The Evening Star

by Larry McMurtry

  “Is she running away?” Rosie asked.

  “Yes, and she sounds really happy,” Aurora said. “I have decided, for once, to let be.”

  “Why?” Rosie and the General asked, almost in chorus.

  “Because I want her to have that happiness,” Aurora said sharply. “It may not last, of course—but then, what lasts?”

  “Well, we’ve lasted, sort of,” the General said.

  “‘Sort of is right,” Aurora said.

  16

  The next morning Aurora woke in a state of low spirits, of the sort most apt to afflict her when she managed a more or less noble act—in this case, letting Melanie leave them to pursue her own life. It was the right thing to do, and she considered that she had done it with at least a bit of grace; yet the fact was, Melanie was now gone and she missed her already. Also, Melanie was pregnant, and who would be there now to see that she stayed on a proper, healthy prenatal course? Young people were apt to place too much confidence in their bodies; they assumed things would turn out all right, and yet, often, when babies were born, things didn’t.

  She crawled out of bed, being careful not to wake the elderly nudist sleeping beside her, went downstairs, made tea, and brought a pot of it back to bed with her. It was just light. A rosy tint showed over the treetops to the east. Aurora repaired to her window seat to drink her tea and watch the dawn develop; she felt no less low. Very little was right in her life, she knew. Her granddaughter, by now, was far to the west, perhaps sleeping in a cheap motel with her young man. To Aurora, Bruce hadn’t seemed much, but at least he had been capable of an impulse. One of her grandsons would be just finishing his shift at the 7-Eleven—at least he would be, if he hadn’t been murdered on the job. Another grandson, seventy miles to the north, had the job of being a prisoner, because he had murdered. All of her dreams for those children had been cruelly shattered—what would any of them ever amount to?

  While she was sipping and reflecting, Hector uttered a strangled groan and woke up briefly. “Turn me over, I ache,” he said. “I need to change sides.”

  Aurora put down her tea and helped him change sides; before she had quite finished he uttered another groan and went back to sleep.

  “Hector, I do wish you wouldn’t groan, it makes you seem so old,” Aurora said, but he didn’t hear her. Sometimes she thought he just looked normal, but other times she thought he looked very old, and this morning he definitely looked very old. She had many years of life before her—at least she hoped she had—but it was obvious that Hector didn’t have very many—not a reflection that helped her low spirits much.

  C.C. Granby’s station wagon was parked at her curb, as it always was on the rare nights when Rosie could persuade her jittery beau to spend the night with her. Aurora had peeked into the car a time or two and had pronounced it a mess. C.C. sold oil-field products of a mysterious nature and the station wagon was always littered with them. A neat man in person, he seemed to let chaos reign in his car.

  Aurora had no more than glanced down at the car, taking note of the fact that Rosie’s boyfriend had at least showed up. But something didn’t seem quite right about the car, so she glanced again. The light was not strong; she wasn’t sure, but the car seemed to be trembling slightly. It struck Aurora as very odd: parked cars rarely trembled. She looked again, and sure enough the car was trembling—in fact, it was almost shuddering. She recalled that oil-field work sometimes involved explosives; perhaps C.C. had left some form of explosive in his car and the explosive was about to go off. It seemed rather alarming. She was about to grab the telephone and call Rosie to tell her to wake her boyfriend and get him out there before his station wagon exploded all over her lawn, waking the neighbors and very likely bringing the police; but then, peering more closely, she thought she saw a human form, or forms, in the car. A passing cloud had just obscured the sun, making it difficult to see; also, she was high up and the car well below her. Perhaps it wasn’t about to blow up; perhaps someone was inside, trying to steal whatever C.C. sold. She had heard that there were even methods by which cars could be started and stolen by people who didn’t have keys to them.

  Peering more closely, Aurora managed to convince herself that human movement of some sort was taking place in C.C.’s car; she was on the point of reaching for the phone to call the police, when to her astonishment one of the rear doors of the car opened and her own maid, Rosie, got out, tucking her bathrobe around her tightly. She was barefooted, and she was also nervous. Aurora immediately drew back from the window, and in the nick of time, too, for Rosie glanced nervously up at the very spot from which she had been peeking.

