Passion and Affect (15 page)

“When I look at you,” he would say, “what I see is not some flip kid running around dancing, but a finished person.” By spring, Patricia was very strained. She tried spending some time away from Richard, sitting at the bar watching her friends dance. It was what she wanted to do while young. Basically, she was a good-natured girl, known for her high spirits. She wanted to string her college days like bright glass beads, one by one by one. After an evening with her friends, upset at her longing to be what she once was—
just a kid
—she looked in the mirror and realized that what Richard told her must be true: she was past being silly. She was passed being flip. She had to be—there was no future in it. Something about Richard frightened her and she fought against it. One night they discussed it, and Richard told her that she was only frightened of being what she could be, if she wanted to.

“Then what are you hanging around with me for?” Patricia had asked.

“You tell me.”

“Because I'm fabulously pretty.”

“That's very flip, Pat. As a matter of fact, I don't think you're pretty. From time to time, you're something much better. You're beautiful, but pretty you're not.” Then Richard told her that children fooled around, but adults went to bed with each other—which side was she on? She took the side of the adults and it was settled. At the end of her junior year they were married in her parents' house in Connecticut.

In the mornings after Richard left for school, Patricia put on the Rad McClosky record and drank her coffee sitting next to the speaker. She drank two cups of coffee and listened to the record three times. On the shelf above the stereo was a picture of herself and Richard, taken by a friend. They were sitting on a sofa, and Richard's arm was around her. He was medium-sized and wiry, with shiny black hair, straight teeth, and a mustache. Next to him in the photo, she felt she looked flimsy and insubstantial. Her hair curled and fell into her eyes. She was wearing and still wore what Richard called “baby sweaters” and her legs in their boots twisted around one another. In the photo, he looked as if he were Architecture, and she was a random, flying buttress he was supporting.

She was three years married and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she did not see that she had become any more serious, any less young and heedless, or any more willing to get down to what Richard called “the things of life.” He was right when he said that she had not made up her mind about anything. She was shy in Indiana. There seemed to be a code of life that she didn't understand. In the East, things had familiar shapes, and a familiar place to put them in. Born in Connecticut and educated in Cambridge, she felt she was in the midst of an alien order. She felt in Indiana the way she had felt in France when she was eighteen. Since Richard was at work on his novel, they kept socializing to a minimum, except for invitations to dinner parties at faculty houses, which were repaid by dinner parties at their house. One afternoon a week she took a bundle of laundry to the laundromat, and watched a collection of fat women in Hawaiian shirts feeding towels into the washing machines. In the afternoon she listened to Rad McClosky and drank coffee. Richard had stopped plaguing her about
Bleak House
or about the modern dance class. Now he watched her silently and she felt like a patient about whom the doctor has said: We can do nothing but wait.

It had been decided, after one long, serious talk, that Patricia should not do anything until she felt ready, and when she was ready, she and Richard, together, would work out the details. At the time she wondered how she would know when she was ready. Then she had thought that Richard would know.

What she did was listen to Rad McClosky. She learned every song by heart and knew every nuance. She knew when the guitars broke in unexpectedly, when the piano took over, and when the rhythm line changed. While doing the laundry or shopping at the Great West, she could listen to it in her head, as if there were a switch in her mind that would play Rad McClosky for her.

Richard's birthday was in April, and three weeks before it Patricia realized that she had no money other than the weekly house money. She knew what she wanted to buy him: a set of the Arden Shakespeare they had seen in a second-hand book store. Richard had always wanted it. While they were still in Cambridge, he used to comparison shop the book stores for a set, but either they were annotated in ballpoint ink, or tattered, or in mint condition and therefore overpriced. In secret, Patricia had gone to the second-hand store, priced it, and calculated how much money she could possibly take out of her house money to add up to forty dollars. But buying Richard a present with house money was wrong: it took food out of his mouth in order to provide him with a'gift. Besides, she was buying it with his money. If she asked her parents for a check, it would have to be accounted for.

