AURORA RILEY

I knew the time would come to consider Aurora again. Aurora Riley, that plain and passionate girl that I did not deserve—and who certainly did not deserve me. I did not treat her well. Oh, I never hurt her physically—that’s not my way, I am not a particularly physical person. Sometimes it seems to me that I barely live in the physical world at all. A ghost in solid form, with only the ghosts of emotions. I sublimate my feelings into an intellectuality that serves, all too often, as a fuel for sarcasm. Or at least that’s how I reacted to life in my younger days, if I ever had “younger days.” I was what people referred to as an “old soul” as a child and youth. I am sorry to say that the people who said this meant it as a compliment, but they misinterpreted my seriousness and my utter lack of spontaneity. I was not wise, merely cold.

My parents never understood me—and I did not particularly want them to. My workmates have generally seen me as diligent and technically adept, and, while that is true, it is not out of any dedication to the business nor even to the craft I practice. I simply prefer to deal with people at a distance, sublimated into words and numbers. Aggregates over the actual, living individual, please. Of course they thought me odd, standoffish, as well. And for good reason: I was the hunched little man eating alone at a corner table in the building cafeteria, who cleaned his plate, stacked his silverware carefully beside it in the busing bin, and read thick novels until he hurried back to his desk in the broad gray room where we all worked. I didn’t follow sports, as of course I still do not. I preferred Russian novels to spy thrillers. I didn’t even own a television, as I was forced to mention now and then when the inevitable and fortunately occasional conversations turned to the most recent episode of some vapid comedy. I blinked back at my interlocutors and blandly asserted my lack of interest in Hollywood product, and, frankly, enjoyed the slack-jawed consternation my statements elicited from otherwise fairly intelligent folks. The one soul not taken aback by my cultivated peculiarity was Aurora Riley. I still don’t understand this, and that lacuna in my worldview nags at me.

We met in the company cafeteria—it was a large company, and in those days offered a free lunch, the legacy of its founding during the Depression. The food was far from culinarily significant, not that I cared then, nor do I now. But it was not repellent, and no one that I can recall suffered food poisoning from it, and, being served cafeteria-style, in stainless steel bins behind angled glass sneeze guards, and requiring no interaction with a cashier, it was perfect for one such as I. The women behind the counter—and they were all women, dressed in white uniforms resembling nurses’ outfits—were all quiet, short, stout, and either Black or Latina, and were certainly not paid very well. My colleagues tended towards the glossy and white, and there was a wall far denser than the sneeze guard between them and the cafeteria ladies. I must confess I felt a certain comfort in the presence of these women, as they reminded me of my school days, when no one would speak to me except one of the cafeteria ladies, who always called me “darlin’,” and snuck me an extra piece of crumb cake from the dessert trays that marked her realm. Nevertheless, I did not even once so much as wish one of them a good day; I was too distant from human feeling then. Aurora began the process of changing that, but did not see it through. Indeed, it was not until recently that I became more of a decent person. But Aurora initiated the process, slow though it was, and my time with Aurora began in that cafeteria.

It was the Russian novels that attracted her attention. The majority of my co-workers (I can hardly call them “colleagues”; the work we did lacked the dignity to justify that term, and collaborations were at a minimum, for which I was grateful), the majority of my co-workers suffered no interest in literature; the television, or, for the wilder ones among them, the corner bar, offered sufficient distraction from that gloom of mortality which defines the sensation of being human and finite in this random universe. Few wish to confront themselves with their own eventual extinction and call it entertainment, so Russian literature would constitute for them a sort of horror, if not boredom. Aurora, however, noted what I was reading that day in the cafeteria and felt, she later explained, a sort of warmth pervade her; for she herself was a reader of what is often scornfully referred to as “serious literature,” meaning, for most Americans, “boring old junk,” of the sort forced upon them in the beige haze of high school. Aurora, instead of finding my taste pretentious or merely incomprehensible, shared it. She came to my table, leaned slightly, and very correctly asked if she might sit by me, promising to be quiet because “I love the Russians myself; I re-read them all the time.” Normally I would have refused company, but the literary connection and the probable commonality of perception that it implied inspired a feeling that I eventually identified as relief: here was someone I might not have to pretend with, who might actually be interesting to me, and possibly I to her. I nodded in assent, watched her sit down out of the corner of my eye, and continued to read for a few minutes, just to establish my territorial boundaries. I was generally indifferent to others, but tried not to be outright rude, as it might lead to tedious consequences with certain persons. Aurora, however, seemed harmless, possibly even good-natured, and so I finished my chapter, placed the marker on the page, and closed the book. Aurora had been watching me the whole time, which I had been aware of.

