Moving On (64 page)

“How are you?” she asked when Joe answered the phone. “I thought I’d wait to call until we could talk.”

“Where’s your steady fellow?” he asked.

“Borger. I think he wishes he could get back to the life he knows.”

“I wish he could too,” Joe said. “With all my heart I do. Then I could get back to the life I know.”

“Did you bring that little car you had in Hollywood? I wouldn’t mind being taken for a drive. I wanted to at the time but you didn’t suggest it.”

“Oh, the Morgan. No, I left it home. I could call the studio and have them air mail it. When am I going to be blessed with your company?”

“I’m not sure. I’d just as soon Sonny didn’t get the idea that we were old flames. At times he’s pretty possessive.”

“Can’t blame him,” Joe said. “This is no place for intrigue. Trying to have an affair in this town would be nerve-racking as hell, no matter who you are or who it’s with. Monogamy must have been invented for dumps like Amarillo.”

“I’m curious about the starlet I read about,” Eleanor said. She had been curious about the starlet ever since she came to Amarillo.

“Catherine? Do you really care?”

“Yes, I care,” Eleanor said.

“That’s depressing. What’s the good of millions of dollars if they can’t keep you from being jealous of Sonny’s conquests?”

“So she’s his conquest. Is that for sure, or is that just your opinion?”

Joe hesitated. His opinion was that Sonny screwed Catherine Dunne in her dressing room, in her motel room, in his motel room, and in the hearse, pretty much as the spirit moved him. But he didn’t want to give his full opinion.

“They may have done it just to be able to put one another on their scorecards,” he said. “It’s unlikely either of them gives a damn about the other.”

Eleanor was silent. “You seem to have made a kind of conquest yourself,” he said. “Jim Carpenter can do nothing but sing your praises.”

“He’s young and easily dazzled,” Eleanor said. “I like him a good deal. He’s very bright when he’s encouraged to be. He seems to like being in the movies. I think he feels a little guilty for going off and leaving his wife and baby.”

“He ought to feel guilty. His wife’s a delight. So far as I can see, you and her are the two best things Texas has produced. I wish one of you were President.”

“Me and her,” Eleanor said. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that. How would you rate us?”

“Cut it out,” he said. “If you’re not going to come and see me you don’t get to be jealous. Besides, I don’t really know her. We’ve had two slightly moony conversations in which I waxed profound about life and love. She soaked it up as if I knew what I was talking about.”

“I guess I’m just still peeved because Sonny chased her home that night in Phoenix.”

“Well, like it or not, he does get around on you, honey,” Joe said. “I doubt it was Patsy’s fault.”

“That’s no consolation,” Eleanor said. “I wish I knew why talking to you makes me feel so domestic.”

“That is a mystery. What do you want to do, come over and wash my socks?”

“I wouldn’t know how,” she said. “I never washed a sock.”

