The Evening Star (6 page)

“No, I forgot you had a conclusion,” he said simply. “I’m glad you’re in a better mood.”

“Too bad for you, now I’m not in it anymore,” Aurora said, although the thought of gumbo and the pleasing ceremony of dinner and the fact that she was dressed and looked nice perked her up more than she was ready to admit.

“You don’t deserve my conclusion but I’ll give it to you anyway,” she added. “My conclusion is that from now on, when we’re angry, we should just slug it out till one of us drops.”

Now that he was convinced she was in a good mood, the General was not particularly interested in her conclusion.

“You mean have fist fights?” he asked mildly. “How’d you come up with that one?”

“You see, you don’t take me seriously,” Aurora said. “As it happens, I don’t take you seriously, either. I’m apt to be quite cavalier about your special efforts—in fact, I just was. But you’re equally cavalier about my tender feelings.”

“Your what?” the General asked, startled.

“My tender feelings,” Aurora repeated. “Don’t sit there pretending you didn’t hear me. I have tender feelings quite often, thank you very much.”

“Well, I make special efforts quite often too,” the General said. “Thank
you
very much.”

“You see, this very discussion proves my point,” Aurora said. “Your special efforts make no impression on me, and my tender feelings make no impression on you. So why are
we bothering? From now on you have permission to be as cranky as you want, and I’ll be as difficult as I can. That way we’ll know where we stand.”

“Where
you
stand, you mean,” the General said. “I can’t stand, unless I have my crutches.”

“Don’t interrupt me,” Aurora said. “There is one last part to my conclusion and it’s the surprising part. Are you ready to be surprised, Hector?”

“Sure, every day’s a new day,” the General said.

“I’m afraid I’ve concluded the opposite,” Aurora said. “If one happens to be living with you, as I appear to be, every day is pretty much the same day. We quarrel and then you sulk. In fact, it’s the sameness of the days that has led me to my surprising conclusion. I think we should go into therapy.”

The General considered that he knew Aurora thoroughly, and did not expect to be surprised by anything she might conclude. He was so convinced of this that when she said they should go into therapy he assumed he had misunderstood her. Though admittedly a little hard of hearing, he distinctly heard the word “go” and assumed she must be planning to drag him off on a trip to some ridiculous island in a part of the world he wouldn’t like.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“Where is what, Hector?” Aurora asked, exasperated by his lack of reaction.

“The place you mentioned,” the General said. “I think you mispronounced it Isn’t it in the Maldives, or somewhere?”

“I pronounced it quite correctly—it’s scarcely a hard word,” Aurora said. “T-h-e-r-a-p-y. Therapy. And it isn’t in the Maldives, it’s in the Medical Center.”

“Oh, therapy,” the General said.

Then the concept sank in, and his jaw dropped. “Therapy?” he said. “You mean you want us to see a psychiatrist?”

“Correct,” Aurora said. “In fact I was thinking we might want to try psychoanalysis. I wouldn’t be surprised if a little psychoanalysis had a good effect on our quarrels.”

“You’ve lost your mind,” the General said. “I’m eighty-six
years old. What goddamn good would it do for me to be psychoanalyzed now?”

“For one thing it’s said to be quite good for one’s memory,” Aurora said. “I’ve concluded recently that we have a memory problem. Half of our quarrels start because we disagree in the area of memory. I remember things correctly and you remember things incorrectly, and the next thing you know we’re quarreling. Psychoanalysis might prompt you to remember much more accurately than you do now and I don’t see why we shouldn’t try it.”

“I
remember things incorrectly?” the General said. “Who is it that’s always forgetting where she put her car keys or her earrings? You must have lost a thousand earrings just in the years I’ve known you.”

“Hector, I won’t stand here and listen to your exaggerations,” Aurora said. “You’ve heard my conclusions and I mean to implement them. I intend to have us in analysis so quick it will make your head swim.”

“It won’t be a new feeling,” the General said. “You make my head swim every day.”

“Excuse me, Hector, you know how I hate to bicker on an empty stomach,” Aurora said. In the course of her shower she had somehow gone from full to empty, and could hardly wait to taste the gumbo. Without giving Hector Scott a chance to issue further complaints, she sailed downstairs to start carrying up the dinner.

