Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  “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.

  AT 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.

  They both saw at once that Aurora was up. She was sitting at her dressing table, in her blue dressing gown, with her back to the door, and she gave no indication at all that she had heard it open. She was staring at the mirror, and her hair was in wild disarray.

  “We got the bull by the horns now, honey,” Rosie said. Mostly out of a desire to protect Emma she hurried into the room as if nothing was wrong and went straight over to her boss. The look in Aurora’s eyes was the look Rosie most dreaded—a look of clear, unfocused hopelessness. Her face was composed, but it was not the face of the gay woman who had had such a good time at breakfast, only a few hours before.

  “All right, quit mopin’” Rosie said quickly.

  “Momma, please,” Emma said. “Don’t stare at the mirror that way. What’s wrong?”

  “Quit mopin’, I said,” Rosie repeated. “Get up from there. You got a dinner to cook, if you ain’t forgotten. Don’t sit there feelin’ sorry for yourself. That ain’t gonna get your dinner cooked.”

  Aurora turned her head briefly and met her maid’s eye. Her own were completely without feeling.

  “You think I’m feeling sorry for myself, do you?” she said. “I suppose you’d like a raise for supplying me with that little diagnosis.”

  She glanced at Emma before turning her gaze back to the mirror. “I suppose that’s what you think too, Emma,” she said.

  “For God’s sake, I don’t know what’s wrong,” Emma said. “Neither of us know what’s wrong. What is wrong?”

  Aurora shrugged but didn’t answer.

  “Momma, please answer,” Emma said. “I hate it when you won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Ask Mrs. Dunlup,” Aurora said. “I’m sure she knows me better than I know myself anyway. The truth is I was not prepared to have the two of you enter my bedroom. I do not wish to be visited—that should be plain enough. I would consider it a kindness if the two of you would take yourselves and your opinions away. I might begin to feel vicious at any moment, and for your own sakes I’d rather we didn’t risk a confrontation right now. Two people I know might not survive it.”

  “Go ahead an’ get mad,” Rosie said, hardly able to breathe she was so tense.

  Aurora said nothing. She picked up a hairbrush and idly hit her palm with it a few times. Her eyes were still focused on nothing.

  “We don’t know what to do about dinner,” Emma said. “Please talk. Can’t you just give us some instructi
ons?”

  Aurora lifted the brush and gave her hair a few hopeless strokes. “All right, Emma,” she said, not turning around. “I do not like inflicting myself on people when I am in my present mood, but I see you aren’t going to give me any choice. Evidently I no longer have the privilege of deciding when I’m to have company and when I’m not.”

  “That’s right,” Rosie said, her voice a little hollow from the bluff she was trying to pull. “We’re gonna barge right in on you whenever we feel like it from now on.”

  Aurora turned on her. “You listen, Rosie,” she said. “Talk as much as you like, but you better have another job lined up if you choose to accuse me of self-pity again. I don’t like it.”

  “Shoot, I feel sorry for myself all the time,” Rosie said retreating. “Don’t ever’body?”

  “No,” Aurora said.

  “A lot of people do,” Emma said nervously, trying to help Rosie out.

  Aurora whirled on her. “I was not addressing you, and you have very little knowledge of what you’re talking about,” she said. “There are times when one is ashamed to be seen, and I was in the midst of such a time when the two of you barged in. It was most thoughtless of you. Evidently the two of you concluded that I am so weak or so feeble-minded that I would forget my own dinner party, so you came up to prompt me. I wish you hadn’t. I have been giving dinner parties for a great many years and I am quite capable of preparing a dinner in considerably less time than I have left. I had no intention of shirking my duties as a hostess, which is apparently what you both assumed I was about to do.”

  “Don’t go jumpin’ on me,” Rosie said, on the verge of tears. “I’m half crazy anyway.”

  “Yes, you’re getting much less than you deserve out of this life,” Aurora said. “I happen to have the opposite problem. I happen to be getting better than I deserve. Trevor Waugh never fails to bring that home to me. Why that happens to be so I don’t know, but even if I could figure it out it wouldn’t be any of your business, that I can see.

  “Nor yours,” she said hotly, turning back to Emma. She stopped, her bosom heaving, and considered herself in the mirror for a moment. “It’s odd,” she said. “My lower lip seems fuller when I’m unhappy.”

  Emma and Rosie exchanged hopeful looks, but their optimism was premature. Aurora was staring again, and once her chest stopped heaving she seemed even more drained of energy and spirit than she had before her little outburst.

  “All right,” Emma said. “I’m sorry we came in without warning you. We’ll go away and leave you alone.”

  Aurora looked straight ahead. A tear had leaked out of one eye. It made its way down one cheek, but no more followed.

  “No need for you to go now,” she said. “You’ve seen me at my worst.”

  She looked around at Rosie, sighed, then tightened her lips and drew back her fist in a weak mockery of anger. “I’ll self-pity you,” she said tiredly. “Would you please make me some tea?”

  “Make you a bucketful,” Rosie said, so glad the tension was finally broken that she sniffled a little as she went out.

  “We’re dreadfully sorry,” Emma said, squatting down by her mother’s chair.

  Aurora looked at her and nodded. “Yes, that’s you, Emma,” she said. “You’ve apologized three or four times now for doing something that was perfectly natural. In fact, you may have been right. I might have sat right there and let my dinner party collapse. I’m afraid you’re just going to apologize your way through life, and you’ll be sorry if you do.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Emma asked. “Kick you while you were down?”

  Aurora began to brush her hair in something like earnest. “If you had any instinct you would have,” she said. “It’s certainly the only chance you’ll get to kick me.”

  “Your lower lip is fuller when you’re unhappy,” Emma said to change the subject.

