The Evening Star

  “Could I just have a washrag, please?” she asked. “I believe if I had a wet washrag we could bathe this fever away.”

  Teddy got her the washrag and she began to bathe the little boy’s face and forehead. At first Bump wiggled and resisted, but then he gave up and rested limply in Aurora’s lap. His eyes were already less feverish.

  “Do you think it’s coming down?” Teddy asked. Bump’s fevers were big crises in their lives—far bigger, really, than Jane’s affair with Claudia. Jane worried herself sick over the fevers, and he worried himself sick about Jane and Bump.

  “Why, yes, a little,” Aurora said, feeling Bump’s forehead.

  “I’m going to phone Jane—she’ll be relieved,” Teddy said.

  Bump looked up at Aurora and she made a fish face at him. Ordinarily when his Big Granny made a fish face at him, Bump dissolved in hilarity, but this time he felt too sleepy to laugh. He smiled a little, though.

  “That’s better,” Aurora said.

  Teddy stayed in the bedroom, reporting on Bump’s recovery, for some time. Aurora continued to use the washrag to cool down her great-grandchild. When Teddy returned to the room, his eyes, it seemed to her, were less wild. The little boy would soon be over his fever, and perhaps Teddy had slipped past the gates of madness once again. She herself felt rather tired—perhaps now it was time she went home.

  “Is the woman nice?” she asked, handing Bump to his father.

  “Oh, Claudia?” Teddy said. “Yeah, she is nice. She’s a little bit of a slob, but she’s nice.”

  “Far better that it’s a woman than a man, Ted,” Aurora said. “Just at this moment you may not agree with that opinion, but someday you’ll see that I’m right.”

  “I already think you’re right,” Teddy said. “If it was a man he’d probably try to take Jane away, and that’d be awful. As it is, about the worst that can happen is that Claudia might move in with us.”

  “I see,” Aurora said. “What does Jonathan think of Claudia?”

  “Oh, he likes her fine,” Teddy said. “She reads him stories. If she did move in with us, Jane and I could both work days and Claudia could be his nanny. It would actually be kind of good if we could both work days.”

  “Yes, it probably would,” Aurora said. She gave Bump a couple of kisses on his neck—a neck that was still hot. His fever had not abated that much, but it would, and she thought it best to anticipate its abatement a bit and relieve his worried parents’ minds.

  “Jane’s family is not without their adventurous bent, I must say,” Aurora reflected. “Laurie’s got a Senegalese and now Jane has you and a woman. What about the little one—Betsy?”

  “Betsy’s gay,” Teddy said. “She lives with a girl who’s a dental assistant. I like them both a lot, even though Betsy thinks men are brutes.”

  “Well, except for you and one or two scattered souls, Betsy’s right,” Aurora said, handing Jonathan to him.

  “Did you see Tommy?” Teddy asked cautiously when she stood up to go. Tommy was a sore subject, best approached in a gingerly fashion.

  “Yes, but for the last time, unless he changes,” Aurora said. “I have other responsibilities, and I can’t afford to be hurt that badly. I told him so, too.”

  “I don’t think Tommy will change,” Teddy said.

  “I don’t either, so there’s no point,” Aurora said. “What do you hear from Melly?”

  “We don’t,” Teddy said. “I guess they aren’t able to afford a telephone yet. I told her to call from a pay phone and make it collect, but she won’t.”

  “I’m becoming a trifle worried,” Aurora said. “It would be nice to know if either one of them actually has a job yet, and if they don’t I’d like to know what they’re living on. I wonder if your father’s heard from her—I suppose he’d help his own child if it was an emergency.”

  “I guess he would,” Teddy said without conviction.

  “At least he would if it were life or death,” he added. “If Melly was just broke, I doubt he’d want to hear it. Madga would skin him alive if she caught him giving any of us money. She definitely expects him to spend all his money on her and her children.”

  “I’m sure—I predicted he’d get that sort of wife,” Aurora said. “On the whole it serves him right, but it’s no help where Melly’s concerned.

