“You must come here a lot,” Jane said, after the third waitress had said good morning to Aurora, calling her by her first name.
“Yes, I come here to think about my mother,” Aurora said. “Also, of course, I eat.”
She was, at the moment, eating a plate of scrambled eggs, and pancakes had been ordered.
“Why do you have to drive all the way over here just to think about your mother?” Jane asked. She was having buckwheat cakes and they were, she had to admit, very good. “If I could find a place where I could stop thinking about my mother I’d eat there all the time,” she added.
“My mother never ate in a place like this in her life, not even in Maine,” Aurora said. “There were certain constraints imposed on ladies in her day—she saw little of the lower classes, and yet she took a lover from the lower classes.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call them the lower classes,” Jane said. “That’s so snobbish. At least call them the working classes.”
“Oh, well,” Aurora said, “the terms may change, but the facts are the same. My mother fell in love with a gardener. He was a neighbor’s gardener at first, but my mother persuaded my father to hire him, and then he became our gardener. He was a lovely man, one of the finest I’ve known. His name was Sam. Just the other day I used his name when I needed to invent a lover in a hurry.”
“Why did you need to invent a lover in a hurry?” Jane asked, amused. “I thought you had a new lover.”
“I do now, but I just took him this morning,” Aurora said, waving for them to hurry up with the pancakes. “I didn’t have him when I needed him for political purposes—that occurred when I discovered Pascal with his hand up a young woman’s skirt. I took Sam’s name and made him seventeen years old.
“I’ve often wondered what my mother’s life would have been if she’d met her Sam when she was seventeen,” she said, as the pancakes arrived. “He would have been considered entirely unsuitable. Great pressure would have been put on her to give him up. Still, I think she might have bolted. She was very brave when it came to acting on her emotions. If she’d met Sam a little sooner, she might have bolted.”
“I’m glad I wasn’t born then,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t have put up with any of that shit.”
“I expect not,” Aurora said. “Is your girlfriend nice?”
“Yeah,” Jane said, startled, “Did Teddy tell you?”
“Of course. I wormed it out of him,” Aurora said. “Do you mind?”
Jane didn’t, actually. In a way she was even glad. Crazy as Aurora might appear to be, she was at least tolerant about things most people weren’t tolerant about. She clearly didn’t think it was a tragedy that she had a girlfriend, whereas her own mother, had she known, would have thought it was the end of the world.
“She’s a female Teddy,” Jane admitted. “I guess I must be drawn to Teddy types, for some reason. Now I have two of them.”
“How fortunate,” Aurora said. “The Ted type is actually a very nice type. I wish I had one.
“In fact, I wish I had two,” she added.
“So what about the lover?” Jane asked. “Who did you seduce now, Aurora?”
Aurora grinned. “My shrink,” she said. “Dr. Bruckner.”
“Is that man a Freudian, or what?” Jane asked. She had met Jerry at Aurora’s dinner party and thought he was really attractive, almost suspiciously so—he had bassetlike qualities that were pretty appealing, at least. It was sort of a shock that Aurora had actually slept with a man that much younger than herself—although why it should be a shock, Jane didn’t quite know. It was sort of a shock, though, logical or not.
“Did you really sleep with him or are you two just thinking about it?” she asked.
Aurora looked at her pleasantly, but she didn’t answer.
Jane wished she could take back the question. “Sometimes when I’m thinking about it I almost convince myself I’ve gone ahead and done it, when I haven’t,” she explained.
“Yep, that’s common,” Aurora admitted. “I was so attracted to Lord Mountbatten that I almost persuaded myself we’d had a romance on a boat.”
“But you didn’t?” Jane asked.
“Alas, I didn’t,” Aurora said. “He was on the boat, though, and I saw him. If he’d ever displayed the slightest interest I would have been putty in his hands, but he didn’t.”
“Yeah, I met Jack Nicholson at a party once and had the same problem,” Jane said. “Is your shrink nice?”
