Terms of Endearment (22 page)

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 unawares.

“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?”

“Boston,” Vernon said.

Old Schweppes sucked in his breath. “Good God a’mighty!” he said. “Boston, Mass. Let me walk on that for a while.”

They walked, Vernon with his hands in his pockets. Old Schweppes was usually a non-stop talker, and the fact that he had fallen silent at the mention of Boston was a little upsetting. Not a word was said on the sixth and seventh levels; when they got to the eighth Old Schweppes walked to the edge of the building and looked down.

“She’s a widow then,” he said. “Don’t take no Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. She wouldn’t come off down here by herself, not if she’s from Boston, Mass.” He sighed heavily and started walking upward again. “Not a young widow, I don’t guess?” he asked.

“She ain’t fifty,” Vernon said. “At least I’m older than she is.”

“Naw, widows mostly marry down, age-wise,” Schweppes said. “That’s a fact I’ve observed. They don’t want to have to get used to somebody else if they’re just apt to die. Havin’ to watch one husband play out’s enough for most women. Course you’re as fresh as a pullet. That’s some advantage. It means you’ll be easy to outsmart, once the warfare starts. Also means you ain’t got
nobody to compare them with. It ain’t often a fifty-year-old woman gets a chance to be first on the scene. I think that’s your biggest advantage.”

“She done knows I ain’t got no experience,” Vernon said. “I never made no bones about that.”

Schweppes began to shake his head. “You ever think about night school?” he said. “The oil business is one thing and ladies from Boston, Mass., they’re something else. They’re particular about speech up in that part of the country. You can get away with just so much of that old country-boy talk, an’ then they’re gonna let you know it’s gettin’ old. Right there’s one problem.”

Vernon began to feel downhearted. He began to wish he’d left Old Schweppes to
Sports Illustrated.
It was all beginning to sound like a lawsuit, and one that was going against him. For every advantage he had, Old Schweppes was finding two disadvantages.

“She’s already jumped on me about that,” he said. “Schweppes, I can’t go to night school. I’d feel plumb ridiculous.”

“Well, if you’ve reached the stage where you’ve got to have a woman, you’re going to feel ridiculous the big part of the time anyway,” Schweppes said. “I was never mixed up with nobody from further east than Little Rock neither. I never said more than howdy to a smart woman in my life, and I still went around feeling dumb half the time. They’re smarter than us—that’s what it boils down to.

“Not as ornery, just smarter,” he added.

Then he fell totally silent, and they walked up and up. A late night fog had risen, and they gradually rose above it. Old Schweppes began to belch and clear his throat. “Vernon, you’re a lot like me,” he said. “You ain’t ever gonna be a drinkin’ man, or a dopey. I know you gamble, but that ain’t serious. Gamblin’s only serious if a poor man does it. I guess a woman’s about the only chance you got to stay human, if you come right down to it. I guess a fat brunette from Boston, Mass., is as good a place to start as you’re gonna get. I’d hate to see you get any crazier than you are, if you want the truth of the matter.”

“Me?” Vernon said. “I ain’t crazy, Schweppes. I ain’t even been sick in the last fifteen years.”

“Well, you ain’t dangerous crazy, but you’re crazy anyhow,” Schweppes said, looking Vernon over as he said it. “Normal people sleep in beds, you know—beds with other people in them, if they can manage to. Normal people don’t bed down for the night in Lincoln Continentals on the top of parking garages. That’s a sign of craziness in my book. You’re just a crazy person that ain’t lost his ability to make money in the oil business—at least you ain’t lost it yet.”

Vernon didn’t know what to say. It seemed to him that Old Schweppes was a lot like Aurora when it came to speaking out. He had never spoken out that way to anybody in his life. He couldn’t think of anything to say in his defense, so he said nothing. They were up eighteen floors and he had the impulse to go over to the elevator and shoot up the last six. He had tried company and it hadn’t worked out.

Then, just when Vernon was feeling darkest, Old Schweppes patted him on the shoulder. “Buy her a present,” he said. “Women and politicians ain’t got much in common, but they can’t neither one of ’em totally resist bribes.”

