Duane's Depressed (47 page)

“I think I’ve been doing pretty well with it,” he said.

“No you haven’t, you’re still in love with that gay shrink,” she said. “That’s never going to come to anything.”

Duane dropped the subject—in fact, he didn’t disagree.

As the summer waned, so did the number of pages he had left of Proust. When he dropped below two hundred he began to feel a little sad and also a little anxious—the anxiety arose from the knowledge that it would soon be time for him to call Honor Carmichael and request an appointment. Much of Proust he didn’t remember at all, but he did remember how anxious the young boy telling the story had become at the thought that his mother would soon come up and kiss him good night—kiss him good night and then be gone. Duane felt some of the same mixture of anticipation and apprehension when he thought of visiting Honor Carmichael again. He remembered how swiftly his hour with her passed, so swiftly that, like the boy in Proust, he would begin to miss her before she even arrived. Just a few words, a few moments, and he would be out on her front steps again, faced with a long gap of time before his next appointment.

Also, even though he only enjoyed about one page out of one hundred of the many pages he had read, he did not really want the reading to end. Reading Proust had become a habit—he didn’t want to lose it from his life. The feelings he had about the books were so complicated, so mixed up with feelings he had about Karla or Honor, that he could not understand them. He would sit in his lawn chair at night, watching the distant lightning flicker, unhappy, but not for any clear reason. Something was lost—he had not the skills to say what was lost, or how the loss had occurred, or whether he could expect to save or capture anything.

It struck him that perhaps Honor had wanted him to read that particular novel because it was so long and complicated that—if he stayed faithful to his task and finished it—it would arouse feelings in him so complicated that he would have to come to her if he sought explanations of those feelings.

Perhaps Honor Carmichael hoped to help him understand the kinds of things that Mr. Proust understood about the losses that come to one in life. Perhaps she thought he, particularly, needed to understand the nature of such losses—surely she didn’t ask all her patients to read such a long book about a foreign place. She had picked the book particularly for him and he hoped, when he saw her again, to ask her why.

Thinking about the matter in those terms made him feel a little more hopeful, although, within the hopefulness, his sadness still hung, like an old coat in a closet.

The evening when he finally read the last few pages of Proust was very hot. Thunder had rumbled all afternoon. He closed the book and took it with him outside. He wanted to sit a minute in his lawn chair. When the shower broke, the raindrops at first were hot too, but they soon cooled. As the rain began to fall harder he rose and took the Proust book back inside. It had taken him more than a year to read the whole of the three books—he did not want the last volume to get wet.

Then he took his clothes off and went back to the lawn chair for a few minutes, letting the cool rain pelt him. It had been a sweaty day—it was nice to be showered by the fresh-smelling rain before he went to bed.

17

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, his assigned task done at last, Duane rode into Thalia, meaning to water his garden and then call Honor Carmichael and make an appointment. He felt it was time to start again where he had stopped the day Karla was killed.

But he dawdled over his watering, did a little weeding, pulled up a few onions, chopped them with some tomatoes and a good cucumber, and had an excellent salad for breakfast. Several travelers stopped at the garden during the morning. Three frizzy-haired old ladies showed up from Anadarko, Oklahoma, chattery as birds. Duane indulged them, showing them this and that—something he rarely did, anymore. In only a year’s time the general public had come to irritate him. Mainly he hid in his trailer if a car showed up with an out-of-state license plate.

Though he had waited a long time for his chance to see Honor Carmichael again, he found himself unable to simply pick up the phone and make the call. He had been depressed when he had seen her before, but he didn’t consider that he was particularly depressed anymore. In fact, all that was depressing him that morning was the thought of seeing Honor in such a limited way. A patient-to-doctor relationship wasn’t what he wanted.

Around noon, the call still not made, he cycled over to Wichita Falls and ate at the diner where Maria had worked. Maybe, by a miracle, she had come back; maybe he could initiate a normal relationship with an appealing woman, rather than pursuing
an expensive and ultimately futile relationship with a woman who didn’t want him and never would.