“Nice, but disappointed,” Aurora said. “I do think disappointment ruins more people than all the diseases known to man. It ruined my lovely mother. Perhaps that’s why I’ve struggled all my life to keep it from ruining me.”
“You don’t seem disappointed, Aurora,” Jane said. “You look like you’ve kept your fight.”
“I’ve kept my fight,” Aurora said. “I hope you keep yours, Jane. In a few more years you may find that keeping it isn’t as easy as it once was.”
“It isn’t that easy now” Jane told her. “Sometimes I get pretty depressed. If it wasn’t for Bump I’d probably go crazy again—Bump sort of closes that option.”
“Yes, insofar as it’s an option,” Aurora said.
“Did your mother finally go crazy?” Jane inquired. Aurora occasionally mentioned her mother, but she had never before said anything really interesting about her. Now it seemed a gardener had been the love of her life. It wasn’t so hard to understand how that could happen. Most of the gardeners she had met had seemed like pretty healthy guys.
“No, she didn’t go crazy,” Aurora said. “My father found out about Sam and moved out and never spoke to my mother again. It was rather Lady Chatterley. My father had no interest in sleeping with my mother, but he was highly annoyed that she had slept with a gardener—not once, but often.”
“How did your father treat you?” Jane asked.
“He came to my wedding, got drunk, and kissed me,” Aurora said. “It was not the sort of kiss a bride is looking for from her father on her wedding day, either. I saw him only twice after that—once at a lunch in New York, which didn’t go well, and the other time at his funeral.”
“What about your mother and Sam?” Jane asked. “Did it last forever?”
“It did,” Aurora said. “Forever was only another five years, though. Sam fell out of a tree he was pruning and broke his back. A doctor did something wrong in the hospital and Sam died. Mother went slightly off, after that. Her last beau was a Portuguese fiddler, who also tried to kiss me.”
She felt a momentary sadness from thinking about how sad her mother had looked in her last days. The fiddler had tried to kiss every woman who came to visit, but her mother put up with him.
“Has Pascal ever bothered you?” she asked, realizing suddenly that Pascal looked not unlike her mother’s Portuguese fiddler.
“Don’t sit there and think bad thoughts,” Jane said. “We’ve eaten, let’s go. Pascal is a nice man and he’s never tried to kiss me. It’s the General who’s the flasher.”
“I know, just don’t look,” Aurora said, wondering if the Pig Stand would have mince pie at such an early hour.
“Hector’s dotty half the time now,” she added. “He seems to think that if he can just manage a return to the golf course his mind might come back, but I think that’s a slim hope. On the other hand, when he’s not dotty he’s the same old annoying Hector. I wonder if hitting a golf ball would really bring his mind back.”
“It’s a slim hope,” Jane said. Most of the time, in her opinion, General Scott was way around the bend.
15
When Melanie didn’t come back from the supermarket with the steaks she was supposed to shoplift, Bruce got worried and then more worried, but he didn’t know what to do with his worry except smoke dope and wait. Something was way out of order, but he didn’t know what. Melly was very anxious to keep him pleased. If she’d got the steaks she would have come right back with them.
By the time three hours ha
d passed, he knew something had to be way out of order, and he began to make up disaster scenarios, some of which were pretty paranoid. There were tough gangs in the Valley—some gang members could have been prowling around the supermarket, in which case, by this time, Melanie could have gotten gang-banged, or even murdered. She could also have made the mistake of hitchhiking, though the supermarket wasn’t that far away, and she had said she was just going to walk. But if she got lazy on the walk back she might have hitchhiked—she was pretty bold about it—and if the wrong guy picked her up she could also be a corpse. Or, if she wasn’t a corpse, she could be in Mexico or Nevada or somewhere.
By the time it was ten o’clock, Bruce was feeling frantic despite all the dope he had smoked. Maybe he had got very mixed up and it was her night to work at the deli—but that couldn’t be it, otherwise she wouldn’t have marched off to shoplift their supper.
