The Evening Star

  If so, it wasn’t of her driving. He got in her car as if it were a matter of course that they would go in her car, not his old heap, and he seemed to accept it also as a matter of course that she would drive. He easily let himself be picked up, as if that were the normal way, and seemed content to be delivered to wherever she wanted to deliver him.

  “I’m pretty sure I used to see you on the beach at Santa Monica,” he revealed, as soon as they got in the car. “You had two girls with you and a man who looked a little bit Mexican.”

  “Please, a little bit Spanish,” Patsy said. “That was my husband, Tomas—he’d die at the thought that anyone might take him for a Mexican, though he was a Mexican.

  “Then he died, anyway,” she added, reflecting on what a weird thing she had just said.

  “When I met you at Aurora’s I thought I recognized you,” Jerry said. At a stoplight just before they hit the freeway, Patsy hastily put her hair up; he found he still liked the way she lifted her arms. The movements of women, particularly the unself-conscious physical moments of women, who were, in the main, highly self-conscious, were a kind of sexual poetry—at least their little motions or gestures, such as pinning up their hair, struck his eye as poetry. The smarter the women, the less likely it was that they would ever be able to forget themselves, and the more moving it was when they actually forgot themselves and did something simple and graceful.

  “You should have spoken up,” Patsy said, whirling onto the freeway. “I was pretty beaten down in those days. Tomas did everything he could to destroy my confidence in my looks, although he only married me for my looks. I would have been highly flattered to think that someone liked the way I looked on the beach.”

  Jerry had been feeling lonely and rather discouraged when Patsy walked up to him. He had been thinking that he might just move back to Las Vegas—maybe he’d run a bingo game for a while, something low key. He didn’t feel quite up to the craps tables, much less blackjack or baccarat or anything very high stakes. He just might run a bingo game, and it wouldn’t even have to be in Vegas, it could be Reno or Tahoe or even Elko. It would get him out of the sticky situation he was in with Aurora, and also out of his life as a therapist, which was beginning to seriously pull down his spirits. Maybe he’d run into a happy showgirl who liked to race-walk or something.

  The move would require nothing more elaborate than putting his books in storage and maybe buying a couple of new tires for the station wagon. One morning he could just be gone. The people who showed up expecting to find him where they normally found him would be surprised, and he himself would be in El Paso or somewhere, heading west.

  The power to leave—simply to leave, informing no one—was a power he cherished. He felt that within the next week or two, certainly within the next month, he would probably exercise it. His thinking had begun to focus more and more on Elko. He liked it that it was marginal—it was really just barely in Nevada, with Salt Lake a nice drive to the east. It was interesting to imagine what Elko women would be like, interesting enough that he spent quite a few happy hours imagining Elko girlfriends.

  But now there was Patsy—she had apparently just decided to walk into his life. Now that he had the chance to see her up close, he wasn’t totally sure she was the woman he had seen on the beach—there had been a lot of attractive brunettes with sexy, skinny arms on that beach, some of them with daughters and handsome husbands—but the fact that she might be and that he had already told her about it and convinced her already that he had once seen her and desired her meant that they had something going—something with a little bit of myth woven into it. He loved sitting back and watching her drive. Certain Texas women, like certain California women, seemed to be born to the wheel. Driving was like breathing to them—they did it with complete assurance, as Patsy was doing it now. He himself drove well enough, but he was nervous about being rammed, and he divided his attention about equally between the road ahead and the rear-view mirror. Patsy was the fastest driver on the freeway—she seldom did more than flick her eyes at the rearview mirror. Now and then she also flicked her eyes at him. They were just quick glances, but Jerry felt nonetheless that he might have to put off finding out about the women of Elko, Nevada, until a little later in life.

  “Let’s have your life story,” Patsy commanded as they were approaching the bridge to the island. By the time they reached the crab house and managed to get their order in over the din of Future Farmers and Future Farmerettes, she had heard a lot of the life story, enough to convince her that if anything he was even more aimless and easily led than she would have supposed. The affair he seemed to be mired in with Aurora—an affair he immediately confessed to—was a case in point. At times, listening to him describe himself, Patsy felt her spirits sag: the man was such a dishrag, did she even feel like buying his dinner, much less like taking him home? He seemed to be saying that he was fascinated by Aurora and had a kind of crush on her but didn’t really want to sleep with her, although he was sleeping with her, of course.

