The Evening Star (11 page)

“I just meant it was too bad you didn’t have a more agreeable evening,” he said, and then he began to hum a patriotic tune, something he had taken to doing with increasing frequency in moments of stress. Since almost all moments were now moments of stress, he found himself doing a good deal of humming.

In this case the patriotic tune he started to hum was “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” a tune he associated with the Second World War, though it seemed to him he had also heard it a good many times during the Korean engagement.

“Stop that stupid humming, Hector,” Aurora said. “Every time you fumble the ball nowadays you start humming unrecognizable melodies from your distant youth. I much prefer
that you just admit that you fumbled the ball, as you did. Humming, as you prefer to engage in it, won’t help you recover many fumbles, if I’m using the right terminology.”

“That wasn’t an unrecognizable melody,” the General protested. “That was ‘There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere.’”

“Shut up about the stupid song,” Aurora said. “Didn’t you just imply that you wished I’d slept with Pascal?”

“Of course I didn’t imply it,” the General said. “I didn’t imply any such a goddamn thing.”

It occurred to him that perhaps he had implied it, but if so, what was to be gained by admitting it?

“Then what did you mean when you said it was too bad that nothing more sinister happened between Pascal and myself this evening?” Aurora asked. “Were you hoping he’d murder me? Was that what you meant was too bad, that he didn’t murder me?”

“Aurora, I just woke up,” the General said. “I don’t know what I meant. I probably said something stupid. We quarrel all day as it is—do we have to quarrel all night, too?”

“Get out from under me, Hector,” Aurora said. He seemed to be trying to wedge himself underneath her—it was another of his new habits.

“And stop lying, too,” she added. “My hearing has not deserted me, thank you, and I very distinctly heard a remark suggesting that I am now free to seduce my admirers willy-nilly, and furthermore that I can count on your sympathy, if one lets me down, shall we say?”

“I thought I was supposed to be sympathetic to whatever happened to you,” the General said. “You’re always complaining about my lack of sympathy, but the second I show some I get attacked. I’d like to know what the rule is. Am I supposed to chortle with glee every time some fool disappoints you?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I expect you to do,” Aurora said. “You’ve hounded me with your jealousies for more years than I can remember, and I won’t have you wimping out now.”

“Doing what, now?” the General asked.

“Wimpery, wimping out,” Aurora said. “It’s something Melanie often complains about. Now that it’s happened to me I’ve decided that it’s a very useful term.”

“What’s it supposed to mean?” the General asked.

“It suggests a failure in the area of manly behavior,” Aurora said.

“Oh, impotence,” the General replied. “Here we go again. If that’s what you’re complaining about, why not call a spade a spade?”

“Because in fact that wasn’t what I was complaining about, Hector,” Aurora said. “I was speaking of a certain desertion of principles, where I am concerned. Annoying as your principles have always been, I still expect you to hew to them. You’re not French, you know, and you are not required to adopt a French attitude toward my infidelities. When I behave badly I expect wrath, not sympathy.”

“Your what?” the General asked, suddenly sitting up in bed. “I didn’t know you committed any goddamn infidelities. I thought you said nothing happened.”

“Nothing did, but that’s because Pascal is a fool,” Aurora said, glancing at him to see what, if any, effect she might be having.

“I know he’s a fool, I’ve been telling you that for five years,” General Scott said. “What does that have to do with what we’re talking about?”

“Merely that I had every intention of seducing him on the sofa,” Aurora said lightly.

“You what!” the General said. Despite the heated argument he found himself in, his head felt cold, and he leaned out of bed and tried to reach his nightcap with one of his crutches, hoping to drag the nightcap within reach. Unfortunately Aurora had heaved it nearly into the bathroom, and he couldn’t retrieve it.

“Well, you’ve always had a lot of goddamn cheek,” the General said. “Now my head’s cold. I might get pneumonia and die, in which case I have no doubt that you’ll immediately start screwing some little fop from Europe right here
where I’m lying. You won’t have to bother about sofas if I get pneumonia and die.”

Aurora retreated into an aloof silence, her favorite form of silence.

