The Evening Star (36 page)

14

After leaving Jerry, Aurora’s spirits suddenly lifted. She had done the presumably degrading thing—seduced a man thirty years her junior—and had emerged from it apparently undegraded. Her dignity, as far as she could tell, was intact. It was a little disappointing that Jerry wasn’t that expert a lover, since, as far as she could see, he had very little to do
except
become an expert lover; he had the equipment but seemed to lack the temperament, somehow. It was an area of endeavor in which she had always frankly sought finesse; but it seemed that finesse was no easier to find when one was ending up than it had been when one was starting out.

Still, for all that Jerry Bruckner lacked finesse, as well as the lustful temperament, Aurora felt lifted. At least, by golly, she had managed once more to get a man to do what she wanted. She had to make the move herself, but then she had almost always had to make the move herself—it seemed rather a matter for congratulation that she hadn’t lost the boldness that it took to make the move.

She decided that a hearty breakfast would be a good way to reward herself, and it occurred to her that it might be nice
to take breakfast with Jane, who would be getting off work about then. Against everyone’s wishes, she had been doing the night shift lately.

Delighted with her idea, she sped over to Fairview Street, arriving just in time to see Jane sell a spring roll to a man who was delivering beer. The sight of delivery trucks always brought to mind Royce Dunlup, Rosie’s long-deceased husband, a man who spent most of his life delivering potato chips in a little blue truck. Aurora herself had crunched quite a few of Royce’s potato chips. Royce himself had had a big crush on her, much to Rosie’s annoyance. It didn’t seem so long ago that Royce had sat in her kitchen, exhibiting his crush as best he could by staring at her worshipfully whenever Rosie happened to leave the room—which wasn’t often. And yet it
was
long ago, and Royce was dead, a thought that caused the soaring kite of her good spirits, lifted by the morning and sex, to dip just slightly.

To get her good spirits soaring again, she disembarked from her Cadillac and had a couple of spring rolls herself as preparation for her breakfast.

“Ten years ago you couldn’t have sold such a thing as a spring roll in this town,” she said to Jane, who looked at her in the cool way that—though a little unnerving—was just Jane’s way of looking. At that moment Mr. Wey, the Vietnamese gentleman who owned the 7-Eleven, popped out of a little room at the back where he had been making the spring rolls.

“We sell a hundred a day,” he said. Mr. Wey was very proud of the success of his spring rolls.

“My goodness, do you?” Aurora said. “I might take a few home to Rosie and the General.”

Rosie had called Teddy about Melanie’s difficulty, and Teddy had informed Jane, who was not terribly sympathetic. Much of her time at Mr. Wey’s 7-Eleven was spent watching for shoplifters, and the thought that Melanie had been dumb enough to shoplift two steaks annoyed her. Teddy was horrified that Jane was annoyed—he believed in instant forgiveness, no matter what the crime. But Jane didn’t. To her,
shoplifting meant awkwardness, confrontation, police, and extra bookkeeping; she often scolded Teddy because of his unwillingness to confront shoplifters, even when he caught them red-handed. In her view it was symptomatic of Teddy’s unwillingness to confront the messy nature of life itself, which amounted to cowardice. She was feeling quite stony when Aurora breezed in. She was preparing to go home and tell Teddy in no uncertain terms what she thought of his sister’s actions, and also what she thought about his wishy-washy attitude in relation to the hard questions life posed. As always, when he was confronted, Teddy’s hands would shake and his voice would become high and squeaky. Bump would hide in the closet and talk to Kermit the Frog, his closest companion now, and the day would be off to a stupid start, all because Melanie was a pawn of her boyfriend who was too lazy to pay for the stupid steaks he felt he had a right to eat whenever he wanted.

Thinking about all that made Jane feel fed up. Her mate was a moral wimp and, for that matter, so was her lover. Claudia Seay was just as wimpy as Teddy when it came to such things as shoplifting, or anything else that required difficult action. Jane spent more and more of her time being fed up with both of them. Next time some Cajun cocksman wandered in and asked her to go dancing she might just take him up on it.

Her stony mood wasn’t exactly the best mood in which to go to breakfast with Aurora, who waltzed in in what looked like her nightgown and housecoat. Now she had eaten two spring rolls, which she clearly had no intention of paying for, and besides that she was shamelessly flirting with Mr. Wey.

