The Evening Star (55 page)

She thought of going to Pascal’s—there was a chance he would rise to the occasion and provide her with an emotional refuge for a bit. For all his petulance about raspberry jam, he was rather a knowing man—that was the good part about his being French.

On the other hand, he was a very selfish man—he might try to take advantage of her in her distress. In fact, that would be just like him. He had already offended her several times by being callous about Hector’s death. Only last week he had offended her at lunch by suggesting pointedly that she had mourned long enough.

“Life is for the living,” he said.

“Yes, I know, I’m living right now,” Aurora said.

“You are not living—you are not active,” Pascal said. “My wife died, I was sad, but I put it behind. I became active again.”

“I’ve had a sample of your activity,” Aurora reminded him. “It’s fine, but for the moment I prefer my grief, if you don’t mind. For all his persnickitiness Hector Scott meant a lot to me. I hope I don’t have to remind you of that too many more times, Pascal.”

His views on activity and inactivity being what they were, she decided it was not the moment to present herself to Pascal. She thought of the Pig Stand and of a waffle house she was fond of, but with no enthusiasm: the punch she had just received seemed to have taken away her appetite. She felt too punched to eat, or cry. She thought of going to Galveston and watching the ocean all day, but there would be traffic, her car might stop, it was a long way to drive. She had come out barefoot, in her gown and housecoat, which would leave
her feeling at a disadvantage if she had to talk to policemen or tow-truck people, which could well be the case if her car did stop.

Carefully, using an old route remembered from the days when Houston had no freeway, Aurora inched north across the bayou and east through the railroad yards until she was in the region of the Ship Channel. Somewhere on McCarty Street she remembered seeing an open-air Greek bar where the sailors came to drink and play cards. It was in sight of the great refineries to the south—the air smelled of oil and salt. But she remembered it as friendly, and friendly at the moment was all she hoped for from life.

Sure enough, the bar—actually, little more than a shed—was there, open to the breezes from the Gulf, and to the traffic from McCarty Street as well. Two old Greek men in undershirts were sitting at a little rickety table, shuffling little ivory dominoes. Both were stocky, both had white hair, both were smoking, and neither seemed at all surprised when a large barefooted woman in a gown and housecoat got out of an old Cadillac and picked her way across the strip of shaley gravel that functioned as their parking lot.

“Got any retsina this morning?” Aurora asked, with the best smile she was capable of.

The Greek on her right raised his eyebrows and smiled. “You lose your shoes?” he asked.

“Shut up! She left them at the dance,” the Greek on her left said. He rose and went to retrieve a wobbly-looking green chair that someone had kicked into the parking lot in the course of the night. Aurora had almost hit it while attempting to park correctly. The man set it carefully on the somewhat uneven concrete floor of the bar.

“Sit, be comfortable,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

The other man got up, disappeared briefly, and returned with a bottle of retsina and a glass.

“Don’t drop it, it’s the last glass,” he said, setting bottle and glass in front of Aurora. “I may go buy some more today if it don’t get too hazy.

“It’s a beautiful day, it ain’t gonna get hazy,” he added, for Aurora’s benefit.

It
was
rather a beautiful day, Aurora decided. Sunlight was slanting through a number of holes in the roof, which seemed to be affixed to the walls at a rather tipsy angle.

“The hurricane blew the roof off, but we stuck it back,” the other man informed her. “We didn’t stick it back too straight.”

“It don’t look heavy, but it’s heavy,” the other man informed her.

“It’s also rather punctured,” Aurora observed, pouring herself a retsina. “Don’t you get wet when it rains?”

“We don’t come here when it rains,” one of the Greeks admitted.

Aurora quickly drank about half of the glass of retsina, watched impassively by the two men. Both had huge bags under their eyes—identical bags. The longer she inspected them, the more identicalities she noticed. They had identical bellies, identical undershirts, identically muscular shoulders, and identical white hair. Besides, the looks they fixed on her were also identical: profoundly world-weary, and yet alert. They were men, she was a woman, she had walked into their lives, and they were sizing matters up.

“My goodness, I’ve figured it out, you’re twins,” Aurora announced.

The two men shook their heads. “Brothers, not twins,” one said.

