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  “Aurora, we’re at the doctor’s office,” the General said. “We’re parked in his driveway. He’s probably looking out the window at us right now, wondering why we don’t come in. Don’t cry now.”

  “Well, I feel like it,” Aurora said again. “The thought of all my wasted cheerfulness makes me want to cry.”

  “It wasn’t wasted,” the General said. He was feeling a little desperate.

  “It was—you never stopped being depressed,” Aurora said, beginning to cry. “All my cheerful attitudes just got smashed on your depressions. You’re the most negative man I’ve ever known. I wish I hadn’t even thought of psychoanalysis, because I know it won’t work. None of the thousands of things I’ve suggested we do together have ever worked, and it’s because you don’t like anything and you don’t want to do anything, and if I persist and work up some gallant little initiative, you smash it.”

  She cried briefly; the General felt too crushed and guilty to say a word. He racked his brain, trying to think of some gallant initiative of Aurora’s that he had actually responded to—something that had worked out well. But just at the moment his mind was blank, and he couldn’t come up with anything.

  After one or two bursts, Aurora’s crying subsided.

  “The last thing you should ever do is accuse me of lacking a positive attitude,” she said, wiping her eyes. “You lack a positive attitude—you, you, you!”

  “Well, you lack a few things too,” the General countered. “Are we ever going to go in and be psychoanalyzed, are or we just going to sit in this man’s driveway all morning and have our usual quarrels?”

  “I guess we must go in,” Aurora said, screwing the rear-view mirror around so she could hastily repair her eyes. “I doubt I would have cried when I was looking so nice if I hadn’t been cruelly disappointed in this man’s house. I’m so disappointed in it I hardly feel like letting him psychoanalyze me now.”

  “Aurora, we’re here, let’s try it, at least,” the General said. “The man’s expecting us.”

  “People often expect things that don’t happen,” Aurora said. “Look at me. I’ve been expecting happiness on a daily basis all my life. But the days keep passing, and where is it?”

  Somehow they pulled themselves together, walked up the driveway, and rang the bell. The door opened immediately, before Aurora had quite finished composing herself. I’m not quite ready for this, she thought, when she saw the door opening. So many things in life happened before one was quite ready: Emma, for example, had been born two weeks early, before she was quite ready, and she had always supposed that this slight prematureness was what had caused her to be such a nervous mother, at least for the first few years. She preferred to be quite ready before things happened, but all too often they began to happen anyway while she was getting inwardly prepared for them; and that was just what was occurring with her psychoanalyst’s door. It was opening, though she was not quite ready.

  In the door stood a rumpled man, perhaps in his early forties, with a shock of graying hair and the largest, saddest brown eyes Aurora had ever looked into. He was wearing a corduroy coat with patched elbows, and Levi’s, but the shock of seeing a doctor in Levi’s was offset by the look in his eyes—a look that was far more welcoming than the look in most doctors’ eyes.

  Looking back on her time with Jerry Bruckner, after his death, Aurora felt it had all happened because from the first moment he had made her feel welcome—immediately and completely welcome—to a degree that no man, before him or after him, had ever done.

  “Howdy, I’m Jerry Bruckner, come on in,” the doctor said. He had a rather husky voice.

  “Howdy?” Aurora asked, stepping inside. “Do psychiatrists from Vienna really say howdy?”

  “Probably not, but who said I was from Vienna?” Jerry Bruckner asked, shaking the General’s hand.

  “That’s fine with me, I hate Austria,” the General said.

  “But I thought you must be,” Aurora insisted, though her vision of a classical psychoanalysis was rapidly slipping away. “The name sounds so Viennese.”

  The doctor looked slightly amused.

  “I’m from Las Vegas, Nevada,” he said. “I doubt there are too many psychiatrists in Houston who are actually from Vienna.”

  “No, but there can’t be vast numbers from Las Vegas, either,” Aurora commented, looking around the waiting room, which was nothing more than a rather shabby living room with an orange couch that needed recovering along one wall.

