The Evening Star (8 page)

“If you want to be lewd we should be upstairs,” Pascal said, smiling. “
They
should be downstairs—people can talk about Lithuania anywhere. Upstairs we could be lewd all night.”

“All night, at your age?” Aurora said, aware that two of her suitor’s appetites had just come in conflict with each other. Pascal was trying to finish his Camembert while keeping a firm grip on her hand—rather too firm a grip, in fact, if seduction was his purpose. She felt an old restlessness take her—it was no doubt quite immoral for her to lead this little man on, but she was doing it anyway, as she had many times in her life, with men small or large, just to see what would happen. Would Pascal Ferney at last fight his way through her taunts, or would he retreat to cheese and wine?

“If we were upstairs you’d be surprised,” Pascal said. “Not all of me is old.”

“Not all of me is dumb, either,” Aurora said. “As you correctly point out, people can talk of Lithuania anywhere, but I don’t believe that’s the
only
thing that can be done anywhere. In my youth I knew people who were capable of committing lewd behavior in a quite surprising variety of places. In fact, I rather frequently found myself doing that sort of thing too—all over the house, or even out-of-doors, if the mood took me. If you don’t mind my saying so, Pascal, the notion that carnal actions of a lengthy duration can only occur in a bedroom on the second floor of my house is rather un-Gallic, is it not? Somehow I had imbibed the myth that the French can do it anywhere, anytime. What a pity it’s only a myth.”

Pascal was thunderstruck. Convinced as he was that all women
did
want him, and want him a lot, he could scarcely believe his ears. This woman, who had never given him more than a kiss and a squeeze now and then, was accusing him of being too conventional in his approach to sex.

“Besides that, we’re not arm wrestling,” she said, before he could collect his thoughts. “Stop squeezing my hand so hard. Having my fingers crushed is not my idea of foreplay.”

Pascal turned red in the face, dropped her hand, then immediately
tried to take it again. Aurora jerked it away. Pascal had been about to take a swallow of wine, but the jerk caused it to slosh out of his glass and splash his tie. All the while, Aurora was looking at him in a reckless way, a way that he had not seen her look before. He felt a coward—she was making him feel a coward with her reckless look.

“Pascal, you seem to be falling apart before my very eyes,” Aurora said. Her demon was out, and she was in a mood to destroy him utterly, since nothing else was happening. “Now you’ve managed to waste my wine and ruin your tie in the same motion. Isn’t that the tie I bought you in Paris?”

Pascal jumped up in a fury. “I’ll throw you on the couch!” he said. “You’ll see what happens then.”

“Pooh, sticks and stones,” Aurora said. “I don’t believe you’ll throw me anywhere, or do anything else very interesting, either.”

Pascal felt a blind rage coming over him. He rushed around the table, meaning to grab Aurora by the throat and still her merciless tongue forever. He
did
grab her by the throat, but before he could get on with the business of strangling her a young voice at his elbow said, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing? You behave, Pascal.”

To his horror he saw Melanie standing at his elbow, holding a silver soup tureen.

He immediately took his hands off Aurora’s throat.

“Oh, mademoiselle, thank God you came,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You certainly did know what you were doing—you meant to strangle me,” Aurora said, rubbing her neck. On the whole she felt rather pleased with how things had gone. She lifted her eyebrows and grinned at Melanie.

“Oh, no, no, it was just a fit,” Pascal said meekly. “It was
amour fou.”

“You needn’t explain to my granddaughter,” Aurora said. “She knows what brutes men are—she was just cruelly beaten by one herself, scarcely an hour ago.”

“Oh, Granny,” Melanie said, “I wasn’t cruelly beaten, I was just shoved over a chair. What did you do to make Pascal so mad?”

“The same thing she always does!” Pascal exclaimed. “Taunts—she only taunts me. She doesn’t mean a word. I love her, but so what, as you kids say.”

“It’s just that my demon got loose and decided to make a snack of this unwary Frenchman,” Aurora said. “Pascal, that’s excellent cake—I think we might just table the passion question for a bit. I suggest you go to the bathroom and run a little cold water over that tie you just soaked in wine. If you want to soak your head at the same time, that’s no business of mine, but in my view it wouldn’t hurt you. Then come back and eat your cake.”

