Terms of Endearment Read online

  “Yeah, they mowed down Bonnie and Clyde,” Rosie observed happily whenever the conversation drifted into such channels.

  General Scott, however, knew quite well that Rosie knew quite well that he had been up since five A.M., and her remark fell somewhere between impertinence and insult. Under ordinary circumstances he would not have tolerated either from anyone, but unfortunately nothing involving Aurora Greenway and her household, if it could be called a household, seemed to align in any way with ordinary circumstances. Faced with the usual irritating and extraordinary circumstances, he made his usual effort to be restrained but firm.

  “Rosie, we won’t go into the question of why I’m up,” he said. “Could you put Mrs. Greenway on at once?”

  “It don’t look like it,” Rosie said, glancing at her boss. Her boss had a cheerful but rather distant look on her face as she sat among the litter of bills.

  “Why not?” the General asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rosie said. “I don’t think she’s made up her mind who she’s talkin’ to today. Wait a minute while I find out.”

  “I do not want to wait, and I won’t,” the General said. “This is childish nonsense. You tell her I want to speak with her at once. I have waited thirty-five rings already. I’m a punctual man myself and I was married for forty-three years to a punctual woman. I don’t appreciate delays of this kind.”

  Rosie held the receiver away from her ear and grinned at Aurora.

  “He says he won’t wait,” she said loudly. “He says it’s childish nonsense, and his wife never made him wait in his life. She was right on time for forty-three years.”

  “What a ghastly thought,” Aurora said with a dreamy wave of her hand. “I’m afraid I’ve never marched to any man’s drum and I’m far too old to start now. Also I have observed that it’s generally weak-minded people who allow themselves to be slaves to the clock. Tell the General that.”

  “She ain’t marching to no drum and she ain’t no slave to no clock,” Rosie said to the General. “And she thinks you got a weak mind. I guess you can hang up if you want to.”

  “I do not want to hang up,” the General said, gritting his teeth. “I want to speak to Aurora, and I want to speak to her now.”

  Invariably, attempts to get through to Aurora caused him to grit his teeth at some point. The only saving aspect was that they were still, at least, his teeth: he had not yet been reduced to gritting dentures.

  “Where is she?” he asked, still gritting.

  “Uh, she ain’t far,” Rosie said cheerfully. “Uh, some ways she’s far and some ways she’s close,” she added after another glance at her boss.

  “That being the case,” the General said, “I would like to ask why it was necessary to allow the phone to ring thirty-five times. If I still had my tanks this wouldn’t have happened, Rosie. A certain house I know would have been leveled long before the thirty-fifth ring, if I still had my tanks. Then we’d find out who’s to be trifled with and who isn’t.”

  Rosie held the receiver away from her ear. “He’s off on his tanks agin,” she said. “You better talk to him.”

  “Who’s there, who’s there?” the General said loudly into his silent receiver. In his prime he had commanded a tank division, and attempts to get through to Aurora almost always brought his tanks to mind. He had even begun to dream of tanks, for the first time since the war. Only a few nights before he had had a very happy dream in which he had driven up River Oaks Boulevard standing in the turret of his largest tank. The people in the country club at the end of the boulevard had all come out and lined up and looked at him respectfully. He was the only four-star general in the club, and the people there looked at him respectfully even without his tank; but it had been a satisfying dream nonetheless. General Scott had many dreams involving tanks, many of which ended with him crunching through the lower walls of Aurora’s house, into her living room, or sometimes her kitchen. In some of the dreams he merely tanked around indecisively in front of her house, trying to come up with some method for getting a tank up the stairs to her bedroom, where she always seemed to stay. To get into her bedroom he would need a flying tank, and everyone who knew anything about generals knew that Hector Scott was a realist where ordnance was concerned. There were no flying tanks, and even under duress his subconscious refused to supply him one. As a result he continued to find himself in conversations with Aurora Greenway or her maid that put him in the mood to try and break the telephone receiver over his knee.

