“If you’ll come hold the dustpan I’ll sweep up that sugar before the ants get started,” she said to Willie.
“Oh, come on, leave it,” Aurora said. “I think the ant threat is being exaggerated. After all, ants have to eat too, don’t they?”
“Yeah, but I’m sorry about the sugar bowl,” Rosie said. “I was just freaking out—I never thought I’d be having to deal with stuff like this at my age.”
“Yes, I know the feeling,” Aurora said. “I’m sure if we all had dollar bills for every time we’ve had that feeling we’d be in a position to do takeovers and things of that nature.”
“You sure about the sugar bowl?” Rosie asked. Suddenly her legs felt so tired she was doubtful that she could even make it to her little house. The moment Willie stood up, she leaned on him.
“I hope we ain’t kept you all up,” Willie said, putting his arm around Rosie. “I hate to upset other people with my problems.”
Aurora gave him a nice smile.
“Don’t give it a thought,” she said. “There are many times in life when it’s rather a relief to be asked to think about other people’s problems. One can take a little vacation from thinking about one’s own.”
Willie just nodded. He had been rendered speechless by Mrs. Greenway’s smile—and not for the first time, either. Whenever she chose to smile at him he was rendered speechless, a fact Rosie had not been slow to notice or comment on.
“You got one bad habit now, and that’s heroin,” she had said to him only that morning. “It ain’t the only bad habit in the world, though. There’s two or three more you need to watch out for.”
“Like what, for instance?” he inquired.
“Like flirting with Aurora,” Rosie informed him. “My husband Royce liked to flirt with Aurora, and look what happened to him.”
“Well, what did?” Willie asked.
“He died,” Rosie said.
“Of flirting?” Willie asked.
“That and a few other things,” Rosie said.
Willie decided it was not a matter he needed to pursue any further. If Mrs. Greenway wanted to smile at him, that was surely her business. If Rosie disapproved, she would just have to take it up with her boss. He himself decided to go on enjoying the smiles, but with as little comment as possible.
Hewing to that principle, he managed to steer the shaky Rosie out the door.
“Hector, don’t you think it’s time you went to bed?” Aurora said, once Willie and Rosie made their departure.
“No, I can sleep when I’m dead,” the General remarked.
“Well, no doubt, but a little shut-eye now and then wouldn’t hurt you, even if you aren’t dead,” Aurora commented, getting up to turn on the stove. She felt like having a sip of tea.
“You treat me as if I’m dead,” the General said. “At least you do half the time. When you’re not treating me like a corpse, you treat me worse. You talk to me as if I were an idiot, or a child.”
“Hector, it’s after midnight,” Aurora said quietly. “Must you reproach me at midnight? I just want a cup of tea. You can have one, too—though I suppose it will just make both of us more wakeful.”
“It’s because I’m so old,” the General said. “You treated me better when I was younger. Now I’m not younger. I’m old. I’m worn out. I’m crabby.”
“In your case, crabbiness preceded age, by many years,” Aurora said. “You were crabby the day I met you, not to mention thousands of days thereafter.”
“Yes, I guess I was, but you loved me anyway,” the General remarked. “You thought I was interesting.”
Aurora concentrated on her tea, hoping he would just shut up.
“But now I’m an old man,” the General said. “You don’t think it’s worth while to love me anymore.”
Aurora had her back to him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but he began to wish he hadn’t made that last remark. Before he could apologize, Aurora turned abruptly and left the room. She left so quickly that she forgot to turn off the burner under the teapot.
After waiting a minute or two, hoping Aurora would come back, the General got up and turned off the burner himself.
20
“I don’t quite know what to do about her,” Jerry said—he was referring to Aurora.
“You’re not alone,” Patsy said. “Nobody’s ever known what to do about Aurora.”
