Terms of Endearment (31 page)

“I just mentioned it because I know you don’t want him yourself,” Emma said. “I thought he might be nice for Rosie. What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know,” Aurora said. “I used to only feel desperate just before my periods, but now it’s apt to happen anytime.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Emma said. “Desperate about what? You’re perfectly fine.”

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you,” Aurora said. “There you sit, on the threshold of life, as I believe they say. I bet you’re in your little nightgown, reading some little book or other. Don’t tell me I’m all right when I’m not. While you’re sitting there on the threshold I’m looking out the back door, and I don’t like what I see. Who knows when my last chance might slip by?”

“Last chance for what?” Emma said.

“For someone!” Aurora said. “Just someone. Or do you think I ought to give up in deference to your father’s memory and dig in my garden for the next thirty years? It’s far from a simple problem. Only a saint could live with me, and I can’t live with a saint. Older men aren’t up to me and younger men aren’t interested. No
matter how brilliant a child you manage to have, I’m hardly the sort to content myself with being a grandmother. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Go grab Vernon then,” Emma said, yawning. The wine was coming back on her.

“I can’t,” Aurora said. “I don’t think Vernon took the slightest notice of women before he met me. What’s one to do about a man who’s waited fifty years to notice women?”

“You mean you smashed your car into a fifty-year-old virgin?” Emma said.

“If such a thing is possible, I’ve done it,” Aurora said.

“Oil millionaires usually have girls tucked away somewhere,” Emma said.

“Oh, if only Vernon had one,” Aurora said. “That would be perfect. Then I could have the thrill of taking him away from her. But I’ve sniffed around thoroughly and there’s not a trace of a girl. I think that Lincoln is my only competition.”

“All this is very reassuring,” Emma said. “Your life is as much of a mess as mine. Experience must not be everything.”

“Hardly,” Aurora said. “Now I’ve brushed my hair and filed my nails, only my hair was already brushed and my nails already filed. I’ve been doing a great deal that’s superfluous lately. That can’t be a good sign.”

“Vernon’s probably biting his,” Emma said. “We’ve been talking fifteen minutes.”

“What a boor your husband is to go to sleep so early,” Aurora said. “He didn’t make a single witty remark all evening, and his tie was dull. I can’t understand why you married someone so unenergetic. Energy is the very least one should be able to expect from a man. There’s no visible evidence that Thomas does you any good at all. Your hair is dull, and he evidently expects you to raise a child in a garage.”

“We don’t plan to live here forever,” Emma said. “I hope you’ll be careful with Vernon. He may be a tender plant.”

“What can I do, with you and Rosie protecting him?” Aurora said. “He has no business being a tender plant at his age, but you don’t have to worry. I may be impossible, but I’m not a lawn mower.”

3.

A
URORA HUNG
up, sighed, and went downstairs to find Vernon and Rosie sitting rather somberly at the kitchen table. The kitchen was spotless. Rosie had her raincoat on and her purse in her hands, but she did not seem eager to leave. Vernon was nervously shuffling a deck of cards.

“You two are hardly encouraging,” Aurora said. “Why are you so quiet?”

“I’m plumb talked out,” Rosie said, although she had said almost nothing all evening. Her face looked a little sunken. When Aurora sat down, she got up to leave.

“I better get going,” she said. “I don’t want to miss that last bus.”

Aurora got up again and walked with her to the door. “Thank you for staying,” she said. “I won’t make a habit of keeping you this late.”

“You didn’t keep me,” Rosie said. “I was just purely too lonesome to leave. Emma looked a little peaked, I thought.”

Aurora nodded, but didn’t comment. Rosie loved to speculate about Emma’s unhappiness, and it was not something she wanted to get into a conversation about just then. She said good night. The sidewalk was pale in the moonlight and she stood in the doorway and watched Rosie walk along it, past the Lincoln, toward the bus stop at the corner. The sound of her heels on the concrete was quite distinct in the still night.

She glanced at Vernon and saw that he was still fiddling with his deck of cards. For some reason, or no reason, the hopefulness in her, which had pulsed quite strongly for part of the evening, began to fade and grow faint, in time, almost, with her maid’s fading footsteps. To stop it from going out altogether she shut the door and turned back to the table.

