“Well, I wish I was dead,” Rosie said.
“Not only are you not dead, you’ve got a date,” Aurora said. “Look on the bright side.”
“I have, and that’s another reason I wish I was dead,” Rosie said.
8
When they reached the house they were startled to see the General, naked once again, standing in the front door. The moment they stopped the car he began to wave his crutch at them.
“Shit, there’s the ancient nudist again,” Aurora said.
“I’ll sneak around and do my tablecloth number,” Rosie said. “We’ll have him decent in no time.”
“Not likely, he’s never been especially decent,” Aurora said.
Rosie was worried about Aurora, who clearly was in a worse than usual mood, and thought it best to try to subdue the General as soon as possible. For Aurora to reject the Pig Stand was a bad sign; seeing the General standing naked before his Maker, not to mention the neighborhood, was not something she deserved to have to cope with on such a day.
“He’s yelling some gibberish at us,” Aurora said. “I suppose it could be good news. Last time he did this Melanie was running away. Maybe this time she’s come back.”
“I think he’s probably just lost his mind,” Rosie said, not wanting Aurora to get her hopes up too high where Melanie was concerned. The few times Melanie had called she had sounded almost giddy with happiness, and there seemed little likelihood that she would be arriving back in Houston anytime soon.
They got out of the car, Rosie heading for the back door, Aurora for the front.
“Hector, it’s a wonder you haven’t been arrested,” Aurora told him, when she got within range of the General’s increasingly limited hearing. “This is a respectable neighborhood and people really don’t expect their neighbors to stand in the front door naked.”
“But I know what happened to Pascal,” the General said. “There was a good reason why he didn’t show up the other night.”
“And what might that be?” Aurora asked, just as Rosie arrived with the tablecloth and thrust it between the General and the outside world.
“Oh, no you don’t,” the General said, trying to poke the tablecloth away with his crutch.
“Oh, yes I do,” Rosie said, pulling the tablecloth back like a matador leading a bull. She proved to be the swifter: before he knew it, the General was decently swaddled again.
“Good God, you’re both more interested in wrapping me up like a mummy than you are in hearing my news,” he said with annoyance. “You’d think neither of you had ever seen a naked man before.”
“A more accurate interpretation, Hector, is that we’ve both seen one too many naked men,” Aurora said. “What is this you’ve found out about Pascal’s irresponsible absence the night of my kidnapping?”
“What kidnapping?” the General asked. “You weren’t kidnapped and you know it.”
“No, but Pascal thought I was, so in a moral sense he was quite irresponsible in not showing up at once to join in the search for my abductors,” Aurora said. “I believe the logic of that reasoning is flawless, if I did invent it myself.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” the General said. “He tried to come but he had a car wreck. He’s been in the hospital knocked out cold for a day and a night. The consulate just called to say he seems to be out of danger, but he did crack his skull in a couple of places, I guess.”
Aurora sighed, just the kind of sigh the General hated to hear her sigh. She was not looking her best, in his view, and after her sigh she looked even more discouraged than she had looked coming up the walk. He had meant to confide in her some exciting news, which was that he had had an erection while he was taking his shower, only about an hour ago, but now she was looking so downcast that he thought he better keep quiet about his erection for a while.
“He’s not going to die,” he assured her, thinking perhaps that his blunt statement about Pascal’s cracking his skull had been a little too blunt. “He was just coming to help when he had the wreck.”
“That car of his ain’t nothing but a soup can,” Rosie said. “If he had much of a wreck in that thing he’s lucky he ain’t up in harpland, playing a harp.”
Aurora smiled a wry smile. “I don’t know which prospect depresses me more,” she said. “Pascal dead or Pascal playing a harp.”
“He was just trying to help,” the General repeated.
Aurora looked at Rosie. “Why is it men feel compelled to repeat the most obvious statements?” she said.