“Have you ever read any of Dostoevsky’s short stories?” she asked. She spoke in clear, unhurried, measured tones. “Everyone reads the novels—or at least everyone who reads. Or so I hope. But the stories are quite different.”

I confessed that I had not read them, had not yet discovered that he had written any.

She brightened. “They are comical, sometimes hilarious. The same exploration of the human condition—you know, of course: love, loyalty, betrayal, ignorance, and death.” Yes, I could hear the punctuation as she spoke. “But a different take on it. Often slapstick.”

I felt slightly disgruntled, as I considered “my” Dostoevsky to be uniformly grim. “Perhaps,” I said, “he wrote them for money?”

Aurora shrugged. “Same theme, different treatment. Maybe a god’s-eye view, do you think? Watching the puppets stumble across the stage, taking themselves so seriously, only to die, or wish they had? And God laughing the whole time!” She smiled, and I looked at her face for the first time.

Of course I had seen her about the office, it was an open-plan office, and we worked in adjacent units. But now I looked at her analytically: a plain, oval face with small features, dull coloration, and the sort of hairstyle attributed to Joan of Arc in old paintings. The hair of a sort of non-color between blonde and brown. Slim-bodied, with not much shape. I noted her clothes out of the corner of my eye: studiously plain, as if she were emulating the popular image ascribed to librarians or country schoolteachers in books or films of lesser import. I remembered that she always wore longish skirts, though short ones were then in style. In summary, a person who disappeared from view even when standing in front of you, a condition to which I aspired as well. This was someone who would not be bothersome, I hoped. I told her my name.

“Aurora Riley,” she replied. “A rather grand name for someone like me, isn’t it? I mean the ‘Aurora’ part.”

I didn’t quite know how to answer that, for if I agreed, I would have insulted her, and if I had made an insincere compliment, I would have felt I had insulted myself. I said nothing for a moment, while she gazed at me with a studiously neutral expression. I suspected a test, until she laughed and said, “Don’t worry; I know I’m plain, and I don’t care. It helps filter out the superficial baloney I hear men spout at the pretty girls all the time.”

I had an answer to this: “I’m no looker myself, and I don’t care. I’m not out trolling for pussy, if you’ll pardon the expression. That’s a term I’ve heard used by the superficial men you refer to. I hope I’m not one of them.”

“You’re reading Dostoevsky in this day and age, so I presume you are not. And I don’t mind the expression. I grew up with a gruff Irish father—Irish by background, he was born in a rough part of Boston, and made good as a mechanical engineer after starting his work life in a boiler factory. He hated delicate speech.” Aurora’s eyes became dreamy for a moment. “Drove my poor mother crazy; she was all for delicacy. And Daddy was delicate, in how he treated us physically. But he never could give up swearing and rough speech. He said it gave him great pleasure, and reminded him of his buddies at the boiler factory. He still keeps in touch with them. How are you finding Raskolnikov?”

“He’s a fool,” I answered. “His crime was hardly well-plotted, and expressive of self-indulgence. And he got off lightly in the end. This is my second time reading the book, you see. Raskolnikov was basically lazy, inside and out.”

“Yes,” Aurora said. “I don’t find him admirable. You harbor no affinity for axe murderers, then?”

“I hope I’ve never known one,” I answered.

“Well, you never know. I met a murderer once, though a rather ordinary one. An ex-biker that one of my girlfriends was in love with. He beat a man to death for making a wisecrack about his mother. She’s a counselor, she met him in jail. They actually got married!”

“Are they happy?”

“He was a drinker too. He jumped off a tall building on their second anniversary. She blames herself, but you know, she ought to know better. A guy like that carries baggage.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Not quite like that. My father’s a drinker, but he’s not out to kill himself or anybody else.”

