The Evening Star (69 page)

“Well, I’m up, come and see me,” Aurora said.

“Get the number of the one with the skinny legs,” Vassily requested as Theo, dumbstruck by his good fortune, was making a hasty departure.

He raced to Aurora’s, but to his dismay, nothing had changed. She was wrapped in a robe, she gave him brandy, but she was remote.

“You left, where’d you go?” he asked, trying to joke. She had brought him into her brightly lit kitchen, to give him the brandy.

“Perhaps I’ve gone into reverse,” Aurora said. The look on her face was friendly, yet not encouraging.

“Life for the living,” Theo reminded her.

“Reverse isn’t death,” Aurora reminded him. “I
am
living, I’ve just changed gears.”

“I wish you’d change back so we could get together,” Theo said. “I mean, I know it’s the wrong day to say it, but if you’ve got a feeling it’s better to say it, right?”

“It certainly is better to say it,” Aurora agreed.

“Well, I’ve got a feeling, now I’ve said it, you gonna throw me out?” Theo asked.

“No, I’m going to make you into my hand-holding friend,” Aurora said, reaching over to take his hand. His hand felt comfortable to her—it bore two or three scars, one of which she traced with her finger.

“That’s from when I ran a lathe,” Theo said.

Aurora didn’t comment.

“You mean, that’s it—hand-holding?” Theo asked. He had popped off, and now he felt on shaky ground.

“That’s it—take it or leave it,” Aurora said. “Youthful as you are, you probably should leave it.”

“I ain’t leaving it,” Theo assured her—he was too much in love. Besides, women changed their minds.

“Don’t waste too much of your youthfulness waiting for me to change my mind, either,” Aurora said immediately. To Theo she looked sad—too sad; he didn’t care if she didn’t change her mind.

“Vassily wants the phone number of that girl you had with you,” he said, feeling in a hurry to change the subject.

“That girl has three grown children,” Aurora informed him. “Your brother’s what I mean by elemental. I don’t know if he’d be interested at the level of hand-holding.”

Theo shrugged. “I’ve seen him when he’d be glad to get it,” he said. “His next to last wife didn’t let him touch her for four years.”

“Such times come to us all, I guess,” Aurora said.

“Yeah, they came to me after Eta was smashed in the wreck,” Theo said. “I went six years.”

“Goodness,” Aurora said.

“I lived, it don’t kill you,” Theo said. “Vassily has bad judgment, he’s better off when he don’t have no woman.”

The next morning Patsy called Aurora. She sounded rather flustered.

“One of your Greeks just called and asked me for a date,” Patsy said.

“Yes, Vassily,” Aurora said. “Since they provided us with a free wake I felt I couldn’t refuse him your phone number.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Patsy said. “I mean, I liked them, but we just met once, and the circumstances were a little unusual. I don’t know what we’d talk about on a date.”

“Though it’s none of my business, I hope you accepted,” Aurora said. “It might be interesting for you, just once, to go out with someone who wasn’t an artist or an artist manqué.

“A man of the people, so to speak,” she added.

“Actually, I’ve had a few of those,” Patsy said. “Remember my rodeo clown? There was also my carpenter—actually, several carpenters—and my Vietnam helicopter pilot and my semipro baseball player,” she said, remembering her several efforts with men of the people.

“Well, this ball is in your court,” Aurora said. “Return it if you choose.”

Later, when she told Rosie that Vassily had asked Patsy for a date, Rosie evinced no surprise.

“I seen him looking at her legs,” she said. Secretly, she was glad it was Vassily, and not Theo. She was harboring a soft spot for Theo herself. Despite his obvious crush on Aurora, he sometimes smiled at her in a way that seemed to mean he might be interested. And if he was, she was, Aurora or no Aurora—that Theo just had a really nice way about him.

18

“Hon, this don’t make no sense,” Rosie said. “You’d already stopped dating him, and he was on his way out of town anyway. You might not have ever heard from him again, other than that little note.”

