Terms of Endearment (27 page)

“Okay, okay,” Rosie said. “If you want me to iron something you better pick it out quick. I’m washing the windows today.”

“I guess you can hang up the phones,” Aurora said, hanging up hers.

2.

“T
HERE YOU
are, Trevor … aren’t you?” Aurora said when she stepped into the darkness at the restaurant he had chosen for their dinner date. It was his custom to choose the darkest possible restaurants, for the most obvious possible reasons, and she wasn’t surprised by the kind of place she found herself in, only by the degree of the darkness, which was almost total. The maitre’d had disappeared ahead of her into pitch blackness.

Her confusion lasted only a moment, however; then a familiar figure loomed in the gloom, smelling of tweed, the sea, and good cologne. The figure enveloped her in an embrace.

“More beautiful than ever—you’re still the woman I love,” a familiar voice said in accents as clearly Philadelphian as they had been thirty years before. The accents were being delivered less than an inch from her ear, and had moved down toward her neck before the last word was out, dispelling whatever doubt she might have had about the identity of the man who was embracing her.

“That’s you, Trevor. I believe I sense it,” she said. “Get your head out of my collar. I thought I was to be the guest, not the meal.”

“Ah, but what a meal you’d be!” Trevor Waugh said, not relinquishing his brief advantage. “A dish for the gods, Aurora, as Byron said.”

At that Aurora began to squirm in earnest. “That’s you, Trevor,” she said. “You’ve spoiled yet another romantic moment with a misquotation. Lead me to my seat please, if you can find it.

She began to fumble her way along what seemed to be an aisle, with Trevor beside her, fumbling his way along as much of her as he could reach. In a moment she stumbled into the maitre d’, who had been waiting a discreet distance ahead, and he led them around a corner into a room with a fireplace and great deep booths covered in maroon leather. The place they were in was a
hunt club; wherever Trevor went, and he went everywhere, he managed to find great dim hunt clubs with trophy heads and mounted fish on the walls, fireplaces and rum and booths covered in maroon leather.

When they were seated Aurora allowed herself to look at him and saw that he was much the same, handsome and tanned, with white hair, his old smell of tweed and rum and good barbers, his pipe in his coat pocket, his cheeks full of color, his shoulders still broad and his teeth as even and white as they had been thirty years before, when the two of them had fumbled their youthful way around the dance floors of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. He was, when all was said and done, the most enduring of her suitors. In the wake of her eventual rejection he had married three times, prominently but unsuccessfully, and had spent his life sailing the seven seas, pursuing the game and fish of the world, pausing now and then to seduce unlikely ballerinas and youthful actresses, ladies of society, and, whenever possible, their daughters as well; but always, once or twice a year, he found some excuse to sail his boat to wherever she was and renew a suit that in his eyes had never really been interrupted. It was flattering, and it had gone on a very long time; and since he had chosen such a discreet booth she let him take her hand under the table.

“Trevor, I’ve been missing you,” she said. “You’ve waited quite a long time to come see me this year. Who’d you have out there with you on the seven seas?”

“Oh, Maggie Whitney’s daughter,” Trevor said. “You knew Maggie, didn’t you? From Connecticut?”

“I don’t know why I tolerate your behavior with the young,” Aurora said. “It’s inconsistent of me, I must say. I recently disposed of a man for doing far less than you do in the course of your sails. I suppose you’d go sailing with my daughter if she were single.”

“Well, I’d rather have the mothers, but I guess I’m slipping,” Trevor said, “I can’t seem to get the mothers, and I have to have somebody. I can’t sleep a wink alone.”

“I don’t think we need talk about it,” Aurora said. It was true that Trevor Waugh was the one man she was hopelessly tolerant of. There had never seemed any harm in him, somehow; he had
never been known to be unkind to any woman, young or old. All his wives and ladies and their daughters and all his actresses and ballerinas left him after a while, carrying with them many fine presents and Trevor’s love and fond regards; and he remained tender and fond toward all of them. He had in some small way enhanced every woman he had met and never hurt one, and yet not a one had ever returned to him, not even momentarily, that she knew of. The very fact of all those daughters, which in another man would have seemed monstrous, seemed only touching and rather sweet in Trevor—a way, almost, of giving continuity to the love he bore their mothers.

