The Evening Star

  “I feel sorry for Willie,” she added. “Willie’s nice—he must feel like he’s fallen in with a bunch of totally crazed people.”

  Rosie didn’t care how nice he was—what was driving her crazy was that he wouldn’t move! Aurora had stopped revving, which meant that she must be backing.

  “Stop her! Stop her!” Rosie yelled at him furiously, ignoring Patsy’s comment—although a little later she remembered it and felt somewhat comforted knowing that Patsy thought Willie was nice.

  “Shit, okay!” Willie said, yanking his snub-nosed pistol out of its holster and heading for the door.

  “Stop right there!” Rosie said, and Willie stopped.

  “I thought you wanted him to go. Why’d you tell him to stop?” Patsy wondered.

  “Because he drew his stupid gun,” Rosie said. “I don’t know if I told you, he’s a gun nut. I just want him to stop her, not shoot her!”

  “Oh,” Willie said. He reholstered his gun, carefully snapping the little strap that went behind the hammer. Then he went out the door to stop Aurora.

  “You can sure find yourself some slow ones,” the General said, sinking shakily into a chair. “I thought that man would never get a move on.”

  Willie Cotts had a move on, all right, but the move only carried him a few feet out the door. He saw Mrs. Greenway back the car clear of the garage and swing it in a wide arc, its rear end toward the house. In a moment she completed her backing and paused briefly to put the car in forward gear. He was not more than four feet from her when she paused—he could easily have stepped over and grabbed the keys or the steering wheel or something, but he didn’t. He just stood there, watching. Mrs. Greenway noticed him and looked out her car window at him. He thought he saw tears on her cheeks, but she did not seem to be angry with him, particularly—certainly she was not as angry as Rosie had been when he finally ran out of the house.

  “Goodbye, Willie, I’m sorry I awakened you,” Aurora said, as she put the car in gear.

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Greenway—drive friendly now,” Willie said.

  Aurora gave him a bit of a smile. “Your companions in misery don’t give me credit for knowing how to drive friendly, I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m glad that you have a little more confidence in me.”

  Then she drove away.

  After a bit Willie realized that he would have to go back inside and admit that he had not stopped her. He stood a little longer, gathering his courage, and then went back inside.

  “Did you stop her?” Rosie asked.

  “No, I didn’t, I ain’t her boss and you ain’t either,” Willie said with what firmness he could muster.

  “What’d I tell you?” the General said.

  13

  “It’s been my lifelong habit to do this after deaths,” Aurora admitted, not happily, as they lay in Jerry’s bed. The lower lip, hairy wrists, and sturdy legs, once she finally got to touch them, had been as good as she imagined, though the man himself as a lover was not quite all she had hoped he might be. She had arrived at dawn and had rung Jerry’s bell in more ways than one; but now that it was rung, she felt troubled. Her body was at rest, but not her spirit. Her granddaughter had had a terrible experience, and in response she had driven to Bellaire and thrust herself into the bed of a man she scarcely knew, a faux doctor of some sort who just happened to have, for her, an intense physical appeal, the very satisfying results of which she could still feel in her body. Not for years, or even decades, had a man tempted her so. Now she had him: why wasn’t it bringing her peace?

  “I think a good many people do it after deaths,” Jerry said.

  “Yes,” Aurora agreed. “Not a few have done it with me at such times. Some of my least ladylike experiences have occurred right after funerals.

  “Sometimes within minutes after funerals,” she added, remembering an occasion in Philadelphia. Trevor’s beautiful young sister had been drowned in a boating accident for which Trevor was at least partly responsible. At the graveside she had begun to have a terribly mortal feeling—Anna-belle was really dead, and dead so young; she herself was only a year older. Her mortal feelings got worse, and Trevor’s mortal feelings seemed to get worse too. While the mourners were filing to their handsome black cars, she and Trevor wandered off, glued themselves together, and made love violently on a cot in a little gardener’s hut at the back of the cemetery. The body forgets, pleasures and pains alike, and Aurora had forgotten much pleasure and some pain, yet she hadn’t forgotten the soaking few minutes with Trevor in the cemetery in Philadelphia. Even now, remembering, she felt a certain stirring, and put a hand on Jerry Bruckner, only to withdraw it a second later. Somehow, in all her doing and forgetting, the expense of spirit was adding up. Jerry was decades younger—what was she doing, touching him? What was she doing?