  “I guess I’m a little dense tonight,” Patsy said. “I know she’s a bulldozer, but is she that much of a bulldozer that you have to make love to her when you’d rather not? Come on.

  Jerry was uncomfortably aware that Patsy wasn’t really liking what he was telling her about Aurora. She kept her eyes down, listening. The more he tried to explain that it both was and wasn’t a big deal, the more he saw Patsy stiffening. The friendliness she had seemed to have in the grocery store and on the drive down to Galveston wasn’t really there anymore. She was looking at him skeptically—even a little hostilely.

  “Maybe I just have a class problem,” he admitted. Class was something most of the women he went out with had never even thought about, and if he mentioned it as a possible explanation for some of his own dubious behavior it would sometimes distract them sufficiently to make them forget that they were on the verge of being angry with him.

  “Come again?” Patsy said. “You’re sleeping with a woman thirty years older than you because you have a class problem? Is your crush on her supposed to be a crush on her class, or what? I don’t get it.”

  “I’m just not confident with upper-class women,” Jerry said. “I doubt that I would ever have got up the nerve to speak to you in the grocery store—although I noticed you several times, and wanted to.”

  “Jesus Christ, I’m not an upper-class woman,” Patsy said. “Neither is Aurora Greenway. I’m just a Dallas girl whose father made a little money in the oil business.”

  “Well, but Aurora seems upper class,” Jerry said. “You do too. Maybe I’m just measuring from where I started out—I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Mr. Shrink,” Patsy said. “I doubt that it’s class inferiority that prompts a man to sleep with someone his mother’s age. There doesn’t really have to be that weird an explanation, does there? The explanation is that Aurora’s still attractive. I’ve never been crazy about her but even I can see that she’s still an attractive woman. She’s one of those greedy people who somehow manage to be appealing simply by being totally greedy.”

  She felt rather like throwing her plate at him—his conversation was so stupid that for a moment it made her miss her dead husband. Tomas had been perfectly capable of not saying a word to her for three or four weeks at a stretch, but when he did talk he was smart—mean, but smart. Tomas made her work for everything she got: sex, compliments, even domestic peace. She didn’t like it, but at least it had a flavor. What would Jerry’s flavor be if the best he could offer was a remark about his terror of high-born women, or women he supposed to be high-born?

  “I mean educated,” Jerry said. “Women like you and Aurora are much more knowing than I am. You’ve traveled, and you’ve been to school. It’s not so much that you know which fork to use. You know which poems to quote, and you’ve been to all the museums and seen all the pictures. My mother was just a skater with a good figure—she left school in the seventh grade.”

  “What about you???
? Patsy asked.

  “I finished high school and went to casino school, but I dropped out,” Jerry said.

  “Casino school?”

  “Sure—where they train croupiers,” Jerry said. “I guess the best casino schools are in Europe, but I just went to one of the ones in Las Vegas. It’s not everybody who can make it as a croupier. Most of the people I went to casino school with didn’t make it.”

  “I thought you were a shrink,” Patsy said. “Actually I didn’t think you were a shrink at first, but spying on you in the supermarket almost convinced me you might actually be one. So are you a fake shrink, or what?”

  “At least I have you confused,” Jerry said. “Can we get out of here? I hate this noise.”

  They drove to the south end of the seawall and watched the ocean for a while. Patsy had ceased to feel hostile. Jerry had disarmed her with his remark about Aurora’s knowingness, and her own. Their knowingness had nothing to do with class—or maybe it did, though not in the old Continental sense. She knew she wasn’t upper class, but on the other hand she had traveled, had read some poetry, had seen all the pictures in all the museums. She had never thought of her traveling or her museuming or her reading as being definitive—in fact, all that had just made her feel dilettantish and shallow—another sign that she could never really rise above the decorative, because her mind itself was only decorative. Such little learning as she had enabled her to hold her own at upper-middlebrow parties the world over, but that was as far as it took her. She could read, but she couldn’t write; she could look, but she couldn’t paint. She was a first-rate dinner partner, though—the many rich or famous men who had been seated beside her at parties in L.A. or London or Madrid had not gone home disappointed. They liked sitting beside her and chatting with her, and yet that in itself was a damning fact. It just meant that her mind matched her looks—both were highly decorative, but neither had even the slightest hint of the exceptional.

