The Evening Star Page 20

  “Yeah, sexual advances,” Norma informed him. “What kind of advances did you think I was talking about?”

  “I just wondered,” Jerry said. Norma, who was named after her hometown, Norman, Oklahoma, had buck teeth and a low flash point. It was the buck teeth that made her look interesting, and the low flash point that kept Jerry from asking her for a date. He knew that quarrels were a part of life, but that didn’t mean he had to enjoy them. In fact, he didn’t enjoy them—perhaps that, too, was attributable to his thirty-five years with Lola. He and his mother had rarely exchanged a cross word, but instinct told him that lots of cross words were going to be exchanged if he took up with Norma—so, in the end, he didn’t.

  What he did, though, was spend a lot of time thinking about the Raus. How could it be that after all those years of wedded union, Mrs. Rau could get mad enough at the doctor to blow him nearly in two with a shotgun? Was it a last straw? Or the first straw? Had the doctor worn her down with forty-odd years of adulteries, or had he fooled her all that time into thinking he was a faithful husband, only to reveal himself in a fatal moment as a chaser after winsome seventeen-year-olds? Jerry had never met Mrs. Rau and had seen the doctor only in his office; he was not the type to go snooping around the Raus’ neighbors, asking them what they knew about the old couple’s marriage, which meant that his questions remained pure questions: that is, unanswered. When the doctor and his wife rose in his mind, as they did from time to time, Jerry was of the opinion that it might have been a first straw, or, to put it more precisely, a first-and-last straw, but that, he knew, was just a guess.

  Six months later Jerry got a postcard announcing that there would be a house sale of the Raus’ effects. Dr. Rau had once shown him his proudest possession, a copy of Die Traumentung—Freud’s first great book—signed by Freud. The doctor kept the book in his office in a handsome leather slipcase. Jerry decided to go to the sale, hoping to get the book. He wanted it as a talisman, a great text by a great master, something to carry with him through life.

  Unfortunately, on the day of the sale he overslept; by the time he got there the book was gone. In fact, by the time he got there, almost everything was gone, though a sizable crowd was still milling around in the house. A few of the cheaper prints still hung on the walls, and some crockery was still piled on card tables in the living room, but by and large the sale had achieved its purpose: the Raus were gone, and so were most of their domestic accouterments. What surprised Jerry was how old and how German the crowd was: apart from a few neighbors and a passerby or two, the whole crowd was old and German. It was a crowd that seemed to belong to the thirties, or at the latest, the forties. Quite a few of the women had cigarette holders, and one fat old gentleman even had a monocle. They weren’t tatty, either—most of them were dressed rather well in the Continental manner of decades past; they were a far cry from what one usually saw at house sales in L.A. Jerry would not have been surprised to see Von Stroheim, Von Sternberg, Thomas Mann, or Alma Mahler, or even Dietrich, walk out of one of the empty dusty bedrooms.

  He had almost passed up the sale, but soon felt glad that he had gone. He had missed the great book but had gained a glimpse of something even more rare: L.A. as it had once been—smart, tenacious, determined, elegant. The people milling around among the Raus’ sparse effects might be a little stooped, a little wrinkled, a little too made-up: but they did not look defeated. They looked as if they intended to be around for a while—such pretty seventeen-year-old Americans as strayed into their paths had better look out. They might be old, but clearly they weren’t through.

  Wandering out onto the small back porch, Jerry noticed a couch covered by an old bedspread with peacocks stitched on it. He needed a bedspread and picked this one up to look at it more closely—Lola would have loved the peacocks. But it was old and dusty, and he decided against it. Then, in attempting to spread it neatly back on the couch, he realized that he wasn’t looking at just another ordinary piece of furniture: he was looking at an analyst’s couch.

