“Well, this ball is in your court,” Aurora said. “Return it if you choose.”
Later, when she told Rosie that Vassily had asked Patsy for a date, Rosie evinced no surprise.
“I seen him looking at her legs,” she said. Secretly, she was glad it was Vassily, and not Theo. She was harboring a soft spot for Theo herself. Despite his obvious crush on Aurora, he sometimes smiled at her in a way that seemed to mean he might be interested. And if he was, she was, Aurora or no Aurora—that Theo just had a really nice way about him.
18
“Hon, this don’t make no sense,” Rosie said. “You’d already stopped dating him, and he was on his way out of town anyway. You might not have ever heard from him again, other than that little note.”
Aurora had only eaten an orange for breakfast. In fact, she hadn’t even eaten all the orange—she just sort of picked it to pieces. In the months since Jerry’s death she had lost over twenty pounds. She had stopped doing all the things she had done all her life, and it worried everyone. She had stopped watching television, stopped buying clothes, stopped wearing makeup, stopped going out, stopped having romances, or even flirting, and she had even virtually stopped eating. The change alarmed neighbors and friends, suitors and grandchildren, but it alarmed Rosie most, she being the one person who had to watch it every single day of her life, and at close range to boot.
“Are you speaking for yourself, or have you been appointed a one-woman committee to harass me at my own breakfast table?” Aurora asked, looking up.
“Well, everybody’s worried, this ain’t like you,” Rosie said.
“On the contrary, it’s precisely like me as I am at this time in my life,” Aurora said. “I’m aware that you all liked me better the way I was before, but there’s nothing I can do about that because I’m no longer the way I was before.”
“You could be, though, if you could just get over Jerry,” Rosie said. “You hounded me till I finally got over Royce, why can’t I hound you till you get over Jerry?”
“Bad comparison,” Aurora said. “You were young and active when Royce died. You had many productive years ahead and I was determined that you not waste them. I admit I expected you to do better than C.C. and Willie, but that sort of bad luck couldn’t have been predicted.”
“That’s another thing we need to talk about,” Rosie said, uneasily. “Arthur’s proposed three times now—I gotta decide what I’m gonna do. But I can’t decide, not with you like this.”
“What do you mean, ‘like this?’ Aurora asked calmly. “I’m clean, you know! I bathe every day. I brush my teeth. I go to my doctor for my checkups and no one has informed me of any structural flaws. My vital signs are as vital as ever. I don’t know why the mere fact that I’m living the life of my choice gives people the notion that they can refer to me as ‘like this.’
“Besides that, I’m still concerned about the people I’m concerned about,” she added, after a pause.
“I’m sorry I ever brought it up, I’m just confused myself,” Rosie said, sitting down at the table.
“I think it’s horrible of all of you to pester me to lose weight for decades if you’re only going to accuse me of being ‘like this’ when I finally do lose a few pounds,” Aurora remarked. She got up and was about to make her way out to her little garage office where she spent her days, working on her memory project on the new word processor Teddy had taught her how to use. Rosie looked more than confused—she looked as if her heart were breaking.
“I’ve been here working for you over forty years,” Rosie said. “I thought I’d just go on living here and working for you and we’d never change from being how we’ve been. I guess it scares me to think of marrying Arthur and moving away.”
“Rosie, Arthur Cotton lives across the street,” Aurora said, touched by her maid’s sad eyes and quavery voice.
“Across the street and down two houses,” Rosie corrected, though she knew the correction sounded ridiculous. From her suitor Arthur Cotton’s bedroom windows she could look across a long-familiar street and see Aurora’s bedroom windows. The move—if she undertook it—might seem like no move at all to some people; but the thought of it frightened Rosie more than any move she had ever contemplated in her life.
“It’s just that I wouldn’t be working for you no more,” Rosie said. “If I wasn’t still your maid it might be different. You really don’t like Arthur much—you know you don’t.”