His affairs had never left scars, unless on him, and of course to expect Trevor Waugh not to be physical would have been like expecting the sun not to shine. He and she had not been lovers for almost thirty years—she had been his first romance and he her second—and in the years afterward she had had no urge to go back to his bed, yet when she saw him she made no effort to deny him his hugs and fumblings; indeed, she would have known he was sick if he hadn’t hugged and fumbled. Trevor could not be without, no one had ever wished him to, and it was a fortunate thing that the world contained as many mothers and daughters as it did to keep him in good spirits.

“Trevor, I assume you’ve ordered whatever’s best,” she said.

“Depend on it,” Trevor said, nodding at a waiter, who almost instantly came forward with a wonderful crab salad. Where gustatory pleasures were concerned, his tastes were almost irreproachable, though, sportsman that he was, he was slightly more prone to order game of some sort than she would have been. She allowed him to pat her a bit, as a reward for his excellent crab, and decided that life on the sea did something nice for a man’s smell. Trevor had always smelled better than any man she had known. His smell seemed to be a mixture of salt, leather, and spice, and she leaned toward him and sniffed a time or two to see if it was still the same. Trevor took it as a sign of encouragement and got right down to business.

“I guess I surprised you, didn’t I?” he said. “I bet you didn’t expect me to call up and demand a yes or no after all these years.”

“Yes, it was a rude shock, dear,” Aurora said. “Only my longstanding fondness for you kept me from hanging up. What put such a thought in your head, if I may ask?”

“I’ve always thought we were meant for one another,” Trevor said. “I’ve never known why you married Rudyard. I’ve never known why you wouldn’t leave him.”

“Why, Trevor,” she said. “I got along with Rudyard perfectly well. Or imperfectly well, to be more accurate. At least he was not always off with ballerinas and schoolgirls.”

“But that was only because you wouldn’t marry me,” Trevor said, a pained look on his handsome face. His hair had been an aristocratic white almost from the time he left Princeton, and it went awfully well with his face and his clothes.

“I’ve never understood it,” he said, squeezing her hand. “I’ve just never understood it.”

“Dear, so few things can be understood,” Aurora said. “Eat your crab and have a little more wine and don’t look so pained. If you’ll tell me what it is you’ve never understood perhaps I can be helpful.”

“Why you stopped sleeping with me, to be frank,” Trevor said. “I thought everything was all right. Then we took that sail from Maine to the Chesapeake and I still thought everything was all right and you got off the boat and married Rudyard. Wasn’t everything all right?”

“Trevor, you ask me that every time we dine together,” Aurora said, giving him a little squeeze in consolation. “If I’d known you were going to take it so seriously I might well have married you and spared you all that brooding. Do stop taking it so seriously.”

“But why?” Trevor said. “Why? I keep thinking it must have been my fault.”

“Yes, your modesty or whatever it is,” Aurora said, having a little of his crab, which in the course of his brood he was neglecting. She had immediately finished off hers.

“I really don’t wish your modesty to turn into insecurity, Trevor—not over something that happened thirty years ago. I’ve told you as much hundreds of times, I’m sure. No young woman could have had a better lover than you were, but you see I was just a young woman then, and exceptionally vacant. I expected
your eye might rove, I suppose, or else mine might. I can’t recall the circumstances too precisely, but I seemed to get the feeling that if I kept sailing around on that boat with you some carelessness might occur. Forgive me, dear, but I’ve never quite seen you as a family man. Though I don’t know that that was it, either. Perhaps you were a little lax in your pursuit, I can’t seem to remember. At any rate, the fact that I wandered off and married Rudyard didn’t mean that everything we did wasn’t ‘all right,’ as you put it. I do think, considering the life you’ve led, you’d have stopped worrying about being all right by now.”

“I always worry about it,” Trevor said. “What else have I got to worry about? I’ve got plenty of money. Maggie’s daughter didn’t think I was very all right. I want you to marry me before I slip any farther. You and I wouldn’t have any trouble. What if the day comes when I can’t even get actresses? You don’t want that to happen to me, do you?”

