When she heard Rosie say the words “anal sex” she looked around, surprised.
“He sounds like a little macho jerk to me,” Rosie added. “You’d be better off without him.”
“Rosie, you and Granny are always telling me that,” Melanie complained. “Every time I get ditched you try to tell me I’d be better off without the guy.”
“Yes, and it’s true, specially if anal sex is all they can think about,” Rosie insisted. Then she remembered her own problems with C.C. and oral sex, preferably in cars; she felt sad for a moment. Other than that, C.C. hadn’t been so bad.
“Men are weird, nine tenths of them,” she said.
“Maybe they are, but I still need one,” Melanie pointed out. “I don’t make a good loner. I do a lot better when I have a guy around, even if he’s not perfect.”
“What’s that about anal sex?” Aurora inquired, looking up from her inspection of the sweetbreads.
Melanie hadn’t known her grandmother was in the room with Rosie until she heard her voice, distantly but distinctly.
“Uh-oh, is Granny hearing this?” she asked.
“Uh, she’s cooking,” Rosie said, feeling awkward. “I guess Pascal’s come back into the picture.”
“Rosie, that’s really premature,” Aurora said. “The mere fact that I’m letting him come to dinner doesn’t mean that he’s in the picture.
“At the moment there isn’t a picture,” she added, with a bit of a droop in her voice. “At the moment there’s just a blur.”
“Pascal might snap things back in focus, though, if he plays his cards right,” Rosie said, determined to be the optimistic one for a change.
“His cards are mainly deuces,” Aurora said. “Why is Melanie questioning you about anal sex?”
“Don’t tell her! It’ll just make her hate Lee if she ever happens to meet him,” Melanie said. She heard her grandmother’s voice growing louder.
“I think she wants to talk to you herself,” Rosie said, since it was obvious that Aurora expected to do exactly that.
“Shit!” Melanie said. “I didn’t want to talk to Granny right now. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Hon, she’s just upset, her new boyfriend’s just left her,” Rosie said to Aurora, covering the receiver with one hand and trying to indicate with a look that it might be better if, for the moment, Aurora left well enough alone.
“Well, if I’m not wanted, I’m not wanted,” Aurora said, getting the message plainly enough; indeed, too plainly. She went back to her sweetbreads, but not with the light heart she usually brought to the early stages of cooking.
“You might be wanted in a minute,” Rosie said, not liking the look on Aurora’s face. “Right now she just wants someone to confide in.”
“Is she mad?” Melanie asked, biting a hangnail. She hated trying to talk to Rosie about personal stuff when she knew her grandmother was in the room.
“No, now she’s crying,” Rosie said with a sigh—she was not unsympathetic either to Aurora or to Melanie. She was just in the middle, as she had so often been.
“It could be the onions, we’re just starting to cook,” she said. She began to feel sad herself—it was awful to be in the middle when grandmother and grandchild were both unhappy.
“It’s not onions,” Aurora said, but not loudly enough for Melanie to hear. The fact that no member of her family wanted to confide in her in times of crisis, or had ever wanted to confide in her at such times, made a pain in her breastbone. Year after year, decade after decade, it seemed that Rosie received the confidences—first it had been from Emma, now it was from Melanie. She felt shut out, always had. What was she, if not a mother and grandmother? It seemed too much to bear, but she went on cooking anyway, unhappy, but for the moment stoic.
Later, after the dinner with Pascal had been negotiated adequately, if, on Aurora’s part, a little numbly, Melanie did call her to apologize for not talking to her that afternoon.
Melanie was feeling better. She had spent several hours thinking over her relationship with Lee and had found that she could only remember one occasion when he had been really nice to her. All the other times he had been borderline, at best.
Also, she felt guilty about her granny—it was no trick to tell from Aurora’s voice if she was happy—and she was not happy.
“Are you just upset because I didn’t talk to you this afternoon?” Melanie asked. With her grandmother there was no point in beating around the bush; better just to come right out and say it.
“Well, I’m upset about a number of things, Melly,” Aurora admitted. “That’s one of them, but it’s not really the most major.”
“Granny, you’re my parent,” Melanie explained. “Daddy doesn’t want to be my parent, and my mother’s dead. You’re the only person I have to hide things from—and everybody needs to hide some things from their parent, don’t they?”
“I’m sure it’s unusual, but that was not the case with me,” Aurora said, reflecting. “At least it wasn’t the case in regard to my mother—I never told my father a significant secret in my life.”
“But you could tell your mother? Even things about sex?” Melanie asked, curious.
“My mother was the one person I could tell anything to,” Aurora said. She instantly forgave Melanie, whose voice was that of a sad, hurt little girl.
“Now that I look back on it, I’m sure it was odd that I could tell my mother anything,” Aurora reflected. “I can’t remember holding back at all.”
“You were lucky,” Melanie said. “It must have been wonderful to be able to tell your mother anything.”
“It was wonderful,” Aurora agreed. “She was a very frank woman, with a remarkably open mind—very remarkably open, considering her time and her place.”
She was silent for a moment, remembering her mother, and the long talks they had once had.