But Maria was not back. When he asked about her the young man behind the counter just looked vague. The cook, a wiry little woman, came out of the kitchen and gave him a shrewd look. She knew what he wanted, knew why he was always making inquiries about Maria.

“We don’t know,” she said. “She had to go home. She’ll be back, but we don’t know when. She can’t get no papers on her father.”

Thwarted at the diner, Duane pedaled out the Seymour highway to the Stingaree Courts. He thought he might rent the honeymoon suite again, just for one night. He could visit with Gay-lee and Sis and Shorty. Maybe being back at the Stingaree Courts would help him to decide whether to resume the life of a psychiatric patient again.

To his shock, the Stingaree Courts was closed. There was a For Sale sign in the window of the office—the gravel parking lot was empty of cars, except for an ancient Mercury with all four wheels missing, rotting in the weeds by the outer fence. There was no Sis, no Gay-lee, no Shorty. The line of low cabins seemed to be sagging already, sinking back into the earth.

Duane peered in the window of the office, but the windowpanes were so heavy with dust that he could see little. The office was completely empty—even the counter where guests had once registered had been removed.

He cycled back down the road to the bar where the man who had once played football for Iowa Park tended bar. But his former opponent was not there, or at least not there yet. Instead an old man with a cigarette dangling from his mouth was wearily pushing a mop across the floor.

“Do you know anything about the Stingaree Courts?” Duane asked. “I used to stay there sometimes but it looks like they’re closed for good.”

“Yep, closed for good,” the old man echoed. “The Meekses are gone. It’s the same old story. The old man died and the old lady left. That business about the fish got in the papers, though—it even made the television.”

“What business? What fish?”

The old man chuckled—when he did his cigarette fell out of his mouth. He bent slowly down, picked it up, looked at it, and flipped it in the general direction of a big trash can.

“There was a catfish in one of the water beds,” he said. “How it got in there, don’t ask me. What it lived on, don’t ask me. When the old boy who bought the water bed drained it, the next thing you know a catfish was flopping around on the ground.”

“That’s amazing,” Duane said. “Was it a big one?”

“No, it wasn’t what you’d call big,” the old man said. “How big could a catfish get, living in a damn water bed? But, like I said, it made the TV.”

18

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, disgusted with his own wavery behavior, Duane picked up the phone and made an appointment with Dr. Carmichael for the next afternoon at three. Even if he only ended up seeing Honor once, at least he wanted to tell her he had done what she ordered him to do: he had read the Proust books.

That afternoon, after his work in the garden was done, looking at the three fat silver-and-black paperbacks piled up on his table, he began to grow nervous. He
had
read the three books—at least he had turned every page—but he had no confidence that he understood even a tenth of what he had read. What did Honor mean to do? If she started asking him questions about Proust he felt sure he would embarrass himself immediately. If she quizzed him about the characters he wouldn’t even be able to say the names correctly. It all seemed like folly. He had finished the book only two days ago, but already it was just a jumble of names, places, and descriptions in his mind.

That night he rode out to the cabin and sat in his lawn chair, wavering between excitement and despair. One moment he would decide he ought to just give up.

“There
is
a time to just plain give up, Duane,” Karla had said to him, many times. It was one of her maxims. “There’s times when you can’t move the world just by being bullheaded.”

Then he would remember his glimpse of Honor the day the
wind blew her skirt and, despite himself, would grow excited. He told himself he ought to calm down. He was just making a visit to a doctor. But he couldn’t calm down and was relieved when he saw the headlights of a pickup coming across his hill. It was Bobby Lee, stopping for his binightly chat.

A few weeks before, Bobby Lee had impulsively proposed marriage to a young woman he had just met. The woman had been putting gas in her car at one of the local Kwik-Sacks, when Bobby Lee drove up to the pump just behind her. The young woman, whose name was Jennifer, had been humming “The Yellow Rose of Texas” while pumping gas. She had blonde hair and two babies in her car.

“The minute she set that nozzle back in the pump it was like I knew, Duane—it was like I knew!” Bobby Lee said. “It was sort of the way she was humming that got me.”

