The Evening Star

  Aurora drained the glass and turned it upside down.

  “I think I’ll refrain from breaking it, since it’s your last,” she said. “I’ve had rather a bad shock today and I would rather not drink alone. Let’s spare the glass and drink out of the bottle.”

  She took a swig from the bottle and handed it to Vassily, who drank a good swallow and handed the bottle to Theo.

  Two grimy young sailors came walking up the road from the direction of the Ship Channel. They ignored the retsina drinkers and fed a few quarters into a dusty soda-pop machine. Nothing happened for a bit until they began to punch the pop machine. One kicked it and the other shook it. Finally a single 7-Up clattered out. The two sailors stationed themselves at the bar’s other table, popped open the 7-Up, and shared it.

  “If you hurry before I get drunk you could probably teach me to play that interesting-looking domino game you were playing when I drove up,” Aurora said. She took the last swallow from the bottle of retsina.

  Theo got up and returned in a moment with another bottle.

  “I can tell you a curious thing about ivory,” Aurora said, playing with one of the little dominoes. “It turns black if it doesn’t get sunlight. Of course, there’s not much danger that your dominoes won’t get sunlight here.”

  “You don’t want to play with Theo, he cheats,” Vassily said.

  “Shut up—you cheat,” Theo said, with no heat.

  “That’s how I lost the bar,” he added, to Aurora. “He cheated.”

  “Oh, well, if I get him drunk, Theo, perhaps you’ll win it back,” Aurora said. She found herself rather warming to Theo as the retsina began to take effect. Though Vassily and he looked identical, Vassily did not quite seem to have Theo’s sparkle—even if, at first glance, sparkle might seem an odd word to apply to a fat old Greek with bags under his eyes.

  Still, Aurora thought she detected sparkle in the way Theo looked at her.

  “What happened, your boyfriend leave you?” he asked, handing her the new bottle.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” Aurora said. “The son of a bitch left me for my daughter’s best friend.”

  7

  “I’m looped, I’m plastered, I’m God’s own drunk!” Aurora said, wobbling into her kitchen. Though everything was rising and falling, swirling and heaving as if an earthquake was in progress, she felt sure she could make it across the kitchen floor under her own power.

  A second later, her conviction proved to be hubris: the floor seemed to bubble, flinging her feet out from under her. She fell flat on her face and cracked her head solidly on a doorjamb. Then she rolled over, sprawled out more or less in the starfish position on her own kitchen floor, and tried unsuccessfully to focus on Rosie and Willie, who had been sitting at the table playing rummy when she wobbled in.

  “Oh shit, I hate him,” she said, before passing out.

  “Her boyfriend left her, she don’t hate me,” a voice explained from the doorway that connected the kitchen to the garage.

  Rosie hadn’t even had time to put her cards on the table. She looked down briefly at Aurora and then over at the person who had spoken—a small, stocky, white-haired man in an undershirt and old pants. He wore sandals, but no socks, and had bags under his eyes. Rosie had never seen him before and didn’t know how to evaluate his statement, or Aurora’s. For a second her instinct was just to try and go on with the rummy game, hoping that what had just occurred was a hallucination of some kind.

  “Willie, are you ever gonna play?” she asked in a neutral voice.

  Willie, meanwhile, suddenly felt in terrible peril. Aurora was sprawled on the floor, right beside his chair, lying on her back with her legs spread wide. He had glanced down once, just as she had rolled over and passed out, and, through no fault of his own, had seen practically up to her crotch. Though the glance had only lasted about a tenth of a second, it wouldn’t go out of his mind, which is why he felt in terrible peril. If he glanced down again and actually saw Aurora’s crotch, that would be the end, so far as Rosie was concerned. Rosie would notice, and as soon as she informed him that she’d noticed, she would probably never speak to him again. If she did speak to him again, it would only be to tell him what a terrible person he was. It was even conceivable that she would make him move out.

  The one certainty Willie clung to in his dilemma was that he must not—absolutely must not—glance down at the large female body lying just beside his chair. The briefest glance would invite calamity—yet, even so, he had a terrible urge to glance down briefly just once more.

