The Evening Star (64 page)

“Oops, I didn’t really mean to do that, I’m sorry,” Melanie said, but quick as her apology was, it wasn’t quick enough. Before she could move Lee yanked her off the bed and began to hit her with both fists.

“Lee, stop! It was just an accident,” Melanie yelled, covering her face with both arms. Immediately what went through her mind was that if she showed up on the set at seven the next morning with a black eye and a fat lip or something, that might be that: she might be replaced on the spot. At all cost she wanted to protect her face, and she did protect it—she got a hard bump to the back of her head when he jerked her off the bed, and also some bruises on her arms, but Lee was mostly just flailing; he was too mad to aim his blows. He smoked too much and wasn’t in good shape anyway—it probably wasn’t thirty seconds before he wore out and stopped trying to hit her. He was still plenty mad, though. Before Melanie could really recover from the storm of blows, he called her a cunt and a bitch and three or four other choice names—then got up and stormed out the door.

Melanie didn’t try to stop him—she felt too stunned, and once she got over being stunned, too disappointed. Because of the Bruce factor, it had been almost the first time she had brought Lee home with her for the day. When they got to her apartment after the meal she had felt at peace—she was just looking forward to being comfortable with Lee for a while in her own setting. It seemed like a big luxury she was getting to have, just being at home with Lee. She had been thinking she might make him pasta for dinner—they had never just had a simple meal at her apartment before. Sex would have been fine, too; she would have probably been in the mood after her nap, although so far sex with Lee had not really been world-shaking—being tired from the long hours, or
worrying about Bruce or something, had sort of put a hitch in her response. Lee was a little to rabbity, he was not one for much foreplay, but Melanie was confident that if she was just a little patient they’d hit a groove—she was actually real attracted to Lee; she took the optimistic view that their love-making was going to get better once they could relax and she could get him to take a little more time with her.

But now it was ruined—he had hit her with the wrong suggestion at the wrong moment, he would probably never forgive her for kicking him off the stupid bed. Before she knew it she was crying, which is what she mostly did for the rest of the afternoon. She looked in the mirror many times to be sure she wasn’t getting a black eye, and when she wasn’t looking in the mirror or crying she was mostly looking out the window, hoping Lee would get over it and come back. She didn’t really think it would happen—he was too arrogant—but for an hour or two she did keep hoping.

Later, feeling really lonely and shocked because a relationship she mainly enjoyed and was sort of banking on had been ruined in less than five minutes and for a stupid reason at that, she called Rosie and told her what had happened.

“Anal sex, yuk!” Rosie said.

Aurora happened to be in the kitchen at the time, sniffing some sweetbreads she had decided to cook for Pascal. He had apologized for his rudeness so many times that Aurora finally decided enough was enough and invited him to dinner.

When she heard Rosie say the words “anal sex” she looked around, surprised.

“He sounds like a little macho jerk to me,” Rosie added. “You’d be better off without him.”

“Rosie, you and Granny are always telling me that,” Melanie complained. “Every time I get ditched you try to tell me I’d be better off without the guy.”

“Yes, and it’s true, specially if anal sex is all they can think about,” Rosie insisted. Then she remembered her own problems with C.C. and oral sex, preferably in cars; she felt sad for a moment. Other than that, C.C. hadn’t been so bad.

“Men are weird, nine tenths of them,” she said.

“Maybe they are, but I still need one,” Melanie pointed out. “I don’t make a good loner. I do a lot better when I have a guy around, even if he’s not perfect.”

“What’s that about anal sex?” Aurora inquired, looking up from her inspection of the sweetbreads.

Melanie hadn’t known her grandmother was in the room with Rosie until she heard her voice, distantly but distinctly.

“Uh-oh, is Granny hearing this?” she asked.

“Uh, she’s cooking,” Rosie said, feeling awkward. “I guess Pascal’s come back into the picture.”

“Rosie, that’s really premature,” Aurora said. “The mere fact that I’m letting him come to dinner doesn’t mean that he’s in the picture.

“At the moment there isn’t a picture,” she added, with a bit of a droop in her voice. “At the moment there’s just a blur.”

