Moving On (17 page)

Though there was a liquor table with a Negro barman standing behind it, Sonny went over personally to fix their drinks. The two of them felt stranded. The gray-suited man stared out the window with an expression of quiet boredom. “Well, no cowgirls, at least,” Patsy said. As she said it a lady they both instantly felt they ought to know emerged from the other bedroom in conversation with a short, slightly chubby, grizzled man in a Hawaiian sports shirt. As soon as the woman saw them she came over.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone else had come. I’m Eleanor Guthrie. In a sense I’m the hostess.”

“My goodness,” Jim said. He had brightened the minute she walked over.

“Come now,” Eleanor said, smiling at Patsy. “If you weren’t from Texas you would never have heard of me. It’s just my bad luck to be the last cattle queen.”

They walked over with her to meet the man in the sports shirt. There was a phonograph in the far corner of the room, and a Beatles album was on, turned rather low. Patsy was a little surprised. The man in the sports shirt was quietly snapping his fingers and doing a slow dance step by himself. He stopped and shook hands firmly when they were introduced. He had a merry, slightly rakish look, for all his chubbiness, and a mustache and a good smile.

“This is Mr. Vaslav Percy,” Eleanor said. “He’s a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter.”

“Vaslav
Joe
Percy,” he said, smiling cheerfully at Patsy.

“It’s an awful nom de plume,” he added. “Don’t take it seriously. Joe will do. You got tagged with names like that in Hollywood in the thirties. I picked the Vaslav because I liked ballet and it was Nijinsky’s first name. Dance with me, Eleanor?”

“Oh, I better pass,” she said. “There will be people to greet.” Sonny brought Jim and Patsy their drinks and immediately left to answer the door.

Joe Percy began to move again with the music. “You two in college?” he asked. “Young revolutionaries of some kind?”

“We’re graduates,” Patsy said. “We’re both very inactive. What are the names of your books? Maybe I’ve read some of them.”

“My books?” he said. “Be serious. Eleanor was flattering me. I’m a screenwriter. I wrote a couple of books long ago but kids nowadays don’t know them, thank god. They read enough junk without reading me. Terrible books, as I remember them.”

“Come on,” Patsy said. “Tell me. I never met a published writer before, I don’t think.”

“Good god,” he said. “Have you been living in an egg or something? I’ve met six thousand novelists in the last year alone.
You
dance with me—maybe we can put on something a little more raucous. I never reveal the names of my books to a woman unless I’ve fucked her, beaten her, or danced with her.”

Patsy was quite shocked, but the shock didn’t linger long. Mr. Percy had said the word too casually and in too merry a tone, with no evident intention of shocking anyone at all. She was used to hearing the word used at semi-bohemian student parties where everyone was exaggeratedly drunk or genuinely high, but she was not used to hearing it in the company of someone like Eleanor Guthrie. Fortunately Joe Percy was one of those men who could make the frankest speech sound innocent. His good nature was so obvious that it would have been almost impossible for him to sound obscene. Patsy decided that the essence of sophistication was the ability to absorb such shocks with a gay smile, so she accompanied Mr. Percy to the phonograph table and they looked through the records together.

“Actually, for you I’ll make an exception,” he said, for he was also perceptive and had noted the shock he had given her. “If you’ll excuse my crudity I’ll reveal the names of my books right now and we can dispose of the subject. You won’t believe what they’re called.”

“I will too,” she said. “I’m gullible.”

“Okay,” he said, lifting his drink in a kind of salute. “My novel was called
The Opalescent Parrot
and my book of poems was called
The Final Albatross
. The thirties were as unbelievable as my titles, at least where I was. Everybody had their bit and mine was bird imagery. All my screenwriting buddies were writing proletariat crap about the wretched of the earth, so to be different I wrote Firbankian crap about tubercular degenerates. If you happen on either of the books, love me a little and don’t read it. I’d do as much for you if you wrote a book.”

“I believe you,” Patsy said. “I promise.”

