“If you make me lose my patience with you you’re going to be sorry,” Aurora said with a bit of flash in her eye. “Your jealousy is understandable and I understand it. I’ve put Alberto to sleep and pointed out to you that he’s harmless. Sometimes I think you’re a waste of good meat sauce. All I want is for him to go to sleep at a friendly table once in a while. His wife is dead and he’s lonely—considerably lonelier than you are, since I seem to have taken you in. Nothing that exists between us requires me to drive my old friends from my door, that I can see. Is that what you want? Are you really prepared to be that ungenerous at your age?”
The General ate some pasta. He knew he should leave well enough alone, but despite that he still felt anxious.
Aurora pointed to Alberto. “Does a sight like that make you feel threatened, Hector? Don’t you think you might stop and count your blessings before we continue this discussion?”
“All right,” the General said. “I suppose there’s no harm in a meal. It was those flowers that made me mad.”
Aurora took up her fork again. “That’s better,” she said. “I like flowers in my house. Alberto loves to give them to me, and you don’t. There’s no point in pretending that you do. I doubt you’ve smelled two flowers in your life.”
“All right, what do you think the man’s after?” the General said loudly.
“Sex, probably, since you’re too prudish to say it,” Aurora said. “Once again you’ve managed to miss the point by your usual mile, Hector. The fact that most men have the same ultimate motive doesn’t mean that they have the same qualities. Desires may not vary that much, but their expressions do. Alberto’s little floral offerings show some real appreciation—appreciation of me, appreciation of flowers too. I wouldn’t think of denying Alberto that little expression. It would mean that I didn’t appreciate him—which I do. I’d be remarkably shallow if I weren’t able to appreciate an affection that’s persisted as long as his has.”
“Mine’s persisted as long as his has,” the General said.
“Not quite,” Aurora said. “It might surprise you to know that Alberto had already won and lost me before I met you. He predates you by four years, if I’m counting right. The fact that he’s still around is quite endearing.”
“But he was married. You were married,” the General said.
Aurora continued her meal.
“Well, at least you admit he’s got an ultimate motive,” the General said. “I heard you.”
Aurora looked over at him. “Well, the bittersweet is not your sphere, Hector,” she said. “Perhaps you’re better off—I’m not the one to say. However, if I had chosen to remain dependent for appreciation, or kindness either, solely upon those who could achieve their ultimate ends, I’m sure I would have often eaten alone.
“I ate alone enough, anyway,” she added, thinking back on her last few years.
They were quiet. The General was not without sense. Aurora poured herself a bit more wine and turned the wine glass slowly in her fingers. She was sitting, he saw, not so much with him as with memory, and he stopped trying to argue about Alberto and switched from wine back to rum. The rum mellowed him, so that when Alberto awoke and managed to fumble his way out to his car he heard himself trying to persuade the tired little man that it would be safer, tired as he was, to spend the night on Aurora’s couch. He even heard himself asking him to drop in again sometime, since after all it had been harmless, quite harmless. Alberto, yawning and rumpled, didn’t hear him. He backed the Lincoln into a shrub and eventually managed to steer it into the street. Aurora stood on her lawn smiling a little, evidently not at all alarmed by the way Alberto was driving. The General, rather drunk, forgot her until she put her hand on the back of his neck and gave it a hard squeeze.
“What a hard neck,” she said. “Nothing bittersweet about you, and that’s fine. I must say I’m deeply pleased.”
“What?” the General said, still peering after the weaving car.
“Yes, you and Alberto will end friends,” she said, walking off a few steps and looking up at the waves of night clouds. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll take in old Vernon and old Trevor and a few more of my others before you’re done. All of you can sit crying into your drinks at the memory of what a lot of trouble I was.”
“What?” the General said. “Where are you going to be?”
“I’ll have caught the tide,” Aurora said. Her head was tilted back. She was watching the rapid, passing Houston clouds.
