Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  “Trevor, I assume you’ve ordered whatever’s best,” she said.

  “Depend on it,” Trevor said, nodding at a waiter, who almost instantly came forward with a wonderful crab salad. Where gustatory pleasures were concerned, his tastes were almost irreproachable, though, sportsman that he was, he was slightly more prone to order game of some sort than she would have been. She allowed him to pat her a bit, as a reward for his excellent crab, and decided that life on the sea did something nice for a man’s smell. Trevor had always smelled better than any man she had known. His smell seemed to be a mixture of salt, leather, and spice, and she leaned toward him and sniffed a time or two to see if it was still the same. Trevor took it as a sign of encouragement and got right down to business.

  “I guess I surprised you, didn’t I?” he said. “I bet you didn’t expect me to call up and demand a yes or no after all these years.”

  “Yes, it was a rude shock, dear,” Aurora said. “Only my longstanding fondness for you kept me from hanging up. What put such a thought in your head, if I may ask?”

  “I’ve always thought we were meant for one another,” Trevor said. “I’ve never known why you married Rudyard. I’ve never known why you wouldn’t leave him.”

  “Why, Trevor,” she said. “I got along with Rudyard perfectly well. Or imperfectly well, to be more accurate. At least he was not always off with ballerinas and schoolgirls.”

  “But that was only because you wouldn’t marry me,” Trevor said, a pained look on his handsome face. His hair had been an aristocratic white almost from the time he left Princeton, and it went awfully well with his face and his clothes.

  “I’ve never understood it,” he said, squeezing her hand. “I’ve just never understood it.”

  “Dear, so few things can be understood,” Aurora said. “Eat your crab and have a little more wine and don’t look so pained. If you’ll tell me what it is you’ve never understood perhaps I can be helpful.”

  “Why you stopped sleeping with me, to be frank,” Trevor said. “I thought everything was all right. Then we took that sail from Maine to the Chesapeake and I still thought everything was all right and you got off the boat and married Rudyard. Wasn’t everything all right?”

  “Trevor, you ask me that every time we dine together,” Aurora said, giving him a little squeeze in consolation. “If I’d known you were going to take it so seriously I might well have married you and spared you all that brooding. Do stop taking it so seriously.”

  “But why?” Trevor said. “Why? I keep thinking it must have been my fault.”

  “Yes, your modesty or whatever it is,” Aurora said, having a little of his crab, which in the course of his brood he was neglecting. She had immediately finished off hers.

  “I really don’t wish your modesty to turn into insecurity, Trevor—not over something that happened thirty years ago. I’ve told you as much hundreds of times, I’m sure. No young woman could have had a better lover than you were, but you see I was just a young woman then, and exceptionally vacant. I expected your eye might rove, I suppose, or else mine might. I can’t recall the circumstances too precisely, but I seemed to get the feeling that if I kept sailing around on that boat with you some carelessness might occur. Forgive me, dear, but I’ve never quite seen you as a family man. Though I don’t know that that was it, either. Perhaps you were a little lax in your pursuit, I can’t seem to remember. At any rate, the fact that I wandered off and married Rudyard didn’t mean that everything we did wasn’t ‘all right,’ as you put it. I do think, considering the life you’ve led, you’d have stopped worrying about being all right by now.”

  “I always worry about it,” Trevor said. “What else have I got to worry about? I’ve got plenty of money. Maggie’s daughter didn’t think I was very all right. I want you to marry me before I slip any farther. You and I wouldn’t have any trouble. What if the day comes when I can’t even get actresses? You don’t want that to happen to me, do you?”

  “Of course not,” Aurora said. “I’m sure we’ve had this very conversation before, Trevor. I’m feeling a great deal of déjà vu and I don’t see why we’re having to wait for the second course. Food might help dispel my déjà vu. I only seem to suffer from it in your company, I might add. You have an unfortunate way of trying to get me to remember things I’ve forgotten. I never can, you know—all I can remember is this conversation. I really haven’t the faintest idea why I married Rudyard instead of you. I’m hardly a psychiatrist, and I do hope the day comes when you let me alone about it.”