“Sometimes when they’re scared they forget their own words the minute they’re out of their mouths,” Rosie said. “C.C. will forget his own name when he’s scared.”
“Are you scared, Hector?” Aurora asked.
“Hell, no,” the General said. “I just thought you’d want to hear the news, since you like Pascal so much.”
“Maybe I like him and maybe I don’t,” Aurora said. “If you knew what was good for you, you’d be scared, but I don’t believe you know much of anything, so now I’m going upstairs and be depressed. You keep away from me for a while or you’ll not only be scared, you’ll be struck.”
“Good lord, what did I do?” the General asked, when Aurora had indeed gone upstairs. “It’s been years since she’s threatened to hit me.”
“Ssh,” Rosie said, trying to lead him into the kitchen. “Her heart’s broke, is all. She says she ain’t going to see Tommy no more.”
“Oh, that’s bad,” the General said. “I’m afraid that’s very bad. Maybe we better call Teddy and see if he can come over and try to cheer her up. Sometimes Teddy’s the only person who can cheer her up when she’s really low.”
“It’s worth a try,” Rosie said. “We’ll have to try it tomorrow, though. This is about the time Teddy goes to work.”
They both sat at the kitchen table but could think of nothing to do but sit and fret. Rosie sprinkled a little salt on her wrist and licked it off, a habit she fell into when almost out of her mind with nervousness.
“If I were to eat that much salt I’d have a stroke and die,” the General informed her.
“So?” Rosie said, sprinkling more salt. “I ain’t you, am I?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean you’re immortal, either,” the General said.
Before Rosie could summon a retort, they heard Aurora coming downstairs. They stopped talking instantly—when she was in certain moods, a single careless word might set her off.
“Don’t sit there huddled,” Aurora said, annoyed by the mere sight of them. “You know how rabbitlike behavior irritates me.”
“All behavior irritates you when you’re irritated anyway,” the General pointed out. “At least all my behavior irritates you. If I could stop breathing right now I would—at least until you get in a better mood, and who knows when that will be?”
“Hector, I’m going,” Aurora said. “You could see that for yourself if you could bring yourself to look up from your rabbitlike crouch.”
Rosie noticed that Aurora had changed her dress and had a purse over her arm—nonetheless, she herself still felt like licking a few more sprinkles of salt off her wrist and planned to do so the moment Aurora was safely gone.
“I’m not crouched, particularly,” the General said. “I’m bent with age and care. You can go fuck yourself, for all I care. You’ve been totally rude to me ever since you came home, and I’ve had enough. Rosie and I are decent human beings who are just trying to do our duty as we see it, and you’re behaving like the monster you are at heart. I don’t know why I ever entered this house and I’m apt to leave at any time. Besides, I’m not sure you ought to drive in your condition. You’ll be the next one with a cracked skull.”
“At least my skull has hair on it, unlike some I could mention,” Aurora said, as she went out the door.
“She’s right about that,” Rosie said. “That woman’s got a fine head of hair. A crack or two wouldn’t even show.”
“Shut up,
” the General said. “This whole conversation has been a travesty.”
“Is a travesty one of them wigs female impersonators wear?” Rosie asked—she was vaguely aware of having heard the word travesty but didn’t see how it applied to the conversation, which was no different from thousands that had taken place in Aurora’s house over the years.
“Turn on the TV before we both go crazy,” the General said.
9
Aurora felt almost irresistibly drawn to drive by Jerry Bruckner’s house before going to the hospital to see Pascal, and in fact went a mile or two in that direction before correcting her compass and heading for the Medical Center. She knew there was nothing to be gained from her infatuation with Jerry Bruckner, and yet she was also painfully aware that she was infatuated with him, even though she suspected that he was a rather empty man. He just happened to be a really appealing empty man, of the sort she had been too frequently drawn to in her life. Trevor, her yachtsman, had been just such an empty man, sailing, marrying, and seducing, to no purpose, his whole life, and yet she had loved Trevor, believing to the end that if circumstances could be budged a little she could fill him out, or up, and make him into a more or less substantial person.
