The Evening Star Page 19

  Jerry Bruckner had hardly flirted with her at all during the dinner party, but that was okay. Aurora had given him few chances. But a couple of times Patsy had caught him looking, a good sign. She didn’t know if she believed he was a real analyst, whatever being a real analyst meant in this day and time, but he did seem to be some kind of therapist, which left a ready-made opening. Over the years she had tried every kind of therapy, from primal scream to mud baths; a little therapy with Aurora’s new boyfriend surely wouldn’t hurt, whatever brand of it he practiced. She could make an appointment some day and tell Jerry Bruckner the sad truth about her most recent Latin architect, though really, in that case, the truth was more silly than sad. The man owned two perfect, gorgeous Dalmatians, and was more interested in spending time with them than he was in spending time with her. Nothing as dramatic as discovering him being sucked off by a gardener had occurred; she just got tired of competing with a couple of spotted dogs.

  Rosie seemed despondent. As usual, she had performed brilliantly in aerobics class, but now she was staring blankly out the window of the car, indifferent to the fact that Patsy was doing her usual eighty-five. They had decided to go to a Vietnamese market over near the Ship Channel and reward themselves with a Vietnamese breakfast before going back to Aurora’s house.

  “Had you met the guest of honor before?” Patsy asked.

  “Which?” Rosie asked. C.C. Granby was hopeless, she had about decided to break up with him, but the question was, if she did, would she ever be able to get another boyfriend?

  “The guest of honor at the dinner party?” Patsy repeated. “Aurora’s shrink.”

  “Oh, Jerry,” Rosie said. “Yeah, I met him before.”

  Patsy waited, but Rosie didn’t elaborate. She stared blankly out the window some more.

  “What’s the matter?” Patsy asked. “Why are you clamming up on me? Are you forbidden to talk about him?”

  “Talk about who?” Rosie asked. Her mind had been tugged back to C.C. Granby—it was as if her mind was a paper clip that kept getting flattened against the magnet of C.C.’s intractability. He was already talking about making love in the car again and had even shyly proposed what he thought might be an ideal solution to the problem of the car’s rocking noticeably: oral sex.

  It did not strike Rosie as an ideal solution, but the mere thought of it, and the certainty that C.C. would return to the proposition again and again, as regularly as he rolled his shirtsleeves up and down, made it difficult for her to keep her mind on Patsy’s questions.

  “I ain’t supposed to talk about anything, specially to you, but when has that ever stopped me?” Rosie asked.

  “It’s stopping you this morning,” Patsy said.

  “Naw, I’m just distracted,” Rosie said. “I’m getting where I’m distracted more and more. Aurora thinks I need therapy myself.”

  “That’s interesting,” Patsy said. “With Jerry Bruckner or with somebody else?”

  “With Jerry,” Rosie said. “One thing I’ll say for him, he can cook. He’s come over and cooked dinner a couple of times. If I ever had a boyfriend who could cook I’d think I was in heaven.”

  “Me too,” Patsy admitted.

  “What does General Scott think about all this?” she asked, a little later. They were on Canal Street—the mist off the Ship Channel was cut by strips of sunlight.

  “The General ain’t been himself lately,” Rosie said. “Half the time he calls me Aurora, or Aurora me. He’s gettin’ a little senile, I guess.”

  “Is he still going to the shrink with Aurora?” Patsy asked. “It’s not exactly standard procedure for two people to be analyzed together, if they are being analyzed.”

  “Naw, he quit after about three weeks,” Rosie said. “He says Aurora’s driving scares him too much now. She got at least one ticket every time they went to see Jerry, and once she got three in one morning. The General’s nerves ain’t up to it. He likes Jerry, but he and Aurora fight so much over her driving that the therapy wears off before they even get home.”

  “I bet she does it on purpose to get the General to stay home,” Patsy said. “I bet she really just wants Jerry to herself.”

  “Aurora don’t have to fake bad driving, though,” Rosie said. “She drives about as bad as anybody I know. My kids could drive better than she does before they were ten years old.”