  He bought the couch immediately and stuffed it into his no longer new but still very serviceable station wagon. He was proud of his purchase—in fact, excited by it—but when he put it in his apartment, the one thing he did not do was sit on it. Once a girlfriend named Didi sat on it briefly, and the sight made Jerry so uncomfortable that he suggested they go for a walk. The couch was not an ordinary piece of furniture, to be sat on, slept on, worn out, and eventually plunked into a lawn sale or given to the Goodwill. It was an analyst’s couch—a relic, in Jerry’s view, of a stricter, more polished, more intellectually rigorous era. It was not for girlfriends to sit on while they watched TV and/or did their nails.

  The more or less accidental, last-minute purchase of Dr. Herman Rau’s analyst’s couch changed Jerry’s life—a fact he pointed out to Aurora Greenway one day when she was lying on it but exhibiting signs of restlessness.

  She was lying on it facing him, too, which was not the way a patient in therapy was supposed to face. The fact that she was facing him was merely the first of many victories Aurora won in struggles involving proper therapeutic procedure.

  “The point is, you’ll feel freer to talk if you’re just looking into your memory rather than looking at me,” Jerry said, when they discussed the matter of which way she should face when she lay on the couch.

  “Well, you’re the doctor, but it’s plain you don’t know me very well,” Aurora said, smiling at him. He was one of those rare men the mere sight of whom made her smile; she saw no reason why she should lie on an uncomfortable couch and stare at the wall when she could be staring at a man whose slightly gloomy appearance almost invariably cheered her up.

  “I know I don’t know you very well,” Jerry said. “I’d like to know you better, and I hope I will, but if you watch me when you talk to me about your past, then you’ll be trying to guess what I’m thinking about what you’re telling me. That might just slow things down.”

  “I certainly will try to guess what you’re thinking, if I choose to tell you anything significant,” Aurora countered. “If you’re my therapist, why can’t I know what you’re thinking? If you’re going to keep secrets from me, what’s the point?

  “This couch could use some pillows,” she added. “I intend to bring some next time I visit. I may even buy you some new curtains—these you have now are pretty dingy. I don’t think I can concentrate on any former traumas if I have to be uncomfortable and look at dingy curtains. I’ll be too busy experiencing new traumas to remember my old ones.”

  Most of Jerry’s patients dressed like their moods, and their moods were mainly dull, drab moods, so they arrived wearing dull, drab clothes, and equally dull, drab expressions. Aurora was the complete opposite: she dressed in reds and yellows or bright blues, and her moods were equally vivid. She didn’t seem depressed at all—or at least she didn’t once the General dropped out of therapy and she began coming alone.

  Jerry had pointed out to them on their first visit that it was uncommon for couples to be treated together.

  “I told her that,” General Scott said. “I didn’t think you’d want to do both of us at the same time, but Aurora wouldn’t pay me any mind. She never does pay me any mind.

  “She made me come,” he added. “This wasn’t my idea.”

  “Yes, and I believe I erred, for once,” Aurora said.

  “There’s only one couch,” Jerry pointed out, amused. He decided he liked her.

  “That’s fine, I’ll lie on it and Hector can sit in a chair, if he wishes to stay,” Aurora said. “It’s much easier for him to get back on his crutches if he’s in a chair.”

  “If I wish to stay? What choice do I have?” the General asked. “Do you expect me to walk home in the shape I’m in?

  “No, but there are plenty of taxis in Houston,” Aurora pointed out. Now that she had met Dr. Bruckner, she could not imagine why she had insisted on dragging Hector along.

  “What’s wrong with a taxi?” she added. “Y
ou rarely approve of my driving anyway.”

  Jerry used that opportunity to point out to them that he was a lay therapist. He pointed that out to all his patients on their first visit, informing them frankly that he had never been to medical school and had no degrees of any kind. So far, without exception, his patients had been too depressed to care about his lack of formal credentials. They were there, they hurt, they wanted to talk about it; if Jerry would at least try to help, that was good enough for them.

