Terms of Endearment (14 page)

“That’s exactly what F.V. does think,” Rosie said loudly. “He knows how you drive. A Cadillac can kill you just as dead as a tank. I’ve heard F.V. say that many a time.”

“Oh, shut up,” Aurora said hotly. “You know how touchy I am about my driving.”

“I haven’t said anything, Aurora,” the General said firmly.

“Well, I wish your voice weren’t so scratchy, Hector,” Aurora said.

“It’s just F.V.’s bad luck to live right there at the corner,” Rosie went on, taking up her dustcloth. “The kitchen’s right where you’d end up if you was ever to forget to turn.”

“I
shall not forget to turn!”
Aurora said with great emphasis.

“I didn’t say you would!” General Scott said, his temper rising.

“Hector, I’m hanging straight up if you’re planning to shout at me,” Aurora said. “My nerves are not all they might be today, and you have not helped any by letting my phone ring thirty-five times. If you wear out my bell I won’t appreciate it, I can tell you that.”

“Aurora, my dear, all you need do is answer it,” the General said, striving to bring moderation and mellifluousness to his
voice. He was aware that his voice was scratchy, but it was only a natural consequence of the fact that he had been stationed in the tropics when he was young and had impaired his vocal apparatus in the line of duty, or by yelling at idiots too loudly and too often in a humid climate. Ignorance and incompetence on the part of his subordinates had always caused him to yell sooner or later, and he had encountered so much of it in his career that his voice had been little more than a croak by the time World War II ended. It seemed to him to have recovered itself well enough, but it had never pleased Aurora Greenway, and it seemed to please her less as the years went by. At the moment it didn’t seem to be pleasing her at all.

“Hector, I do think you ought to know better than to admonish me,” she said. “I am not a member of an army and am hardly interested in being treated like a private, or a sophomore, or whatever rank you’ve assigned me in your thoughts. It is my phone, you know, and if I am not disposed to answer it that is
my
business. Besides, I am frequently gone when you ring, I’m sure. If my bell is going to have to ring sixty or seventy times every time you take it into your head to call, then it’s certainly going to wear out. I’ll be lucky if it lasts the year.”

“Aha, but I knew you were there,” the General said quickly. “I’ve got my binoculars here and I’ve been watching your garage. Nothing’s left it since six o’clock this morning. I fancy that I know you well enough to know that you’re not likely to go anywhere before six in the morning. So in effect I have you. You were there and you were just being stubborn.”

“That’s a rather demeaning deduction,” Aurora said instantly. “I certainly hope you didn’t conduct your battles like you’re conducting what might loosely be called our courtship. If you had I’m certain we would have lost whatever wars we happened to be in.”

“Oou, my God,” Rosie said, wincing a little for General Scott.

Aurora didn’t so much as pause for breath. The thought of Hector Scott, who was sixty-five if he was a day, sitting in his bedroom with his binoculars glued to her garage since six in the morning was more than enough to make her see red.

“While I’ve got you, Hector, let me point out to you certain
possibilities you seem to have overlooked in your reasoning, or whatever you do,” she said. “First, I might have had a headache and not have wished to speak, in which case hearing a phone ring sixty times would hardly have contributed to my ease. Second, I might well have been in my back yard, beyond the sound of my phone or the reach of your binoculars. I’m very fond of the act of digging, as you ought to know. Often I dig. I must have
some
relaxation, you know.”

“Aurora, that’s fine,” the General said, feeling a short retreat was called for. “I’m glad to have you out there digging—it’s fine exercise. I’ve dug a great deal myself in my day.”

“Hector, you’ve interrupted,” Aurora said. “I was not speaking of your day, I was enumerating possibilities you had overlooked in your impetuosity to talk to me. A third distinct possibility is that an invitation had taken me beyond the sound of my phone.”

“What invitation?” the General said, sensing trouble. “I don’t like the sound of that much.”

“Hector, at this moment I’m so annoyed with you that I don’t really give a twit what you like and don’t like,” Aurora said. “The plain fact is that I frequently, indeed habitually, receive invitations from a number of gentlemen other than yourself.”

“At six in the morning?” The General asked.