“Ort to have driven her home, I guess,” Vernon said.

Aurora had picked up a teapot, thinking to make them some tea, but something, some nervousness or uncertainty in his tone,
irritated her. She left the teapot where it was and went at once to the table.

“Why?” she asked. “Why ought you to have taken her home? I fail to see that you have any obligation of that sort at all. Rosie stayed here by her own choice, and she is quite habituated to riding the bus. It isn’t raining and she isn’t a hardship case, despite her present circumstances. She’s a grown adult who’s rather more accustomed than most to fending for herself. If you don’t mind, I wish you’d explain to me why you made that remark.”

Vernon looked up and saw that she was pale with anger. He was horrified—he couldn’t think what he had done that was so bad.

“Don’t know,” he said honestly. “She looked lonesome, an’ her house ain’t much out of my way.”

“Thank you,” Aurora said. “Why don’t you leave, then? You can probably catch her at the bus stop, and if not you can chase down the bus. I doubt that any bus can outrun a fancy car like yours. If you don’t mind my saying so, that car of yours is more suited to someone in the heroin traffic than to a respectable businessman.”

It suddenly occurred to her that she knew almost nothing about the man sitting at her table. “Are you in the heroin traffic?” she asked.

Vernon was having trouble with his lungs. “I didn’t mean nothin’ wrong,” he said.

Aurora watched him, her teeth clenched. Then she stopped watching him and stared at the wall. “Yes, go on, apologize five or six times,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“But what?” Vernon asked. “But what?”

“Oh, shut up,” Aurora said. “I don’t want to talk. It doesn’t matter now. I suppose I should be grateful you bothered to stay as long as you did. No doubt it was very foolish of me to suppose the evening might not be quite at an end. Of course it was also foolish of me not to notice what a fancy you’ve taken to Rosie.”

Vernon stared at her, trying to understand. He was hearing a language he had never heard before—a language not so much of
words, but of emotions. He didn’t understand it at all—he just knew that everything depended on his being able to set things right.

“I ain’t a fancy,” he began desperately. “That ain’t what. It’s just … I was being polite.”

The pain in his voice was compelling enough to cause Aurora to look at him again. “Yes, you’re much too polite, I know that,” she said. “It’s a pity I’m not, but it doesn’t matter now. It happens that you were my guest tonight, and Rosie is not the only woman in the world who is sometimes lonely. I have no claim on you and I certainly don’t want any now, but it would have been only mannerly of you to sit and drink a cup of tea with me before you rush off to huddle in your car again. However, I’m sure that’s much too much to ask of a busy man like you. You were ready to seize any excuse to rush off, weren’t you?”

Her eyes held his, and Vernon knew there was no point in denying it.

“Maybe so, but you don’t understand,” he said.

“I understand you didn’t really want to stay,” Aurora said. “Nothing is more basic than that. Either you were scared to or you just didn’t want to. The first explanation isn’t very flattering to you, and the second isn’t at all flattering to me.”

“Scairt, yeah,” Vernon said. “I don’t know. I never met nobody like you, nor been in nothin’ like this. Why wouldn’t I be scairt?”

Aurora turned so livid with fury that she felt her skin might split. A sense of wrongness overwhelmed her and she hit the table with both hands. The sight of Vernon, honest, nervous, and maddeningly meek, was unendurable. When she hit the table he jumped.

“I don’t want you to be scared!” she yelled. “I’m just a human being! I just wanted you to sit and drink some tea … with me … and be my companion for a few minutes. I’m not going to pour the tea on you unless you drive me completely out of my wits with your reticence, or your stupid inarticulateness. I’m not scary! Don’t tell me I’m scary! There’s nothing frightening about me. You’re just all cowards!”

She sank into a chair and hit the table several more times
before the energy began to go out of her. Vernon stayed in his chair; he didn’t try to move. Aurora was panting from her outrage.

“Why don’t I make the tea?” Vernon said after a minute. “You’re all upset about something.”

He said it without the slightest sense of irony. Aurora shook her head in acquiescence and waved him toward the stove.

“Certainly. I’m glad to see that terror hasn’t paralyzed you,” she said. “Good God. What a useless … stupid …” She shook her head again and left the sentence unfinished.