“Too goddamn much cheek,” the General repeated. He wanted his nightcap, but he didn’t quite want it badly enough to get out of bed, which was now nicely warmed by Aurora’s body, and he didn’t want to ask her to get it for him, either. Asking her to get his nightcap for him was one of those things he just didn’t want to do.

“How long have you been planning this little seduction?” he asked. “I thought you were acting odd, but I never thought you’d go that far, with Melly and me right upstairs.”

“I didn’t plan it at all, my demon just happened to escape,” Aurora said. “I assure you I long ago learned the folly of planning, where men are concerned. One can plan till one faints and still be very likely to draw a blank.”

At the thought of all the blanks she had drawn in her life, Aurora suddenly felt overwhelmed. She sighed her sigh and put her face in her hands.

“What’s the point?” she said. “Everything I’ve ever done has failed.”

The General gave up on his nightcap. He hated to see Aurora sad at any time, but he particularly hated it when she slipped into one of her everything-I’ve-ever-done-has-failed moods, which seemed to him to come over her much more frequently now. Probably that was his fault. Probably everything was his fault. He should have gone to Masters and Johnson’s clinic in St. Louis the minute he began to have trouble getting it up; he had suggested that very thing to Aurora, but at the time she wouldn’t hear of it. She said it would be far better for them to enjoy a peaceful old age than for him to involve himself with sex doctors. But a year and a half had slipped by, and they weren’t enjoying a peaceful old age at all—they quarreled day and night, and Aurora spent half her time sighing or deciding that her whole life had been a failure, or crying or sulking or being anything but the jolly woman he had known for so long. Very likely it was all his
fault; he should have overruled her and headed straight for Masters and Johnson at the first sign of trouble. Sammy, his friend in Rancho Mirage, had gone to a sex doctor of some sort when he began to flag, and the doctor had turned Sammy right around and made it possible for him to continue his pursuit of bimbos.

“I knew I should have gone to Masters and Johnson,” the General said. “Here you are, a comparatively young, lively woman, stuck with an old geezer who has to wear a nightcap. In my youth they had these goat-gland operations—they advertised them as gorilla glands, but I think they were really just goat glands. They wouldn’t have been able to catch that many gorillas, for one thing. My Uncle Mike had one of those goat-gland operations—he had to go to Mexico to get it—but it must have worked. Uncle Mike got married several times after that. If he weren’t dead I’d call him up and ask him about it. With all these transfers and transplants they do now I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve improved the goat-gland operation.”

“Hector, go to sleep before I strangle you, like Pascal tried to do me,” Aurora said, taking her face out of her hands. “Why would you think I’d be interested in receiving the products of alien glands?”

“It might be better than receiving no products at all,” the General said. He was thinking how nice it would be to go to Mexico for a few days—he had always liked Mexico, anyway—and come back potent. That prospect intrigued him so much that it took a moment for him to react to the fact that Aurora had said Pascal tried to strangle her.

“Did you say he tried to strangle you?” he asked. “Tried to strangle you how?”

“With his hands, Hector, a common method,” Aurora said, glad that the gland issue had been disposed of. It had come up frequently during the months of Hector’s decline. Evidently his Uncle Mike had made a big impression on him, although in her view several marriages might point more readily to the failure of such a method than to its success.

“Let’s see your neck,” the General said, turning on the bed
light. He had to put on his glasses to see her neck clearly; and when he did put on his glasses he could see nothing out of the ordinary about her neck, or about the bosom just below it. Now that he had his glasses on, he rather preferred to look at the bosom.

“He doesn’t seem to have done you much damage,” he said.

“No, he has small French hands—he’s virtually hopeless as a strangler,” Aurora said. “I wish you’d stop leering.”

“Well, why’d he do it?” the General asked, reluctantly turning off the light.

“When I saw he was going to thwart me I became merciless,” Aurora said. “As you know yourself, I can ill abide being thwarted.”

“It probably fired him up, though,” the General said. “He’s a lot younger than I am. I doubt he would have got as far as strangling you if he wasn’t pretty fired up.

“I wish you liked the Midwest more,” he said; his mind reverted to Masters and Johnson. It was a pity Aurora didn’t approve of the Midwest. If there was only some way to get her interested in St. Louis, or even Chicago, he might be able to slip in a few visits to Masters and Johnson. A few visits might well be enough—with science advancing practically every day, fixing him up might be a simple matter. Obviously Aurora was never going to sit still for the goat glands, but perhaps now they had pills or injections or something.

