Texasville by Larry McMurtry Page A

asked, a moment later.
    “Who for?” Duane asked. It was one of those moments when life seemed unfair. Karla got better-looking every year, whereas he just got more tired.
    “For guests, Duane,” Karla said. “That’s who you need a guesthouse for.”
    “This house will sleep about a thousand people,” he pointed out. “And the only guest we ever have is Bobby Lee, when he passes out after supper.”
    “He might like privacy, though,” Karla said.
    “All he’d have to do is walk off down any hall,” Duane said. “He’d have so much privacy we’d have to call the Highway Patrol to find him.”
    “It’s not the same as a guesthouse, though,” Karla said. “A lot of people wouldn’t care to be surrounded by our family.”
    Duane was lying on their most recent waterbed, which was larger in terms of square footage than the little house he and Karla had lived in when they were first married. He was watching cable news with the sound off. A tidal wave had hit somewhere in India, washing hundreds of thousands of people into the sea.
    “I don’t care to be surrounded by our family, either,” he said. “I might build myself a guesthouse. We could buy a golf cart and park it in the kitchen.”
    “Why would we want to park a golf cart in the kitchen?” Karla asked, momentarily intrigued by her husband’s line of thought.
    “Then if any guests show up they could drive around in it until they find a bedroom,” Duane said.
    “I guess we could use a golf cart,” Karla allowed. “Little Mike’s too speedy for Minerva. She could use it to chase him down.”
    “Karla, I was just kidding,” Duane said.
    “Sometimes you have your best ideas when you’re kidding,” she said.
    “I’ve had another one,” he said. “Let’s don’t build a guesthouse, let’s build a jail. It can be Jack and Dickie’s room. We’ll have real bars on the windows. It will be good to give those boys a taste of prison life right here at home so they’ll know what to expect when they wind up in Huntsville.”
    “The reason there’s women’s lib is because husbands don’t take their wives seriously when they want to build guesthouses,” Karla said.
    She changed T-shirts, slipping into one that said, MARRIED BUT STILL ON THE LOOKOUT . Duane wondered if there was any significance to the fact that she hadn’t worn a bra to Fort Worth. He wondered if there was any significance to anything people did with their bodies. The older he got, the more he doubted that there was. Who people slept with seemed too circumstantial to worry about. It wasn’t the fact that Karla had boyfriends that annoyed him—it was the boyfriends she picked, none of whom made any effort to be friendly to him, or even civil. Arthur treated him like a yardman.
    Meanwhile, on the big screen of the TV, in vivid color, the survivors of the tidal wave wandered around looking stunned, on a white beach. They had lost everything: their homes, their loved ones, their meager possessions had all been swept into the sea.
    “There’s some people with real trouble,” Duane said aloud, half to himself.
    Karla was brushing her hair. She could see the TV in the mirror.
    “I know, don’t lay there and watch it,” she said. “Turn the channel.”
    “A hundred and twenty thousand people got washed away,” Duane said. “That’s more people than there are in Wichita Falls.”
    “It’s way over there and we can’t do a thing about it, Duane,” Karla said. “It’s what can happen if you live too near the ocean.”
    “It wasn’t two years ago that you wanted to buy a beach house on Padre Island,” he reminded her.
    Karla brushed her shining brown hair for a while.
    “You once told me you’d give me anything my heart desired,” she reminded Duane.
    “I must have been drunk when I said it,” he said.
    “You were not—it was about twenty years ago,” Karla said.
    “Oh, no wonder,” Duane said. “A young man’s even more unreliable than a