“I don’t drink. During my foolish late adolescence, I tried, but never had the taste for it.”

“Neither do I. Makes dating harder, not drinking. At least with most men….”

There was a silence in which we both considered the obvious import of that statement. After a quick analysis of the situation, I decided to take the bait. “Well, then, let’s go to dinner. We’ll disappoint the waiter, as the alcohol is a major part of any dinner bill, but perhaps we won’t disappoint each other.”

Aurora smiled, and we set the date for Friday of that same week.

We both owned cars, but it turned out that she lived close enough to walk to work, which she always did, so we would be able to leave directly from the office in my vehicle. We agreed this would simplify the logistics of the grand event. Then lunchtime was over, and we returned to our respective desks. We met for lunch every day thereafter, usually reading together after chatting over the food. She was in the middle of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, reading it, she said, for its exploration of issues of class in a rigidly stratified society. I approved of this critical view, though Lawrence had always struck me as a self-indulgent writer. Aurora agreed with me, but added that his self-indulgence was a perhaps inevitable response to social pressure meant to steer him away from his ideological deviance. “Look at Chatterly. After all,” she said, “How could an aristocratic woman give herself to a man clearly her social inferior, and pollute the domineering bloodline she was meant to perpetuate as the regrettably animalistic vessel of procreation for her class?” Yes, she spoke that way, in the cafeteria amid the slouching forms of our companions in labor, who, I suspected, strove to emulate the aristocracy of old Britain in miniature, pouring their wealth into houses with lawns maintained by rough men they looked down upon. If they read Chatterly at all, it would likely be for the descriptions of the protagonists’ couplings, using its literary value as a cover for the pornographic thrill of acknowledging that sex exists at all.

Which reminded me that sex would certainly become a factor in our developing relationship. Although I was not a virgin, having been initiated in my later adolescence by a wild-child sort of young woman who probably saw me as a charity case, I was not experienced. But then Aurora impressed me as someone not likely to be greatly experienced in that realm herself. She was, I judged then, no seductress.

In this judgement I turned out to be wrong. Our dating process began smoothly enough, with a proper dinner at a middle-level restaurant, which was all we could afford. We split the bill, upon her insistence; she was a fiercely egalitarian sort, in fact an ardent Marxian, though emphatically “not a Marxist-Leninist; they’ve ruined communism,” as she declared. I dropped her off at home, with a brief hug properly enacted outside of the car, and we agreed on a movie the next weekend. We chose a dreary Swedish art film playing in a revival house, and discussed it at length on the walk back to the car. Again I dropped her off with a hug. On the third date, a daytime date on a Saturday, we went to an obscure bookstore in a bohemian district—this was her characterization, and was typically correct: it was on a street full of tiny shops selling peculiar objects and brightly-colored clothing such as Aurora never wore, nestled under a row of hills covered with old houses and older trees. The bookstore was cramped, of course, and hosted not one but two store cats, and the other customers looked like lost aging hippies and what were perhaps their grown children, who sported intentionally chaotic hairstyles and numerous tattoos. At first I felt out of place, especially in the company of the relentlessly plain Aurora Riley, but it turned out that she was a regular customer there, well-known and highly regarded, as I judged after witnessing the enthusiastic greeting she received from the thin and hirsute proprietor. She naturally introduced me after they had engaged in a long discussion over a new and extremely long experimental novel that had recently appeared. Levi—that was his name—shook my hand with enthusiasm, appeared to be glad to have met someone associated with Aurora, and immediately, following her prompt, began rather jovially interrogating me on my opinion of several Russian authors. I was not then accustomed to rendering my opinions in any detail, but I seem to have improvised an acceptable disquisition, as in the end Levi laughed happily and grabbed me in a surprisingly muscular embrace. I realized that I had passed some sort of test, and that Aurora had perhaps informed him ahead of our visit that she would be presenting a love interest—something she blithely confessed to later that night.

