Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  “All this is very reassuring,” Emma said. “Your life is as much of a mess as mine. Experience must not be everything.”

  “Hardly,” Aurora said. “Now I’ve brushed my hair and filed my nails, only my hair was already brushed and my nails already filed. I’ve been doing a great deal that’s superfluous lately. That can’t be a good sign.”

  “Vernon’s probably biting his,” Emma said. “We’ve been talking fifteen minutes.”

  “What a boor your husband is to go to sleep so early,” Aurora said. “He didn’t make a single witty remark all evening, and his tie was dull. I can’t understand why you married someone so unenergetic. Energy is the very least one should be able to expect from a man. There’s no visible evidence that Thomas does you any good at all. Your hair is dull, and he evidently expects you to raise a child in a garage.”

  “We don’t plan to live here forever,” Emma said. “I hope you’ll be careful with Vernon. He may be a tender plant.”

  “What can I do, with you and Rosie protecting him?” Aurora said. “He has no business being a tender plant at his age, but you don’t have to worry. I may be impossible, but I’m not a lawn mower.”

  3.

  AURORA HUNG up, sighed, and went downstairs to find Vernon and Rosie sitting rather somberly at the kitchen table. The kitchen was spotless. Rosie had her raincoat on and her purse in her hands, but she did not seem eager to leave. Vernon was nervously shuffling a deck of cards.

  “You two are hardly encouraging,” Aurora said. “Why are you so quiet?”

  “I’m plumb talked out,” Rosie said, although she had said almost nothing all evening. Her face looked a little sunken. When Aurora sat down, she got up to leave.

  “I better get going,” she said. “I don’t want to miss that last bus.”

  Aurora got up again and walked with her to the door. “Thank you for staying,” she said. “I won’t make a habit of keeping you this late.”

  “You didn’t keep me,” Rosie said. “I was just purely too lonesome to leave. Emma looked a little peaked, I thought.”

  Aurora nodded, but didn’t comment. Rosie loved to speculate about Emma’s unhappiness, and it was not something she wanted to get into a conversation about just then. She said good night. The sidewalk was pale in the moonlight and she stood in the doorway and watched Rosie walk along it, past the Lincoln, toward the bus stop at the corner. The sound of her heels on the concrete was quite distinct in the still night.

  She glanced at Vernon and saw that he was still fiddling with his deck of cards. For some reason, or no reason, the hopefulness in her, which had pulsed quite strongly for part of the evening, began to fade and grow faint, in time, almost, with her maid’s fading footsteps. To stop it from going out altogether she shut the door and turned back to the table.

  “Ort to have driven her home, I guess,” Vernon said.

  Aurora had picked up a teapot, thinking to make them some tea, but something, some nervousness or uncertainty in his tone, irritated her. She left the teapot where it was and went at once to the table.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why ought you to have taken her home? I fail to see that you have any obligation of that sort at all. Rosie stayed here by her own choice, and she is quite habituated to riding the bus. It isn’t raining and she isn’t a hardship case, despite her present circumstances. She’s a grown adult who’s rather more accustomed than most to fending for herself. If you don’t mind, I wish you’d explain to me why you made that remark.”

  Vernon looked up and saw that she was pale with anger. He was horrified—he couldn’t think what he had done that was so bad.

  “Don’t know,” he said honestly. “She looked lonesome, an’ her house ain’t much out of my way.”

  “Thank you,” Aurora said. “Why don’t you leave, then? You can probably catch her at the bus stop, and if not you can chase down the bus. I doubt that any bus can outrun a fancy car like yours. If you don’t mind my saying so, that car of yours is more suited to someone in the heroin traffic than to a respectable businessman.”

  It suddenly occurred to her that she knew almost nothing about the man sitting at her table. “Are you in the heroin traffic?” she asked.

  Vernon was having trouble with his lungs. “I didn’t mean nothin’ wrong,” he said.