  Aurora moved to a more secure vantage point from which to watch the enthralling drama taking place on her lawn. This time she peeked from behind a drape and was rewarded with the sight of C.C. himself, his shirttail not tucked in, buckling his belt. He seemed to be in an affectionate mood—he kept reaching for Rosie’s hand and trying to put his arm around her. He had rather a large belly, Aurora observed, but then so had Rosie’s husband, Royce Dunlup.

  Rosie, for her part did not seem to be in a particularly affectionate mood—she kept glancing up at Aurora’s window, nervously. After a bit of shuffling around on the dewy grass, Rosie finally gave C.C. a perfunctory kiss. Then she virtually raced across the lawn to the back gate and disappeared. C.C. also glanced up at Aurora’s window a couple of times, tucking away at his shirttail all the while. Finally he got in his car, started it, and turned it slowly around in the street, as he always did when he got ready to drive away; only this time, instead of driving away, he sat in the car for a moment, eased it back to the curb, killed the motor, got out, checked nervously to see that his fly was buttoned, and trudged slowly back toward Rosie’s little cottage.

  Aurora, still peeking, realized with a flush that she had almost witnessed a sex act. She felt quite sure one had taken place right in front of her house, in C.C.’s messy station wagon; he had been one of the participants, and her own beloved Rosie had been the other. If she had been able to see a little more clearly in the dim morning light, she would have seen them doing it, in a car parked at her curb. The thought was startling, perhaps even shocking—on the other hand, she couldn’t deny the thought, or the fact, that somehow it had produced a certain immediate excitement.

  Meanwhile, unaware of the storm gathering nearby, the General had quietly awakened. Turning him over had relieved his ache, and once his ache was gone he began to feel wakeful. To his surprise he noticed that Aurora wasn’t in her window nook, drinking tea—that was a departure from habit. Most mornings when he became wakeful she was in her window nook, wrapped so snugly in her bathrobe that nothing significant was showing, but this morning she was peeking out of one corner of her window, her bathrobe hanging open and a good deal that was significant showing, peeking intently at something taking place on the lawn below.

  “What’s happening, a mugging?” the General inquired. “If it’s a mugging, hadn’t we better call the police?”

  “Shut up, Hector, C.C. might hear you!” Aurora hissed. “He’s looking in our direction at this very moment. I feel sure he knows that he’s being observed.”

  “But if it’s only C.C., and he isn’t being mugged, then he is being observed,” the General said. “You’re observing him. Besides, what do I care if he hears me?”

  “You know what, Hector? C.C. and Rosie just had sex in that car,” Aurora said. “I witnessed it myself, or very nearly, and that’s why I’m observing C.C. now.”

  “You mean to see if you want to have sex with him yourself?” the General asked, very startled. “I never supposed C.C. was exactly your type, although maybe I’m mistaken,” the General added.

  He decided to scramble out of bed himself and observe this interesting spectacle, but before he could move, Aurora suddenly jumped back in bed and sat on him, an action which startled him so that he knocked his glasses off the night table. He had been reaching for them in order to have a look at C.C.


  “What do you mean? They didn’t really have sex in the car, did they?” the General asked, a little alarmed by Aurora’s aggressive behavior. She very rarely sat on him any more, and there was the matter of his injury.

  “How do you know they did?” he insisted. “Is C.C. standing there naked?”

  “No, but you seem to be naked, thanks to your nudist principles,” Aurora said, grinning. “Do you know what Liebestod is, Hector? Perhaps if we attempt a few practices right here and now you’ll die in the midst of them, at a moment of ecstasy or something. That way I’ll save all that money that we were going to spend on psychoanalysis, and besides maybe we’ll even have a little fun.”

  “If you mean the Liebestod part, no,” the General said. “Of course I don’t object to the fun, if I can manage.”

