“Yes, I am free for lunch,” Pascal said. “I am free for all lunches. Solange was cruel to me because of the fax.”
“Well, that’s between you and your young mistress,” Aurora said. “Pull yourself together and get yourself over here about twelve.”
“Okay, but I don’t want you to fix me,” Pascal said. “I’m already fixed enough.”
“If you behave correctly I might not fix you, but I’ll certainly fix you if you’re not here on time,” Aurora said, before hanging up.
“I knew he was back in the picture,” Rosie said.
Aurora reluctantly yielded the bed and deposited herself in her window nook, sticking Proust back on her bookshelf first. It was not to be a six-sentence day, it didn’t appear.
“He’s rather crushed today—I suppose I was moved to pity,” Aurora said. “I thought we might take him over to meet our Greeks.”
“We? Why do I have to go?” Rosie asked.
“Well, they’re brothers, and we’re almost sisters,” Aurora said. “I thought we might continue our tradition of double-dating where our Greeks are concerned.”
“I don’t know, I’m scared it will get messy,” Rosie said. “Suppose I fall in love with the same one you fall in love with? Then if I win you’ll fire me. But if I think I’m going to be fired I won’t be able to let go and enjoy nothing anyway.”
“Whoa! That’s racing ahead if I ever saw racing ahead,” Aurora said. “Nobody’s in love yet—I doubt we’ll be so lucky.”
“I still think it’ll get messy,” Rosie said. “Everything you start gets messy in five minutes and everything I start is messy before I even start it. It just seems like we’re asking for trouble.”
“Even so, I prefer trouble to endless nothingness,” Aurora said.
“What’s so bad about nothingness?” Rosie asked.
“Do you really want to live out your life just changing my sheets?” Aurora asked. “Wouldn’t a little mess be preferable to day after day of the void?”
“If Willie would just work himself up to one phone call, then I’d feel better,” Rosie said. “I know he ain’t calling, because he feels guilty about running out on me. It ain’t that I want him back, either. I’d just like one phone call so I’d know the poor sucker’s still alive.”
“I agree that Willie has not been thoughtful,” Aurora said. “On the other hand he hasn’t phoned out of a clear blue sky and called you a slug, either, as Pascal just did to me.”
“So what are we supposed to do when we get over there where the Greeks live?” Rosie asked. The idea of going to see them had startled her at first, but now that the prospect had been rattling around in her mind for a few minutes she had ceased to find it frightening. After all, it was broad daylight, and she did like feta cheese. Maybe a little visit could be managed without too much mess.
Aurora had kept the Greeks’ phone number taped to her telephone for the last few days in case of emergencies; she dialed it and got Vassily.
“Boys, it’s us,” Aurora said. “We’re coming over to visit.”
“Bring some more of that lamb à la grecque, if you got any,” Vassily said. “That was first-rate lamb à la grecque.”
“That’s what I like about Greeks, they’re men of appetite,” Aurora said. “Also, they snap right into a conversation, which is more than I can say for the males of most nationalities. What’s become of my friend Theo?”
“We got new glasses for the bar,” Vassily said. “Theo’s polishing one.”
“Well, tell him hello,” Aurora said. “Rosie and I will be along about noon, and we may bring an old Frenchman I want you to meet.”
“I hope he ain’t from Paris, I hate people from Paris,” Vassily said.
“No, he’s from Brittany,” Aurora said. “If he says anything rude to me I hope one of you will beat him up.”
“Theo can, I don’t fight no more,” Vassily said.
“Why not?”
“Because I lose,” Vassily said. “Theo loses, too, but he’s a scrapper. He might be able to whip this old guy from Brittany.”
When Pascal stumbled up to Aurora’s door precisely at noon, trying to look as pitiful as possible, she opened it and immediately slammed him on the chin with her fist. Though she didn’t really hit him very hard, it gave him a shock—also, her ring cut his chin slightly.
“There!” Aurora said. “I’ve spent my morning remembering all the bad things you’ve called me over the years. You deserve to be socked, and now you have been.”
