Terms of Endearment (32 page)

Vernon’s breast was all confusion. Aurora was smiling at him, which didn’t fit with all the terrible things she had just said. She seemed exuberant again, and seemed to have forgiven him for all the wrong things he had done, but he knew he might do more wrong things at any moment. He jittered and tapped his fingers rapidly on his knees, hoping very much that he could manage not to do anything wrong. Generally when there was a woman around she was a waitress and there was a counter in between them, but there certainly wasn’t a counter between him and Aurora.

“Jitter, jitter, jitter,” she said. “Stop tapping your fingers.”

Actually, watching him twitch had reminded her of the first small man in her life—a tiny dean from Harvard who had been her first lover and whose memory had remained surprisingly fresh after quite a number of years. His name was Fifoot, Dean Fifoot, so small and ugly, so energetic and competitive and intense—compensating
constantly in every possible way—that neither her scruples nor her maidenhood had stood the slightest chance; she had lost both at the same time and never really recovered even the scruples, it seemed to her. If there had really been anything wrong with Trevor it had been that he was mild and lazy and tall and confident and had the bad fortune to follow upon a man with gigantic energies and ambitions and a small body. Trevor could never have imagined such hunger as her little dean had; she herself was only to encounter its like again, briefly, in Alberto, when he was flush with his first great success as a singer. For that matter, Trevor would never have got the chance to sail her around on his boat if Dean Fifoot hadn’t suddenly married a rich unattractive woman. Aurora could not recall that she had been precisely heartbroken—her heart had never had time to get focused exactly—but for several years thereafter she did feel that life was a comedown in some respects. And now there was another small man, in her very own kitchen, rattling his teacup against his saucer, worth six million dollars by his own admission, energies to burn, the need to compensate sticking out all over him, and yet without a speck of savoir-faire.

“It’s just my luck,” she said.

“What is?”

“You,” she said. “Here I need a man of the world and I get a man of the oil fields.”

Vernon looked puzzled.

“You’re a very unrewarding person, in my view,” Aurora went on. “You wait fifty years to fall in love for the first time, and then you pick me. I’m fiendishly difficult, as you’ve already discovered. Only years of experience could prepare any man to deal with me. You have the nerve to present yourself to me without a shred of experience, just when I need a lot of love and skillful handling. In short, you’re a washout.”

She sat back happily to watch him make what he could of
that
speech.

“How’d I know I was gonna meet you?” Vernon asked. “Chances was one in a million.”

“What a ridiculous defense,” Aurora said. “The point of my criticism was that you’ve lived fifty years and made no effort to
meet anybody, that I can see. You’re a perfectly nice, competent, efficient, friendly man, and you might have made some woman very happy, yet you’ve made no effort to use yourself at all. You’ve made no one really happy, not even yourself, and now you’re so set in your ridiculous ways that you wouldn’t know how to begin to relate to another person. It’s shameful, really. You’re a wasted resource. Furthermore, you’re a resource I might have wanted.”

“Ought to be ashamed of myself, I guess,” Vernon said.

“Shame never made anybody happy,” Aurora said. “It’s one of those perfectly useless emotions, like regret. Meanwhile all around you people are starving.”

“Well, I got half my life left, if nothing don’t fall on me,” Vernon said. “Maybe I can learn something.”

“I doubt it,” Aurora said. “The day we met you showed some promise, but I don’t know where it went. You’ve allowed me to cow you. I guess you were just a flash in the pan.”

Vernon stood up suddenly. He knew things were hopeless, but he couldn’t stand to hear Aurora say it so cheerfully. “No, I’m just an ignorant fool,” he said.

Aurora was on the point of telling him his remark contained a redundancy, but she noted just in time that she had tripped along too far and hurt his feelings.

“Now, now,” she said. “Of course I apologize. Don’t you have any sense of play at all? I was speaking in a spirit of fun. I just like to see how you react. Pay attention to the tone of my voice once in a while, for goodness’ sake. I can’t be serious all the time, can I? Are you trying to leave again just because I twitted you a little?”