  This response surprised Jerry at first. When the notion first occurred to him to try to be a lay therapist, like Marty Mortimer, he hadn’t invested much in the idea. Something told him, though, that L.A. was the wrong town for the experiment; he stuffed the analyst’s couch into his old station wagon and headed back to Houston. But he did so with no great expectations about developing a booming practice. From what he had seen of it, he liked Houston—it seemed wide-open and, as cities went, unusually welcoming; it might be the kind of loose, freewheeling place where a lay therapist might have a chance. If it didn’t work, he could always go back to the concierge business.

  In fact, he went back to the concierge business and stayed in it for almost a year while he was trying to decide whether being a lay therapist was ethical, whether he was up to it, whether he should just give up the idea. He bought a house with a study that would make an ideal office. He put the analyst’s couch in that office, arranged his psychiatric books—by this time he had over three thousand—had some cards printed, and even had a sign painted. But he didn’t take an ad in the phone book; in fact, he didn’t even stick his sign in his yard—he left it propped tentatively on his front porch while continuing to work at the concierge trade. He also continued to try to make up his mind. He was forty years old and had been studying psychology and psychoanalysis for nearly half those years. Did he dare try being a therapist, or didn’t he?

  Evidently he didn’t dare; the sign remained propped on the porch, and Jerry continued to be a concierge until one steamy June afternoon, when fate took a hand. He was resting in his dim living room, watching a Mets game on TV, when there came a knock at the door. A small, fat, elderly, drunken woman stood on the porch, smoking and holding the leads of two wheezing Corgis, so ancient they could scarcely shuffle along.

  “Hi, I’m Marge,” she said, “If you’re a doctor, help me. My daughter’s had thirty-six strokes on the same side of her brain, and my husband has emphysema so bad he has to be on oxygen twenty-four hours a day. I’ve been walking past this house for six months, waiting for you to put your sign in the yard, but it’s still propped on the porch, and I can’t wait any longer. I have terrible problems. If I take the dogs home, can I come in and talk?”

  “You don’t have to take the dogs home,” Jerry said. “I don’t mind dogs.”

  That same afternoon, after Marge left, Jerry put the sign in the yard. In a week he had ten patients; in a month he had nearly forty, all of them, like Marge, people with terrible problems who happened to be wandering around Bellaire, noticed the sign, and grasped it as a last straw. Jerry Bruckner, self-invented therapist, was in business; he knew he wasn’t doing analysis or anything resembling it, but he did think he was following in the noble tradition of Marty Mortimer by giving a little informed attention to people whose problems were on the order of Marge’s, whose daughter actually had suffered thirty-six strokes on the same side of her brain. It was catch-as-catch-can psychotherapy, but it took away the empty feeling that had been part of his life for so long. He had finally found something that he thought might be his work, and the feeling grew as he struggled to provide at least a little sympathy and a little knowledge to hopeless human case after hopeless human case. Some of his patients only came five or six times, but most of them, like Marge, still came every week—Marge to smoke, chat, reproach her wheezy old dogs, and talk about her terrible problems.

  By the middle of his second year as a practicing, if unlicensed, therapist, Jerry had gained confidence enough to put a tiny one-line ad in the Yellow Pages. After the first rush, passerby traffic had slowly trickled off. After all, only so many people with really terrible problems—so terrible that they would just whip over to the curb at the sight of a sign saying “Therapy”—would have any reason to be driving along his little street in Bellaire, Texas. It seemed time to cast a slightly wider net.

  Jerry cast it, and the third person who called, once the ad appeared in the Yellow Pages, was Aurora Greenway.

  3

  “You’re falling in love with that young man—don’t think I can’t tell,” the General said, watching Aurora dress. Aurora was singing, as she frequently did, and he didn’t know whether she heard him. He had been meaning to bring up the subject of her new love for some time, but somehow his courage always deserted him at the last moment.

  So he brought it up while she was singing, half hoping that she wouldn’t hear him.

  “That’s why you didn’t want me to keep on being psychoanalyzed,” he added.

