“You haven’t been talking to this one,” Aurora said. “You’ve just been hiring people and fixing cars and putting off trips, all on the basis of our rather slim acquaintance. I don’t quite know that I want to be responsible for all that. I’ve known married couples to live together for years without incurring that much responsibility for one another.”
“Aw, you mean you don’t want me around?” Vernon said. He put his hands on the arm of his chair as if he were about to get up and leave at once.
“Now, now,” Aurora said. “You must learn to be very careful about twisting my words. I usually try to say precisely what I mean. Those of you who are in oil have to go find it, I’m told. I have a very bad character, as you should already know. I’ve never been particularly loath to have people do things for me, if they appear to want to, but that doesn’t mean I want you to suffer business reverses just in order to pursue our acquaintance.”
Vernon leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees; it made him look very short.
“Aurora, it’s all I can do to call you Aurora,” he said. “I don’t know how to talk like you do—that’s the plain truth. I ain’t ignorant exactly, but I just ain’t had no practice. If you want me around that’s one thing, and if you don’t then I can always go on up to Alberta an’ make a few more mil.”
“Oh, dear,” Aurora said. “I wish you hadn’t said that last word. I don’t know my wishes well enough to weigh them against millions of dollars.”
Vernon seemed in an agony of worry. He was squinting strangely, as if he were afraid to open his eyes all the way. His eyes were the best thing about his face, and she didn’t like him squinting them shut.
“You weren’t planning to live in Canada the rest of your life, were you?” Aurora said. “You were intending to return to Houston someday, weren’t you?”
“Oh, yeah,” Vernon said.
“Well, I intend to go on living here,” Aurora said. “So far as I know I will still be living here when you get back. You could come see me then, if you wished, and you won’t have lost any millions. Hadn’t that ever occurred to you?”
“No, I think it’s do or die,” Vernon said at once. “If I was to go off now who knows but what you’ll marry before I get back.”
“I know, for God’s sake,” Aurora said. “I’m not interested in matrimony, and in any case my suitors are a mixed bag. Some of them are worse than others and the nicer ones seem to be the hopeless ones, for some reason. This is an extremely theoretical conversation, you know. We just met today.”
“Yeah, but I’m changed,” Vernon said.
“Fine. I’m not,” Aurora said. “I don’t wish to marry.”
“Aw, but you do,” Vernon said. “It sticks out all over you.”
“It most certainly does not!” Aurora said, outraged. “Nobody’s ever said anything like that to me in my life. What do you know about it anyway? You admit you never met a lady until you met me, and you may live to regret meeting me.”
“Well, however it turns out, meetin’ you took the fun outa makin’ money,” Vernon said.
Aurora had begun to wish she had taken the General’s advice and turned the first time she came to the road home. As it was, she had managed to create another complication for herself—and the complication was still fidgeting.
“You’ve not explained to me why you now feel it unwise to go to Canada, Vernon,” she said. “You need a better reason than any you’ve given.”
“Look at me,” Vernon said. “I ain’t got your kind of style. I can’t talk like you do. I look funny and we just barely met. If I run off now you’ll just start thinkin’ how dumb and funny-lookin’ I am and when I come back you ain’t gonna know me from Adam an’ you ain’t gonna want to. That’s the reason.”
“An astute point,” Aurora said, looking at him closely.
They both fell silent for several minutes. It was a soft spring night, and despite Vernon’s fidgets Aurora felt rather content. Life continued to be interesting, which was something. Vernon began to wiggle the toe of his boot. For an essentially pleasant man he had more irritating physical mannerisms than anyone she had ever known, and after watching him for a while she spoke up and told him just that. After all, he himself had pointed out that subtleties were lost on him.
“Vernon, you have a great many irritating physical mannerisms,” she said. “I hope you mean to try and whittle those down. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve always felt free to criticize people immediately. I don’t see that it can hurt to try and improve someone. I’ve never quite been able to improve anyone up to the point where I could accept them, but I do fancy that I’ve improved a few men enough to make them palatable to others.”
She yawned, and Vernon stood up. “You’re sleepy,” he said. “I’ll just give you a handshake and see you tomorrow, if that’s all right.”
“Oh,” Aurora said, accepting the handshake. It seemed strange to be receiving it on her patio. He had a small rough hand. They walked through the darkened house and she stepped out in her front yard with him for a moment. She considered inviting him to breakfast, just to see what he looked like in the morning, but before she could frame the invitation he had nodded to her and turned away. The abruptness of the departure left her feeling a little melancholy. The day had had too much of Cinderella in it, she feared, though she was sorrier for Vernon than she was for herself. He was friendly and had nice lights in his brown eyes, yet in all likelihood, even without a time lag in Canada, the future would reduce him just as he had predicted, to someone fidgety and funny-looking, whose style was hopelessly foreign to her own. It had been a little too dramatic, too full of golden coaches. She went upstairs and looked long at her Renoir as she undressed, all too aware that she would probably awaken feeling that the world was pumpkins after all.
CHAPTER VIII
1.