“Do I get to know your names?” Aurora asked.

“Petrakis,” one said. “I’m Theo and he’s Vassily.”

“Well, I’m Aurora. I like this retsina, but I hate to be the only one drinking, particularly at such an early hour,” she said.

“It don’t matter when you drink,” Theo said. “Your stomach don’t know what time it is.”

“Are you sure this is the only glass?” Aurora asked. “What kind of bar just owns one glass?”

“A Greek kind of bar,” Vassily remarked. “Everybody that comes here thinks he has to be a Greek and break glasses. I wanted to get plastic but Theo won’t have no plastic.”

“We argue,” Theo said. “I think plastic is tacky.”

“I absolutely agree,” Aurora said, just as a large oil truck,
running a bit too close to the edge of the road, whooshed a gust of hot exhaust into the bar, causing her to cough.

When she stopped coughing, the two Greeks were still looking at her.

“You two look as if you’ve seen it all, and I guess if it’s Western civilization we’re talking about, you have,” Aurora said.

The men had no comment on that observation.

“If you two are not twins, who’s the elder?” Aurora asked, hoping to milk a little volubility out of them.

“I was born first,” Theo said. “I beat him by a year.”

“It’s my bar, though,” Vassily said. “He just works here.”

Aurora drained the glass and turned it upside down.

“I think I’ll refrain from breaking it, since it’s your last,” she said. “I’ve had rather a bad shock today and I would rather not drink alone. Let’s spare the glass and drink out of the bottle.”

She took a swig from the bottle and handed it to Vassily, who drank a good swallow and handed the bottle to Theo.

Two grimy young sailors came walking up the road from the direction of the Ship Channel. They ignored the retsina drinkers and fed a few quarters into a dusty soda-pop machine. Nothing happened for a bit until they began to punch the pop machine. One kicked it and the other shook it. Finally a single 7-Up clattered out. The two sailors stationed themselves at the bar’s other table, popped open the 7-Up, and shared it.

“If you hurry before I get drunk you could probably teach me to play that interesting-looking domino game you were playing when I drove up,” Aurora said. She took the last swallow from the bottle of retsina.

Theo got up and returned in a moment with another bottle.

“I can tell you a curious thing about ivory,” Aurora said, playing with one of the little dominoes. “It turns black if it doesn’t get sunlight. Of course, there’s not much danger that your dominoes won’t get sunlight here.”

“You don’t want to play with Theo, he cheats,” Vassily said.

“Shut up—
you
cheat,” Theo said, with no heat.

“That’s how I lost the bar,” he added, to Aurora. “He cheated.”

“Oh, well, if I get him drunk, Theo, perhaps you’ll win it back,” Aurora said. She found herself rather warming to Theo as the retsina began to take effect. Though Vassily and he looked identical, Vassily did not quite seem to have Theo’s sparkle—even if, at first glance, sparkle might seem an odd word to apply to a fat old Greek with bags under his eyes.

Still, Aurora thought she detected sparkle in the way Theo looked at her.

“What happened, your boyfriend leave you?” he asked, handing her the new bottle.

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Aurora said. “The son of a bitch left me for my daughter’s best friend.”

7

“I’m looped, I’m plastered, I’m God’s own drunk!” Aurora said, wobbling into her kitchen. Though everything was rising and falling, swirling and heaving as if an earthquake was in progress, she felt sure she could make it across the kitchen floor under her own power.

A second later, her conviction proved to be hubris: the floor seemed to bubble, flinging her feet out from under her. She fell flat on her face and cracked her head solidly on a doorjamb. Then she rolled over, sprawled out more or less in the starfish position on her own kitchen floor, and tried unsuccessfully to focus on Rosie and Willie, who had been sitting at the table playing rummy when she wobbled in.

“Oh shit, I hate him,” she said, before passing out.

“Her boyfriend left her, she don’t hate me,” a voice explained from the doorway that connected the kitchen to the garage.

Rosie hadn’t even had time to put her cards on the table. She looked down briefly at Aurora and then over at the person who had spoken—a small, stocky, white-haired man in an undershirt and old pants. He wore sandals, but no socks,
and had bags under his eyes. Rosie had never seen him before and didn’t know how to evaluate his statement, or Aurora’s. For a second her instinct was just to try and go on with the rummy game, hoping that what had just occurred was a hallucination of some kind.