  He was just arriving at that state when Aurora stretched out her hand and took the phone. “I might as well talk to him,” she said. “I’m really not in any great hurry to pay my bills.”

  Rosie yielded the receiver with some reluctance. “It’s a good thing they took his tanks away when they let him out of the army,” she said. “What if he got ahold of one someday an’ come after us?”

  Aurora ignored her. “Well, as usual, Hector,” she said, uncovering the mouthpiece, “you’ve frightened Rosie rather badly with all your talk of tanks. It seems to me that at your age you would have learned what frightens people and what doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if she gives notice. No one wants to work in a household that a tank’s apt to burst into at any moment. It does seem to me you’d realize that. I’m sure F.V. wouldn’t like it if he thought I was likely to smash in on him any any moment.”

  “That’s exactly what F.V. does think,” Rosie said loudly. “He knows how you drive. A Cadillac can kill you just as dead as a tank. I’ve heard F.V. say that many a time.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Aurora said hotly. “You know how touchy I am about my driving.”

  “I haven’t said anything, Aurora,” the General said firmly.

  “Well, I wish your voice weren’t so scratchy, Hector,” Aurora said.

  “It’s just F.V.’s bad luck to live right there at the corner,” Rosie went on, taking up her dustcloth. “The kitchen’s right where you’d end up if you was ever to forget to turn.”

  “I shall not forget to turn!” Aurora said with great emphasis.

  “I didn’t say you would!” General Scott said, his temper rising.

  “Hector, I’m hanging straight up if you’re planning to shout at me,” Aurora said. “My nerves are not all they might be today, and you have not helped any by letting my phone ring thirty-five times. If you wear out my bell I won’t appreciate it, I can tell you that.”

  “Aurora, my dear, all you need do is answer it,” the General said, striving to bring moderation and mellifluousness to his voice. He was aware that his voice was scratchy, but it was only a natural consequence of the fact that he had been stationed in the tropics when he was young and had impaired his vocal apparatus in the line of duty, or by yelling at idiots too loudly and too often in a humid climate. Ignorance and incompetence on the part of his subordinates had always caused him to yell sooner or later, and he had encountered so much of it in his career that his voice had been little more than a croak by the time World War II ended. It seemed to him to have recovered itself well enough, but it had never pleased Aurora Greenway, and it seemed to please her less as the years went by. At the moment it didn’t seem to be pleasing her at all.

  “Hector, I do think you ought to know better than to admonish me,” she said. “I am not a member of an army and am hardly interested in being treated like a private, or a sophomore, or whatever rank you’ve assigned me in your thoughts. It is my phone, you know, and if I am not disposed to answer it that is my business. Besides, I am frequently gone when you ring, I’m sure. If my bell is going to have to ring sixty or seventy times every time you take it into your head to call, then it’s certainly going to wear out. I’ll be lucky if it lasts the year.”

  “Aha, but I knew you were there,” the General said quickly. “I’ve got my binoculars here and I’ve been watching your garage. Nothing’s left it since six o’clock this morning. I fancy that I know you well enough to know that you’re not likely to go anywhere before six in the
morning. So in effect I have you. You were there and you were just being stubborn.”

  “That’s a rather demeaning deduction,” Aurora said instantly. “I certainly hope you didn’t conduct your battles like you’re conducting what might loosely be called our courtship. If you had I’m certain we would have lost whatever wars we happened to be in.”

  “Oou, my God,” Rosie said, wincing a little for General Scott.

  Aurora didn’t so much as pause for breath. The thought of Hector Scott, who was sixty-five if he was a day, sitting in his bedroom with his binoculars glued to her garage since six in the morning was more than enough to make her see red.

  “While I’ve got you, Hector, let me point out to you certain possibilities you seem to have overlooked in your reasoning, or whatever you do,” she said. “First, I might have had a headache and not have wished to speak, in which case hearing a phone ring sixty times would hardly have contributed to my ease. Second, I might well have been in my back yard, beyond the sound of my phone or the reach of your binoculars. I’m very fond of the act of digging, as you ought to know. Often I dig. I must have some relaxation, you know.”