Vernon sat back down. “I’m in a pickle,” he said, thinking out loud. “I don’t know whether I’m going or coming,” he added, blushing.

Aurora accepted the blush as a sign of emotion, and decided she’d better be satisfied with that. She spent the last twenty minutes of the evening trying not to do anything that might upset him, but when he asked if he could come for breakfast she shook her head.

“I don’t think you should bother, Vernon,” she said. “I don’t
even think you really want to. We’re a bigger puzzle to one another than we were the day we met. I’m glad you wanted me for your first sweetheart, but I’m a little too formidable for a first sweetheart. I might have made a nice last romance, but you haven’t had your first one yet, have you?”

“Well, this,” Vernon said.

When he got in his car to drive away, Aurora shook her head, in criticism of herself, and without another word turned and went back to her house.

Vernon drove away feeling so confused he was almost sick at his stomach.

4.

S
OMETIME IN
the night Aurora awoke. She hated to awake in the night and tried to will herself to stay asleep, but it didn’t work. She woke into a state of deep
tristesse—
helpless and wordless. It was happening more and more often, and it was something she never told anyone about. It was too deep. She usually made a special effort to be gay after such nights; if anyone noticed anything out of the ordinary, it was Rosie, and Rosie held her peace.

When she knew she was awake, with the sadness upon her again, she got up and took her pillows and her comforter to the window nook and sat looking out the window. There was a moon, and the trees in her back yard cast deep shadows. It was a thoughtless state, a formless sadness; she could not even say whether what she missed was someone to want, or someone to want her, but the ache behind her breastbone was so pronounced that she occasionally hit herself, hoping that would make it loosen and go away. But the feeling that made the ache was too strong; her little blows didn’t affect it. It was her old off-centeredness, or uncenteredness, a sense that something was stopping that hadn’t ought to stop.

She had made every effort to remain active, to keep open to life, and yet life was beginning to resist her in unexpected ways. Men, some of them decent and good, seemed to march through
her life almost daily, and yet they caused so little to stir within her that she had begun to be afraid—not just that nothing would ever stir again, but that she would stop wanting it to, cease caring whether it did or not, or even come to prefer that it didn’t.

It was that fear, finally, that left her awake and tearless at her window late at night. She wasn’t falling behind, slipping into some sort of widow’s stupor; she was moving ahead, beyond reach. Her own daughter had suddenly made her realize it by quietly usurping her right to have a child. It was Emma’s turn to have children, but what was it
her
turn to do? It had taken her daughter’s pregnancy to make her realize how nearly impregnable she herself had become—impregnable in a variety of ways. Let her get a little stronger, a little older, a little more set in her ways, with a few more barricades of habit and routine, and no one would ever break in. Her ways would be her house and her garden and Rosie and one or two old friends, and Emma and the children she would have. Her delights would be conversation and concerts, the trees and the sky, her meals and her house, and perhaps a trip or two now and then to the places she liked best in the world.

Such things were all very well, yet the thought that such things were going to be her life for as far ahead as she could see made her sad and restless—almost as restless as Vernon, except that her fidgets were mostly internal and seldom caused her to do anything more compulsive than twisting her rings. As she sat at the window, looking out, her sense of the wrongness of it was deep as bone. It was not just wrong to go on so, it was killing. Her energies, it seemed to her, had always flowed from a capacity for expectation, a kind of hopefulness that had persisted year after year, in defiance of all difficulties. It was hopefulness, the expectation that something nice was bound to happen to her, that got her going in the morning and brought her contentedly to bed at night. For almost fifty years some secret spring inside her had kept feeding hopefulness into her bloodstream, and she had gone through her days expectantly, always eager for surprises and always finding them.

Now the stream seemed dry—probably there would be no more real surprises. Men had taken to fleeing before her, and soon her own daughter would have a child. She had always lived close to people; now, thanks to her own strength or her own particularity and the various quirks of fate, she was living at an intermediate distance from everybody, in her heart. It was wrong; she didn’t want it to go on. She was forgetting too much—soon she would be unable to remember what she was missing. Even sex, she knew, would eventually relocate itself and become an appetite of the spirit. Perhaps it had already happened, but if it hadn’t it soon would.