CHAPTER XVII
1.
DEEP IN the fall, with her time at hand and the weather still almost as hot as it had been in July, Emma came home with a cart full of groceries just in time to catch her husband in the midst of a poetic flirtation with her best friend Patsy. Flap was sitting at one end of the couch, and Patsy, slim and lovely as ever, was sitting at the other end blushing.
“Hi, there!” Flap said, a little too enthusiastically.
“Hi, hi,” Emma said, dragging the groceries in.
“Thank God,” Patsy said. “He was reading me improper verse.”
“Whose?” Emma asked dryly.
“I’ll help,” Patsy said, jumping up. She was very relieved to see her friend. Her own tendency to flirt was an embarrassment to her, yet she could seldom resist. Males were always surprising her with compliments, and she responded with witticisms and blushes, which seemed to bring even more compliments. With Flap Horton a flirtation was the only way around listening to him pontificate about literature, but that was all it was good for. She had always found him slightly repulsive physically and couldn’t imagine how her best friend Emma could stand to sleep with him. She went over and gave Emma a big smile so she wouldn’t think anything had really been afoot.
“Nobody ever reads improper verses to me,” Emma said, casting herself as the unromantic drudge, for the sake of convenience.
Patsy helped her unpack the groceries and they made iced tea and sat at the kitchen table drinking it. After a while Flap got over being embarrassed at having been caught flirting and came and joined them.
“Has your mother got rid of that repulsive old general yet?” Patsy asked.
“Nope,” Emma said. “She’s caused him to mellow a little.”
“Bullshit,” Flap said. “They’re both just as snobbish and arrogant as they ever were.”
For a moment Emma got angry. It always angered her to hear people coolly dismissed. “They’re no more snobbish than some other people I could name,” she said. “No more arrogant. At least they don’t spend all their time fishing, like Cecil.”
Flap hated all conflict, but he particularly hated conflict in front of guests. He looked at Emma, large, hot, and hostile, and couldn’t see anything about her that he liked.
“Why shouldn’t Cecil fish?” he asked. “He wouldn’t be any better off if he were out chasing women all the time.”
“I didn’t say he should chase them all the time,” Emma said. “I just don’t think he’s better off for avoiding them.”
“Maybe he was a one-woman man,” Flap said.
“Sure, like you,” Emma said. She knew she shouldn’t be acting that way in front of her friend, but she didn’t want to stop. Patsy was part of it, in a way, and would have to take her chances.
Patsy was even less able to bear conflict than Flap. “Oh, cut it out, you two,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t asked about your mother. I was just popping off.”
Flap turned sullen. “Her mother’s never had less than three men trailing her around,” he said. “That doesn’t happen by accident, you know. Men don’t trail unless women leave a scent.”
“I don’t particularly like your choice of words, but I’ll remember what you’re saying,” Emma said. She gripped her iced-tea glass tightly, wishing Patsy were gone. If she weren’t there, anything might happen. She might fling the glass at him, or ask him for a divorce.
There was a minute of horribly tense silence, in which Flap and Emma held themselves in and Patsy pret
ended to look out the window. They all pretended to look out the window. In order to have something to do Emma got up and made some more tea, which the others accepted silently. Patsy was wondering if she left a scent. The notion was slightly repellent but slightly sexy. She opened her purse, got a comb, and began to comb her hair. She was imagining marriage, something she often did. In her vision marriage was mostly a house, beautifully furnished and appointed, like Mrs. Greenway’s, in which she lived with a neat, polite young man. She could never envision the young man very clearly, but insofar as she saw him at all she saw him as neat, blond, and kind. He certainly wouldn’t be a sloppy, sullen, sarcastic person like Flap Horton.
Flap only noticed that Patsy’s arms weren’t chubby like his wife’s.
Emma, well aware that she was everything her husband no longer wanted, was chewing the lemon from her tea and looking at the same hot green lawn she had looked at every day for many months. She had stopped feeling hostile. What she felt was that it would be nice not to be pregnant anymore.
