Free The Evening Star by Larry McMurtry Page B

for a moment, gave her granny a kiss, and left. She could hardly wait to tell Teddy and Jane what she had just witnessed—talk about blowing their minds!
    “Good night, dear,” Aurora said. “Remember little Andy and try not to smoke.”
    Pascal ate his cake in silence while his tie dripped on his pants. Aurora was watching him quietly—she did not seem to be angry, but then she had not seemed to be angry when he arrived, either, and yet within ten minutes she had goaded him into a violent act.
    “What’s the matter with you now?” Aurora asked. “I hope you aren’t preparing to sulk or weep or produce any other manifestations I’m not in the mood for.”
    “Why can’t you come to my apartment?” Pascal asked. “In my apartment there would be nobody but us.”
    “That’s quite true,” Aurora said, smiling at him. “On the other hand, if I were in your apartment, I might faint from the stench and the squalor. You must admit that you seem to lack housekeeping skills along with savoir faire and various other things.

    “Though perhaps that’s what you want,” she added, kicking him lightly under the table. “You want me to faint. Then you’d have a passive body to work your will on. But that’s not the way it’s going to happen, if it happens.”
    “I want it to happen!” Pascal exclaimed. “I want it to happen.”
    “Well, if it should, keep in mind that this is not a passive body that you’re looking at,” Aurora said. “Nobody’s getting any fun unless I get some too.”
    “I will get a housekeeper,” Pascal declared. He lived in a tiny studio apartment near the zoo. The fact was that he had allowed it to become rather grubby over the years. The one time Aurora had visited it she had held her nose the whole time. It was hard to seduce a woman who was resolutely holding her nose.
    “I will make it spotless! Spotless!” he declared—his soon-to-be-hired housekeeper would make the house spotless, and Aurora would come. He felt better just thinking about it and reached for the wine bottle.
    “You’ll see,” he said. “I’ll even buy new sheets. You’ll see.”
    “New sheets, Pascal?” Aurora said. “I hardly know if I deserve quite that much savoir faire.”
    He was still talking about his housekeeper and his soon-to-be-spotless apartment when she tucked him into his Peugeot and sent him home.

7
    Teddy and Jane met when they were both patients at a psychiatric hospital in Galveston. Soon after they fell in love, both were released from the psychiatric hospital—on the same day, in fact. They felt it was a happy omen and for some months they weighed the question of marriage before deciding against it. Then they weighed the even weightier question of children and decided they wanted one—or possibly two. Roughly a year after they took the second decision, Jonathan arrived. Jonathan was now nearly two and had yet to speak—or, to be more accurate, had yet to speak in English. One of the things that convinced Teddy and Jane that they were perfect for one another was that both had been majoring in classical languages when they began to go wrong in their heads. Jane had been at Bryn Mawr, Teddy at the University of Texas. Jane’s parents and Teddy’s grandparents both lived in Houston, and that was where they had retreated when they dropped out. After a few months of getting crazier and crazier, they had both agreed to be admitted to the hospital in Galveston.
    The fact that Jonathan, whose nickname was Bump, hadyet 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.