Free Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry Page B

covers of magazines, involves dangers that don’t arise in loving obscure women. The dangers don’t lie within the women, of course—any suburban housewife can stab you with a paring knife just as quickly and as fatally as the most high-strung movie star.
    The danger develops in that brightly lit, well-patrolled area called publicity. Loving women who merit more or less continuous publicity is a specialized pursuit, rife with little dangers. The innocent and common act of going into a 7-Eleven to buy a gallon of milk acquires a new tonality if you happen to be in love with someone whose face is apt to appear regularly in
USA Today
or the
National Enquirer
. There she’ll be—Jeanie, Nema,Marella—with a new or a fading husband, or a rumored new boyfriend. In all likelihood I would already know that the husband was being phased out or the boyfriend phased in, but such knowledge did little to cushion the shock. There was always a moment of unease as I fumbled for change; sometimes I marched stoutly out without buying the tabloid, only to stop and buy it at the next 7-Eleven down the road.
    As much as I hated encountering my girlfriends’ pictures in one of those publications, I was apparently not equipped to resist even the most absurd and fallacious mention of them, or the hastiest and most unflattering paparazzi picture. In fact, the more unflattering the picture, the worse the temptation: the sight of one of them looking wildly unkempt, hair a mess, ridiculously dressed, some lout on her arm, undid me more than the glamour shots that were always turning up on the covers of
People, Paris-Match
, or
Vanity Fair
. In the glamour shots, staged with a full complement of hair, makeup, and costume personnel, you got more or less the woman the world wanted to love; the work of the paparazzi, disgusting as it was, nonetheless gave you something more true—the woman herself, in all her bewilderment, vivacity and élan undimmed, messiness unreduced, gloriously or ingloriously female, and always, to me, deeply affecting: the woman, in short, that I
did
love.
    For decades I had been a haunter of newsstands the world over, but as the years passed I gradually began to avoid them, along with drugstores, 7-Elevens, any place where I might see a picture of one of my girlfriends on a magazine cover. I didn’t want to have to handle the emotional electricity such little shocks produced—and it was for more or less the same reasons that I had flipped past hundreds of mentions of Houston in the years since I left her. Houston, too, was sexy, glitzy, high-profile, her green trees and shining glass buildings a temptation to photographers of all levels of skill. Even a slick shot in an airline magazine, glimpsed high above the Pacific, sometimes made me deeply homesick for Houston, for the weedy neighborhood, the pulsing freeways and cunty smells of the Houston that I still loved.
    I yearned, but I didn’t go back: Danny Deck Day never happened.
    Now I was definitely going back, in fact, was almost there. Huntsville and its prison were already behind me. Apprehension, which had been flitting across my nerve ends since my daughter’s first call, flitted ever more rapidly. Not only would I soon have to reckon with a child I had never seen; I would also have to reckon with a city I had once loved deeply but had neglected for twenty-two years.
    The women I knew always exacted an immediate price for the most minor neglect; even Gladys was not above giving me margarine rather than butter on my pancakes, though I had repeatedly forbidden her even to
buy
margarine—if she thought I was inattentive to what she called her “situation” for a few days—her “situation” being her ever-shifting relations with Chuck, who had lately shown an increasing tendency to absent himself to places as far afield as Tucumcari.
    If Gladys, my faithful cook, repaid my neglect with margarine, what would a female entity as powerful as Houston do? Would she