“Do you think you’ll come home?” she asked. “There’s going to be a little funeral tomorrow.”
“Oh, we’ll come home,” Rosie said. “We were coming anyway. What else can we do? It’s where we live. Who arranged the funeral?”
“I did,” Patsy said. “I just told them I was a friend.”
Later, after Melanie had come, been awed by the news of the tragedy and by the change in her grandmother, been fed room service and sent home, Rosie and Aurora sat by the windows in Aurora’s room, looking out at Beverly Hills. Rosie could not get it out of her mind that the girls had been so young. To her that seemed the worst part—that the man would go to a dance in a dangerous part of town with girls so much younger than himself and not take better care of them.
She raised the issue several times, but Aurora didn’t respond. She just sat looking out the window.
Rosie couldn’t seem to stop, though—she couldn’t help it. All she could think about was the youth of the two dead girls, and how pretty they had probably looked in their party clothes.
Finally, after she had mentioned the girls four or five times, Aurora looked up at her with a glint of anger.
“Stop talking about them!” she said. “Don’t say another word. Young as they were, they were still closer to his age than I am. Don’t you realize that?”
Rosie hadn’t realized it—it just hadn’t occurred to her.
“Oh lord, I’m sorry,” she said, wishing she had never said a word about the girls or anything else. In a way she saw what Aurora was getting at, but in a way she didn’t see what difference it made. Aurora was old enough to take care of herself, and the dead girls hadn’t been.
It was no time to argue, though, Rosie knew. Neither of the women said anything else for a very long time. They sat looking out the window, down Rodeo Drive and down the years, until the sky began to turn again, and cars to honk in the busy street below.
17
When they got home, tired and sad, the next afternoon, Jerry’s letter was among the mail. Aurora thought the handwriting on the envelope looked familiar, but there was no return address and it took her a moment to realize that the handwriting was Jerry’s. When it finally struck her she immediately tried to hand the letter to Rosie.
“Please read it for me,” she said. “It’s from Jerry.”
But Rosie wouldn’t take it. She drew away.
“It’s from beyond the grave,” Rosie said. “I’m too superstitious to read something like that.”
Aurora took the letter upstairs and read it in her bathroom with the door shut. What saddened her most was that it was just written on plain paper—Jerry had never felt legitimate enough as a doctor to have letterheads printed. He wouldn’t award himself even that much of a title—it led her to reflect, with increasing grief, how empty the man must have felt. He had been smart enough and kind enough, in her view, to have earned a few little victories, or to have acquired enough sense of his own value as a counselor to grant himself official stationery at least. Yet he hadn’t. He even told her once that he felt more like a psychiatrist when he had been doing stand-up comedy than he had since he began his unsanctioned practice. The fact that his patients sanctioned the practice by coming back again and again had not been enough to make him feel legitimate.
It seemed very sad—too sad to keep to herself. Also, the note was cryptic. Though he had clearly meant to compliment and thank her, she didn’t understand the compliment. How had she been a great help to him? Puzzled, but under control, she took the note down to Rosie, who consented this time to read it.
“It’s nice, it’s just real short,” she said.
“Yes, that’s what I’m feeling,” Aurora said. “I never felt that I knew the man very well, and now I feel that I must not have known him at all. He said that I was a great help, and I would like to have been, but right now I can’t feel that I was any help at all.”
“He probably just meant that if you hadn’t fallen in love with him he wouldn’t have had no happiness at all in the last part of his life,” Rosie said.
“Of course he had no idea that it was the last part of his life,” Aurora said. “I wonder if Patsy got a note—after all, she was in love with Jerry, too.”
“I guess we can ask her at the funeral,” Rosie said.
“No, we mustn’t,” Aurora said. “If she didn’t get one, and we reveal that I did, it will just make her inferiority complex worse. Treacherous as she was, we still don’t want that.”
“Does that mean you’re ready to forgive and forget?” Rosie asked. She was hoping that someday Patsy would be allowed back in the house, so that they could have a little tea and a chat before running off to the exercise class in the morning.