Aurora had only eaten an orange for breakfast. In fact, she hadn’t even eaten all the orange—she just sort of picked it to pieces. In the months since Jerry’s death she had lost over twenty pounds. She had stopped doing all the things she had done all her life, and it worried everyone. She had stopped watching television, stopped buying clothes, stopped wearing makeup, stopped going out, stopped having romances, or even flirting, and she had even virtually stopped eating. The change alarmed neighbors and friends, suitors and grandchildren, but it alarmed Rosie most, she being the one person who had to watch it every single day of her life, and at close range to boot.

“Are you speaking for yourself, or have you been appointed a one-woman committee to harass me at my own breakfast table?” Aurora asked, looking up.

“Well, everybody’s worried, this ain’t like you,” Rosie said.

“On the contrary, it’s precisely like me as I am at this time in my life,” Aurora said. “I’m aware that you all liked me better the way I was before, but there’s nothing I can do about that because I’m no longer the way I was before.”

“You could be, though, if you could just get over Jerry,” Rosie said. “You hounded me till I finally got over Royce, why can’t I hound you till you get over Jerry?”

“Bad comparison,” Aurora said. “You were young and active when Royce died. You had many productive years ahead and I was determined that you not waste them. I admit I expected you to do better than C.C. and Willie, but that sort of bad luck couldn’t have been predicted.”

“That’s another thing we need to talk about,” Rosie said, uneasily. “Arthur’s proposed three times now—I gotta decide what I’m gonna do. But I can’t decide, not with you like this.”

“What do you mean, ‘like this?’ Aurora asked calmly. “I’m clean, you know! I bathe every day. I brush my teeth. I go to my doctor for my checkups and no one has informed me of any structural flaws. My vital signs are as vital as ever. I don’t know why the mere fact that I’m living the life of my choice gives people the notion that they can refer to me as ‘like this.’

“Besides that, I’m still concerned about the people I’m concerned about,” she added, after a pause.

“I’m sorry I ever brought it up, I’m just confused myself,” Rosie said, sitting down at the table.

“I think it’s horrible of all of you to pester me to lose weight for decades if you’re only going to accuse me of being ‘like this’ when I finally do lose a few pounds,” Aurora remarked. She got up and was about to make her way out to her little garage office where she spent her days, working on her memory project on the new word processor Teddy had taught her how to use. Rosie looked more than confused—she looked as if her heart were breaking.

“I’ve been here working for you over forty years,” Rosie said. “I thought I’d just go on living here and working for you and we’d never change from being how we’ve been. I guess it scares me to think of marrying Arthur and moving away.”

“Rosie, Arthur Cotton lives across the street,” Aurora said, touched by her maid’s sad eyes and quavery voice.

“Across the street and down two houses,” Rosie corrected, though she knew the correction sounded ridiculous. From her suitor Arthur Cotton’s bedroom windows she could look across a long-familiar street and see Aurora’s bedroom windows. The move—if she undertook it—might seem like no move at all to some people; but the thought of it frightened Rosie more than any move she had ever contemplated in her life.

“It’s just that I wouldn’t be working for you no more,” Rosie said. “If I wasn’t still your maid it might be different. You really don’t like Arthur much—you know you don’t.”

“No, but it’s not as if I
dislike
him,” Aurora said. “Somehow I’ve managed to remain largely indifferent to Arthur Cotton all these years. What I did dislike was his late wife’s name.”

“Eureka, what’s wrong with that?” Rosie asked.

“Nothing, in the abstract,” Aurora said. “It’s just that having a Eureka and an Aurora on the same street seems a bit much.”

“Anyway, if I marry him and move over there, who knows what will happen?” Rosie said. “It might change things too much.”

“Why should it?” Aurora asked—through she had had the same thought a few times.

“Well, I wouldn’t be right here in the kitchen to nag you,” Rosie said. “We might drift apart. Someday we might not even be friends no more.”

Aurora sighed, came back, and sat down at the table again. Arthur Cotton was an insurance man, and a very wealthy one. He loved his lawn, and in the course of mowing it for the past thirty years had often stopped to chat briefly with Rosie, if she happened to walk past on her way to the bus stop. Five months before, his wife, Eureka, had dropped dead. Three weeks after her funeral he asked Rosie for a date. On the third date he proposed. He told Rosie he had secretly yearned for her for many years. Rosie couldn’t—and didn’t—pretend to Arthur that she had yearned for
him
for thirty
years—all her passion amounted to was having once or twice mentioned to Aurora that she thought Arthur was cute in his roly-poly way.