  “All right, marry me and I’ll never bring it up again,” Trevor said. “I’m sorry if I’m being ungentlemanly about it, but something’s come over me lately. Nothing seems to satisfy me. I guess it’s age.

  “No, it’s your preoccupation with sport,” Aurora said. “You have something of a mind, dear, and you can’t expect it to remain content with the little you seem to want to offer it. I think you’ve sailed too many boats, caught too many fish, and shot too many animals. Not to mention what you may have done with too many women.”

  “Yep, now the chickens are coming home to roost,” Trevor said, the same look of pain on his face. “You’re the only person left who could satisfy me, Aurora. You always have been. You’ve got to marry me this time. If you get away again there’ll be nothing left to hope for. I might as well sail off into the sunset and never come back.”

  Aurora was examining the lobster that had just arrived and, in a discreet way, smacking her lips. “Trevor, you know me,” she said. “I have a hard time concentrating on romance when there’s food before me. I do think you ought to avoid images like that, though—as well as misquotations. A dish for the gods is Shakespeare, not Byron, and a threat to sail into the sunset, however sincere and practical, is not apt to sway me. After all, you’ve spent most of your life in the sunset, for all I know. I think far better of your wines than I do of your imagery.”

  “Aurora, I mean it,” Trevor said, taking her hand in both of his. Aurora immediately jerked her hand away and grabbed a fork with it.

  “Trevor, propose to me as much as you like, but don’t try to hold hands with me while I’m handling silverware,” she said.

  “Without you I have no hope,” Trevor said, a good deal of his soul in his eyes. Aurora looked over, noticed the soul, and gave him a bite of her lobster, since he had so far ignored his own.

  “I think you’re being a little shortsighted, dear,” Aurora said. “It’s the fact that I won’t marry you that preserves your hopes. If I did marry you I’d just be your wife. There’s nothing very hopeful in that, that I can see. But as long as I remain free, then you can remain perpetually hopeful and I can get the pleasure of your company once in a while, when I need it, and we can go right on, year after year, with our romance.”

  “But I worry,” Trevor said. “I get off at sea with some woman or other and I begin to worry. I think, What if I come back and Aurora’s married? It even throws off my aim. I was missing grouse in Scotland the last time I was there, and I never miss grouse. For some reason every time one flew up I had a vision of you in a marriage ceremony. Couldn’t hit a thing.”

  “Oh, dear,” Aurora said. “You’re the first person whose aim I’ve thrown off. If it will help any I can assure you I have no intention of marrying. I’d miss our little romance if I did, and I don’t like missing things.”

  “That doesn’t help any,” Trevor said. “You married Rudyard and that didn’t interrupt us. We were already interrupted. Nothing will make me stop worrying.”

  Aurora shrugged. The lobster was wonderful. “Worry, then,” she said.

  Trevor began to eat. “Actually, there is one thing that might stop my worrying,” he said.

  “I was sure there was,” Aurora said. He handled a knife and fork with grace—he always had—and the sight made her reflective, or at least as reflective as it was possible for her to be, while she was eating. It did seem strange in retrospect that she had left such a well-bred
fun-loving man as Trevor for a person such as Rud, who could have eaten pimento cheese sandwiches every night of his life and not complained. Rud knew about good food, he knew where to get it and what it should taste like, but, except in the brief period of their courtship, he had never made much of an effort to secure it. Trevor’s appetites were clearly more of a match for hers, and always had been, and it was not a little odd that she had felt no urge, then or ever, to marry him.

  “We’ll talk about all that later,” Trevor said, reaching under the table to give her leg a friendly squeeze. “I want you to see the way I’ve fixed up my boat.”

  “Describe it to me,” Aurora said. “It isn’t likely I’ll be able to risk a boat ride after eating so much. Besides, you’ve not told me about your women of the year. You’re the only man I know who leads an interesting life, and I don’t know why you want to thwart my curiosity this way.”