“The pity is that I was very young then,” she said. “I didn’t have anything very complicated to tell her. But I did once have a very minor venereal disease, and I told her that.”
“You did?” Melanie said.
“Yes, I did. She was quite unfazed, and very practical. She took me to the doctor herself.”
“I guess you’d have more complicated things to tell her now,” Melanie said.
“I certainly would,” Aurora agreed. “Later life itself is a complicated thing. But Mother died before she could have learned much about it, and the upshot of that is that I’ve had inadequate counsel and have not coped particularly well.”
“I think you’ve coped fine,” Melanie said.
“Nope, I haven’t—lack of counsel has resulted in many setbacks,” Aurora assured her.
“Isn’t that what shrinks are for? Counsel?” Melanie asked.
“Yes, presumably that’s what they’re for,” Aurora said. “But since mine allowed me to seduce him and then allowed Patsy Carpenter to seduce him, too, only a short while later, I don’t think I can expect adequate counsel from him.”
“You could change shrinks,” Melanie pointed out.
“I could, but I think I prefer just to change the subject,” Aurora said. “Am I ever going to be allowed to know why Rosie was talking about anal sex this afternoon?”
“I guess you can know,” Melanie said. “My boyfriend wanted to have it and I didn’t, which is why we broke up.
“I mean I didn’t want to have it today,” Melanie added. “I didn’t mean I was against it per se.”
“It does require rather a special mood,” Aurora said casually. She was still thinking about her mother, remembering the way she played with her rings, twisting them round and round on her fingers when she was thinking about some problem Aurora had presented her with.
Melanie tried to imagine her grandmother having anal sex, but her imagination wouldn’t go near it—her imagination wouldn’t even provide much in the way of a sensual aid when she tried to imagine herself having it with Lee.
“Anyway, I’m back to no boyfriend
,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t complain. I’m sure there are worse fates.”
“There are, but not many,” Aurora said, remembering how flat and bored she had felt that very evening, trying to get through a dinner with Pascal.
“What does that mean?” Melanie asked. “Are you really that unhappy?”
“I’m not frolicking much these days,” Aurora admitted. “I’m afraid I’m a very needy person, and this has led me to accept the wrong people in my life. Even when I know quite well that they’re the wrong people I often accept them anyway, rather than be without.
“I really don’t seem to be able to flourish when I’m without,” she added.
“Are you going to get your shrink back from Patsy?” Melanie asked. “I bet you could if you tried.”
Aurora let that one sit for a moment. She had the sense that it might be the wrong sort of thing to be talking about with her granddaughter. But, on the other hand, she had just praised her own mother for being open to discussion of just such complexities. Also, the question was a hard one: Was she or wasn’t she going to actively compete for Jerry? For the past few weeks she had not supposed she would, but, now that Melanie had asked, she realized she was not exactly settled in her mind where he was concerned.
“I might be just that foolish,” she said. “At this point my options seem to be folly or resignation, and I actually think folly might be the more honorable option. I’ve been a fool before, and in a way it’s kept me going. I may just have to be a fool again.”
Melanie tried to chatter about her job, or anything that might cheer her grandmother up, but Aurora was still rather gloomy when the conversation ended.
Melanie stayed awake until nearly two o’clock, hoping Lee would call and make up, but he didn’t. The next day she saw him at a distance as she was walking to the makeup trailer. She started to wave, but he wasn’t looking her way, so she didn’t. Then, while she was being made up, he smart-lipped one of the stars and was fired on the spot. By the time Melanie walked to the set for her first scene he was already gone. It was sort of stunning how quickly you could vanish if you were just an A.D.
“Sweetie, you’re better off without him,” Shirley said when she heard about the breakup.
“You sound just like my grandmother!” Melanie said, a little bitterly. She was still upset, it was a raw wound, you’d think people would notice!
Still, she wasn’t really mad at Shirley. After all, Shirley had gone out of her way to get Bruce a job, and that was still the nicest thing anyone had done for either one of them since they moved to Hollywood.
14
After having struggled to remain on his best behavior during Aurora’s dinner, Pascal reflected for the better part of a day and decided that he was bitterly dissatisfied with the tenor of the evening. He felt sure he had been slighted in a number of subtle but nonetheless significant ways: his hug upon arrival had been perfunctory, and his kiss upon departure even more so. Conversation, usually so challenging as Aurora let her mind dart here and there, had been indifferent, as perfunctory as her embraces. She had even asked him again for gossip about Madame Mitterrand, probably the most boring question it was possible to ask a member of the French diplomatic corps.
He was in a bad mood the day after the dinner; that evening he started drinking cognac and kept drinking it until he fell out of his chair while reaching for the little instrument that flicked the TV channels. Somehow he had dropped it and had kicked it just out of reach. He leaned over to reach for it, fell out of his chair, went to sleep, and woke up with a splitting headache just in time to shave and go to work. He cursed his secretary because of a typo, and almost spat at Solange, who was unable to get the fax machine to work immediately.
“It must work now!” Pascal demanded, his head still splitting.
Solange stared back at him icily—she was, on the whole, an extremely composed young woman—too composed, in his view.
“As you can see, it doesn’t work now,” she said. “I guess it has not heard this news.”