Too embarrassed to argue, Pascal trundled off.

“My God, Granny, what was that all about?” Melanie asked. She knew life was full of surprises, but she had never expected to come downstairs and find her grandmother being strangled in the study.

“Just a contretemps, a very small one,” Aurora said. She reached across the table and took what was left of Pascal’s wine. “I was just trying to get him to make love to me on the couch. In my heyday I was made love to a great many times on couches, and I suppose I had in mind to try it once more. Unfortunately, Pascal chose to strangle me instead.”

She took a sip of wine. Now that her anger had passed she was feeling a little discouraged.

“It’s a lesson you should take to heart,” she said, looking at her chubby granddaughter.

“What lesson?” Melanie asked. She was stunned by the thought that her grandmother had apparently been willing to fuck Pascal on the couch in her study. She knew her granny was eccentric, but she had never supposed she would do anything
that
eccentric.

“Given the option, men will frequently try to murder you rather than make love,” Aurora said. “There are exceptions, but not too many.”

“Granny!” Melanie said, again. “You were going to do it on
that
couch, with Pascal? What if the General had come downstairs and caught you?”

“I would have been very angry,” Aurora said. “Hector knows me well enough to realize that there are times when
he should leave me well enough alone. It points to another lesson, which is that it’s unwise to incarcerate yourself with a man nearly fifteen years your senior. I’ve done it and now I’ll have to make the best of it—for all I know Pascal may be the best of it, too.

“Chew on that for a while,” she said in a lighter tone. She noticed that her granddaughter was struggling to assimilate some rather shocking information.

“I’ll chew on it for years,” Melanie said, as Pascal came back into the room. He looked disconsolate, and his tie was dripping wet.

“I can’t believe it,” Aurora said. “When I directed you to run cold water on your tie I naturally assumed you’d take it off first. I thought you French were supposed to have savoir faire. What happened to yours, dear?”

“It has been a strange evening,” Pascal said. “At this moment I am not myself.”

He sat down and began to apply himself to his walnut cake.

Melanie took the soup tureen to the kitchen. She came back to the study for a moment, gave her granny a kiss, and left. She could hardly wait to tell Teddy and Jane what she had just witnessed—talk about blowing their minds!

“Good night, dear,” Aurora said. “Remember little Andy and try not to smoke.”

Pascal ate his cake in silence while his tie dripped on his pants. Aurora was watching him quietly—she did not seem to be angry, but then she had not seemed to be angry when he arrived, either, and yet within ten minutes she had goaded him into a violent act.

“What’s the matter with you now?” Aurora asked. “I hope you aren’t preparing to sulk or weep or produce any other manifestations I’m not in the mood for.”

“Why can’t you come to my apartment?” Pascal asked. “In my apartment there would be nobody but us.”

“That’s quite true,” Aurora said, smiling at him. “On the other hand, if I were in your apartment, I might faint from the stench and the squalor. You must admit that you seem to lack housekeeping skills along with savoir faire and various other things.

“Though perhaps that’s what you want,” she added, kicking him lightly under the table. “You want me to faint. Then you’d have a passive body to work your will on. But that’s not the way it’s going to happen, if it happens.”

“I want it to happen!” Pascal exclaimed. “I want it to happen.”

“Well, if it should, keep in mind that this is not a passive body that you’re looking at,” Aurora said. “Nobody’s getting any fun unless I get some too.”

“I will get a housekeeper,” Pascal declared. He lived in a tiny studio apartment near the zoo. The fact was that he had allowed it to become rather grubby over the years. The one time Aurora had visited it she had held her nose the whole time. It was hard to seduce a woman who was resolutely holding her nose.

“I will make it spotless! Spotless!” he declared—his soon-to-be-hired housekeeper would make the house spotless, and Aurora would come. He felt better just thinking about it and reached for the wine bottle.

“You’ll see,” he said. “I’ll even buy new sheets. You’ll see.”

“New sheets, Pascal?” Aurora said. “I hardly know if I deserve quite that much savoir faire.”