Much later that night, as she invited me into her apartment when I drove her home. Her apartment was not large, but it was certainly large enough for what ensued. It became immediately evident to me that Aurora had enjoyed considerably more sexual experiences than I had, and that she was not a shy or diffident lover. This did not bother me; I was both shy and diffident in that realm at the time, and I was relieved to have found an effective guide to the procedure. Aurora did not slight her body, slight though it was; she had, she explained later, determined to “enjoy herself” in an extremely literal sense of the phrase, alone or with a helper, as she put it, and was perfectly willing to train her helper if that was necessary. I needed training, but with sufficient repetition, I finally achieved a reasonable proficiency in the task. Aurora herself enjoyed the training sessions; I was, and still am, in no position to judge the sincerity of her expressions of passion, but if she was “faking it” to gain my approval, she was a world-class actor, and one who had written the script herself. I believe she was naturally passionate, and had not let herself be trained out of passion by social demands that women be “pure” and despise sex. That, at least, was how she phrased it to me later, when we discussed the matter, as we discussed everything. She was, of course, bisexual, and had had two relationships with women as well as several with men. None had lasted long, as her lovers had become possessive, something she would not tolerate. I assured her that I was not possessive, and that in fact I found the idea of possession burdensome. I owned a car, it is true, a minimum of necessary furniture, and some clothes, as well as a personal computer, but I did not wish to have charge of another living creature and the obligations therein entailed. There had never even been a pet in my life; my parents had once brought a cat into the house to be a companion to me, but the animal remained indifferent to everyone except my father, whom it seemed to adore. Aurora would never become my pet, or “my” anything, I assured her more than once, and attempted to sound the quotation marks in my speech. This would become altogether too true in due time, but we were not thinking ahead in the early days of our relationship.

Her physical enthusiasms gained justification as she trained me in amatory practice, till I became what I suppose was a “good lover.” I was certainly nothing special as a physical specimen; I was excessively thin, did not enjoy a commanding posture, and was of only modestly more than average endowment, at least according to Aurora. But I have always been a ready learner, and of course, cold though I must admit I am to human sentiments, I certainly did not find my training sessions repellent. I confess to laughing from mere pleasure more than once. Unfortunately, this began to awaken a cloying sentimentalism in Aurora, whom I appreciated as a companion in the appreciation of literature, and as a disciplined thinker and Marxian analyst. Though I was certainly no “commie”—I was neither sufficiently materialistic in even the philosophical sense, nor sufficiently sharing—I enjoyed the sensations engendered by hearing her astute and detailed analyses of the current world system’s structural infelicities. Alternating such experiences with our sexual extravagances compounded a profoundly affecting exhilarant, and I began to enjoy myself in enjoying her. At the same time, she was becoming more emotionally attached, and I began to find her increasing deferral to my whims and wishes, such as they were, troubling, and troublesome. I was not, I realized, able to tolerate what appeared to be an increasing dependency on my company, especially as much of it was her creation, as it were.

An example: we had taken up hiking in a wildland park near our neighborhood. This park comprised a number of steep hills separated by equally steep canyons, and a strenuous ramble along one of its ridges brought us to an outcropping of pale stone that afforded us a view of the city below. I carefully made my way to the edge of a declivity and stood there to examine the panorama, which included our neighborhoods. It was a fine view, with the city safely reduced to an agglomeration of roofs and trees, along with loops of gray freeway crowded with glittering cars that did not resemble cars any more from that height. No individual humans were visible, only the boxes, mobile or stationary, that confined them. I felt comfortable up there. The closer view, of steep canyons furred with gray-green shrubs, was also satisfying. An inhuman view, despite the rumbling human presence spread out below, noted only by reference to its artifacts. A slow breeze rose from the canyon immediately below us, bearing the pleasant odors of plants whose names I was unlikely ever to know. I almost forgot about Aurora, a female human, waiting behind me. I had left her perched on the outcropping behind me, farther from the steep edge. I took several deep breaths and looked out at the distant sea.

At that moment, something impinged on the vista, and I realized that I was surrounded by what I estimate to be close to a hundred small white butterflies. The insects orbited me for nearly a minute before separating and going their own ways to destinations unknowable to me, and probably to them. I have no love for insects, but the moment offered a modest charm. I turned around and smiled at Aurora, who was now standing, wide-eyed, on her rock. We had, I suddenly recalled, been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude together and analyzing it as we went. There is a recurring motif in the story where a character is surrounded by butterflies for a moment just as I had been. I walked back to Aurora, who was speechless: she grabbed me by the shoulders and compressed me to her in a tight hug, which she followed with a passionate kiss. “Like, like in the story,” she said.