  Theo Petrakis, from the doorway, saw that the two people in the kitchen were in a stunned state, to put it mildly. In his view they could be excused: it was probably not every day that their boss came home drunk and fell down and knocked herself out. He had seen people sitting at his own bar become stunned for long stretches just because they happened to witness a car wreck on McCarty Street in which only one or two people were killed or mangled. In the early months of the war he had often been stunned himself by seeing people killed; but, after he had seen a few hundred killed, as he had, he ceased to be easily stunned, and remained not easily stunned throughout his years in Houston, during which he had witnessed almost as much violence as he had seen in the war. In the war it was clear why the violence was occurring, and in Houston it often was not clear, but in either case the effect on Theo was slight.

  In the present situation, Theo realized that he would have to be the one to act, so he left his position in the doorway, walked around the table, squatted by Aurora, decided she was really out cold, and carefully pulled her gown and housecoat a little farther down over her legs.

  In the four hours Theo had spent watching Aurora get drunk he had fallen deeply in love with her, much to the disgust of his cynical brother, Vassily, who, when she passed out briefly without paying for the first three bottles of retsina—she had a short nap, with her head on the green table—actually suggested that they call the police and have her taken to jail.

  “Yeah, jail, where drunks belong,” Vassily repeated, when Theo asked if he had heard him correctly.

  “You were a drunk for thirty years, did you belong in jail?” Theo inquired.

  “No, I’m your brother, this lady ain’t your brother,” Vassily pointed out. He hated it when Theo fell in love. It had happened many times in their long life together, and its consequences were always painful and expensive. Now it was happening again, right before his eyes, and it irritated him. His one hope was that the police would come and drag the drunken woman away before Theo went completely over the edge. Once Theo went over the edge, wild disorder followed, and business always suffered. Besides, Vassily had been with Theo all his life, except when Theo ran off in order to be in love. Though he acknowledged that Theo had a right to be in love, Vassily still resented the separations.

  When Theo walked around the table, Rosie came out of her shock, only to discover that, on the whole, she was more shocked than she had been when she was actually in shock. The small man squatting by Aurora, attempting to see that her unconscious body was modestly covered, was clearly no hallucination. Something dreadful had happened, and whatever it was, it was real. Aurora had actually come in drunk and knocked herself out cold. Besides that, she had come in with a stranger, a little fat man in an undershirt. At first glance Rosie had feared that he was just some aging sex fiend that Aurora had somehow fallen prey to, but since he seemed to be trying to cover Aurora up, rather than uncover her more, perhaps that judgment was too harsh. Perhaps he wasn’t a sex fiend.

  “You gotta washrag?” he asked, looking at her from his squatting position near Aurora.

  “Sure, what am I doing, I guess I’ve gone crazy, it ain’t like this is the first drunk I’ve ever seen,” Rosie said, jumping up.

  Willie got up too and stumbled over to the corner of the kitchen so as not to be in the way. One of his lifelong rules had been to try and stay out of the way while serious matters were being attended to, and it c
ertainly seemed to him that Mrs. Greenway lying unconscious and only partially dressed on the kitchen floor constituted a serious matter.

  Rosie didn’t take that view—Willie’s habit of doing as little as possible just when things really needed doing had more than once caused her to want to punch him in the nose.

  “Willie, you could be helpful, go upstairs and get a couple of pillows,” she commanded.

  She herself immediately got a bowl of ice cubes, a dish towel, and a couple of washrags, all of which she passed to Theo.

  “Thank you, are you Rosie?” he asked gravely.

  “Sure am, what’s your name?” she asked.

  “I am Theo Petrakis,” he said, reaching across Aurora’s prone body to offer his hand.

  “Rosie Dunlup,” Rosie said, shaking hands with him. “Can I just call you Theo? I think I can remember that.”

  “Of course,” Theo said gravely. “Now that we are introduced I guess we better get to work. You got a dishpan?”

  “Did you mean a bed pillow or a couch pillow?” Willie asked. He had moved to the foot of the stairs. At such a moment of crisis he didn’t want to make any mistakes, and the only way not to was to ask.