Pascal was so shocked to have been hit that he didn’t say a word in his own defense. He couldn’t think of one.
“May I borrow a Kleenex?” he asked finally.
On the drive over to McCarty Street he had to borrow two more. The cut was tiny but deep. Aurora and Rosie seemed to be in fine moods, but Pascal wasn’t in a fine mood. He had been relegated to the backseat—Aurora claimed she needed Rosie in the front to help her with directions. Pascal thought there was more to it than that; first he had been hit, now he was being exiled. In his depression he could hardly follow a word the two women were saying. Also, the neighborhoods they were driving through looked alarmingly violent. They were the types of neighborhoods he never went into no matter where he was in the world. Aurora stopped at a great many stoplights, which seemed to him a risky policy. Murderous-looking men, young and old, black and brown and white, stared at them from the sidewalks. The two women paid no attention—they had dressed up, and were chattering as happily as girls.
Finally, still unmurdered, they arrived at a little green shed sitting just off a dusty street, from which he could see the tops of ships at dock in the Ship Channel. Two men in undershirts sat under the shed, staring at them.
“They’re in their undershirts,” Rosie said, considerably shocked. She had once lived not very far from where they were—indeed, had spent her whole twenty-two-year marriage not very far from where they were—and she knew that dress standards in the McCarty Street area were apt to vary; still, seeing the Greeks in their undershirts gave her a start. To her it seemed provocative, and she remembered her own prediction, which was that things might get messy. Men who showed up for dates in their undershirts were looking for something, in her view, and there was little mystery as to what it was.
“Nonsense, it’s just their national dress,” Aurora said, when Rosie revealed why she was taken aback.
“Pascal, are you bleeding to death? If not, why are you so quiet?” Aurora asked, whipping around to give him a good looking over.
“I will live for a while,” Pascal said.
“Well, we’re going to have a nice time with these Greeks, don’t you be gloomy,” she said, opening her door.
Pascal had every intention of remaining completely gloomy, but within ten minutes, to his great surprise, he had stopped being gloomy and was having a good time—even a wonderful time. Business was slow at the Acropolis Bar that day. The Petrakis brothers had taken advantage of the long morning lull to procure a few refreshments. Theo and Vassily proved, to Pascal’s surprise, to be charming men. Retsina was provided, Theo had polished the bar’s new glasses to perfection, there was excellent feta, olives, some tasty little sardines. The two men treated Pascal like a friend; they refused to let him pay for the retsina, or for anything. Theo thumped a dusty jukebox a few times and it began to emit tinkly Greek music. Soon everyone was dancing, Aurora with Vassily, Rosie with Theo; then Aurora made Pascal dance—the Greeks even gave him a Band-Aid for his chin, which still dribbled blood occasionally. Pascal decided that the Greeks were fine men: Europeans, after all, like himself. Though previously he had not particularly cared to regard Greeks as Europeans, Theo and Vassily treated him with such consideration that he changed his mind and accorded them European citizenship. They were civilized men—they might even have been French.
“What do you think about her French boyfriend?” Vassily asked Theo after the party had piled back into the Cadillac and lumbered away.
&nb
sp; “Who says he’s her boyfriend?” Theo asked.
“Well, he was with her—unless you think he was with Rosie,” Vassily said. He found that he had developed an interest in Aurora, but he didn’t say so—better to wait and see which way the wind blew, the next time it blew.
“He looked half dead to me,” Theo said, feeling a little melancholy. He sensed that complications might lie ahead. Usually when he spotted complications on the horizon, he moved to another country—but he had about used up the countries, and just at that moment didn’t feel like moving. Still, it seemed to him that a hurricane of complications was building up, just offshore.
“I hope the dead half is from the waist down, then,” Vassily said.
“Uh-oh, I knew it, you’re falling in love,” Theo said.
“I ain’t falling in nothing, I just don’t trust no Frenchman,” Vassily said.
