The Evening Star (52 page)

“I’ve never seen you with any other man unless you count that time Pascal tried to strangle you,” Melanie said. “It’s just always been the General. When I think of you seeing this shrink I don’t know how to imagine it. You and the General sort of fit, at least as I imagined you. I can’t imagine anyone else fitting with you that way.”

“I know what you mean,” Aurora admitted. “I’m bound to say that a great deal of trouble arises in life when people start imagining other people’s relationships. I suppose people can’t help doing it, but I still find it unfortunate.”

“Why, it’s just imagining—what does it hurt?” Melanie asked.

“People tend to get carried away with their own imaginings,” Aurora said. “Then when real people go and do real things with other real people, and the things they do clash with someone’s cherished view of how they are or how they’re behaving, there can be problems.

“In fact, it may be that that’s the root of most problems,” Aurora continued. “Rosie’s currently imagining that Hector Scott was better to me than he was, despite the fact that she lived in close proximity to us for twenty years. She ought to know better, but she doesn’t; now she’s angry at me half the time because I took a lover or two to help me get through Hector’s declining years.”

Again Aurora sighed.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Melanie said hastily. “I mainly just called to tell you I intended to try this audition.”

“You don’t have to change the subject just because I’m a little discouraged,” Aurora said. “If you and everyone else
keep avoiding my discouragement I don’t see how I’m ever to work out of it.

“Don’t imagine me as invulnerable, but don’t imagine me beaten, either,” she added. “I’m not beaten. I’m just a little discouraged.”

Melanie didn’t know what to say. In fact, it did frighten her a lot when her grandmother became sad or when she cried or sank into despair. It didn’t happen all that often, but it was frightening when it did happen.

“I know you have a right to be sad, I just don’t know how to handle it when you are sad,” Melanie said.

“Well, that’s human,” Aurora said. “
I
didn’t like it when
my
mother faltered, either. She was supposed to be the strong one. She faltered terribly when her main lover died, and it scared me out of my wits.”

“Was that Sam?” Melanie asked.

“Sam,” Aurora said. “Her handsome gardener. When she lost him she stopped being strong, and the fact that the only strong person in my life wasn’t strong anymore undid me to such an extent that I panicked and married your grandfather.

“People don’t like it when the strong one suddenly goes weak,” Aurora added. “I suppose we all need the illusion that there’s someone who’s always strong, but it’s just an illusion. Right now I’m feeling discouraged and would be happy if someone else would take over and be the strong one for a while, but I don’t think anyone is likely to leap to this task. Rosie certainly won’t. She’d rather spend her days standing on her head.”

“I wish I’d known your mother,” Melanie said, hoping Aurora would talk a little more about the past. She wanted to know more about her great-grandmother and her lover, Sam the gardener. Of course she’d seen lots of pictures of her great-grandmother in the family albums—there were even a few pictures of Sam the gardener. But stories were better than pictures—stories just gave her more sense of what her great-grandmother might have been like.

“Well, she was a gifted woman, but in the end she only achieved her life, which is what most of us do,” Aurora said.
“I hope you’ll look a little harder before you marry, Melly. Don’t marry a non-starter like I did. Try to find someone who’ll do something.”

“I probably won’t marry at all,” Melanie said. “There might not be anybody who likes me that much.”

“There certainly will be somebody who likes you that much,” Aurora assured her. “You’re just blooming, you know. In the course of your blooming I’m sure you’ll encounter several young men who will want to marry you.”

“I doubt it,” Melanie said. “I’m not pretty enough.”

“As I said, you’re blooming,” Aurora said. “When you’ve finished the process you’ll be more than pretty enough.

“Anyway, it’s rarely prettiness that people marry,” she added. “I was plump as a plum when I was your age, and yet scads of young men flung themselves at me. I had so many options that I became confused and chose your grandfather. When he died I still found myself with a bunch of options, and I became addled again and chose Hector, mainly because he insisted on being chosen. There are only two kinds of men, insistent and uninsistent, and I can’t seem to resist either kind.”

“What about the shrink?” Melanie asked. “What kind is he?”

“Uninsistent,” Aurora said. “I practically had to take his pants off myself in order to get him in bed.”

“Granny!” Melanie said, a little shocked.