“Pascal might snap things back in focus, though, if he plays his cards right,” Rosie said, determined to be the optimistic one for a change.

“His cards are mainly deuces,” Aurora said. “Why is Melanie questioning you about anal sex?”

“Don’t tell her! It’ll just make her hate Lee if she ever happens to meet him,” Melanie said. She heard her grandmother’s voice growing louder.

“I think she wants to talk to you herself,” Rosie said, since it was obvious that Aurora expected to do exactly that.

“Shit!” Melanie said. “I didn’t want to talk to Granny right now. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Hon, she’s just upset, her new boyfriend’s just left her,” Rosie said to Aurora, covering the receiver with one hand and trying to indicate with a look that it might be better if, for the moment, Aurora left well enough alone.

“Well, if I’m not wanted, I’m not wanted,” Aurora said, getting the message plainly enough; indeed, too plainly. She went back to her sweetbreads, but not with the light heart she usually brought to the early stages of cooking.

“You might be wanted in a minute,” Rosie said, not liking
the look on Aurora’s face. “Right now she just wants someone to confide in.”

“Is she mad?” Melanie asked, biting a hangnail. She hated trying to talk to Rosie about personal stuff when she knew her grandmother was in the room.

“No, now she’s crying,” Rosie said with a sigh—she was not unsympathetic either to Aurora or to Melanie. She was just in the middle, as she had so often been.

“It could be the onions, we’re just starting to cook,” she said. She began to feel sad herself—it was awful to be in the middle when grandmother and grandchild were both unhappy.

“It’s not onions,” Aurora said, but not loudly enough for Melanie to hear. The fact that no member of her family wanted to confide in her in times of crisis, or had ever wanted to confide in her at such times, made a pain in her breastbone. Year after year, decade after decade, it seemed that Rosie received the confidences—first it had been from Emma, now it was from Melanie. She felt shut out, always had. What
was
she, if not a mother and grandmother? It seemed too much to bear, but she went on cooking anyway, unhappy, but for the moment stoic.

Later, after the dinner with Pascal had been negotiated adequately, if, on Aurora’s part, a little numbly, Melanie did call her to apologize for not talking to her that afternoon.

Melanie was feeling better. She had spent several hours thinking over her relationship with Lee and had found that she could only remember one occasion when he had been really nice to her. All the other times he had been borderline, at best.

Also, she felt guilty about her granny—it was no trick to tell from Aurora’s voice if she was happy—and she was not happy.

“Are you just upset because I didn’t talk to you this afternoon?” Melanie asked. With her grandmother there was no point in beating around the bush; better just to come right out and say it.

“Well, I’m upset about a number of things, Melly,” Aurora
admitted. “That’s one of them, but it’s not really the most major.”

“Granny, you’re my parent,” Melanie explained. “Daddy doesn’t want to be my parent, and my mother’s dead. You’re the only person I have to hide things from—and everybody needs to hide some things from their parent, don’t they?”

“I’m sure it’s unusual, but that was not the case with me,” Aurora said, reflecting. “At least it wasn’t the case in regard to my mother—I never told my father a significant secret in my life.”

“But you could tell your mother? Even things about sex?” Melanie asked, curious.

“My mother was the one person I could tell anything to,” Aurora said. She instantly forgave Melanie, whose voice was that of a sad, hurt little girl.

“Now that I look back on it, I’m sure it was odd that I could tell my mother anything,” Aurora reflected. “I can’t remember holding back at all.”

“You were lucky,” Melanie said. “It must have been wonderful to be able to tell your mother anything.”

“It
was
wonderful,” Aurora agreed. “She was a very frank woman, with a remarkably open mind—very remarkably open, considering her time and her place.”

She was silent for a moment, remembering her mother, and the long talks they had once had.

“The pity is that I was very young then,” she said. “I didn’t have anything very complicated to tell her. But I did once have a very minor venereal disease, and I told her that.”

“You
did?”
Melanie said.

“Yes, I did. She was quite unfazed, and very practical. She took me to the doctor herself.”

“I guess you’d have more complicated things to tell her now,” Melanie said.