  “Was it different because I’m so old?” Aurora asked, quite unable to repress the question.

  “Of course not,” Jerry said. He felt restful. It was always reassuring to get to make love to a woman there was a good chance he might never get to make love to. He almost always did eventually get to sleep with those women he thought he might have only a slim chance with, but each time there was an element of surprise that was sort of nice. His answer had been a bit of a lie, because at first he had felt nervous and careful, and it was in his mind that Aurora was the age of his mother. But now he was merely wondering if Sondra would drop by and catch them. Sometimes Sondra did drop by on the way to take her little boy, Timmy, to play school. Sondra was terribly jealous, and if she caught them she would have a violent fit and that would be that—Sondra wouldn’t stand for anything less than total possession. If he even let his gaze linger too long on a girl he happened to see in a restaurant, Sondra would notice and have a violent fit.

  Her violent fits were tiring, and yet he rather hoped Sondra wouldn’t come by and catch him in bed with Aurora Green-way. In his experience the arrival of a new woman rarely meant the departure of the woman who was already there. Aurora hadn’t been one bit hesitant about lovemaking, but she was hesitant about him. She might be relaxed in her body, but she wasn’t relaxed in her mind. She might decide in a day or two to give him a thumbs down—it was what she clearly felt she should give him, although she didn’t want to. But if she should change her mind, he didn’t want to lose Sondra, a possessive shrew who nonetheless had certain perfections, her nipples, for example. Nipples could be all sorts of ways and shouldn’t be that big a deal, but Sondra’s just happened to be exactly the way his eyes thought nipples ought to be—ditto her shoulders, ditto her legs. One of the ways in which he knew himself to be slightly obsessive was his desire to have the various erotic body parts look exactly as he liked them to look. It wasn’t that in his actual behavior he was that rigid or exclusive—he had slept with and loved lots of women who didn’t have nipples or legs that looked exactly as he thought nipples or legs should look. Still, when someone did happen to have exactly the right look, it was a nice extra—nice enough to cause him to put up with such things as violent fits.

  “Men should learn not to use the phrase ‘of course’ when attempting to reassure women about sexual matters,” Aurora told him. “I was feeling sad, and what you said didn’t help, because it can’t be true. It must make some difference to you sexually that I’m thirty years older than you.”

  “It didn’t, though,” Jerry said, knowing that he was fudging just a bit.

  “Well, if not, it was only because it was our first time,” Aurora said, stroking his leg.

  “You don’t seem to ever say anything true to me,” she said, feeling her melancholy deepen. She raised up on an elbow to look him in the eye.

  “You open your mouth but all that comes out are statements in the order of ‘Of course not,’ or ‘It didn’t, though,’” she said. “If you don’t wish to comment when I make a remark, don’t comment. I resent being put off with phrases like that. I am older, you know—I have my insecurities. If you can’t honestly help me with t
hem, then just lie there and look appealing. I’ll talk for both of us. Maybe I only want someone who looks appealing, anyway.”

  “I never know what to say when women ask me about sex,” Jerry admitted. It was annoying that women were so unreasonably honest.

  Aurora smiled. Perhaps this fellow with the satisfactory legs and great lower lip was empty because no one had ever applied themselves to filling him. The thought made her feel a little better. He seemed very boyish in a gentle, half-shy way. Perhaps with a little application on her part, he wouldn’t prove quite hopeless.

  “I thought sex was the one thing psychiatrists always knew what to say about,” she said.

  “Not me,” Jerry said, wishing she would just shut up. But he could tell from the look in her eye that she wasn’t going to shut up. Even as he wished she would shut up he recognized that the most lovable thing about this woman, and the reason he himself was half in love with her, was because she was determined not to shut up, ever, not till the day of her death. And in the face, she didn’t seem old—not to him.