Most of the other records were hillbilly or pop vocalists and they ended up dancing to the Beatles after all. Patsy loved to dance, and it turned out that Mr. Joe Percy, despite his slight chubbiness, danced with flair. The room filled very suddenly, almost in one rush, as they were dancing. Patsy didn’t notice the people closely until they stopped to rest, but when she did she felt lucky to have got Mr. Percy to dance with. He was a very appealing man and he admired her and let her know it, but without giving her any more starts. Most of the other people who poured into the room looked depressing and slightly shabby. They looked like night-club announcers, or disc jockeys, or young restaurateurs, and their wives were mostly thin and had dyed hair. They would have made her feel depressed and lost and wretchedly out of place, but Mr. Percy, by dancing with her and treating her generally as if she were the loveliest woman around, kept her feeling pleasant. Now and then she caught glimpses of Jim and Eleanor Guthrie. They were sitting on a couch and seemed to be talking rather gravely.

When Mr. Percy had had enough he stopped and led her to the window. “Boy,” he said. “You almost inspired me to a coronary. Excuse me. I’ve got to find the place.”

“Come back,” she said. “I think you’re the only one here I want to talk to.”

As he was leaving, Sonny Shanks came over. “See you’re having fun,” he said. “You don’t have to dance with that fat little writer all the time. I can do them dances too.”

“All right,” she said, not enthusiastic. The minute Joe Percy walked away she had begun to feel out of place. Jim was still talking to Eleanor, and it was hard to blame him. In looks and dress and manner Eleanor was all she might have been supposed to be—a very lovely woman, rather grave and not at all vulgar. She wore a white dress and her dark blond gray-streaked hair was pulled to one side. Now and then her face lit briefly as she made some remark to Jim. She wore a gold bracelet and a green pendant of some kind, set in gold. Watching her, Patsy felt like the merest schoolgirl, like a college freshman and a prim and proper freshman at that.

“I expected more cowboys,” she said to Sonny. They had moved to a corner where there was room to dance.

“You got me down for a hick just because I rodeo,” he said. “I ain’t such a hick.”

She really did not feel like dancing with him and was merely swaying with the music, moving her arms a little. Sonny followed suit, a yard away.

“This is just how I had it planned,” he said. “OP Jim can keep Eleanor happy and I can dance with you. She likes to have someone young and smart and up on this ’n’ that to talk to and I don’t know many people who can fill the bill.”

“She could talk to Mr. Percy. He’s got a fine gift of gab.”

“He ain’t young an’ en-tranced, though.”

“No. He’s
en
tranced with me.”

“Ain’t we all?”

She kept her eyes off him, looking at the dancers. Most of the male guests might have been chosen expressly to make Sonny stand out—thin-chested dull-looking men whose suits or sports coats didn’t fit. Joe Percy was the only one among them who seemed to have any character, or even any energy. He was dancing again. A silver blonde in green Capris had snagged him when he emerged from the john.

Even without the red shirt and Levi’s and bare feet Sonny would have stood out. In such a crowd his confidence of movement was striking enough. And he was not so imperceptive as she had supposed. He very quickly figured out that she didn’t want to dance with him and stopped suddenly and dropped into a chair. He draped a leg over the chair arm and waved his bare foot in time to the music. From being gay he had become moody, and in her eyes the change improved him. His hostly gaiety was too superficial; it made his handsomeness seem brittle. When he frowned, as he was frowning at her, his face filled with hollows and shadows and became a more formidable face than it had been.

“So what’s so good about you?” he said, looking her in the eye.

“I don’t know,” Patsy said, startled by the question. “I never said anything was.”

“Eleanor’s as good-lookin’ as you,” he said, as if arguing with himself, though he continued to look at her. “That redhead over by my saddle ain’t bad, if you set her in the right light. What do you think you got on ’em, hunh?”

“Nothing,” Patsy said, disturbed. “Nothing. What are you talking about? I don’t have anything on anybody. My god, what a conversation.”

“Nothing wrong with it,” Sonny said reflectively, waving for the barman to bring him a drink.

“Well it’s absurd,” she said, impatient with him. “I didn’t say anything to make you talk to me that way.”

“Right,” he said, smiling suddenly as if she had just reminded him of something. “It was just seeing you, you know. Milk right from the cow. You ain’t even had time to cool. You’re right as you can be. Who wants to talk to a nice pitcher of milk.” And he grinned at her over the glass the barman handed him.