  Aurora watched him, her teeth clenched. Then she stopped watching him and stared at the wall. “Yes, go on, apologize five or six times,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “But what?” Vernon asked. “But what?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Aurora said. “I don’t want to talk. It doesn’t matter now. I suppose I should be grateful you bothered to stay as long as you did. No doubt it was very foolish of me to suppose the evening might not be quite at an end. Of course it was also foolish of me not to notice what a fancy you’ve taken to Rosie.”

  Vernon stared at her, trying to understand. He was hearing a language he had never heard before—a language not so much of words, but of emotions. He didn’t understand it at all—he just knew that everything depended on his being able to set things right.

  “I ain’t a fancy,” he began desperately. “That ain’t what. It’s just … I was being polite.”

  The pain in his voice was compelling enough to cause Aurora to look at him again. “Yes, you’re much too polite, I know that,” she said. “It’s a pity I’m not, but it doesn’t matter now. It happens that you were my guest tonight, and Rosie is not the only woman in the world who is sometimes lonely. I have no claim on you and I certainly don’t want any now, but it would have been only mannerly of you to sit and drink a cup of tea with me before you rush off to huddle in your car again. However, I’m sure that’s much too much to ask of a busy man like you. You were ready to seize any excuse to rush off, weren’t you?”

  Her eyes held his, and Vernon knew there was no point in denying it.

  “Maybe so, but you don’t understand,” he said.

  “I understand you didn’t really want to stay,” Aurora said. “Nothing is more basic than that. Either you were scared to or you just didn’t want to. The first explanation isn’t very flattering to you, and the second isn’t at all flattering to me.”

  “Scairt, yeah,” Vernon said. “I don’t know. I never met nobody like you, nor been in nothin’ like this. Why wouldn’t I be scairt?”

  Aurora turned so livid with fury that she felt her skin might split. A sense of wrongness overwhelmed her and she hit the table with both hands. The sight of Vernon, honest, nervous, and maddeningly meek, was unendurable. When she hit the table he jumped.

  “I don’t want you to be scared!” she yelled. “I’m just a human being! I just wanted you to sit and drink some tea … with me … and be my companion for a few minutes. I’m not going to pour the tea on you unless you drive me completely out of my wits with your reticence, or your stupid inarticulateness. I’m not scary! Don’t tell me I’m scary! There’s nothing frightening about me. You’re just all cowards!”

  She sank into a chair and hit the table several more times before the energy began to go out of her. Vernon stayed in his chair; he didn’t try to move. Aurora was panting from her outrage.

  “Why don’t I make the tea?” Vernon said after a minute. “You’re all upset about something.”

  He said it without the slightest sense of irony. Aurora shook her head in acquiescence and waved him toward the stove.

  “Certainly. I’m glad to see that terror hasn’t paralyzed you,” she said. “Good God. What a useless … stupid …” She shook her head again and left the sentence unfinished.

  She watched Vernon without much interest as he made the tea. He did know how, which was something, but by the time he brought the two cups to the table both anger and energy had left her and she was as she had been that afternoon—spiritless, convinced of nothing except that there was not much point in trying to make things right. Things would never be right.

  “Thank you, Vernon,” she said, taking her cup. He s
at down opposite her. With a teacup in his hands he seemed to feel more secure.

  “If I could just talk like you do it’d be an improvement,” he said.

  “Oh, Vernon, don’t bother about me,” Aurora said, noting that he actually was the nice little man she had thought him to be-only it didn’t matter.

  “I was not mad at you because of the way you talk,” she said. “I was mad because you were scared when you had no reason to be and because you were all set to rush off and leave me with no one to drink tea with. That’s one of the only things I look forward to about an evening like this, you know—someone to drink tea with at the end of it. For all I know, the whole point of civilization is to provide one with someone to drink tea with at the end of an evening. Otherwise you have no one with whom to talk over whatever may have happened during the evening. Dinner parties are often more fun to talk about than they are to attend—at least they aren’t complete until they’ve been discussed.”