15
When Jerry took Juanita to the Saturday night dance, as agreed, he expected to feel like a grandfather dancing with a teeny-bopper, and he did sort of feel that way, but he was the only one who noticed. The dance hall was a barn of a place on North Main; it was packed with people, many of them Mexican-American couples as old as he was or older, all dancing vigorously and many dancing well. At first Juanita, dressed to the nines and chewing gum like crazy, was a little dismayed by the stodginess of Jerry’s performance on the dance floor, but then she discovered that, unlike Luis, he didn’t become jealous or enraged when she danced with other men, so she danced with a steady stream of young guys while Jerry stood on the sidelines, happy just to drink beer and watch. Juanita got a little drunk and very sweaty, but she was having a good time—Jerry’s limitations as a dancer didn’t really bother her much. When she’d had her fill of dancing she grabbed his hand and took him home—or rather, she took him to a home she had borrowed for the occasion, mainly because she was still a little nervous about Luis. He hadn’t showed up at the dance, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be trouble if he showed up at her apartment and caught the two of them in bed.
“You’re gonna be my boyfriend now, I want someplace where we can be peaceful,” Juanita said.
The place was a girlfriend’s hot one-room apartment on 7½ Street. Becoming boyfriend and girlfriend turned the bed into a puddle of sweat, but their sleep was peaceful, as Juanita had wanted. The next morning Juanita awoke in the mood to see Jerry’s house.
“Luis won’t find us there, we can fuck all day,” Juanita said, though in fact her sexual interest was perfunctory—it was just part of being a boyfriend and a girlfriend. It left her not deeply stirred.
On the way to Jerry’s house they stopped for pancakes. While they were eating, Jerry told her he had decided to leave town—then, between bites, as her young face fell, he asked her if she’d like to go with him to Los Angeles.
“Oh, man, you bet—my dream is coming true,” Juanita said, her black eyes shining.
Jerry wanted to pack a thing or two and leave that afternoon, but Juanita, despite her eagerness to be in L.A., the city of her dreams, got a little scared by the suddenness of it all and asked if they could wait a week.
“My sister, she works in Galveston, she was coming up for the dance next Saturday—I guess I oughta see my baby sister one more time before we split,” she said.
She was a very pretty girl, and the knowledge that the main dream of her life was about to come true made her prettier. They spent the whole day at Jerry’s house, watching television or sitting around his backyard draped in towels, drinking sun tea. The feeling of being a grandfather with a teeny-bopper arose in Jerry again—without makeup, Juanita looked like a bright-eyed girl of fifteen. She was all animation, chatter, excitement, happiness. He watched her, entranced, and yet with a little edge of sadness beneath his affection. As he listened to Juanita chatter and chirp, he also thought of his patients—the patients he would be leaving in a week; the patients he would have preferred to leave that very day.
His patients, it seemed to him, were at the opposite pole of being from Juanita. She was a pretty girl on the rise, all energy, frivolity, bounce. His patients, on the other hand, were all people on the slide, people whom the downward curve of life had caught and would never release. The force of the curve would only take them down and farther down, until the bottom stopped them.
His new fondness for Juanita made him wish that he could really help her escape the downward curve. He wished it could be that her friendliness and spirit would buoy her up, let her keep rising. It was their first day as lovers. Jerry wished he could make a wish for her and have it come true; yet he felt sad, because he didn’t think his wish for this lovely girl would come true. The downward curve of life caught everybody—the wasting of the generations would soon bruise Juanita too.
That night they went to a movie with one of Juanita’s girlfriends, the one who had lent them the tiny hot apartment on 7½ Street. The friend was a tall, skinny girl named Maria, who talked nonstop, including during the movie.
Driving home later, Jerry thought of Aurora. He missed her, as she had predicted he would—for a moment he had the impulse just to drive by her house and knock on her door. He realized that he wanted to tell Aurora goodbye—though rarely, in his many leavings, had he told anyone goodbye. He had been moody most of the afternoon, and he knew it had to do with delay: he had wanted to be out of Houston that morning. Waiting a week so Juanita could go to one more dance with her sister didn’t feel quite right to him.
