It’s Christmas.”

“It’s hard being without a sex life when everybody else is celebrating,” Bobby Lee said.

“
I’m
without a sex life,” Duane pointed out. “Ruth’s without a sex life. You ain’t the only one.”

Ruth took offense at the remark.

“Speak for yourself, Duane,” she said. “You aren’t privy to my intimate secrets.”

Her rejoinder took both of them aback.

“Excuse me,” Duane said. “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

“If an old crone like you can have a sex life when I don’t get one, then I’m moving away,” Bobby Lee said. “I don’t want to live in a town where such things can happen.”

“Duane’s the one who really needs a sex life,” Ruth said. “He’s in perfect health. What’s the point of perfect health if there’s no sex? It just means it ain’t perfect health—it’s wasted health.”

“I’d prefer it if we dropped the whole subject,” Duane said.

In fact, though, he had begun to ask himself the same question. An appealing Mexican woman, who worked in a small café where he sometimes ate on his rare trips to Wichita Falls, had been flirting with him lately. Occasionally, if the café wasn’t too busy, she’d sit and chat with him for a minute. The woman’s name was Maria—she was in her late forties, unpretentious, frank, cheerful. Lately her image had begun to come into Duane’s mind at night, competing in his fantasies with Honor Carmichael’s. The flirtation, so far, had been light. Duane knew very little about Maria—didn’t know whether she was married, a widow, or what. He just knew that she liked him. She was there, a possibility—indeed, the only possibility.

Toward the end of dinner Ruth grew lachrymose, saddened by the thought that her last Christmas dinner was nearly over. She insisted they all drink brandy. She and Bobby Lee got drunker, tried to dance, cried, forgave each other for a lifetime of mutually insulting behavior. Duane sat on the couch and watched a football game he had no interest in. He began to miss Karla. Whatever her faults, Karla always managed to pull off splendid Christmases. At her Christmas dinners everybody ate so much that they lacked the energy to be hostile. Duane didn’t have the skill, or even the interest.

While Ruth and Bobby Lee indulged in an orgy of forgiveness he washed the dishes.

When he left, Bobby Lee had passed out on the couch and Ruth was asleep in her rocking chair, snoring loudly.

Before he pedaled away Duane took the precaution of hiding Bobby Lee’s pickup keys. Bobby Lee was not popular with
the local constabulary—if he woke up and drove off in his drunken state they would be sure to pounce on him.

Duane rarely drank brandy—he was drunker than he realized, so drunk that he pedaled right off one of the low wooden bridges, smashing his bike and gashing his forehead. He had to walk the rest of the way to the cabin, bleeding freely. He thought of Karla. She always liked it when he did something foolish. She would laugh her head off if she saw him as he was then.

What Honor Carmichael would think of such behavior he didn’t know.

14

T
HROUGHOUT THE WINTER
, usually in the afternoon, when he was done with woodchopping and errands, Duane, each day, read his ten pages of Proust. Reading the ten pages became his balance to woodchopping. It was mental woodchopping, though he did not always feel that he was getting the wood cut, where the Proust books were concerned. Even after three and a half months, when he finished volume one, he still could not rid himself of the feeling that he was doing something inappropriate. He knew that if Bobby Lee, or one of his own children, discovered him reading such a book they would have been completely bewildered. People would think he was trying to pretend to be smarter than he was.

Duane, though, knew that he wasn’t pretending to be smarter than he was, because often he would sit with the book for two hours and come away with almost no sense of having understood what he read. Sometimes he would sit down with the best of intentions—even with a little pleasurable anticipation; he liked the sense that he was being faithful to his chore—and yet be almost totally unable to concentrate on the page in front of him. He would start one of Mr. Proust’s long, looping sentences only to have his mind simply drift off before he had read even halfway down a page. Sometimes he would have to start a given page over six or seven times; his concentration just kept slipping, and he grew lazy about looking up words that he
didn’t really understand. Sometimes he would spend most of his hour and a half on the first three or four pages and then hastily scan the last several pages, eager to be free of the book for the day. The minute he finished, if he happened to be at the cabin, he would take a long walk, meandering along one of the creek beds with his twenty-two.

At first he was consciously resentful of the book he was reading, and consciously resentful of Honor Carmichael for forcing it on him. He wanted
her
—perhaps she realized that, perhaps she didn’t—and she had given him Proust as a substitute.

Of course, she couldn’t really force him to read the book. He had had no appointments with her since the death of his wife—though she seemed to consider that he was still her patient, he himself wasn’t too sure about it. But if he wasn’t her patient, then he wasn’t in her life at all—which was not what he wanted. Her insistence that he read the three books was not unlike Karla’s insistence that he take the speed-reading course, or yoga lessons, or a course in Latin dancing. Both women seemed determined to improve him in ways of their own choosing, a similarity that annoyed him when he thought about it, and he did think about it from time to time.

Still, in a way that he could not have described, he eventually developed a more welcoming attitude toward the reading. Having to sit down and concentrate his mind for an hour or two every day came to seem like a positive thing. His resentment toward the task wore off sooner than his resentment toward the book itself. Very gradually, his reading improved. There were still many days when he took nothing from what he read—those days were, in fact, still the majority—but on the whole his mind wandered less and, now and then, he would have a moment of recognition, of the sort he had had when the old man mentioned that he thought of his dead wife, but not for long. Often his recognition would involve no more than a description of weather, or of some natural or social condition that he had observed himself, though without grasping what he had seen as intelligently as Proust grasped it. The reading was not wholly barren, though the people that Proust described were mostly as foreign to his own experience as people could be.