“No, but it’s not as if I dislike him,” Aurora said. “Somehow I’ve managed to remain largely indifferent to Arthur Cotton all these years. What I did dislike was his late wife’s name.”
“Eureka, what’s wrong with that?” Rosie asked.
“Nothing, in the abstract,” Aurora said. “It’s just that having a Eureka and an Aurora on the same street seems a bit much.”
“Anyway, if I marry him and move over there, who knows what will happen?” Rosie said. “It might change things too much.”
“Why should it?” Aurora asked—through she had had the same thought a few times.
“Well, I wouldn’t be right here in the kitchen to nag you,” Rosie said. “We might drift apart. Someday we might not even be friends no more.”
Aurora sighed, came back, and sat down at the table again. Arthur Cotton was an insurance man, and a very wealthy one. He loved his lawn, and in the course of mowing it for the past thirty years had often stopped to chat briefly with Rosie, if she happened to walk past on her way to the bus stop. Five months before, his wife, Eureka, had dropped dead. Three weeks after her funeral he asked Rosie for a date. On the third date he proposed. He told Rosie he had secretly yearned for her for many years. Rosie couldn’t—and didn’t—pretend to Arthur that she had yearned for him for thirty years—all her passion amounted to was having once or twice mentioned to Aurora that she thought Arthur was cute in his roly-poly way.
She wasn’t entirely unmoved by his proposals, though. Willie had never called—not once; she felt in limbo and wanted to get out. What scared her was the thought of leaving Aurora’s employ after forty years. What would she be if she was no longer a maid? The question stuck in her mind and she couldn’t stop asking it.
Privately Aurora wished that Eureka Cotton could have managed not to drop dead for a few more years. A little more longevity on her part would have spared them all a painful dilemma. But Eureka hadn’t managed it, and there they were.
“Rosie, listen to me,” Aurora said finally. “You and I have survived together in this kitchen for forty-two years. You were with me the night my husband died. You were with me the night my daughter died. You were with me when we found out that Tommy had killed his girlfriend. I like to hope that I’ve been some support in various of your family tragedies, too. You’re not only my friend, you’re my dearest friend, and that isn’t going to change. What you should be asking yourself is whether you think you can be happy living with Arthur Cotton. That’s the real question.”
Rosie began to cry. It was sweet of Aurora to tell her that she was her dearest friend—and, of course, Aurora had long been her dearest friend. And yet she felt uncertain. A marriage could change things around and end up making everything different. Little things that she enjoyed doing with Aurora, such as watching certain soaps, she might not get to do anymore. Just sitting and talking at the table might not be quite the same if she was living way off down the street.
“I know Arthur’s important, but it’s the thought of leaving you that makes me nervous,” Rosie said. “You’re still upset about Jerry, you ain’t eating right, and you don’t pay attention to yourself like you used to. I’d just feel like I was deserting you in your time of need.”
“Rosie, I’m not starving,” Aurora pointed out. “I’m just more interested in my memory project than I am in eating right now. I’ve spent a great many years stuffing myself, as you should know better than anyone. Why can’t I just let it go for a while?”
Rosie abandoned that point and moved to another.
r /> “Another thing is, Arthur’s rich, and I’ve always been just a working woman,” she said. “He wants to fly me off to Paris and buy me fur coats and emeralds—the only place he’ll even take me to eat is Maxim’s and my stomach can’t handle all that rich food. I keep telling the poor man he’s trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but he won’t listen.”
“It certainly won’t work if you go into it with that attitude,” Aurora said. “What’s wrong with a few fur coats and emeralds?”
“Maybe I’m just too old to change sides of the street,” Rosie said. “Now, if he’d just let me go on working for you, I might do it, but he won’t, will he?”
“No, Arthur’s much too custom-bound to allow his wife to be a domestic,” Aurora said. “In fact, instead of being a maid, you’d undoubtedly be required to hire a maid.”