  “Rosie’s quite worried, too,” she added. In fact, Rosie was so worried that she wanted both of them to fly to Los Angeles and see for themselves how things stood. They had argued about the wisdom of such a step as recently as that morning.

  Teddy felt slightly guilty for not worrying about his sister more than he did, but in fact life at home was about all he had time or energy to think about. Bump was wiggling, meaning he wanted to be put on the floor, which might make his fever to back up.

  Teddy put him on the floor and Bump collapsed in a heap, thumb in his mouth, looking not much less feverish than he had when Aurora came in. If his fever actually went up before Jane got home there would be hell to pay, Teddy worried.

  “Ted, relax,” Aurora said, seeing his anxiety writ plain on his face as he looked down at the child. “We’ll just give him a tiny bit of aspirin and I assure you the fever will go down.”

  “Jane doesn’t approve of aspirin,” Teddy said quickly.

  “I know—shut your eyes and you won’t see a thing,” Aurora said. She went to the bathroom, broke off a quarter of an aspirin tablet, got some water, and got the aspirin down the child, whom she deposited back in his bed.

  “Jane doesn’t know everything, nor does she rule the planet,” she told Teddy, giving him a big hug before she left.

  “I think I’ll study a little Sanskrit,” he said, looking relieved.

  11

  Melanie told the young officers that she was pregnant, but they put the handcuffs on her anyway and then seemed to just forget about her while they chewed gum and got the details from the grocery-store employee who had caught her with the two steaks under her sweater. It was all just dumb, completely dumb—she didn’t have the right attitude to be a good shoplifter and she had told Bruce so; she just hadn’t been able to convince him. He had it in his head that the mere fact that she was pregnant would protect her, although she was only a little more than three months pregnant and really didn’t show. But Bruce was in one of his stubborn moods; he wanted her to shoplift some steaks and she finally gave in and did it, or tried to do it, feeling stupid and guilty both.

  They weren’t even all that totally desperately broke; she still had her little waitressing job at the deli on Ventura. It was just that they had used almost all her tip money, plus Bruce’s paycheck from his part-time job at the filling station, to pay the rent on their cruddy apartment, which was an ugly green building on the east edge of Studio City. Even so, they had enough money for Chinese food or some tacos at one of the cheap Mexican places strung along Lankersheim, but Bruce kept insisting that he wanted red meat, and now she was caught; so caught that she was beginning to feel sick to her stomach from worry. The supermarket was on Victory Boulevard, not far from the Burbank airport. Planes kept coming right over her, deafeningly. The cops just left her standing on the sidewalk at the edge of the parking lot while they chatted with the girl from the grocery store—she was skinny but sort of pretty, Melanie thought. Hordes of little Hispanic children milled around, looking at her with her wrists handcuffed—they obviously thought it was a good joke that a fat Anglo girl had got caught with steaks under her sweater. Some of the older women, with kids hanging all over them, wearily pushing shopping carts out to their beat-up cars, didn’t seem to think it was so funny—they looked down at the sidewalk when they passed. Nobody was really sympathetic, though; no friendly faces turned her way. The trouble was her trouble, and it was clear that none of the shoppers wanted to get near it.

  Melanie didn’t blame them; it was too stupid, and they were right not to care about it. She wished fervently that she had just stood up to Bruce and insisted that they go get so
me tacos, or else Chinese; he was going to be pissed, for sure, that she got caught. She had no idea how much it would cost to bail her out of jail, but undoubtedly it was going to cost more than they had—they would have to ask for help from somebody. The anxiety of being arrested, to the extent that she was arrested, was making her feel very tired—she wished they would put her in the police car so at least she would be sitting down, but the officers just went on chatting with the skinny girl from the grocery store and showed no interest in putting her in the police car, or anywhere else.

  If only she had stood up to Bruce, Melanie thought again—but Bruce was so disappointed that he had moved all the way to L.A. just to work part time in a gas station that she rarely had the heart to refuse him when he really wanted something. Whether it was sex or steak, she sort of felt he ought to get it if it would put him in a better mood for at least a little while.

