The Evening Star (22 page)

“I’m a pessimist because I’m old and useless,” the General said. “We’ll see how optimistic you are when you’re my age.

Despite his spiffy appearance, he did look shockingly old to her at times. For years her eyes had lit up at the sight of General Scott in a uniform, or General Scott in one of his crisp summer suits; not every man wore clothes as well as Hector. But now he didn’t so much wear them as huddle in them, issuing gloomy statements.

The General happened to glance out his window and he saw a little green sign on the lawn of a house they were passing. It said, “Dr. J. Bruckner, Therapist.” Aurora sailed right on past the house.

“Whoa,” the General said. “You just passed our doctor’s office.”

Aurora looked out her window and saw nothing on either side of the street except ugly little suburban houses. It was certainly not the sort of block where she supposed their psychoanalyst would have his practice. She had envisioned a tasteful glass office building, with good carpeting and discreet receptionists. There were hundreds of such tasteful glass buildings in Houston, many of them housing doctors. Certainly it would be a lot easier to sort through the tangle of Hector’s psyche if the sorting were taking place in a tasteful building with possibly a bank or two in it.

“Stop, I said,” the General said. “You passed the house.”

“We’re not looking for a house, Hector—we’re looking for a doctor’s office,” Aurora said.

“I know, we just passed it, I’ve now told you that three times,” the General said. “You’ll have to turn around.”

“Not until I spot a building that looks as if it ought to have a doctor’s office in it, I’m not,” Aurora said. “This is the kind of street salaried people live on—I don’t think we’ll find a respected psychoanalyst installed among a lot of salaried people.”

“What a ridiculous snob you are,” the General said. “I’m
telling you again, we just passed Dr. Bruckner’s house. He had a sign on his lawn. I read it plain as day. It said ‘Therapist,’ and therapy is what we’re after. We’re getting farther and farther from it every second. Couldn’t you try being reasonable, for once?”

“Hector, I’ve been to doctors before, I know what a doctor’s office is supposed to look like,” Aurora said. “An analyst is only a sort of doctor.”

In explaining her position, Aurora ran a red light, and unfortunately a patrol car happened to be lurking right at the intersection.

“Now you’ve done it,” Hector said, as the patrol car swung into action and began to make a loud sound and to blink a bright light. Aurora gave up and started to ease toward the curb, but she didn’t ease quite close enough to suit the patrolman, who instructed her several times, through his loudspeaker, to pull over.

“He wants you to pull over,” Hector said, to her intense irritation. Whenever she got into difficulties with the traffic police Hector invariably took the patrolman’s side—she had almost broken up with him over this issue several times, and she now began to wish she
had
broken up with him. If she had, not only would she not have to watch her own lover cravenly ally himself with the authorities, but she wouldn’t have to see him huddling in his suit, looking infinitely old.

“Hector, for your information, I
am
over,” Aurora said. “It’s not gallant of you to pick on me when I’m in trouble, either.”

“If you’d done what I told you and turned around five blocks back you wouldn’t
be
in trouble,” Hector informed her. “If you won’t listen to me, what can I do?”

Aurora, who had had a lifelong phobia about scraping her tires against the curb, eased gradually nearer the sidewalk, expecting to hear a hideous scraping sound at any moment.

“Please get out of the car!” the officer behind her said several times through his bullhorn.

“Why do you think he wants me to get out of my car?”
Aurora wondered. “They rarely insist that I leave my car. Do you think he’s going to shoot me just for running a red light?”

“He probably thinks you’re some kind of maniac, but he’s not going to shoot you,” the General said.

“Hector, why would he think I’m a maniac?” Aurora asked, extracting herself from her seat belt and opening her door. Unfortunately she had not yet put her car in Park, and was continuing to drift slowly curbward. When she noticed her error she slammed the gear shift over to Park, causing the car to stop abruptly. Hector, who had his seat belt on, jerked forward but didn’t quite bump his head.

“I don’t know about him, but J think you’re some kind of maniac,” the General said. “We
are
on our way to a psychiatrist and it’s a goddamn good thing. We probably should have gone years ago.”

