Ларри Макмертри - The Last Picture Show

"Don't yell at me," she said. "I know what you are" Herman looked at her solemnly. "I sure don't know what to think about a wife like you," he said, not at all belligerent. "We're even," she said. "I don't know what to think about a husband like you, either. Marriage is a bad joke, isn't it." She saw that she could rip him wide open if she said the right mean things, but she didn't really have the energy and it didn't seem worth doing.

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"You're going to sleep on that couch from now on," she said, throwing his pillow across the room.

"Hell I am," the coach said, getting up. "Hell I am." But he picked up the pillow and stood holding it.

"You are," Ruth said, switching off the bedside light. "There's some sheets in the bathroom."

"Goddammit, I ain't gonna sleep on this couch," Herman said. "It's gonna take more than your kicking to keep me out of my own bed: "

"I'll do whatever it takes," Ruth said. "Maybe IT call the school board and get a few things off my chest."

Her calm voice infuriated the coach, but it frightened him, too. She was clearly an unstable woman. He felt like kicking hell out of her, but instead he went and got some sheets and made a bed on the couch, feeling like a martyr. She didn't deserve it, but the manly thing to do would be to give her a night to cool off. It seemed to him that his mother must have been the last good woman who had ever lived.

The next day Ruth went to see John Cecil, hoping to comfort him. It occurred to her that he might be hungry, so she took what was left of a banana-nut cake she had baked the day before and walked over to the Cecils' house. The porch was dusty and the morning paper lay in the flower bed where the newspaperboy had thrown it. John took a long time to answer her knock.

"Hello, John," she said. "Can I come in?"

He looked tired and a little sick, and she felt silly for bringing the rich cake. He had on a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up unevenly.

"I'll just put this on the cabinet," she said awkwardly, moving past him with the cake. She got to the kitchen just in time to see a little pot of asparagus boil over—John had put too much water in the pot. "Oh, goodness," he said. She turned the burner off and he sponged off the stove. Curiously, the event seemed to lift his spirits a little.

"That's exactly the kind of bachelor I make," he said. He pulled up a kitchen chair for Ruth to sit in and they looked at one another directly for the first time since she had entered.

"What are you going to do, John?" she asked. He seemed such a kind man, and she realized at that moment that they had lived three blocks apart for fifteen years without really becoming friends.

He shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck with both hands. "I'll just have to do what I can for Irene and the girls," he said. "I've got a friend who runs an Indian reservation in New Mexico—maybe he'll let me teach out there. If that don't work out I guess I can go back to Plainview and work in my brother's grocery store. When you've messed up your life the way I've messed up mine it doesn't much matter."

"But you didn't mess it up," Ruth said. "My husband messed it up. I'll never forgive him for it. If anybody needed to be fired for ... what they fired you for, it was him."

John Cecil looked at her with astonishment. "Oh, you don't mean that, Ruth," he said, after a moment. "Why Herman's the football coach."

She saw that he didn't believe her, and knew that Herman had been right. Nobody, not even John Cecil, would believe her, and in truth she didn't even know for sure herself what Herman was. She just felt sad and uncertain and wanted to cry.

"But you've even got two kids," she said. "We don't have any kids, and we never will."

John chuckled. "It's kind of amazing to me that me and Irene had the girls," he said. "I guess it just don't take much enthusiasm for people to have two kids."

Suddenly Ruth wanted to be home, away from John Cecil. His sadness was so heavy that just being with him made her feel the weight, made her own limbs seem heavier. She made an excuse and left quickly, glad to be outside.

The next day John Cecil left Thalia for good, to go back to Plainview to his brother's grocery store. The job on the Indian reservation hadn't worked out.

When Sonny returned from the senior trip, Ruth and he discovered that they were famished for one another. The first afternoon he stayed so long that, while they were dressing, the coach's pickup drove into the driveway. It was something they had dreaded and been frightened of for months, but just then they felt so calm and comfortable with one another that they were not even scared. Besides, the coach customarily spent ten or fifteen minutes carefully putting away his fishing equipment. Sonny quietly finished dressing and went in the living room, so he could go out the front door as the coach came in the back. Ruth, wearing only her panties, folded the quilt and took it to the cedar chest in the hall closet, where it was kept. She was still a little excited, still a little warm. She picked up her dress and went into the living room—the late sun was filtering through the Venetian blinds and Sonny was peeping out of one window, watching the garage. Ruth came up behind him, slipped her arm around his waist and rubbed his stomach. When he realized she was still almost naked he turned with a smile and lifted her breasts. She put the dress on and Sonny buttoned it in back.

"I love you," she said. "You must treat me right from now on."

He didn't reply, but when they heard the back door open he kissed her lightly and walked blithely away, down the front sidewalk.

Herman was in the kitchen, poking around in the cabinet trying to find some Mercurochrome to put on a skinned hand. He could never find things like that when he needed them. Ruth stood in the door a moment, watching him fumble in the cabinet, and her mood was so good that she felt a moment of fondness for him. All he really needed of her was an occasional small kindness.

"I'll find that," she said. "How was fishing?"

For three weeks she continued to make his bed on the couch, and he accepted it, bewildered. Every night he thought he would think up a way to get his supremacy back, but every night the task proved too much for him and he decided it wouldn't hurt Ruth to have one more night to cool off.

In fact, he needed only to wait. Ruth found that she didn't like to sleep alone. She slept better with a body next to hers, even if it was Herman's. For a night or two she fought with herself, determined to keep the advantage she had gained, but she just felt more and more restless and decided finally that it was a silly way to keep an advantage. The next evening, when she was changing the pillowcases, she put Herman's pillow back on the bed. Without a word being said, he came too.

chapter nineteen

Summer shaped up very well for Sonny, but very badly for Duane. The first thing Sonny did was quit his job with Frank Fartley. He then hired on as a roughneck with Gene Farrow. He liked driving the butane truck better, but doing it full time gave him no chance to be with Ruth, whereas if he roughnecked at night he could count on spending the whole afternoon with her. Coach Popper was away fishing almost every day. Ruth was becoming happier every day, and was a lot more fun to visit than she had been. She and Sonny both lived for the afternoons.

Duane, unfortunately, had no one to make his days worthwhile. True to her word, Jacy had cut him off cold. Once in a while he saw her driving through town, her sun glasses on, the top of her convertible down, her bare arms tanned from all the hours she spent lying around the country club pool in Wichita. Such glimpses made him ache with desire, but ache was about all he could do. He spent most of June futilely trying to get her to talk to him on the phone—usually she just hung up, but the few times she didn't hang up were even worse.