  “I should get that couch recovered,” Dr. Bruckner said, echoing her very thought.

  “Goodness, you just read my mind,” Aurora said, smiling at him. “I hope you’ll do that some more.” She immediately forgave his living room, as she had forgiven the Levi’s. He had a nice smile—and a nice smile meant a lot.

  “She expects a great deal,” the General put in, nervously. He thought the doctor ought to know that right away—at any moment Aurora might start criticizing the man’s clothes, or his furniture, or the wallpaper, or something else.

  “I don’t know about reading your mind, but I can offer you coffee or tea,” the doctor said.

  “But where’s that charming receptionist I spoke to when I made the appointment?” Aurora inquired—she had never been in a doctor’s office that seemed less like a doctor’s office. Where was the usual staff, the ones who stuck your finger or inquired about your insurance policy?

  “I think her name was Simone,” she added, to the General’s annoyance. Did she think a psychoanalyst wouldn’t remember his own receptionist’s name?

  “I believe I did do Simone with you,” Jerry Bruckner said. “You sounded like you might prefer someone French. Sometimes I do Simone, sometimes I do a Magda, and sometimes I just do Marjorie, for people who prefer to deal with a plain American receptionist.”

  “I don’t follow you at all. What does this mean?” Aurora asked.

  Jerry Bruckner smiled his welcoming smile again. “I can’t afford a receptionist and I’m not sure I’d want one around even if I could afford one,” he said. “I was an actor for a while. I’m pretty good at voices. For you I did Simone.”

  “Well, goodness gracious,” Aurora said.

  20

  The letter from Melanie was postmarked Quartzite, Arizona, a place Tommy never heard of. He asked Joey if he had heard of it, but Joey had been sulky for a few days and didn’t bother to answer. He then asked a couple of guards, but neither of them had heard of it, either. In terms of travel horizons, the prison personnel were fairly limited. Few of the guards had heard of too many places unless the places happened to be in East Texas.

  Tommy let the letter sit for three days before he read it. Often, when he got letters from people on his letter list, he let them sit for anywhere between a week and a month before he read them. The other inmates couldn’t understand this—most of them read their mail immediately and obsessively. The fact that Tommy let his sit for a week or more just convinced them of what they already knew: Tommy was spooky, an alien of some sort.

  In fact, Tommy had considered telling the prison authorties just to send back whatever came in the way of mail. Communications from the outside world were not events that he welcomed—they were more likely to be events that he dreaded. He allowed members of his family to visit, but at the same time he made it clear that he was not encouraging them to visit; and he didn’t encourage them to write, either. The things that they wrote were too apt to be like pleas for him to change himself, to become a person he had never been and didn’t want to be. He really didn’t want to think about such changes or such ways of life anymore. When he thought about them he experienced conflicting vibes, or even got migraine headaches. Far better just to concentrate on his own plans, his own forms of rebellion, his own way of being. It was a weakness that he hadn’t yet hardened himself to the point of rejecting all visits, as well as all mail. The fact was, he just got tired of seeing no one except criminals or the prison personnel—and most of the prison pers
onnel were fantasy criminals, or criminal groupies. The more horrible the criminals, the more the guards and the shrinks were apt to kowtow to them.

  The letters that Tommy had the hardest time dealing with were those from his brother Teddy, who couldn’t seem to admit that Tommy wasn’t interested in giving him advice anymore. As the older brother and the stronger personality, Tommy had casually dished out a lot of advice over the years, and now Teddy didn’t want to admit that Tommy had basically tuned out. Teddy’s letters were all about his fears that Jane was going to leave him and go live with a woman she was having an affair with. If she did, Teddy was convinced he would crack up and have to go back to the mental hospital.

  Tommy never made any reply to Teddy’s letters or his pleas for advice. He maintained a strict silence, assuming that Teddy would eventually realize that he no longer had the slightest interest in domestic shit like that. Who Jane was sleeping with, or not sleeping with, or whether Teddy was in or out of his head, were just not concerns he felt like making space for in his consciousness. Even before he killed Julie and went to prison he had stopped wanting his consciousness to be filled up with family trivia of that sort. He preferred simply to be left out, but no one seemed willing to leave him out—which was why he let their letters sit, often for weeks.

