The Evening Star (61 page)

“Don’t you ever notice nothing?” Theo said, exasperated.

“I noticed—I said it was a nice neighborhood, didn’t you hear me?” Vassily said contentedly.

“It’s interesting they lived in Shreveport,” Rosie said, as she and Aurora were washing up together. “I ain’t talked that much about Shreveport since F.V. D’Arch was alive.

F.V. D’Arch, a Shreveport native, had been General Scott’s driver for many years, until one day in the garage a heart attack struck and carried him off.

“They’re nice, our Greeks, aren’t they?” Aurora said, her hands in the dishwater. Rosie was drying wineglasses. Just the way Aurora said it—our Greeks—gave Rosie a good feeling, a really good feeling. It was as if after all these years, she and Aurora had finally had a double date.

11

The next morning when Jerry Bruckner stepped out of his front door to get the paper, Aurora was sitting on the steps. He was startled and a little scared, though she looked at him calmly. There was something girlish and a bit demure in her look.

“I thought you’d never return,” he said, feeling silly.

“I haven’t returned,” Aurora said. “Was it Patsy who left the brilliant yellow belt on your couch?”

“Yes, she forgot it,” Jerry said.

“Did you fuck her before she forgot it?” Aurora asked.

“Uh—huh,” Jerry said.

“That means yes, I take it,” Aurora said.

“It means yes, I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “I’ve missed you.”

“Now you can really start missing me,” Aurora said, standing up. “Goodbye.”

She walked quickly down the sidewalk, not looking back—nor did she look back once she was in her car. She just started the car and drove off. Jerry had started to follow her as she was walking toward the car—had started to argue. But it didn’t seem that Aurora had come for discussion, so he
didn’t. He watched and then went back inside, forgetting the paper.

“Of course she didn’t come for discussion, she came for confirmation, nothing else,” Patsy said as they were discussing it, later that day. They were on Patsy’s bed, in her spacious second-floor bedroom. When Jerry got up to adjust the air conditioning he looked out the window and saw Katie, Patsy’s younger daughter, who was visiting from L.A. Katie, topless, was floating on a pool mattress in the middle of her mother’s large pool. Like her mother, Katie had small breasts. Unlike her mother, she was too young to have cares.

Jerry returned to the bed, thinking—as he had been almost constantly lately—that it was really time for him to leave town. He had been honest when he said he missed Aurora. He missed her quite a lot. Patsy was younger and more beautiful, but she was also less free and less fun. Patsy had many cares, and despite all her efforts to relax or let go, her cares seemed to restrain her. Even in lovemaking, for which she was almost desperately eager, there was some restraint, not in regard to his needs and pleasures, or her own either, really—she was not inhibited—but, still, there was something a little sad in Patsy’s sex: she was greedy but seemed displeased by her own greed. It was in that that she differed most from Aurora.

“I knew she knew—she’s not dumb,” Patsy said. “It’s been a month. Aurora doesn’t just stop speaking to someone for a month unless she thinks she’s got a powerful reason. I’m the reason. I wonder if she’ll ever speak to me again.”

Jerry was thinking of Lalani, his doughnut-shop girlfriend. Lalani had much larger breasts than Katie, and, like Katie, she was too young to have cares. Deplorable though he knew it was as an element in his character, Jerry had long known that when it came right down to it he really preferred women who were either too young or too dumb to have cares.

“So what if she found out?” Patsy asked, raising up on an elbow to study Jerry’s face—his face fascinated her. It was attractive and intelligent, and yet also passive and empty. The parts were there, but she couldn’t get a grip on the
whole. She had once hoped that kissing him would make him reveal the whole, but it hadn’t. Kissing, fucking, the entree, the main act, usually told her something, but kissing Jerry only told her that she was kissing a pretty odd, though seriously attractive man.

“Suppose I hadn’t forgotten my stupid belt and she hadn’t found out?” she asked. “What would you have done? Would you have just gone right on sleeping with us both?”

“I wasn’t sleeping with her,” Jerry said, reminding her what he felt was an important, or at least a significant, point. “I hadn’t slept with her since General Scott died.”

Patsy regarded this distinction, of which Jerry was so proud, as a wimpy, bullshitty point, and she had said as much before.

