The Evening Star Page 8

  “Bye, Melly,” Teddy said. He seemed a little glazed. Getting a bite on the ear from his wife didn’t seem to perk him up much.

  “Teddy’s weird,” Melanie said, the minute he went out the door. The thought occurred to her that Teddy and Jane might break up someday; other couples broke up, and so might Teddy and Jane. If that happened, Jane might take Bump away. Between sips of tea Melanie began to bite at her hangnail. Teddy and Jane breaking up would just make a bad situation worse.

  “Teddy’s fine, stop biting yourself,” Jane said.

  “Do you think you’ll ever break up with him?” Melanie asked—she couldn’t hold back the question. Teddy and Jane were really important to her. Except for Rosie, they were the only people she could go to when she got really strung out. Of course, that left out Koko, who had helped her through strung-out periods a million times, but her relationship with Koko had become confused the minute she slept with him.

  “Get a grip on yourself,” Jane said calmly. “Just because he got in a little dig about my kissing habits doesn’t mean we’re going to break up. I might even be pregnant right now. We want at least one more kid.”

  “You’ll have to get a bigger apartment,” Melanie said, brightening immediately. That was great news—Teddy and Jane wanted more kids.

  Still, when Jane got yawny and Melanie left and was driving through the late-night mist to her dump of an apartment off Fairview Street, she didn’t feel any too calm. She had seen Teddy go to pieces before—he might go to pieces again. Rosie seemed to think that Jane had been crazier than Teddy at the time the two of them met. Underneath the surface there was something kind of wild about Jane. It would be pretty horrible for Bump if his mother and father went to pieces again.

  Melanie parked in front of her apartment and started to get out and go in—but then she didn’t. She stalled. What she usually did when she went into her apartment was call somebody to take her mind off what a mess the apartment was; but the only person she could call at such an hour was Koko, and if she called Koko he would want to come right over. Then, if she let him, she might not be able to get him back to being just her basic pal.

  Also, if she was in the apartment, she was definitely home, but if she was still in her car the situation was was sort of less definite—she could con herself into thinking that she might be about to go somewhere else, even if it was only to the Westheimer 7-Eleven to buy a pack of cigarettes from her brother.

  Technically she knew that it was really not that safe to spend the night in your car—some rapist or girl killer could always come by and spot her. But in fact, with the deep mist wrapped around the car like a cocoon, she felt safer in the car than she did in the apartment. That was a great thing about Houston: those deep mists. You could put on a tape and sort of listen from within your cocoon of misty fog. Melanie put on a tape of one of her favorite groups, Pump Up the Volume. She didn’t turn it up very loud—she didn’t want a passing rapist to find her in her cocoon. She had her old poncho in the backseat and she wrapped up in it and let the music and the mist and the little red light on the tape player sort of coax her into being drowsy. It wasn’t really sleep, but to Melanie it was more restful than being upstairs amid her mess. If she went upstairs she might start missing Bruce; she might start crying and cry too long, or she might start having hate thoughts about Beverly and her stupid Ferrari. At the very least she might lie there feeling zingy all night, worrying about people going to pieces. On the whole it was just better in her car—being drowsy under her poncho, hearing the music, and feeling sort of safe and cozy because of the mist.

  8

  After she dispatched Pascal, Aurora wandered into the kitchen, there to discover Rosie, who was watching CNN. To Aurora’s annoyance she seemed to have finished off the walnut cake.

  “Yeah, I got nervous and ate it,” Rosie admitted. “We still got that extra piece of mince pie you brought from the Pig Stand in case of emergencies. Remember that piece of pie?”

  “Of course I remember it—who do you think bought it?” Aurora said. “I just happened to be more in the mood for walnut cake, but that mood has now obviously been frustrated, along with all the other moods I’ve had this evening.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rosie said. “C.C. ain’t called for two days, that’s why I got so nervous I finished off the cake. Maybe he’s quit me.”