  Actually, Melanie herself felt pretty disappointed with their life in L.A., but she tried to hide it; somebody had to at least try to be the cheerful one, and it seemed as if it should be her. After all, she had agreed to the move in about ten seconds; at that time she was giddy with love and also eager to get Bruce as far away as possible from Beverly and her Ferrari. But she had never expected just to arrive in L.A. and become an immediate movie star, which is what Bruce seemed to have expected. He was cheerful for about a week, until it dawned on him that he was still a million miles from being a movie star, or anything else different from what he had been in Houston, even though he did enroll in an acting class that met twice a week in North Hollywood.

  Melanie had never had the faintest expectations of becoming a movie star, though she still thought she might try someday for a career in television—at least she might if she ever lost weight. But she wasn’t going to lose weight until the baby came, so she just started looking for the best job she could get in order to help support them until Bruce got some training and maybe made a little progress toward an acting career.

  Still, living in a cruddy apartment on Cahuenga and waitressing and pumping gas just wasn’t that different from living in a cruddy apartment on Fairview Street and waitressing and pumping gas. The big difference for her was that she was pregnant, but Bruce wasn’t pregnant, and the big difference for him was that he no longer had a Ferrari to drive or a bunch of friends with drug money in their pockets to run around with. Melanie thought maybe she could make some of it up to him with extra good sex, and she did try, but the results weren’t too consistent. Once in a while it actually was extra good, but a lot of times it was just normal fucking and it didn’t keep Bruce from looking depressed when he went off to the filling station.

  Just as Melanie was making a mental checklist of people she might call to get her out of jail—it was a short checklist, she didn’t know that many people in L.A.—the cops finished their flirtation with the grocery clerk and turned their attention to her. While they were flirting with the clerk they had both looked jolly, but when they started hustling her toward the police car they got real stern again. Melanie started to feel a little queasy from fear—what if they beat her up or something? Neither one of them was much older than she was, but when they deigned to look at her at all their eyes made it clear that in their eyes she was just total criminal trash. Melanie wished her grandmother were there: it wouldn’t take her grandmother long to make them feel like total criminal trash.

  But of course that was an irrational wish—her grandmother wasn’t there. She herself was on the way to jail and that was that. The silence in the car was horrible—the cops managed to ignore her in a way that made it clear that they hated her, if only for the inconvenience of being required to drive her to jail. Melanie began to wish they’d read her her rights or something, just to break the silence, although it wasn’t actual silence, since the police radio squawked all the time—it was just silence between her and the cops. She looked out the window and happened to notice a familiar green building: they were driving right past her own apartment building! If Bruce would only look out the window he could see her being arrested! But he was undoubtedly just flopped on the bed, watching TV and waiting for her to show up and cook his steak. He probably even had enough money to pay for the stupid steaks; she thought for a moment of telling the cops that, but they both looked so hateful she was a little afraid to speak, and didn’t speak. She went back to her mental list of people she could call and immediately ruled out her father. She had called her father only once since moving to the West Coast, and he had not seemed pleased to hear that she was more or less in the neighborhood. She had thought he might at least invite the two of them down for lunch some weekend, but he hadn’t, and he sure wasn’t going to want to drive all the way from Riverside to get her out of jail.