5

While the General and Aurora were having their discussion, Rosie, in the kitchen, had been trying to help Melanie get a grip on herself. For starters, she made her a chocolate milkshake and slipped a couple of raw eggs in it. When left to herself, Melanie’s diet seemed to consist mostly of potato chips and Diet Pepsi, not exactly ideal fare for a mother-to-be. Rosie seized any chance to improve it.

“Weren’t Bruce’s parents both drunks?” she asked. Melanie sat, or rather slumped, at the table, smoking and looking desperately unhappy.

“They go to AA,” Melanie said. “Bruce doesn’t even live with them now. He lives with his new girlfriend.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about the new girlfriend,” Rosie said. “The fact that he’s got one might be a blessing in disguise.”

“Easy for you to say, you’ve got a boyfriend,” Melanie said, annoyed. People were always telling her she ought to be glad she had lost Bruce.

“I
have
got C.C., but that don’t mean you can’t do a lot better than Bruce,” Rosie said. “Anybody that would beat up
a pregnant woman is a good person to stay clear of, if you ask me.

“He didn’t really beat me up, he just shoved me, and I fell over a chair,” Melanie said. “I was upset when I told you he beat me up.”

Although she hated Bruce at the moment, she didn’t like to hear Rosie criticize him. Neither Rosie nor her grandmother understood anything about her life, and it irked her when they made criticisms.

“Getting shoved down could be the first step in getting beat up,” Rosie said. She was in no mood to relent where Bruce was concerned. “Once men start shoving you around they don’t know when to stop.”

“Did your husband beat you?” Melanie asked. She could only dimly remember Rosie’s husband, who had died about the same time as her mother. Her main memory was of the man’s stomach, which was huge.

“Not on your life, he didn’t,” Rosie said. “I told him while we were engaged that if he ever raised his hand to me I’d kill him. He only hit me once, and that was self-defense.”

“Self-defense?” Melanie asked, interested. In her memory the man had been almost a giant—at least his stomach had been as big as a giant’s. Why would he have needed to hit a tiny woman in self defense?

“Yeah, I discovered he was screwing a slut,” Rosie said. “I tried to stab him with a butcher knife. He beat me off and then one of his own friends stabbed him with a butcher knife anyway—Royce nearly died that time.”

“Why did his friend stab him?” Melanie asked. A few minutes before she had wanted to die; she was convinced she would never be attractive or happy, and that no one would ever love her as much as Bruce had, when they first met. But now she felt a little better. She was thinking of asking Rosie for another milkshake.

“The friend that stabbed him had been screwing the same slut,” Rosie said.

“I guess I shouldn’t call her a slut,” she added more gently, after a moment’s reflection. “She visited Royce in the hospital—it
could be she was just crazy about him. When he died she called and asked if she could come to the funeral.”

“Did you let her?” Melanie asked.

“Yeah, I let her,” Rosie said. “I thought it was nice manners on her part to call and ask, even if she did wreck mine and Royce’s marriage.”

“I don’t think you would really have stabbed your husband,” Melanie said. “May I have another milkshake?”

“Just because I’m small don’t mean I’m harmless,” Rosie assured her. “I would have killed Royce right there in the bathroom if he hadn’t punched me in the snoot.”

Melanie tried to imagine Rosie stabbing her fat husband with a butcher knife, but she couldn’t. Then she tried to imagine herself stabbing Bruce with a butcher knife because he had decided to live with Beverly, a girl who had once been her best friend.

Neither of her imaginings worked. Rosie and her grandmother couldn’t get it through their heads that she still loved Bruce. She had cried for a week when he started living with Beverly, but that hadn’t made her want to stab him. She didn’t even stop loving him, mainly because she suspected that he didn’t really like Beverly that much. The real trouble was that Beverly’s folks were too rich. They were so rich they had given Beverly a Ferrari for her birthday.

