Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “I better get back,” she said. “You coming?”

  He shook his head. “You go on.”

  Jean patted his arm. “Safe landing,” she said as she walked away.

  He watched the easy sway of her hips, the rhythm of her dress. She was, he knew, a very attractive woman and other men thought him lucky to be with her. He considered how his forty-three years of living had brought him to be half drunk and sitting in a crippled airplane watching his wife’s well-maintained body as she walked out to be toasted by people who were strangers to him. This felt like the punch line to some elaborate joke.

  Jeremy pulled himself from the cockpit, a sudden urgent fullness in his bladder. Downstairs by the coat racks, he remembered, they had passed a men’s room on the way in. He headed out through the back hallway, the orange carpet dimly lit by track lighting, and came to an exhibit on the history of electricity. Glass cases displayed early lightbulbs and Edisonphones and lengths of copper wire. Outside one case was a plastic box with rows of green and red buttons. He pushed one, and a painted plywood panel lit up with tiny bulbs to show the path of lightning across the sky to the ground. He pushed another, and a man’s recorded voice scratched through an overhead speaker, explaining the evolution of electrical generation and its importance to industry and the growth of America. Jeremy leaned close to the glass, watching the lights as the calming, neutral voice explained the history of power and man’s harnessing of nature.

  As he listened, his mind unearthed a glimmer from thirty years prior, ninth grade, when he’d attended football camp at Chapel Hill. He’d spent a week living in the dorm, sweating through his days in the damp air and dry grass of summer, running scrimmages and drills, drinking ice water from coolers. Near the end, the busloads of campers had come in early one afternoon as hard rains pounded the practice fields. They ran shouting from the buses toward the high-rise dorm. The fastest among them—a big, red-haired running back from Winston—sprinted to the door, laughing, his face streaked with mud, then grabbed the pull handle, spasmed once, and slammed to the concrete landing. He looked up blinking, as if he’d been lifted and thrown there. Others followed, their arms jerked by the force of the electric current that somehow had shorted out through the steel doorframe. They quickly discovered the pattern—everyone barefoot or grounded in cleats was jolted, and everyone in sneakers was not. They took turns, daring one another, letting the current snap their elbows.

  Jeremy had held back until finally someone dared him. He hesitated, remembering stories about the electric chair and how the murderers’ hair would smoke or their hearts explode. In the same instant he thought this, his palm touched the door, and something alive gathered inside his arm and ripped through his fingertips, the shock liquid and silvery. He heard profanity wrung from his own mouth and then stood looking at his tingling hand and the moment was over, his heart fluttering, the boys around him laughing. He and the others pulled on their wet sneakers and formed a line, holding hands, grabbing those who were barefoot or in cleats, each grounded touch sending the feathery shock through the long extension of themselves, adding to the line until there were nearly forty of them. They whipped around the asphalt lot like skaters, linked by their hands, tracking victims, the air metallic with the smell of ozone. The rain soaked his clothes, his arms pulled and twisted, rib cage aching as they ran shouting through the rows of buses and around the hedges that surrounded the building, his feet sometimes pulled off the pavement. For half an hour they ran after one another. He could see them now, like the tiny lights reflected behind the display glass, the years charged, old memory chasing him down.

  Jeremy’s hands slipped from the glass, leaving fingerprints and a greasy oval where his nose had been. He realized that they could have been, all of them, electrocuted. A wire-service tragedy, page-three irony. But that seemed now what gave the story its meaning, that they hadn’t died and hadn’t known that they could. More than anything else, reminiscence held all possibility of romance. Maybe the brochures for the museum ought to be rewritten to explain that this was all history was—understanding slathered on the messy past. The display lights blinked out and the taped voice ran quiet. He still had to pee.