The two of them had gone to Galveston to eat crabs, and were doing just that at a large, noisy crab house on the seawall. The restaurant was full of Future Farmers of America and also Future Farmerettes of America, in Galveston for their annual get-together. All looked as if they had been trucked to the Gulf Coast from very far inland, from small towns in the south or the prairie states. Boys and girls alike were pimply, loud, and in such a state of raw farmland innocence that Patsy had a hard time keeping her eyes off them. They were so innocent-looking that more than once she had an impulse to ask Jerry Bruckner to whisper. The impulse was irrational—no one could hear much of anything in the crab house anyway. Still, Patsy felt it was wrong for Jerry to be spilling the details of his affair with Aurora in the presence of a bunch of kids who were no older and certainly no wiser than Melanie, Aurora’s grandchild.
Ambushing Jerry Bruckner had turned out to be quite simple. Several times she had spotted him in Jamail’s, the fancy grocery store on Buffalo Speedway—he was usually brooding at the deli, trying to decide between corned beef and pastrami. It seemed to her that it was in his moments of indecision at Jamail’s that Jerry seemed most psychiatric. If she hadn’t known he was a psychiatrist, she might have guessed it from the way he stood there and brooded.
But she did know, and she also knew that she found him seriously attractive. Still, she wasn’t in the habit of just walking up and grabbing every seriously attractive man she spotted. While in the process of deciding whether she should just walk up and grab Jerry Bruckner she watched him at the deli counter and eventually concluded that she should proceed with caution. After that, when she spotted him at Jamail’s, she usually veered off down the nearest aisle, hoping he hadn’t seen her. Her theory that he was Aurora’s lover was, at that point, just theory. Rosie Dunlup was of the opinion that they were close but that they hadn’t actually “done it,” as Rosie put it.
“What makes you so sure they haven’t actually done it?” Patsy asked Rosie every time the subject came up, which was more or less every time she and Rosie went to exercise class together.
“It’s just a feeling I get that they haven’t,” Rosie said. “I admit I could be wrong.”
“Is it because he’s so much younger than she is?” Patsy asked.
“It makes me uncomfortable thinking about how much younger he is, I admit that,” Rosie said. “If it was me, and the guy was the age of my oldest boy, I don’t think he’d be interested,” she added, chewing a hangnail.
“Rosie, stop eating your fingers,” Patsy said. Rosie stopped.
“In fact, though, it isn’t you we’re talking about,” Patsy said. “It’s Aurora. Anyway, you turned the question around. Forget about whether this man who’s the age of your oldest son is interested in you, and tell me whether you would be interested in him.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore—old-age sex is too depressing,” Rosie said. “If it don’t work it’s depressing, and if it does work you still wonder whether you wouldn’t be better off playing racquetball.”
Actually, to Aurora’s astonishment and the General’s delight, Rosie and Willie had joined a health club and had begun to play racquetball several times a week. Now the General was wanting to play too. He was finally off his crutches and was getting the athletic itch again. Willie was slow, but the General was slower—Rosie couldn’t quite imagine a racquetball game slow enough that the General could contribute, but if it came to a choice between things to think about, she felt she would prefer to think about the General playing racquetball than to think about Aurora and Jerry doing things in bed.
“A surprising number of men choose women old enough to be their mothers,” Patsy said. “They must enjoy something about it physically. It’s puzzling, but it’s a fact.”
“It may be a fact, but you can take it and park it, for all I care,” Rosie said.
Patsy might have elected to park her interest in Jerry Bruckner had it not been for a depression she fell into after coming back to Houston from L.A. Or perhaps the depression had begun in L.A. She had run into three of her old boyfriends in one day and had been appalled by all three of them. Bob, her sculptor boyfriend, had just seemed like an aging, sullen lout. Elias, her professor boyfriend, took her to lunch and talked pedantic gibberish to her until it was all she could do to stay awake and not drown in her vichyssoise. Henry, her rich patron-of-the-arts boyfriend, looked flabby and fucked out; he came across as a spoiled dope with a ponytail. It was discouraging to realize that she had once convinced herself she saw some magic in the three men, some talent or spirit or intelligence that was either no longer there or—more likely—had never been there.
