Rosie was so nervous that she felt drunk might be where she was headed, too, so she drank a little vodka with Vassily. Theo opened a bottle of wine and smoothly consumed half of it while they were sitting around the kitchen, adjusting to one another and waiting for Aurora. In her nervousness Rosie had even considered bolting back upstairs and suggesting that Aurora hurry—she didn’t feel she was up to handling foreign guests, solo, too much longer. On the other hand, hurrying Aurora almost always backfired. Fortunately Aurora floated downstairs just as Rosie was approaching panic.
“I see Theo’s been clearing his throat with a little wine,” Aurora said. “Perhaps I should clear my throat the same way.”
Theo immediately rose and poured her a glass.
“Vassily’s never been in this neighborhood,” he remarked. “Me neither, till I met you.”
“Well, you’re men of the sea, the wine-dark sea,” Aurora said. “I wouldn’t expect to find you this far inland except in a good cause, such as cheering me up.”
“Vas needs to cheer himself up,” Theo said. “He’s been in the dumps lately.”
“Yeah, I’m getting divorced,” Vassily said. “I hate my wife.”
It seemed to Rosie that Vassily looked at her significantly as he said it. She had been hoping no one would look at her significantly until she straightened out her situation with Willie—if she had a situation with Willie. Unsettled by what seemed to be a significant look, she gulped a little more vodka.
“Rosie, I see you’re being a brilliant hostess—our guests look as happy as Greeks can look,” Aurora said. “This seems a perfect occasion for a little role reversal—you continue being the hostess and I’ll attempt to function as the scullery maid. If I get in over my head, Theo can help me. He has the look of a man who’s had experience with scullery maids.”
“Okay, fine,” Rosie said. She had no idea what that meant she was supposed to do.
“It’s cooling off—why don’t you take our guests out on the patio?” Aurora suggested. “The scullery maid will be along in a bit with some fruits de mer.”
“Shrimp, I bet,” Vassily said, as he got up and followed Rosie and Theo out.
“Shrimp, among other delicacies,” Aurora said, noting that Vassily was now looking significantly at her. “And then we’ll have some excellent lamb.”
It proved, indeed, to be excellent lamb. The brothers Petrakis consumed it in satisfying quantities—satisfying both to them and to the cook—while Rosie, animated by uncertainty and drink, chattered with the two of them about the one subject they found they had in common: Shreveport, Louisiana, where, it turned out, the brothers had once had what Vassily described as “business interests.” Rosie’s hometown, Bossier City, was just across the river. The fact that she and the two Greeks had spent time in the same place made Rosie feel much closer to them than she had expected to. She drank a good deal of vodka and then a glass or two of wine and ceased to worry too much about Vassily’s significant looks.
Indeed, even by the time the lamb was served, Rosie had begun to feel that it was the best dinner party Aurora had ever had. Amazingly, Aurora had meant what she said about the role reversal. Rosie actually found herself leading the conversation, for once. It might have been only geographical reminiscences on the order of which store was on what corner in the Shreveport-Bossier City area, but she was the woman doing most of the talking. Aurora was up and down, serving; when she was down she was pleasant, but not especially talkative.
“Usually she does all the talking at these dinner parties,” Rosie confided to Theo at a moment when Aurora was out of the room. “I don’t know what hit her tonight.”
“Nothing’s hit me—when one is lucky enough to have a Greek chorus, one should shut up and let it chorus,” Aurora said, popping back in just in time to overhear the remark.
In fact, something had hit her: a fatigue of the spirit; a sense that she was on a treadmill and that the treadmill was slowing down. She could not quite get her brights to click on, or her partying spirit to kick in. She did her best, but her best on this occasion was far beneath her normal best. Of course her guests had never seen her at her normal best, and they munched their lamb and drank their wine contentedly, unaware of what they were missing.
“I must say you’re a laconic chorus, as choruses go,” Aurora commented, as she and Rosie were seeing the Greeks to their pickup.
“It’s your fault,” Theo said. “There was so much to eat we didn’t get time to talk.”