  “Baloney,” Aurora said, scooting closer so that her face was only an inch or so from his. “Sex requires just as much interpretation as any other complicated thing. What’s the point of a psychiatrist who won’t talk about it?”

  “Maybe I should go back to being a stand-up comic,” Jerry offered.

  “Un-uh,” Aurora said, wishing he would kiss her. “You’re not sad enough to be a comic, but you are sad enough to be an interesting lover.”

  Ten minutes after Aurora left, Sondra did show up. Timmy was running a fever so she had left him home with a sitter. She was in jogging clothes and wanted him to jog with her. Actually, she didn’t jog, she race-walked, a form of exercise that made Jerry feel profoundly silly—so silly that he had never learned to do it correctly. Sondra was always having to stop and show him how to move his hips and swing his arms. Having to stop annoyed her; she was capable of race-walking five miles without stopping, and it pissed her that Jerry was hardly capable of walking a whole mile without his form going to pieces.

  “If you would just concentrate you could do it right!” she complained the third time she stopped to correct his form.

  “Don’t pay any attention to me,” Jerry said. It was muggy and he felt tired. Although she didn’t require race-walking, Aurora took a lot of energy. Aurora required thinking, which was at least as difficult as race-walking.

  “Just go off and leave me,” he added. Often Sondra did go off and leave him far behind, but then she would do a U-turn and reappear, looking pissed, to correct his form.

  “No!” Sondra protested. “We’re supposed to be doing this exercise together, right?”

  “Well, I guess,” Jerry said.

  “What’s the point of doing something together if the person you’re doing it together with is always a mile behind?” Sondra asked.

  “I may not know what the point is,” Jerry admitted.

  “Not only do you have a very bad form as a race-walker, but you don’t have very good answers either,” Sondra informed him as she was trying to show him how to swing his arms.

  Aurora had said almost exactly the same thing to him, not two hours before, when he hadn’t been able to come up with anything to say about sex.

  “I guess I’m just boring,” he had said.

  Aurora stared at him with her large green eyes when he said it.

  “That’s the possum’s defense,” she said, after a bit.

  Jerry decided he liked the line, though. It was sort of pleasant to claim boringness while enduring the scrutiny of women who were not boring.

  “I guess I’m just boring,” he said to Sondra now, as she was making him swing his arms back and forth in the approved race-walking style.

  “That’s right, you’re boring, you fucker!” Sondra said, as she went race-walking away.

  14

  After leaving Jerry, Aurora’s spirits suddenly lifted. She had done the presumably degrading thing—seduced a man thirty years her junior—and had emerged from it apparently undegraded. Her dignity, as far as she could tell, was intact. It was a little disappointing that Jerry wasn’t that expert a lover, since, as far as she could see, he had very little to do except become an expert lover; he had the equipment but seemed to lack the temperament, somehow. It was an area of endeavor in which she had always frankly sought finesse; but it seemed that finesse was no easier to find when one was ending up than it had been when one was starting out.

  Still, for all that Jerry Bruckner lacked finesse, as well as the lustful temperament, Aurora felt lifted. At least, by golly, she had managed once more to get a man to do what she wanted. She had to make the move herself, but then she had almost always had to make the move herself—it seemed rather a matter for congratulation that she hadn’t lost the boldness that it took to make the move.

  She decided that a hearty breakfast would be a good way to reward herself, and it occurred to her that it might be nice to take breakfast with Jane, who would be getting off work about then. Against everyone’s wishes, she had been doing the night shift lately.

  Delighted with her idea, she sped over to Fairview Street, arriving just in time to see Jane sell a spring roll to a man who was delivering beer. The sight of delivery trucks always brought to mind Royce Dunlup, Rosie’s long-deceased husband, a man who spent most of his life delivering potato chips in a little blue truck. Aurora herself had crunched quite a few of Royce’s potato chips. Royce himself had had a big crush on her, much to Rosie’s annoyance. It didn’t seem so long ago that Royce had sat in her kitchen, exhibiting his crush as best he could by staring at her worshipfully whenever Rosie happened to leave the room—which wasn’t often. And yet it was long ago, and Royce was dead, a thought that caused the soaring kite of her good spirits, lifted by the morning and sex, to dip just slightly.