  Listening to Patsy try to probe made Rosie feel sulkier than she had been feeling to begin with. Sometimes she enjoyed gossiping about Aurora’s love life, and sometimes she didn’t. This was one of the times when she didn’t. On her low days it sometimes seemed that she had spent her whole life doing nothing but talking about Aurora and her boyfriends. It seemed to her that there really ought to be a little more to life than trying to figure out whether Aurora Greenway was sleeping with a particular man or not—and anyway, the task was not as simple as it might seem. For all her flaunting of this suitor or that, Aurora could be as secretive as the next person when it suited her to be. Neither she herself nor Patsy nor anyone else had ever been able to determine whether Aurora had actually slept with the man called Cowboy Bill, a tall, craggy rodeo promoter who had drifted incongruously into Aurora’s orbit, circled around in it for five years, and was still apt to show up and receive a warm welcome whenever the rodeo was in town.

  But how warm was a warm welcome, in Cowboy Bill’s case? Rosie didn’t know, and neither did anyone else except Aurora and Cowboy Bill.

  “What’s therapy like?” she asked, hoping to change the subject. She liked Patsy and didn’t want to hurt her feelings; she just thought it was a little early to start worrying about what might be going on between Aurora and Jerry Bruckner.

  “I ought to be able to answer that question, since I’ve had every kind known to man,” Patsy said. “Sometimes it’s pretty helpful and sometimes it isn’t. Dr. Bruckner seemed like a pretty relaxed guy. I don’t think he’s going to solve all your problems, but he might help you with a few of them. It wouldn’t hurt you to go see him a few times.”

  “I only got one big problem, and that’s C.C.,” Rosie said. “All he thinks about is oral sex, but what’s really driving me crazy is that he keeps rolling his shirtsleeves up and down.”

  “He does what?” Patsy asked.

  “He rolls his shirtsleeves up, and then he rolls them back down again,” Rosie said. “The oral sex I can take or leave, but watching that man mess with his stupid shirtsleeves is driving me bats.

  “It’s like he’s obsessed with his shirtsleeves,” she added, as they pulled up to the little Vietnamese market. In the morning it was a very popular place. Two or three Mercedeses and a dozen or more pickups were already parked at the curb—so many that Patsy had to park a block and a half away.

  “It sounds to me like C.C.’s the one who needs therapy,” Patsy said. “On the other hand, there might be a simpler solution.”

  “Like what?” Rosie asked.

  “Like buying him some short-sleeve shirts,” Patsy said. “When’s his birthday?”

  2

  Before becoming a therapist, Jerry Bruckner had mainly made his living either as a concierge or as a stand-up comic. His specialty as a comic had been analysis routines. In those days he worked mostly in lower Manhattan, where a lot of people appreciated a comic who could mimic Freud or Jung, Adler or Reich or whoever. Jerry even managed to locate an orgone box and did a hilarious Reich routine from inside it.

  His crowd-stopper, though, was Anna Freud. When Jerry did Anna Freud the customers knocked over tables and rolled in the aisles, such as they were.

  Still, stand-up comedy was hard work, even if one had a well-honed specialty. Jerry was getting a living, but he wasn’t getting ahead, and the grime and grayness of New York eventually wore him down. He missed his hometown, Las Vegas, and the sun and the sunsets and the beautiful desert sky. His mother, Lola, had been a showgirl—the star of the Stardust for nearly twenty years. One of the reasons Jerry got interested in psychoanalysis in the firs
t place was that his mother’s lover, during most of Jerry’s childhood, had been an itinerant psychiatrist named Marty Mortimer. Marty was known in Las Vegas as the Shrink of the Strip; he had not quite managed to get through medical school and was just a lay shrink, but he was a much beloved figure in Las Vegas. He roved from casino to casino, doing his work mostly between the shows. He had eased countless showgirls through anxiety attacks brought on by too much thinking about what would happen to them when their breasts began to sag or their thighs to get fat; he counseled gay costume managers, and high rollers who were no longer rolling so high. Besides all that, he was a pillar of support to Lola and an excellent stepfather to Jerry, whose real father lived in Australia and was seldom heard from.

