The Evening Star (26 page)

By the middle of his second year as a practicing, if unlicensed, therapist, Jerry had gained confidence enough to put a tiny one-line ad in the Yellow Pages. After the first rush, passerby traffic had slowly trickled off. After all, only so many people with really terrible problems—so terrible that they would just whip over to the curb at the sight of a sign saying “Therapy”—would have any reason to be driving
along his little street in Bellaire, Texas. It seemed time to cast a slightly wider net.

Jerry cast it, and the third person who called, once the ad appeared in the Yellow Pages, was Aurora Greenway.

3

“You’re falling in love with that young man—don’t think I can’t tell,” the General said, watching Aurora dress. Aurora was singing, as she frequently did, and he didn’t know whether she heard him. He had been meaning to bring up the subject of her new love for some time, but somehow his courage always deserted him at the last moment.

So he brought it up while she was singing, half hoping that she wouldn’t hear him.

“That’s why you didn’t want me to keep on being psychoanalyzed,” he added.

He liked Dr. Bruckner fine and didn’t really mind all that much that Aurora had a crush on him, but he had rather enjoyed chatting with the young man the four times they had gone together, and Aurora’s crush meant that now he was denied a pleasant outing. Though Aurora had always been a terrible driver, she, and no one else he had ever ridden with, had driven as badly as she managed to drive on their visits to Dr. Bruckner. It was obvious to him that she was driving so terribly in order to discourage him from going with her. He
had
stopped going with her, but now he regretted
his decision. There was nothing to do at home—at least nothing that he had not already done a hundred times. Driving to Bellaire and chatting with Jerry Bruckner had been something new to do—at least it would be, if Aurora could just get him there alive. If not, being dead would be what he had to do, and being dead was pretty soon going to be what he had to do anyway. He didn’t want to rush it by getting in a car wreck, but at the same time he felt a growing resentment of Aurora for being so selfish and denying him his little outings.

“I don’t get many outings, you know,” he said. Aurora had stopped singing, but she was still humming, and she had given no indication that she had heard his thrust about her being in love with Jerry Bruckner.

“Are you going to answer, or are you just going to pretend that you didn’t hear the question?” the General asked finally, when his patience had begun to wear thin.

“What you said was a statement, not a question,” Aurora said. “I heard it perfectly well, but, as you know, I prefer not to have annoying statements made to me while I’m singing my arias. Now that I look back down the years, I think we would have had a better life together if you hadn’t so frequently insisted on making annoying statements while I was singing.”

“I have to make statements sometime,” the General said. “If you’re not singing you’re napping, or if you’re not napping you’re gone, or if you’re not gone you’re cooking or eating or we’re quarreling or something.

“Anyway, I don’t know what you think was so annoying about my statement,” he added. “I just pointed out that you’re falling in love with Jerry.”

“Yes, Hector, but the problem of you saying that to me while I’m singing is that it poses a number of questions, and in order to consider any one of them, I have to stop singing, which I wasn’t ready to do,” Aurora said.

A moment before, when she was singing, Aurora had been looking happy, but the General saw to his concern that she was no longer looking quite so happy. She didn’t look angry with him, which was the way she had often looked in the last
few years, but neither did she look as happy as she had looked while she was singing.

The change in her demeanor made him regret that he had spoken.

“I’m not mad at you about it,” he said. “I guess I was just thinking out loud.”

Aurora had slipped into one of her silences, or seemed about to slip into one, and he was willing to apologize or do almost anything else, if only she wouldn’t slip into one of her silences. Her silences terrified him—always had. Now she was looking out her bedroom window, a sure sign that a silence might be gathering, but when he said he wasn’t mad at her she turned and smiled at him. It was not one of her stunningly happy smiles, but it was a smile, at least, and not a silence.

“What an odd thing for my old boyfriend to be thinking out loud,” she said.

“Well, what’s so odd about it?” the General asked, relieved that she was at least talking. “If you’re falling in love with Jerry, why wouldn’t I be thinking about it?”

“You’ve never been exactly the compliant type,” Aurora said. “If I’m falling in love with Jerry and you’re not mad, what am I to take that to mean? That you’re too far gone to care?”