All she really knew about Jerry Bruckner was that he had sad brown eyes and a perfect lower lip; also the hairs on his wrists had an exciting effect on her. He had obviously read a great many books on psychoanalysis, while remaining in most respects a slightly untidy innocent who seemed to know little about life—the sort of person who made a sex life of waitresses and airline stewardesses—not that there was anything wrong with waitresses and airline stewardesses. The flaw was in the man who was attracted to transient women; the attraction so often seemed to be to the transience, not to the women.
Once in the parking lot at the Medical Center, Aurora studied her reflection in the rearview mirror. It was an annoyed face she saw—annoyed that life had left her so vulnerable to sad eyes, lower lips, and sexy wrist hairs. But there was really nothing to be done about it; though she knew herself to be a woman of considerable force of will, her force of will had never been sufficient to relieve her of any of her vulnerabilities, and she didn’t imagine that it would be sufficient this time. Meanwhile, there was an aging Frenchman with a bent penis and a cracked skull to think about; she took her time getting out of the car and proceeding with her duty, but she did finally enter the hospital, where, after a few wrong turns, she located Pascal’s room.
The door to the room was slightly ajar. She was about to push it open and go on in when she was stopped by the sound of a woman’s voice. The woman was speaking French. Peeking through the crack, Aurora saw a young woman with long, casually combed brown hair sitting on the edge of Pascal’s bed, clasping one of his hands in both of hers. Where Pascal’s other hand was, Aurora couldn’t precisely see, but then the young woman wiggled and giggled and bent over to give him a noisy kiss.
Aurora drew back instantly and walked on down the hall in a slight state of shock. Sometimes, in his cups, Pascal had bragged about his conquests of young women, but she had complacently supposed that was just par for the course Gallic bragging, done in the hope of making her so jealous that she would become a conquest herself.
Now she had become a conquest—a girlfriend, really, and had just almost walked in on Pascal and another girlfriend, a fact that made her feel like a complete fool. Probably Pascal hadn’t been bragging all those years; probably any number of young beauties with casually combed hair had succumbed to the same wooing that she had eventually succumbed to. Part of the reason she felt such a fool was that she had overlooked an obvious fact: young women were easy prey to older men with some experience of the world. In her youth she herself had once been easy prey for a Philadelphian who had really been after her mother. His name was Morton Needham; she had never regretted the affair, but she did regret that she had forgotten its lesson: young women were pushovers for older men who knew how to push—and quite a few older men did know how to push.
She wandered on down the hall, as far as the hall went, recovering from her shock. Her first impulse had been to leave, but her second impulse was to hang around and get a better look at the girl; the second impulse won. She went back along the hall, tiptoed past Pascal’s room, and waited in the little waiting room by the nurse’s station. She was leafing through a ragged copy of McCall’s when she heard the click-click of heels coming with what sounded like Parisian haste from the direction of Pascal’s room. The girl passed within ten feet of her. She was skinny and no beauty, but she had a certain chic and a Hermes bag over her shoulder. She looked to be, at most, a year or two older than Melanie, of whom Aurora only had to think momentarily to feel a kind of ache: the ache of missing.
Aurora decided that five minutes would constitute a decent interval between bedside visits, but discontented with the magazine, not to mention life, she cut it to one minute, and went back to the room. Pascal was not in bed when she arrived but she could hear him in the tiny bathroom. She settled herself in a green chair and waited silently for his return. If he emerged looking frail and pitiful she was prepared to forgive all—who could begrudge a frail old Frenchman a skinny mademoiselle or two?