“I seem to be the type of person who can forgive more than I’m able to forget,” Aurora said. “The man’s dead—why hate Patsy? On the other hand, I won’t be forgetting what she did anytime soon.”
“Maybe she’ll tell me if she got a letter,” Rosie said. “I doubt he wrote her one, though. You’re more the type that a man like that would write letters to.”
“Someday I may ask you to clarify that statement,” Aurora said. “He didn’t write letters to me. He only wrote me one short note. I don’t know what you mean at all.”
Once she thought it over, Rosie didn’t either, though she still felt it was probably true in a general way.
A copy of Jerry’s will had been found in the glove compartment of his station wagon. He had requested cremation and that had been done; since he had no living relatives, or none anyone knew about, Patsy signed the order. Then, unable to resist the best taste she could get, she had arranged a little service, to be held in the Rothko chapel. Several of Jerry’s patients came. Except for one, a tall, nervous boy who reminded Aurora uncomfortably of Teddy, all the patients who showed up were elderly. None of them looked well off. They were also very ill at ease in the setting—most of them had clearly never been in the Rothko chapel before; indeed, it seemed unlikely that many of them had ever heard of Mark Rothko or would know what to make of his huge, somber paintings.
“Patsy always overshoots,” Aurora whispered to Rosie. “She can’t stop being arty, even when somebody dies. Why couldn’t she have found some simple little nondenominational church? Most of these people don’t know where to put their feet.”
She had insisted that Pascal accompany them, and he didn’t seem to know where to put his feet, either. He kept shuffling around nervously, although they were only in the chapel ten minutes.
Among the mourners were three tall, toothy young women—they were cheaply dressed and red-eyed from crying, unlike the more elderly mourners, who accepted Jerry’s passing with a tired stoicism.
“How old do you think those girls were?” Aurora asked, as she watched them walk away across the green lawn once they were all outside again.
“Mid-twenties,” Rosie ventured. “They all look like waitresses.”
“Well, but nice waitresses,” Aurora said. “They look healthy—not sicklied over, like we are.”
“Speak for yourself, I ain’t sicklied over, I just get headaches once in a while,” Rosie declared.
“Who was this man that was killed?” Pascal asked. In life he tried to avoid the kind of people who would go to places where they would get their throats cut, and he would have preferred to avoid such people even after they were dead.
“One of my doctors—you shut up,” Aurora said. She didn’t want him probing.
Feeling weary, and wondering what the point was of knowing such a woman, Pascal trudged back to his consulate, which was only a few blocks away.
“I guess that’s that,” Patsy said, walking over, a little nervous—Aurora seemed friendly, but she wasn’t sure she could trust it. “Do the two of you want to come with me to scatter his ashes?”
“I don’t, not me,” Rosie said. “I ain’t touching no ashes, if it’s ashes of a person.”
In fact, she had a horror of cremation. What if
a person was just in a deep coma and came out of it to find themselves in some kind of oven being burned up? She couldn’t think of anything she’d rather not risk.
“I didn’t know that was part of the plan,” Aurora said. “Where would we scatter them?”
“In Galveston, in the sea,” Patsy said.
“Let’s stop at the Pig Stand first,” Aurora said. “I’d like to fortify myself with a piece of pie.”
Rosie agreed to accompany them, but only on condition that she didn’t have to touch Jerry’s ashes, or even see them. They were put in the trunk of Patsy’s car, and Rosie was allowed to sit in the front seat as far from the remains as possible. Even so, she spent the short ride to the Pig Stand hunched against the dashboard. “I just get nervous when I think about being dead,” she said.
At the Pig Stand, Patsy choked up and became so upset that she couldn’t finish her pie. Embarrassed, she got up and walked around outside until she stopped crying.