  “At least you’re not against ecstasy,” Aurora said, rummaging around a bit beneath herself. “You know how I hate to be the one to miss out. Perhaps it’s only a lack of imagination that’s been causing us to miss out. It would never occur to either one of us to turn my car into a boudoir, would it? Does the thought excite you? As you can tell, it excites me a good deal.”

  The General could tell. His heart was racing so rapidly that suddenly Liebestod seemed a real possibility—why was Aurora hurrying so? But thanks to the racing, it seemed that at least a little blood was pumping elsewhere—but would it last long enough for Aurora in her wild mood?

  “I’d never manage in that car, not with these crutches,” the General said, hoping everything would keep racing and pumping for a few more minutes. He felt more smothered than ecstatic, but the chances were he’d be even more smothered if Aurora came away frustrated from this endeavor. “Anyway, you don’t need to think of your car as a boudoir, you have a boudoir,” he reminded her.

  “Yes, and we’re in it, but for the present purposes I’d prefer to imagine that we’re in my car—no, not that, either—for the present purposes I’d prefer to imagine that we’re in C.C.’s car,” Aurora whispered in his ear.

  The whisper was exciting. Aurora, usually so ladylike, had long had the habit of whispering rather raunchy suggestions in his ear—she had at one time done it often, but in recent years she had seemed to run out of suggestions. The General had forgotten how exciting it was to have her whispering in his ear.

  “Oh, C.C.’s car,” he said. “It’s a station wagon. I suppose I could manage in that. I didn’t expect this to happen.”

  “It’s happening, if you’ll shut up and move a little,” Aurora said.

  17

  Rosie felt so miserable that, for once, even the news failed her. Peter Jennings didn’t look interesting. Tom Brokaw didn’t look interesting. Dan Rather didn’t look interesting. In desperation Rosie tried CNN, but no one on CNN looked interesting, either. Demonstrations of unrest continued, pretty much throughout the world, from Beijing to Washington, D.C., but Rosie found that she didn’t care. She watched Kermit the Frog for a few minutes—Kermit was one of the few performers on TV who seemed to get as depressed as she did, but she couldn’t really concentrate on his troubles because C.C.—the last person in the world who would have been likely to be able to cheer her up at that moment—kept trying to cheer her up. Or, if he wasn’t exactly trying to cheer her up, he was at least trying to get her to assure him that he wasn’t the sole cause of her depression.

  “I didn’t know it would turn out this way, I didn’t mean to do nothing wrong, please don’t cry,” C.C. said twenty or thirty times, as Rosie cried.

  “C.C., it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t do a thing wrong, I’m just depressed,” Rosie said twenty or thirty times. “Why don’t you just go on to work?”

  “Because if I go off to work with you crying I’ll just worry all day—I’d rather kill myself and get it over with,” C.C. said. Indeed, he himself looked so miserable that Rosie almost wished he would kill himself, or kill her, or somehow put one or both of them out of their misery. It wasn’t going to happen, though. C.C. kept turning up his cuffs and then turning them back down, a habit that drove her crazy.

  “C.C., just leave ’em alone!” she pleaded.

  C.C., in the process of turning down his cuffs, had no idea what she was talking about.

  “If I apologize will it make it better?” he asked. He was a short, stocky man, with a head so nearly square that Rosie sometimes wanted to ask him if his mother had put a box over his skull when he was a baby to make his head become square.

  “You done apologized till I’m sick of hearing it,” Rosie said discouragingly. “After a while I’ll cry myself out and then maybe I’ll get better, but you sitting there apologizing and rolling your stupid shirtsleeves up and down ain’t gonna have any effect, except the effect of making me wish I could find a boyfriend who had sense enough just to leave me alone when I get like this.”

  At that, C.C. began to act a little huffy. “Well, I was brought up to believe there ain’t nothing wrong with saying you’re sorry,” he said, rolling his cuffs back up.

  “There ain’t nothing wrong with saying you’re sorry, but after you’ve said it ten or fifteen times, that’s enough!” Rosie shouted. Out her window she could see Aurora pacing up and down on the downstairs patio, pretending she wasn’t eavesdropping or paying any attention to what might be going on in Rosie’s cottage, although she was obviously nearly dead with curiosity.