“Oh, come on, Jane, don’t deny me,” Aurora said, when Jane was acting as if she might decline the breakfast. “We won’t talk about Melanie. I’m as annoyed with the girl as you are. She was not brought up to shoplift at the whim of her lover, I can tell you that. When she gets her strength back she’s in for a stern talking to from her grandmother, I can assure you.”

“What will we talk about, Aurora?” Jane asked, still cool to
the notion of breakfast. She gave Aurora a look that was somewhat hostile.

“Lovers,” Aurora said. “I just took a new one. I’ll tell you about mine if you’ll tell me about yours.”

Mr. Wey was so startled by the remark that he dropped a spring roll, and the tongs he was holding it with, into a waste-basket. His English was improving, but it wasn’t perfect. Perhaps he had misunderstood. Then he concluded that he
had
misunderstood, and hurried to the back of the store to straighten up the paper towels. The spring roll and the tongs remained in the wastebasket.

Jane was always slightly annoyed with herself when she gave in to Aurora. Sometimes she
didn’t
give in, but this time she did—it was hard to say no to a woman well up in years who could be that brash about taking a lover. At the Pig Stand no one seemed to notice that Aurora was in her nightgown and housecoat—and no reason why they should, since half the men smoking and eating breakfast were just wearing undershirts and shorts.

“You must come here a lot,” Jane said, after the third waitress had said good morning to Aurora, calling her by her first name.

“Yes, I come here to think about my mother,” Aurora said. “Also, of course, I eat.”

She was, at the moment, eating a plate of scrambled eggs, and pancakes had been ordered.

“Why do you have to drive all the way over here just to think about your mother?” Jane asked. She was having buckwheat cakes and they were, she had to admit, very good. “If I could find a place where I could
stop
thinking about my mother I’d eat there all the time,” she added.

“My mother never ate in a place like this in her life, not even in Maine,” Aurora said. “There were certain constraints imposed on ladies in her day—she saw little of the lower classes, and yet she took a lover from the lower classes.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them the lower classes,” Jane said. “That’s so snobbish. At least call them the working classes.”

“Oh, well,” Aurora said, “the terms may change, but the facts are the same. My mother fell in love with a gardener. He was a neighbor’s gardener at first, but my mother persuaded my father to hire him, and then he became our gardener. He was a lovely man, one of the finest I’ve known. His name was Sam. Just the other day I used his name when I needed to invent a lover in a hurry.”

“Why did you need to invent a lover in a hurry?” Jane asked, amused. “I thought you
had
a new lover.”

“I do now, but I just took him this morning,” Aurora said, waving for them to hurry up with the pancakes. “I didn’t have him when I needed him for political purposes—that occurred when I discovered Pascal with his hand up a young woman’s skirt. I took Sam’s name and made him seventeen years old.

“I’ve often wondered what my mother’s life would have been if she’d met
her
Sam when she was seventeen,” she said, as the pancakes arrived. “He would have been considered entirely unsuitable. Great pressure would have been put on her to give him up. Still, I think she might have bolted. She was very brave when it came to acting on her emotions. If she’d met Sam a little sooner, she might have bolted.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t born then,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t have put up with any of that shit.”

“I expect not,” Aurora said. “Is your girlfriend nice?”

“Yeah,” Jane said, startled, “Did Teddy tell you?”

“Of course. I wormed it out of him,” Aurora said. “Do you mind?”

Jane didn’t, actually. In a way she was even glad. Crazy as Aurora might appear to be, she was at least tolerant about things most people weren’t tolerant about. She clearly didn’t think it was a tragedy that she had a girlfriend, whereas her own mother, had she known, would have thought it was the end of the world.

“She’s a female Teddy,” Jane admitted. “I guess I must be drawn to Teddy types, for some reason. Now I have two of them.”

“How fortunate,” Aurora said. “The Ted type is actually a very nice type. I wish I had one.

“In fact, I wish I had two,” she added.

“So what about the lover?” Jane asked. “Who did you seduce now, Aurora?”

Aurora grinned. “My shrink,” she said. “Dr. Bruckner.”

“Is that man a Freudian, or what?” Jane asked. She had met Jerry at Aurora’s dinner party and thought he was really attractive, almost suspiciously so—he had bassetlike qualities that were pretty appealing, at least. It was sort of a shock that Aurora had actually slept with a man that much younger than herself—although why it should be a shock, Jane didn’t quite know. It
was
sort of a shock, though, logical or not.

“Did you really sleep with him or are you two just thinking about it?” she asked.