Patsy stopped combing her hair the minute she noticed that Flap was watching her. Actually she felt rather put off by both the Hortons. There was something violent in their attitude toward one another that she didn’t like and didn’t want to think about. Probably it had to do with sex, something else she didn’t want to think about. In her fantasies of marriage sex was seldom more than a flicker on the screen of her mind. It had not happened to her very many times yet, and she was not sure about it at all.
“Why are we all sitting here staring?” Flap asked. Long silences made him uncomfortable.
“Because there’s nothing else to do,” Emma said. “I interrupted a poetry reading and made everyone uncomfortable.”
“Don’t apologize,” Patsy said.
“I hadn’t.”
“No, but you were about to. You have a tendency to assume the sins of the world.”
“Let her assume them,” Flap said. “She commits enough of them.”
“I’m leaving,” Patsy said. “I don’t know why you got her pregnant if you didn’t intend to be nice to her.”
“These things happen,” Flap said.
Patsy was hyperventilating, as she always did when she was upset. “Boy, they’re not happening to me,” she said. She smiled at Emma and left.
“We made her cry,” Flap said the minute she was out of earshot.
“So what?” Emma said. “She cries constantly. She’s just the crying sort.”
“Unlike you,” Flap said. “You would never want to give anyone the satisfaction of having affected you that much.”
“No,” Emma said. “I’m made of stern stuff. The fact that my husband lusts after my best friend isn’t going to get my goat. Maybe if you try real hard you can seduce her while I’m in the hospital having the baby.”
“Oh, shut up,” Flap said. “I was just reading her poetry. Her mind could stand some improving.”
Emma flung the tea glass. It missed Flap and hit the wall behind him. “Would you like a divorce?” she said. “Then you could devote all your time to improving her mind.”
Flap stared at her. He had passed from fantasies of escape with Patsy into the strange state of contentment that sometimes came with the realization that he really didn’t have to do what he had been fantasizing. Before he could even sort out his wishes a tea glass had sailed past his head and his wife was looking at him out of deep, unfathomable green eyes.
“That was an asshole thing to do,” he said. He had a sinking feeling. There was never any knowing what would happen.
“Would you like a divorce?” Emma repeated.
“Of course not. Will you try to be rational for a moment?”
Emma was satisfied. She would have liked to throw the table. “Don’t ever talk to me about improving her mind again,” she said. “That wasn’t what you were thinking about.”
“It’s fun to talk about literature to someone who listens,” Flap said. “You don’t listen.”
“I don’t even like literature anymore,” Emma said. “All I’m really interested in is clothes and sex, just like my mother. Unfortunately I can’t afford clothes.”
“You seem so scornful,” Flap said. He stopped trying to argue and just sat not looking at her, presenting an entirely passive surface. Passivity was his only defense at such times. With no anger of his own, he was no match for his wife. Emma saw what he was doing and got up and went and showered. When she came out Flap was sitting on the couch reading the same book he had been reading Patsy. Her tension had drained away; she no longer felt hostile. Flap wore the meek look he often wore when he had been made to feel guilty or had been bested in a fight.
“Stop looking that way,” she said. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”
“I know, but you’re looming over me,” he said. “You really are immense.”
Emma nodded. Outside, the evening had begun, and the spaces between the trees were already dark. Emma went to latch the screen door. In her mind there was only one certainty: that she would soon have a child. Its weight pulled at her as she stood and watched the shadows in her yard.
2.
ACROSS HOUSTON, in the stinking, oily evening air of Lyons Avenue, Emma’s greatest champion, Rosie Dunlup, was standing at her own front door saying goodbye to a life, if it was a life, if it had ever been a life. Rosie wasn’t sure. All she planned to carry away of it, though, was what she had in the two cheap suitcases that were sitting on her tiny porch. The children weren’t there. Once again Lou Ann and Little Buster had been dispatched to their aunt’s, where there were so many children underfoot that two more wouldn’t matter, not for a few days anyway, and in a few days Rosie planned to be settled back in Shreveport, Louisiana, the city of her birth.