“Just because she can hum pretty tunes don’t mean she would make a good wife for a man your age,” Duane said, but his words of caution came too late—much too late. Bobby Lee had walked right up to Jennifer; there was no hesitation at all. He gave her a shy kiss and told her he wanted to marry her for life—all this before he even met her kids. What’s more, he got away with it—somehow the impulse worked. The girl had just been passing through on her way to Abilene, where she hoped to get a job working in an old folks’ home. She was twenty-six and had never been married—the two kids, as she put it, had just kind of arrived. Nobody in Thalia could call to mind a more striking example of love at first sight.

“He probably just liked her butt,” Lester Marlow speculated. “She probably had her cute little butt turned to him while she was pumping gas.”

So far, two weeks into the relationship, love had not dimmed—Jennifer seemed not to have experienced the slightest problem with the fact that one of Bobby Lee’s balls was a fake.

“As long as one of them’s yours, that’s fine with me,” Jennifer said—it was a statement that seemed likely to bind him to her forever.

Or, perhaps,
not
forever. The nuptials had yet to be celebrated and Bobby Lee had begun to exhibit traces of nervousness,
which is one reason he had taken to showing up at Duane’s for binightly chats.

“What’s new?” Duane asked, when Bobby parked and got out.

“I’ve been thinking of driving off a cliff—what do you think of that option?” Bobby Lee asked.

“It would depend on the cliff,” Duane said. “If it was a low cliff you might just get crippled up for a while. That might be your best out.”

“Out from what?” Bobby Lee asked.

“Out from marrying a girl you just met at a gas station and don’t know from Adam,” Duane said. “Haven’t you ever heard about courtship?”

“I know, but I’m too old to date,” Bobby Lee said. “The minute I saw Jennifer I knew that was it, the whole question was settled.”

“If it’s so settled why are you running out here to bother me every other night?” Duane asked. “Why aren’t you home changing diapers?”

“Fuck, that’s the whole problem, I hate to change diapers,” Bobby Lee said. “I got two grown children. What am I doing starting over with two little pissers whose daddies have been lost track of?”

Duane said nothing.

“Do you think it’s a sign of loose morals that she didn’t bother to keep up with the daddies?” Bobby Lee asked.

“It could be,” Duane said.

“Her mother’s a Seventh-Day Adventist—that’s another bad sign,” Bobby Lee said.

“I’m not a marriage counselor,” Duane reminded him, in case he had forgotten that fact.

“I know, but I ain’t married yet either,” Bobby said. “I’m using you as a prenuptial counselor. Another thing that gets me is the thought of having to buy those kids braces. Then right after that they start getting girls pregnant.”

“Right, girls like Jennifer,” Duane said.

“You think I’m doing it because she don’t mind that I’ve
only got one ball, don’t you?” Bobby said. “That’s what everybody thinks. I can feel it in the air.”

After that Duane refused all comment.

“If only Karla hadn’t smacked into that milk truck,” Bobby Lee said. “It’s times like this when I need a shoulder to cry on.”

“I doubt she’d lend you a shoulder to cry on if she knew you’d started proposing to girls you meet in filling stations,” Duane said. “She might take the view that you’ve always ignored her advice anyway.”

“Ruth’s right,” Bobby said.

“Right about what?” Duane asked.

“About you getting cynical,” Bobby said. “Ruth thinks it’s all because of that psychiatrist you want to sleep with, only she’s gay.”

“That first plan of yours sounds better to me all the time,” Duane said.

“Which plan?”

“The one where you drive off a cliff,” Duane said.

19

O
N THE WAY TO HIS APPOINTMENT WITH
H
ONOR
C
ARMICHAEL
, Duane got butterflies in his stomach. He felt the same almost sick anticipation he had begun to feel after his first session or two. He knew that his time with the doctor would be too brief—it would be like the mother’s kiss, in the first volume of Proust, a pleasure so brief that one would begin to dread its absence even before it happened. But the sight of her house, once he turned into the street, with its nice lawn and nice flowers, soothed him a little. It was a house that bespoke peace of mind. He tried to get a little better control of his feelings. He needed to calm down and let the doctor do her work.