  “A bed pillow, Willie—I mean two bed pillows,” Rosie said, trying not to sound as put out as she felt. “Why would I send you upstairs to get a couch pillow when there’s couches all over the place?”

  Willie, abashed that he had managed to annoy Rosie at a time of crisis, hurried upstairs.

  Working from opposite sides of her body, Rosie and Theo began to bathe Aurora’s temples.

  “He was a prison guard until he got on dope,” Rosie said, once Willie left. “He’s cured now, but I still have to tell him everything.”

  “I am on dope too, Excedrin,” Theo said. “I think you better get the dishpan. This lady drank four bottles of retsina. My brother and I, we drank too, but we didn’t drink no four bottles.”

  “I don’t even know what it is you’re talking about, but if she drank four bottles of it we may need more than a dish-pan,” Rosie said. “We may need a bathtub.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” Theo admitted.

  At that moment Aurora made a whimpering sound and gritted her teeth.

  “Oh boy,” she said, without opening her eyes.

  “Willie, get down here with them pillows, she’s coming to,” Rosie yelled.

  “Rosie, don’t yell,” Aurora said. “My head is splitting. I must have got a bump.”

  Her eyes were still closed.

  “Hon, you fell and hit your head on the door,” Rosie said, bathing Aurora’s temple lightly with an ice cube held in a washrag.

  Willie had made the mistake of attempting to decide which pillows were the most suitable, a hopeless task. In desperation he grabbed five and hurried downstairs.

  Aurora yawned.

  “That feels good,” she said, as more ice was applied to her temples. “Did Theo leave?”

  “Theo is at your service,” Theo said.

  “You sound as if you’re also at my elbow,” Aurora said, her eyes still closed.

  “My God, I didn’t say bring a hundred pillows,” Rosie said irritably. It annoyed her that Aurora’s boyfriends were always able to muster more presence of mind than her own. Theo seemed to be a source of great strength compared to Willie, who was mainly a source of great irritation.

  “Couldn’t decide,” Willie said.

  “Rosie, must you pick on Willie when my head hurts so?” Aurora asked.

  “I wasn’t picking on him much,” Rosie said, trying to get a grip. “He just brought a few too many pillows, but we might need them before we’re done.”

  “Theo, are you near?” Aurora inquired, tentatively opening one eye. The room immediately began to swirl like a merry-go-round. She tried to swivel a bit so as to counteract the swirl, but it didn’t work; the swirl got faster, and she was forced to close her eye again.

  “Oh boy, troops,” she said. Though her eye was now firmly closed, parts of her body were still participating in the swirling of the room. She realized too late that opening the one eye had been a serious mistake—now the room wouldn’t stop swirling and she couldn’t stop swirling, even though she was lying flat on the floor. Very soon, and very ominously, her stomach showed signs of wanting to join the universal swirl.

  “Could someone please assist me to the bathroom?” she said, or rather, whispered. She was afraid that any attempt to use her voice normally might precipitate the crisis.

  Rosie looked at Theo, who surveyed the surroundings with the practiced eye of the barkeeper.

  “The sink’s close,” he remarked.

  “Theo, I know you’re just trying to be practical, but I would prefer not to be sick in a sink,” Aurora whispered. She was still hoping against hope that somehow the swirling would cease, or at least slow down, but every syllable she uttered seemed to make the swirling speed up. It seemed to her that the room was already swirling through space at the speed of a galaxy or something—astronomy had not been one of her best subjects.

  “Oh dear, I’m afraid the matter’s become urgent,” she said. “I’m afraid the wisest if not the only course is to get me somewhere quickly.”

  Even as she said it she marveled at her own capacity to speak in complete and even lucid sentences at such a moment of crisis—it had always been thus, and it often had a tendency to make the crisis worse, since her lucidity often infuriated her helpmates, most of whom could scarcely speak in a complete sentence at the calmest moments of their lives.

  Theo decided he had better pick Aurora up to facilitate rapid transport, so he slid his arms under her and did just that, to the surprise of everyone, particularly Aurora.

  “What’s happening, is gravity annulled?” she inquired as she felt herself being lifted into the air.

  “Shut up or you’ll puke sooner,” Theo advised.