“Aurora, I’ll always care,” the General said. “You don’t have to put it so brutally. I can’t help it if I’m this far gone.”

“So you
are
going to be mad if it turns out that I’m in love with Jerry, is that what you mean?” Aurora asked, with a flash of spirit.

“I don’t know if I’ll be mad—I don’t know what I’ll be,” the General said. “What can I do about it if I do care?”

“The act of caring is doing something—will you never understand that?” Aurora said. Her bosom was heaving and she looked as if she were about to become very angry.

“I don’t want you to beat me, if that’s how you interpret caring,” she said. “But I don’t see why I can’t know whether you care.”

“Why do we always end up talking about whether I care?” the General asked—he felt a strong sense of déjà vu.

“That’s simple—because it’s so hard to tell if you do!” Aurora said. “You’ve tolerated a lot of my admirers. More than once I expected you to leave me because of them, but you didn’t.”

She fell silent for a moment, making an attempt to calm down. The General had no idea what to say.

“That is, I expected you to leave me when you could still walk,” she added, in a more kindly tone.

“Well, now I can’t walk very well, and I’m not going to leave you,” the General said. “You’ll have to pack me off if you want to get rid of me.”

He waited for a response, but Aurora said nothing. She seemed to be thinking, a fact the General could not help but be alarmed by. Even when Aurora was angriest, he would rather she speak, not think. When she was thinking, all he could do was dread all the awful things she might say or do when she resumed talking.

“Are you going to pack me off so you can live with Jerry?” he asked. The thought was in his mind that that was just what she might do if she was in love with the young doctor, as he was pretty sure she was.

“What makes you think I’m in love with anyone?” Aurora asked, fixing him with a stern look. Her eyes got larger when she was stern. At the moment they were very large and very green.

Looking into her angry eyes, the General wished that he had managed to suppress his last remark—in fact, he wished he could take back all his remarks, all that he had made in the last few minutes, and perhaps most of the remarks he had made over the last few years. He should never have brought up Jerry Bruckner, or anything else, for that matter. In a sense, that was the story of his life with Aurora: he should never have brought anything up. Time after time, when he ventured to open his mouth, the next thing he knew she was looking at him out of large, angry green eyes.

“You’re just looking happier lately, or something,” he suggested mildly.

Aurora said nothing. She continued to look straight into his eyes in the unnerving way she had.

The General tried to think of something he might say that would at least cause her to break her silence. He hated it when Aurora became silent. Sharp as her responses could be, they were still preferable to her silences.

“You look like you’re enjoying life more,” he added. “You’ve got your fun back, or something. There was a time when you didn’t seem to have your sense of fun anymore.”

“I see,” Aurora said. “And you think I could only have got my sense of fun back by falling in love with Dr. Bruckner, is that what you’re saying?”

“Oh, go to hell, you’re driving me crazy!” the General said, exasperated. “I won’t sit here and be badgered like this. You always come back from your therapy looking happy, and I just thought you might be in love with Jerry, that’s all. If you’re not, you’re not—can’t we just forget I ever mentioned it?”

“Nope,” Aurora said, but in a more friendly, less exasperating tone. “I have to train my memory, you know. Therapy requires one to have a good memory, and besides therapy, there’s my memory project.”

“Good lord, are you still thinking about that?” the General said. “Do you seriously think you can crank your memory up to the point where you can remember every day of your life?”

“Not unassisted, perhaps,” Aurora said. “But then I’m not unassisted. I have quite extensive records, and I absolutely intend to remember every day of my life. My project wouldn’t be off to a very good start if I did what you just suggested.”

“What do you mean, what I just suggested?” the General said. He knew he had said a number of things in the course of the conversation, but he had no idea which ones he might have said five minutes before.

“That was when you suggested that the only possible source of my renewed sense of fun was that I’ve fallen in love with Jerry Bruckner.”

“Oh,” the General said. “I didn’t say that five minutes ago. “We’ve been talking about it for a goddamn hour at least, and you still won’t admit it.”

