The Evening Star (21 page)

“He wants to know if he’s being left to starve because he complained about his eggs,” Rosie said to Aurora.

“No, but coming on top of a meager one and a half, it was certainly unwise of him to complain,” Aurora pointed out. “After all, I didn’t complain about the one and a half. Besides, he threw his crutch at me. Let me have the phone.”

“Hello, Hector,” she said coolly, once she got it.

“Aurora, I’m sorry I complained,” the General said. “I miss you. I wish you’d come back upstairs.”

“Why, so you can conk me with your crutch?” Aurora asked. “What if I’m not in the mood to be conked?”

“I won’t conk you—I love you,” the General said. In times
past he had seldom declared his love so directly, but now he often had to declare it directly several times a day, just to keep things on an even keel. Even then, they didn’t stay on a particularly even keel. It was rather a disappointment that life was just as uneven at the end as it had been at the beginning and in the middle. He had always supposed that passion would eventually subside, and that when it did life would be calm. He had once rowed a little boat across the Bay of Naples at sunset, and when he thought back on the experience he realized that he had hoped that was more or less how old age would be: serene, beautiful, calm, with sky and water in harmony.

But here he was, his hands shaking, calling from the second floor of Aurora’s house to the first floor, pleading with her to come back up and see him and, if possible, bring him a scrap of bacon, or
something
to eat. It wasn’t much like the Bay of Naples at sunset with the evening star bright in the sky.

“Well, perhaps you do—perhaps I’ll come in a moment,” Aurora said. “You should be getting dressed now. We’re going off to see our analyst in about an hour.”

“Oh, drat,” the General said. “I forgot about that. I haven’t had a bite to eat, you know. You threw that egg on my head and took my breakfast away.”

“Rosie says I squuz it,” Aurora said, with a giggle.

“There’s no such word as ‘squuz,’” the General informed her.

“Yes, I made that point,” Aurora said. “Did you wash your hair?”

“Of course I washed my hair,” the General said. “What choice did I have? Did you think I want to go through life with egg all over me?”

“Hector, I was merely thinking of our poor analyst,” Aurora said. “If I brought you in with egg in your hair, the poor young man might give up on us before we even get started. We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?”

“No, but the point is, I’m starving,” the General said. “Do you think Rosie could at least make me some oatmeal?”

“Well, I don’t know, her day has had a tragic beginning, or
very nearly,” Aurora said. “I refuse to put your case—you’ll have to put it yourself.”

She handed the phone back to Rosie, who listened patiently to the General’s request.

“Okay, but there’s no brown sugar, I forgot to get any,” Rosie said. “You’ll just have to eat it with plain old white sugar, much as you hate it—or else you can have honey.”

“A little honey will be fine,” the General said.

18

Bump hated it when his Bigs shut the bedroom door. First they locked the screen door so he couldn’t escape down the stairs and into the yard. Then they plopped him in his bed with some books and toys, told him to be nice, gave him a kiss or two, and then abandoned him. No matter how he tried to get them to play, or how hard he cried, or how loud he yelled, his Bigs ignored him and disappeared behind their door.

Often this happened in the morning, not long after his father got home. Everyone would be sitting on the couch and for a while Bump would be the center of attention—his mother and father would kiss him a lot and laugh at the things he did. It was usually when they started to kiss one another that he got abandoned. He knew this and would try to stick a book between their faces if he thought they were going to kiss, but his Bigs just laughed and ducked under the book. They kissed anyway.

Then they locked him in the house, but out of their bedroom. Sometimes it made him feel lonely, but mainly it made him feel angry. Once or twice he lay on the floor and tried to
peek under the door, but all he saw was his father’s shoes and a heap of clothes on the floor.

Sometimes he yelled, but nobody answered. Sometimes he listened, but all he could hear was jiggle sounds from the bed. They were the kind of sounds he made when he bounced on his Big Granny’s bed. If his own Bigs just wanted to bounce on their bed, why wasn’t he welcome to bounce with them? Once his mother was in a hurry and didn’t manage to get the door completely shut, and he slipped in for a second; the bed was making jiggle noises, but his Bigs weren’t bouncing nearly as high as he imagined. Before he got two steps into the bedroom his mother came rushing at him naked, even more like a beast, and flung him into his bunk bed so hard he cried for a long time. She slammed the door to the bedroom so hard it made Bump want to run away. He got a pencil and tried to poke a hole in the screen door—he wanted to squeeze through like Peter Rabbit and run away, but he could only make a tiny hole, and then he broke the pencil.