While he was thinking of sights Aurora might possibly want to see in the Midwest—he had given up on the Gateway Arch; whenever he mentioned it, she yawned—he grew tired and went back to sleep sitting up, with his mouth open.

Aurora felt relieved—quarreling about sex or the lack of it with Hector in the middle of the night was not her favorite way to spend the middle of the night. Far better to read Proust, or merely sit with the light off looking out the window at the moon above the streetlight, fantasizing about a time when Tommy might be out of prison, when Teddy and Jane might be back in school, when Melanie might be happily
married. If even one of those fantasies would come true, she could sleep at night rather than spending so much of it staring and fretting.

Meanwhile they weren’t coming true, and there was Hector. When he was asleep she found she still occasionally had nice feelings for him, even if he happened to be sleeping with his mouth open. Cranky and irritating as he was, at least he was there beside her and was sort of staying the course—not an easy course, she knew, and not one too many men would have wanted to stay. It was something, and, when she thought about it, it still touched her.

She got up, went around the bed, and found his nightcap, which she managed to get back on his head. Then she turned back the covers and began to try and scoot him into a reclining position; it was difficult but it was also necessary. He had gone to sleep sitting straight up: the military posture that had once thrilled her so was now something of a burden—depending on which way he tipped, he could easily fall out of bed, and if there was one thing Aurora was sure of at that hour, it was that the two of them didn’t need any more broken bones.

9

In Huntsville, in his cell, seeing that Joey, his cellmate, had finally gone to sleep, Tommy got his notebook from under his bunk and began to work on his code. Teddy, his brother, was the only one who knew that he was devising a code in which to write a book about prison life that would freak out the world.

“Why a code?” Teddy had asked, when Tommy first mentioned his plan. In fact, Teddy was thrilled that Tommy was interested enough in life even to contemplate the creation of something as ambitious as a code.

Since Tommy had been about fifteen, his only ambition had been to have no ambition. His main way of being himself was to refuse to try to do anything that society might consider worthwhile. Teddy considered Tommy to be the brightest person he knew—he was even brighter than Jane, and Jane would have graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr if she hadn’t gone crazy one semester before graduation. But for all his brightness, Tommy had barely graduated from high school and had refused to stay in college more than a few weeks. He just wouldn’t try: he felt that all ambition was
cooperation, and that cooperation was corrupt. At one point Teddy had engaged Tommy in many conversations about ambition and corruption and the capitalistic system, as well as all sorts of matters related to trying, and he was convinced that his brother was absolutely pure in his beliefs, which meant that he would never try anything. Teddy had been the one person in the family who wasn’t shocked when Tommy killed Julie. Though he had never told anyone his deepest suspicion—not even Jane—Teddy didn’t really believe the official account of the killing, which was that Tommy got rattled in an argument over drugs and accidentally shot Julie instead of the dope dealer she was then going with. Teddy had never seen Tommy get rattled enough to shoot the wrong person in a quarrel. In Teddy’s view, Tommy probably shot Julie because she had sold out and betrayed the no-ambition ideals they shared, or seemed to share, when they were first going together. Julie wasn’t pure; she was conniving. She wanted money, and lots of it. Teddy had never liked her and didn’t mourn her—she just wasn’t smart enough to deal with a person as dedicated to silence and nothingness as his brother Tommy. She should have known Tommy would kill her if she didn’t stay out of his way. Tommy didn’t try to make disciples, but of course he wasn’t absolutely smart in
all
areas of life: he had been hustled by girls more than once.

Tommy had gone almost a decade, all through the latter part of his adolescence, hardly doing a single thing to further himself in the world. Twice he had starved himself to the point where he had to be institutionalized and force-fed. He only permitted himself actions that he perceived to be essentially terroristic—such as selling cocaine to white upper-middle-class kids. Tommy believed that white upper-middle-class kids were the trash of the planet; helping them destroy themselves seemed to him a worthwhile goal. He was no rabid ecologist, no particular friend of the planet, but he did consider that turning rich white kids into mindless freaks was the sort of service that he shouldn’t disdain.