  But to Jerry Bruckner, son of a showgirl, she and Aurora Greenway, two fairly ordinary women, were empresses of the haut monde. The touching part of that was that the man, for once, was undoubtedly sincere. He really was awed by semi-educated women who were just smart enough and well-trained enough to go into Hermes or Fendi and buy a decent handbag.

  Patsy was glad he had come out with that remark—maybe, after all, he wasn’t totally uninteresting. Also, he had a nice way of being quiet—at least he did if the sea was there to look at and listen to. He wasn’t bored, he wasn’t sullen, he wasn’t nervous, and he wasn’t too attached to his own observations or anxieties. They sat for half an hour without speaking. Patsy felt that her irritation had been a little silly. She had violated one of her own beliefs, which was that speculating about men was foolish. She could have grabbed Jerry Bruckner at almost any time and whirled him off to Galveston to eat crabs. She could even have grabbed him the night after she met him at Aurora’s dinner party. Instead, she had speculated and fantasized. She had sort of invented Jerry as she had wanted him to be, and had then been annoyed to discover that he didn’t resemble the guy she had invented. Knowing nothing about him, she had let her imagination advance him a notch or two socially. She had invented him as the kind of man she liked to sit next to at dinner parties—someone who was lively and at the same time dazzled by her. Such men often turned out to be more fun at the dinner party than they were if she turned up in bed with them, but Jerry had looked so appealing, sitting by Aurora, that she had discounted her own rules, and also her considerable experience in such areas.

  “Does the fact that you went to casino school mean that you aren’t a real shrink?” Patsy asked.

  “I’m not accredited,” Jerry said. “I never went to college, much less to medical school. But the man who was sort of my stepfather was a psychiatrist. He talked to me a lot about psychiatry, and he also left me his books. When I was in New York trying to be a comic I did analysis routines. I went into analysis myself, but my analyst got killed before we got very far.”

  He stopped, feeling it must all sound really flimsy to Patsy. He could easily be a convincing shrink to people like the woman whose daughter had had all the strokes in the same side of her head, or to the old man who kept trying to convince him that Jesus had come back and was living in the neighborhood; but he hadn’t been a convincing shrink to Aurora, and he didn’t think he’d have any better luck with Patsy.

  Down the beach, a mile or two away, he could see the lights of the big hotel where he’d worked as a concierge after hitchhiking to Galveston for the first time. That was the day he left Cherry, a girl he still sort of missed.

  For a moment, he not only sort of missed Cherry, he missed her a lot. If it had been Cherry in the car, and not Patsy, he wouldn’t feel so tight in his chest or be so worried about saying something stupid or uninformed. He knew that he had a weak grasp of historical chronology; he was always confusing artists or composers who lived in the eighteenth century with those who lived in the nineteenth. Errors of that sort marked you as a booby if you ran with a certain crowd. With Cherry it had been no problem. Cherry was a nice, boisterous American girl who liked to do things top speed. She didn’t know much about anything, and probably would have placed the eighteenth century as way back before the birth of Jesus, in whom she believed fervently if vaguely.

  “You don’t need to be quite so wary of me, Jerry,” Patsy informed him. “I’m just trying to get to know you. I’m not going to turn you in to the thought police for practicing shrinkery without a license. I was just kind of wondering how you got started in it.”

  “I made a sign and put it on my porch,” Jerry said. “Most people believe signs, you know, if the sign says ‘Therapy,’ they don’t question it. All they want to know is how much you charge.

  “I used to be concierge at that hotel,” he added, pointing down the beach. They had never had a concierge until I came along. I said I’d work for tips if they’d let me try it. The first day I made four hundred and twenty dollars. I probably should have stayed a concierge.”