  “Aurora, that’s fine,” the General said, feeling a short retreat was called for. “I’m glad to have you out there digging—it’s fine exercise. I’ve dug a great deal myself in my day.”

  “Hector, you’ve interrupted,” Aurora said. “I was not speaking of your day, I was enumerating possibilities you had overlooked in your impetuosity to talk to me. A third distinct possibility is that an invitation had taken me beyond the sound of my phone.”

  “What invitation?” the General said, sensing trouble. “I don’t like the sound of that much.”

  “Hector, at this moment I’m so annoyed with you that I don’t really give a twit what you like and don’t like,” Aurora said. “The plain fact is that I frequently, indeed habitually, receive invitations from a number of gentlemen other than yourself.”

  “At six in the morning?” The General asked.

  “Never you mind when,” Aurora said. “I’m not as old as you, you know, and I’m far less fixed in my habits than your good wife seems to have been. In point of fact there is very little telling where I’m apt to be at six in the morning, nor is there any particular reason why I should be required to tell, if I don’t choose to. I’m no one’s wife at the moment, as I’m sure you realize.”

  “I realize it and I find it a patent absurdity,” the General said. “I’m ready to do something about it too, as I’ve told you many times.”

  Aurora covered the receiver with one hand and made an amused face at Rosie. “He’s proposing again,” she said. Rosie was poking in a closet, trying to find a pair of shoes that might be worn out enough that she could appropriate them for her oldest daughter. The General’s latest proposal surprised her not at all.

  “Yeah, he probably wants you to get married inside a tank,” she said.

  Aurora went back to the General. “Hector, I don’t doubt your readiness,” she said. “A number of gentlemen seem to be ready, if that means anything. The point I must insist upon is that you aren’t able, however ready you may think yourself to be, and I don’t quite like the term ‘patent absurdity’ used as you chose to use it just now. I see nothing patently absurd in being a widow.”

  “My dear, you’ve been a widow for three years,” the General said. “For a robust woman like yourself that’s long enough. Too long, in fact. There are certain biological needs, you know—it doesn’t do to ignore biological needs too long.”

  “Hector, are you aware of how rude you’re being?” Aurora said with a flash in her eyes. “Do you realize you let my phone ring a great many times, and now that I’ve been considerate enough to answer it all you can think of to do is lecture me about biological needs. You could hardly have put matters less romantically, I must say.”

  “I’m a military man, Aurora,” the General said, trying to be stern. “Blunt speech is the only thing I know. We’re both adults. We needn’t beat around the bush about these things. I was merely pointing out that it’s dangerous to ignore biological needs.”

  “Who says I ignore them, Hector?” Aurora said with a devilish tone in her voice. “Happily there are still some nooks and crannies of my life your binoculars can’t reach. I must say I’m not especially happy with the thought of you sitting there day after day speculating about my biological needs, as you call them. If that’s what you’ve been doing it’s no wonder you’re usually so disagreeable to talk to.”

  “I’m not disagreeable to talk to,” the General said. “I’m not unable, either.”

  Aurora opened one bill, the one from her least favorite dressmaker. It was for seventy-eight dollars. She looked at it thoughtfully before she replied.

  “Unable?” she said.

  “Yes. You said I was ready but unable. I resent that, Aurora. I’ve never allowed anyone to cast slurs on my ability. In fact, I’ve always been able.”

  “Well, you’ve lost me somewhere, Hector,” Aurora said vaguely. “It’s quite careless of you. I think what you must be referring to is my remark about marriage. It would be very hard for you to deny that you aren’t able to marry me, since I simply won’t have it. I don’t see how you can consider yourself able in that regard, when it’s obvious to both of us that there’s not a thing you can do about me.”

  “Aurora, will you shut up?” the General yelled. His temper rose abruptly, and at about the same time, though not so abruptly, his penis also rose. Aurora Greenway was infuriating, absolutely infuriating; except for one or two lieutenants, no one in his life had been able to make him so angry. No one in his life had been able to cause him to have erections just by talking to him on the phone, either, but Aurora could. She was almost infallible, too-some timbre in her voice seemed to do it, whether she was being argumentative, or whether she was just being happily vague and talking about music and flowers.