  With her other suitors she had never been able to tolerate even the mention of other women, but Trevor was the grand exception. He assured her constantly that she was his only real love, and she believed him and derived a great deal of pleasure from hearing about the women he made do with. Trevor sighed, but somehow he always felt better after he had told Aurora about his little loves, so he told her about a Polish actress and a California horsewoman and a couple of nice mothers and daughters from Connecticut. It carried them through the lobster and dessert and into brandy. Aurora was stuffed and content and let him hold her hand while they talked.

  “Now you see,” she said, “if I hadn’t been so good at leading you a merry chase none of that would have happened to you, and some of it must have been merry at least.”

  “It was all merry,” Trevor said. “That’s the point, Aurora. Every romance I’ve had for thirty years has been merry. Maybe that’s why I only want you. You’re the only one who makes me unhappy.”

  “Oh, Trevor, don’t say that, dear,” Aurora said. “You know I can’t stand to feel that I’ve been cruel to you. Here you’ve just provided me with such a nice meal.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Trevor said. “It’s just that I like being unhappy about you better than I like being happy about most of the women I know.”

  “Dear, you’re far too nice,” Aurora said. “I seem to recall that I was quite cruel to you on one or two occasions in the past and you never worked up anything like enough indignation to suit me. If you had, who knows but what I’d have come to heel.”

  “I know,” Trevor said. “I may look big and dumb but I’m not a dope. If I had done that you’d have stopped having anything to do with me.”

  Aurora chuckled. Her old flame had his endearing aspects still. “True, I can’t stand people who presume to blame me,” she said. “I’ve considered the right to blame as my prerogative. What’s going to become of us, Trevor?”

  “Two lobsters a year, I guess,” Trevor said. “Maybe a pheasant now and then. Unless you marry me. If you’ll just marry me this time I’ll promise to change. We could move to Philadelphia. There’s the family business, you know. I’d even sell my boat if you wanted me to.”

  Aurora quickly patted his hand. She dropped her eyes and something inside her dropped a little bit too.

  “Darling, you must never sell your boat,” she said after a moment. “I’m flattered that you love me more, and I do believe you, but since I refused to be your life I certainly have no right to ask that of you now. Besides, you cut such a dashing figure on your boat. You don’t know how often through the years I’ve thought of how dashing you were in the days when we sailed around like we did. I really don’t know what I’d do for romantic thoughts if I didn’t know you were always on your boat … looking dashing … and that you’d come and see me by and by.”

  Trevor was silent. So was she.

  “You weren’t meant for Philadelphia and the family business,” Aurora said. “No more was I meant for the sea. I don’t know that anything works if one person has to give up too much. I’ve never been able to do anything about myself, I’m afraid, Trevor, and that being the case, I’ve always been glad that you loved the sea as much as you do.”

  “So am I,” Trevor said. “It’s a good second best.”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t suppose everyone has that good a second best,” he said. “They have a combo here, you know. I don’t know why we’re sitting here. We’ll just get sleepy. Would you like to go upstairs and dance?”

  “Why, Trevor, of course,” Aurora said, folding her napkin. “Why are we sitting here? You’ve hit upon the one thing it would never occur to me to refuse you. Let’s dance at once.”

  3.

  THEY DANCED at once. “goodness, how I’ve missed it,” Aurora said.

  “How I’ve missed you,” Trevor said. He danced as well as he handled a knife and fork. Then, just as it seemed to both of them that they were hitting their stride, the combo stopped playing and the musicians began packing their instruments. Unfortunately they had had the bad judgment to close with a waltz, and waltzes threw Trevor into such a depth of nostalgia for their waltzing days in the east that the whole blithe balance of the evening was very nearly destroyed.

  “Dawn always found us on our feet, remember?” he said, embracing Aurora, who had been airing herself for a moment by an open window. “Let’s go to that Mexican place you know. Dawn could find us on our feet again. I’m not too old.”

  “Very well,” Aurora said, since he had been nice and hadn’t brought up his ultimatum at all.