VERNON HAD often heard it said that human nature was a mystery, but the truth of the statement had not struck home to him until that afternoon, when Aurora had looked at him seriously for the first time. The human natures he encountered in the oil business were nothing like that mysterious, he was sure. His employees and his competitors might make him mad on occasion, but none of them had ever troubled him, seriously—not as he began to be troubled when he looked back from his Lincoln and saw that Aurora was still standing on the lawn. The fact that she was still standing there seemed to suggest that she considered the evening not finished, in which case she might have interpreted his leaving as being a sign that he didn’t like her, or something like that. It was a horrible thought to have to live with all night, and Vernon soon found it intolerable. After driving fifteen or twenty blocks he turned around and went back to Aurora’s street to see if she was still standing there. She wasn’t, which left him with nothing to do but turn around again and drive to his garage.
He hadn’t told Aurora, but one of the several businesses he owned was a parking garage in downtown Houston—the newest, tallest, and best parking garage in the city. It was twenty-four stories high and equipped not only with ramps but with a super-quick carlift made in Germany. It would hold several thousand cars, and often had; but by the time Vernon got there, full of his new worries, the garage was almost empty.
He drove straight up to the top, the twenty-fourth story, and parked the Lincoln in a little niche he had cut out in the west wall. The wall was still high enough to keep him from accidentally driving off, but it was cut low enough that he could see over it without getting out of his car.
At night no one but him was allowed to park on the twenty-fourth floor. It was where he slept—more than that, it was his home, the one thing money had bought him that he loved completely and never tired of. The garage was only three years old; it was just by accident one night that he had driven up there to see what the view was like. From then on it had been his place. On a few clear nights in the fall he had been able to look southeast and see Galveston, but that was unusual. He always got out of the Lincoln after he par
ked and walked around the edge of the building for a while, just looking. Off to the east were the strange orange and pink glows of the great clusters of refineries along the Ship Channel—glows that never dimmed.
From his building he could see every road that ran out of Houston, all of which he had driven many times. To the north, whitely lit, were several great interchanges—out of one of them ran the road to Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas, and Nebraska. There were roads running east, into the pines of East Texas, or the bayous of Louisiana, or New Orleans, and roads south, to the border, or west to San Antonio, El Paso, and California. The view from the roof was always different, depending on how the weather went. On clear nights there were hundreds of thousands of lights spread out below him, each one distinct; but then there were the foggy, rumbling nights of Houston, with the fog hovering way down below him, somewhere about the twelfth floor, and the mass of lights beneath it orange and green and indistinct. Then sometimes it was clear below and the clouds hung just above his head, up where the thirtieth story would have been if there had been one; the lights from below lit up the clouds. Sometimes there were northers; at other times the Gulf sent gales from the south, blowing mountainous gray clouds past him and rocking the Lincoln. One night the winds off the Gulf blew so hard that it scared him, and he had had concrete stanchions built to stand on either side of the car, so he could get out and chain it securely in place if the winds got too high.
Often, in his walks about the edge of the building, Vernon would stop and watch the strings of evening jets ease down toward the airport, their wing lights winking. They were like great birds coming in to feed. Despite his ear problems he had flown enough to know most of the flights and their pilots, crews, and stewardesses. He could spot the Braniff coming in from Chicago, or the late evening Pan Am from Guatemala City, both flights he had flown many times.
Usually, by the time the planes were all in, he was ready to do a little business. If he was dirty he might get in the elevator and go down and walk the three blocks to the Rice Hotel for a bath and a change of clothes, but he always came right back to the roof and settled himself in the back seat of the Lincoln and began to put in his nightly calls. The nice thing about being so high up was that he could see so far, literally, that in his mind’s eye he could often see the places he was calling: Amarillo or Midland, the Gulf shore, Caracas or Bogota. He had interest in a dozen places, and he knew his crews in each place and seldom let a night pass without calling all of them to find out what was happening.
Once the calls were over, if it wasn’t too late, he lay back in the Lincoln with the front door open to let in a little breeze and watched television. The reception was wonderful, up so high. Sometimes there would be lightning storms, with the lightning breaking just over his head, and if that happened he switched the television off, out of a feeling that it wasn’t safe. His father had been killed by lightning while sitting on the running board of a tractor, and Vernon hated it.
If he was restless or hungry he could always go down to the fourth floor, where there was a refreshment room with fifteen different machines in it, a kind of small automat. Old Schweppes, the night watchman, was generally settled down for the night in his little cubbyhole next to the refreshment room, but he was too arthritic to sleep well in such humid weather and if Vernon so much as put a quarter in one of the machines the old man would hear it and come hobbling out in hopes of a little conversation. Old Schweppes’s whole family—a wife and four children—had been wiped out in a trailer-house fire thirty years before, and he had not recovered from it, nor even tried. He had lived out thirty more years of life as a night watchman, and he didn’t talk to many; but somehow the vestiges that remained of the gregarious man he had once been asserted themselves when Vernon appeared, and once that happened it was not easy to shake free of the old man.
