“I can play cards too,” Theo remarked. “If we ain’t gonna play for money, at least we could play for toothpicks.”
Two hours later, when they stopped playing cards, Theo had won the whole box of toothpicks. He attempted to teach Rosie and Willie several new card games, but their grasp of the games was imperfect, and Theo always won. The only sound from upstairs was the occasional faint flush of a toilet. When he had won all the toothpicks, Theo decided to go.
“I guess she ain’t gonna come back downstairs today,” he concluded, a little sadly. He had hung around hoping for one more glimpse of Aurora—he also wanted her to have one more glimpse of him. People who got very drunk sometimes didn’t remember a thing about the experience. Certain levels of drunkenness often canceled all memory, both of the place and of the people who had been around during the drunkenness. Aurora had been at a pretty deep level of drunkenness—four bottles of retsina was not nothing. She might not remember him, his brother, or McCarty Street. If he turned up at her dinner the next night, with or without Vassily, Aurora might not have the faintest idea who he was. He himself had once forgotten a whole marriage due to drunkenness—one that had taken place in Egypt. He had married an Egyptian woman, lived with her for the better part of a week in a state of deep drunkenness caused by drinking too many Egyptian liquors that his system was not familiar with, and, once back to sea and sober, forgot all about it. He might never have remembered the marriage at all if it had not been for the fact that on his next trip to Alexandria he had happened to bump into his wife in a tobacco shop. She was with her new husband, an Englishman, and thus did not comment much on the fact that he had forgotten not only their nuptials but the whole week of their marriage.
All this led him to conclude that Aurora might be too drunk to remember him, which might mean that he would never see her again. Since he was now in love with her, this was a discouraging prospect, and he said as much to Rosie, who seemed trustworthy.
“What if she don’t remember nothing?” he asked. “Lots of drunks don’t remember nothing. She ain’t gonna want somebody she don’t remember showing up for dinner.”
“Aurora won’t forget you,” Rosie assured him. “She’s got a project, and it’s to remember every single day of her life, even back to when she was a baby.”
“Lots of luck,” Willie remarked. “I can’t remember nothing before third grade.”
“And not much after,” Rosie commented. “But then you ain’t Aurora. Once she gets after something she’s determined. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she remembered every day of her life. She’s got all her old calendars and she goes out in the garage and works at it.”
“Sounds dopey to me,” Theo said. “Why would anyone want to remember every day of their life?” It would take up all the space in their head.”
“I don’t know, maybe you can ask her tomorrow,” Rosie said.
“I can’t remember but about three days of my life,” Theo said. “The day the war ended was one.”
The more he thought about Aurora’s project, the weirder it seemed. Still, he wanted to see more of her if he possibly could.
“She said to be sure and get your phone number, in case she can’t remember the name of your bar,” Rosie said. “She said she might want to talk when she feels better.”
She offered to call Theo a cab, but he looked at her as if she were crazy, before trudging off to catch the bus.
“He said he learned most of them card games in Yugoslavia,” Rosie reported later to a very weak Aurora, pale as a ghost in her bed.
“That’s fine, I like a well-traveled man,” Aurora said.
8
For most of that day, Aurora was too sick to care whether she lived or died, recovered or perished, had a lover or didn’t have a lover. Rosie peeked in about noon to see if she was well enough to consider a snack, only to discover Aurora lying on the floor midway between bathroom and bed.
“I’m not dead, I’m resting, go away,” Aurora said.
“Hon, if you’re too weak even to crawl, then you need help,” Rosie informed her. She noticed that Aurora had pulled most of the bedcovers off the bed and had constructed a kind of nest for herself on the floor, near the window nook.
“I’ll proceed to my nest in a moment,” Aurora said. “Did my Greek leave?”
“Yeah, but what makes you think he’s yours?” Rosie asked, annoyed by Aurora’s habit of assuming that she could have whatever she wanted, at least where men were concerned. Having what she wanted in the way of men was exactly what had led her to be lying collapsed in the middle of her own bedroom floor.