Her thought on the plane, as it descended into muggy Houston, was that there had really been no period of her life when she had not seriously misled herself about men—nor, really, was there any reason to suppose that her judgment was getting any better. Her future might turn out to be just as full of jerks and failures as her past had been. Not only was she not likely to find Mr. Right, but it didn’t even seem likely that she would manage to locate Mr. Halfway Right, or perhaps even Mr. Tolerable. Her marriages, so far, had been awful, and her love affairs insignificant. She hadn’t written a good book, painted a good picture, composed a fugue, or even a lively song; she hadn’t done any of the things she had once hoped she would do. She hadn’t even nurtured a genius—Matt’s translation of Rilke had petered out somewhere around the sixth Elegy, and Matt himself had gone to work in Sacramento as a staffer for the State Arts Council.
On the whole, if you excepted three more or less well-raised children, it wasn’t much of a record. Patsy didn’t think she was a bad person—in fact she was confident that she was a nice person—but it wasn’t enough.
From snooping on him in the supermarket, plus the one time she had observed him at close range at Aurora’s party, Patsy felt sure that Jerry Bruckner could be annexed more or less at will, should she decide to annex him. He looked like a passive man, of the sort who was perfectly content to accommodate whatever women wanted to crowd into his life, provided they themselves did all the work. He wouldn’t be likely to take any initiative, but he would be even less likely to resist whatever initiatives others might take. If he was sleeping with Aurora, it was probably because she had insisted on sleeping with him.
Patsy had been depressed for three weeks before she concluded that her depression was serious enough that she might have to consider therapy. She had been in and out of therapy for most of her adult life; she thought no more about adopting a new therapy than she would about changing her shampoo. Of course, since she was beginning to feel that a spot of therapy wouldn’t hurt, she had a perfectly valid reason for calling Jerry Bruckner and making a professional visit. There was no reason not to do it—after a session or two, if he still seemed seriously attractive, she could just let nature take its course, if nature had a mind to.
Perhaps if Aurora hadn’t been in the picture she would have done it that way—but Aurora was in the picture. If she presented herself at Jerry’s door as a patient he might casually report it to Aurora, which would create a complication. Aurora had always been suspicious of her, although on no clear grounds. Finding that Patsy had just become a patient of her boyfriend’s would not be something Aurora would just lightly brush off.
Patsy decided it wasn’t a complication she wanted—not yet, not until she sniffed the breeze with the man, at least. She didn’t imagine that sniffing the breeze would take long, either. He looked to be the sort of man who would tell you his whole romantic history on the first date. If he was interested in adding a fresh chapter to his romantic history—well, that question could probably be answered rather rapidly, too.
She remembered that several of the times she had seen him in Jamail’s had been around four in the afternoon—between the late-lunch rush and the early-evening shopping frenzy. She knew what his old station wagon looked like, so she started cruising the supermarket’s parking lot about that time of day. She felt a little like a predator—after all, she was stalking her dead best friend’s mother’s boyfriend—but that didn’t stop her. In fact, her depression began to lift the minute she began her stalk. By the third day, when she finally spotted the station wagon in the parking lot, her depression was mostly gone and she was impatient to conclude her ambush.
She walked in and headed right back to the deli counter, where Jerry was waiting, his hands in his pockets, for his corned beef to be wrapped up.
“Hello, remember me? I’m Patsy Carpenter,” she said, putting her hand on his arm for a second, lightly.