  “Why yes, Hector, I will shut up, though I think it’s rather rude of you to suggest it,” Aurora said. “You are being exceptionally rude to me today, you know. I’ve been paying my bills and trying to concentrate on my accounts and you sound very scratchy and military and aren’t helping me at all. If you don’t stop being so rude I’m going to have Rosie talk to you in my stead, and she is apt to be far less polite than I’ve been.”

  “You haven’t been polite, you’ve been very goddamn irritating!” the General said, only to hear a click on the line. He put the receiver back on its hook and sat tensely for several minutes, quietly gritting his teeth. He stared out the window toward Aurora’s house, but he felt too dispirited to bother lifting his binoculars. His erection lingered a bit and then subsided, and shortly after things were back to normal he picked up the phone and called again.

  Aurora answered on the first ring. “I certainly do hope you’re in a nice mood now, Hector,” she said at once, before he even spoke.

  “How did you know it was me, Aurora?” he asked. “Aren’t you taking a big chance? It very well could have been one of your other habitual callers. It might even have been your mystery man.”

  “What mystery man, Hector?” she asked.

  “The one you strongly hinted at,” he said, not with much asperity. A feeling of hopelessness had come over him. “The one whose bed you are presumably sharing on those occasions when you don’t happen to be home at six A.M.”

  Aurora opened two more bills while the General was cooling off; she was trying to remember what she had done with the forty dollars’ worth of lawn supplies she had apparently bought three months before. The General’s accusation glanced off her lightly, but the tone he made it in was slightly more serious.

  “Now, Hector,” she said, “you’re sounding resigned again. You know how I hate to hear you sounding resigned. I hope you haven’t allowed me to beat you down again. You’re just going to have to learn to defend yourself a little more vigorously if you want to get along with me. I should think a military man like yourself would hav
e more skill at self-defense. I can’t quite think how you survived all your wars if this is the best you can do.”

  “I was inside a tank most of the time,” the General said, remembering how cozy it had felt. Aurora sounded suddenly very friendly and warm, and his erection began to come back. It had often amazed him how quickly she could begin to sound friendly and warm once she knew she had someone on the ropes.

  “Well, I’m afraid all that’s past, dear,” she said. “You’re just going to have to get by without your tanks from now on. Say something to me and put some snap in your tone, if you don’t mind. You can’t imagine how depressing it is to have a resigned voice coming over one’s telephone.”

  “Right, I’ll get to the point,” the General said, miraculously his own man again. “Who’s the new fellow?”

  “What are you talking about?” Aurora asked. She was gathering up all her unopened bills. She had decided to put the unopened ones in a neat stack before opening them. The sight of neat stacks of things sometimes went a long way toward convincing her that her life was really in order, despite how she felt. She had decided the seventy-eight-dollar bill was probably legitimate and was waving at Rosie to bring her her fountain pen, which was on her dressing table instead of where it ought to be. Her dressing table was not amenable to neat stacking—hundreds of objects had found their way to it and gotten no further, and Rosie was holding up perfume bottles and old invitations and eyebrow pencils, hoping to come up with whatever it was Aurora wanted fetched.

  “The fountain pen, the fountain pen,” Aurora said, before the General could reply. “Can’t you see I’m writing a check?”

  Rosie found the pen and pitched it to her carelessly. She loved to investigate Aurora’s dressing table—it always yielded products she had never heard of. “Tell him you’ll marry him if he’ll trade off that Packard,” she said, sniffing at some cucumber oil. “I swear, that car costs a mint of money and he don’t go nowhere in it even. F.V.’s tried to tell him but it don’t do no good.”

  “Rosie, I’m sure General Scott is capable of deciding what automobile he wants to drive,” Aurora said, writing the check forcefully. She had a strong sense just then of being in command of her fortunes. “What was it you were saying, Hector?”