  Still, the thought of fat little Melanie being in a place like Quartzite, Arizona, was sort of intriguing; before he opened the letter he went to the prison library and looked the place up in an atlas. It was just a tiny dot in the middle of the desert, not far from California, which probably meant that Melanie was making an ill-advised effort to go see their father. Maybe she thought the mere fact that she was pregnant would soften the man up enough that he would help her go to school or something.

  Knowing his father, Tommy knew Melly was making a big mistake if she thought anything of that nature would happen. Professor Horton—as he and Teddy preferred to call him; Melanie was the only one of them who still called the man Daddy—would just be horrified that Melanie had turned up, since when any of them turned up his present wife got pissed and had a fit, to make him pay for having dared to have children by anyone but her. Also, the thought that another child of his descent was on its way into the world could only be a downer, from Professor Horton’s point of view. It just meant that he might ultimately be asked to contribute money toward the child’s welfare, which would piss his wife off even more and cause her to throw worse fits.

  Joey hated it that Tommy didn’t read his mail right away. Seeing letters lying there for four or five days unopened made him want to beat Tommy up for being such a selfish prick. He himself almost never got letters, only a few scrawls from his mother or one of his crazy aunts once in a while, Every one of his letters made him cry and want to go home, but Tommy didn’t even think enough of his family to open his letters. Joey didn’t like being in a cell with such a person, but he didn’t beat him up, either: he was too afraid that if he did, Tommy would figure out a way to kill him some night in his sleep.

  Tommy knew that Joey disapproved of his discipline about the letters, but then Joey would never block any impulse—the fact that he couldn’t was why he was in prison—and could not even grasp the concept of discipline, much less exercise any. Even if Tommy had wanted to read the letters immediately, he would have let them sit for a bit, just to make his point with Joey; but, after three days, curiosity about what had caused his kid sister to write him a letter from a remote town in the Arizona desert got the better of him and he opened the envelope and read the letter:

  DEAR TOMMY:

  I’m in this town in Arizona—boy is it an ugly dump, but there are all these big saguaro cactuses around, they’re kind of interesting to look at.

  Bruce drove all the way from Houston to here without stopping, and now he’s so tired he can’t wake up. I think maybe we should have stopped a little sooner, I’ve never seen Bruce this tired. But he was really interested in putting some distance between himself and his parents, so he just kept driving.

  Anyway, we’re nearly to California, our ultimate destination. We just sort of fell in love and ran away. I’m not really too sure what we’re going to do in California—I guess we’ll just get jobs and try to be grownups and make a living and stuff. Maybe that sounds silly to you, but Bruce and I are eager to try it.

  The biggest surprise was that Granny didn’t try to stop me. I expected her to freak out, but she didn’t. Granny will surprise you sometimes.

  We’ll have to get a real cheap apartment to begin with—we don’t have much money to start out our new life with.

  Tommy, I guess this means I won’t be coming for visits for a while. I was getting pretty discouraged about the visits anyway—it just seemed like visits were a kind of form of pressure, from your point of view. Part of the reason I’m writing is to let you know the pressure’s off, at least where I’m concerned. It’s kind of scary, being this in love with somebody—I’m so obsessed with Bruce right now that I feel like waking him up—it’s crazy, but I even miss him when he’s asleep. It’s wild, being that obsessed, but I can’t help it, I’m out-of-control in love. I’ll just be glad when we get to L.A. and find a place and sort of get settled in.

  I’m gonna stop now—I know you don’t like long letters. Anyway, Bruce just rolled over, maybe he’s about to wake up. I’m gonna try to get him moving.

  I guess that’s my big news, Tommy. Please be careful. I love you.

