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  The General hobbled into the bedroom behind her, feeling very low in his thoughts. He was saddened by his own propensity for angering Aurora, even on occasions when he was making a special effort to keep her in a good mood. Special efforts didn’t seem to count for much in this life—not really, the General concluded. Whatever ground one gained by a special effort was rarely ground one could hold for more than a few seconds, after which it was back to trench warfare. Aurora’s chance reference to the Battle of the Somme didn’t describe his life as it might be in a military home. It described his life as it was with her. Mud, barbed wire, and sudden death were likely to be one’s portion.

  He crutched himself over to the window and stood beside her silently. He didn’t know what to say.

  On the sidewalk below them, under the streetlight, two squirrels sat facing one another as if in conversation.

  “Do you think those squirrels are happier than we are?” the General asked. Aurora loved animals and could sometimes be distracted by references to them.

  Aurora knew he was trying to atone for his wounding remark, but she still felt wounded and did not intend to be led into a discussion about the happiness of squirrels.

  “It’s not my fault that I’m younger than you, Hector,” she said. “That’s why you’re mad at me, isn’t it? That’s what people nowadays refer to as the bottom line, isn’t it? I’m younger than you, and I always will be. I have quite a good chance of outliving you. Is that what you’re mad about?”

  It was, although at the moment the General didn’t really feel angry.

  “I know I’m lucky,” he said. “You’ve been wonderful to me for twenty years. If you want to know the truth, you’ve been the best part of my life. You’ve been better than soldiering and a lot better than being married to Evelyn. It makes me mad that it has to end.

  “Of course, that’s not your fault,” he added hastily. “It’s just what happens. It’s just life and death.”

  Aurora blew out her breath in a kind of resigned sigh. It made the General nervous. More and more, the course of their life together was being punctuated by Aurora’s long sighs of resignation. The General didn’t like it. In his twenty years with Aurora she had passed through a great many moods, some of them hundreds of times, but the one mood she normally skipped was resignation. She might be buoyant, she might be sad, she might be furious, but she had never been resigned.

  But now she had begun to sigh her new sigh, and to the General it bespoke resignation. More than once he had wanted to ask her to stop sighing, but he was afraid to. She might take it wrong. Over the years he had said a great many things that she had taken wrong—so many, in fact, that he could not understand why she had not just kicked him out.

  While they were standing together at the window, a small car pulled into the driveway and Melanie, Aurora’s granddaughter, got out. She was chubby, and her short hair, to the General’s annoyance, seemed to be green.

  “Is her hair green?” he asked Aurora. “I thought it was pink.”

  “It was pink, now it’s green,” Aurora said. “Are we going to have to quarrel about that, too?”

  “It’s just that I was finally getting used to it being pink,” the General said. “Now I have to get used to it being green. Before that it was orange. It makes my head spin.

  “Melanie’s hair was beautiful once, when it was blond,” he added.

  Aurora was thinking the same thought. When she was a small child, Melanie’s shining blond hair had delighted everyone who saw her. Indeed, Melanie herself delighted everyone who saw her. She had only been three when her mother died, and for the next several years her liveliness, charm, and self-confidence had kept them all going; in those years it had been hard to stay gloomy with Melanie around. She had defied all opposition, particularly Aurora’s opposition, and Aurora’s opposition was the only serious resistance Melanie encountered as she skipped and darted through her early youth, getting her way nine times out often.