“Well, that’ll never work, I’d die before I’d give another human being an order,” Rosie said.
“I find that hard to believe, since you’ve given me millions,” Aurora said. “For forty years you’ve been driving me from my own bed, where I was perfectly comfortable, just so you could make it up in keeping with some arcane schedule you seem to feel you have to keep to.”
“Oh, well,” Rosie said. It was true that she sometimes bossed Aurora, a bit.
“Oh, well yourself,” Aurora said. “You crack the whip perfectly well, when you feel like it. I’m sure I would have finished Proust years ago if you hadn’t always driven me from my bed just as I was getting settled in with his book.”
In the three weeks after Jerry’s death, Aurora had shut herself into her little garage office and read Proust straight through. At times she put the book down and brooded; at other times she put the book down and wept, not so much for a lost Paris, or her own lost love, as from a profound sense of wasted time. Somehow she had let her life slip by, achieving nothing. She did not suppose, in her hours of regret, that she had ever had mind enough to achieve a great work, like Monsieur Proust. Perhaps she hadn’t mind enough to achieve a work of even modest scope—yet it did seem to her that she had mind enough and sufficient individuality that she ought to have achieved more. Her mother had always hoped she would write, or, failing that, sing, but she had done neither. She had, in the end, merely lived, partaking rather fully of the human experience, absorbing it, and yet doing nothing with it. That was the common way, of course, and yet the knowledge that she had not transcended the common way left her discontented, restless. It seemed to her that her problem may have been that she absorbed experience too avidly—so avidly that she had never taken time really to think about it.
As she saw it, the memory project was her last chance. Whatever she achieved with her new computer and her huge archive of social calendars, desk diaries, baby books, cruise journals, concert programs, playbills and the like—counting Emma’s few jottings, the collection spanned four generations—would not be a great work of creation and re-creation, such as Proust had done, but it would be something that would reflect the deeper side of her nature, or at least show that there had been a deeper side.
“I can’t keep the poor man hanging, I’ve got to say yes or no,” Rosie said, still tortured by the thought of Arthur Cotton.
“Pardon my bluntness, but have you slept with him yet?” Aurora asked.
“Well, nearly,” Rosie said. “He’s been nervous. He says he’s nervous because he’s afraid of getting his heart broke at the last minute.
“I don’t really care, I ain’t very attracted to him anyway,” she added. “I think he’s cute, but cute’s kind of got its limits.”
“Then why won’t you give Theo a chance before you handcuff yourself to this rich man?” Aurora asked. “Theo’s dying to take you out.”
“It’s just because he’s given up on you, though,” Rosie said. It was true that she still had her soft spot for Theo, and it was also true that he had been asking her for dates and even bringing her little presents lately—usually just some particularly good olives, or some feta or something—and yet it didn’t feel right, she knew it was just because of his despair about Aurora. Like everything else that happened to her, Theo’s little suit seemed to involve impossible complications.
“It all just comes back to what I wanted to talk to you about in the first place,” Rosie said.
“Oh, yes, my state of mind,” Aurora said. “I’m aware that practically everyone in the universe is dissatisfied with it, but I don’t know why. I’m healthy, stable, and busy—isn’t that enough?”
“No, because it’s like you ain’t trying anymore,” Rosie said. “All these years, when one of us got ground down and just wanted to give up, it was mainly just that you always kept on trying that got us though.”
“What that boils down to is that I’m a very selfish woman and I’ve brought a certain amount of energy to what was mainly just selfishness,” Aurora said. “I was grabby and you all liked it, although you complained about it constantly. Now I’ve stopped being grabby, and none of you know what to do with yourselves.”
“That’s it,” Rosie said. “When are you going to start being grabby again?”
“What if I never do?” Aurora asked. “The years have slipped by in a twinkling, and now you and I are old women—at least we are women who are not young. I don’t feel like being grabby any more. Since we’re talking about my state of mind, I want to point out that what seems to shock all of you is that a state of mind is what I’ve acquired. If I feel that I’ve lived my life fully enough, what I want to do now is think about it. Just think about it, got it?”