“Never you mind when,” Aurora said. “I’m not as old as you, you know, and I’m far less fixed in my habits than your good wife seems to have been. In point of fact there is very little telling where I’m apt to be at six in the morning, nor is there any particular reason why I should be required to tell, if I don’t choose to. I’m no one’s wife at the moment, as I’m sure you realize.”

“I realize it and I find it a patent absurdity,” the General said. “I’m ready to do something about it too, as I’ve told you many times.”

Aurora covered the receiver with one hand and made an amused face at Rosie. “He’s proposing again,” she said. Rosie was poking in a closet, trying to find a pair of shoes that might be worn out enough that she could appropriate them for her oldest daughter. The General’s latest proposal surprised her not at all.

“Yeah, he probably wants you to get married inside a tank,” she said.

Aurora went back to the General. “Hector, I don’t doubt your readiness,” she said. “A number of gentlemen seem to be ready, if that means anything. The point I must insist upon is that you aren’t able, however ready you may think yourself to be, and I don’t quite like the term ‘patent absurdity’ used as you chose to use it just now. I see nothing patently absurd in being a widow.”

“My dear, you’ve been a widow for three years,” the General said. “For a robust woman like yourself that’s long enough. Too long, in fact. There are certain biological needs, you know—it doesn’t do to ignore biological needs too long.”

“Hector, are you aware of how rude you’re being?” Aurora said with a flash in her eyes. “Do you realize you let my phone ring a great many times, and now that I’ve been considerate enough to answer it all you can think of to do is lecture me about biological needs. You could hardly have put matters less romantically, I must say.”

“I’m a military man, Aurora,” the General said, trying to be stern. “Blunt speech is the only thing I know. We’re both adults. We needn’t beat around the bush about these things. I was merely pointing out that it’s dangerous to ignore biological needs.”

“Who says I ignore them, Hector?” Aurora said with a devilish tone in her voice. “Happily there are still some nooks and crannies of my life your binoculars can’t reach. I must say I’m not especially happy with the thought of you sitting there day after day speculating about my biological needs, as you call them. If that’s what you’ve been doing it’s no wonder you’re usually so disagreeable to talk to.”

“I’m not disagreeable to talk to,” the General said. “I’m not unable, either.”

Aurora opened one bill, the one from her least favorite dressmaker. It was for seventy-eight dollars. She looked at it thoughtfully before she replied.

“Unable?” she said.

“Yes. You said I was ready but unable. I resent that, Aurora.
I’ve never allowed anyone to cast slurs on my ability. In fact, I’ve always been able.”

“Well, you’ve lost me somewhere, Hector,” Aurora said vaguely. “It’s quite careless of you. I think what you must be referring to is my remark about marriage. It would be very hard for you to deny that you aren’t able to marry me, since I simply won’t have it. I don’t see how you can consider yourself able in that regard, when it’s obvious to both of us that there’s not a thing you can do about me.”

“Aurora, will you shut up?” the General yelled. His temper rose abruptly, and at about the same time, though not so abruptly, his penis also rose. Aurora Greenway was infuriating, absolutely infuriating; except for one or two lieutenants, no one in his life had been able to make him so angry. No one in his life had been able to cause him to have erections just by talking to him on the phone, either, but Aurora could. She was almost infallible, too-some timbre in her voice seemed to do it, whether she was being argumentative, or whether she was just being happily vague and talking about music and flowers.

“Why yes, Hector, I will shut up, though I think it’s rather rude of you to suggest it,” Aurora said. “You are being exceptionally rude to me today, you know. I’ve been paying my bills and trying to concentrate on my accounts and you sound very scratchy and military and aren’t helping me at all. If you don’t stop being so rude I’m going to have Rosie talk to you in my stead, and she is apt to be far less polite than I’ve been.”

“You haven’t been polite, you’ve been very goddamn irritating!” the General said, only to hear a click on the line. He put the receiver back on its hook and sat tensely for several minutes, quietly gritting his teeth. He stared out the window toward Aurora’s house, but he felt too dispirited to bother lifting his binoculars. His erection lingered a bit and then subsided, and shortly after things were back to normal he picked up the phone and called again.