“I like this neighborhood,” Vassily said, looking around at the well-kept lawns. “It’s nice, you know. It ain’t dusty.”
“Anyway, you was quiet yourself,” Theo said, eying Aurora closely. “I guess you’re still upset about that jerk that jilted you.”
“I am, a bit,” Aurora admitted. “How shrewd of you to notice.”
“It’s plain as day,” Theo said. “You’re here, only you ain’t. Vas gets that way when he’s depressed about his girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?” Aurora said. “I thought it was his wife he’s depressed about.”
“Naw, he ain’t depressed about Angela, he just wants to kill her,” Theo said.
“I see,” Aurora said.
“You’d see for sure if you met Angela, she’s a terrorist,” Theo said.
Rosie and Vassily had wandered off down the sidewalk, indulging in yet more reminiscences of Shreveport while Vassily admired the neighborhood’s houses.
“I’m sure Vassily can hold his own, even with a terrorist,” Aurora said. “I’m not so sure about you, though.” She put her arm lightly over his shoulder as she said it.
“No, I’m fine,” Theo said. “I’m just fine.”
“Well, you look like a soft touch to me,” Aurora said. “Tell me about your heartbreaks.”
Theo considered. Aurora took her arm off his shoulder and walked over to the pickup. She thought she might examine it while Theo gave some thought to his heartbreaks. She kicked a rear tire once or twice to see if it was solid, and found that it was.
“The worst was my second wife, she was German,” Theo said. “Then there was Becky, but I shouldn’t have never got involved with her, she was too young for me—she liked to kick up her heels and dance all night, which is okay if you’re young, but I wasn’t.”
Aurora was silent, watching him across the sidewalk. Their pickup smelled like a sea creature.
“I’m afraid that was the problem with my jerk,” she said. “He was young and I’m not—although in this case I was the one who wanted to kick up my heels. He didn’t seem to want to do much of anything.”
“A deadhead,” Theo said. “These kids you see nowadays, they don’t have no energy. It’s like they don’t know how to live.”
“Well, at least I know that much,” Aurora said. “I think I know how to live.
“I guess the real problem is that I don’t know how to stop living,” she added. “Most people would be relieved if I’d just stop, but I don’t want to stop.” She felt, for a moment, undone by the accuracy of her own insight.
“Even when I was younger, they wanted me to stop—twenty years ago they were wanting me to stop,” she said, almost tearful.
“Why should you stop? You’re beautiful!” Theo said. He could hear sadness in Aurora’s voice and felt like rushing to her. But then, just as love was about to overwhelm him, his brother and Rosie wandered back up the sidewalk.
“I like the area,” Vassily said. “Soon as I get rich, this is where I’m moving.”
“Your pickup smells like a rolling fish,” Aurora said, hastily struggling up from her sinking spell. “Why’s that?”
“Because we haul fish in it when we ain’t got nothing else to do,” Vassily said.
Theo had a hard time choking down his sense of overwhelming love for Aurora. For the millionth time in his life he was reminded that his brother had no sense of timing, and no sensitivity to what was going on around him. He could have taken Rosie on a little longer wal
k—five minutes more—but here he was, back, and before Theo could find a way to say anything nice to Aurora, courtesies had been exchanged, the evening ended, and he was driving back across Houston with Vassily, who was fairly drunk and happy as a lark.
“Don’t you ever notice nothing?” Theo said, exasperated.
“I noticed—I said it was a nice neighborhood, didn’t you hear me?” Vassily said contentedly.
“It’s interesting they lived in Shreveport,” Rosie said, as she and Aurora were washing up together. “I ain’t talked that much about Shreveport since F.V. D’Arch was alive.
F.V. D’Arch, a Shreveport native, had been General Scott’s driver for many years, until one day in the garage a heart attack struck and carried him off.
“They’re nice, our Greeks, aren’t they?” Aurora said, her hands in the dishwater. Rosie was drying wineglasses. Just the way Aurora said it—our Greeks—gave Rosie a good feeling, a really good feeling. It was as if after all these years, she and Aurora had finally had a double date.