“They were just caught in an updraft,” I said. “No magic involved--”

“Shut up and take me home,” she answered. “And fuck me blind.”

I believe this marked the beginning of a deterioration in our relationship. She seemed to take the imputation of a magical aura seriously—she whom I respected for her diligent rationality. It began with small deferrals, a collapse of her resistance to my suggestions of, for example, nothing more significant than where to eat that night, or whether to walk or drive to some location that was neither near nor far. But it grew to encompass our more intellectual engagement, and infect our political and philosophical discussions with an air of ready surrender on her part. Even in our physical relationship, she began to ask that I take the lead, though I had been trained by her. She made no pronouncement of this change in status between us, nor did she reference it casually; she simply enacted a growing submissiveness in every negotiation we engaged in. It began to irk me; I realized that I had become accustomed to our intellectual sparring, as well as the fact—I must be honest with myself now—that I enjoyed being directed sexually, and not having to suffer a sense of responsibility in that realm. Of being relieved of the need to be inventive.

I am not particularly suited to situations that require fluidity or inventiveness; left to myself, I prefer routines, but even I understood that routine is decidedly unsexy, and now she was gradually, if innocently, maneuvering me into a position of leadership that I never wanted. I felt resentment towards her personally; we were no longer equals in standing, though I had felt she was my equal in intellectual power and firmness of opinion. And so she was, but I now felt that Aurora Riley was using me to relieve her of the responsibility to live her own life.

I may have been wrong in this; over the decades since, I have come to realize that I have often been a quiet bully, and that that quality can be superficially comforting to an insecure person who wishes to find a defined space in which to operate. Nevertheless, I did not know myself as well as I thought back then, and I blamed this sudden elevation, to an undesired position of emotional responsibility, on a hitherto undisclosed weakness in her character. Eventually, I insisted that we part.

I resented her by then, possibly—certainly—because I had come to enjoy the taste of power she gave me over her, body and soul, not that I think we have souls. But the power brought with it an obligation which I could not tolerate at that time. Why should I have to live for the two of us? In those days I was young enough to be idealistic in my own cold way. She had also, after all, granted me a taste of a relationship of equals, and I did not like the flavor of our new commonwealth. I told her we could not continue to see each other, and that our behavior at work would have to remain one of frigid cordiality, which would only continue what we affected in the office anyway; neither of us wanted our colleagues to know that we were romantically entwined. Now that we were not, it would be easier to maintain that behavior. She heard my pronouncement with confusion and a very minor flow of tears, but in this as well she acceded to my wishes.

If she had not—if she had reasserted herself, asked for an explanation, perhaps reverted to her former strong self, we might have stayed together and continued to grow, and I might have become a better man. But I also failed to offer negotiation. I realized somewhat later that I had come to like the poison of power. By the time I came to this conclusion, she had, wisely, moved on, found a new lover, married him, and moved with him to another state. I met him once; a mild, kind man, such as I might have become had Aurora and I both been more honest with each other and ourselves.

As it is, my weakness defined my life for decades afterwards: I decided to perfect my cold and manipulative inclinations. I left the office and the meaningless analytical work I did there and became a researcher for a law firm, a sort of detective who never left the office, but prowled the Internet rooting out the unpleasantries of our clients’ enemies so that my employers could sully them in court. And, eventually, I married, but it was decades before I behaved well to my wife. I worked to make her feel small, and thus to give myself a larger perspective in my own distorted view of myself.

I have since changed, with great effort, and am now almost a kind man. But I cannot erase the quiet, almost gentle harm I have done to both Aurora and my wife over the decades. Although it is not too late to love, for I think I do love now, it is too late to heal. I live on, remorseful, a better man at last, but still a failure.

Richard Risemberg has been publishing stories, poems, essays, and articles in edited journals for years, including Snowy Egret, Juxta, Eclectica, Momentum, Cycling Mobility, The Audubon Society Newsletter (Santa Monica), Terrain, Empty Mirror, and even the Los Angeles Business Journal.