“All right,” Vernon said, brightening a little. “Then what?”

“Buy her another present,” Schweppes said. “You’re a rich man. My grandmother was a Yankee and she couldn’t get enough of nothing. A woman that don’t like presents is bound to have a mean streak in her.”

When they reached the twenty-fourth floor Old Schweppes walked over and peered in the Lincoln. He shook his head and sucked in his breath again, making the deep hollows in his cheeks appear even deeper.

“Only a crazy man would own a television set anyway,” he said. “You got one in your car—that makes you double crazy. I hear they give out X-rays. You ain’t gonna win no widow from Boston, Mass., if you soak up too many of them X-rays.”

He reached out and shook Vernon’s hand and immediately began to hobble off. “It wouldn’t hurt you to try to get used to sleeping in houses,” he said, leaving his boss in as much of a quandary as ever.

2.

V
ERNON MADE
his seat down into a bed and lay on it, but when the sky became gray he still couldn’t claim to have slept. He had thought about the things Aurora had said, and about the things Old Schweppes had pointed out, and it was clear to him that Old Schweppes must be right: he was crazy. Twenty years back, when he was in his thirties, he had thought so himself for a time, but he kept so busy he forgot about it. Of course it was crazy to sleep in a car on a roof; no lady would like that, and Aurora seemed to be more particular than most ladies, besides. So it was all hopeless and he had been foolish to speak out so absurdly, and there was nothing to do but give up. Still, he had told her he would come back and see her, and he thought he could allow himself that pleasure at least once more.

He started the Lincoln, coasted slowly down the twenty-four levels of ramp, and drove out South Main to a little all-night cafe he was fond of near the Astrodome. The Dome was a ghostly sight in the morning mist; from a certain distance away it looked like the moon suddenly come to rest on the earth.

The cafe where Vernon customarily ate his breakfast was called the Silver Slipper, for no good reason at all. It was not silver, and no one who had worn a silver slipper had ever been inside it, so far as anyone knew. It was run by a husband and wife team named Babe and Bobby, who made it their life. They had a tiny house trailer hitched to the back wall like a Shetland pony, and whichever one of them was tiredest slept in it while the other cooked. It was really an antique one-man trailer dating from the 1930s, and they had taken it in payment for two hundred dollars’ worth of cheeseburgers owed them by a one-time friend named Reno, who had lived for a while in the smelly little trailer camp a few yards up the street. Reno had eventually found life in the trailer camp too stable and had moved downtown to the Trailways bus station, where he became a wino. The
bed in the trailer was the width of a narrow shelf, and Babe and Bobby had never figured out a way to sleep in it side by side, though they could copulate in it fairly well if they were careful. It didn’t really matter, since they couldn’t both leave the cafe long enough to sleep together. Their help was sporadic and they were proud of their ability to do it all themselves.

“Scrapin’ by” was what whichever one of them was up said every morning when Vernon came in for his sausages and eggs and asked how they were doing. He had offered to buy them out many times so they could afford some help and maybe a better trailer, but Babe and Bobby were too independent to cotton to such talk. Babe was a fat redhead who thought Vernon was cute as a button, and she teased him about his intentions every time he offered to buy them out.

“I know you, Vernon,” she said. “Soon as you got me on the payroll you’d get ideas. I get enough guys in here with ideas in the course of a day. I’m gettin’ too old to worry about all you boys and your ideas.”

Vernon could not help but be embarrassed by such talk. “Aw, I’m too old,” he said usually.

Babe and Bobby were both sitting at the counter stirring their coffee when Vernon walked in. Nobody else was in the Silver Slipper.

“Mornin’,” Vernon said.

Bobby kept on stirring his coffee and said nothing—more and more he was prone to lapses. Babe got up and got Vernon some coffee.

“Thank God for a customer,” she said. “Me an’ Bobby was fallin’ asleep in all this quiet. You look like you got the jumps today. About to make another million?”