  “Particularly since you didn’t do nothing to apologize for even once!” Rosie added, also loudly.

  C.C., red-faced, close to tears, and at his wit’s end, finally gave up. He made an awkward attempt to pat Rosie on the shoulder, and an even more awkward attempt to give her a kiss before rolling his shirtsleeves down one more time and standing up to go.

  “Have it your way—I just hope you feel better—call you later,” he stammered, as he left. Crossing the yard he kept his head down, so as not to have to speak to Mrs. Greenway, a person who terrified him.

  Aurora busied herself with some geraniums, but watched C.C. go out of the corner of her eye. Moments later, Rosie stumbled out of her cottage, wiping her eyes and trying to get her apron tied, but before she got three steps she dropped her apron and fled back to her house in tears, shutting her door firmly behind her.

  Aurora retrieved the apron and went and made a substantial breakfast. Rosie had looked shaky; she would require sustenance at some point, and she herself required it immediately. Hector, still upstairs, had sunk into such a state of post-coital gloom that feeding him seemed almost beside the point. Nonetheless, she boiled him a couple of eggs, whacked the tops off them and carried him up a tray equipped with his egg spoon and also coffee, orange juice, and bacon.

  The General was on his chaise, and his gloom had not abated. Before Aurora and the tray even cleared the top of the stairs he began to find fault.

  “I don’t want those eggs, they haven’t been done properly,” he said. “What’s the matter with Rosie that she can’t even do my eggs properly?”

  At that a dangerous light came into Aurora’s eyes, and the General noticed.

  “Well, maybe I can get one of them down anyway,” he said hastily. Aurora set the tray down and carefully lifted one of the eggs out of the egg cup. He had a feeling she might be going to throw it at him, but instead she held it over his head and squeezed it until the yellow ran into his hair. Then she picked up the tray and went back downstairs, taking the other improperly broken egg, as well as a lot of other food he would have been perfectly happy to have eaten. The General tried to throw his crutch at her but by this time egg yolk was dripping down his face, and he missed.

  Aurora didn’t say a word, though she heard the crutch hit the railing. She went back to her kitchen and ate every bite of the breakfast she had prepared for the General, minus only the egg she had squeezed over his head. Then she ate the breakfast she had prepared for herself, and was rather guiltily beginning to annex portions of the breakfast she had made for Rosie when Rosie made a shaky entrance.

  “Good, I w
as about to eat your English muffins and now I won’t have to—you can eat them yourself,” Aurora said.

  “I’m sick, I can’t eat a bite. Besides, I lost my apron,” Rosie said, dropping into a chair. Actually, the English muffins did look delicious. She particularly liked them with marmalade, and a nice pot of marmalade was handy on the table.

  “No, I rescued your apron,” Aurora said. “I was afraid a bird might carry it away. Why are you sick?”

  “Because nothing I do ever works out,” Rosie said, digging a knife into the marmalade. “Seventy years of not having a thing work out is a lot of years of nothing working out.”

  “Rosie, I’d like to point out something to you,” Aurora said. “You have seven children, am I correct?”

  “Yeah, seven,” Rosie admitted.

  “I’d like to point out to you that all seven of your children have turned out splendidly,” Aurora said. “They grew up, they pursued educations, all but two of them married—and I’m sure those two will get around to it eventually. They’re responsible citizens, several of them own their own businesses, and for all we know they may all get rich.”

  “Oh, yeah, true,” Rosie said.

  “Well, here I sit, listening to you complain,” Aurora said. “My daughter is dead, and not a single one of my grandchildren has done even as well as the least successful of your children. How dare you sit at my breakfast table and tell me that nothing you’ve ever done has turned out right! It looks to me like everything you’ve ever done has turned out rosy, no pun intended.”

  “Well, it’s true, I’ve got my kids to be proud of, I guess I overlooked that part,” Rosie said.

  “Overlooking seven successful, healthy children is like overlooking Mount Everest,” Aurora said. “You have no idea how happy I’d be if even one of my grandchildren exhibited the kind of competence your children have. I’d think I was in heaven.