  The low thumps and vibrations of full-blown dancing sounded from the banquet room behind him. He moved along the dim halls and down a series of back stairs until he found the men’s room. As he washed his hands, he looked at himself in the narrow mirror, his skin greenish and sickly in the fluorescent light. He patted his hair and hook shot his paper towel into the trash can. Near the elevator he found a still-smoldering cigarette in the ashtray and took a few drags from it, feeling it buzz inside his head.

  Across the hall, an exhibit featured mannequins of pioneers posed near an orange plastic fire, holding cardboard skillets, coonskin caps perched crookedly on the heads of the men, the women in long dresses of rough fabric. The mannequins were the type on display in the hip, noisy stores of the mall—lithe and thin, their nipples erect. Jeremy laughed at this, then stepped over the Plexiglas partition that surrounded the exhibit. He straightened the caps of the two men, ran his finger along the fringe of their buckskin coats, hefted their rifles. The brown leaves under his feet were made of some thin synthetic cloth. He thought how it would look if he were to remain for the next school group passing through, how to explain the presence along the Oregon trail of a middle-aged section manager in a wool suit and argyle socks. He wore in his hair an oily formula meant to take away his gray. This was Jean’s suggestion, that he lose the gray he thought he had earned. Jeremy decided that the fact that the hair color was her idea ought to be pointed out in the self-guided tour pamphlet. He posed for a moment, as still as his drunkenness would allow him, pretending to warm his hands over the orange cellophane. He looked at the men around him, their still, chipped faces.

  “Looks like a hard winter ahead,” he said, startling himself with the echo of his voice. He tried to imagine pioneer names for them, but could not think of any. As he ran through the list of the men he worked with, it amazed him how none of the names would fit: Stan, Rog, Anthony, Kevin, Stephan. Sissy, soft-handed names, he decided, then reached out and fingered the nipple of the pioneer woman through the gray fabric of her dress. She rocked a little on her stand.

  “Can I help you, sir?” For a moment, he felt the jolt of the steel door passing through him again. He looked up to find the security guard shining a flashlight politely away from his face. She wore an oversize, shiny blue coat and blue uniform-store clothes, her ponytail looped through the plastic adjuster of her hat, which read SENTRY SECURITY in bright red letters. She chewed a wad of gum, her slight double chin appearing then disappearing.

  “I’m with the party upstairs,” Jeremy said. He moved past the fake campfire. “My wife ….” He let his sentence trail off.

  “That your wife?” She pointed the light at the pioneer mannequin. “She’s a little old for you. Like, maybe a hundred years.” There was no discernible humor in her voice, and the warmth of a blush slowly crept into his face. He felt clumsy, exposed. When he tried to laugh, the sound came out like a small choke. This was something else Jean was good at, the tiny performances that brought one through a day of public living.

  “I’m just…what can I tell you?” he said.

  “Your name?” the woman asked.

  Jeremy started to pull out his wallet. He straightened up as he always did in dealing with police at traffic stops, as if good posture could keep him out of trouble. His billfold opened to a row of credit cards.

  “I don’t care if you can drive or not,” the woman told him. “I just want to know your name.”

  “It’s Jeremy. Jeremy Barseleau. Yours?”

  “Celina Di Felice. It’s Italian, even though I don’t look it.”

  “It’s pretty, though, like a little song.”

  She nodded. “The same line you use on all the pioneer women.” Her own small laugh sounded more like a sneeze. She motioned with the flashlight. “I guess my job i
s to tell you that you ought to come out of there.”

  “And miss the gold rush?” He laughed this time, but she did not join in. He had never really known how to make other people laugh. Somehow his timing was off.

  She held his hand as he stepped over the Plexiglas, her grip cool and strong, her hand tiny and rough. He thought of Jean with her large, red-nailed hands. He tried to imagine her hands unadorned—empty, like this woman’s, of color or jewelry.

  He straightened his tie. “Thank you. Sorry for the trouble.”

  She shrugged. “Gave me something to do. You should have resisted so I could shoot you.”

  He smiled. “At least let me get you something to eat.”

  “They got food up there?” She clicked off her light, slipped it into her belt.