Still, he got so jittery that he had to do something, so he went down to the pay phone at a nearby laundromat and called the deli. Just as he had feared, it wasn’t her night to work, and she wasn’t there. Since he was already out, he jumped in the car and raced over to the supermarket, but it was closed and the parking lot was empty except for a couple of old people walking their poodles. Bruce felt like running over the stupid poodles, he was so worried, but he managed to restrain himself. He didn’t know what to do. There was a hospital not too far from the supermarket—he passed it every day on his way to the filling station—so he cruised over there, thinking maybe she had been the victim of a hit-and-run, but nope—no Melanie Horton had been admitted to the hospital.
Then it occurred to him that maybe Melanie had finally got caught shoplifting. They had been supplementing their diet with a little shoplifting for several weeks, and Melanie kept complaining that she hated doing it and that it wasn’t right. Even if it was a big, gross supermarket owned by slimy capitalists who exploited the poor, that didn’t, in her view, make it right to steal steaks. Also, just doing it made her feel guilty. The fact that she was shoplifting was bound to be obvious to security people or even just simple grocery clerks: if she kept on doing it, she was bound to get caught, and then what?
Bruce soon concluded that that was probably the simplest explanation for her disappearance, but it didn’t help him much with his dilemma. If she had been caught, where was she? Despite performing some minor crimes, such as hauling marijuana, he had never been anywhere near a jail in his whole life and had no idea how to find the one they might have taken Melanie to. Actually, the mere thought of a cop so depraved that he would arrest an obviously sweet person such as Melanie was pretty nerve-racking.
Thinking about that made him regret his folly in demanding steaks. There was an excellent cheap Thai place only two blocks from their apartment: they should just have eaten Thai.
But it was obviously too late for that, and his stomach was so upset he had to stop at a convenience store and buy some Maalox just to quiet it down. He went back to the grocery-store parking lot, hoping a miracle would happen and Melanie would be standing there, but the only ones there were more old people walking even worse dogs than poodles—midget Mexican dogs without hair and dachshunds and Pekinese. The parking lot seemed to be a kind of dog-walking sanctuary for old couples with tiny dogs. Melanie was not standing there, and he really didn’t know what to do. If she was in jail, she couldn’t have called him, because of their lack of a phone; she might have called her father, but probably not. She might have called her grandmother, in which case he might as well shoot himself. Her grandmother thought he was scum anyway—what was she going to think now?
Several cop cars passed. Once or twice he thought of flagging one down, but seven or eight passed without his being able to muster the nerve to flag one down. What was he going to say if a cop did consent to stop? Please bring my girlfriend back, all I wanted was a steak?
What he did was drive aimlessly around for about another hour, not getting too far out of the area, in case Melanie crawled out of a ditch or something and appeared on the sidewalk. The mere sight of her would have made him the happiest man alive.
To calm his nerves he stopped at a pay phone and on impulse made a collect call to Beverly in Houston. He didn’t really expect her to be home—after all, it was Saturday night—but she was, and not only that, she accepted the call.
“Hi,” he said tentatively. He hadn’t really expected to get her, and wasn’t really prepared with things to say.
“I’m real pissed off at you. Where are you?” Beverly said at once. Like a lot of Houston rich girls, Beverly was pretty up front.
“Uh—L.A.—I’m just out here trying to be an actor,” Bruce said.
“What about that fat whore you left with?” Beverly asked. She more or less despised Melanie, although they had once been best friends.
“She’s sort of become a missing person,” Bruce admitted.
“Good, I hope she stays missing for the next fifty years,” Beverly said. She displayed no interest in why Melanie might be missing.
Bruce found making conversation a little difficult. Beverly was totally pissed off, just as she said, and it was sort of hard to get around that fact and have a normal conversation, particularly when he was really worried about Melanie.
“Do you still have the Ferrari?” he asked finally.