Unfortunately for him, Pascal strode out of the bathroom looking cocky—though all the cockiness left him instantly when he saw Aurora sitting in the chair by his bed. His first feeling was relief—Solange had left. But then, she had only just left: what if Aurora had noticed her? Solange would never pay any attention to a woman Aurora’s age, even if she had seen her, but what about Aurora? His shock was so great he gasped. He had been feeling vigorous and had even been thinking of asking the doctor if he could go home, but his sense of vigor declined sharply when he caught sight of his visitor. The spring immediately went out of his walk and the blood out of his face. So great was his shock that he ceased to be able to walk straight and had to grasp the railing at the end of the bed to keep from veering off toward the corner where the television hung. Indeed, before Aurora had had time to say a word, he had more or less become the pitiful old Frenchman she had expected to find in the first place.
See that her mere arrival on the heels of his departing guest constituted a kind of overkill, Aurora immediately got up and helped him get around the bed and back under the covers. She felt like saying “Gotcha!” but managed to hold her tongue.
Pascal had no trouble holding his tongue. He had a feeling Aurora knew everything—if she had so much as glimpsed Solange in the hall she would immediately have figured it out. If she knew everything, then he was at her mercy and he had better keep quiet. A false word at such a time would seal his doom. She hadn’t kissed him, which probably meant that his doom was already sealed, but while there was a chance, the best strategy was to remain quiet and look sick. Since he suddenly felt quite sick, there was no problem with that part of his strategy, nor, since he was terrified, with the first part of the strategy either.
Aurora sat down again and they both were silent. Pascal considered trying to groan, calling for the nurse, taking a pill, or just keeping his eyes shut, but he did none of these things.
Aurora soon got tired of what felt like a very silly silence. “Well, Pascal, what an old bamboozler you are,” she said mildly. “Ten minutes ago you were chattering amorously with your young girlfriend, but so far you haven’t said a single word to your old girlfriend. It makes me feel rather unwanted, just when I was hoping to feel wanted.”
“I want!” Pascal said, taking hope from her mild tone. “I was coming to save you when I had the wreck. I ranned the stop sign.”
“You may have run it but you didn’t ranned it, unless you mean rammed it,” Aurora said. “You don’t have to start talking like Peter Sellers just because I caught you with Mademoiselle. You can speak excellent English, and you’d better, or I’m marching out of here never to be seen again.”
“I forgot the stop sign, that was the problem,” Pascal said. “I forgot it and I fell into a pickup. It was because I
was so afraid you were kidnapped.”
“You thought I was kidnapped?” Aurora said.
“Yes, the Mafia,” Pascal said vaguely, realizing that in the sober light of day his kidnapping theory must seem a little silly.
“The Mafia indeed,” Aurora said. “In fact, on the day in question I merely happened to linger with my young sweetie a little longer than usual.”
“Oh,” Pascal said. It seemed like a simple explanation until he happened to remember what had happened a little earlier on the day in question—at least he was fairly sure it was the day in question. What had happened was that they had made love not once, but twice, in his apartment, on his new mauve sheets.
“What?” he said, thinking he must have misunderstood, or at the very least, have got his days mixed up. If the day in question was the day they had made love twice, then what nonsense was Aurora talking? On such a day all she needed to do was go home, and without giving the matter further thought, he said as much.
“You should have just gone home,” he said, feeling a little confused but also a little indignant.
“Now, now,” Aurora said. “This is obviously a loose confederation we’re in, and you mustn’t be telling me what I should have done. If you, at your age, can have a skinny mademoiselle, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t avail myself of a vigorous young monsieur.”
“But,” Pascal said, and stopped. He felt himself growing indignant, the very thing his doctors insisted that he not do. He had been strongly advised to keep calm, but how could one keep calm with Aurora sitting there bragging about the vigor of her young lover? In view of his health, which he had sacrificed in an effort to save her from the Mafia, she should not be talking such talk.
“But there is no need!” he said, making what seemed to him a generous—even overgenerous—effort to be reasonable. “You have me.”
“Yes, but you have Mademoiselle what might her name be?” Aurora asked.