“Of course he’s mine,” Aurora said. “How dare you challenge my right to him?”
“Good lord, I just asked a question,” Rosie said.
Later, though, after a couple more painful crawls to the bathroom to attempt to empty a stomach that was already empty, Aurora began to remember the chain of events that had brought her to such a state. It was a short chain, actually, the beginning and end of which was the discovery of Patsy Carpenter’s belt on Jerry Bruckner’s couch. When she was strong enough to feel anything again, what she felt was a sense of betrayal, as bitter as the few drops of bile that seemed, after so much vomiting, to be all that was left of her bodily fluids.
The next time Rosie ventured to peek in the door, it was almost dinnertime. Aurora was in the bed crying, with just her bed light on.
Aurora, feeling lonely, hopeless, and old, told her about the belt on the couch.
“So it was really happening... I mean, you and Jerry?” Rosie said, relieved to have correct information at last.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Aurora admitted. “I guess it was only happening in the sense that it occurred.”
“I don’t get it,” Rosie said. “What does that mean?”
“It means I wanted it and he didn’t,” Aurora said. “I was there, but he wasn’t. So in a sense it wasn’t happening at all. And what that means is that I made a very bad fool of myself, and now I’ve had my comeuppance,” she added in a flat voice. “I knew I’d get my comeuppance eventually—I just didn’t think Patsy Carpenter would be the one to deliver it.”
“Maybe she didn’t,” Rosie said. “All you got to go on is a belt on a couch. Maybe she just got an itch and took off her belt to scratch it, and then she forgot the belt.”
Aurora looked at her so grimly that Rosie was taken aback. What had she done now? Then it occurred to her that perhaps she shouldn’t have mentioned itch and scratching.
“Or she could have just lost a button, or something, or eaten too much—you don’t know,” she added lamely.
Later in the night, sitting wakeful but blank in her window nook, Aurora realized that Rosie could be right. There could be an innocent explanation for the belt on the couch. She didn’t for a moment believe there was, but it was possible. But did it matter? If Jerry wasn’t sleeping with Patsy already, he would be sleeping with her soon, or with some other young woman soon. What seeing the belt had brought home to her had little to do with Jerry: what it had brought home to her was her own folly. She had cast aside her dignity for a few months of sex with a younger man who didn’t really want her. Besides that, she had grasped the whole equation from the beginning and had done it anyway. Her lifelong tendency had been to overreach, but she could not recall an occasion when she had overreached so crudely, or been slapped down so hard.
“You’re probably right, but you could be wrong, remember?” Rosie said at breakfast, while making pancakes for Aurora. Just then the phone rang.
Aurora, who was closest, ignored it. It rang several times.
“Want me to get it?” Rosie asked.
“You may, if you choose,” Aurora said.
Rosie got it and immediately gave Aurora a scared look.
“It’s Jerry!” she whispered, covering the receiver not only with her hand but with a pot holder too, for good measure.
Aurora didn’t change expression or respond in any way.
/> “Hi, Jerry,” Rosie said, thinking she might want to quit her job if she was going to be placed in the middle every time the phone rang from now on.
“Yeah, she’s fine, but she just ain’t come down yet. I guess she’s probably in the shower, want her to call you?” Rosie said. Aurora frowned when she heard the want-her-to-call-you part.
“Please have her call me, she didn’t show up yesterday and I’ve been a little worried,” Jerry said.
“He says he’s been a little worried,” Rosie said, putting down the phone.
Aurora got up without a word, walked through the garage, and got into her car.
Once the car warmed up, she began to back it out of the garage. She had a grim look on her face, and it wasn’t, Rosie felt, because of the familiar threat of scraping her fenders. Rosie followed her out of the garage and down the driveway, determined to make one last effort to get her to be reasonable—or, if that took too much effort, at least to get her to reveal where she was going.