She watched Vernon without much interest as he made the tea. He did know how, which was something, but by the time he brought the two cups to the table both anger and energy had left her and she was as she had been that afternoon—spiritless, convinced of nothing except that there was not much point in trying to make things right. Things would never be right.

“Thank you, Vernon,” she said, taking her cup. He sat down opposite her. With a teacup in his hands he seemed to feel more secure.

“If I could just talk like you do it’d be an improvement,” he said.

“Oh, Vernon, don’t bother about me,” Aurora said, noting that he actually was the nice little man she had thought him to be-only it didn’t matter.

“I was not mad at you because of the way you talk,” she said. “I was mad because you were scared when you had no reason to be and because you were all set to rush off and leave me with no one to drink tea with. That’s one of the only things I look forward to about an evening like this, you know—someone to drink tea with at the end of it. For all I know, the whole point of civilization is to provide one with someone to drink tea with at the end of an evening. Otherwise you have no one with whom to talk over whatever may have happened during the evening. Dinner parties are often more fun to talk about than they are to attend—at least they aren’t complete until they’ve been discussed.”

She stopped, aware that she was making no sense to Vernon.

“In any case, I would like to apologize for my outburst,” she said. “I’m sorry I accused you of designs on Rosie. You saw a
chance to escape and be polite at the same time, that’s all. It doesn’t matter now.”

The fact that she kept saying that it didn’t matter made Vernon very uneasy. “How am I gonna learn if I don’t make mistakes?” he said.

“You aren’t going to learn,” Aurora said. “Not from me. You’d be dead before you got to the third lesson. It was very wrong of me to encourage you—I’m sorry I did. We’re worlds apart, or light-years, or however you want to measure it. I’m entirely to blame, as usual. I’m a very ill-tempered, disagreeable woman.”

“I thought it was my fault,” Vernon said.

“Sure, like the car wreck,” Aurora said. “You can’t get away with that here, Vernon. I’m harder to fool than that young patrolman.”

“It’s just ignorance,” Vernon said. “That’s my trouble.”

“Of course. It’s hard to learn much if you live your life inside a car,” Aurora said. “That Lincoln is like a big egg, you know. Frankly, I don’t think you want to hatch.”

“Didn’t much care until I met you,” he said.

“Please don’t leave off your pronouns,” she said. “You’ve no idea how it irritates me to hear people chop their sentences that way. I really meant to bring you out and show you a bit of my world, but now you’ve discouraged me.”

“I can still take a run at it, can’t I?” Vernon asked.

“No,” Aurora said, determined to strip him of every shred of hope. “Go on to Alberta, where you were going to begin with. You’ll be more comfortable, I’m sure.”

“You’d make a poker player,” Vernon said, trying a smile. “It’s hard to tell when you’re bluffin’.”

“Wrong,” Aurora said. “Ladies never bluff. They may change their minds, but that’s a different matter.”

“Folks is right,” Vernon said. “Love means trouble.”

“Oh, hush,” Aurora said. “I made you fall in love with me, if that’s what you did. It was my whimsey, and certainly none of your doings.”

She found that she had stopped wanting to talk about anything. She wished very much that Trevor were back, because he would have hugged her, if he had been there, and to be hugged
was what she wanted most. She could have forgiven almost anything for a nice hug. She looked longingly at Vernon, but he didn’t know the meaning of the look. What she felt was too subtle for him.

His instinct was not completely passive, though. He could tell that she needed something, so he brought the teapot and carefully poured her some more tea.

“There you are,” he said hopefully, starting to go back to his side of the table.

Aurora reached out with a foot and dragged a chair from one end of the table around to her side. “I do think you could at least sit on the same side of the table with me,” she said.

Vernon sat down, a little nervously, in profile to her. His profile was only a couple of bumps, and Aurora recovered a touch of her good humor in contemplating it. When she had had enough she reached down and caught the leg of his chair and with a grunt or two managed to twist it so he was more or less facing her.

“There, now we’re having tea, Vernon,” she said prettily. “You’re on my side of the table, you’re more or less facing me, I can see your eyes instead of just your chin and the end of your nose, and you’re close enough that I can hit you if you irritate me. This is almost civilized procedure.”