  Marty Mortimer’s dream, unrealized, was to be analyzed by some great analyst, preferably a strict Freudian, after which he would become an analyst himself and have a little office in one of the many white stucco buildings on the edge of the desert, where he could do proper analysis. He planned to give very low rates to showgirls, for whom he had a great fondness; but one day, while making his way from the Stardust to the Circus-Circus, Marty pitched over, dead, victim of a heart attack. Lola and Jerry were bereft, and the showgirls Marty had counseled so tenderly and whom he had hoped, with the tool of analysis, to coax into happy lives, were forced to make do with evangelists who offered them Jesus and heaven but were much less sympathetic to worries about breasts and thighs.

  Marty’s legacy to Lola was the little stucco building in which he had hoped to set up office; his legacy to Jerry was his psychoanalytic library, a good one. Marty’s library became Jerry’s college—he soon became almost obsessed with the rivalries and feuds of Freud and the early schismatics. By night he made his living dealing blackjack at the MGM Grand, and by day he read his way through the works of a lot of quarrelsome European doctors. A good deal of what he read seemed funny to him. Since childhood he had done minor stage bits with his mother, and he gradually developed the notion of a comedy act based on psychoanalysis and its founders.

  Jerry realized, of course, that a comedy act dealing with Freud and Jung and the others was not likely to be welcomed in Las Vegas—a town where even tits and feathers, or lions and tigers, or people being shot out of cannons frequently failed to distract people from the slots or the craps tables for more than a few minutes at a time.

  So one day Jerry bought a bus ticket, kissed his weeping mother goodbye, and went to New York, where he survived by doing sidewalk magic and a little short-order cooking until he developed his act, which he worked with fair success until New York ground him down. At least, though, he had risen above buses—when he moved to Los Angeles, to reacquaint himself with sunlight as Westerners knew sunlight, he took a plane.

  In L.A. the sunlight was adequate—not as good as you got in the desert but a lot better than you got in New York—but his career as a stand-up comic quickly came to an end. Plenty of Angelenos were in analysis, but for them it was a dead serious business; they didn’t want people being funny about it. Sophisticated New Yorkers loved to hear analysis being made fun of, but in Los Angeles making light of analysis was a good way to start a fistfight. When Jerry mimicked Jung or Adler, very few people chuckled; nobody rolled in the aisles when he did Anna Freud. After a few penurious months, which he only survived financially by working at an Orange Julius stand on the Santa Monica pier, Jerry went home to Las Vegas, to deal some more blackjack and help his gentle mother die of cancer.

  During most of the time of her dying, Lola lay on a couch in the little house Marty had left her, watching Carol Burnett reruns. Jerry often watched them with her. He sat in a big chair by the couch and held her weak, frail hand. Lola had never ceased to believe in his talent as a comic. Sometimes, for her amusement, he redid Carol Burnett routines, Lucille Ball routines, or Bob Newhart routines. His mimicry was flawless, even though his heart wasn’t in it.

  “When you were a little boy in school you only liked science, remember?” Lola reminded him, a day or two before she died. “I had it in my mind you’d be a doctor. You’re so sweet, Jerry. You’d be a fine doctor. People need someone sweet to be with them when they’re sick.

  “Look at us,” she added. “I’ve hardly even noticed I’m dying, you’ve been so sweet to me.”

  But Lola, star of the Stardust, died despite his sweetness; and in his loneliness following her death, Jerry fell in love with a seventeen-year-old showgirl named Cherry. They had been in love only a week when Cherry got laid off in the late summer lull and decided to use the layoff to go home to Houston, to her little sister’s wedding. Cherry had long legs and perfect breasts; she had no worries about getting rehired when things picked up.

  After some hesitation, Jerry allowed himself to be taken to Houston. He was still sad about Lola and didn’t feel in the mood for wedding-type festivities, but when Cherry wanted something she very rarely took no for an answer, and she didn’t take it this time: she had long legs and perfect breasts, and didn’t see any reason to.