  “Nonsense, why would any man quit you?” Aurora asked. “Most of them would far rather quit me.”

  “Well, we both got the same kind of tongues,” Rosie pointed out. “The mean kind.”

  “Do I have to hear the news every time I come into my own kitchen?” Aurora asked, taking the mince pie out of the refrigerator. Now that she was holding it in her hand it looked every bit as appealing as the walnut cake.

  “A whole mountain fell on top of a little town down in South America,” Rosie informed her. “It was just a little village full of real poor people, and now it’s gone and they’re all buried in mud, except for one baby they managed to get out. It’s awful.”

  “It certainly is, but I’m not looking at it,” Aurora said. “This is suffering I can’t possibly redeem, and I object to having to confront it in my own kitchen. There’s quite enough suffering I feel I must at least try to redeem—falling mountains and smothered villages are far more than I can cope with.”

  Rosie immediately clicked off the TV. It was obvious that Aurora was in no mood for any news, really.

  “I turned it off,” she said apologetically. Aurora’s mouth was already full of pie.

  “That’s what I hate about television,” Aurora said, pausing at the halfway point of the pie and wishing she had brought two pieces home instead of one.

  “What’s what you hate?” Rosie asked, when no comment followed. Aurora sat with her fork in her hand, looking annoyed and unhappy.

  “What I hate about it is that it brings every suffering face in the world into my kitchen,” Aurora said. “I don’t want to see Chinese suffering, Romanian suffering, Palestinian suffering, South American suffering, or any other suffering. I’m up to my gullet in suffering right here at home—you saw how sad Melly looked. I’ll try to take care of my own but I’m not going to sit here and feel responsible for China or Romania or anywhere else.”

  “That’s the most pie I ever saw you eat in one day,” Rosie commented. “Three pieces of mince, and then there was that piece of chocolate cream that you ate this morning before we went to the prison.”

  “So what, it’s the only appetite I can satisfy by myself,” Aurora snapped. “No males or their organs need be involved. Just me and my pie.”

  “Oh,” Rosie said, “Did the General flash you or what?”

  “No,” Aurora said. “Pascal ran cold water on his necktie without bothering to take if off first, and then he attempted to strangle me. I’m so disappointed in him I could cry, and I would if I weren’t already cried out.”

  “I know what you mean,” Rosie said, “I’m about ready to give up on C.C. I would give up on him, only the next bozo to come down the pike might be even more of a washout than he is.”

  Aurora didn’t answer, so Rosie got up and left. She liked to leave a perfectly clean kitchen, but in this case holding out for perfect cleanliness meant waiting for Aurora to finish her mince pie and then washing the pie plate and returning it to the cabinet. Rosie decided she better not risk it. Aurora did not look to be in the mood to appreciate having her pie plate snatched from her hands and washed.

  “Good night, hon,” Rosie said, going out the back door. As soon as she got to her cottage in the backyard she meant to switch CNN back on and see if any more babies had been rescued from the fallen mountain in South America.

  Aurora knew Rosie would have liked to snatch the pie plate; she had been prepared to tear her limb from limb, verbally, at least, if she tried it. But when Rosie left, the fighting spirit went out of her at once, and her appetite suffered such a sharp falling off that she could scarcely finish her pie. In fact, she eve
n left a curl of crust on her plate, something she rarely did. She almost regretted chasing Rosie off. When the two of them were together they at least generated enough human energy to bicker, and there were moments when bickering with Rosie seemed a good deal better than doing nothing with no one.

  But Rosie was gone, the pie was eaten, her irredeemably sad grandson had been duly visited, Hector had been rude, Melanie had been depressed, and Pascal had disgraced his nation, more or less. There were moments when she felt she might someday achieve a living, more or less complete relationship with Pascal Ferney, but those moments were few and far between. And yet, if not with him, who could she achieve a living, more or less complete relationship with?