“Willie, are you ever gonna play?” she asked in a neutral voice.

Willie, meanwhile, suddenly felt in terrible peril. Aurora was sprawled on the floor, right beside his chair, lying on her back with her legs spread wide. He had glanced down once, just as she had rolled over and passed out, and, through no fault of his own, had seen practically up to her crotch. Though the glance had only lasted about a tenth of a second, it wouldn’t go out of his mind, which is why he felt in terrible peril. If he glanced down again and actually saw Aurora’s crotch, that would be the end, so far as Rosie was concerned. Rosie would notice, and as soon as she informed him that she’d noticed, she would probably never speak to him again. If she did speak to him again, it would only be to tell him what a terrible person he was. It was even conceivable that she would make him move out.

The one certainty Willie clung to in his dilemma was that he must not—absolutely must not—glance down at the large female body lying just beside his chair. The briefest glance would invite calamity—yet, even so, he had a terrible urge to glance down briefly just once more.

Theo Petrakis, from the doorway, saw that the two people in the kitchen were in a stunned state, to put it mildly. In his view they could be excused: it was probably not every day that their boss came home drunk and fell down and knocked herself out. He had seen people sitting at his own bar become stunned for long stretches just because they happened to witness a car wreck on McCarty Street in which only one or two people were killed or mangled. In the early months of the war he had often been stunned himself by seeing people killed; but, after he had seen a few hundred killed, as he had, he ceased to be easily stunned, and remained not easily stunned throughout his years in Houston, during which he
had witnessed almost as much violence as he had seen in the war. In the war it was clear why the violence was occurring, and in Houston it often was not clear, but in either case the effect on Theo was slight.

In the present situation, Theo realized that he would have to be the one to act, so he left his position in the doorway, walked around the table, squatted by Aurora, decided she was really out cold, and carefully pulled her gown and housecoat a little farther down over her legs.

In the four hours Theo had spent watching Aurora get drunk he had fallen deeply in love with her, much to the disgust of his cynical brother, Vassily, who, when she passed out briefly without paying for the first three bottles of retsina—she had a short nap, with her head on the green table—actually suggested that they call the police and have her taken to jail.

“Yeah, jail, where drunks belong,” Vassily repeated, when Theo asked if he had heard him correctly.

“You were a drunk for thirty years, did you belong in jail?” Theo inquired.

“No, I’m your brother, this lady ain’t your brother,” Vassily pointed out. He hated it when Theo fell in love. It had happened many times in their long life together, and its consequences were always painful and expensive. Now it was happening again, right before his eyes, and it irritated him. His one hope was that the police would come and drag the drunken woman away before Theo went completely over the edge. Once Theo went over the edge, wild disorder followed, and business always suffered. Besides, Vassily had been with Theo all his life, except when Theo ran off in order to be in love. Though he acknowledged that Theo had a right to be in love, Vassily still resented the separations.

When Theo walked around the table, Rosie came out of her shock, only to discover that, on the whole, she was more shocked than she had been when she was actually in shock. The small man squatting by Aurora, attempting to see that her unconscious body was modestly covered, was clearly no hallucination. Something dreadful had happened, and whatever it was, it was real. Aurora had actually come in drunk
and knocked herself out cold. Besides that, she had come in with a stranger, a little fat man in an undershirt. At first glance Rosie had feared that he was just some aging sex fiend that Aurora had somehow fallen prey to, but since he seemed to be trying to cover Aurora up, rather than uncover her more, perhaps that judgment was too harsh. Perhaps he wasn’t a sex fiend.

“You gotta washrag?” he asked, looking at her from his squatting position near Aurora.

“Sure, what am I doing, I guess I’ve gone crazy, it ain’t like this is the first drunk I’ve ever seen,” Rosie said, jumping up.

Willie got up too and stumbled over to the corner of the kitchen so as not to be in the way. One of his lifelong rules had been to try and stay out of the way while serious matters were being attended to, and it certainly seemed to him that Mrs. Greenway lying unconscious and only partially dressed on the kitchen floor constituted a serious matter.