Rosie smoked and drank coffee. Aurora, unusually silent, ate three pieces of pie. Dolly, the waitress, attempted to be friendly, but was a little unnerved. Rosie revealed that they had a human’s ashes in their car. Dolly remembered that Aurora’s old boyfriend had died right there in a booth—and now she was carrying ashes in her car! Mostly, Dolly liked Aurora—she was friendly and she left good tips—but she seemed to always have people dying around her, and that was not a good sign.
After the meal, Aurora insisted on driving by the Acropolis Bar. She thought they ought to have a wake, and the Acropolis Bar was, in her view, a good place to have it.
“I’ll just get out and give the Petrakis brothers a little warning,” she said.
Theo and Vassily were there, sitting on their stools.
Aurora got out of the car, Rosie waved, and Patsy, feeling miserable, merely sat.
“We’re taking a comrade home to the sea,” Aurora said to the brothers. “His ashes are in my trunk. I thought on our way back we might stop by and have a little wake. Life for the living, after all.”
“Life for the living,” Theo agreed. “Do you want a band?”
“Well, is one handy?” she asked.
“Across the street and back a block there’s a band,” Theo said. “That’s handy enough.”
“Most of a band,” Vassily corrected. “Bobby’s in jail.”
“Well, he can’t play anyway,” Theo said.
“We’ll be happy with whatever you care to arrange,” Aurora said.
Once in Galveston, she took off her stockings and waded with Patsy into the warm, dirty gray surf. Patsy did most of the scattering. Aurora walked behind, wishing Jerry could have brought himself to write a longer letter; but he hadn’t—the mystery of his character would never be revealed.
“We should have just scattered him along the highway,” she remarked, driving back. “He was more of a man of the highways than he was a man of the sea.”
“I know, but the sea’s nicer,” Patsy said. “The sea’s supposed to be our home.”
“Speak for yourself, it ain’t mine,” Rosie said. She had a headache and wished she could be home. Taking a whole afternoon to get a funeral over with was not her way of doing things.
As soon as Theo saw them coming back, the band started playing under the shed that was the Acropolis Bar. By a miracle, Bobby’s girlfriend had made bail for him that morning, so the band’s force was undiminished.
Still, in Aurora’s view, the band didn’t generate enough force for a proper wake.
“They’re so music-boxy,” she said to Vassily. “I was hoping for something a little more elemental.”
“More Dionysian,” Patsy said.
“Oh, these boys are good boys,” Theo said, not sure how to take Patsy’s remark. “It ain’t often they get in trouble. Bobby just let jealousy get the best of him—that’s what got him sent to jail.”
Aurora had sand on her legs; so did Patsy. Vassily noticed—the sight produced a little erotic thrill. The sad woman, Patsy, had skinny legs, but that was all right. In fact, it even sharpened the erotic thrill. Theo kidded him about it, but he liked women with skinny legs.
Aurora belted down seven or eight glasses of retsina, but she didn’t dance, and she seemed remote. Theo felt a little hurt. The promise of their first meeting had not been fulfilled, and he was beginning to fear that it never would be. Probably she had been in love with the man whose ashes they had scattered. If that was the case, his death might take a while to wear off. It was easier to stay in love with dead people than with living people for the simple reason that they weren’t around to irritate you. He himself was still in love with his third wife, Eta, a Yugoslav. Eta had been killed in a car wreck in Brighton, England. She had refused to accept the English penchant for driving on the left side of the road. She was stubborn, like many Yugoslavs. Eta had frequently cursed him, but their love had been passionate and he could not stop being in love with her—though he felt he might succeed in stopping if only Aurora would be a little less remote.
“You’re chilly today, crispy,” he said, looking at her mournfully.
“Well, I lost a friend, leave me alone,” Aurora said.
“You were mean to Theo, after he went and got cheese and the band and everything,” Rosie told her on the way home. The retsina had gone down too smoothly—she had a feeling she might be drunk.
“I don’t know if I want a lot of people getting drunk when I die,” she said. “It don’t feel respectful, not to me.”