Finally, she saw a job for a part-time typist advertised and took it. Twice a week for three weeks she sat behind a gray filing cabinet at Harley's Auto Supply and typed out shipping bills. She asked to be paid in cash and hoarded the bills in a spice jar that she hid at the back of a cabinet. It was her constant fear in those three weeks that Richard might decide that the shelves needed rearranging and would come across a jar of coriander with five-dollar bills hidden in it.

Three days before Richard's birthday, Patricia drove to the book store with the jar of coriander in her handbag. At a stoplight on the way it occurred to her that the set might have been sold and she panicked: she had never thought to check if it were still there. Richard was right about her: she simply couldn't plan.

But the set was there—in mint condition—and it was hers for forty dollars. The clerk watched as she produced the jar of coriander and picked the bills out from the seeds.

She took the set home in a carton and hid it under the sink in back of the rags. The day of his birthday, she wrapped each volume in pink and green tissue paper and stacked them back in the carton, which she wrapped in yellow paper and tied with a green bow. In the afternoon she roasted a chicken and made a carrot pudding for Richard's birthday supper. Rad McClosky sang from the living room and she hummed with him. When she looked at the carton sitting on the table, she was dazzled at her accomplishment. With the baster in her hand, she harmonized to “The Fire in My Heart That Burns for You”:

“I can't help it, I can't sleep

It's like walking right through smoke

From the fire in my heart that burns for you.

As you sow so shall you reap

But believe me it's no joke

The fire in my heart that burns for you.”

Dinner was ready when Richard got home, and the carton was sitting on his chair. He pulled his chair out, saw it, and asked Patricia what it was.

“It's your birthday present,” she said. Richard looked at it with suspicion, but he was visibly touched.

“Should I open it now or wait till after dinner?” he asked.

“After,” said Patricia, but it was a bad choice. She could scarcely eat in anticipation.

Dinner finished, Richard untied the green ribbon and tore off the yellow paper. Then he took the tissue paper carefully from each volume and stacked them on the table. He pushed his chair back and asked Patricia where she got the money to buy it.

“I worked as a typist, part-time.”

“Where?”

“At a place called Harley's Auto Supply off Route 3.”

“Why did you do that?”

She looked at him, on the verge of tears. “To get your birthday present for you.”

Richard drummed his fingers on the top volume. Then he folded the tissue paper neatly and restacked the books in the carton. Patricia watched him, squinting, one leg wrapped around the other.

“I'm very touched,” said Richard. “But we have to take them back.”

“But you said … when we were downtown, you always said you wanted it.”

“Pat, I'm very touched, but I think you misunderstand. I'm really touched that you wanted to get me a birthday present, but I can't possibly approve of what you did to get it. If you wanted to work, you should work for
you
, not to get things for me. It's a way of buying me. I couldn't possibly keep this knowing that you worked at some awful job to get it for me. It's slavish.”

By this time, Patricia was weeping into her napkin. “I don't think they'll take it back,” she said. “It's second-hand.”

“I want you to do things for you, Pat,” said Richard softly.

The following Saturday, they drove downtown. The bookstore would not take back the set of the Arden Shakespeare since it was second-hand, although in mint condition. Richard was silent on the drive back, and Patricia thought he was angry, but at home he arranged the set carefully on one of his shelves. He displaced several volumes of Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, and Henry James in the process. He spent the rest of the afternoon rearranging his shelves in order to find a proper slot for each one.

Monday afternoon, Richard came home early. Patricia was sitting in front of the speaker listening to Rad McClosky. She had hardly moved out of the chair all day. She heard the key turn in the door and Richard appeared.

“Hello,” she said brightly.

“Would you turn that off, please?”

Patricia switched off the stereo and sat back in her chair.

“Pat,” said Richard. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong. I'm just fine.”

“Pat, you are
not
just fine. You haven't been fine for quite a while. I've been very concerned about you recently, and we haven't talked about it at all. I came home early today to really sit down with you.”