  Jerry Bruckner was a quiet man; Cherry’s family, though friendly to a fault, soon proved to be a little too loud for his taste. For that matter, Cherry herself was a little too loud for his taste—she had so much energy that he frequently felt a little overwhelmed. She liked to holler at the top of her lungs when they danced, and she was apt to screech and scream, also at the top of her lungs, when they made love. Her father owned a little welding company specializing in oil-rig repair; her mother was head dispatcher for a local trucking company; and her three tall, perfectly formed sisters also did their share of hollering and screaming. It was all done in the spirit of heartiness, health, and good fun, but Jerry still felt he was apt to be deafened before the wedding even happened, and he became a little depressed at the thought of all the stomping and hollering that would take place at the wedding reception. At Cherry’s insistence, they had arrived in Houston a week early so Cherry wouldn’t miss a single bit of the partying, which involved dusk-till-dawn honky-tonking and many large meals.

  If Jerry was a near genius-level mimic, he was an absolute genius-level hitchhiker. Two days before the wedding he got out of bed, took one last look at the sleeping Cherry’s perfect breasts, and took a walk down the ramp of the nearest freeway. Fortunately 1-10 was only four blocks from Cherry’s family home. Before he had even gone halfway down the on ramp, he was picked up by a black nurse on her way home to Galveston; an hour later he was walking on the gray, almost-deserted Galveston beach, enjoying the quiet. By midafternoon he had a job shucking crabs at a big seafood restaurant on the seawall, and another little chapter in his life had ended: the Cherry chapter.

  Jerry spent a happy six months odd-jobbing it around Galveston, ending up as concierge at the only beachfront hotel that even knew what a concierge was. The Texas tips were so good that when he tired of the job he bought a brand-new station wagon and drove back to Las Vegas to sell Lola’s little building and pack up Marty Mortimer’s extensive psychoanalytic library.

  On the long drive across the spacious West, Jerry performed a mini-analysis on himself and concluded that he was not cut out for great loves or high passions. Getting girlfriends had never been a problem; he liked all of them and fell in love with a few of them, but the high passion never seemed to quite kick in, and after a time either he would saunter away from them or they would saunter away from him. Often he would feel a few twinges of loss when he and a girlfriend parted, but no intense regret. His only intense regret was that Lola had died. He spent a good deal of time reflecting on his years with his mother—the things he missed most about her were her gentleness and her good manners. Even in pain and disappointment, neither had ever deserted her.

  Jerry moved back to L.A. and got a job as a concierge at a very good Beverly Hills hotel. He was an excellent concierge, well informed, well liked, and well tipped. He immediately went into analysis with a dour, bald Freudian in Westwood, and used tips to pay for his analysis. Nearly four years were spent in discussin
g Lola and her manners: whether subconsciously he resented them, or merely loved his mother to excess, or blamed her for his absent father, or all of the above. Meanwhile he dated actresses who were still at the waiting-tables stage, almost marrying one named Sheryl, whose breasts were not much less perfect than Cherry’s. He liked Dr. Rau, his keen-minded, grumpy old analyst, but the analysis came to an abrupt halt one day when Dr. Rau’s wife of some forty-five years greeted him at the door of their home with a loaded shotgun and killed him on the spot. She had just discovered that he had been playing around with a neighbor’s teenage daughter.

  Mrs. Rau left her husband lying dead in the foyer of their modest West Hollywood home; she went upstairs, ran a bath, got in it fully clothed, and used a pair of nail scissors to strip the electrical cord on her hair dryer. Then she turned the hair dryer on, dropped it in the tub, and neatly electrocuted herself.

  The case was big news for two days—longer, of course, in the immediate West Hollywood neighborhood where the Raus had lived. The neighbor’s daughter, a well-developed seventeen-year-old, swore that nothing improper had happened, but in the minds of many her protests lacked conviction. One of the many who didn’t believe her was a waitress named Norma who worked at a little coffee-and-doughnut shop in the Westwood block where Dr. Rau had had his office. Jerry had consumed quite a few doughnuts there while trying to decide whether to ask Norma for a date. One day, while he was trying to decide, Norma happened to mention that Dr. Rau had made advances, and that she, personally, was of the opinion that he had received more or less what he had coming to him.

  “Sexual advances?” Jerry said.