The Evening Star

by Larry McMurtry

  The fact that Jonathan, whose nickname was Bump, had yet to speak in a recognizable language worried Aurora considerably, but didn’t worry Teddy or Jane at all. For one thing, he could draw some of the Greek alphabet in his coloring book, and had recently shown an interest in the Cyrillic alphabet as well.

  “I don’t care how many alphabets he can draw,” Aurora said. “I want him to say something I can understand.”

  “Maybe he’s just waiting until he has something interesting to say,” Teddy suggested. “Wittgenstein didn’t speak until he was four.”

  “Wittgenstein wasn’t my great-grandchild either,” Aurora said. Jonathan was a beautiful child—he had curly blond hair, unlike his mother, whose hair was blond but straight—and was apparently quite happy. He had alphabet blocks in a variety of alphabets, procured from a special store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he wasn’t amusing himself with them he played what appeared to be quite complicated video games on a TV set that was used for no other purpose—Teddy and Jane objected to American TV on the grounds that the sets weren’t high resolution and thus produced images that were visually degraded. They felt that they were being ripped off by American TV manufacturers, who could have easily made high-resolution TV sets if they had wanted to.

  Aurora also objected to Jonathan’s nickname, Bump. She felt it was a very inadequate nickname for such a beautiful child.

  “Bump suggests a bump on a log,” Aurora pointed out. Sometimes she would show up in the middle of the afternoon and sit on the couch in the little apartment for a while, watching Jonathan amuse himself with his many alphabet blocks. He was by no means a withdrawn child—he loved to crawl all over his great-grandmother and to sit in her comfortable lap and have stories read to him. He made approving or disapproving sounds, he giggled, laughed, yelled, and cried, much as other children did. He just declined to converse. One of Aurora’s theories about this worrisome fact was that Jonathan was silently protesting his own nickname.

  “Why should he speak to people who call him Bump?” she asked one day. “The fact that he can draw all those alphabets suggests a strong sensitivity to language. He probably hates his nickname. If you two would start calling him by his right name he might be talking a blue streak in a matter of days. Nicknames can be dangerous, you know. Perfectly nice people get stuck with dreadful nicknames, often for their whole lives. What if he wants to be president and people are still calling him Bump?”

  Teddy and Jane thought that possibility too slim to take seriously. Jane was rather more prone than Teddy to taking things seriously—at times even too seriously—but she wasn’t worried about Jonathan’s political career being sabotaged by his nickname.

  “He just looked like a Bump, even when he was still in me,” Jane said. “He didn’t even weigh six pounds when he was born.”

  Jane was a very quiet woman—very quiet but very smart. Aurora approved of Jane and had a great deal of confidence in her. Jane was modest, spent nothing on clothes, said little, fed Teddy and Jonathan admirably, kept the apartment tidy, and seemed to be to both a competent and responsible young woman.

  Indeed, Aurora felt slightly intimidated by Jane. All her life she had been slightly intimidated by people who were both competent and responsible. She could not have imagined that such a person would end up in her family, though to her chagrin Patsy Carpenter, her daughter’s best friend, had predicted something of the sort.

  “Teddy may go crazy now and then, but when it comes to a mate he’ll pick well,” Patsy said once, when she and Aurora were discussing the fact that neither of them had done a particularly brilliant job of picking.

  “Why would you think so?” Aurora asked.

  “Because all of his girlfriends have been nice,” Patsy said. “All of his girlfriends have been a lot nicer than any of the people my own kids have been attracted to.”

  Patsy had three children, a son and two daughters, by different marriages. They were roughly the ages of Emma’s children, and none of them had the knack of choosing well. Her son Davey had already married and divorced two shallow rich girls, while her daughters, both of whom had temporarily believed themselves to be Maoists, showed a strong preference for working-class louts.

  Patsy was acutely aware that she herself lacked the knack of picking well. Jim, her first husband, had been an inoffensive but not exactly brilliant yuppie nerd—a yuppie nerd long before either term had been coined—who managed to lose his entire and considerable inheritance in a computer business just when other, brighter yuppie nerds had begun to make billions in computer businesses.