  MELLY

  “What’s your sister look like?” Joey asked, when he noticed that Tommy was finally reading his letter. Another weird thing about Tommy was that he kept no pictures of his family. He himself had snaps of every one of his sisters and brothers—even one of the brother he had murdered—and his mom and his aunts and his three best girlfriends. But Tommy had none.

  “She’s a little chubby,” Tommy said, putting Melanie’s letter back in its envelope.

  “I wish I could meet her,” Joey said wistfully. “She sounds like just my type. I don’t go for no toothpicks.

  “You know, skinny girls,” he added, not sure that Tommy had taken his point.

  “That’s what I thought you meant,” Tommy said.

  II

  The Decorative Woman

  1

  Knowing that Rosie Dunlup’s loyalty to her boss was absolute, Patsy thought it best to take a cautious approach to inquiring about Aurora’s new lover—if he was her lover—Jerry Bruckner, whom she had met the night before at a dinner party Aurora had given for him. Aurora had been radiant—she looked fifty-five again—and the minute she met Jerry, Patsy felt sure she knew why. He was a seriously attractive man—“seriously attractive” being a term she had brought home with her from L.A. Implicit in the definition was the suggestion that seriously attractive men were seldom serious about women. They were not where one applied if one were looking for long-term loyalty, but Patsy had ceased to suppose that she could afford to spend too much more of her life looking for long-term loyalty; she could easily be dead before she found it, and even if she did find it there would probably be a price to be paid in the area of serious attractiveness.

  The dinner party had been lively, the food excellent. Poor old General Scott had gone sound asleep in the middle of it, but that hadn’t slowed anyone down—least of all Aurora. For much of her adult life Patsy had an inkling that sooner or later, unless they were lucky, she and Aurora might clash over a man. Aurora was obviously just better at finding men than she was; the odds were that sooner or later she might find a man they both would want. Aurora, after all, was a great forager; she grazed her way through herds of men, all the while keeping a firm grip on someone like General Scott, or Emma’s father, Rudyard, if only for the sake, as she had once admitted, of having some sort of continuing presence of the male sort in her house.

  “It’s one of the few things that can be said for marriage,” Aurora had once remarked. “It provides a continuing presence of the male sort—if one likes such a presence, of such a sort, as
I happen to.”

  She had admitted this to Emma and Patsy on a rainy Houston day many years before. Emma had just married Flap, and Patsy herself was just about to marry Jim. They were discussing bridesmaids’ dresses, but she and Emma—both passionately curious about Aurora and her boyfriends—did she sleep with all of them? did she sleep with none of them?—had managed to turn the conversation toward the great haunting questions that they themselves discussed virtually nonstop whenever they got together to contemplate adult life: marriage, boyfriends, adultery—and was the last really fatal, in the moral sense, at least?

  “What we really want to know is, do we have to throw ourselves under trains if I ever sleep with someone other than Flap, or if Patsy ever sleeps with someone other than Jim?” Emma asked, timidly.

  Aurora had given them a long, wicked look, in which, for a moment, a kind of challenge had flickered. But the challenge, if that’s what it had been, faded quickly, to be replaced by Aurora’s standard infuriating patronizing gaze.

  “You two should be out selling Girl Scout cookies,” she said. “Instead, you’re sitting in my kitchen trying to find out how wicked I am.”

  “Right, why can’t we know?” Emma asked.

  “Only those I’m wicked with know how wicked I am,” Aurora said.

  “I bet you’re plenty wicked,” Patsy said, annoyed by the woman’s patronizing tone.

  Now, nearly three decades later, driving Rosie home from aerobics class, she still found Aurora’s tone annoying, only this time she had the notion that she might do something about it—something on the order of taking her new boyfriend away. She knew herself to be a much less forthright seducer than Aurora; more than once she had let other, more aggressive women lead her to the men she wanted. Sometimes she waited patiently for the romance to stall before interposing herself; other times she had not felt like waiting that long. If she sensed that the man was getting interested and might be ripe to switch, she would sometimes lay a timid, modest kind of ambush—often her very reserve would convince the man that he was the one doing the ambushing.