The comment offended Patsy to the quick. Not only was he presuming to size her up, but the result of it all was that he had sized her up precisely as she had sized herself up every time she looked at Eleanor Guthrie. She was a girl. It did not please her at all that he found her girlishness entrancing. She could not think of a comeback to his remark about her being a pitcher of milk—though later she thought of a hundred. She turned abruptly, went to the bedroom, and shut herself in the john, very depressed and wishing she had had the good sense to stay at the motel. But a look in the mirror improved her spirits. The dancing had given her color. She was not going to let a bastard like Sonny Shanks chase her home. What she needed was to find Mr. Percy and dance some more.

When she came out, Shanks was standing in the bedroom looking even moodier than he had been.

“Never meant to tick you off,” he said. “I was just paying you a compliment.”

She didn’t like him being there waiting for her. He spoke quietly enough, but she didn’t like his stance, or his eyes. There was a force in him very much stronger than any she had ever had to deal with, and it scared her.

“Oh, just leave me alone,” she said, going past him. “Go bother my aunt, if you have to bother somebody.”

Sonny pursed his lips quizzically. “Eleanor’s gonna like you,” he said in a very casual tone. It was as if he had suddenly decided to switch off the force.

Patsy went back to the party a little confused. Sonny was too shifty—one second hateful, the next almost likable. She went over and sat down on the floor by the couch near Jim’s legs. Joe Percy was there, mopping his brow, and Jim looked slightly pinched around the mouth, as if he wished Joe Percy weren’t there. When Patsy sat down Jim glanced at her fondly, but it was an absent, abstract fondness, as if his mind and not his eyes had registered her presence.

Joe Percy held a whiskey glass with a single ice cube in it. He twirled the glass in his fingers in such a way that the whiskey and the cube spun around and around together, the cube never touching the glass. “How do?” he said when Patsy sat down. “I never made it back. I was intercepted. Let me finish this drink and we’ll dance some more.” His eyes were friendly and intelligent, and he did not appear to be fooled by anyone, least of all himself.

“Yep, I’ve written every kind,” he said, turning back to Eleanor. “Jungle movies, pirate movies, serials, spy movies, movies about the Mounties, everything. I’ve worked for more fourth-rate directors than any man alive, unless it’s Randolph Scott. So now I guess I’ll write a rodeo movie. From what I’ve seen of rodeo, it deserves me.”

“A versatile man,” Eleanor said.

“I should say, versatile,” he said. “You wouldn’t know the half of it.” He winked at Patsy and gave her a sly, confidential, surprisingly tender smile, as if to neutralize in advance any vulgarity he might feel called to utter.

“There was once a famous actress, plagued like myself by fourth-rate directors, who assured me I was the best lay in Hollywood.

“After Bob Mitchum, of course,” he added with a broad grin. “Always excepting Bob Mitchum.”

“I think you’re a trifle vain,” Patsy said, deciding she liked such conversations when they were with people like Mr. Percy. She was positive no actress had ever told him any such thing, he was merely being entertaining, probably for her benefit.

“Trifle!” Joe Percy said. “I should hope I’m vain. A writer without vanity would be like a woman without a cunt, if you’ll pardon the usage. Drink, anyone?”

He got up and went to the bar. Jim was patting his foot nervously in time with the music. “I wonder what makes Californians so blunt,” Eleanor said. Patsy had no idea. She felt a bit flat and noticed that Jim was getting drunk. She didn’t have to look at him to notice it, she could tell by his voice. He had only been drunk four or five times since they had been married. She got up and went over to the picture window. The lights of Phoenix were brilliant in the darkness. Looking down, she saw that Sonny and the man in the gray suit and one of the girls in Capri pants were standing by the swimming pool. Sonny still had on the red shirt but had changed to swimming trunks. He stripped off the shirt, slid into the pool, and swam two lengths, cutting right down the center of the greenish water. Then he pulled himself smoothly back up on the side and shook the water off himself with a twist or two of his body, almost like a dog. The girl handed him his shirt and the three of them disappeared beneath the ledge of the motel.

Mr. Percy came over and suggested they dance some more, but Patsy shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve had enough of this party. I like you, though. I’m glad I met you.”

“Mutual,” he said and kissed her on the cheek. It pleased her.

“That’s it,” he said. “Smile. You’ve got a smile all your own.”