  “I think they may have a little. About two banquet tables’ worth.”

  She smiled, her teeth crooked and white. “If you insist. Get me some food and I won’t arrest you.”

  “You can’t arrest me. You are just a play cop, aren’t you?”

  “Well, you’re just a play party guest. Otherwise you’d be upstairs. Who are you avoiding?”

  By now, Jean would probably be looking for him. “I’ll get your food,” he said.

  Upstairs, Jeremy loaded a plate with chicken wings, shrimp salad, canapés, a slice of brie, Watergate salad, and German chocolate cake. On the way down he grabbed two of the ribboned champagne bottles that lined the stairs. He carried his load of food down to the pioneer display and found Celina gone. He shielded his eyes against the track lights to make out the covered wagon and the pioneer woman in the shadows. This was the place, but she was nowhere around.

  “Celina?” he whispered as he made his way back through the dark halls, past old hay rakes and mattocks and plows, past colonial drawknives and rosin barrels. Almost without meaning to, he stopped briefly to look at each display. It awed him, how many things people had thought of to invent. He wondered if there were a limited supply, if someday there would be nothing else to make, nothing else to think of or know. He imagined people standing around looking at each other and shrugging.

  He found a rear stairway and walked up, balancing the food and bottles. At the top was a steel door, though he could not remember which floor he was on. The door opened out behind the awards table, the unclaimed statuettes still scattered across it. Jean stood off a way, holding the unlit cigarette she kept with her in an attempt to quit. A small circle of friends surrounded her.

  “Well, look at you!” she shouted. Jeremy walked over toward her. “There is plenty, honey, you don’t have to hoard it.” Her group laughed.

  Jeremy stopped and held the load of food as if someone had dumped it in his arms. “I’m hungry, I guess.”

  She pointed her cigarette at the bottles. “Thirsty, too, looks like.” He hated this time of the night, when after a few drinks she would draw laughs by teasing him, sketching their marriage by way of little jokes and asides. It was these nights when he could convince himself he was done with her, that their years had brought them to nothing. As he shifted the bottles under his arm, a bit of shrimp salad fell to the floor.

  “Jeremy, listen,” she said, pulling him to a safe distance. She spoke low into his ear, her voice losing its practiced lightness—more real now, more worried. What he wanted, he sometimes thought, was for the breezy, public Jean to be his all the time. For their marriage to be the way it seemed when he sat in folding chairs and heard her talk about it over the faint squeal of microphone feedback. He wanted to marry the woman behind the podium. She leaned on his arm.

  “The mayor’s dance is at midnight, and I would like you there to turn me around the floor.” She fingered his wedding band. “I know these things aren’t fun for you, but it’s the one favor I’m asking. Please don’t disappear on me.”

  “I’m just looking at some of the displays,” he said. She smiled. She was really sweet, he knew. This was the consensus among their friends.

  “See anything good?” she asked.

  T watched a show about the way teenagers ignore death,” he said, “and I toured the hall of pioneer nipples.”

  A look of small panic crossed her face. He was talking too loud.

  “You’ll have to show me those sometime,” she said.

  He nodded. “I’d like to.”

  “Go easy on the champagne, and don’t forget the dance, please, Jeremy. This really is important to me.”

  “Haven’t I always been there when you needed me to?” This was a line he’d heard on a TV show somewhere. He stood close to her, speaking in a quieter voice.

  “Yes, you have.” She squeezed his arm. “Come find me.”

  “Midnight,” he said. “Got it. Promise I’ll be here.” He thought drunkenly of Cinderella.

  He felt his way down the back stairs by the faint red glow of the fire escape signs. His steps gave a hushed echo on the stair skids, the thick base of the champagne bottle tapping the handrail as he descended. He walked through the halls, calling for Celina in a hoarse whisper. He passed mannequins dressed as redcoats and as colonists with muskets and fake plastic horses, and others clothed as Rebels and Yankees. The set faces were lit from above, the clothes too new-looking, as if they had come from Wal-Mart. Jeremy fell into the habit of speaking to these figures as he passed, showing them the twenty-first-century miracle of his digital glow-in-the-dark wristwatch and his cell phone, asking if they had seen a blonde dressed as a cop. He told the plastic Yankees that they should not attack on Christmas Day.