“Hi,” Jerry said. He had noticed Patsy in Jamail’s several times, but she had seemed to want to avoid him—something he found mildly depressing. He remembered her vividly from Aurora’s dinner party. She had been the most attractive woman there—hauntingly so, really, the haunting part being that he was pretty sure he had seen her several times before on the beach at Santa Monica. He thought so, but he couldn’t quite be sure: after all, he had gone to the beach at Santa Monica hundreds of times, mainly to watch women. Indeed, in his L.A. years, it had been his main sport—lying on a towel, pretending he had come for a tan, while he watched women. He had watched hundreds and was pretty sure that he had seen Patsy more than once, picnicking with her two teenage daughters and an arrogantly handsome man who generally looked angry. Patsy, if that was who it had been, immediately lodged in his fantasy—there was no explaining it, but she was a woman who happened to look just right, to him. He liked the way she lifted her arms to pin up her hair. She seemed to be doing her best to ignore her husband’s evident ill temper, but she didn’t entirely succeed. Even when she was smiling and chatting with her girls, there was something slightly sad in her look. When left alone she simply gazed out to sea. Now and then she walked at the edge of the surf. Once he had started to walk parallel to her so he could watch her, but after a few yards he began to feel silly, and stopped. Why was he ogling a married woman? Even if she wasn’t particularly happily married, that didn’t mean she was going to get divorced just because he liked her face or the way she lifted her arms.
Now the same woman—he was almost certain it was the same woman—with the same liveliness in her eyes, and the same sadness in her face, had walked up to him in a supermarket in Houston and put her hand on his arm. The few times he had spotted her in the grocery store he had hoped they would bump into each other by the vegetables or something, so that he could at least find out if she was the woman he had seen and remembered—at least he could ask her if she had once lived in Santa Monica. But she seemed to want to avoid him, and he was too shy to chase her. A few times he had even wondered why she wanted to avoid him. Once, driving home from the grocery store, it occurred to him that she might have seen him on the same beach, and been put off by one of the women he was with. Few of them had been as good-looking as Patsy or her husband or, for that matter, her children. They were just the girlfriends of the moment. A few had been a little on the vulgar side. For a time, when he first moved to California, he had been attracted to loud, brash, energetic California girls, none of them exactly elegant or graceful, or possessed of good taste in the way that Patsy was.
But he didn’t know—it was all speculation; he wasn’t even positive that Patsy was the woman he had seen and fantasized about. Once he thought it over a bit, he realized he was probably stretching things to think that Patsy Carpenter was avoiding him because his girlfriends of several years ago had been a little coarse. If she was avoiding him, it might have been because of something he said at Aurora’s dinner party, though he couldn’t imag
ine what it would have been.
Now, there she was—not avoiding him. She had even touched him. Light as it was, it pleased him a lot. Though it might mean little, the mere fact that Patsy had approached him reaffirmed one of his most cherished beliefs, which was that whatever women he really wanted, the ones that most completely satisfied his idiosyncratic eye, that looked just right, would find their way to him eventually, or allow him to find his way to them. Here it was, happening again: an old image of someone not known, but seen and desired, had floated up from his beach days and materialized as a living woman at his side.
“You don’t really want to eat that salty corned beef, do you?” Patsy asked—she had decided on an immediate strike. “Wouldn’t you rather go to Galveston and eat some crab?”
The deli man heard the invitation. He had been just about to put the tape on the package of corned beef, but he stayed his hand and looked inquiringly at Jerry Bruckner.
“Sorry,” Jerry said, to the deli man. “Looks like I just had a better offer.”
“Looks like you just did,” the deli man said, with a nod to Mrs. Carpenter. He had known her for many years and didn’t really approve of her ways; in particular he didn’t approve of some of the young guys she had turned up with over the years. But then, he had witnessed worse—far worse—in his years in Houston, and it was none of his business. He put the corned beef back in its proper tray.
“That meat man doesn’t like me,” Patsy said, as she and Jerry were walking out of the store. “I think he probably thinks I’m a slut because I’ve been known to go out with younger men.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Jerry said.
Patsy found the remark slightly disappointing—actually she hadn’t been worrying about the deli man in the least. She would rather Jerry had addressed himself, even jokingly, to the question of her presumed sluttishness—her younger men—or to some question. But Jerry just walked around the content of her remark. He did have a good head of hair, though. Once they got outside, the sunlight glinted in it nicely. She decided, what the hell, why be picky? We just met. Maybe he’s scared.