“A lapse isn’t the same as breaking up, so don’t try to tell me you had broken up with her,” she said emphatically. “I’d stop screwing my new guy too if my old guy lay down and died. I’d go into mourning too. But I wouldn’t stay in mourning forever. By and by I’d want my new guy to take me to bed again, if he was still around.”

Jerry said nothing. Often, when Patsy made a point that she considered important, he just said nothing. The most important-seeming points in a given conversation might not seem to matter at all if they were let lie for a day or two.

“So what would you have done when she wanted you again?” Patsy asked. “Tell me. This is not a question I intend to let you duck.”

“Maybe I would just have left town,” Jerry said.

“That’s the coward’s way,” Patsy said.

“But it could still be the best way,” Jerry said. “Cowards are sometimes survivors, you know.”

Despite her nice breasts and lack of cares, he wasn’t seeing much of Lalani anymore, though on the whole Lalani made a nice balance to Patsy: she was coarse where Patsy was over-refined; she had solid instincts in areas where Patsy’s were shaky; she had no interest in things Patsy knew too much about; and she had no emotional restraints, whereas Patsy had too many.

He might have continued to see a lot of Lalani had it not been for a new discovery in the perennial pretty-women-without-cares sweepstakes. His new discovery was a nineteen-year-old Hispanic girl named Juanita, a countergirl at a little all-night tamale stand in the Heights. By a geographical irony too serious for Jerry to ignore, the tamale stand was just across the I-10 from the freeway ramp he had walked down the morning he hitchhiked away from Julie, his first Houston girlfriend. In fact, when he stood at the tamale stand, eating a tamale or a burrito and attempting to flirt with Juanita, he could look across I-10 and see the very spot where the black nurse had stopped to give him his ride to Galveston on the wedding day of Julie’s sister.

He tried to convey the richness of this irony to Juanita, mainly because it gave him a chance to prolong their conversations, but Juanita couldn’t get interested and didn’t pretend to. Why should she care if this nice-looking Americano used to hitchhike from the other side of the freeway? She knew all the talk was probably just his way of showing interest in her—she was petite, beautiful, and full of talk herself; lots of guys came to the tamale stand and showed interest—but she would have liked it better if he had asked to take her dancing or something.

Juanita was an illegal, but she wasn’t too worried about it—Immigration wasn’t likely to come around hassling any girl as pretty as she was.

Jerry kept dropping by, though, and she began to like him, even if he did talk sort of boring. One day she confessed her dream to him: her dream of living in L.A. She had learned her English reading movie magazines, and she wanted to go to L.A. real bad. Jerry was a good-looking guy: Juanita picked up right away that he was mainly showing up to see
her,
not to eat tamales—which was fine. He looked like a guy who might be moving along soon. Maybe if he liked her so much he’d take her with him. If he didn’t take her all the way to L.A., he might at least take her closer. Juanita was hoping for Phoenix or Tucson, at least. If some guy would just take her that far she was pretty sure she could make it the rest of the way on her own.

Of course, her boyfriend Luis had offered to take her to L.A., but Juanita didn’t think that had much of a chance. Luis was a busboy at a fried-chicken place—he was an illegal too. Juanita had already pretty much decided not to go running off to California with him. Even if he could save the money for bus tickets, they’d never make it. Luis had the smell, or something—Immigration had already sent him back to Mexico twice.

Fortunately, working double shifts at the fried-chicken place kept Luis pretty busy—otherwise he could be trouble. He was so in love with her that he liked to lurk around the tamale stand on his day off, spying on her to see if she was too nice to customers. If she was even a little bit nice to some customer who was a male, it meant a big fight the next time they were alone together. He was so obsessed with keeping Juanita to himself that if he saw her being nice he would usually threaten to kill her, and the customer too. Once or twice at the tamale stand he got so enraged watching her be nice to customers that he blew up, threatened guys he had never seen before, threatened Juanita, threatened the manager of the tamale stand. Once he even pulled a knife and threatened a black guy. The manager called the cops, but Luis got away before they came. If they had caught him he would have been sent back to Mexico for sure.