  But then the teenage years came, and almost at the moment of their arrival Melanie lost her liveliness, charm, and self-confidence, retaining only her defiance. From being skinny and quick, she became chubby and slow; she dawdled endlessly, missing her school bus morning after morning. At thirteen she began to disappear from school for hours at a stretch; at fourteen she became addicted to amphetamines and had to spend most of a summer at a substance-abuse camp. Only Rosie could exercise any influence over her at all. By then Aurora had lost so many battles with Melanie that she had more or less ceased battling, from sheer exhaustion. Melanie’s boyfriends had been a succession of rich louts, uniformly intolerable, at least from Aurora’s point of view. Melanie became pregnant by one of them; Rosie persuaded her to have an abortion. Shortly afterward, she ran away for the first time, though only to the home of a friend who had moved to Dallas. When she was seventeen, the stress in the house rose to such a level that Aurora consented to her getting an apartment. She graduated from high school early and enrolled in a media program at the University of Houston, but dropped out and began to work at various fast-food jobs. Then she punked out and quit working. She was now pregnant again, a fact she had only informed them of the week before. Aurora argued for another abortion, but Rosie—mother of seven and grandmother of six so far—wanted her to have the baby: one abortion was okay, two were not. Besides Rosie was frankly gaga about babies and was still vaguely bitter about the fact that she herself had not had a few more.

  “Shouldn’t we ask Melanie up?” the General inquired. “She may be in trouble.”

  Aurora sighed again. “Leave her to Rosie for a bit,” she said. “She only comes to see Rosie anyway.”

  “I’m getting pretty hungry,” the General admitted. “I’ve been nervous all afternoon. I get nervous when you go to the prison. Then I get hungry when you finally come back.”

  Aurora, still digesting three pig sandwiches and a large piece of mincemeat pie, sat down on her bed. She felt like a nap, but knew she couldn’t have a nap just then.

  “We’re having some excellent gumbo,” she informed him. “And I’m having Pascal for dessert.”

  At the mention of Pascal, the General saw red.

  “You’re what?” he said. He not only saw red, he turned red. Even in the dimly lit bedroom, Aurora saw him flush.

  “Excuse me, I’m having him over for dessert,” she amended. “I myself just had some wonderful mince pie at the Pig Stand. You just control yourself. On top of everything else I’ve had to deal with today I don’t think I can bear one of your jealous fits about Pascal.”

  The General didn’t speak for some time—he was doing his utmost to rein in his fit. Aurora looked exhausted and depressed, and a fit just at the moment would be sure to make things worse.

  “You might come to like him, if you’d try,” Aurora said. “You eventually came to like my other boyfriends—only now they’re all dead.”

  “Well, they weren’t exactly boys,” the General reminded her. “Some of them were nearly as old as I am.”

  Aurora began to remove her rings. She needed a shower—nothing else was likely to revive her.

  “They may not have been young, but they had boyish qualities I’m afraid you’ve always lacked, Hector,” she said. “There’s very little of the boy left in you.”

  “How could there be, I’m eighty-six,” the General pointed out, in what he thought was a reasonable tone. “Besides, I’ve sent men into battle. Those things age you.”

  In fact, he could only occasionally remember the battles he had sent men into, but he liked to remind Aurora that he had been a soldier. None of her other boyfriends had sent men off to die.

  “Yes, they aged you, and now you’ve insisted on aging me,” Aurora said. “I wish I had Charlie back, and Trevor and Vernon and Alberto. You’re so rude to Pascal he won’t even stay around to play cards. I’m sure if we had a couple of my boyfriends to play cards with we wouldn’t quarrel so much.”

  “I might like Pascal if he weren’
t French,” the General said. “I fought in France, you know. The women are pretty but the men are much too prissy. They’re always saying ‘Vive la France!’ I’ve heard all I want to hear of ‘Vive la France!’ if you don’t mind.”

  “What does it matter what I mind? I’m going to shower,” Aurora said, hoisting herself up with the aid of one of the General’s crutches.

  “I hope you aren’t mad,” the General said. “I guess I could make a special effort with Pascal. If only he won’t say ‘Vive la France!’ I might come to like him.”

  “Well, we’ll see, Hector,” Aurora said, switching on the light in her bathroom. She paused at the door for a moment, looking at the General, who felt that on the whole he was trying hard and not succeeding where Aurora was concerned. He began again to feel a little sorry for himself.

  “I said I’d make a special effort,” he repeated.