“Then you better stay alive until I’m gone,” Aurora said. “I certainly plan to get drunk when you die, if I’m around.”
“I can’t imagine how you found those Greeks,” Patsy said. “They’re cute, you know. I liked them.”
“Greeks are always simple to find,” Aurora said. “Just go to the nearest port, and there will be a Greek, if not several.”
That night, wakeful, she called Theo and apologized for being sharp with him. In the background she could hear the band—probably the same band—tinkling away like a music box.
Theo was glad she called—he had been ill at ease and low ever since she’d left.
“I wish I could come see you,” he said. Though he knew it was far too soon to declare himself—after all, a man she had probably loved had just died—he was still having trouble not declaring himself.
“Well, I’m up, come and see me,” Aurora said.
“Get the number of the one with the skinny legs,” Vassily requested as Theo, dumbstruck by his good fortune, was making a hasty departure.
He raced to Aurora’s, but to his dismay, nothing had changed. She was wrapped in a robe, she gave him brandy, but she was remote.
“You left, where’d you go?” he asked, trying to joke. She had brought him into her brightly lit kitchen, to give him the brandy.
“Perhaps I’ve gone into reverse,” Aurora said. The look on her face was friendly, yet not encouraging.
“Life for the living,” Theo reminded her.
“Reverse isn’t death,” Aurora reminded him. “I am living, I’ve just changed gears.”
“I wish you’d change back so we could get together,” Theo said. “I mean, I know it’s the wrong day to say it, but if you’ve got a feeling it’s better to say it, right?”
“It certainly is better to say it,” Aurora agreed.
“Well, I’ve got a feeling, now I’ve said it, you gonna throw me out?” Theo asked.
“No, I’m going to make you into my hand-holding friend,” Aurora said, reaching over to take his hand. His hand felt comfortable to her—it bore two or three scars, one of which she traced with her finger.
“That’s from when I ran a lathe,” Theo said.
Aurora didn’t comment.
“You mean, that’s it—hand-holding?” Theo asked. He had popped off, and now he felt on shaky ground.
“That’s it—take it or leave it,” Aurora said. “Youthful as you are, you probably should leave it.”
“I ain’t leavin
g it,” Theo assured her—he was too much in love. Besides, women changed their minds.
“Don’t waste too much of your youthfulness waiting for me to change my mind, either,” Aurora said immediately. To Theo she looked sad—too sad; he didn’t care if she didn’t change her mind.
“Vassily wants the phone number of that girl you had with you,” he said, feeling in a hurry to change the subject.
“That girl has three grown children,” Aurora informed him. “Your brother’s what I mean by elemental. I don’t know if he’d be interested at the level of hand-holding.”
Theo shrugged. “I’ve seen him when he’d be glad to get it,” he said. “His next to last wife didn’t let him touch her for four years.”
“Such times come to us all, I guess,” Aurora said.
“Yeah, they came to me after Eta was smashed in the wreck,” Theo said. “I went six years.”
“Goodness,” Aurora said.
“I lived, it don’t kill you,” Theo said. “Vassily has bad judgment, he’s better off when he don’t have no woman.”
The next morning Patsy called Aurora. She sounded rather flustered.
“One of your Greeks just called and asked me for a date,” Patsy said.
“Yes, Vassily,” Aurora said. “Since they provided us with a free wake I felt I couldn’t refuse him your phone number.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Patsy said. “I mean, I liked them, but we just met once, and the circumstances were a little unusual. I don’t know what we’d talk about on a date.”
“Though it’s none of my business, I hope you accepted,” Aurora said. “It might be interesting for you, just once, to go out with someone who wasn’t an artist or an artist manqué.
“A man of the people, so to speak,” she added.
“Actually, I’ve had a few of those,” Patsy said. “Remember my rodeo clown? There was also my carpenter—actually, several carpenters—and my Vietnam helicopter pilot and my semipro baseball player,” she said, remembering her several efforts with men of the people.