Juanita didn’t really mind that much that Luis was obsessed with her—sometimes she even sort of liked it. But that didn’t mean she intended to set off for L.A. with him. She liked to think she had a little more common sense than that. The nice quiet Americano, who was showing up at the stand every day or two now, seemed like a much better bet. One night she got up her nerve and asked
him
if he’d like to go dancing—maybe the guy was too shy to ask her, or maybe he thought she was too young. He looked kind of startled when she asked him, but he didn’t say no. He said he’d do it if he wasn’t too busy on the weekend. The weekend was coming along in a day or two, and Juanita was getting excited, wondering if she’d have a new boyfriend to take her dancing. Fortunately Luis had to work on Saturday night—he wouldn’t be around.

“Sometimes I wish I could be a virus in your brain,” Patsy said to Jerry—she didn’t bother to conceal her annoyance. “You’re always drifting away from me, and I have no idea where you’re drifting to. If I were a virus, at least I’d be there. I’d wiggle in so deep you’d have to think about me once in a while.”

“When I think of you too much, I feel guilty,” Jerry said.

“Guilty,” Patsy said. “Baloney. You don’t look as if you feel very guilty—of course you probably aren’t thinking of me, either.

“Who were you thinking of, if not me?” she asked after a moment.

“Bruno Bettelheim,” Jerry said—a stock answer. In fact, he had been thinking about Juanita’s invitation. Maybe he
would
go to the dance with her on Saturday night. Then maybe they would just head down the road—instead of taking the east ramp onto I-10, perhaps they’d take the west ramp. They could drive most of the night and then sleep most of the day in some small-town motel in West Texas. It seemed like time to get back to Nevada, but getting back to Nevada wasn’t so urgent that he would need to go straight there—he could take the talkative and curvaceous Juanita to L.A., city of her dreams, and help her get settled before wandering on north to Tahoe or Elko or wherever he decided to wander.

“I don’t believe you feel guilty. Why should you? You haven’t hurt me,” Patsy said.

“I feel guilty generally when I think about women,” Jerry said. It was mostly true, he mostly did. “And I usually feel specifically guilty when I think of a specific woman.”

Patsy got up and put on a robe. She had the oppressed feeling she always got when the hour of breakup was close at hand. Part of the oppression consisted of all the unanswered questions that seemed to circulate through her system—first among them, why she had wanted Jerry so much in the first place. Why had she invested so much time and so much hope? She had had to drag him virtually every step of the way she had gotten him to go, and even so the affair had lasted only a month. She had once had men in her life who
made her feel interesting; now she seemed only to be able to get men who made her feel the opposite, and at the moment she felt the opposite. She felt dull and a little stupid, but why? Maybe she had only wanted Jerry because Aurora Greenway had him. So she went after him and got him, they had a little nice sex, one or two lively conversations, one or two excellent dinners which she either cooked or paid for, and that seemed to be that. A breakup loomed, but there was nothing urgent about it, much less tragic—they had barely got to know one another anyway. In a sense, the most interesting thing about the affair was Aurora’s absolute silence with regard to both of them: the thought only made Patsy feel more oppressed. If the defining thing about a love affair was that Aurora Greenway, aggressive as she was, hadn’t even bothered to issue a challenge to it, what did that say?

“Would you like to just forget that we know one another?” Patsy asked, coming back to sit on the bed. She sat far enough from Jerry so that he couldn’t touch her—not that he would be especially likely to try. What was more likely was that she would forget her annoyance and touch
him.
It wouldn’t be the end of the world if she forgot and touched him, but right at the moment she would rather not.

“I don’t think I could forget that I know you,” Jerry said. “I
do
know you, and I have a good memory. I’m not going to forget that I know you.”

“That’s a dishonest statement,” Patsy said. “Your good memory isn’t the point. I have a good memory too, but I’ve had lovers that I’ve forgotten utterly—I mean utterly. If I met them on the street I wouldn’t recognize them, and if one of these guys I’ve forgotten came up to me at a party and said, hi, we used to fuck, how are you? I’d probably slug him.”

“I still don’t get the point,” Jerry said. “I’m certainly not going to forget you—not ever.”

“Why not?” she asked, though his remark made her a little hopeful. It was possible that she was mistaking low key for no key.

“For one thing, you know more about Rilke than anyone I’ve ever met,” Jerry said.