  Discouraged, she put the pie plate in the sink and surveyed the contents of her refrigerator for a moment, hoping to spot some especially enticing leftover that might revive her appetite. People were constantly pointing out to her that all she did was eat, and it was more or less true; but eating was at least a real pleasure and it seemed hardly to matter any more whether she put on weight. She had never been exactly tiny, and now that she was older, she felt that weight was one worry she could safely dismiss.

  “I’d rather be strong than thin,” she said, when Rosie and Melanie chided her about her eating. Fortunately, Hector Scott knew better than to chide her about it, and in any case he had long been attracted to women of a certain heft, herself included.

  She trudged up to her bedroom and opened the curtains. Invariably Hector closed them, and just as invariably she opened them again, because she liked the way the streetlight at the end of the block made circles in the mist—circles that were like little moons of luminosity. Hector, whose circulation was now so impaired that he had taken to sleeping in socks, gloves, and a nightcap, was snoring away. She preferred to ignore the socks and the gloves, but it was hard to ignore the nightcap, which made him look far too much like a character out of Dickens—Ebenezer Scrooge or Silas Marner or someone.

  Aurora washed her face, got into her gown, and crawled into bed. She didn’t feel sleepy; she felt empty, absent, idling—as if she had strayed into an area of life that she had not really been able to make her own. Often she read most of the night, mysteries and one thing or another. She had been making a late assault on Proust, but when she felt so absent she could rarely quite focus on Proust. Occasionally she might amuse herself with an old staple—movie magazines—but lately movie magazines hadn’t been working quite as well as they once had. The stars now seemed ridiculously young, their antics and the romantic complications they got themselves into seemed adolescent in a way that had ceased to be appealing. Even their beauty had ceased to be appealing; she didn’t know why, exactly. Perhaps it was because physical beauty was never likely to make an appearance in her life again—it was vaguely annoying that there seemed to be an endless supply of it running around Hollywood and behaving badly.

  When she slipped into bed, Hector’s body immediately edged over toward hers, as if in tropic response to her size and her warmth. His body did that every night. Aurora sat up in bed, looking out at the streetlight and the little moon it had created around itself. She felt Hector’s hand fumbling for her hand. Every night he fumbled for her hand. Aurora removed his glove and flung it on the floor before allowing him to take her hand, at which point, to her annoyance, he woke up.

  “What happened to my glove?” he asked.

  “I took it off, Hector,” Aurora said. “I don’t feel like holding hands with a glove, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, but you don’t like it when my hands get cold, either,” the General said. “I’m caught either way I go.”

  “You’re no more caught than I am, you know,” Aurora said. “Either I’m holding hands with a glove or I’m being fondled by an icy claw. It’s very disappointing that this is how life ends.”

  “Ends?” the General said. “That’s nonsense. Your life isn’t ending. My life is a lot closer to ending than your life is. I’ll be lucky if I last five years, and I imagine you’ll last at least twenty.”

  “Those are just numbers,” Aurora said. “In other respects this is how life ends, and I have every right to be disappointed, if not indignant.”

  “Did anything happen with the Frenchman?” the General inquired. He noted sadly that Aurora seemed subdued. Difficult as she was when she wasn’t subdued, he still hated to see her subdued, and it seemed to be happening more often. It was not uncommon for them both to find themselves awake in the middle of the night feeling subdued. In the General’s thinking, it was all because of sex, too. If he hadn’t petered out, no pun intended, they would have something to do in the middle of the night if they both happened to be awake. It might not be all that it had been, but would probably have been enough to keep them from feeling so subdued.

  “Well, he came and ate and made a fool of himself,” Aurora said. “Anything is a rather vast category, Hector. If you mean did I manage to stumble through the amenities, yes. On the other hand, if you mean something more sinister, no, nothing happened.”

  “Well, that’s too bad, I guess,” the General said.

  “Too bad, you guess?” Aurora said, stung. She snatched his nightcap off and threw it in the general direction of his glove.