Aurora answered on the first ring. “I certainly do hope you’re in a nice mood now, Hector,” she said at once, before he even spoke.

“How did you know it was me, Aurora?” he asked. “Aren’t you
taking a big chance? It very well could have been one of your other habitual callers. It might even have been your mystery man.”

“What mystery man, Hector?” she asked.

“The one you strongly hinted at,” he said, not with much asperity. A feeling of hopelessness had come over him. “The one whose bed you are presumably sharing on those occasions when you don’t happen to be home at six
A.M
.”

Aurora opened two more bills while the General was cooling off; she was trying to remember what she had done with the forty dollars’ worth of lawn supplies she had apparently bought three months before. The General’s accusation glanced off her lightly, but the tone he made it in was slightly more serious.

“Now, Hector,” she said, “you’re sounding resigned again. You know how I hate to hear you sounding resigned. I hope you haven’t allowed me to beat you down again. You’re just going to have to learn to defend yourself a little more vigorously if you want to get along with me. I should think a military man like yourself would have more skill at self-defense. I can’t quite think how you survived all your wars if this is the best you can do.”

“I was inside a tank most of the time,” the General said, remembering how cozy it had felt. Aurora sounded suddenly very friendly and warm, and his erection began to come back. It had often amazed him how quickly she could begin to sound friendly and warm once she knew she had someone on the ropes.

“Well, I’m afraid all that’s past, dear,” she said. “You’re just going to have to get by without your tanks from now on. Say something to me and put some snap in your tone, if you don’t mind. You can’t imagine how depressing it is to have a resigned voice coming over one’s telephone.”

“Right, I’ll get to the point,” the General said, miraculously his own man again. “Who’s the new fellow?”

“What are you talking about?” Aurora asked. She was gathering up all her unopened bills. She had decided to put the unopened ones in a neat stack before opening them. The sight of neat stacks of things sometimes went a long way toward convincing her that her life was really in order, despite how she felt. She had decided the seventy-eight-dollar bill was probably legitimate
and was waving at Rosie to bring her her fountain pen, which was on her dressing table instead of where it ought to be. Her dressing table was not amenable to neat stacking—hundreds of objects had found their way to it and gotten no further, and Rosie was holding up perfume bottles and old invitations and eyebrow pencils, hoping to come up with whatever it was Aurora wanted fetched.

“The fountain pen, the fountain pen,” Aurora said, before the General could reply. “Can’t you see I’m writing a check?”

Rosie found the pen and pitched it to her carelessly. She loved to investigate Aurora’s dressing table—it always yielded products she had never heard of. “Tell him you’ll marry him if he’ll trade off that Packard,” she said, sniffing at some cucumber oil. “I swear, that car costs a mint of money and he don’t go nowhere in it even. F.V.’s tried to tell him but it don’t do no good.”

“Rosie, I’m sure General Scott is capable of deciding what automobile he wants to drive,” Aurora said, writing the check forcefully. She had a strong sense just then of being in command of her fortunes. “What was it you were saying, Hector?”

“I asked you who you were spending the night with,” the General said tightly. “I’ve asked you several times. Of course if you don’t choose to answer, that’s your business.”

“Oh, pooh, you’re much too touchy, Hector,” Aurora said. “I was merely trying to make you realize that my whereabouts at six
A.M
. is somewhat subject to whimsey. I might have decided to dance until dawn, or then again I might be off taking a cruise in the Caribbean with one of your rivals. You really don’t seem to have much sense of sport, you know. It’s something you really might try to cultivate before you get any older.”

The General felt deeply relieved. “Aurora, can I ask you one favor?” he said. “If you’re going out today would you give me a ride to the grocery store? I’m afraid my car has broken down.”

Aurora smiled to herself. “Well, that’s rather a prosaic favor, Hector, when one considers all you might have asked for,” she said, “but it’s certainly one I can manage. If you’re sitting over there starving, my bills can certainly wait. I’ll just pull myself together and you and I can go out for a nice drive. Who knows but what you’ll weaken and buy me lunch.”

“Aurora, that would be wonderful,” the General said.

“Tricked him into it, didn’t you?” Rosie said when her boss hung up. “Didn’t take much trickin’, did it?”