“Jerry sounded real concerned on the phone,” she said, easily keeping pace with the car as Aurora crept backward down the driveway. “He sounded like he misses you.”
This got no response at all, but Rosie, ever hopeful, kept following, all the way to the street.
“I hope you ain’t gonna go get drunk again,” she said, as Aurora curved into the street and shifted from reverse to drive.
“Your system is just going to get damaged if you keep getting drunk,” Rosie continued by way of parting advice. Aurora ignored her, looked down the street to see if there were any obvious obstacles ahead, and drove off.
“It could have been somebody’s else’s stupid belt—it could have been a patient’s,” Rosie yelled after her, before going through the backyard to her own little house, to rout out Willie. She felt that bad things might happen before the day was over; she wanted Willie to be up and about—she didn’t expect him to deliver any particularly wise counsel, but she did expect him to sit and drink coffee with her while she worried.
To her annoyance, Willie wasn’t in their little house. At first she thought he had just misplaced himself. Lately he had been moping around the backyard a lot, trimming hedges—but when she looked, she discovered that the backyard wasn’t where he was moping, if he was moping. She hurried back into the house, hoping to find him in the kitchen, but he wasn’t in the kitchen and he didn’t appear to be in any of the bathrooms either.
It came to her in a flash that Willie was gone—he had skipped, departed, run off. Once this simple thought occurred to her she realized she was not very surprised, though she was intensely annoyed. Now he would be even less useful than he had been when he was there!
Of course, Willie was slow; he had still been in bed when she had gone in to try and coax Aurora into eating a few pancakes. He wasn’t in the backyard, but maybe he was in the alley behind the backyard, wandering around indecisively, trying to decide which way to run like a rat when he ran.
Rosie darted into the alley, saw no Willie, and quickly jogged around the block, hoping to spot him at the bus stop. He had registered two DWIs lately and was no longer allowed the keys to his midget pickup. But Willie wasn’t at the bus stop either. Slow people evidently moved faster when they were conducting an escape. She herself had never been slow, but when, years before, she had decided the jig was really up with her marriage, she had acted like greased lightning—and then had had to come back home anyway, due to the fact that her husband, Royce, had been disemboweled by one of his best friends.
She went back inside and made another inspection of the house, but she didn’t really expect to find anyone there, and she didn’t find anyone there.
“Gone where?” Aurora asked, twenty minutes later, when she returned, having merely driven aimlessly around the neighborhood for a while. She had meant to go to Jerry’s and have it out with him as a prelude to forgetting him and getting over him, if she could. But she hadn’t gone more than two blocks before she began to feel shaky; she parked for a while in a nice spot of River Oaks shade, but didn’t become less shaky and soon was forced to admit that she wasn’t up to having anything out with anybody, not just then. Her stomach still felt knotted, and she could detect only faint traces of appetite, a sure sign that she was in no condition to have very much out with a man.
Now, just when she needed sympathy on the home front, Rosie, who often gave it, had had the bad timing to become deserted herself, leaving her in no state to provide much sympathy.
“Oh, buck up,” Aurora said. “He probably just went to buy shaving cream. If the world were made of shaving cream, men would still manage to run out of it just when one would prefer to see them shaved. At least that’s been my experience with men, and I’ve had a lot, as you know.”
“No, he left me,” Rosie assured her. “I knew he was about to unless I stopped being mean to him.”
“If you knew that precise fact, then why didn’t you stop being mean to him?” Aurora inquired. “Did you want him to leave?”
“I did and I didn’t,” Rosie admitted, glancing at the stove, where a nice pile of pancakes was waiting, unconsumed.
“Them pancakes just went to waste,” she added.
Aurora turned her attention to the substantial stack of pancakes on the stove—it seemed to her that her stomach might be becoming a little less knotted.
“Nonsense, those pancakes still look quite edible to me,” she said. “Let’s you and I split them. You know my principles.”