  Finally he found her, in a large room set aside for special visiting exhibits, the current one titled “The Atomic Age.” Celina sat cross-legged on a love seat inside someone’s re-created living room from 1955, watching Milton Berle on a boxy black-and-white TV. Outside the fake window was a bomb shelter shaped like a small RV, air vent jutting upward, one wall cut away and replaced with Plexiglas, the olive-drab shelves stacked with Wheatena biscuits, Ritz crackers, and steel cans of water. He sat beside her, the vinyl upholstery squeaking beneath him, the two of them surrounded on three sides as though they lived in some fourth-grader’s diorama.

  “You found me,” Celina said, smiling. He handed her the food, spilling some on the beige carpeting. He felt clumsy, as if he somehow had failed her instead of doing her a favor. She lifted a forkful of Watergate salad to her mouth. He undid the foil and wire on the champagne and popped the cork. It ricocheted and landed on the end table, atop a copy of Life magazine with Dwight Eisenhower on the cover.

  “You got him,” she said. “I come down here to goof off. Don’t tell.”

  “Who would I tell?” he said. “Hey, Uncle Miltie, see that she’s fired.” At this, she laughed out loud, as if he had finally hit some resonant spot. He watched her laugh, the way it just came out of her all at once. He decided that he loved this in her. On the tiny screen, Milton Berle was wearing a dress and trying to kiss Danny Kaye. The audience howled. Celina chewed, drank from the bottle, then passed it to him, and he drank. Nothing had ever tasted so good, and he drew long, fizzy swallows until his eyes watered. He saw her with clarity as his drunkenness increased, saw the small imperfections of her nose and the thin, hard lines around her mouth. She was almost pretty. Celina tipped her hat back on her head and leaned against the love seat, shutting her eyes against the lights. She stood up suddenly and changed the tape in the VCR hidden under the TV cabinet. Jack Benny flickered onto the gray screen, frowning and holding his violin. Across the hall, in another room, Jeremy could see more of the enlarged photos of microscopic animals, the hairy legs and dangerous pinchers. It surprised him that such a small world could be so fierce.

  Celina drank. “Where’s wifey?” she asked. This annoyed him suddenly, her calling Jean “wifey,” as if subtly mocking him for being married to her.

  “My wife, Jean, is upstairs, being awarded and feted.”

  “Are you happily married? Or do you secretly hate it?”

  He looked at her. There was a
tiny smear of sauce on the corner of her mouth. “I know your type. You think it’s smart to ask questions that put people on the spot.”

  She shrugged. “I hate small talk. Just another name for bullshit.”

  “To answer your question, I’m happy if I don’t think about it too much. Married happiness is like, I don’t know…an autonomic response.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “Like your heart beating or your eyes blinking. You don’t have to think about it.”

  “Or don’t get to think about it,” she told him. As she said this, he was hit by recognition: this was their old furniture, his and Jean’s, or something very much like it, castoffs from his in-laws the first year they were married, when being poor felt like fun. He pictured their cramped apartment, the rusted, leaky toilet, the plumbing that would groan and honk in the middle of the night, and how in the dark, wedged together in their bed, he would make Jean laugh by telling her that Harpo Marx was trapped in the wall. He looked around, remembering the low-slung aqua-colored vinyl couch, the coffee table shaped vaguely like an artist’s palette, the abstractly designed ceramic ashtrays. In the mock kitchen were a Formica table and chairs, metal cabinets painted bright yellow, and vintage Tupperware displaying a Jell-O mold and green bean casserole. Everything plastic, fake, more so even than it had been then. Preservation, he supposed, equaled history.