“What news?” Pascal asked. He wondered apprehensively if some dreadful thing had happened somewhere in the world of which he had not informed himself. Perhaps it was even something that bore on the destiny of France.
“The news that Monsieur Pascal wants it to work now!” Solange said, looking him over with evident distaste.
At the moment the man looked grotesquely ugly to her: red-eyed, red-faced, jowly. She found it a little hard to believe that she had once found the same ugliness attractive; but—no getting around it—she had. Of course, having an affair with a man with a crooked penis made a good story to tell to her girlfriends; even some of her boyfriends laughed at her descriptions of the crooked penis, though normally the last thing she would have mentioned to a lover was another lover’s penis.
“Oh,” Pascal said, relieved that France had not been disgraced without his knowing about it immediately.
“I drank cognac,” he added, by way of apology for his surly behavior.
Solange continued to stare at him icily. She popped open the fax machine, discovered there was no paper in it, tapped off down the hall, came back with a roll, stuck it in the machine, and snapped it shut with a loud pop.
“Now it will respond to monsieur’s every command,” she said.
“Why can’t you be kind?” Pascal asked. “I ache all over this morning. I had a bad night. I am old and lonely. Once you were kind to me but now you aren’t.”
“Because you behaved like a pig,” Solange informed him. “Go get a lady pig to be nice to you.”
She started his fax and left. While the fax was running, the machine began to make a little grrr sound, like the growl of a small animal. Pascal began to feel desperate. He was afraid to summon Solange again, and yet the fax was not moving smoothly through the machine as it ought. It was merely sitting in its slot while the machine growled.
Finally, feeling that the growling sound, Solange, his job, Houston, and in fact his whole life were collectively intolerable, Pascal simply walked away. The fax was too stupid to send, anyway. The mayor of Houston wanted President Mitterrand to attend the Fat Stock Show next year. There would be a special barbecue in his honor, if only he would agree to come. Better yet, the Concorde would be allowed to bring him, though normally the Concorde was not permitted to land in Houston because of its noise. None of this would ever happen—what did it matter if the fax reached the Quay? Let the next person who wanted to send a fax fix the growling machine. Solange’s icy looks were like stabs to the heart. He felt he might sob—if he sobbed, perhaps his head would feel better. He shut himself in his tiny office and remembered that Aurora had insulted him with her indifference, and suddenly his anger rose so fast he couldn’t control it. He grabbed the phone and called her, meaning to bury her in curses.
“Hello,” Aurora said. She was in her bed, attempting to make her way through a few sentences of Proust, something she rarely attempted unless she happened to be so low in spirit that she couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“You were like a slug!” Pascal burst out. “A big white slug. I’m calling to say I am never coming again—I will not be insulted in this way.”
“Wait a minute now, start over,” Aurora said. “Did I go to the trouble of picking up my phone just to hear you call me a slug? Of course I’m slightly large, and I’m certainly white, but in just what manner do you think I resemble a slug? Isn’t a slug some form of worm? Am I really such a fool as to have fixed sweetbreads for a man who equates me with a worm?”
“You didn’t think about me,” Pascal said. “Is it because of the Greeks?”
“No, it’s because you’re a dull old fart,” Aurora said. “I tried to think about you several times during what I admit was an indifferent dinner, but the truth is it was like turning to an empty channel. There’s not much there to see, and even less to think about.”
“My head aches, I’m old and lonely,” Pascal said, his anger draining out of him. H
e was horrified that he had lost control of himself so completely; he had even called Aurora a slug. A slug? Why had those words come from his mouth? She would never forgive him, probably. He felt that his only hope was to appear as pitiful as possible, which was not hard, because he felt pitiful.
“You deserve to be lonely, if the best you can do is call me a slug,” Aurora said. “I’m going to tell Rosie you said that, and we’re going to fix you.”
“Don’t fix me, I’m a broken person,” Pascal said. His life was a wreck, he had nothing, he began to weep.
“Oh, shit, now you’re crying, just because I was mean,” Aurora said. Rosie came into the room, her arms filled with crisp clean sheets, a sure sign that Aurora would soon be asked to move so the bed could be changed.
“Pascal called me a slug but now he’s sobbing,” Aurora said, holding the receiver in Rosie’s direction in case she wanted to hear the sobs.
“I don’t want to hear it, who wants to listen to a Frenchman cry?” Rosie said. “You have to move so I can change this bed.”
“Now, when I’m only on my second sentence of Proust?” Aurora asked, grinning. “Usually I read at least five or six sentences before I give up.”
“I don’t care, move it, I’m already half a lap behind where I like to be this time of day,” Rosie said.
“It would be better to be dead than to live like this,” Pascal said, his sobs subsiding.
“Well, that’s pure speculation, Pascal,” Aurora said. Somehow his sobs were having a tonic effect on her spirits.
“It might be a good deal worse to be dead,” she continued. “Do you think the French government could spare you for a few hours?”
“Why?” Pascal asked. Her threat to “fix” him was not one that he felt he should take lightly.
“Pascal, if you’re going to question me, let’s forget it,” Aurora said. “Just answer my question: Are you free for lunch, or aren’t you?”