Aurora got out of her car with as much dignity as possible, only to be confronted with a small redheaded policeman who looked at her skeptically, as they all did; though, actually, once she focused on him, she noticed that his skepticism seemed to be mainly directed at her car, which, much to her surprise, was still quite some distance from the curb.

“That’s not exactly what I call pulling over,” the patrolman said. “If this was a time of day when there was much traffic you’d be obstructing it. Have your eyes been checked recently?”

For a moment Aurora couldn’t quite grasp what he meant: people checked their coats, but why would anyone check their eyes? Then she realized that the redheaded officer had merely spoken imprecisely: he was attempting to inquire about her vision.

“My vision is fine, thank you, Officer,” she said. “It’s just that I have a little phobia about scraping my tires against the curb. In fact, that’s why I was hurrying to my doctor, to see if he could do something about my phobia.”

“Is that why you ran the red light?” the officer asked. “Is this some kind of medical emergency?”

“Why, yes, it could be considered in that light,” Aurora
said. “As you can see yourself, I have quite a serious phobia. I’m nowhere near that curb, but I assure you that in my head I heard a kind of continual screech, such as tires make when you scrape them. An imaginary screech of that intensity can be quite distracting, I assure you.”

The small policeman looked at her wryly and shook his head.

“Nice try,” he said, and began to write her a ticket for running the red light.

“Not nice enough, evidently,” Aurora said. “If you’re going to give me a ticket the least you can do is help me find my doctor’s office. His name is Bruckner and he’s a psychoanalyst. I’m very hopeful that he can help me with my phobia.”

“I hope so too,” the officer said. “Otherwise the next time you run a red light and don’t bother to pull over you’ll probably get a double ticket, one for the light and one for blocking traffic.”

“Do you know where Dr. Bruckner’s office is, at least?” Aurora asked, feeling rather incensed.

“Yes, you just passed it,” the officer said, handing her the ticket. “Once you turn around it’ll be on the left, about three blocks back. It’s a little green house with a sign in the yard. Please try to stop at the stoplights, ma’am.”

Aurora got in her car and immediately executed a sweeping U-turn, right in front of the patrolman, who watched her skeptically, it seemed to her.

The General, too, watched her skeptically, although the light in front of her was red, and she politely stopped at it.

“I’m not sure U-turns are legal in Bellaire,” he said, but the look in Aurora’s eye—a look with which he was long familiar—advised him that it would not be wise to raise too many questions about legalities in Bellaire—not just at that moment, at least.

“Hector, we must look for a little green house with a sign in the yard,” Aurora said. “I expect it will appear on our left at some point.”

“That’s right,” the General said.

“No, not right—left!” Aurora insisted.

“I meant right in the sense of correct,” the General informed her. “The word has more than one meaning, you know.”

“Hector, I’m merely trying to follow the officer’s directions,” Aurora said, “I don’t want to get into the question of multiple meanings. I’m sure our analyst may want to, but I don’t.”

“Aurora, there it is, right there—see!” the General said, pointing excitedly as they approached the house. “It’s the one I tried to get you to stop at in the first place.”

Aurora looked and saw a more or less normal ugly green ranch-style suburban house. Reluctantly she executed yet another sweeping U-turn and pulled into the driveway.

“What a disappointment!” she said. “Why would a respected psychoanalyst from Vienna live in a dump like this?”

“It’s a perfectly normal house,” the General observed. “People have to live somewhere, you know. Anyway, we’re hiring him for his brain—who cares what kind of house he lives in?”

“I care,” Aurora confessed. “I suppose it’s silly of me, but I can’t help it. I just had rather a different image of what Dr. Bruckner’s office might look like.” She sighed.

“Now don’t start sighing,” the General said. “We’ve decided to do this and let’s try to go into it with a positive attitude.”

Aurora sighed again.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep sighing,” the General said. “I hate it when you sigh. Why do you have to sigh so much?”

“Because you’re the last person who should criticize me for the lack of a positive attitude,” Aurora said. “I’ve met virtually every day of the last twenty years with a positive attitude—even a cheerful attitude, in most cases. And a lot of good it’s done me.”

The General, feeling trapped, said nothing.

“I feel like crying,” Aurora announced, to his horror.