  “Yes, dear, I heard you,” Aurora said. “I believe I’ve heard you utter the phrase ‘special effort’ a half dozen times since I came up. I don’t want to seem unappreciative, but there are times when your special efforts are more trouble than they’re worth. There are times when I’d trade them all for a good card game.”

  “You are unappreciative, though,” the General said. “I’m doing my best. It’s not your fault that you’re younger, and by the same token it’s not my fault that your boyfriends died before I did. I know you wish I’d died first so you could get a younger man to live with, but I’m stubborn, and I didn’t. That’s the way the goddamn cookie crumbled.”

  To his annoyance Aurora looked at him and sighed her sigh again—it was the last sound she uttered before she shut the bathroom door. In a second the General heard the sound of the shower. There was nothing for it but to hobble back to his patio and wait for dinner.

  As he hobbled he reflected that he had hit the nail squarely on the head when he said what he had about Aurora wishing he had died first. After all, he was a worn-out old man—any younger woman would prefer someone with more vigor, particularly more vigor of what one might call the bedroom type.

  That was undoubtedly the nail, and he had undoubtedly hit it on the head. The problem was that, with Aurora, hitting nails on the head was not necessarily the right thing to do. But what was the right thing to do? Did she expect him to spread a red carpet for his own successor? Making things easy for rivals had never been his way, either in love or in war.

  Aurora, in the shower, experienced a sharp touch of remorse. Hector had made a special effort, but for some reason it had activated her cruel streak. Ordinarily, even when a little tired, it was her habit to sing arias in the shower, but the persistence of her cruel streak, where Hector was concerned, left her aria-less this time. Try as she might to be appreciative, the fact was that Hector irked her intolerably at such times, and he always had. It seemed to her that her cruel streak had emerged even oftener, and with more force, when they had both been younger and Hector better able to defend himself.

  The horrible thought struck her that, due to some perversity in her own character, she loved Hector Scott only when he was cranky. At his worst he had certainly been as cranky as she was cruel, and yet she had accepted him as her lover when she might instead have accepted several men who were, by comparison, meek as mice: her boyfriends, the ones who were all dead.

  Thanks to her prison visit she was too cried out to wax very sentimental about her lost boys, or to deceive herself that, as suitors went, hers had been a particularly spectacular group. Charlie Norris, her most recent loss, had been a Cadillac salesman; their courtship had consisted of many test rides in gleaming, new-smelling vehicles that Charlie had hoped to sell her. He had won her affection mainly by incessant flattery, but she was not so won as to spend tens of thousands of dollars on one of his cars. The General rather liked Charlie because he played golf, and in fact had been standing beside Charlie Norris when he hit his last tee shot and fell dead of a heart attack before the ball even hit the fairway.

  Prior to Charlie there had been Trevor, Alberto, and Vernon. Trevor choked on the lobster, Alberto—once a brilliant tenor—died of a brain tumor, and Vernon, her helpful if hopelessly inhibited oilman, had met his death in the crash of a bush plane in Alaska—or at least it was so assumed. No trace of the plane, its pilot, or Vernon had ever been found.

  Of her four fallen friends, only Vernon’s death struck her as truly sad; or, rather, not his death but his life, or lack of a life. Trevor had had his yachts and his women, Alberto had had his great voice and his early fame; even Charlie had had his gleaming cars, and a certain hearty, attractive bonhomie.

  But Vernon had had only his aloneness, and all her wiles—back when she had wiles in abundance—could not induce him to leave it. He had been the most helpful man she had ever known, arriving time after time to get her out of trouble or help her survive crises; but once the trouble ended or the crisis passed, Vernon left. The next time he called he might be in a hotel in Riyadh, or a hut on the North Slope: curious, friendly, even wise at times—but distant.

  “Here is my conclusion, Hector,” she said when she emerged, refreshed, repaired, and dressed for dinner.

  The General had been sitting on the patio but had not turned on the light. He felt too gloomy even to turn on a light. Try as he might, he could not manage to ignore Aurora’s moods. She had hundreds of moods. He knew it was foolish to allow himself to react to every one. After all, at his age, what did one more female mood matter? If it got too bad, he could always die.