They chatted a few minutes more, inconsequentially, of this and that, and when she hung up Eleanor went out on her balcony and looked down on the lights of the city. She felt very melancholy, but it was a familiar late-night melancholy, one that she had known for years. She did not expect to be alone long enough for it to get serious. Somewhere on a road to the north the hearse with the horns painted on it was already speeding back toward Amarillo. Sonny would be different for having been to the rodeo. She had never known a rodeo not to leave some residue of excitement in him, and whatever it left always got through to her. They seldom approached each other casually after he had been to a rodeo. Always he had that recklessness about him that made him so beloved of the crowds—it showed in his walk, his manner, his way of smiling. Frequently she hated him at such times, for he was never more arrogant or less affectionate. Sometimes they fought, sometimes they made love, sometimes they did both—whatever they did was apt to be violent. Sonny made the terms at such times; if she didn’t like them it was too bad. Frequently she didn’t like them and fought with him and left, but almost always when she left she regretted it bitterly later. Then, after quiet months at the ranch, or travels that were too smooth, to places she had been, there would be moments, hours, sometimes days, when she was forced to wonder if she had ever been really alive, really in the mainstream, or the maelstrom, or whatever it was. Only the memory of those nights with Sonny after rodeos, when they were both at their wildest, convinced her that she had. The fights were terrible, for she fought to have him all, or to be done with him completely, and neither thing was possible. And the lovemakings generally began as fights, with her cornered near some bed. Her anger did not give way to gentleness, but it gave way to something rawer, something more compelling; then her greed sometimes grew faster than it could be fed. Sonny hated her at such times. She outlasted him, exhausted him; in such a state he could not scare her, could not intimidate her. She held the power and it disturbed him. Sometimes he left, sometimes he fell asleep. Sometimes, though, he was too much; he beat her at her own game. Sometimes the greater energy was his, and he weakened her so with pleasure that she became frightened. It left her hopelessly at his mercy; it was hard to fight him when her body was not with her. Her body was with him, and only some part of her intelligence, some woman in her skull, fought desperately for existence while the rest of her cleaved to Sonny. Sometimes she fought free and left. She would have to keep fighting as she dressed and often would get caught again and pulled back to the bed. It was at just such times, when he could have let her go, that she might abruptly turn the tables on him. When her fright turned back to hunger it was usually Sonny who left. He could sometimes stop her when she tried to leave, but she could never stop him. When he started out, he went. If she managed to get away, she could not relax for days; her body kept wanting him and expecting him; but if he left her she knew it was over for a while, perhaps for a long time, and she lost all fear and nervousness, soaked in a hot bath, and slept in deep relaxation. But whether she left or he left, the memory of such times was a comfort in empty seasons. She need never doubt that she had had the real thing. The real thing sometimes got too real, while it was happening, but she would not have wanted to be without it.

In coming to Amarillo she had known there would be a problem, but she had supposed it would be Joe Percy. Instead, it was Jim Carpenter. She had all but forgotten him and was surprised the night of her arrival to see him approaching with Sonny. She remembered then how attracted he had been to her in Phoenix, and it was evident before the night was over that her attraction had not dimmed. He put himself out conversationally, and it was obviously for her benefit. He immediately made something of a fool of himself by attacking the Vietnam war in a company that was conservative in the extreme. Jim apparently assumed that she shared his liberalism, which she didn’t, but she liked him for the way he defended it. His boyish attempts to dazzle her had their charm and their appeal, all the more so because he was young and romantic and idealistic in a company that might almost have personified cynicism. The company consisted of half a dozen Panhandle aristocrats, cattle and oil barons and their fattening wives, people who were just polished enough to have remained naïve about the ruthlessness of their own motives, but who took for granted the ruthlessness of everyone else’s. They all, men and women alike, admired Sonny—he was most of the things the men would rather have been than what they were, and one of the people the women would rather have had than who they had—so it was a great evening for him. Nothing made his ego shine like the admiration of people who were wealthier than him. At first it puzzled her that he had brought Jim along, but then she saw that Jim was as awed by him as everyone else, and that explained it. Sonny loved to awe.

Later, the party over, they chatted casually about Jim. Eleanor was undressing and Sonny was sitting on the bed in his briefs wiggling his ankle and frowning.

“I think your young friend is going to turn up with a crush on me,” she said.

“Jimbo? He’s had a crush on you ever since Phoenix. One of the reasons I hired him. I thought if I kept him around to admire you, you might stay and visit awhile.”

“I don’t think I’m quite that vain,” she said. “Why don’t you do your own admiring?”

He looked at her shrewdly and lifted an eyebrow, and Eleanor felt annoyed, for she was in very good shape. She had been strict with herself for months, had exercised and ridden and dieted and had just spent a week in a very expensive beauty spa. She was feeling splendid and felt she was looking splendid and she wanted him to say so.

“You are right shapely,” he said, but with mock gallantry. “All these Hollywooders will be trying to zap you the minute they see you. That’s what they call it now. About all we do all day is sit around and bullshit about zapping.

“You brought enough clothes,” he remarked, watching her hang up her dress. “You didn’t used to carry around so many clothes.”

“I didn’t use to be forty-four, either,” she said. “I find they do more for me all the time.”