She scratched around in her purse and found her housekey but she had no real desire to lock her house and in fact would have liked to walk away and leave it open. The washing machine she had saved so long to buy was about the only thing in it she wanted that she couldn’t get in the two suitcases. It was a poor house and most of the furniture was broken; it had never been much good anyway. Leave it to whoever wants it, Rosie thought. Let the Negroes and Mexicans and thieving restless street kids that she had spent twenty years locking out come in and take what they pleased. Let them gut it, for all she cared; she didn’t mean to come back and try to make a life amid such cheap objects, not anymore. She was finished with Lyons Avenue and all that went with it, and in fact it would have suited her fine to see someone drive up with a house-moving rig and a few jacks and steal the house itself, leaving nothing but a space and some dirt and a few pieces of junk in the back yard to show where her life had been lived. It had been a junky life anyway, Rosie thought and it would serve Royce right if someone just drove up and stole the house itself.
But habit was strong; even though she didn’t want anything that was left in the house and never meant to return to it again, she searched until she found her key and locked the front door. Then she picked up her suitcases and walked over to the bus stop by Pioneer Number 16. Kate was out sweeping up the day’s debris to make room for the debris that evening would bring.
“Going on your vacation?” she asked, noticing the suitcases.
“Yeah, permanent,” Rosie said.
“Aw,” Kate said. “Stood it long enough, have you?”
“That’s it,” Rosie said.
The news embarrassed Kate, who couldn’t think of a thing else to say. It was obviously a momentous event, but as it happened, her mind was really elsewhere—specifically, it was on the fact that her lover wanted her to get a tattoo. Her lover was named Dub. She didn’t want a tattoo, but he was being persistent and had even agreed to let her get it on her upper arm instead of her behind, which is where he originally hoped to see it. All it was supposed to say was Hot Momma, inside a heart; Dub’s would say Big Daddy, inside another. She had promised him a decision that evening, in fact; and with that on her mind and the drive-in to run, it was hard to work u
p much of anything to say to Rosie, even if she was leaving forever.
“One of these days, after it’s done too late, he’s gonna wisht he hadn’t been such a fool, honey,” she said finally, just as Rosie stepped onto her bus.
Kate waved, but Rosie didn’t see it. The bus had nobody in it but six tough-looking white kids. They stared at Rosie insolently and she sat behind the small barricade of two cheap suitcases and thought how funny it would be if after twenty-seven years on Lyons Avenue she suddenly got raped and murdered just as she was leaving. Such things often happened, she knew. The fact that she had managed to live so long in such a dangerous neighborhood without being raped was only an indication of how unattractive she was anyway. Plenty of people had been raped right on her own block, including a woman ten years older than her. The youths stared and Rosie looked away.
She got out at the Continental Trailways station, bought a ticket to Shreveport, and then sat silently by her suitcases. A lot of people in the bus station were sitting just as silently as she was. The people who rode buses, it seemed, were mostly like herself—too beaten down to have much to say.
What had beaten Rosie down was another month of Royceless life, during which nothing at all had happened except that Little Buster had at one point managed to wander into a wasp nest. He had been bitten all over and had scratched so badly that half the bites became infected. During the month that he had been gone, Royce had called only once, and that had been to tell her to be careful and not wreck the truck, since, as he put it, he might be needing it. What that meant Rosie didn’t know; when she asked him he said, “You’d argue in a sandstorm,” and hung up.
Insomnia settled on her, and her nights were filled with nothing more comforting than the sound of Little Buster bumping against his crib and moaning slightly, or of Lou Ann complaining that he’d wet his bed. Rosie tried TV, but anything of a family nature caused her to burst into tears.