Aurora looked at her pleasantly, but she didn’t answer.

Jane wished she could take back the question. “Sometimes when I’m thinking about it I almost convince myself I’ve gone ahead and done it, when I haven’t,” she explained.

“Yep, that’s common,” Aurora admitted. “I was so attracted to Lord Mountbatten that I almost persuaded myself we’d had a romance on a boat.”

“But you didn’t?” Jane asked.

“Alas, I didn’t,” Aurora said. “He was on the boat, though, and I saw him. If he’d ever displayed the slightest interest I would have been putty in his hands, but he didn’t.”

“Yeah, I met Jack Nicholson at a party once and had the same problem,” Jane said. “Is your shrink nice?”

“Nice, but disappointed,” Aurora said. “I do think disappointment ruins more people than all the diseases known to man. It ruined my lovely mother. Perhaps that’s why I’ve struggled all my life to keep it from ruining me.”

“You don’t seem disappointed, Aurora,” Jane said. “You look like you’ve kept your fight.”

“I’ve kept my fight,” Aurora said. “I hope you keep yours, Jane. In a few more years you may find that keeping it isn’t as easy as it once was.”

“It isn’t that easy
now
” Jane told her. “Sometimes I get pretty depressed. If it wasn’t for Bump I’d probably go crazy again—Bump sort of closes that option.”

“Yes, insofar as it’s an option,” Aurora said.

“Did your mother finally go crazy?” Jane inquired. Aurora occasionally mentioned her mother, but she had never before said anything really interesting about her. Now it seemed a gardener had been the love of her life. It wasn’t so hard to understand how that could happen. Most of the gardeners she had met had seemed like pretty healthy guys.

“No, she didn’t go crazy,” Aurora said. “My father found out about Sam and moved out and never spoke to my mother again. It was rather Lady Chatterley. My father had no interest in sleeping with my mother, but he was highly annoyed that she had slept with a gardener—not once, but often.”

“How did your father treat you?” Jane asked.

“He came to my wedding, got drunk, and kissed me,” Aurora said. “It was not the sort of kiss a bride is looking for from her father on her wedding day, either. I saw him only twice after that—once at a lunch in New York, which didn’t go well, and the other time at his funeral.”

“What about your mother and Sam?” Jane asked. “Did it last forever?”

“It did,” Aurora said. “Forever was only another five years, though. Sam fell out of a tree he was pruning and broke his back. A doctor did something wrong in the hospital and Sam died. Mother went slightly off, after that. Her last beau was a Portuguese fiddler, who also tried to kiss me.”

She felt a momentary sadness from thinking about how sad her mother had looked in her last days. The fiddler had tried to kiss every woman who came to visit, but her mother put up with him.

“Has Pascal ever bothered you?” she asked, realizing suddenly that Pascal looked not unlike her mother’s Portuguese fiddler.

“Don’t sit there and think bad thoughts,” Jane said. “We’ve eaten, let’s go. Pascal is a nice man and he’s never tried to kiss me. It’s the General who’s the flasher.”

“I know, just don’t look,” Aurora said, wondering if the Pig Stand would have mince pie at such an early hour.

“Hector’s dotty half the time now,” she added. “He seems to think that if he can just manage a return to the golf course his mind might come back, but I think that’s a slim hope. On the other hand, when he’s not dotty he’s the same old annoying Hector. I wonder if hitting a golf ball would really bring his mind back.”

“It’s a slim hope,” Jane said. Most of the time, in her opinion, General Scott was way around the bend.

15

When Melanie didn’t come back from the supermarket with the steaks she was supposed to shoplift, Bruce got worried and then more worried, but he didn’t know what to do with his worry except smoke dope and wait. Something was way out of order, but he didn’t know what. Melly was very anxious to keep him pleased. If she’d got the steaks she would have come right back with them.

By the time three hours had passed, he knew something had to be
way
out of order, and he began to make up disaster scenarios, some of which were pretty paranoid. There were tough gangs in the Valley—some gang members could have been prowling around the supermarket, in which case, by this time, Melanie could have gotten gang-banged, or even murdered. She could also have made the mistake of hitchhiking, though the supermarket wasn’t that far away, and she had said she was just going to walk. But if she got lazy on the walk back she might have hitchhiked—she was pretty bold about it—and if the wrong guy picked her up she could also be a corpse. Or, if she wasn’t a corpse, she could be in Mexico or Nevada or somewhere.