“There's nothing wrong,” said Patricia. “I'm fine.”

“Pat, come on. You've let everything go. You don't seem to want to do anything any more. You fall into this childish ennui. There are any number of things you can do, you know that. But it seems to me that all you do is sit around the house and listen to that ape boy and his slide guitars. Is that what you do?”

Patricia stood up and took the record off the record player. Then she broke it over her knee.

“No,” she said.

That night she slept badly. There had been no fight, no discussion. At dinner, Richard began to speak of her inability to cope, a favorite phrase of his, and Patricia uttered six commonplace words she had never said before as a sentence. “I don't want to discuss it,” she said. After dinner Richard worked on
Pain in Its Simplicity
and his lectures. Patricia hemmed a skirt and was in bed with the light off when Richard came to sleep. He went to sleep at once: he was an immediate but light sleeper. Patricia was stiff on her side of the bed. She knew how easily his sleep was broken and she didn't want to interrupt it. Tears spilled out of her eyes and down her cheeks. She wondered if she had broken the record out of childish pique or as a concession to Richard, a sign that she would do better. Then she wondered how she was going to live without Rad McClosky, and the tears spilled faster. She looked over at Richard, asleep on his side in striped pajamas. They were as separate as the eggs in the icebox. After lying awake rigidly for hours, she fell asleep as the dawn came up. When she woke it was ten thirty and Richard had gone to his classes.

She made the bed, had a cup of coffee, and washed the dishes. In the living room she saw that the record was lying on the floor in two jagged pieces. Richard had left them there to remind her. She picked them up and tried to fit the pieces together. They connected for an instant and fell apart in her hands. She threw them into the wicker basket. Then she sat in the chair in front of the stereo and thought about her first college beau, and of her roommate. She was the same girl now that she had been then, she thought. She went into the bedroom and packed a book bag with two pairs of underpants, a blouse and skirt, a comb, brush, and extra toothbrush—nothing that would be missed. She wrote a note and taped it to the icebox, the place messages were left. It read:

Richard: The car is in my name and I am taking it for a drive. I may be back, but may not. Patricia.

She drove to Flame's Discount Record store and bought another copy of
Closing Doors
. Once in the car, she was confronted with Indiana. All she knew of it was the triangle that formed her life there: from house to downtown, from downtown to University, and from University to shopping center. Even Harley's Auto Supply had fallen within this pattern. The thought of the expressway frightened her: sign upon sign upon sign. Besides, it was a toll road and she had only six dollars, Rad McClosky having claimed four of her ten. She drove away from Flame's on a road she had never taken. She knew it did not lead downtown, or to the University, or to home. For an hour she drove abstractly with the radio on, past rows of frame houses, past factories and oil refineries. She passed through a series of small towns. At the edge of each was a marker giving its name, date of founding, and density of population. She was welcomed by the Elks, Optimists, Kiwanis, and Hoosier clubs, and the Methodist and Episcopal churches. After three hours, she knew she was lost. Listening to the radio distracted her and she had made several turns. She thought she might drive to Connecticut, but she had no idea what highway to take, how long the trip would be, how much the tolls and gas would cost. Besides, if she got to Connecticut, what would she say? She was not a daughter: she was a wife.

The radio played all the songs she liked, “Closing Doors,” “Hickory Holler's Tramp,” and “A Road in Arkansas.” She sang the chorus:

“Down this road in Arkansas, I can't even see a sign

My tears have lead me down the highway

All I know is you're not mine, and I'm lonely and I'm poor

And I'm stranded on this road in Arkansas.”

She tried to substitute “Indiana” for “Arkansas” but it didn't fit.

She wondered what Richard was doing, if he had come home early and found her note. Would he call the highway patrol, or would he wait for her to come back? If she called the house, would he be there? It would be easy enough to get back: all she need do was pull in at a gas station and get directions.