Leaving meant going: pure freedom. Any hitch made him feel a lot less free. So, by the same token, did saying goodbye. Telling people you were leaving moved leaving into a whole different category. It civilized it, which sort of contradicted the point.
Jerry had no intention of saying goodbye to Patsy, or Lalani, or Sondra, or any of his patients. But he would have liked to see Aurora again and hear her voice for a few minutes, even if her voice was saying cutting things about his character and behavior. If anyone held her own against the downward curve, it was Aurora.
He let himself drift to the edge of River Oaks, but then he caught himself and went on home. Aurora didn’t want to see him, and no reason she should. He sat on the couch and watched television until three in the morning—The Late Show and then The Late Late Show. There was a Doris Day festival in progress—both movies featured Doris Day.
During commercials or when his interest in Doris and her antics flagged a little, Jerry went through the files of his patients. Since he was going to be here another week, he felt he might try to connect one or two of the more severely troubled patients with another psychiatrist. But sorting out the more severely troubled was not easy, since mainly what they all suffered from was neglect. Mrs. Fry was a typical case: her husband hadn’t shown any interest in her sexually in eighteen years. Mr. Milbank, same story: his wife got sick at her stomach every time he tried to make love to her. Mrs. Henwood’s three children never called her, even on Christmas, even on Mother’s Day. She lived alone. Mrs. Dawson also lived alone—the daughter who had had thirty-seven strokes had to be sent to a “place,” as Mrs. Dawson called it.
It occurred to Jerry that he ought simply to mail his whole file to some young doctor who was just getting started. If he or she took on all of Jerry’s patients there would be an immediate income, and also a solid introduction to the psychiatrist’s life work.
His patients mainly were people in whom everyone had simply lost interest—all interest. They were just people who were getting older. Most of them had never been particularly interesting to begin with, even in their prime, but as they slipped past their prime they became even less interesting—to neighbors and friends, mates and children—than they had once been. In time, once everyone around them lost interest in them, they began in consequence to lose interest in themselves: to slip, to not take good care of themselves, to skip little duties, to abandon their modest schedules, to ignore their bills. But the slippage wasn’t total, else they wouldn’t have bothered coming to him. The though
t that they must be at least a little interesting, that someone ought to pay their troubles at least a little attention, seemed to be what brought them to him.
Now he, too, was going to fail them: to demonstrate by vanishing that he hadn’t been able to become very interested in them either.
That was the story—sad, but common—of most of his patients—but it wasn’t the story of Mr. Mobley, who, in 1946, had run over and killed his own baby son while backing the family car out of the driveway in order to pack it and leave on a big family vacation to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Mr. Mobley had only been married five years at the time, his young family had never been able to afford a vacation before, and, in the excitement of packing for it, everybody somehow lost track of the baby, who was crawling in the driveway, trying to catch a grasshopper, when he was run over and killed.
Five years passed. The Mobley family had not quite recovered, but they were functioning and were even planning a big Christmas for their two daughters, May and Billie, eight and nine respectively. But something went wrong with the Christmas-tree lights. May and Billie had two little girlfriends over for a slumber party and all the girls had just gone to sleep. Mr. Mobley was gone, hauling lumber to Alexandria, Louisiana, for the lumberyard where he worked. Mrs. Mobley slept upstairs. When she realized there was a fire, the smoke boiling up the stairs was so thick she couldn’t face it: all she could do was jump out the window. Later the coroner told her the little girls were likely all dead by then anyway because of the smoke. All four died, the worst tragedy the little town of Cypress, Texas, had ever experienced during the Christmas season. Mr. Mobley heard about it on the truck radio as he was hurrying back from Alexandria to be with his family for Christmas.
Mrs. Mobley died of a stroke a few years later. Mr. Mobley, who described himself as “off and on a Christian,” considered that it was merciful of the Lord to take her. He himself had not partaken of this mercy. He was in his eighties, still dressed neatly, lived on Social Security, watched a little television, gardened a little, smoked a lot, drank occasionally, and was tormented, night after night, year after year, with intolerable visions of his children’s deaths.