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  “I wish you’d told me Melanie was leaving,” Jane said. “I’m going to miss Melanie. We should have gone and seen her off, or something.”

  They were lying in bed, lovemaking over, listening to Bump use his little wagon like a battering ram against their bedroom door.

  “That little boy of ours is determined,” Teddy said. “Listen to him try to break down the door.”

  “For one thing, Melanie was our ambassador to Aurora,” Jane said. She had learned to blank out Bump’s attempts to get into the bedroom while she and Teddy made love. At first they had irritated her and thrown her off, but she adapted. Where sex was involved, Jane liked to think she could always adapt. She wasn’t going to be cheated out of the big pleasure, not by Bump or anyone. Sometimes she wished Teddy weren’t so placid, though. Sex with Teddy was fine, but sometimes she felt it could be even better than fine if he would occasionally be more antagonistic, or get a little angry or something. It was just a thought—maybe she was wrong—but it was a thought she kept having.

  “I don’t think Melanie wanted to be seen off,” Teddy said, wishing his son would stop banging the wagon against the door. Jane was very appealing to him at that moment—despite a thumping orgasm, she seemed a little restless. He felt there might be more sex in the offing, but it wasn’t going to happen if Bump kept banging the wagon against the door.

  “Maybe she felt if she went through too much seeing off she might lose her nerve and not go,” he suggested. He reached down beside the bed, found one of his shoes, and threw it at the door as hard as he could. The tactic worked. Bump stopped butting the door with his wagon. There was total silence from the other room.

  “I think I trumped him,” Teddy said.

  “It shouldn’t be hard, he’s only two,” Jane said. “At least he gets mad and lets us know it.”

  Teddy raised up on an elbow and looked at his wife. “Is that comment directed at me?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Jane said. “Sometimes I wonder if you’ll ever get mad again. You wanted to yesterday, when I spanked Bump, but I guess you didn’t have the nerve.”

  Teddy decided it was unlikely there was any more sex in the offing—not that there needed to be, necessarily. But, having quelled Bump, he didn’t know if he still had the energy to quell Jane. Something had left him when he threw the shoe at the door.

  “I just threw a shoe at the door,” he pointed out.

  “Big deal,” Jane said. “That was tactical. There’s a difference between tactics and emotion.”

  “Right,” Teddy said. “But the last time I crossed the line I got put in a straitjacket. You weren’t around to see that. That was before we met, and also before I discovered lithium.”

  “I wish I had been around to see it,” Jane said. “I’d like to see you get so mad you had to be put in a straitjacket.”

  “Why?” Teddy asked.

  Jane shrugged. “Maybe I just would,” she said.

  “It’s stupid to romanticize anger,” Teddy said. “I don’t think you’d like it so much if you saw it.”

  “We’ll probably never know,” Jane said.

  19

  Despite his conviction that going to an analyst was ridiculous—at his age, Aurora’s age, or any age—General Scott had cleaned himself up admirably for the occasion. He wore his best suit and the red bow tie with tiny spots that Aurora had picked out for him in London.

  The sight of Hector in his best suit and his red bow tie lifted Aurora’s spirits to the level that was apt to cause arias from her favorite operas to float out of her mouth. Several floated out of her mouth between her house and the distant Bellaire street where Dr. Bruckner had his office.

  Hector’s response to her singing, unfortunately, was not quite on a level with his appearance.

  “Don’t sing those goddamn arias when you’re driving,” he said. “You can barely drive adequately when you’re quiet. If you want us both to live to get this analysis started I’d advise you to shut up.”

  “Hector, it’s very unfortunate that you have so little appreciation of my singing,” Aurora said. “Singing is a very healthy thing. I’m sure Dr. Bruckner will back me up on that.”

  The General’s spiffy appearance belied his mood, which was black. Despite a hearty, if belated, breakfast, his post-coital gloom had not passed—if anything, it had deepened. He could not rid himself of the conviction that the morning’s brief intimacy had been his last hurrah—and not much of a hurrah at that. The minute it ended he had started having the feeling that he and Aurora would never make love again, and the feeling wouldn’t leave him. He felt completely drained of juice—he was just an old bone.

  “The first thing I’m going to tell that psychoanalyst is that I can no longer ejaculate,” he remarked. They were at a stoplight on the edge of Bellaire, and Aurora had stopped singing. For some reason she considered it inappropriate to sing at stoplights.

  “You’re not going to tell him any such thing,” Aurora said. “I forbid it. There’s a great deal we can talk about with this nice young man other than your ejaculations.”

  “I don’t have any ejaculations,” the General said. “That’s what I just said, and that’s the point I intend to stress. Nothing comes out, and you know what that means.”

  “No, I’m not sure I do,” Aurora said. “I’m not sure I want to, but I am sure I don’t want you mentioning our problems along that line to the nice doctor.”

  “How do you know he’s nice?” the General asked. “We haven’t even met him.”

  “No, but I spoke with him, and he has a soothing voice,” Aurora said. “His voice is the exact opposite of yours, Hector. Your voice rarely soothes me, and the fact is I often need soothing.”

  “Well, yours doesn’t soothe me, either,” the General said. “Particularly not when you sing arias in the car. Go, why don’t you—the light is green.”

  “Hector, it just turned!” Aurora pointed out.

  “Well, but when it turns, it means it’s time to go, immediately,” the General reminded her.

  “I just like to give it a second or two, to be sure it means it,” Aurora said, going.

  “Right after we made love this morning I got the terrible feeling that we’ll never make love again,” Hector said. “The feeling won’t go away, which is why I’m so depressed. Can I tell that to the psychoanalyst?”

  Aurora didn’t answer. She did not like the suburb of Bellaire—indeed, she was opposed to the whole concept of suburbs, though it appeared that suburbs were where most people now lived. In her youth it had been different. There were cities, towns, villages, and the country, with none of this muddle of stoplights, convenience stores, and small ugly houses in between.

  “If I can’t tell him about my feeling that we’ll never make love again, then I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell him,” the General said. “My parents have been dead for over fifty years—I don’t think I can say much about them.

  “It’s going to be a sad life if we never make love again,” he added.

  “Hector, why can’t you be an optimist instead of a pessimist?” Aurora said. Actually, she had also had the feeling, after their early morning intimacy, that something was over—namely her long, twenty-year romance with Hector Scott. Passion had quite probably made its last appearance in their lives—the passion, that is, that had been theirs.

  It was not a happy thought. She wished that she could simply be still and content, at rest in her heart, as the elderly, or at least the late middle-aged, were supposed to be, but in fact she never felt still, content, or at rest. Not only had the fever of life not abated—in her it seemed to be glowing ever more hotly. Instead of feeling calm she felt agitated and needy, too alive to sleep, and often troubled by thoughts that were unladylike and, in fact, distinctly lustful, about unlikely men or even more unlikely boys. One such boy came to cut her grass. He was Hispanic, wore shorts, and had wonderfully sturdy legs. His name was Jaime and every time she happened to glance down from her wind
ow and notice his sturdy legs she was apt to have lustful stirrings. Very often these stirrings followed her into the depths of sleep, causing her to have to get up and pace the house in her restlessness. Of all afflictions, lust was the one she had least expected to be beset by, at her age, but there was no doubt that lust was the affliction that beset her.

  “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.