“It?” Aurora asked. “Is ‘it’ supposed to refer to your quaint notion that I’ve fallen in love with my doctor?”

“Right,” the General said. “If you’d just admitted it right off, we wouldn’t have had this interminable quarrel, which feels like it’s going to go on for the rest of my life.

“Most of our goddamn quarrels have felt like they were going to go on for the rest of my life,” he added, recalling all the times when he had that sensation while quarreling with Aurora.

Aurora smiled—a happier smile than any he had seen from her since the quarrel began.

“It’s true that I sometimes have to quarrel at length with you, Hector,” she said. “Life’s just that way. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes lengthy quarrels are the only means I have of determining what you feel.”

“That’s a goddamn lie,” the General said, feeling his gorge rise. “I always tell you every goddamn thing I feel, and I always tell you immediately.”

“If there was a God I expect he’d strike you dead for a lie of that magnitude,” Aurora said. “You’ve obviously waited days, or perhaps weeks, to bring forth your theory about my being in love with my doctor.”

The General had to admit that that was true, though he didn’t admit it out loud. He had suspected almost from the first that Aurora might fall in love with Jerry, but he had quietly kept his suspicions to himself.

“I was trying to wait for the right moment to bring it up,” the General said.

“In that case, you didn’t wait long enough,” Aurora said. “You brought it up while I was singing, and now we’re having this quarrel.”

“We’re not going to be having it much longer,” the General assured her. “The reason we’re not is because I’m sick of it. Just answer yes or no. Are you in love with him or not?”

“Not, as it happens,” Aurora said, highly amused.

“You’re not?” the General said, very surprised. He had expected her to admit it with her usual brashness—the brashness she always displayed when they were discussing her other men.

“No, not as yet, at least,” Aurora said.

The General thought that over for a moment and decided he didn’t like the sound of it.

“That’s not very reassuring,” he said. “When
are
you going to fall in love with him? Tomorrow? Next week? If you’re going to fall in love with him you might as well go ahead and do it.”

“Yes, but one can’t just go and do that sort of thing,” Aurora said pleasantly. “I try to be brisk whenever I can, but falling in love is not one of the things one can be brisk about.”

“I hate it when we quarrel,” the General said. “I wish I’d never asked.”

“I know. You’d think you’d learn what to ask and what not to ask, but you never do, dear,” Aurora said. Then, seeing that her old boyfriend looked quite exhausted, she took his hand for a bit to show that she meant no harm.

4

The day Aurora decided that the time had come to allow Pascal to seduce her, she let him make her lunch in his apartment, but restricted him, to his annoyance, to one glass of wine. She had never allowed him to feed her in his apartment before, and Pascal, convinced that his moment had finally arrived, was beside himself with excitement. He would have liked a little more wine, both to calm his nerves and to go with the excellent lamb he had cooked. Aurora devoured the lamb and his
crème brulée
with relish, but was adamant about the wine.

“But why not?” Pascal asked, annoyed.

“Because I say not,” Aurora said, eating the last bite of her
crème brulée.
She looked him in the eye and wiped her mouth.

“I’ve often had my fun spoiled by intemperance,” she told him. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had any fun, and I’m not about to have it spoiled just because you’re nervous about sex and want to glug a lot of wine.”

“I’m not nervous about sex—I’ll strangle you again!” Pascal said, furious for an instant. He shot up from his chair as if
he’d been sitting on a coil and a wrestling match ensued, during which Aurora, at several points, had great difficulty suppressing her sense of comedy. The new mauve sheets Pascal had so hoped to impress her with were no help in her effort to keep from laughing, but she did end up between them with him, only to discover at the moment of entry that something about the entry was a little different from any entry she had ever experienced.

“Whoa,” she said, twisting a little. “What’s wrong here? We’re not getting a perfect fit.”

“I’ll explain, it happened when I was a boy,” Pascal said. “I’ll correct.” And he did correct, shifting himself atop her right leg. Aurora felt slightly puzzled, but otherwise, there they were. Pascal was wild in his happiness, the fit improved once he was lying on her leg, and she soon went a bit wild herself.