“Aurora, we’re at the doctor’s office,” the General said.
“We’re parked in his driveway. He’s probably looking out the window at us right now, wondering why we don’t come in. Don’t cry now.”

“Well, I feel like it,” Aurora said again. “The thought of all my wasted cheerfulness makes me want to cry.”

“It wasn’t wasted,” the General said. He was feeling a little desperate.

“It was—you never stopped being depressed,” Aurora said, beginning to cry. “All my cheerful attitudes just got smashed on your depressions. You’re the most negative man I’ve ever known. I wish I hadn’t even thought of psychoanalysis, because I know it won’t work. None of the thousands of things I’ve suggested we do together have ever worked, and it’s because you don’t like anything and you don’t want to do anything, and if I persist and work up some gallant little initiative, you smash it.”

She cried briefly; the General felt too crushed and guilty to say a word. He racked his brain, trying to think of some gallant initiative of Aurora’s that he had actually responded to—something that had worked out well. But just at the moment his mind was blank, and he couldn’t come up with anything.

After one or two bursts, Aurora’s crying subsided.

“The last thing you should ever do is accuse me of lacking a positive attitude,” she said, wiping her eyes. “
You
lack a positive attitude—you, you, you!”

“Well, you lack a few things too,” the General countered. “Are we ever going to go in and be psychoanalyzed, are or we just going to sit in this man’s driveway all morning and have our usual quarrels?”

“I guess we must go in,” Aurora said, screwing the rear-view mirror around so she could hastily repair her eyes. “I doubt I would have cried when I was looking so nice if I hadn’t been cruelly disappointed in this man’s house. I’m so disappointed in it I hardly feel like letting him psychoanalyze me now.”

“Aurora, we’re here, let’s try it, at least,” the General said. “The man’s expecting us.”

“People often expect things that don’t happen,” Aurora said. “Look at me. I’ve been expecting happiness on a daily basis all my life. But the days keep passing, and where is it?”

Somehow they pulled themselves together, walked up the driveway, and rang the bell. The door opened immediately, before Aurora had quite finished composing herself. I’m not quite ready for this, she thought, when she saw the door opening. So many things in life happened before one was quite ready: Emma, for example, had been born two weeks early, before she was quite ready, and she had always supposed that this slight prematureness was what had caused her to be such a nervous mother, at least for the first few years. She preferred to be quite ready before things happened, but all too often they began to happen anyway while she was getting inwardly prepared for them; and that was just what was occurring with her psychoanalyst’s door. It was opening, though she was not quite ready.

In the door stood a rumpled man, perhaps in his early forties, with a shock of graying hair and the largest, saddest brown eyes Aurora had ever looked into. He was wearing a corduroy coat with patched elbows, and Levi’s, but the shock of seeing a doctor in Levi’s was offset by the look in his eyes—a look that was far more welcoming than the look in most doctors’ eyes.

Looking back on her time with Jerry Bruckner, after his death, Aurora felt it had all happened because from the first moment he had made her feel welcome—immediately and completely welcome—to a degree that no man, before him or after him, had ever done.

“Howdy, I’m Jerry Bruckner, come on in,” the doctor said. He had a rather husky voice.

“Howdy?” Aurora asked, stepping inside. “Do psychiatrists from Vienna really say howdy?”

“Probably not, but who said I was from Vienna?” Jerry Bruckner asked, shaking the General’s hand.

“That’s fine with me, I hate Austria,” the General said.

“But I thought you must be,” Aurora insisted, though her
vision of a classical psychoanalysis was rapidly slipping away. “The name sounds so Viennese.”

The doctor looked slightly amused.

“I’m from Las Vegas, Nevada,” he said. “I doubt there are too many psychiatrists in Houston who are actually from Vienna.”

“No, but there can’t be vast numbers from Las Vegas, either,” Aurora commented, looking around the waiting room, which was nothing more than a rather shabby living room with an orange couch that needed recovering along one wall.

“I should get that couch recovered,” Dr. Bruckner said, echoing her very thought.

“Goodness, you just read my mind,” Aurora said, smiling at him. “I hope you’ll do that some more.” She immediately forgave his living room, as she had forgiven the Levi’s. He had a nice smile—and a nice smile meant a lot.