“No. Thanks to you my parents sold it, you dickhead,” Beverly said coldly.
“So what are you driving?” Bruce asked.
“Just a stupid little BMW, thanks to you,” Beverly said.
“BMWs are nice cars, though,” Bruce pointed out.
“Not as nice as Ferraris,” Beverly said. “Half the kids I know have BMWs. I hate having the same car as half the kids I know.”
You’ll live, Bruce thought, but he didn’t say it. Beverly was ticked enough as it was.
“I heard Melanie is pregnant, is that true?” Beverly asked.
“Uh, yeah, she’s pregnant,” Bruce said.
“If you marry her, that’s it for us,” Beverly informed him. “You’re not fucking me again if you marry that fat whore.”
Bruce didn’t know what to say to that. After all, he lived in L.A. and she lived in Houston, and she hadn’t much liked having sex with him anyway. Why was she suddenly talking about fucking?
“So do you care whether you ever fuck me again, asshole?” Beverly asked.
“Yeah, sure I do,” Bruce said. He didn’t feel that he should stop and consider when asked a question like that by a girl. Was he going to tell her he didn’t care whether he ever fucked her again? No way—better just to lie.
“What if I show up in Beverly Hills?” Beverly asked. “Are you going to be too scared of your wife to get it on?”
“She’s not my wife,” Bruce reminded her.
“Answer the question,” Beverly said.
“Why would you come out here?” Bruce said—he felt he should stall on this one.
“Are you just gonna be dull?” Beverly asked. “My mother comes out there all the time to shop. I could come with my mother if I wanted to.”
Bruce was thinking that a pretty big change must have come over Beverly. In Houston she had rarely been too eager to get it on, and when he did manage to persuade her, she mainly seemed interested in getting it over with. Not once had she ever seemed to get into it to the extent that Melanie did. Melly was a girl who really got into having sex—whatever was happening, she was there; it was not too surprising that she’d got pregnant.
Beverly, though, had quite a few hang-ups in the sexual area. Most of the time she seemed more interested in makeup than she did in sex. So why was she suddenly talking about journeying to L.A. just to fuck him?
“I could probably talk her into coming next week,” Beverly said. “Have you got a job, or what?”
“Uh, yeah, part time,” Bruce said. “I’m in an acting class.’”
“Big deal,” Beverly said. “How do I get in touch with you, if we come?”
“I’m not sure,
” Bruce said. “We haven’t been able to afford a phone. I guess you could leave a message at the filling station.”
“You don’t even have a phone?” Beverly said.
“Out here it costs a fortune just to get one,” Bruce informed her. Sometimes her rich-girlness was pretty hard to take. It was clear she was shocked to discover that she actually knew someone who was too poor to afford a phone.
At that point the conversation stalled. Bruce gave her the number of the gas station, though he wasn’t too sure he wanted to get himself involved with Beverly again even if she came to L.A. for the specific purpose of having sex with him. It was a little weird. Of all the people in the world he could have called to calm his nerves, Beverly was probably the number one worst choice. As he now remembered, nothing that happened with Beverly had ever made him calmer. It just made him feel more zingy, usually. At the moment, his big problem was finding Melanie, Beverly’s deadly enemy. So what was he doing standing at a pay phone at Burbank and Vineland, talking to a girl in Houston who thought he was an asshole? He had done it himself, but it didn’t add up. Now the question was, how to get Beverly off the phone?
“If I come, you better show up, and you better do something pretty special, or that’s it,” Beverly said, while he was considering the problem of how to get her off the phone.
“You better at least take me to the Ivy to make up for all the trouble you’ve caused,” Beverly said. “I’d still have a Ferrari if it wasn’t for you.”
“What’s the Ivy?” Bruce asked.
“It’s a restaurant, dumbbell,” Beverly said. “All the movie stars go there. You live in Hollywood—haven’t you even heard of the Ivy?”
“We live way over in the Valley,” Bruce told her. “We don’t get to Hollywood too much.”