  She stopped, aware that she was making no sense to Vernon.

  “In any case, I would like to apologize for my outburst,” she said. “I’m sorry I accused you of designs on Rosie. You saw a chance to escape and be polite at the same time, that’s all. It doesn’t matter now.”

  The fact that she kept saying that it didn’t matter made Vernon very uneasy. “How am I gonna learn if I don’t make mistakes?” he said.

  “You aren’t going to learn,” Aurora said. “Not from me. You’d be dead before you got to the third lesson. It was very wrong of me to encourage you—I’m sorry I did. We’re worlds apart, or light-years, or however you want to measure it. I’m entirely to blame, as usual. I’m a very ill-tempered, disagreeable woman.”

  “I thought it was my fault,” Vernon said.

  “Sure, like the car wreck,” Aurora said. “You can’t get away with that here, Vernon. I’m harder to fool than that young patrolman.”

  “It’s just ignorance,” Vernon said. “That’s my trouble.”

  “Of course. It’s hard to learn much if you live your life inside a car,” Aurora said. “That Lincoln is like a big egg, you know. Frankly, I don’t think you want to hatch.”

  “Didn’t much care until I met you,” he said.

  “Please don’t leave off your pronouns,” she said. “You’ve no idea how it irritates me to hear people chop their sentences that way. I really meant to bring you out and show you a bit of my world, but now you’ve discouraged me.”

  “I can still take a run at it, can’t I?” Vernon asked.

  “No,” Aurora said, determined to strip him of every shred of hope. “Go on to Alberta, where you were going to begin with. You’ll be more comfortable, I’m sure.”

  “You’d make a poker player,” Vernon said, trying a smile. “It’s hard to tell when you’re bluffin’.”

  “Wrong,” Aurora said. “Ladies never bluff. They may change their minds, but that’s a different matter.”

  “Folks is right,” Vernon said. “Love means trouble.”

  “Oh, hush,” Aurora said. “I made you fall in love with me, if that’s what you did. It was my whimsey, and certainly none of your doings.”

  She found that she had stopped wanting to talk about anything. She wished very much that Trevor were back, because he would have hugged her, if he had been there, and to be hugged was what she wanted most. She could have forgiven almost anything for a nice hug. She looked longingly at Vernon, but he didn’t know the meaning of the look. What she felt was too subtle for him.

  His instinct was not completely passive, though. He could tell that she needed something, so he brought the teapot and carefully poured her some more tea.

  “There you are,” he said hopefully, starting to go back to his side of the table.

  Aurora reached out with a foot and dragged a chair from one end of the table around to her side. “I do think you could at least sit on the same side of the table with me,” she said.

  Vernon sat down, a little nervously, in profile to her. His profile was only a couple of bumps, and Aurora recovered a touch of her good humor in contemplating it. When she had had enough she reached down and caught the leg of his chair and with a grunt or two managed to twist it so he was more or less facing her.

  “There, now we’re having tea, Vernon,” she said prettily. “You’re on my side of the table, you’re more or less facing me, I can see your eyes instead of just your chin and the end of your nose, and you’re close enough that I can hit you if you irritate me. This is almost civilized procedure.”

  Vernon’s breast was all confusion. Aurora was smiling at him, which didn’t fit with all the terrible things she had just said. She seemed exuberant again, and seemed to have forgiven him for all the wrong things he had done, but he knew he might do more wrong things at any moment. He jittered and tapped his fingers rapidly on his knees, hoping very much that he could manage not to do anything wrong. Generally when there was a woman around she was a waitress and there was a counter in between them, but there certainly wasn’t a counter between him and Aurora.

  “Jitter, jitter, jitter,” she said. “Stop tapping your fingers.”