“Of course not,” Aurora said. “I’m sure we’ve had this very conversation before, Trevor. I’m feeling a great deal of déjà vu and I don’t see why we’re having to wait for the second course. Food might help dispel my déjà vu. I only seem to suffer from it in your company, I might add. You have an unfortunate way of trying to get me to remember things I’ve forgotten. I never can, you know—all I can remember is this conversation. I really haven’t the faintest idea why I married Rudyard instead of you. I’m hardly a psychiatrist, and I do hope the day comes when you let me alone about it.”

“All right, marry me and I’ll never bring it up again,” Trevor said. “I’m sorry if I’m being ungentlemanly about it, but something’s come over me lately. Nothing seems to satisfy me. I guess it’s age.

“No, it’s your preoccupation with sport,” Aurora said. “You have something of a mind, dear, and you can’t expect it to remain content with the little you seem to want to offer it. I think you’ve sailed too many boats, caught too many fish, and shot too many animals. Not to mention what you may have done with too many women.”

“Yep, now the chickens are coming home to roost,” Trevor said, the same look of pain on his face. “You’re the only person left
who could satisfy me, Aurora. You always have been. You’ve got to marry me this time. If you get away again there’ll be nothing left to hope for. I might as well sail off into the sunset and never come back.”

Aurora was examining the lobster that had just arrived and, in a discreet way, smacking her lips. “Trevor, you know me,” she said. “I have a hard time concentrating on romance when there’s food before me. I do think you ought to avoid images like that, though—as well as misquotations. A dish for the gods is Shakespeare, not Byron, and a threat to sail into the sunset, however sincere and practical, is not apt to sway me. After all, you’ve spent most of your life in the sunset, for all I know. I think far better of your wines than I do of your imagery.”

“Aurora, I mean it,” Trevor said, taking her hand in both of his. Aurora immediately jerked her hand away and grabbed a fork with it.

“Trevor, propose to me as much as you like, but don’t try to hold hands with me while I’m handling silverware,” she said.

“Without you I have no hope,” Trevor said, a good deal of his soul in his eyes. Aurora looked over, noticed the soul, and gave him a bite of her lobster, since he had so far ignored his own.

“I think you’re being a little shortsighted, dear,” Aurora said. “It’s the fact that I won’t marry you that preserves your hopes. If I did marry you I’d just be your wife. There’s nothing very hopeful in that, that I can see. But as long as I remain free, then you can remain perpetually hopeful and I can get the pleasure of your company once in a while, when I need it, and we can go right on, year after year, with our romance.”

“But I worry,” Trevor said. “I get off at sea with some woman or other and I begin to worry. I think, What if I come back and Aurora’s married? It even throws off my aim. I was missing grouse in Scotland the last time I was there, and I never miss grouse. For some reason every time one flew up I had a vision of you in a marriage ceremony. Couldn’t hit a thing.”

“Oh, dear,” Aurora said. “You’re the first person whose aim I’ve thrown off. If it will help any I can assure you I have no intention of marrying. I’d miss our little romance if I did, and I don’t like missing things.”

“That doesn’t help any,” Trevor said. “You married Rudyard and that didn’t interrupt us. We were already interrupted. Nothing will make me stop worrying.”

Aurora shrugged. The lobster was wonderful. “Worry, then,” she said.

Trevor began to eat. “Actually, there is one thing that might stop my worrying,” he said.

“I was sure there was,” Aurora said. He handled a knife and fork with grace—he always had—and the sight made her reflective, or at least as reflective as it was possible for her to be, while she was eating. It did seem strange in retrospect that she had left such a well-bred fun-loving man as Trevor for a person such as Rud, who could have eaten pimento cheese sandwiches every night of his life and not complained. Rud knew about good food, he knew where to get it and what it should taste like, but, except in the brief period of their courtship, he had never made much of an effort to secure it. Trevor’s appetites were clearly more of a match for hers, and always had been, and it was not a little odd that she had felt no urge, then or ever, to marry him.

“We’ll talk about all that later,” Trevor said, reaching under the table to give her leg a friendly squeeze. “I want you to see the way I’ve fixed up my boat.”

“Describe it to me,” Aurora said. “It isn’t likely I’ll be able to risk a boat ride after eating so much. Besides, you’ve not told me about your women of the year. You’re the only man I know who leads an interesting life, and I don’t know why you want to thwart my curiosity this way.”