Sonny snorted with amusement and she looked around at him, but he didn’t explain. He had been thinking precisely what she just said—she had reached the age where he liked her better with her clothes on. That evening at dinner she had been just the way he wanted her. Every man at the table had felt a little more male because she was there, and had envied him for being the one to bring her. The way her presence worked on the men had been a real pleasure to him. But watching her cross the room in her slip didn’t make him feel anything, and when she took the slip off she didn’t seem quite such a prize. Her calves were a little thin, her thighs a little slack, her behind slightly too broad, and with her hair undone and her makeup off, it all told.

“Zap sounds like something you do with a ray gun,” she said.

“Naw, that ain’t what they use,” he said. He didn’t mention that on several occasions he had zapped Catherine Dunne, whose twenty-three-year-old thighs, breasts, midriff, bottom, and face were perfect and twenty-one years fresher than Eleanor’s. Nor did he tell her that his steady zapping for the past month had been with a girl named Angie Miracle, who had a very small part in the film. Angie lacked Catherine Dunne’s perfect face, but she was only twenty-one and her body was the color of a nicely turned French fry. He had never zapped anyone with such a perfect tan, and it was consistent right down into her pubic hair. She had spent five years on the beaches of Southern California and could surf and could dance and was, so far as he could remember, the limberest girl he had ever zapped. Angie had been annoyed when she heard Eleanor was coming, and had moodily arranged to get herself zapped by a young cameraman.

Eleanor’s tan did not compare and her legs did not compare, and it irked him, watching her prepare for bed, that she could not hold what she had had at the dinner party. She came to bed more eager for him than he was for her. Her body had ceased to interest him, whether temporarily or for good he didn’t know.

Often, in the days that followed, he felt like kicking hell out of the young cameraman. Angie Miracle knew how such things should be handled, and she never said a word about Eleanor or went out of her way to talk to Sonny. She passed him on the set as indifferently as if he were a statue. One day in a flash of anger he attempted to trip her, so she would have to acknowledge him, but she avoided his foot as gracefully as if she were doing a dance step and went on her way without speaking. Sonny was not used to being walked past, nor was he used to any of the things he was doing. For the first time in many years he was in a situation that inhibited him at every turn. Every day he grew tighter, more irritable, and more exhausted. When he had decided to do the movie he had merely assumed that acting would suit him, particularly simple acting. Numerous people in Hollywood told him there was nothing to it. When the shooting began and he discovered it wasn’t so simple as he had supposed, he was not immediately worried. He would catch on to it quickly, he assumed. Everyone on the set was patient with him; no one treated him like the fool he felt himself to be, and he kept his presence off camera even when he lost it on.

But he had never been a foolishly conceited man. He was a shrewd judge of ability, his own and other people’s, and he knew quite well that he knew less about what he was doing than anyone in the cast. He could feel his own stiffness, his own awkwardness, and it infuriated him. His confidence was so natural that he had long since ceased to be conscious of it, but he was conscious that it deserted him the minute he went under the cameras. He was at a loss as to what to do, and his frustration carried over into his leisure hours. Ordinarily he would have given Angie Miracle a good shaking and gone right on zapping her when he felt like it. And ordinarily he would have insulted Eleanor and got rid of her. She was proud and brooked very little insulting, and would have gone home on ten minutes’ notice if he had rubbed her wrong. But he kept her there and didn’t make love to her, and he put up with Angie’s snubs and didn’t approach her. He became a little more short-tempered with the menials of the crew, and he kept Jim Carpenter in his company more and more, bringing him to the hotel almost every evening to eat with him and Eleanor.

At first, none of it registered on Eleanor. All spring she had been in a mood to make crucial decisions, but in the end she had made no decisions at all. She felt herself at a crossroads. She had to decide whether to marry, but she couldn’t; it was too abstract a decision. She knew no one she wanted to marry, and yet she felt the urge to be married. She felt she was at an age when she must marry if she was ever going to. If she didn’t, her life from then on until she died would be the ranch and traveling, and traveling and the ranch. That she could marry well, find someone attractive, someone likable, someone she might even love, she didn’t doubt. It would only be a matter of putting herself out a little, letting herself be found. She would only have to stay for a time in places where there were good potential husbands. But she didn’t go to any such place, nor ever came close to going.