11
The next morning when Jerry Bruckner stepped out of his front door to get the paper, Aurora was sitting on the steps. He was startled and a little scared, though she looked at him calmly. There was something girlish and a bit demure in her look.
“I thought you’d never return,” he said, feeling silly.
“I haven’t returned,” Aurora said. “Was it Patsy who left the brilliant yellow belt on your couch?”
“Yes, she forgot it,” Jerry said.
“Did you fuck her before she forgot it?” Aurora asked.
“Uh—huh,” Jerry said.
“That means yes, I take it,” Aurora said.
“It means yes, I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “I’ve missed you.”
“Now you can really start missing me,” Aurora said, standing up. “Goodbye.”
She walked quickly down the sidewalk, not looking back—nor did she look back once she was in her car. She just started the car and drove off. Jerry had started to follow her as she was walking toward the car—had started to argue. But it didn’t seem that Aurora had come for discussion, so he didn’t. He watched and then went back inside, forgetting the paper.
“Of course she didn’t come for discussion, she came for confirmation, nothing else,” Patsy said as they were discussing it, later that day. They were on Patsy’s bed, in her spacious second-floor bedroom. When Jerry got up to adjust the air conditioning he looked out the window and saw Katie, Patsy’s younger daughter, who was visiting from L.A. Katie, topless, was floating on a pool mattress in the middle of her mother’s large pool. Like her mother, Katie had small breasts. Unlike her mother, she was too young to have cares.
Jerry returned to the bed, thinking—as he had been almost constantly lately—that it was really time for him to leave town. He had been honest when he said he missed Aurora. He missed her quite a lot. Patsy was younger and more beautiful, but she was also less free and less fun. Patsy had many cares, and despite all her efforts to relax or let go, her cares seemed to restrain her. Even in lovemaking, for which she was almost desperately eager, there was some restraint, not in regard to his needs and pleasures, or her own either, really—she was not inhibited—but, still, there was something a little sad in Patsy’s sex: she was greedy but seemed displeased by her own greed. It was in that that she differed most from Aurora.
“I knew she knew—she’s not dumb,” Patsy said. “It’s been a month. Aurora doesn’t just stop speaking to someone for a month unless she thinks she’s got a powerful reason. I’m the reason. I wonder if she’ll ever speak to me again.”
Jerry was thinking of Lalani, his doughnut-shop girlfriend. Lalani had much larger breasts than Katie, and, like Katie, she was too young to have cares. Deplorable though he knew it was as an element in his character, Jerry had long known that when it came right down to it he really preferred women who were either too young or too dumb to have cares.
“So what if she found out?” Patsy asked, raising up on an elbow to study Jerry’s face—his face fascinated her. It was attractive and intelligent, and yet also passive and empty. The parts were there, but she couldn’t get a grip on the whole. She had once hoped that kissing him would make him reveal the whole, but it hadn’t. Kissing, fucking, the entree, the main act, usually told her something, but kissing Jerry only told her that she was kissing a pretty odd, though seriously attractive man.
“Suppose I hadn’t forgotten my stupid belt and she hadn’t found out?” she asked. “What would you have done? Would you have just gone right on sleeping with us both?”
“I wasn’t sleeping with her,” Jerry said, reminding her what he felt was an important, or at least a significant, point. “I hadn’t slept with her since General Scott died.”
Patsy regarded this distinction, of which Jerry was so proud, as a wimpy, bullshitty point, and she had said as much before.
“A lapse isn’t the same as breaking up, so don’t try to tell me you had broken up with her,” she said emphatically. “I’d stop screwing my new guy too if my old guy lay down and died. I’d go into mourning too. But I wouldn’t stay in mourning forever. By and by I’d want my new guy to take me to bed again, if he was still around.”
Jerry said nothing. Often, when Patsy made a point that she considered important, he just said nothing. The most important-seeming points in a given conversation might not seem to matter at all if they were let lie for a day or two.
“So what would you have done when she wanted you again?” Patsy asked. “Tell me. This is not a question I intend to let you duck.”
“Maybe I would just have left town,” Jerry said.
“That’s the coward’s way,” Patsy said.