  Melanie decided that the best thing to do was to call Patsy Carpenter’s younger daughter, Katie. Patsy’s older daughter, Ariadne, was a Berkeley radical-type snob who would hardly speak to anyone who hadn’t tried to overthrow the government at least once; she was usually off in some Third World country, finding out more bad things the U.S. government had done. Katie had bopped around the Third World a lot, too, but mainly she preferred to hang out in Westwood, going to UCLA when it suited her and just having boyfriends and hitting the beach the rest of the time. She was a little bit of a snob too, but mainly she was friendly. Katie even came to Texas once in a while to visit her mother, unlike Ariadne, who stayed away from Texas on the grounds that Lyndon Johnson and a lot of people she referred to as pig millionaires came from there. Ariadne was quite contemptuous of her mother for moving back to Texas, a state where Lyndon Johnson had once lived. Ariadne really had a thing about Lyndon Johnson, not to mention a thing about her mother and almost everyone else. The fact that her mother had grown up in Texas in the first place and had quite a few friends there cut no ice with Ariadne—in her eyes, personal things like that shouldn’t matter: they could never cancel out the crimes of Lyndon Johnson. Melanie was willing to agree that Lyndon Johnson had probably done a lot of bad things, but she still felt a little sorry for Patsy, who never got to see Ariadne unless she visited her in places like Ethiopia or Sri Lanka.

  Katie, though, was a lot nicer—Melanie decided Katie was who she had better call from jail. She couldn’t call Bruce because the phone company wanted a two-hundred-dollar deposit before they would connect the phone, and they hadn’t been able to afford it yet. Melanie seemed to remember that once you were arrested you were only allowed one phone call—to your family or your lawyer or something. She didn’t have a lawyer, of course, but the one phone call business was a really worrisome aspect of the trouble she had gotten herself into. Katie went to the beach a lot, and also she was pretty and popular, and had a lot of boyfriends, and fell in love a lot. What if she was off at the beach with a boyfriend and hadn’t left her message machine on? In that event Melanie might waste her one call and never get out of jail.

  When the police car passed their apartment building Melanie got the notion that maybe the police station was in Studio City, not too far from their home, but it soon turned out that the cops were just checking a complaint from an Asian guy who had all four tires stolen right off his car while it was parked near the intersection of Vineland and Lankersheim. Sure enough, when they arrived there, a new-looking Honda was sitting there with all its tires off and its belly sort of on the street. The victim was a small Asian man who was extremely upset about the loss of his tires. Melanie couldn’t blame him. She could imagine how mad Bruce would be if he got off work some day and discovered that all four of his tires had been stolen.

  It took a long time for the cops to calm the man down enough to get the facts from him. Melanie felt tired enough to drop, and also hot and very thirsty—a bottle of Evian would have been a great help just then. The afternoon sun was hitting the car at a real bad angle; the heat and nervousness and everything were making her feel sick, but there was no help for it. All she could do was sit there and sweat.

  Then, when the cops did get
through getting information from the Asian man whose tires had been stolen, it turned out that the police station they intended to take her to was in Oxnard. Melanie immediately got nervous all over again, wondering what bus she would take if she got released on her own recognizance or something and had to find her way home in the middle of the night. Maybe Katie could be persuaded to come and get her, but Katie lived in Santa Monica and probably had no idea where Oxnard was, and if Katie was off on a date it was going to be tricky getting home, assuming she got to go home.

  As they were driving to Oxnard, the cop who wasn’t driving finally got tired of being silent and stern and turned in his seat so he could give Melanie the eye. He must have decided she wasn’t a serial killer or anything, because he even gave her a little smile. It was just a little smile, but it did give her some hope that they weren’t going to beat her up or anything just for shoplifting two steaks.

  “I think you’re gonna wish you’d stayed home and had macaroni before this is over,” he said. He had a little blond mustache, kind of untidy.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have done it,” Melanie said. “I’ve never committed a crime before and I’m real sorry.”

  Both cops laughed; they seemed to think it was hilarious that she had apologized.

  “Well, I am,” Melanie said, feeling a little silly.

  “Hey, don’t apologize to me,” the young cop said. “I wouldn’t mind a steak myself. The point is, it’s dumb to shoplift on Saturday night, because if you get caught it takes too long to get processed.”

  “Oh,” Melanie said.

  “Yeah,” the other cop said. “By the time we get you to the jail there’ll be a hundred hookers ahead of you.”

  “A hundred hookers?” Melanie said, startled.

  “Yeah, and they’ll be pissed because it’s Saturday night and they want to go back to work,” the cop with the mustache said. “The last place they want to be in is in the slammer in Oxnard.”