Ларри Макмертри - The Last Picture Show

She was undressing, gracefully and without embarrassment, but she stopped a moment to set the bed lamp on the floor. Her breasts were bare—she was the first full-breasted woman Sonny had seen naked.

"I like a little light but I don't like it in my eyes," she said.

With the lamp on the floor the room was mostly in shadow. As Sonny hesitantly undressed, Lois came and stood quietly by him, smiling, occasionally reaching out to stroke his shoulder or arm or chest. "Shy young men are lovely," she said, smiling. He thought her breasts were what was lovely. When they lay on the bed he quickly reached to caress her, but Lois caught his hands and held them for a moment in the valley between her breasts. She raised up on one elbow, her face just above his, and touched him lightly with her lips before she spoke.

"No, no, now," she said. "You're scared to death of me. Your muscles are all tight:" She put her hand on his arms, then on his thigh muscles. Sonny knew they were tight.

"You're scared of me because I'm Lois Farrow," she said. "I'm rich and mean, all that. What everybody thinks of me. But that's not true for you. I may be that way with a lot of men because that's what they want and deserve, but it's still not true. Sam . . . the Lion knew I wasn't any of that, and I want you to know it too. See my hand? It's not like that, and hands are what's real. Put yours right here on my throat."

Sonny did—her throat was warm, and she lowered her face and kissed him. After a while she took his hand off her throat and played with his fingers, kissed them. She kissed him and played with him until he began to play too. He relaxed and became as serious and playful as she was. She seemed really glad to be with him, crazy as it was. What surprised him most was the lightness of her movement—her body was heavier than Ruth's, yet she seemed weightless, so light and easy that they might have been floating together. He came right away, without remembering her at all, and it was only a little later, when he did remember, that he wondered if he had come too soon. She seemed secretly pleased, even delighted, and she took his hands again. They played a little more—Lois continued to touch him lightly with her lips or her fingers.

"You've got a big inferiority complex you ought to cure yourself of," she said.

A little later she spoke again. "It's not how much you're worth to the woman," she said quietly. "It's how much you're worth to yourself. It's what you really can feel that makes you nice."

Dressing, she looked at her watch. "God, it's two," she said. "I guess I better tell them we had a fiat and had to walk to Lawton." She giggled a little and raised her arms to lower her slip over her head. "The excuse never sounds quite so good afterward," she added lightly. She walked over and asked Sonny to button her dress, and then watched him strangely while he put on his shirt.

"Your mother and I sat next to one another in the first grade," she said. "We graduated together. I sure didn't expect to sleep with her son. That's small town life for you." She grinned and stroked his chest again as he buttoned his shirt.

"What will we be?" he asked, when she stopped at the poolhall to let him out.

"Very good friends for a long time," Lois said. "Even I couldn't get away with taking on my daughter's ex-husband on a regular basis. They'd have me committed. Why do you look so sad? You're fine, Sonny."

"I was just thinking of Mrs. Popper," he said. "I guess I treated her terrible."

"I guess you did," Lois said.

He sat in the car a moment longer and then looked at her gratefully. He started to speak but Lois slipped partly across the seat and covered his lips with her palm. When he closed his mouth she took her palm away and kissed him.

"Don't ever say thank you to a woman," she said. "They'll kill you if you do. You let the ladies say thank you."

chapter twenty-four

The next morning Sonny woke up feeling in love with Lois Farrow, but by the time a long week had passed he was back to missing Jacy and wishing he had been able to stay married to her. One night at the café Genevieve told him Lois had asked her to tell him they had taken Jacy to Dallas and would stay there with her until school started. The news did not improve his spirits.

"What do you think about it all?" he asked Genevieve. "I don't know about it all," Genevieve said, "but the one thing that stands out nice and clear is that Lois' little girl took you for a nice ride. Boys in this town don't seem to have much sense when it comes to girls like her."

While they were talking all the football boys trooped into the café, laughing and cutting up. They were making a big thing of how sore and bruised they were—the first workout had been that afternoon. They played the jukebox and sat around talking about what a horse's ass the coach was. Sonny felt left out and even more depressed. He had always been on the football team and had done the same things they were doing after workouts, but suddenly he wasn't on the team and the boys didn't even notice him, he might have been out of high school ten years.

After a while he went over to the picture show and watched a funny movie with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The movie took his mind off things, but afterward, when he was buying a bag of popcorn from Old Lady Mosey, he got another disappointment. She told him they were going to have to close the picture show sometime in October.

"We just can't make it, Sonny," she said. "There wasn't fifteen people here tonight, and a good picture like this, Jerry Lewis. It's kid baseball in the summer and school in the winter. Television all the time. Nobody wants to come to shows no more."

Sonny said he would be sorry to see the place go, and it was true. He went outside and sat on the curb, waiting for Billy to get through sweeping out. Since Sam's death Billy had grown nervous and restless, and was only really happy when he was with Sonny. If Sonny wasn't there to meet him after the show, he would go sweeping off somewhere and be lost half the night, so Sonny had got in the habit of being there. He and Billy would go walking together, Billy carrying his broom and occasionally sweeping at a leaf or a paper cup someone had thrown out. Sometimes they walked as far as the lake. Sonny would sit and watch the water while Billy swept the dam.

Once a week Sonny went to Wichita to have the doctor look at his eye, but the doctor seldom told him anything new. "Looks like sometime this fall I'll have to send you to Dallas. Better be saving your money, If the doctor down there decides to operate it'll cost you plenty."

So far as Sonny was concerned the Wichita doctor was costing plenty himself, but for once money was not too big a worry.. His pumping job paid him enough to live on and he was able to put what the poolhall brought in in the bank. The pumping job was a lonely kind of job, but that was okay: he was not in the mood for people anyway. He spent his mornings bumping over the country roads in the pickup, going from one lease to the next, checking the rod lines, greasing the pumps and motors. Often he took Billy with him—Billy loved to go. When dove season came around Sonny bought a shotgun, an old L. C. Smith .12 gauge singleshot; occasionally, to Billy's surprise, he would take a shot at a dove or a jackrabbit, but he seldom hit anything.

He thought about Ruth a good deal, always painfully. After football season started he thought about her even more—Coach Popper's name was on every tongue. It looked like Thalia was finally going to win the district, and opinion was divided as to whether the team owed its success to the coach's coaching or to Bobby Logan's quarterbacking.

Sonny felt strangely reluctant to go to the games, and stayed home from the first three or four. He felt a little guilty about not going, but somehow he just didn't want to.