“But it could still be the best way,” Jerry said. “Cowards are sometimes survivors, you know.”
Despite her nice breasts and lack of cares, he wasn’t seeing much of Lalani anymore, though on the whole Lalani made a nice balance to Patsy: she was coarse where Patsy was over-refined; she had solid instincts in areas where Patsy’s were shaky; she had no interest in things Patsy knew too much about; and she had no emotional restraints, whereas Patsy had too many.
He might have continued to see a lot of Lalani had it not been for a new discovery in the perennial pretty-women-without-cares sweepstakes. His new discovery was a nineteen-year-old Hispanic girl named Juanita, a countergirl at a little all-night tamale stand in the Heights. By a geographical irony too serious for Jerry to ignore, the tamale stand was just across the I-10 from the freeway ramp he had walked down the morning he hitchhiked away from Julie, his first Houston girlfriend. In fact, when he stood at the tamale stand, eating a tamale or a burrito and attempting to flirt with Juanita, he could look across I-10 and see the very spot where the black nurse had stopped to give him his ride to Galveston on the wedding day of Julie’s sister.
He tried to convey the richness of this irony to Juanita, mainly because it gave him a chance to prolong their conversations, but Juanita couldn’t get interested and didn’t pretend to. Why should she care if this nice-looking Americano used to hitchhike from the other side of the freeway? She knew all the talk was probably just his way of showing interest in her—she was petite, beautiful, and full of talk herself; lots of guys came to the tamale stand and showed interest—but she would have liked it better if he had asked to take her dancing or something.
Juanita was an illegal, but she wasn’t too worried about it—Immigration wasn’t likely to come around hassling any girl as pretty as she was.
Jerry kept dropping by, though, and she began to like him, even if he did talk sort of boring. One day she confessed her dream to him: her dream of living in L.A. She had learned her English reading movie magazines, and she wanted to go to L.A. real bad. Jerry was a good-looking guy: Juanita picked up right away that he was mainly showing up to see her, not to eat tamales—which was fine. He looked like a guy who might be moving along soon. Maybe if he liked her so much he’d take her with him. If he di
dn’t take her all the way to L.A., he might at least take her closer. Juanita was hoping for Phoenix or Tucson, at least. If some guy would just take her that far she was pretty sure she could make it the rest of the way on her own.
Of course, her boyfriend Luis had offered to take her to L.A., but Juanita didn’t think that had much of a chance. Luis was a busboy at a fried-chicken place—he was an illegal too. Juanita had already pretty much decided not to go running off to California with him. Even if he could save the money for bus tickets, they’d never make it. Luis had the smell, or something—Immigration had already sent him back to Mexico twice.
Fortunately, working double shifts at the fried-chicken place kept Luis pretty busy—otherwise he could be trouble. He was so in love with her that he liked to lurk around the tamale stand on his day off, spying on her to see if she was too nice to customers. If she was even a little bit nice to some customer who was a male, it meant a big fight the next time they were alone together. He was so obsessed with keeping Juanita to himself that if he saw her being nice he would usually threaten to kill her, and the customer too. Once or twice at the tamale stand he got so enraged watching her be nice to customers that he blew up, threatened guys he had never seen before, threatened Juanita, threatened the manager of the tamale stand. Once he even pulled a knife and threatened a black guy. The manager called the cops, but Luis got away before they came. If they had caught him he would have been sent back to Mexico for sure.
Juanita didn’t really mind that much that Luis was obsessed with her—sometimes she even sort of liked it. But that didn’t mean she intended to set off for L.A. with him. She liked to think she had a little more common sense than that. The nice quiet Americano, who was showing up at the stand every day or two now, seemed like a much better bet. One night she got up her nerve and asked him if he’d like to go dancing—maybe the guy was too shy to ask her, or maybe he thought she was too young. He looked kind of startled when she asked him, but he didn’t say no. He said he’d do it if he wasn’t too busy on the weekend. The weekend was coming along in a day or two, and Juanita was getting excited, wondering if she’d have a new boyfriend to take her dancing. Fortunately Luis had to work on Saturday night—he wouldn’t be around.