Bump liked it in the early mornings, before his father came home. He and his mother would lie on the couch together and play games. His mother would yawn big yawns and sometimes even go back to sleep. She wore a loose gown and sometimes one of her breasts would come out of the gown. Bump would always be naked—he hated his pajamas and would always take them off as soon as he woke up. Sometimes he would try to pull his mother’s gown off so they could be naked together; but his mother would never take her gown off. She didn’t particularly care if one of her breasts fell out, though. She wasn’t so beastlike when she was playing with him in the mornings. She smelled good then—Bump would often lie on top of her and smell her.

But soon his father would come home and the two Bigs would start talking. Sometimes they would just go right into their bedroom and leave him alone and make him feel helpless. They didn’t seem to realize how bad it was to feel helpless, if you were a Little. The one thing Bump found to do that would let them know how angry he was at being shut
out was to drag his toy box across the room and throw all his toys at the bedroom door one by one. He expected his mother to come raging out like a beast when he threw his toys, but she never did. Sometimes they would yell at him to stop throwing the toys, but Bump didn’t stop. He threw every toy in his toy box—sometimes he even tried to butt the door open with a little wagon he had, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked, not even crying and screaming and kicking the door with his feet. The Bigs just stayed in the bedroom, not caring a bit that he felt helpless.

“I wish you’d told me Melanie was leaving,” Jane said. “I’m going to miss Melanie. We should have gone and seen her off, or something.”

They were lying in bed, lovemaking over, listening to Bump use his little wagon like a battering ram against their bedroom door.

“That little boy of ours is determined,” Teddy said. “Listen to him try to break down the door.”

“For one thing, Melanie was our ambassador to Aurora,” Jane said. She had learned to blank out Bump’s attempts to get into the bedroom while she and Teddy made love. At first they had irritated her and thrown her off, but she adapted. Where sex was involved, Jane liked to think she could always adapt. She wasn’t going to be cheated out of the big pleasure, not by Bump or anyone. Sometimes she wished Teddy weren’t so placid, though. Sex with Teddy was fine, but sometimes she felt it could be even better than fine if he would occasionally be more antagonistic, or get a little angry or something. It was just a thought—maybe she was wrong—but it was a thought she kept having.

“I don’t think Melanie wanted to be seen off,” Teddy said, wishing his son would stop banging the wagon against the door. Jane was very appealing to him at that moment—despite a thumping orgasm, she seemed a little restless. He felt there might be more sex in the offing, but it wasn’t going to happen if Bump kept banging the wagon against the door.

“Maybe she felt if she went through too much seeing off she might lose her nerve and not go,” he suggested. He
reached down beside the bed, found one of his shoes, and threw it at the door as hard as he could. The tactic worked. Bump stopped butting the door with his wagon. There was total silence from the other room.

“I think I trumped him,” Teddy said.

“It shouldn’t be hard, he’s only two,” Jane said. “At least he gets mad and lets us know it.”

Teddy raised up on an elbow and looked at his wife. “Is that comment directed at me?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jane said. “Sometimes I wonder if you’ll ever get mad again. You wanted to yesterday, when I spanked Bump, but I guess you didn’t have the nerve.”

Teddy decided it was unlikely there was any more sex in the offing—not that there needed to be, necessarily. But, having quelled Bump, he didn’t know if he still had the energy to quell Jane. Something had left him when he threw the shoe at the door.

“I just threw a shoe at the door,” he pointed out.

“Big deal,” Jane said. “That was tactical. There’s a difference between tactics and emotion.”

“Right,” Teddy said. “But the last time I crossed the line I got put in a straitjacket. You weren’t around to see that. That was before we met, and also before I discovered lithium.”

“I wish I had been around to see it,” Jane said. “I’d like to see you get so mad you had to be put in a straitjacket.”

“Why?” Teddy asked.

Jane shrugged. “Maybe I just would,” she said.

“It’s stupid to romanticize anger,” Teddy said. “I don’t think you’d like it so much if you saw it.”

“We’ll probably never know,” Jane said.

19

Despite his conviction that going to an analyst was ridiculous—at his age, Aurora’s age, or any age—General Scott had cleaned himself up admirably for the occasion. He wore his best suit and the red bow tie with tiny spots that Aurora had picked out for him in London.