She wasn’t entirely unmoved by his proposals, though. Willie had never called—not once; she felt in limbo and wanted to get out. What scared her was the thought of leaving Aurora’s employ after forty years. What would she be if she was no longer a maid? The question stuck in her mind and she couldn’t stop asking it.

Privately Aurora wished that Eureka Cotton could have managed not to drop dead for a few more years. A little more longevity on her part would have spared them all a painful dilemma. But Eureka hadn’t managed it, and there they were.

“Rosie, listen to me,” Aurora said finally. “You and I have survived together in this kitchen for forty-two years. You were with me the night my husband died. You were with me the night my daughter died. You were with me when we found out that Tommy had killed his girlfriend. I like to hope that I’ve been some support in various of your family tragedies, too. You’re not only my friend, you’re my dearest friend, and that isn’t going to change. What you should be asking yourself is whether you think you can be happy living with Arthur Cotton. That’s the real question.”

Rosie began to cry. It was sweet of Aurora to tell her that she was her dearest friend—and, of course, Aurora had long been
her
dearest friend. And yet she felt uncertain. A marriage could change things around and end up making everything different. Little things that she enjoyed doing with Aurora, such as watching certain soaps, she might not get to do anymore. Just sitting and talking at the table might not be quite the same if she was living way off down the street.

“I know Arthur’s important, but it’s the thought of leaving you that makes me nervous,” Rosie said. “You’re still upset about Jerry, you ain’t eating right, and you don’t pay attention to yourself like you used to. I’d just feel like I was deserting you in your time of need.”

“Rosie, I’m not starving,” Aurora pointed out. “I’m just
more interested in my memory project than I am in eating right now. I’ve spent a great many years stuffing myself, as you should know better than anyone. Why can’t I just let it go for a while?”

Rosie abandoned that point and moved to another.

“Another thing is, Arthur’s rich, and I’ve always been just a working woman,” she said. “He wants to fly me off to Paris and buy me fur coats and emeralds—the only place he’ll even take me to eat is Maxim’s and my stomach can’t handle all that rich food. I keep telling the poor man he’s trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but he won’t listen.”

“It certainly won’t work if you go into it with that attitude,” Aurora said. “What’s wrong with a few fur coats and emeralds?”

“Maybe I’m just too old to change sides of the street,” Rosie said. “Now, if he’d just let me go on working for you, I might do it, but he won’t, will he?”

“No, Arthur’s much too custom-bound to allow his wife to be a domestic,” Aurora said. “In fact, instead of being a maid, you’d undoubtedly be required to
hire
a maid.”

“Well, that’ll never work, I’d die before I’d give another human being an order,” Rosie said.

“I find that hard to believe, since you’ve given me millions,” Aurora said. “For forty years you’ve been driving me from my own bed, where I was perfectly comfortable, just so you could make it up in keeping with some arcane schedule you seem to feel you have to keep to.”

“Oh, well,” Rosie said. It was true that she sometimes bossed Aurora, a bit.

“Oh, well yourself,” Aurora said. “You crack the whip perfectly well, when you feel like it. I’m sure I would have finished Proust years ago if you hadn’t always driven me from my bed just as I was getting settled in with his book.”

In the three weeks after Jerry’s death, Aurora had shut herself into her little garage office and read Proust straight through. At times she put the book down and brooded; at other times she put the book down and wept, not so much for a lost Paris, or her own lost love, as from a profound sense of
wasted time. Somehow she had let her life slip by, achieving nothing. She did not suppose, in her hours of regret, that she had ever had mind enough to achieve a great work, like Monsieur Proust. Perhaps she hadn’t mind enough to achieve a work of even modest scope—yet it did seem to her that she had mind enough and sufficient individuality that she ought to have achieved more. Her mother had always hoped she would write, or, failing that, sing, but she had done neither. She had, in the end, merely lived, partaking rather fully of the human experience, absorbing it, and yet doing nothing with it. That was the common way, of course, and yet the knowledge that she had not transcended the common way left her discontented, restless. It seemed to her that her problem may have been that she absorbed experience too avidly—so avidly that she had never taken time really to think about it.