“Yeah, eat as much as you can stuff down,” Rosie intoned. “If I was to eat two bites, with my stomach like this, I’d vomit all day, just like you did yesterday. I’m just a bundle of nerves,” she said, as Aurora divided the pancakes evenly and placed them on two plates. Aurora then proceeded to eat both her plate of pancakes and Rosie’s, while Rosie sat, sipped coffee, and looked bleak.
“I wish I still smoked,” Rosie said. “I’d be smoking right now, if I did.”
“Well, we just have to face matters squarely, Rosie,” Aurora said. “We’ve both been abandoned, and that’s that. Do you think there could be another woman in Willie’s life? Or did he just leave you because you were mean?
“You were quite mean, at times,” she added. “I suppose it’s because you have the advantage of having me as a teacher and model for some forty years.”
“Naw, it ain’t your fault, I just get mean sometimes anyway,” Rosie admitted.
“What about my other woman theory?” Aurora asked again.
“It’s possible, but it ain’t likely,” Rosie said. “Willie is too lazy. My guess is he’ll just go back on dope. I don’t know about that cure he took—I don’t think it really worked.”
“Probably not,” Aurora agreed. “I disapprove of these cures anyway. People should be given all the dope they want, in my view—whatever it takes to keep them stable.”
“Oh, poor Willie ain’t up to being stable,” Rosie said, looking suddenly very much sadder. “That man’s like Jello inside—you know, quivers constantly. If I had it all to do over again I wouldn’t have been so mean.”
“Look at it this way—at least he didn’t sleep with Patsy Carpenter,” Aurora commented.
“That could have been an accidental slip on Jerry’s part,” Rosie said. After all, she had known Patsy as long as Aurora had and was not disposed to be as hard on her as Aurora was. Whatever else she might be, Patsy was unarguably attractive, and what else did it take where men were concerned?
“Baloney—Patsy’s a determined predator, like me,” Aurora said, wishing there were more pancakes and wondering if she would still feel hungry if she got up and made some.
“She passed along the gene, too,” she added. “Don’t forget that Katie just stole Melanie’s heartthrob.”
“Some heartthrob, the little jerk,” Rosie said. “I’m never gettin’ involved again, it’s too much torment when it ends.”
“Wrong, totally wrong,” Aurora said, jumping up. She had decided to go for the pancake
s while her appetite was on the upswing.
“What we both must do is seduce someone else as soon as possible,” she said. “It’s the principle that my mother always applied when her horse threw her. No matter how painful the fall, she always got up and got right back on the horse so as not to lose her nerve.”
“Yeah, but what if you lose your nerve anyway?” Rosie asked. “This ain’t my first rodeo, you know? If you get thrown a hundred times, maybe the smart thing to do is stay off horses.”
“Well, if you want to be an old woman, okay,” Aurora said. “You are an old woman, but if you give up and start acting like one, I can assure you you’ll be a lot older in a matter of weeks.”
Rosie pondered that observation for a moment—she didn’t disagree with it. It was just that at the moment the weight of life seemed so heavy that the most restful course seemed to be to go on and sink beneath it.
“I ain’t no woman of steel,” she pointed out. “I don’t know if I can get my nerve up again, and anyway, who would I get it up for?”
Aurora suddenly remembered that she had invited two Greeks to dinner. Actually, all she could remember about them was that they had bags under their eyes, wore undershirts, and had muscular shoulders—and also that oil trucks drove almost through their little shed of a bar on their way to the Ship Channel.
“Didn’t Theo lift me or something when I was extremely drunk?” Aurora asked. She had a vague sense that one set of muscular shoulders had been put into play on her behalf.
“He not only lifted you, he carried you all the way upstairs,” Rosie said. “Got a cramp in his leg, though.”
“I have not been lifted in many years,” Aurora said. “What a pity I was not sober enough to enjoy the sensation.”
“He used to carry sacks off ships, but he don’t do no exercise now,” Rosie said.