  Tomas, her second husband, had seemed a great deal more promising, and for a time had actually been more promising. He was a very elegant and blazingly arrogant half-Spanish architect whose weird, severe houses had enjoyed about a ten-year vogue in L.A. and some of the tonier beach towns. The two of them had produced two bright, lively daughters before Patsy surprised Tomas in the pool house one day being sucked off by a sixteen-year-old gardener’s assistant. Patsy had just turned forty and was no country girl—she and Tomas had run with the Hollywood elite for more than a decade, during which time she had thought some thoughts and seen some sights. Interrupting the sex startled her, but it startled her far less than the deadly beating Tomas proceeded to give her for having presumed to interrupt his pleasure.

  It was a dark day for their marriage, because Tomas discovered that he enjoyed beating Patsy far more than he enjoyed making love to her. After that he beat her frequently and inventively, until she took her girls and left.

  Two years later, before the lawyers had even finished working out their complex property settlements, Tomas tottered feebly up to her door, a dying man. A few months later he became the first prominent L.A. architect to die of AIDS. Patsy took care of him in his last months, though she could see in his eyes that if he had had the strength he would have liked nothing better than to beat her again.

  It was at that juncture that Patsy moved back to Houston and picked up the threads of her old, old relationship with Aurora Greenway, and with Emma’s children. Her sexual confidence, such as it had been, was lost; she was so convinced that she would never pick well that for over three years she simply ceased picking. Though her heart went out to fat little Melanie, the child of Emma’s that touched her most was Teddy. He treated Patsy like a beloved aunt, and, even when he himself was shaky or more or less out of his head, had the knack of soothing her when she was upset.

  Bereft of confidence that she or any of the children would ever manage to mate successfully, she fixed her hopes on Teddy, and he did not disappoint her; besides which, it was no small pleasure to point out that she had seen something in Teddy which Aurora missed.

  Teddy and Jane supported themselves by working different shifts at a 7-Eleven on Westheimer. Aurora, Rosie, and Patsy were all horrified that they had chosen such a dangerous profession; in Houston, as elsewhere, convenience store employees were natural targets, and targets which were frequently hit—but Teddy and Jane simply walked around these protests.

  “That’s the reason we work different shifts,” Jane told Aurora. “If one of us gets killed the other will still be there to raise Bump.”

  “Yes, but it would be a great deal nicer for Jonathan if you were both there to raise him,” Aurora pointed out.

  The 7-Eleven was only two blocks from their apartment, and was owned by a nice Vietnamese who sold spring rolls and good soups as snacks, something Teddy and Jane approved of. Jane often made the soups herself. Mr. Wey, the Vietnamese, was teaching her Vietnamese cooking. Teddy usually worked the night shift, midnight to eight; he had been held up twice and had had a few other nervous moments, but on the whole he and Jane liked the convenience of working at their neighborhood convenience store. They knew almost everyone who came in and felt that they were serving a useful role in their community—the lower Westheimer community, to be specific. It was a little dangerous, but no more so than being crazy, they felt. In her worst year Jane had tri
ed suicide three times; in his worst, Teddy had tried it twice. The arrival of Bump had removed that possibility—both were very devoted to their child.

  But neither had forgotten how they felt on the days when they had tried to die, and they went about their work at the 7-Eleven with a serenity matched only by that of Mr. Wey, who had left Vietnam on a boat that had sunk in a storm, drowning his wife and two of his three children. He lived with his surviving daughter, a girl named Nani, who had started high school in Houston knowing almost no English and a mere four years later won a full scholarship to Princeton.

  Teddy and Jane considered that in Mr. Wey they had lucked into the perfect boss. He appreciated their efficiency and politeness; besides teaching Jane Vietnamese cooking, he was helping Teddy learn the language. Over the years, Teddy’s linguistic interests had drifted eastward—from Greek to Farsi, then Hindi, then Sanskrit. He thought they might drift ever farther eastward, and was delighted to be working for a man who could give him a toehold on Vietnamese.