  The General realized from her hostile tone that in all likelihood he had misspoken, but he was just waking up and didn’t quite have his mental bearings; he knew it was foolish to speak when he didn’t have his mental bearings, particularly if Aurora had hers—and she usually did have hers—but he often failed to stop himself in time. This was particularly likely to lead to trouble if Aurora was feeling subdued when he popped off.

  Besides speaking in a hostile tone, she jerked her hand away, a sure sign that she was miffed, or worse. The General decided to pretend that he had just made a very general remark with no very specific intent. This might not work, but it was about the only option he had open to him.

  “I just meant it was too bad you didn’t have a more agreeable evening,” he said, and then he began to hum a patriotic tune, something he had taken to doing with increasing frequency in moments of stress. Since almost all moments were now moments of stress, he found himself doing a good deal of humming.

  In this case the patriotic tune he started to hum was “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” a tune he associated with the Second World War, though it seemed to him he had also heard it a good many times during the Korean engagement.

  “Stop that stupid humming, Hector,” Aurora said. “Every time you fumble the ball nowadays you start humming unrecognizable melodies from your distant youth. I much prefer that you just admit that you fumbled the ball, as you did. Humming, as you prefer to engage in it, won’t help you recover many fumbles, if I’m using the right terminology.”

  “That wasn’t an unrecognizable melody,” the General protested. “That was ‘There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere.’”

  “Shut up about the stupid song,” Aurora said. “Didn’t you just imply that you wished I’d slept with Pascal?”

  “Of course I didn’t imply it,” the General said. “I didn’t imply any such a goddamn thing.”

  It occurred to him that perhaps he had implied it, but if so, what was to be gained by admitting it?

  “Then what did you mean when you said it was too bad that nothing more sinister happened between Pascal and myself this evening?” Aurora asked. “Were you hoping he’d murder me? Was that what you meant was too bad, that he didn’t murder me?”

  “Aurora, I just woke up,” the General said. “I don’t know what I meant. I probably said something stupid. We quarrel all day as it is—do we have to quarrel all night, too?”

  “Get out from under me, Hector,” Aurora said. He seemed to be trying to wedge himself underneath her—it was another of his new habits.

  “And stop lying, too,” she added. “My hearing has not deserted me, thank you, and I very distinctly heard a remark suggesting that I am now free to seduce my ad
mirers willy-nilly, and furthermore that I can count on your sympathy, if one lets me down, shall we say?”

  “I thought I was supposed to be sympathetic to whatever happened to you,” the General said. “You’re always complaining about my lack of sympathy, but the second I show some I get attacked. I’d like to know what the rule is. Am I supposed to chortle with glee every time some fool disappoints you?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I expect you to do,” Aurora said. “You’ve hounded me with your jealousies for more years than I can remember, and I won’t have you wimping out now.”

  “Doing what, now?” the General asked.

  “Wimpery, wimping out,” Aurora said. “It’s something Melanie often complains about. Now that it’s happened to me I’ve decided that it’s a very useful term.”

  “What’s it supposed to mean?” the General asked.

  “It suggests a failure in the area of manly behavior,” Aurora said.

  “Oh, impotence,” the General replied. “Here we go again. If that’s what you’re complaining about, why not call a spade a spade?”

  “Because in fact that wasn’t what I was complaining about, Hector,” Aurora said. “I was speaking of a certain desertion of principles, where I am concerned. Annoying as your principles have always been, I still expect you to hew to them. You’re not French, you know, and you are not required to adopt a French attitude toward my infidelities. When I behave badly I expect wrath, not sympathy.”

  “Your what?” the General asked, suddenly sitting up in bed. “I didn’t know you committed any goddamn infidelities. I thought you said nothing happened.”

  “Nothing did, but that’s because Pascal is a fool,” Aurora said, glancing at him to see what, if any, effect she might be having.

  “I know he’s a fool, I’ve been telling you that for five years,” General Scott said. “What does that have to do with what we’re talking about?”

  “Merely that I had every intention of seducing him on the sofa,” Aurora said lightly.