  “Are you an altruist?” Patsy asked. “Did you give up being a concierge in order to help suffering humanity? Or was there just more money in shrinkery?”

  “I guess I thought it was a little more intellectual,” Jerry said. “Trying to sort out people’s problems seemed more enterprising than just trying to sort out restaurant reservations for old ladies from West Texas.”

  “I see, you’re the neighborhood priest,” Patsy said. “So much for my quiz.” Her hair felt sticky from the moisture of the sea—also, her ambush felt like a failure.

  Going north, back to Houston, she drove at speeds above ninety. When they arrived at Jamail’s, Jerry’s station wagon was the only car in the parking lot, although beside the store a big produce truck was purring. A team of men with handcarts wheeled vegetables from the fertile valleys of Texas and California into the depths of the store.

  When Patsy stopped, Jerry tried to kiss her, but she drew away.

  “I’m not one of your parishioners yet, Father,” she said. She felt irritated with him, as she had for much of the evening.

  Jerry just felt confused—not a new feeling. He felt that once again he had tried for a woman who was out of his class. Even so, he knew he would be sad if he just let her drive away.

  “Can we do this again?” he asked, his hand on the door.

  “You mean eat crabs?” Patsy asked.

  “Well, eat something,” Jerry said.

  “Don’t know,” Patsy said. “I do know that I’m not dating someone who has to two-time Aurora Greenway to date me.”

  Jerry wished he had just kept his fantasies of the woman on the beach at Santa Monica. Feeling tired and feeling sad, he got out.

  “It was a nice evening,” he said politely.

  “You’re a hypocrite, Father,” Patsy said, as she whipped away.

  21

  Bump had learned to talk. To the delight of both his mother and his father, he had beautiful enunciation, and his
talk, from the first, was interesting. Usually, he even spoke in complete sentences. But there was a catch: he didn’t want to talk to them. He only wanted to talk to his best friend, Kermit the Frog.

  “I’m a Frog too,” he told his Big Granny, one day. “I’m going to live in Frog Town, where Kermit lives.”

  His Big Granny had bought him Kermit and showed him how to slip his hand inside Kermit and wiggle his mouth, so he could speak. His Big Granny had only had to show him once. After that, Kermit went every place Bump went. One day at Big Granny’s, Bump saw Kermit on a picture machine his big Granny had in her bedroom. There was another, smaller picture machine in the kitchen, which Rosie let him watch. At first it astonished him to see Kermit on the picture machine at the very moment that he had Kermit on his own hand and was making him talk to Rosie and Big Granny.

  “Why is Kermit two?” he asked.

  “A good question,” Aurora said. She was very pleased with her great-grandson, now that he could talk. “Kermit is two because the world is weird.”

  “Is that Frog Town in that picture?” Bump asked, pointing.

  “I think so,” Aurora said.

  “I want Kermit to be one,” Bump said. “I want him to be just my Kermit.” He knew numbers, and how they looked, and he also knew the days of the week, although he didn’t find the days of the week particularly interesting. Nothing in the world was as interesting as Kermit, his friend.

  “Why are you in there?” he asked Kermit, pointing at the picture machine.

  Big Granny borrowed Kermit long enough for him to answer Bump’s question.

  “I’m just a poor Frog, that’s where I work,” Kermit said.

  Bump took Kermit home with him that night, a little troubled. He didn’t like it that Kermit was so tricky that he could be in two places at once. He didn’t tell his Bigs this, though. They weren’t really friendly to Kermit. If he gave Kermit too many hugs and kisses, his Bigs didn’t like it. They wanted him to give them the hugs and kisses. His mother was always grabbing him and making him sit in her lap and listen to stories. She didn’t understand that he would rather spend his time with Kermit in one of their hideaways. Their best hideaway was in the yard, under a hedge, but they also had a hideaway in the closet. Sometimes when his mother grabbed him he would try to kick his way out of her lap so he could get back to his life with Kermit, but his mother was strong, and it didn’t always work. She just hung on until his legs grew tired of kicking. If he tried to bite her and tried to make her let him go back to Frog Town she just held him up in the air and laughed. Usually Claudia laughed too, but she rarely tried to make Bump sit in her lap.