  It was not quite time for Teddy to go to work when Melanie came tromping up the stairs and burst in with the news that Pascal Ferney had just tried to strangle their grandmother. Bump was sound asleep in the middle of the floor, hugging a stuffed raccoon. Teddy was reading a page or two of Horace—he didn’t want to let his Latin slip too far—and Jane was combing her long blond hair and wondering if a cup of tea would keep her awake.

  “He did what?” she asked, when Melanie burst out with the news of the attempted strangling. On first blush it seemed a little too weird to be believed.

  “I saw him!” Melanie insisted. “He had his hands around her throat and he was strangling her.”

  “What happened next?” Teddy asked. Something out of the ordinary must have happened, because Melanie was looking more animated than she had looked in months. She was really excited, which in Teddy’s view was good. One of Melanie’s big problems was that she had lost the capacity for excitement when she was around fourteen—her loss of interest in her own math skills was an example. In junior high Melanie had been one of the three top students in the city of Houston in math skills—she could have gone free to virtually any college in the land. But then she just stopped doing anything at all with her math. Teddy was a big believer in keeping one’s skills honed, which was one reason he was reading Horace. Also, of course, he liked Horace, in the way that Melanie had once liked calculus, but now Melanie didn’t seem to like anything very much, not even her stupid lover, or former lover, Bruce.

  “What happened next was that I told him to cut it out,” Melanie said.

  “Did he cut it out?” Jane inquired, getting up to make tea. It looked as if she was going to be up for a while anyway.

  “Yeah, he quit strangling her,” Melanie said. “He got all embarrassed and went to the bathroom and ran water on his tie. I guess he just flipped out or something.”

  “Aurora likes to goad people,” Jane observed. “Maybe she just goaded Pascal once too often.”

  “That isn’t even the interesting part,” Melanie said. “When Pascal left the room I asked her what had been going on and she said she had been trying to get him to make love to her on the couch.”

  Teddy and Jane received this information calmly—a little too calmly for Melanie’s taste. Teddy and Jane made a big point of being unshockable—it could become a little irritating. All Teddy did, when he heard the news, was pick Bump off the floor and deposit him in his bed, which was about three steps away. It wasn’t a large apartment. Bump didn’t wake up, nor did he lose his grip on his raccoon.

  “Don’t you think that’s weird, Teddy?” Melanie asked. “Our own grandmother trying to get a guy to fuck her on the couch? He isn’t even her main boyfriend, either.”

  “Maybe her main boyfriend’s getting too old to cut the mustard anymore,” Jane suggested. “I hope not—I like Hector—but I guess he is getting up in years.”

  “She went to see Tommy today, too,” Teddy reminded them. “She gets a little crazed when she goes to see Tommy, and you can’t blame her. I get a little crazed when I go see Tommy—we all do.”

  “That’s because Tommy’s too sad,” Melanie said, remembering how after her last visit to the prison she had felt so weird and frenzied that she had wanted just to turn her car north and keep driving for days until she got to Wisconsin or somewhere. The part that made her feel frenzied was that Tommy wouldn’t even try not to be sad. He wouldn’t even try to look forward to anything—like getting paroled or something. Of course he wouldn’t be eligible for parole for five or six more years, but still, five or six years wasn’t forever; he could permit himself some little ray of hope, only he wouldn’t.

  “You’re both making it too complicated,” Jane said. “Maybe she just plain wanted to get it on with Pascal.”

  “‘Get it on’ is one of those phrases that makes me shudder,” Teddy said. “Just say she wanted to fuck him. Why torture the language?”

  “Sorry,” Jane said mildly. “I keep forgetting you hate that phrase.”

  “What I really hate is that you don’t hate it,” Teddy said.

  “I don’t see why I’m supposed to hate it,” Jane said, “It’s just a phrase.”

  “I can’t get the thought of Granny doing it on the couch out of my mind,” Melanie admitted. “Do you think old people kiss?”