  To get her good spirits soaring again, she disembarked from her Cadillac and had a couple of spring rolls herself as preparation for her breakfast.

  “Ten years ago you couldn’t have sold such a thing as a spring roll in this town,” she said to Jane, who looked at her in the cool way that—though a little unnerving—was just Jane’s way of looking. At that moment Mr. Wey, the Vietnamese gentleman who owned the 7-Eleven, popped out of a little room at the back where he had been making the spring rolls.

  “We sell a hundred a day,” he said. Mr. Wey was very proud of the success of his spring rolls.

  “My goodness, do you?” Aurora said. “I might take a few home to Rosie and the General.”

  Rosie had called Teddy about Melanie’s difficulty, and Teddy had informed Jane, who was not terribly sympathetic. Much of her time at Mr. Wey’s 7-Eleven was spent watching for shoplifters, and the thought that Melanie had been dumb enough to shoplift two steaks annoyed her. Teddy was horrified that Jane was annoyed—he believed in instant forgiveness, no matter what the crime. But Jane didn’t. To her, shoplifting meant awkwardness, confrontation, police, and extra bookkeeping; she often scolded Teddy because of his unwillingness to confront shoplifters, even when he caught them red-handed. In her view it was symptomatic of Teddy’s unwillingness to confront the messy nature of life itself, which amounted to cowardice. She was feeling quite stony when Aurora breezed in. She was preparing to go home and tell Teddy in no uncertain terms what she thought of his sister’s actions, and also what she thought about his wishy-washy attitude in relation to the hard questions life posed. As always, when he was confronted, Teddy’s hands would shake and his voice would become high and squeaky. Bump would hide in the closet and talk to Kermit the Frog, his closest companion now, and the day would be off to a stupid start, all because Melanie was a pawn of her boyfriend who was too lazy to pay for the stupid steaks he felt he had a right to eat whenever he wanted.

  Thinking about all that made Jane feel fed up. Her mate was a moral wimp and, for that matter, so was her lover. Claudia Seay was just as wimpy as Teddy when it came to such things as shoplifting, or anything else
that required difficult action. Jane spent more and more of her time being fed up with both of them. Next time some Cajun cocksman wandered in and asked her to go dancing she might just take him up on it.

  Her stony mood wasn’t exactly the best mood in which to go to breakfast with Aurora, who waltzed in in what looked like her nightgown and housecoat. Now she had eaten two spring rolls, which she clearly had no intention of paying for, and besides that she was shamelessly flirting with Mr. Wey.

  “Oh, come on, Jane, don’t deny me,” Aurora said, when Jane was acting as if she might decline the breakfast. “We won’t talk about Melanie. I’m as annoyed with the girl as you are. She was not brought up to shoplift at the whim of her lover, I can tell you that. When she gets her strength back she’s in for a stern talking to from her grandmother, I can assure you.”

  “What will we talk about, Aurora?” Jane asked, still cool to the notion of breakfast. She gave Aurora a look that was somewhat hostile.

  “Lovers,” Aurora said. “I just took a new one. I’ll tell you about mine if you’ll tell me about yours.”

  Mr. Wey was so startled by the remark that he dropped a spring roll, and the tongs he was holding it with, into a waste-basket. His English was improving, but it wasn’t perfect. Perhaps he had misunderstood. Then he concluded that he had misunderstood, and hurried to the back of the store to straighten up the paper towels. The spring roll and the tongs remained in the wastebasket.

  Jane was always slightly annoyed with herself when she gave in to Aurora. Sometimes she didn’t give in, but this time she did—it was hard to say no to a woman well up in years who could be that brash about taking a lover. At the Pig Stand no one seemed to notice that Aurora was in her nightgown and housecoat—and no reason why they should, since half the men smoking and eating breakfast were just wearing undershirts and shorts.