The worst of the sadness passed, but when it did she felt so wakeful that she knew she wouldn’t sleep for the rest of the night. She went down, made tea, and got some cookies. Then she returned to her window nook and drank and ate, considering her options. So far as men went, all of the ones she knew were wrong, quite wrong. She had stopped feeling desperate, but she knew that unless something changed and changed soon she was going to do something sad—give up on herself in some way. She didn’t sigh or flounce at the thought; she looked out her window at the dim yard and the cold facts. The cold facts seemed to be that unless she wanted to live alone for the rest of her life, in a general and rather quiescent way, she would have to hack her way into the best relationship she could get.

What seemed to be required was a somewhat cold-blooded decision, and hot blood had been the way of her life. What was obvious was that if she were to wait for hot blood to take her any farther she would probably wait in vain. Miracles did happen, but there was no counting on them. Nothing would ever be right, but it was four in the morning and she was in her fiftieth year. She didn’t want to surrender to everything middling, placid, empty. Better pride be let to fall, if pride was what it was that was reducing her spirit day by day.

She thought of the nice little man in the white car whose love she had idly called into being. It would probably be a very decent love, and it might even be possible to teach him to express it; but the thought of his decency didn’t cause her to lift the
phone. Instead, when her ship’s clock told her it was five o’clock she lifted it and called her neighbor, General Hector Scott.

“Yes, General Scott here,” he said, briskly and scratchily, as wide awake as if it were noon.

“Of course you’re up, Hector,” she said. “You’ve not let down your standards. I must admit that’s something. However, I’ve decided to sue you.”

“Sue
me?”
General Scott said, momentarily incredulous. “You’re calling me at five
A.M
. to tell me you’re going to sue me? That’s the goddamnedst gall I’ve ever encountered, I can tell you that.”

“Well, I’m not likely to relent now that my mind’s made up,” she said.

“Aurora, what in the hell’s got into you?” he asked. “This is arrant nonsense. You can’t sue me.”

“Oh, I believe I’m well within my rights, Hector,” she said. “I believe your whole position in regard to our car wreck was highly illegal. However, I like to think I’m a fair woman. I’m willing to invite you to breakfast, to give you a chance to plead your case. I don’t see how anyone could be fairer than that.”

“Yes, well, I’d like to give you a punch in the goddamn nose while we’re talking of fair,” the General said, his temper flaring at the memory of how coolly she had walked off and left him in the Cadillac.

“Hector, you’re far too old to punch anyone,” Aurora said. “Anything you got you can be sure you deserved, if you’re speaking of inconvenience. Are you coming to breakfast or are you just going to stand there mouthing ineffectual threats?”

“What’s become of your little gambler?” he asked.

“That is a matter that doesn’t concern you at all,” she said. “Are you coming over here or are you going to go run around with those silly dogs?”

“They are not silly, and of course I intend to run,” the General said. “I invariably run. Then I’m coming over there and punch you right in the nose.”

“Oh, sticks and stones, Hector,” Aurora said. “How will you take your eggs?”

“Poached,” the General said.

“All right,” Aurora said. “Try not to exhaust yourself on your ridiculous little run, please. We have our lawsuit to discuss, and I won’t have you flagging.”

She hung up before he could utter another word. Three minutes later, not entirely to her surprise, someone began to bang on her front door. She put the phone back in its place and belted her robe. The banging stopped but the doorbell began to ring. Aurora put on her robe, got a hairbrush, and sauntered slowly downstairs, brushing her hair. She opened the front door and met the eye of a very angry red-faced general. He had on the gray sweat suit he wore to run in.

“I’ll punch you in the nose, God damn you, and then I’ll do my run,” he said.

Aurora lifted her chin. “Un-uh,” she said.

The General could scarcely see, he was so angry; but even in his fury he could detect a look of cool, rather careless challenge in Aurora’s eyes. She had not even stopped brushing her hair.