Terms of Endearment (28 page)

With her other suitors she had never been able to tolerate even the mention of other women, but Trevor was the grand exception. He assured her constantly that she was his only real love, and she believed him and derived a great deal of pleasure from hearing about the women he made do with. Trevor sighed, but somehow he always felt better after he had told Aurora about his little loves, so he told her about a Polish actress and a California horsewoman and a couple of nice mothers and daughters from Connecticut. It carried them through the lobster and dessert and into brandy. Aurora was stuffed and content and let him hold her hand while they talked.

“Now you see,” she said, “if I hadn’t been so good at leading you a merry chase none of that would have happened to you, and some of it must have been merry at least.”

“It was all merry,” Trevor said. “That’s the point, Aurora. Every romance I’ve had for thirty years has been merry. Maybe that’s why I only want you. You’re the only one who makes me unhappy.”

“Oh, Trevor, don’t say that, dear,” Aurora said. “You know I can’t stand to feel that I’ve been cruel to you. Here you’ve just provided me with such a nice meal.”

“I don’t blame you,” Trevor said. “It’s just that I like being unhappy about you better than I like being happy about most of the women I know.”

“Dear, you’re far too nice,” Aurora said. “I seem to recall that I was quite cruel to you on one or two occasions in the past and you never worked up anything like enough indignation to suit me. If you had, who knows but what I’d have come to heel.”

“I
know,” Trevor said. “I may look big and dumb but I’m not a dope. If I had done that you’d have stopped having anything to do with me.”

Aurora chuckled. Her old flame had his endearing aspects still. “True, I can’t stand people who presume to blame me,” she said. “I’ve considered the right to blame as my prerogative. What’s going to become of us, Trevor?”

“Two lobsters a year, I guess,” Trevor said. “Maybe a pheasant now and then. Unless you marry me. If you’ll just marry me this time I’ll promise to change. We could move to Philadelphia. There’s the family business, you know. I’d even sell my boat if you wanted me to.”

Aurora quickly patted his hand. She dropped her eyes and something inside her dropped a little bit too.

“Darling, you must never sell your boat,” she said after a moment. “I’m flattered that you love me more, and I do believe you, but since I refused to be your life I certainly have no right to ask that of you now. Besides, you cut such a dashing figure on your boat. You don’t know how often through the years I’ve thought of how dashing you were in the days when we sailed around like we did. I really don’t know what I’d do for romantic thoughts if I
didn’t know you were always on your boat … looking dashing … and that you’d come and see me by and by.”

Trevor was silent. So was she.

“You weren’t meant for Philadelphia and the family business,” Aurora said. “No more was I meant for the sea. I don’t know that anything works if one person has to give up too much. I’ve never been able to do anything about myself, I’m afraid, Trevor, and that being the case, I’ve always been glad that you loved the sea as much as you do.”

“So am I,” Trevor said. “It’s a good second best.”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t suppose everyone has that good a second best,” he said. “They have a combo here, you know. I don’t know why we’re sitting here. We’ll just get sleepy. Would you like to go upstairs and dance?”

“Why, Trevor, of course,” Aurora said, folding her napkin. “Why are we sitting here? You’ve hit upon the one thing it would never occur to me to refuse you. Let’s dance at once.”

3.

T
HEY DANCED
at once. “goodness, how I’ve missed it,” Aurora said.

“How I’ve missed you,” Trevor said. He danced as well as he handled a knife and fork. Then, just as it seemed to both of them that they were hitting their stride, the combo stopped playing and the musicians began packing their instruments. Unfortunately they had had the bad judgment to close with a waltz, and waltzes threw Trevor into such a depth of nostalgia for their waltzing days in the east that the whole blithe balance of the evening was very nearly destroyed.

“Dawn always found us on our feet, remember?” he said, embracing Aurora, who had been airing herself for a moment by an open window. “Let’s go to that Mexican place you know. Dawn could find us on our feet again. I’m not too old.”

“Very well,” Aurora said, since he had been nice and hadn’t brought up his ultimatum at all.

Then, in the taxicab, life stopped being a romantic memory and became a muddle again. Trevor was more or less all over her, of course, but she was looking out the window, watching Houston go by, and wasn’t taking a great deal of notice.