Sometimes it seemed to him that the very foreignness of the material was what had prompted Honor Carmichael to prescribe it to him. He had told her he wanted to travel to foreign places and she had supplied him with a book that was definitely about a foreign place. Practically the only things he could relate to in the whole first volume were the plants and foodstuffs; he thought that might be because he was paying such close attention to his own garden when he began to read. He was surprised by the care Proust took in the description of asparagus; Duane happened to be particularly fond of asparagus himself. He had grown some asparagus as fine as any described in the book, and yet he had had to urge them on the local people, many of whom had never eaten asparagus and didn’t know how to cook them. Some of his own asparagus went to waste, which clearly would not have been the case if he had been growing it in France.

Still, most of what he read as he did his daily ten pages was tedious stuff. Few of the people interested him and most of the conversation seemed pointless. The maid and the old aunt interested him a bit, the latter because her pickiness reminded him of Ruth Popper; but then the old woman died and the family went back to Paris. It was soon obvious that social life in Paris was a thousand times more complicated than social life in Thalia, but Duane didn’t care. Once in a while he felt amazement that people would go on so about such trifles; but then he would remember that Karla had been almost as bad, when it came to obsessing about trifles. Some days he wished she were still alive so he could tell her that she really ought to move to France.

In the winter, when he finished the first volume, he immediately developed a resistance to opening the second. The book he had just finished was by far the longest he had ever read in his life. He had made his way through more than a thousand pages, only twenty or thirty of which had anything in them that really interested him. Though he liked devoting an hour and a half a day to reading, he resented having to read that particular book. His work in the garden had given him a renewed interest in botany, something about which he had a great deal more to learn. He owned a plant dictionary and several books on shrubs, weeds, and grasses; an hour and a half with any of those books
would have taught him more that he could use than anything he was getting out of the French books.

Also, he knew that he was being foolish to base so much of his life on Honor Carmichael. Even thinking about Honor had become painful to him. Once, cycling home from a trip to the dentist, he glanced over and happened to notice her in a parking lot. It was a windy day. Honor’s long hair was loose; bending to get in the Volvo she had trouble controlling her skirt—Duane caught a quick glimpse of her legs. Then she was in the car and gone—yet the little that he had seen haunted him for two weeks. It produced the kind of excitement that stray glimpses of women had produced when he was a teenager.

But he wasn’t a teenager. He was a sixty-four-year-old man. What was he doing obsessing about the fact that he had seen a little ways up a woman’s skirt as she was getting into a car? It was absurd, and he knew it. He knew that his momentary glimpse of Honor Carmichael’s legs was the kind of thing that Mr. Proust could have written two hundred pages about. But he wasn’t Mr. Proust. He was a retired oilman who happened to still be horny. Why didn’t he just go and seduce Maria, a nice woman who liked him and would readily have taken him into her bed? Why was he hung up on a woman he couldn’t have when there was a nice woman right there in the same town who was hoping he would make a move? Why had he bound himself into such a circle of frustration? In earlier life he had not been one to frustrate himself in that way.

The second volume of Proust lay unopened for ten days. Though it was winter, Duane set out on his bicycle to visit Julie and Nellie and his grandkids. Willy and Bubbles entertained him with their few words of French, and the chef at Goober’s new restaurant cooked some of the food Mr. Proust had been writing about. Duane bought bicycles for Willy and Bubbles, and then rode to Arlington and bought bicycles with training wheels for Little Bascom and Baby Paul. Zenas had decided to invest in health clubs. Nellie, the laziest of his children, had become an exercise professional, whose job it was to train exercise personnel in Zenas’s health clubs in Tulsa, Midland, Hot Springs, Tyler, and other cities.

Duane contemplated bicycling north to see Jack, who was living in a small trailer with three dogs and two horses, somewhere near the Wyoming-Montana line, still pursuing sheep rustlers when he wasn’t going to college. According to his sisters, who had flown up with their boyfriends to visit him, Jack was heavily armed at all times, even taking a saddle gun with him when he took them all horseback riding. The news didn’t surprise Duane, or bother him. Jack had always been happiest when heavily armed—if there was a part of the Wild West that was still wild, Jack would find it and live in it.

On the way back to Thalia from Fort Worth Duane ran into a February ice storm. A warm rain fell most of one night and then a freezing wind sliced down from the plains, dropping temperatures almost to zero. The roads acquired a glaze of ice. Duane, who had spent the night at a small motel in Jacksboro, took one look at the highway and concluded that it was not a good day for bicycling. A few vehicles crawled along the road, but not many. A few hundred yards to the south an eighteen-wheeler had skidded into a ditch and turned over. He had difficulty even walking to the motel office to request his room for another day. The wires of the barbed-wire fences along the roads were sheathed in ice.

Duane spent the day reading fishing magazines. The Weather Channel informed him that certain parts of Wyoming had received more than thirty inches of snow—more than enough snow to bury his bicycle but nothing his son Jack couldn’t handle. Jack had once gone to a survivalist camp above the Arctic Circle and learned to build an igloo. If he happened to be abroad in the thirty-inch snow, no doubt he had a snug igloo to camp in.

In view of the weather Duane decided that his visit to Jack could wait until summer. The winds were still gusting. That night he heard sleet peppering the window; the icy roads received a nice dusting of sleet. But the wind blew itself out and the sun came out warm the next day. The trees and the fence wires soon began to drip. Riding home, Duane tried to imagine how cold it must be in Wyoming.