The sight of Hector in his best suit and his red bow tie lifted Aurora’s spirits to the level that was apt to cause arias from her favorite operas to float out of her mouth. Several floated out of her mouth between her house and the distant Bellaire street where Dr. Bruckner had his office.

Hector’s response to her singing, unfortunately, was not quite on a level with his appearance.

“Don’t sing those goddamn arias when you’re driving,” he said. “You can barely drive adequately when you’re quiet. If you want us both to live to get this analysis started I’d advise you to shut up.”

“Hector, it’s very unfortunate that you have so little appreciation of my singing,” Aurora said. “Singing is a very healthy thing. I’m sure Dr. Bruckner will back me up on that.”

The General’s spiffy appearance belied his mood, which was black. Despite a hearty, if belated, breakfast, his post-coital gloom had not passed—if anything, it had deepened. He could not rid himself of the conviction that the morning’s brief intimacy had been his last hurrah—and not much of a hurrah at that. The minute it ended he had started having the feeling that he and Aurora would never make love again, and the feeling wouldn’t leave him. He felt completely drained of juice—he was just an old bone.

“The first thing I’m going to tell that psychoanalyst is that I can no longer ejaculate,” he remarked. They were at a stoplight on the edge of Bellaire, and Aurora had stopped singing. For some reason she considered it inappropriate to sing at stoplights.

“You’re not going to tell him any such thing,” Aurora said. “I forbid it. There’s a great deal we can talk about with this nice young man other than your ejaculations.”

“I don’t have any ejaculations,” the General said. “That’s what I just said, and that’s the point I intend to stress. Nothing comes out, and you know what that means.”

“No, I’m not sure I do,” Aurora said. “I’m not sure I want to, but I am sure I don’t want you mentioning our problems along that line to the nice doctor.”

“How do you know he’s nice?” the General asked. “We haven’t even met him.”

“No, but I spoke with him, and he has a soothing voice,” Aurora said. “His voice is the exact opposite of yours, Hector. Your voice rarely soothes me, and the fact is I often need soothing.”

“Well, yours doesn’t soothe me, either,” the General said. “Particularly not when you sing arias in the car. Go, why don’t you—the light is green.”

“Hector, it just turned!” Aurora pointed out.

“Well, but when it turns, it means it’s time to go, immediately,” the General reminded her.

“I just like to give it a second or two, to be sure it means it,” Aurora said, going.

“Right after we made love this morning I got the terrible
feeling that we’ll never make love again,” Hector said. “The feeling won’t go away, which is why I’m so depressed. Can I tell that to the psychoanalyst?”

Aurora didn’t answer. She did not like the suburb of Bellaire—indeed, she was opposed to the whole concept of suburbs, though it appeared that suburbs were where most people now lived. In her youth it had been different. There were cities, towns, villages, and the country, with none of this muddle of stoplights, convenience stores, and small ugly houses in between.

“If I can’t tell him about my feeling that we’ll never make love again, then I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell him,” the General said. “My parents have been dead for over fifty years—I don’t think I can say much about them.

“It’s going to be a sad life if we never make love again,” he added.

“Hector, why can’t you be an optimist instead of a pessimist?” Aurora said. Actually, she had also had the feeling, after their early morning intimacy, that something was over—namely her long, twenty-year romance with Hector Scott. Passion
had
quite probably made its last appearance in their lives—the passion, that is, that had been theirs.

It was not a happy thought. She wished that she could simply be still and content, at rest in her heart, as the elderly, or at least the late middle-aged, were supposed to be, but in fact she never felt still, content, or at rest. Not only had the fever of life not abated—in her it seemed to be glowing ever more hotly. Instead of feeling calm she felt agitated and needy, too alive to sleep, and often troubled by thoughts that were unladylike and, in fact, distinctly lustful, about unlikely men or even more unlikely boys. One such boy came to cut her grass. He was Hispanic, wore shorts, and had wonderfully sturdy legs. His name was Jaime and every time she happened to glance down from her window and notice his sturdy legs she was apt to have lustful stirrings. Very often these stirrings followed her into the depths of sleep, causing her to have to get up and pace the house in her restlessness. Of all afflictions, lust was the one she had least expected to
be beset by, at her age, but there was no doubt that lust was the affliction that beset her.