“Well, you did ask,” Aurora said. “I do still have a sexual appetite and I don’t see why I should have to apologize for it, although in point of fact quite a number of people seem to think I should apologize for it. They seem to think I should devote myself to knitting bootees for my great-grandchildren, but I only have one great-grandchild and he’s already past the age for bootees.”

“You don’t have to apologize for it to me,” Melanie said nervously.

“I heard you—you sounded shocked at the thought of your grandmother peeling the trousers off an uninsistent psychiatrist,” Aurora said. She laughed, mainly because she liked her own imagery.

“Do you think I’m too much, Melanie?” she asked.

“Uh, no—you’re just you,” Melanie said.

“Well, most people have always thought I was too much,” Aurora said. “If I am, it’s not calculated. I’ve just always thought I’d better keep trying. So many people stop trying, and the minute they do, they dwindle. I personally would rather not dwindle until I have to.”

“Maybe you’ll never have to,” Melanie said.

“Oh, well, we’re all just following the shadow,” Aurora said. “Poor Hector had no idea he was so close on its heels. He had just been talking about taking me on a cruise to the Orient. We were going to have a big bed, in a stateroom, and make love all the way across the ocean. He didn’t understand women at all, but he kept trying. His last thought was probably about sex.”

“That’s good,” Melanie said. “I mean, maybe it’s weird, since he was so old, but it’s kind of good.”

“Rosie thinks I killed him,” Aurora said.

“How, by making him think about sex?” Melanie asked.

“No, by driving so badly that it caused him to have a fit,” Aurora said. “However, she had a fit, too, and she didn’t die. Hector had thousands of fits about things that were my fault, and he didn’t die. Nonetheless, Rosie’s angry with me. That’s why she’s standing on her head so much, I expect. Doesn’t want to look me in the eye.”

Then, to Melanie’s horror, she sank into sobs.

“I . . . can’t help it . . . that Hector died,” Aurora said, her voice breaking. “He just clicked off. He was . . . very quiet about it. Neither . . . Rosie nor I . . . heard the click. I was trying . . . to finish my crossword, and when . . . I looked up he was gone.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Of course it wasn’t your fault,” Melanie said.

“What?—to Melanie—” Aurora said, trying to get control of herself. Rosie had heard her crying and stepped into the room.

“Don’t tell her about my audition,” Melanie said quickly. “It might hurt her feelings that I’m sort of going to imitate her.”

“Well, we certainly wouldn’t want that,” Aurora said. “She’s as touchy as Proust as it is.”

Aurora sighed, but Melanie could tell she was calming don. “Are you okay now?” she asked.

“I’m functional—I imagine we’d better leave it at that,” Aurora said.

4

“I was doomed even before I was born,” Wilbur said in one of his many attempts to explain to himself and Tommy how he had ended up in prison. Wilbur was Tommy’s new cellmate. Joey, his old cellmate, had lost it one day in the dining hall, or pretended to lose it, Tommy was not quite sure which. He had gone beserko and started screaming at the top of his lungs, after which he had tried to stab himself in the jugular vein with a plastic fork. The fork broke, but Joey was dragged off to the psychiatric unit, where he regressed to the state of a three-year-old, or so rumor had it.

Tommy didn’t buy most of the rumors. For one thing, Joey had never been much more mature than a three-year-old, except in the sexual area. Tommy thought he might have faked the beserko bit in order to get moved to a hospital, where he might find a nurse to fuck. Joey had already whored his way through pretty much the whole unit where they were kept—he was probably just looking for greener pastures, Tommy thought.

Unfortunately, that meant that Tommy ended up with Wilbur for a cellmate, which involved listening to endless analyses
of why Wilbur had been doomed before he was born. Joey had been all dick; Wilbur, who was fat, was all brain. Tommy was not quite sure he liked the change, but there was not much he could do about it other than kill himself, something he wasn’t contemplating in the immediate future. If he did someday fling himself into space, it would be for political reasons, not because he had a fat, overeducated cellmate who considered that he had been doomed before he was born.

“Was your mother a dope addict?” he asked. For a week or two he had kind of stonewalled Wilbur, but that got to be boring, so he decided that he might as well find out why Wilbur considered himself so doomed.

“No, my mother was president of her Amity Club,” Wilbur said.

“What’s an Amity Club?” Tommy asked.

“It’s a club for bored small-town ladies who like to think they’re improving themselves by reading best-sellers and chatting about them,” Wilbur told him.