Often, so as not to be too abrupt and hurt Old Schweppes’s feelings, Vernon would start walking with him up the ramps, the old man always meaning to go just a level or two but never able to stop once he got started. The two of them might take an hour or more winding upward higher and higher above the Gulf Coast, Old Schweppes rambling on and on about baseball, his last love, or about his Navy days in World War I, or about almost anything, until, to his surprise, the two of them emerged onto the roof. Then, embarrassed at the thought of how much he had talked, the old man quickly took an elevator back down to his cubbyhole.
Vernon was not a long sleeper—four hours at a stretch had always been plenty—and the seats of the Lincoln suited him well as a bed. He always woke as the lights of the city were beginning to shine more faintly with the coming of dawn. The cloud of fog over the bays and inlets to the east would be pink underneath, and then white underneath and orange on top as the sun rose through them and shone over the Gulf and the coastal plain. The noise of traffic, which had died out altogether about two o’clock, resumed, and by seven was constant, like the sound of a river. The Lincoln would be beaded with moisture, and Vernon would get a ginger ale out of the icebox to freshen his mouth and then begin his calls again, out to his rigs in West Texas, to see how the night towers had gone.
But Aurora had broken his pattern. This night was different. He got out and walked around the edge of the building several times, but he took no interest in the view. He placed a call to Guatemala, and then canceled it five minutes later. He went out and stood by the wall awhile, popping his knuckles rapidly to make up for all the time he had restrained himself. Two or three planes went over, but he scarcely noticed them. He looked down at the city and after some study was able to figure out almost exactly where her house was. River Oaks was mostly just a patch of darkness because the tall thick trees hid the streetlights, but he knew its perimeters and worked himself north from Westheimer until he located where he thought Aurora must be. He heard the phone ringing in the Lincoln but didn’t answer it.
Old Schweppes came to mind, and without hesitating or even pretending to himself that he wanted a packaged sandwich, he took the elevator to the fourth floor and hurried to the old man’s cubbyhole. Schweppes was a tall, skinny fellow, six four and thin as a reed, with long tangled gray hair and deep hollows in his cheeks. He wore his uniforms about two months between washings, and he was squinting his way through a coverless issue of Sports Illustrated when Vernon appeared, his hands in his pockets.
“Schweppes, how are you?” Vernon asked.
“Worse,” Schweppes said. “What in hell’s the matter with you? The cops after you?”
“Nothin’ like that,” Vernon said. “I’m fine and dandy.”
“Well, the goddamn cops will get us all, one by one,” Schweppes said. “They’ll have to look hard to find me, I can tell you. I’d go to Mexico if I had to, to stay out of jail.”
“Uh, want to walk up the ramp a little ways?” Vernon asked. His need to talk was too bald to be disguised.
Old Schweppes was so surprised he dropped his magazine. It was the first direct invitation he had ever received from Vernon. Their conversations normally came about through elaborate indirection. For a minute he didn’t know what to say.
“The cops ain’t after me,” Vernon said, to reassure him. Old Schweppes had nursed a lifelong paranoia about the police, stemming, apparently, from the fact that he had once been arrested at a cockfight in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and had spent a night in the same jail cell with a Negro.
“Yeah, I guess a little walk wouldn’t hurt,” Schweppes said, heaving himself up. “You got the fidgets the worst I ever seen, Vernon. If it ain’t the cops, then it must be some big gambler. I told you about that, didn’t I? You keep on skinnin’ them big boys an’ sooner or later one of ’em gonna skin you back.”
Schweppes had other paranoias too, and Vernon decided he had better talk first if he was going to talk at all.
“Schweppes, you was married,” he said. “What do you do about women?”
Old Schweppes stopped and looked at Vernon, his mouth open. No question could have taken him more unawar
es.
“What happened?” Schweppes said, taking his old raincoat off its hook. It was often blowy on the ramps, and his joints ached even when it wasn’t.
“I met a real lady,” Vernon said. “She run into my car, was what actually happened. Then I took her home an’ that started it.”
Old Schweppes got an amused gleam in his eye. “Started it, hum?” he said, noncommittally.
He worked himself into his raincoat as Vernon stood on one foot and then the other, and they started up the ramp toward the fifth floor.
“Ask the question agin,” the old man said.
“Well,” Vernon said, “here I am fifty years old an’ I don’t know nothin’ about women. That’s the gist of it, Schweppes.”
“Except that now you met this one you kinda wish you knew somethin’, ain’t that right?” the old man said. “That’s the real gist of the matter. That there’s the nitty-gritty.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Vernon said. “This here’s all new to me. I know I ought to have done more courtin’ when I was younger, but it just never hit me, you know. There’s probably eighteen-year-old kids walkin’ around who’ve got more experience at such things than I have.”
“Well, you come to the right man this time,” Schweppes said. “I was woman crazy half my life—course it was the first half. Somethin’ changed after I lost my family. I ain’t forgot women, though. I got as good a memory as the next man. Blonde or brunette?”
Vernon was slow to pick up on the question, and Schweppes looked at him silently.
“Uh, brown,” he said. “Is that important?”
“Fat or skinny?” Schweppes said. “You just let me ask the questions. At your age you ain’t got no margin of error. You ain’t gonna survive no mistake, gettin’ the woman bug this late in life.”
“She’s largish,” Vernon said, properly docile.
“Where’s she from?”