  Then, in the taxicab, life stopped being a romantic memory and became a muddle again. Trevor was more or less all over her, of course, but she was looking out the window, watching Houston go by, and wasn’t taking a great deal of notice.

  “Dawn always found us on our feet,” Trevor said again. He had grown fond of the line.

  “Well, I must say, Trevor, you’re the only man I know who realizes dancing ought to be a regular part of life,” Aurora said, rather happily.

  “Of course, like sex,” Trevor said. “I’ve got to kiss you.”

  Perhaps because she was having a sleepy moment, or perhaps because his gallantry in pursuing her to so little reward for thirty years always touched her, or perhaps because he still smelled better than any man she knew, Aurora let him, thinking who knows?—though she knew well enough, really. She had had similar impulses, for similar reasons, over the years with Trevor and the results, disappointingly for them both, were never more than bland. Still, little harm was ever done, and none would have been in this case had not Trevor, in a wild, momentary burst of hope, thrust a hand into her brassiere. Just as he did, Aurora broke the kiss, sat up straighter, and took a deep breath, meaning to clear her head and regain her senses, though it was really only pretending to suppose that she had lost them. Trevor had had to turn his wrist at a rather sharp angle to get his hand into the brassiere and when Aurora chose to fill her lungs it not only trapped his hand against her breast but caused a horrible pain to shoot through his twisted wrist.

  “Oow, God,” he said. “Bend over, please. Bend over!”

  “Oh, Trevor, for goodness’ sake, we’re almost there,” Aurora said, misinterpreting the note of urgency in his voice and sitting up all the straighter.

  “Oow! God! Please, you’re breaking my wrist,” Trevor said. He had been forced to slide partially onto the floorboards in order to keep from screaming loudly, and he was sure he had heard a small crack the second time Aurora moved.

  Aurora had been politely ignoring his little foray, which was the only sound practice where Trevor was concerned, but she finally realized from the look on his face that something was amiss, and bent forward. Gingerly he removed his hand and held it haplessly before her eyes.

  “Why does it dangle like that?” she asked.

  “I think it’s the first wrist ever to have been broken by a breast,” he said, feeling it carefully. He had a feeling that bone ends might be protruding, but could find none, and after Aurora had rubbed it for a while he was
forced to conclude that probably it was only sprained.

  “I wish it was broken,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be romantic? Then you’d have to let me stay with you for a while so you could take care of me.”

  Aurora smiled and rubbed it for him. “It was all that talk about dawn finding us on our feet,” she said. “You invariably exaggerate, dear. Dawn usually found us on a couch in the lobby of the Plaza, as I recall.”

  “It’s going to find us on our feet this morning,” Trevor said determinedly.

  Instead it found them sitting at a red table in the small open courtyard of a place called the Last Concert, with Trevor drinking a bottle of Mexican beer. The Last Concert was only a small Mexican bar, with a jukebox and a tiny dance floor, but of the few after-hours places in Houston it was the one Aurora preferred. It was on an obscure street in North Houston, near the railroad yards, and she could hear, not far away, the sound of boxcars bumping into one another. Her old flame sipped his beer. There was no one there but themselves and an old, old Mexican woman, nodding inside behind the bar, and a large gray rat in one corner of the courtyard.

  “I wish I had my pistol,” Trevor said. “I’d try a shot at that rat.”

  The rat was eating a scrap of day-old tortilla, and seemed unperturbed by the presence of two elegantly dressed humans. As the sky above them lightened, the contrast between their dress and the bare shabbiness of the table and the little courtyard became more stark, but Aurora was feeling calmly tired and didn’t mind. Trevor spent half his life in the Caribbean or in South America and was wonderful at Latin dances; for once she had been given her fill of rhumbas and sambas, cha-chas and various wilder dances that Trevor had seemed to be improvising on the spot, to the great delight of five or six middle-aged Mexicans who had stayed to drink beer and watch them until almost six in the morning.

  The light got better still, and she could see that there were more lines than she would have thought in her old flame’s face.