Bruce’s big weakness was sports cars. He had hardly said two words to Beverly before she got the Ferrari, but a week later they were living together. Bruce just wasn’t the sort to pass up a chance to drive a Ferrari. Unfortunately he wasn’t as good at driving sports cars as he thought he was, and had had an accident almost at once. The accident was basically just a fender bender, but Beverly’s parents promptly freaked out—they didn’t like Bruce anyway, and had given Beverly strict orders not to let him drive the Ferrari. They started yelling at Bruce. They told him he had ruined an eighty-thousand-dollar car, and that he had to pay for every cent of the damage or else go to jail. Bruce didn’t even have a job at the time—how could he pay for an eighty-thousand-dollar car, or even one fender of one? Plus, Beverly was real spoiled
and expected Bruce to take her dancing or to nice restaurants at least five or six times a week. Bruce was happy just eating pizza and didn’t have the kind of money it took to take Beverly out every night. The only way he could get that kind of money was to be a dope hauler, running loads of pot up to Fort Worth or Dallas; but Bruce really didn’t like being a dope hauler because of the possibility of being caught, sent to prison, getting raped, and dying of AIDS.

He had just come by her apartment to borrow twenty dollars from her, but Melanie knew he meant to spend the money on Beverly, which was why she got so mad. She freaked out and started yelling at him, which scared him so badly he shoved her over the chair. Bruce wasn’t nearly as tough as he pretended to be.

“Don’t, I’m going to have a baby,” Melanie said. That had been enough to calm Bruce down. The shove really wasn’t that big a deal, and she had begun to regret even mentioning it to Rosie.

Besides, she didn’t feel all that bitter toward Bruce; she felt bitter toward Beverly’s parents. Didn’t they know a Ferrari would attract a lot of attention? Beverly herself didn’t even much like cars, but she had tiny tits and knew perfectly well that having a Ferrari would make it easier for her to get boyfriends.

Had it not been for the Ferrari, Melanie reasoned, Bruce would never have left her, and she wouldn’t have lost her self-esteem. If she hadn’t lost her self-esteem, she would never have slept with either Koko or Steve. Koko had been her best friend for years; he was a sweet Thai boy, just your basic pal, someone who was always there in emergencies and a great person to listen to music with or just hang out with when there was no emergency. It had not been entirely right to sleep with him, she wasn’t that attracted, but Koko was, and now he was madly in love with her. Also, it had increased the confusion about whose baby it was she was pregnant with. The fact that Steve had happened to come home from college just when she was at her very lowest ebb increased this confusion still more. Steve was just your basic
spoiled-rotten yuppie brat. Melanie had dated him for a month or two in high school. He popped into town pretty much at the exact moment she hit bottom; she felt so desperate for someone to be with, even if it was just for five minutes, that she slept with Steven too.

Just thinking about the fix she was in made Melanie feel tired—so tired she would have liked to sleep for a week. Often she
would
sleep through most of the week—heavy sleeps that lasted ten or twelve hours at a stretch. In her view there was no reason not to sleep: she didn’t have a job, and had dropped out of her media studies program because she was too fat and not pretty enough to be an anchorwoman—for years being an anchorwoman had been her secret dream—and Bruce only came to see her when he had had a fight with Beverly, or needed money, or maybe just wanted to smoke a joint with his old girlfriend.

“Do you ever hear from your father?” Rosie asked. If ever there was a child who could use a father’s attention, it was Melanie, but Rosie was under no illusions that Flap Horton, Melanie’s father, would come through with very much attention, very much money, or very much anything. Flap taught English literature in Riverside, California; Melanie adored him and had hoped at various points to be allowed to go to school in Riverside, and perhaps even live with her father, but it was one of those things which was just not coming to pass. Lately, as far as Rosie could tell, Flap had stopped giving Melanie any encouragement at all—very few rays of light came from his direction.

In the first few years after Emma’s death, Flap had tried hard to be a decent father to Melanie and the boys, but then he remarried and acquired three stepchildren; he and his new wife had a child of their own, and Flap’s attention had drifted away—farther and farther away from the children he had had with Emma.

To an extent, Rosie was not disposed to blame him too much. No one could pay attention to everything they were supposed to pay attention to; her own record as a mother had not been spotless. Two or three of her own children had not
really received the level of attention a child should get, and she knew it. But at least she had managed to focus on them in emergencies or in periods of profound need. Melanie was in just such a period at that moment, and Flap, it seemed to Rosie, was doing a very poor job of focusing.

“He never calls,” Melanie said bitterly. “He said he’d help me pay for my car, but he never sent the money. Teddy was sort of interested in going back to school this semester, but Daddy never sent him the tuition money either.”