  But he didn’t die, and he continued to react to Aurora’s moods. If she was in a bad mood when she shut herself in the bathroom, he would be in a worried state until she came out.

  From the sound of her voice, announcing that she had reached a conclusion, he knew she was in a better mood, and his own spirits rose, though he had no inkling as to what her conclusion might be and could not even remember what subject they had been discussing when she shut herself in the bathroom.

  “My goodness, can’t you even turn on the lights for yourself anymore?” she asked, turning on several.

  “I’d rather be in the dark when I’m depressed,” the General said. He had just remembered what they had been talking about before Aurora took her shower.

  “I was depressed because you don’t seem to like my special efforts,” he said. “You’re always badgering me to make them, and then I do and you don’t like them.”

  “Hector, are you comparing me to a badger?” Aurora asked briskly. “We’re dining shortly. I hope you won’t spoil my digestion by comparing me to a rodent.”

  It was the General’s turn to sigh. After his sigh he grabbed the dictionary and began to look up badger. Lately he and Aurora quarreled so often about what words meant, or what things were, that he had taken to keeping the dictionary handy.

  “A badger isn’t a rodent,” he informed her. “It’s related to the bear.”

  His eyesight was untrustworthy at times and he had not actually yet found the word “badger” in the dictionary, but he was pretty sure a badger was a member of the bear family, so he decided to bluff.

  “Are you doing this to avoid hearing my conclusion?” Aurora asked, highly annoyed. Nothing irked her more than to see Hector Scott take refuge in a dictionary.

  “No, I forgot you had a conclusion,” he said simply. “I’m glad you’re in a better mood.”

  “Too bad for you, now I’m not in it anymore,” Aurora said, although the thought of gumbo and the pleasing ceremony of dinner and the fact that she was dressed and looked nice perked her up more than she was ready to admit.

  “You don’t deserve my conclusion but I’ll give it to you anyway,” she added. “My conclusion is that from now on, when we’re angry, we should just slug it out till one of us drops.”

  Now that he was convinced she was in a good mood, the General was not particularly interested in her conclusion.

  “You mean have fist fights?” he asked mildly. “How’d you come up with that one?”
/>   “You see, you don’t take me seriously,” Aurora said. “As it happens, I don’t take you seriously, either. I’m apt to be quite cavalier about your special efforts—in fact, I just was. But you’re equally cavalier about my tender feelings.”

  “Your what?” the General asked, startled.

  “My tender feelings,” Aurora repeated. “Don’t sit there pretending you didn’t hear me. I have tender feelings quite often, thank you very much.”

  “Well, I make special efforts quite often too,” the General said. “Thank you very much.”

  “You see, this very discussion proves my point,” Aurora said. “Your special efforts make no impression on me, and my tender feelings make no impression on you. So why are we bothering? From now on you have permission to be as cranky as you want, and I’ll be as difficult as I can. That way we’ll know where we stand.”

  “Where you stand, you mean,” the General said. “I can’t stand, unless I have my crutches.”

  “Don’t interrupt me,” Aurora said. “There is one last part to my conclusion and it’s the surprising part. Are you ready to be surprised, Hector?”

  “Sure, every day’s a new day,” the General said.

  “I’m afraid I’ve concluded the opposite,” Aurora said. “If one happens to be living with you, as I appear to be, every day is pretty much the same day. We quarrel and then you sulk. In fact, it’s the sameness of the days that has led me to my surprising conclusion. I think we should go into therapy.”

  The General considered that he knew Aurora thoroughly, and did not expect to be surprised by anything she might conclude. He was so convinced of this that when she said they should go into therapy he assumed he had misunderstood her. Though admittedly a little hard of hearing, he distinctly heard the word “go” and assumed she must be planning to drag him off on a trip to some ridiculous island in a part of the world he wouldn’t like.