  Aurora considered it. “Yes, I’m afraid it makes me look a good deal more passionate than I am,” she said. “I’ve never quite lived up to my lower lip.”

  “How was old Trevor?” Emma asked.

  Aurora looked down at her with a touch of hauteur. “Old Trevor is no older than I,” she said. “You might keep that in mind. Old Trevor and old Aurora had a very nice evening, thank you, and in point of fact old Trevor is very nearly ideal. What do you think made me so gloomy? Unfortunately he timed our whole life wrong. I didn’t need him when I had him and now I need him and don’t want him. He even offered to take an apartment in New York this time. Considering that he loathes it there, that was extremely sweet of him. I’d have Bloomingdale’s and Bendel’s, and the Met and the Metropolitan, and a decent Sunday newspaper for a change. I’d also have a nice warm loving man like Trevor. That’s practically everything my nature craves.”

  “Do it then,” Emma said. “Go marry him.”

  Aurora looked her over thoughtfully. “Yes, you have a good deal more of your grandmother’s nature than you have of mine,” she said. “She was a great advocate of half measures too.”

  She got up and wandered over to the window to see how her back yard looked. Life was beginning to return to her in little stages. She tried singing and found that she was in good voice. It made her feel even better, and she looked down at her daughter tauntingly.

  “Was Daddy a half measure?” Emma asked. “You never tell me anything important. How much of your life was he? I need to know.”

  Aurora came back to the dressing table and began to brush her hair vigorously. “Thirty to thirty-five percent,” she said crisply. “Somewhere in that range.”

  “Poor Daddy,” Emma said. “That’s not very much.”

  “No, but it was steady,” Aurora said.

  “I wasn’t sympathizing with you, I was sympathizing with Daddy,” Emma said.

  “Oh, naturally. I’m sure you prefer to think I made your father miserable, but in fact I didn’t. His life was quite agreeable to him—a good deal more so than mine has been to me.”

  “I wish you’d tell me about your wicked past,” Emma said. “Sometimes I don’t feel that I know you well.”

  Aurora laughed. She was enjoying brushing her hair. It had the kind of lights it should have, which pleased her. She got up and went to her closet to begin thinking about what to wear.

  “I have no time to reveal myself just now,” she said. “If I had any time to spare I’d run out and buy a new dress. Unfortunately I do not have time. I’m having a rather exotic goulash tonight—this will be a real test. If Cecil comes up with a dry plate we’ll know he’s superhuman.”

  “Why were you so blue?” Emma asked.

  “Because I ought to marry Trevor and make him happy and in the process lead the life I was meant to lead,” Aurora said. “Unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to achieve the life I was meant to lead. At the moment the line of my life seems to be pointed off into nowhere. Trevor seems to be having trouble with his women, and he’s only going to have more as he gets older. It’s rather disgusting that I don’t care enough about him to haul him out of his stews, but evidently I don’t. There are times when I find myself an unrewarding person. It’s not a feeling I enjoy, and Trevor almost always causes it.”

  She reflected for a moment, twisting her rings. “It’s a good thing my hair still looks nice,” she said.

  “It’s also a good thing you’re in a better mood,” Emma said. “I never know how we get through this dinner party anyway. I never know why we even try.”

  “I think that’s quite plain,” Aurora said. “It’s a social necessity you forced upon us by marrying Thomas. If you hadn’t, it’s certainly not likely that I’d be entertaining Cecil, though actually I suppose he’s a decent sort.”

  At that moment Rosie came in with the tea, and the phone rang. Aurora nodded for Rosie to take it. Rosie said hello and immediately handed the phone to Aurora.

  “Hello, Vernon. When were you planning to come over here?” Aurora asked. She listened a moment, lifting her eyebro
ws.

  “Vernon, if I expected you to be in the way I would hardly have asked you,” she said. “I don’t have time just now to deal with your self-doubts. If you’re afraid to risk yourself in my company perhaps you ought to huddle in your car making phone calls for the rest of your life. That’s certainly safe enough, though it’s rather ridiculous behavior. You come along whenever you’ve got your nerve up.”

  “All right, remember what I told you,” Rosie said when Aurora put down the phone. “I got loyalties to that man. You better not mistreat him.”

  “Don’t be silly. I was just trying to make him feel wanted,” Aurora said, going rapidly to her closet. “I wish to have my tea in private, if no one minds, and then I assure you we’re going to get cracking on our little party. Cecil Horton is going to get a goulash the like of which he’s never reckoned with before.”

  Before Emma and Rosie could get out of the room she had thrown off her dressing gown and pulled a half dozen dresses out of her closet, strewing some on her bed, some on her sofa, and some in the window nook, all the while continuing to brush her shining hair.

  2.

  EMMA’S EVENING started with a fight—par for the course on the evening of her mother’s annual dinner for Cecil. The ostensible cause of the fight was a new tie, which she had bought Flap on her way home that afternoon. She had bought it in a nice men’s shop in the River Oaks shopping center, and it had cost nine dollars. That was extravagant and she knew it, but she still had most of the money her mother had given her to buy clothes with, so it was really her mother’s extravagance, not hers. Besides, it was a wonderful tie, black with deep red lines in it, and she would probably have bought it even if she had been spending their own money.

  Flap, in a bad mood anyway, took offense at the very sight of the tie and refused to consider even putting it on so Emma could see how nice he looked in it.

  “I won’t wear it,” he said flatly. “You just bought it hoping it would make me look good in the eyes of your mother. I know you. You’re a coward to the end. You’re just a Quisling where your mother is concerned. You’re always trying to make me appear to be what she wants me to be. If you were loyal to me you wouldn’t care what I wore.”