  Neither Jane nor Teddy seemed to have any opinion on the likelihood of old people kissing.

  “What if they kissed and one of them had false teeth and the false teeth started to come out?” Melanie asked. “Yuk.”

  Jane laughed. She didn’t often laugh, but she had a deep, delightful laugh that sort of filled the room, once she released it. People who got to hear Jane laugh realized immediately that this was a hearty woman laughing, and after that, when they were with Jane, they waited for her to laugh again. Sometimes they had a long wait. Jane was not a person who could be called giggly or tittery. She either laughed or she didn’t.

  “You should be a writer, Melly,” Jane said. “That’s the kind of thing a writer would think of. I doubt Aurora would let false teeth stop her if she really wanted to kiss somebody.”

  “No, and neither would you,” Teddy said, looking at Jane. “You’d just kiss him—or her—wouldn’t you?”

  Jane handed Melanie a cup of tea.

  “You bet I would,” Jane said, giving Teddy a kind of stern look—a look that, in Melanie’s view, sort of said Watch it, buster. Teddy had a way of saying things that went a little too far. He had made a number of remarks about Bruce that went a little too far, also. Jane lived with Teddy—it was probably good that she could hit him with a stern look when his remarks got out of hand.

  “Maybe I ought to go home,” Melanie said.

  “No, have some tea,” Jane said. “Teddy has to go to work in five minutes.”

  A few minutes later, Teddy did go to work. He had an old green scarf that he wrapped around his throat when he went to work. Teddy was very prone to sore throats—he had many allergies and really needed a drier climate than Houston’s, but he wouldn’t leave the city.

  “If I got you a new scarf for Christmas, would you wear it?” Melanie asked. “You’ve been wearing that scarf ever since you were in grade school—you got it when we still lived in Nebraska. Wouldn’t you like a new scarf?”

  “Well, I might,” Teddy allowed. He seemed to be a little moody—a little low. Teddy rarely did anything dramatic when he was low—he didn’t have fits anymore, or disappear for days at a stretch—but it was not hard to tell when he was depressed. Melanie’s notion was that Jane’s stern look had done it, but then, why shouldn’t Jane have given him the look? He had sort of hinted that Jane was bisexual. Of course, Teddy and Jane were a pretty advanced couple, but Melanie had never given any thought to Jane being bisexual until Teddy made his remark, which sort of implied that Jane would be just as likely to kiss a girl as she would to kiss a boy. Melanie looked at Jane, wondering if it could be true.

  “Do
n’t give him a new scarf,” Jane said. “Give me a new scarf. I’ll wear it. Teddy plans to wear his green scarf for the rest of his life. He doesn’t like change.”

  “You have to admit it can be upsetting,” Teddy said. “I think I’ll go see Granny tomorrow. Maybe I can find out what’s going on between her and Pascal.”

  It was true that their granny told Teddy stuff that she never told anyone else, not even Rosie. Teddy had taken a course in memory while he was still at the University of Texas, and he had talked to their granny about some of the memory concepts he had learned—storage and retrieval and other stuff that Melanie, who had not had a memory course, didn’t fully grasp.

  Somehow the stuff Teddy told their granny about memory had given Aurora the weird idea of trying to remember every day of her life. She called it her memory project and announced that she fully intended to remember every day of her life before she was done. She had had a room over the garage fixed up to do her memory project in, and had even hired people to go up in the attic and bring down boxes full of old engagement calendars and baby books, and her husband’s desk diaries and stuff. She even had engagement calendars and diaries and journals that had belonged to her mother and grandmother—maybe even her great-grandmother. Aurora really seemed to think that when she settled down and sorted out all the calendars and diaries she could do a complete chronology of her entire life and remember every single day; and all this started because Teddy happened to have a free elective and had decided to take a course on the structure of the memory.

  Just before Teddy went out the door to go to work Jane went over and gave him a kiss and bit his ear. “Sell a lot of spring rolls,” she said.