  Actually, watching him twitch had reminded her of the first small man in her life—a tiny dean from Harvard who had been her first lover and whose memory had remained surprisingly fresh after quite a number of years. His name was Fifoot, Dean Fifoot, so small and ugly, so energetic and competitive and intense—compensating constantly in every possible way—that neither her scruples nor her maidenhood had stood the slightest chance; she had lost both at the same time and never really recovered even the scruples, it seemed to her. If there had really been anything wrong with Trevor it had been that he was mild and lazy and tall and confident and had the bad fortune to follow upon a man with gigantic energies and ambitions and a small body. Trevor could never have imagined such hunger as her little dean had; she herself was only to encounter its like again, briefly, in Alberto, when he was flush with his first great success as a singer. For that matter, Trevor would never have got the chance to sail her around on his boat if Dean Fifoot hadn’t suddenly married a rich unattractive woman. Aurora could not recall that she had been precisely heartbroken—her heart had never had time to get focused exactly—but for several years thereafter she did feel that life was a comedown in some respects. And now there was another small man, in her very own kitchen, rattling his teacup against his saucer, worth six million dollars by his own admission, energies to burn, the need to compensate sticking out all over him, and yet without a speck of savoir-faire.

  “It’s just my luck,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “You,” she said. “Here I need a man of the world and I get a man of the oil fields.”

  Vernon looked puzzled.

  “You’re a very unrewarding person, in my view,” Aurora went on. “You wait fifty years to fall in love for the first time, and then you pick me. I’m fiendishly difficult, as you’ve already discovered. Only years of experience could prepare any man to deal with me. You have the nerve to present yourself to me without a shred of experience, just when I need a lot of love and skillful handling. In short, you’re a washout.”

  She sat back happily to watch him make what he could of that speech.

  “How’d I know I was gonna meet you?” Vernon asked. “Chances was one in a million.”

  “What a ridiculous defense,” Aurora said. “The point of my criticism was that you’ve lived fifty years and made no effort to meet anybody, that I can see. You’re a perfectly nice, competent, efficient, friendly man, and you might have made some woman very happy, yet you’ve made no effort to use yourself at all. You’ve made no one really happy, not even yourself, and now you’re so set in your ridiculous ways that you wouldn’t know how to begin to relate to another person. It’s shameful, really. You’re a wasted resource. Furthermore, you’re a resource I might have wanted.”

  “Ought to be ashamed of myself, I guess,” Vernon said.

  “Shame
never made anybody happy,” Aurora said. “It’s one of those perfectly useless emotions, like regret. Meanwhile all around you people are starving.”

  “Well, I got half my life left, if nothing don’t fall on me,” Vernon said. “Maybe I can learn something.”

  “I doubt it,” Aurora said. “The day we met you showed some promise, but I don’t know where it went. You’ve allowed me to cow you. I guess you were just a flash in the pan.”

  Vernon stood up suddenly. He knew things were hopeless, but he couldn’t stand to hear Aurora say it so cheerfully. “No, I’m just an ignorant fool,” he said.

  Aurora was on the point of telling him his remark contained a redundancy, but she noted just in time that she had tripped along too far and hurt his feelings.

  “Now, now,” she said. “Of course I apologize. Don’t you have any sense of play at all? I was speaking in a spirit of fun. I just like to see how you react. Pay attention to the tone of my voice once in a while, for goodness’ sake. I can’t be serious all the time, can I? Are you trying to leave again just because I twitted you a little?”

  Vernon sat back down. “I’m in a pickle,” he said, thinking out loud. “I don’t know whether I’m going or coming,” he added, blushing.

  Aurora accepted the blush as a sign of emotion, and decided she’d better be satisfied with that. She spent the last twenty minutes of the evening trying not to do anything that might upset him, but when he asked if he could come for breakfast she shook her head.

  “I don’t think you should bother, Vernon,” she said. “I don’t even think you really want to. We’re a bigger puzzle to one another than we were the day we met. I’m glad you wanted me for your first sweetheart, but I’m a little too formidable for a first sweetheart. I might have made a nice last romance, but you haven’t had your first one yet, have you?”

  “Well, this,” Vernon said.