“I certainly would,” Aurora agreed. “Later life itself is a complicated thing. But Mother died before she could have learned much about it, and the upshot of that is that I’ve had inadequate counsel and have not coped particularly well.”

“I think you’ve coped fine,” Melanie said.

“Nope, I haven’t—lack of counsel has resulted in many setbacks,” Aurora assured her.

“Isn’t that what shrinks are for? Counsel?” Melanie asked.

“Yes, presumably that’s what they’re for,” Aurora said. “But since mine allowed me to seduce him and then allowed Patsy Carpenter to seduce him, too, only a short while later, I don’t think I can expect adequate counsel from him.”

“You could change shrinks,” Melanie pointed out.

“I could, but I think I prefer just to change the subject,” Aurora said. “Am I ever going to be allowed to know why Rosie was talking about anal sex this afternoon?”

“I guess you can know,” Melanie said. “My boyfriend wanted to have it and I didn’t, which is why we broke up.

“I mean I didn’t want to have it
today,”
Melanie added. “I didn’t mean I was against it per se.”

“It does require rather a special mood,” Aurora said casually. She was still thinking about her mother, remembering the way she played with her rings, twisting them round and round on her fingers when she was thinking about some problem Aurora had presented her with.

Melanie tried to imagine her grandmother having anal sex, but her imagination wouldn’t go near it—her imagination wouldn’t even provide much in the way of a sensual aid when she tried to imagine herself having it with Lee.

“Anyway, I’m back to no boyfriend,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t complain. I’m sure there are worse fates.”

“There are, but not many,” Aurora said, remembering how flat and bored she had felt that very evening, trying to get through a dinner with Pascal.

“What does that mean?” Melanie asked. “Are you really that unhappy?”

“I’m not frolicking much these days,” Aurora admitted. “I’m afraid I’m a very needy person, and this has led me to accept the wrong people in my life. Even when I know quite well that they’re the wrong people I often accept them anyway, rather than be without.

“I really don’t seem to be able to flourish when I’m without,” she added.

“Are you going to get your shrink back from Patsy?” Melanie asked. “I bet you could if you tried.”

Aurora let that one sit for a moment. She had the sense that it might be the wrong sort of thing to be talking about with her granddaughter. But, on the other hand, she had just praised her own mother for being open to discussion of just such complexities. Also, the question was a hard one: Was she or wasn’t she going to actively compete for Jerry? For the past few weeks she had not supposed she would, but, now that Melanie had asked, she realized she was not exactly settled in her mind where he was concerned.

“I might be just that foolish,” she said. “At this point my options seem to be folly or resignation, and I actually think folly might be the more honorable option. I’ve been a fool before, and in a way it’s kept me going. I may just have to be a fool again.”

Melanie tried to chatter about her job, or anything that might cheer her grandmother up, but Aurora was still rather gloomy when the conversation ended.

Melanie stayed awake until nearly two o’clock, hoping Lee would call and make up, but he didn’t. The next day she saw him at a distance as she was walking to the makeup trailer. She started to wave, but he wasn’t looking her way, so she didn’t. Then, while she was being made up, he smart-lipped one of the stars and was fired on the spot. By the time Melanie walked to the set for her first scene he was already gone. It was sort of stunning how quickly you could vanish if you were just an A.D.

“Sweetie, you’re better off without him,” Shirley said when she heard about the breakup.

“You sound just like my grandmother!” Melanie said, a little bitterly. She was still upset, it was a raw wound, you’d think people would notice!

Still, she wasn’t really mad at Shirley. After all, Shirley had gone out of her way to get Bruce a job, and that was still the nicest thing anyone had done for either one of them since they moved to Hollywood.

14

After having struggled to remain on his best behavior during Aurora’s dinner, Pascal reflected for the better part of a day and decided that he was bitterly dissatisfied with the tenor of the evening. He felt sure he had been slighted in a number of subtle but nonetheless significant ways: his hug upon arrival had been perfunctory, and his kiss upon departure even more so. Conversation, usually so challenging as Aurora let her mind dart here and there, had been indifferent, as perfunctory as her embraces. She had even asked him again for gossip about Madame Mitterrand, probably the most boring question it was possible to ask a member of the French diplomatic corps.