  “Theo, you’re in great shape, I’ll say that for you,” Rosie commented, although Aurora’s large body almost entirely blocked her view of the man she was complimenting.

  “If Willie tried to pick Aurora up he’d be down in his back for a week,” she added, with a baleful glance at the useless Willie.

  “He gets down in the back just from bringing in a bag of ice,” she continued mercilessly.

  “Ice—that’s it—I need ice,” Aurora whimpered.

  “Where are we going with her?” Theo asked—Aurora was carryable, but that didn’t mean she was light.

  “Think you could carry her upstairs? It’s just one flight,” Rosie asked.

  “I could carry her for three days,” Theo boasted, hoping Aurora was listening.

  “Oh, Theo,” Aurora said, peeking briefly, to observe herself in the bare muscular arms of her rescuer, who smelled of strong tobacco.

  “Let’s hit it,” Rosie commanded, heading up the stairs.

  Midway up the stairs Theo began to get a painful cramp in his left leg, but he limped stoically on upward, stair by stair, until he was able to deposit Aurora safely on a blue rug in her own bathroom—an easy crawl, in his judgment, to either the bathtub or the toilet. He limped out, but Rosie lingered with Aurora, trying to help with cold rags. Before he was well out the door Theo heard Aurora begin to throw up. Still Rosie lingered in order to flush the toilet as often as possible.

  “Rosie, do go out, I don’t require attendance while I’m losing my retsina,” Aurora said in a very weak voice.

  Theo looked only briefly at Aurora’s bedroom before limping on downstairs. He didn’t feel it was mannerly to inspect a lady’s bedroom while she was ill. Bedrooms were for times of health, or for laying out bodies. He looked forward to seeing Aurora in her bedroom in a time of health.

  Downstairs, he dropped into a chair and began to massage his cramping leg.

  Willie, very anxious, immediately set a cup of coffee in front of Theo.

  “We got plenty,” he said. “What’s the verdict on Mrs. Greenway?”

  “Drunk, that’s the verdic
t,” Theo said, just as Rosie came tripping downstairs.

  “She swears she can crawl to the bed when she gets through puking, but I don’t know—maybe, maybe not,” Rosie said. “I left her a pillow and a dishpan.”

  “A dishpan?” Theo inquired.

  “Yeah, in case she can’t raise up high enough to puke in the toilet,” Rosie said. “She says she thinks she might vomit all day, so she don’t want to be bothered, but tomorrow night you and your brother are invited to dinner, for being so nice to her.”

  “I ain’t bringing Vassily, I don’t like him,” Theo said. “When she passed out the first time, he wanted to put her in jail. Why should she feed him?”

  “Oh, well, be that as it may,” Rosie said, stealing one of Aurora’s favorite phrases. “What do you take in your coffee? I’m glad Willie at least offered you some.”

  She felt increasingly ticked at Willie. He was a much larger man than Theo—why hadn’t he carried Aurora upstairs?

  “Blacker coffee, I’m Greek,” Theo said.

  “You’re strong—do you exercise or are you a weight lifter or what?” Rosie asked.

  “I don’t do no exercise—I used to carry sacks off ships,” Theo explained.

  Willie began to feel sad—he wished very much that he could shoot up. Everyone in the world was more competent than he was, he knew. Rosie was more competent, and the Greek man, Theo, was also. He himself had not even been able to make the coffee black enough to suit their guest, which put him, in his own view, pretty much at the bottom of the ladder, competence-wise. It was depressing to be so useless, but dope made it better.

  “Got any toothpicks?” Theo asked.

  “Why, got coffee in your teeth?” Rosie asked, grinning. She liked Theo. A house containing no one but herself, Aurora, and Willie was, in her view, a pretty boresome house. Theo had a novel way of putting things, and, besides, he was cute. She had once considered Willie cute in a chunky sort of way, but she no longer thought Willie was particularly cute. He might be her problem, or her mainstay, but he wasn’t cute. Theo had a brother—maybe he was cute too. Maybe she and Aurora and Theo and his brother could even double-date. What she would do with Willie if such a thing happened was a question she decided she would think about later.