“Dawn always found us on our feet,” Trevor said again. He had grown fond of the line.

“Well, I must say, Trevor, you’re the only man I know who realizes dancing ought to be a regular part of life,” Aurora said, rather happily.

“Of course, like sex,” Trevor said. “I’ve got to kiss you.”

Perhaps because she was having a sleepy moment, or perhaps because his gallantry in pursuing her to so little reward for thirty years always touched her, or perhaps because he still smelled better than any man she knew, Aurora let him, thinking who knows?—though she knew well enough, really. She had had similar impulses, for similar reasons, over the years with Trevor and the results, disappointingly for them both, were never more than bland. Still, little harm was ever done, and none would have been in this case had not Trevor, in a wild, momentary burst of hope, thrust a hand into her brassiere. Just as he did, Aurora broke the kiss, sat up straighter, and took a deep breath, meaning to clear her head and regain her senses, though it was really only pretending to suppose that she had lost them. Trevor had had to turn his wrist at a rather sharp angle to get his hand into the brassiere and when Aurora chose to fill her lungs it not only trapped his hand against her breast but caused a horrible pain to shoot through his twisted wrist.

“Oow, God,” he said. “Bend over, please. Bend over!”

“Oh, Trevor, for goodness’ sake, we’re almost there,” Aurora said, misinterpreting the note of urgency in his voice and sitting up all the straighter.

“Oow! God! Please, you’re breaking my wrist,” Trevor said. He had been forced to slide partially onto the floorboards in order to keep from screaming loudly, and he was sure he had heard a small crack the second time Aurora moved.

Aurora had been politely ignoring his little foray, which was the only sound practice where Trevor was concerned, but she finally realized from the look on his face that something was
amiss, and bent forward. Gingerly he removed his hand and held it haplessly before her eyes.

“Why does it dangle like that?” she asked.

“I think it’s the first wrist ever to have been broken by a breast,” he said, feeling it carefully. He had a feeling that bone ends might be protruding, but could find none, and after Aurora had rubbed it for a while he was forced to conclude that probably it was only sprained.

“I wish it was broken,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be romantic? Then you’d have to let me stay with you for a while so you could take care of me.”

Aurora smiled and rubbed it for him. “It was all that talk about dawn finding us on our feet,” she said. “You invariably exaggerate, dear. Dawn usually found us on a couch in the lobby of the Plaza, as I recall.”

“It’s going to find us on our feet this morning,” Trevor said determinedly.

Instead it found them sitting at a red table in the small open courtyard of a place called the Last Concert, with Trevor drinking a bottle of Mexican beer. The Last Concert was only a small Mexican bar, with a jukebox and a tiny dance floor, but of the few after-hours places in Houston it was the one Aurora preferred. It was on an obscure street in North Houston, near the railroad yards, and she could hear, not far away, the sound of boxcars bumping into one another. Her old flame sipped his beer. There was no one there but themselves and an old, old Mexican woman, nodding inside behind the bar, and a large gray rat in one corner of the courtyard.

“I wish I had my pistol,” Trevor said. “I’d try a shot at that rat.”

The rat was eating a scrap of day-old tortilla, and seemed unperturbed by the presence of two elegantly dressed humans. As the sky above them lightened, the contrast between their dress and the bare shabbiness of the table and the little courtyard became more stark, but Aurora was feeling calmly tired and didn’t mind. Trevor spent half his life in the Caribbean or in South America and was wonderful at Latin dances; for once she had been given her fill of rhumbas and sambas, cha-chas and
various wilder dances that Trevor had seemed to be improvising on the spot, to the great delight of five or six middle-aged Mexicans who had stayed to drink beer and watch them until almost six in the morning.

The light got better still, and she could see that there were more lines than she would have thought in her old flame’s face.

“Trevor, dear, you never let me see your real face,” she said. “You always hide it away in the darkest restaurants possible. How do you know but what I’d like it if I got to see it once in a while?”

Trevor sighed. “Let’s get on with this ultimatum,” he said.

“Must we, dear?” she said, faintly amused.

“We must, we must,” Trevor said. “I can’t afford to let another ten years slip by. I can’t stand having to worry about you marrying. Please say yes.”

Aurora watched the rat carry its scrap of tortilla along the fence until it came to a hole. It went through the hole but then evidently stopped to eat some more of the tortilla, because its tail remained in the courtyard.