  He liked Dr. Bruckner fine and didn’t really mind all that much that Aurora had a crush on him, but he had rather enjoyed chatting with the young man the four times they had gone together, and Aurora’s crush meant that now he was denied a pleasant outing. Though Aurora had always been a terrible driver, she, and no one else he had ever ridden with, had driven as badly as she managed to drive on their visits to Dr. Bruckner. It was obvious to him that she was driving so terribly in order to discourage him from going with her. He had stopped going with her, but now he regretted his decision. There was nothing to do at home—at least nothing that he had not already done a hundred times. Driving to Bellaire and chatting with Jerry Bruckner had been something new to do—at least it would be, if Aurora could just get him there alive. If not, being dead would be what he had to do, and being dead was pretty soon going to be what he had to do anyway. He didn’t want to rush it by getting in a car wreck, but at the same time he felt a growing resentment of Aurora for being so selfish and denying him his little outings.

  “I don’t get many outings, you know,” he said. Aurora had stopped singing, but she was still humming, and she had given no indication that she had heard his thrust about her being in love with Jerry Bruckner.

  “Are you going to answer, or are you just going to pretend that you didn’t hear the question?” the General asked finally, when his patience had begun to wear thin.

  “What you said was a statement, not a question,” Aurora said. “I heard it perfectly well, but, as you know, I prefer not to have annoying statements made to me while I’m singing my arias. Now that I look back down the years, I think we would have had a better life together if you hadn’t so frequently insisted on making annoying statements while I was singing.”

  “I have to make statements sometime,” the General said. “If you’re not singing you’re napping, or if you’re not napping you’re gone, or if you’re not gone you’re cooking or eating or we’re quarreling or something.

  “Anyway, I don’t know what you think was so annoying about my statement,” he added. “I just pointed out that you’re falling in love with Jerry.”

  “Yes, Hector, but the problem of you saying that to me while I’m singing is that it poses a number of questions, and in order to consider any one of them, I have to stop singing, which I wasn’t ready to do,” Aurora said.

  A moment before, when she was singing, Aurora had been looking happy, but the General saw to his concern that she was no longer looking quite so happy. She didn’t look angry with him, which was the way she had often looked in the last few years, but neither did she look as happy as she had looked while she was singing.

  The change in her demeanor made him regret that he had spoken.

  “I’m not mad at you about it,” he said. “I guess I was just thinking out loud.”

  Aurora had slipped into one of her silences, or seemed about to slip into one, and he was willing to apologize or do almost anything else, if only she wouldn’t slip into one of her sile
nces. Her silences terrified him—always had. Now she was looking out her bedroom window, a sure sign that a silence might be gathering, but when he said he wasn’t mad at her she turned and smiled at him. It was not one of her stunningly happy smiles, but it was a smile, at least, and not a silence.

  “What an odd thing for my old boyfriend to be thinking out loud,” she said.

  “Well, what’s so odd about it?” the General asked, relieved that she was at least talking. “If you’re falling in love with Jerry, why wouldn’t I be thinking about it?”

  “You’ve never been exactly the compliant type,” Aurora said. “If I’m falling in love with Jerry and you’re not mad, what am I to take that to mean? That you’re too far gone to care?”

  “Aurora, I’ll always care,” the General said. “You don’t have to put it so brutally. I can’t help it if I’m this far gone.”

  “So you are going to be mad if it turns out that I’m in love with Jerry, is that what you mean?” Aurora asked, with a flash of spirit.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be mad—I don’t know what I’ll be,” the General said. “What can I do about it if I do care?”

  “The act of caring is doing something—will you never understand that?” Aurora said. Her bosom was heaving and she looked as if she were about to become very angry.

  “I don’t want you to beat me, if that’s how you interpret caring,” she said. “But I don’t see why I can’t know whether you care.”

  “Why do we always end up talking about whether I care?” the General asked—he felt a strong sense of déjà vu.

  “That’s simple—because it’s so hard to tell if you do!” Aurora said. “You’ve tolerated a lot of my admirers. More than once I expected you to leave me because of them, but you didn’t.”

  She fell silent for a moment, making an attempt to calm down. The General had no idea what to say.

  “That is, I expected you to leave me when you could still walk,” she added, in a more kindly tone.