He was still talking about his housekeeper and his soon-to-be-spotless apartment when she tucked him into his Peugeot and sent him home.

7

Teddy and Jane met when they were both patients at a psychiatric hospital in Galveston. Soon after they fell in love, both were released from the psychiatric hospital—on the same day, in fact. They felt it was a happy omen and for some months they weighed the question of marriage before deciding against it. Then they weighed the even weightier question of children and decided they wanted one—or possibly two. Roughly a year after they took the second decision, Jonathan arrived. Jonathan was now nearly two and had yet to speak—or, to be more accurate, had yet to speak in English. One of the things that convinced Teddy and Jane that they were perfect for one another was that both had been majoring in classical languages when they began to go wrong in their heads. Jane had been at Bryn Mawr, Teddy at the University of Texas. Jane’s parents and Teddy’s grandparents both lived in Houston, and that was where they had retreated when they dropped out. After a few months of getting crazier and crazier, they had both agreed to be admitted to the hospital in Galveston.

The fact that Jonathan, whose nickname was Bump, had
yet to speak in a recognizable language worried Aurora considerably, but didn’t worry Teddy or Jane at all. For one thing, he could draw some of the Greek alphabet in his coloring book, and had recently shown an interest in the Cyrillic alphabet as well.

“I don’t care how many alphabets he can draw,” Aurora said. “I want him to say something I can understand.”

“Maybe he’s just waiting until he has something interesting to say,” Teddy suggested. “Wittgenstein didn’t speak until he was four.”

“Wittgenstein wasn’t my great-grandchild either,” Aurora said. Jonathan was a beautiful child—he had curly blond hair, unlike his mother, whose hair was blond but straight—and was apparently quite happy. He had alphabet blocks in a variety of alphabets, procured from a special store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he wasn’t amusing himself with them he played what appeared to be quite complicated video games on a TV set that was used for no other purpose—Teddy and Jane objected to American TV on the grounds that the sets weren’t high resolution and thus produced images that were visually degraded. They felt that they were being ripped off by American TV manufacturers, who could have easily made high-resolution TV sets if they had wanted to.

Aurora also objected to Jonathan’s nickname, Bump. She felt it was a very inadequate nickname for such a beautiful child.

“Bump suggests a bump on a log,” Aurora pointed out. Sometimes she would show up in the middle of the afternoon and sit on the couch in the little apartment for a while, watching Jonathan amuse himself with his many alphabet blocks. He was by no means a withdrawn child—he loved to crawl all over his great-grandmother and to sit in her comfortable lap and have stories read to him. He made approving or disapproving sounds, he giggled, laughed, yelled, and cried, much as other children did. He just declined to converse. One of Aurora’s theories about this worrisome fact was that Jonathan was silently protesting his own nickname.

“Why should he speak to people who call him Bump?” she asked one day. “The fact that he can draw all those alphabets suggests a strong sensitivity to language. He probably hates his nickname. If you two would start calling him by his right name he might be talking a blue streak in a matter of days. Nicknames can be dangerous, you know. Perfectly nice people get stuck with dreadful nicknames, often for their whole lives. What if he wants to be president and people are still calling him Bump?”

Teddy and Jane thought that possibility too slim to take seriously. Jane was rather more prone than Teddy to taking things seriously—at times even too seriously—but she wasn’t worried about Jonathan’s political career being sabotaged by his nickname.

“He just looked like a Bump, even when he was still in me,” Jane said. “He didn’t even weigh six pounds when he was born.”

Jane was a very quiet woman—very quiet but very smart. Aurora approved of Jane and had a great deal of confidence in her. Jane was modest, spent nothing on clothes, said little, fed Teddy and Jonathan admirably, kept the apartment tidy, and seemed to be to both a competent and responsible young woman.

Indeed, Aurora felt slightly intimidated by Jane. All her life she had been slightly intimidated by people who were both competent and responsible. She could not have imagined that such a person would end up in her family, though to her chagrin Patsy Carpenter, her daughter’s best friend, had predicted something of the sort.

“Teddy may go crazy now and then, but when it comes to a mate he’ll pick well,” Patsy said once, when she and Aurora were discussing the fact that neither of them had done a particularly brilliant job of picking.