“Is that why you were doomed?” Tommy asked. “Because your mom liked to read best-sellers?” In only two weeks he had developed a knack for making any statement Wilbur made seem absurd.

“That may have produced prenatal boredom, but it wasn’t why I was doomed before my birth,” Wilbur admitted. “I’m doomed because of my name. How would you like to be named Wilbur?”

“It’s not great,” Tommy agreed.

“Well, I hate it,” Wilbur said. “I hate it, and I hate my parents for giving it to me.”

“You could change it,” Tommy suggested.

“Yes, but before I knew I had that right it was too late,” Wilbur said. His face was so fat that his eyes were barely visible. Most of the inmates called him Squint, and so did the guards, though he probably didn’t mean to squint. His eyes were just fenced in by fat.

“I’ve always felt like a Wilbur and I always will,” Wilbur said.

“I don’t see that it’s that major a catastrophe,” Tommy said.
Despite himself, he sometimes got amused by Wilbur, and he definitely enjoyed needling him.

“It is, though,” Wilbur assured him.

“One of the Wright brothers was Wilbur,” Tommy pointed out.

Wilbur ignored that comment.

“I imagine there are plenty of other people named Wilbur who just lead ordinary lives running hardware stores or something.”

“I’m not attracted to the hardware business,” Wilbur said.

What he was attracted to was opera. He listened to opera through earphones, but sometimes the opera leaked out around the earphones, or else Wilbur fell asleep and the earphones fell out of his ears, in which case more opera leaked out. Tommy didn’t particularly mind, unless he was tinkering with his code, in which case having opera leaking into the cell was pretty distracting.

The person that minded was a black convict named Dog, who was in the next cell. Dog’s nickname derived from the fact that he had beaten his wife to death with a frozen dog. When he decided his wife was fooling around on him, he killed her own pooch, froze it in a neighbor’s deep-freeze for two weeks, and then one day took it out and beat his wife to death with it while she was standing at the bus stop waiting for her bus.

“Turn off that shit,” Dog instructed Wilbur, several times. “I ain’t listening to no screeching shit like that.”

“You can just barely hear it,” Wilbur pointed out—it was true.

“Barely’s too much,” Dog said darkly. He had just been moved to their unit after a long period in solitary, where he had been sent for slamming a cell door as hard as he could on another prisoner’s head. Dog was large, and his victim, also black, had been small. Dog had held the man exactly where he wanted him so that when he slammed the door on his head it would achieve the maximum effect. In this he had succeeded so well that the other prisoner had remained in a coma for four days.

Wilbur was not entirely without sense. He turned the
opera he had been listening to down so low that only a faint sound could be heard, even when the earphones were not in Wilbur’s ears. But he didn’t turn it off, and Dog was not entirely mollified. “Ain’t you got no normal music?” he asked. “I don’t mind about normal music.”

“The whole Italian nation thinks this is normal music,” Wilbur informed him.

Dog let it go for the moment, but he didn’t look happy.

“Italians may think opera is normal music, but this isn’t an Italian jail you’re in,” Tommy pointed out later, when Dog was asleep.

“I turned it down,” Wilbur said in an annoyed tone. Despite being in jail he still had some of the attitudes of a white kid whose family was rich. Having to play his operas at less than full blast struck him as a big inconvenience, and he didn’t pretend otherwise.

“Dog beat his own wife to death with a frozen dog,” Tommy reminded him. “He slammed that guy’s head in the door and put the guy out for four days.”

“I turned it
down
,” Wilbur said crossly. “I have a right to listen to Verdi if I want to.”

“Maybe you
were
doomed before you were born,” Tommy said. “If Dog slams your head in the door a few times you won’t be able to listen to Verdi anyway, because your brains will be running out of your ears.”

“The guards are dying to beat the shit out of him,” Wilbur said. “If he bothers me, I’ll just yell.”

Tommy didn’t bother to point out that the guards were dying to beat the shit out of anything that moved—or, at least, anything that moved in a way that didn’t strike their fancy. If Wilbur wanted to think they would make an exception in his case because he had gone to Kenyon College and studied music for a year, or because his family was rich, let him think it. In fact, the guards thought Wilbur was a fat priss, and it probably wouldn’t be too long before one of them expressed his dislike by spitting tobacco in Wilbur’s coffee, or something.