“You’re going off into the sunset and will never see me again if I say no, isn’t that right?” she asked quietly.

“That’s absolutely right,” Trevor said. He slapped the table lightly with his palm to emphasize the point and drained his beer to show her he was capable of finishing things finally and absolutely, absolutely and finally. He looked her right in the eye while he did it.

Aurora got up and went around and seated herself in his lap. She gave him a lavish hug and a nice kiss on the cheek and smelled around a little for good measure, enough to last her for approximately six months.

“Regrettably, my answer is no,” she said. “However, I hope you’ll help me get a cab before you leave. You’ve entertained me quite royally and I had planned to have you to my house for breakfast, but now that we’re quits forever I suppose you’ll have to rush off to look for a sunset, even though it’s only dawn and you aren’t likely to find one for a number of hours.”

Trevor laid his cheek wistfully against the breast that had almost broken his wrist.

“Oh, well, I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I was just hoping to convince you I meant it. It was the only thing left to try.”

Aurora went on holding him. He had always been quite comfortable to hold, and, when all was said and done, he was such an innocent, such a child.

“You couldn’t ultimatum your way out of a paper bag,” she said. “It’s a gift you don’t have—not your true character at all. If I were you I wouldn’t try it, except with me. We’ve had all these years in which to mellow together, and I appreciate such little gestures, but I’m not sure a younger woman would.”

Trevor chuckled, more or less into her bosom. “No, they massacre me,” he said. “You know, it’s a strange thing, Aurora. I only feel mellow when I’m with you.”

“I’m touched,” Aurora said. “How do you feel the rest of the time?”

Trevor looked up at her, but didn’t answer at once. The first true rays of sunlight slipped into the courtyard through a crack in the board fence, and the old, old Mexican woman came out with a broom and began to sweep up the scraps of tortilla that the rat had missed. She seemed no more interested than the rat had been in the fact that two well-dressed middle-aged Americans were sitting on the same chair, hugging one another at seven in the morning.

“I guess I feel a little desperate,” Trevor said finally. “No one seems to understand what I say, you know. I don’t really say much—I know that—but it would still be nice if someone understood me once in a while. But they don’t, and I try to explain it, and then they don’t understand the explanations either, and that’s when I begin to worry that you’ll get married, Aurora. Do you know what I mean?”

Aurora sighed and hugged him a little closer. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I think you must come to my house and have a little breakfast.”

CHAPTER XI

1.

A
T THREE
that afternoon Emma and Rosie began to lose their nerve. Aurora’s annual dinner party for Cecil was due to begin in only five hours, and nothing had been done. Trevor had been given breakfast and had gone away at ten, back to his yacht, and Aurora had disappeared into her bedroom for a nap. She had disappeared merrily, it seemed to Rosie, and had promised to reappear at one, but Emma had shown up at one to help, and the two of them had waited together for two hours, hearing no sound at all from upstairs.

“If she danced all night she’s probably just tired,” Emma said several times. “If I danced all night I’d be tired, and I’m young enough to be her daughter.”

The wit, such as it was, was lost on Rosie, who was chewing a hangnail. She shook her head.

“You don’t know your ma like I do, honey,” Rosie said. “Dancin’ just peps her up. That woman’s got energy to spare, I
can tell you that. She ain’t asleep—she’s up there mopin’. That’s why I always hate to see Mr. Waugh come to town. She has a good time while he’s here, but the minute he leaves things go bad. I never seen such sinking spells as she has after Mr. Waugh leaves. She’s up there having one right now.”

“How do you know? I think she’s just asleep.” Emma was trying to be optimistic.

Rosie continued to nibble at her cuticle. “I know,” she said. “I don’t get this nervous for nothing.”

When three o’clock came around both of them knew something had to be done. Aurora would be madder at them for not intervening in time than she would be for having her nap interrupted, Emma reasoned. Rosie gave the nap theory no credence, but she agreed that action was called for and reluctantly followed Emma upstairs. The door to the bedroom was closed. At the sight of it they both lost their nerve and stood stupidly in front of it for two minutes, until the spectacle of their own cowardice became intolerable. Emma knocked softly, and when there was no answer timidly pushed the door inward.