The Evening Star by Larry McMurtry

Author:Larry McMurtry [McMurtry, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781451607727
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-06-02T07:00:00+00:00

Sometimes, peering across the dark yard at the little room over the garage, he thought he saw shadows moving across the windows. Once he thought he heard Aurora singing opera—that was very likely, since she enjoyed pouring forth song whenever the mood struck her. But the shadows moving across the windows were harder to explain. Perhaps they meant nothing. Perhaps Aurora was merely talking to Rosie. They both seemed to have become insomniacs in their old age. Willie, Rosie’s beau, had had his shift changed at the prison—he didn’t get off until midnight and rarely showed up at Rosie’s before 1:30 A.M. Rosie whiled away the time by watching CNN, but of course it was possible that now and then she and Aurora had a chat in Aurora’s memory room.

That didn’t explain the time she took dressing, though. The General thought he knew what explained the dressing: Pascal had won her away from him at last! It was just a guess, of course, but it seemed to him a shrewd guess. Pascal was nearly fifteen years younger than he was, and Frenchmen had a way of not giving up, where sex was concerned.

Add to that the undoubted fact that he was slipping a little and it seemed to him that you had a recipe for romance.

The General wished there was something to be done about the fact that he was slipping, but he didn’t know what it might be. Some days he just couldn’t seem to marshal his thoughts—instead of their being marshaled neatly, like a well-drilled platoon, they seemed to wander willy-nilly over golf courses where he had once played, or battlefields where he had once battled. He would begin thinking about something and then lose track of it entirely; his words were apt to behave as badly as his thoughts. Sometimes he called Aurora Evelyn, or Rosie Aurora.

Of course, you couldn’t expect a woman to like being called by another woman’s name, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop doing it except on his clearest days—and even on his clearest days, if he wasn’t watching, he might slip up and call Aurora Evelyn once or twice.

Perhaps that was what had driven Aurora into Pascal’s arms. She had probably reasoned that if he couldn’t remember her name she might do better to sleep with someone else. It was a position that was hard to argue with—which didn’t mean that he wasn’t jealous. On the contrary: the less he knew for sure, the more jealous he became. In time he had become so jealous just thinking of Aurora in the arms of the vain little Frenchman that he had taken to keeping his old service revolver in a box by his bed—the same box where he kept his medications. For a time he had apparently nearly driven Rosie and Aurora crazy by strewing his medications all over the house—a habit that meant he was almost never able to find the ones he was supposed to take at the times when he was supposed to take them.

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