“I got it, I just don’t understand,” Rosie said. “What if you do sit out there and go through them old calendars until you remember every single day of your life? What if you remember everything? It’s still all just stuff that’s passed. What’ll you have, when you do remember it?”
“Why, I don’t know,” Aurora admitted cheerfully. “I haven’t gotten very far with my memory project yet. I’ve just assembled a few scraps. But I do know that working on my memory project is what I want to do. I don’t care about society, I don’t want to travel, I’m not interested in males and their penises anymore. I just want to work on my project. I may be at it for months, or I may be at it for the rest of my life. I don’t know, and I also don’t know why it should throw the universe off just because I’ve chosen to use my mind for a change, instead of just indulging my body.”
“You used to want to be happy,” Rosie said. “It’s what made you such fun to be around, even if you were a little bossy sometimes. You were just determined to be happy. I guess that’s what I miss.”
“Yes, I know what you mean,” Aurora said—often she missed her old high spirits too. In her memory it was not so much that she had been determined to be happy as that she had been determined to fight clear of the constant drag of unhappiness that she supposed to be merely the common affliction of adult life.
“I didn’t want to be defeated,” she said to Rosie. “I didn’t want to be, and I wasn’t—at least I never was for very long.”
“But now you don’t care, right?” Rosie asked.
“I wouldn’t say I don’t care,” Aurora said. “I suppose I’m like an old dog. I’ve mostly got my eye on the other place now.”
“Well, I hate it,” Rosie said. “I’m about as old as you and I’m thinking of getting married. I might even go to Paris, over in France. I ain’t happy but I ain’t quitting, either. We are sort of in this together—it ain’t fair for you to quit, and leave me to struggle alone.”
“Being in neutral isn’t quite the same as quitting,” Aurora quibbled. “The motor’s still running. The car could jump in gear and run over somebody anytime.”
Rosie shook her head. “The bottom line is, you quit,” Rosie said. “I still think it’s all because of Jerry, even though you wasn’t dating him and he was about to leave town.”
“Well, this is where I came in, goodbye for now,” Aurora said. “I’ve got to go organize my concer
t programs. I seem to have over a thousand, which is odd.”
“I don’t think it’s odd,” Rosie said. “You was always going off to the symphony.”
“But I don’t remember it that way—it’s what makes my memory project so interesting,” Aurora said. “I have the programs, so I must have gone to concerts constantly, but I don’t remember getting to go to concerts that often. Rudyard hated having to go out—I always had to coax him or trick him when there was a program I really wanted to hear.”
“If that’s the way you remember it, your memory project’s got a long way to go,” Rosie informed her matter-of-factly.
“Meaning what, may I ask?” Aurora inquired.
“You never coaxed Rud or tricked him when I was here,” Rosie said, a little too vengefully, Aurora thought. “You mainly just told him to get up and get dressed—he was going to a concert with you.”
“Oh, well, I may occasionally have been a little peremptory, if there was a good soloist or if a conductor I happened to be mad about happened to be conducting,” Aurora said. “How tactless of you to remember the few times when I was peremptory with Rud and forget the many times I was forced to coax.”
“I notice you didn’t pester Rud to go along when that old fat Englishman you were so crazy about happened to be conducting,” Rosie reminded her.
“Sir Thomas Beecham, of course I was crazy about him,” Aurora admitted. “Of course I didn’t drag Rud along on those occasions. In fact I was saddened that Sir Thomas had been forced by circumstance to spend his declining years conducting in front of barbarians, and I was quite prepared to make it up to him any way I could.”
“So did you?” Rosie asked. Sir Thomas Beecham had come to dinner a number of times in those years. Rosie remembered that he was very forcefully spoken, and also very hard to please when it came to food.