Living in the Weather of the World

by Richard Bausch

The others in the darkness begin laughing at a remark one of them has made about a girlfriend’s propensity for spilling things and breaking glasses. “She knocked a scrim over once. Shattered a whole cabinet of fine crystal. We were eating at some rich lady’s house in Rome.”

  “I’d like to go to Rome,” one of the others, a young woman, says. “That’s one of the places I want to see before I’m through.”

  “You could spend a year there and not come close to seeing it all.”

  The old gentleman leans across the little table and takes his wife’s hand. “Do you want to go up now?”

  “No, let’s stay here. Just a little longer. Please?”

  He squeezes her hand and turns to look for the waiter. High overhead, a jet is crossing the sky, and someone remarks that it looks like a shooting star.

  THE HOTEL MACABRE

  Kenneth Broley, Julia’s former father-in-law, spent a summer running the semi-submarine tour here, before he went into the army in 1966. “Magical place, Catalina,” he’d said to her toward the end of his life. “I had such good times there.” His voice softened with the pleasure of remembering. In fact, at times it seemed that the family’s memories of the island’s charms stemmed from the kind old man’s nostalgia alone—though they had spent several vacations here when Will was a boy. They all talked about going back someday—except of course for Kenneth’s wife, Eunice, with that prim throat-clearing way of talking, sitting ramrod straight in her black rocker, her small white hands with the polished red talons resting in her lap. “An awful lot of tourists, of course. But if you don’t mind them, I suppose it’s nice.”

  Suppose.

  In that disinclined reluctantly acknowledging tone, and of course nice was one of her staple words, used most often either as a demand or with irony. Nice. Be nice. That’s not nice. I suppose he’s nice enough. That would be nice, I guess. Mrs. Broley leeched strength from anyone who came near her, starting with her husband, and including two daughters, two sons, and their respective wives and children.

  But that’s all gone, isn’t it? They’re all gone. The family never returned to Catalina while she was with Will, and her divorce from Will was a decade ago, within a year of Kenneth Broley’s death. That poor man rented a room at a cheap motel not two miles from his house, and in his carefully packed briefcase he had a plastic bag, a pint of vodka, and a bottle of sleeping pills. He sat on the sofa in front of the television, took the pills, drank most of the vodka, and then pulled the bag over his head. The following morning, he was found by the motel cleaning crew, lying on his side, legs folded up to accommodate the shortness of the sofa. He left no note, though Julia, who grieved for him as if he were her own father, believed he had been driven to it by his wife. Of course she never spoke of it.

  Will and his brother and sisters and that horrible old lady are still back in Memphis as far as she knows. Julia’s with Blake now, and she’s only thinking about these others because she and Blake are here on this delayed honeymoon.

  And earlier today, at straight-up noon, that honeymoon was effectively ruined, one day in.

  Blake’s older sister, Charlotte, has called to say she’ll be arriving on the last boat. She’s sorry for interrupting their little holiday (her words), she knows they’ve been planning it for some time and it’s overdue, but there’s nowhere else to turn. She requires the company of her younger brother, and she hopes Julia won’t mind. She flew into John Wayne from Ann Arbor this morning. Her marriage is coming apart. Again. In her life with the husband, Brian, she severed so many ties (it’s been more than twelve years since she published her short novel, Mozart’s Ghost). He’s a minister in some Baptist sect, and she will tell you she gave up everything for him, this distinguished-looking handsome middle-aged man. How could she have mistaken his definiteness and decisive manner as being charming instead of what they really are: priggishness and bigotry. She can’t stand the pompous bastard another minute. Blake, hanging up the phone, quoted this last in a flat tone, a man reciting something disheartening. “She actually called him that.” He looked down at the floor. “Disaster for us, of course.”

  Julia agreed, nearly at the top of her voice, standing in the doorway of the honeymoon suite, the pretty room, site of the wrecked good time because Charlotte was making a statement. One of her journeys away, the third separation. Charlotte and the severe husband, according to Charlotte, have always had a physical hunger for each other. Charlotte keeps going back. “Why’s it have to be this time that she doesn’t go back?” Julia wept. “Why can’t she do it one more stupid time? Why can’t she? Why can’t she ruin someone else’s honeymoon?”

  “Listen to yourself,” Blake said. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “I don’t have to make sense. This was supposed to be a honeymoon.”

  “Please,” he told her. “We’ll just go on another one. Before fall.”

  “You know we won’t have the money. I want my honeymoon. I have a right to it, and I want it. I want my honeymoon.”

  “Stop it. You sound ten years old. You realize you actually stamped your foot just now?”

  She stamped it again, glaring. “I wish we’d never tried to do this. This is worse than if we hadn’t done it at all.”

  “Julia, for God’s sake please get ahold of yourself. What the hell.”

  —

  THAT WAS NOON.

  Now, waiting on the pier in the long shadows of five o’clock, after hours of only practical communications about the time and the necessary actions to procure another room so late, he says, “I promise we’re going to have this honeymoon before the summer’s over. You’ll see.”

  “I needed this time, Blake. We needed this time.”

  “We’ll make it work. We’ll go into debt if we have to. We’ll have our honeymoon.”

  “I’m beginning to wish we hadn’t come here.”

  “It’s wonderful here. It’s perfect,” he says.

  “My former father-in-law—I told you. The semi-sub. This was their vacation place when Will was a boy.”

  “Yes, yes. But I like it. We can make it ours, can’t we? I mean it’s made for us. It’s just right for us.”

  As though to accentuate his words, a freshet of sea air touches her face, like a caress. Across the way, beyond the forest of boat masts and the water, stands the spherical island museum with its graceful columns, the tree-dotted stony hill rising steeply to its left, toward the clear sky. Along that side, lined by palms, you can see the boardwalk and the row of shops, restaurants, and hotels of Avalon. Lover’s Cove. Close by, they hear the sound of a motorcycle or outboard. It ceases, then starts up again, and finally sputters out.

  “Weather’s so nice,” he ventures.

  She gives forth a small, rueful laugh.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking about those people—my former parents-in-law. The Broleys. Sad Kenneth and his horrible wife. Prim, proper, poisonous, lethal Eunice.”

  “Never had the pleasure.” His tone is thinly sardonic.

  “Eunice’s special word was nice. She could cut through stone with it, way she used it.”

  “Nice?”

  “That’s the word.”

  “Pretty innocuous if you ask me. People use it without even thinking.”

  “She used it thinking.”

  “It’s just a word.”

  “The way a knife is just a knife. Believe me. The woman was pure negation. She wore the poor man out. God, I wanted him to stand up to her. He was the only one in that family who was truly kind. And she ordered him around like a servant she didn’t respect or like very much. ‘Yes, dear. Yes, dear.’ And everything, literally, really, everything was negative. I think she—well, never mind.”

  “He killed himself, right?”

  She nods. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  Blake is silent, gazing at the curve of the beach and the thin closed-to-traffic street beyond it.

  “Lover’s Cove,” she says. “What a
name for a touristy marina with a museum and shops.”

  “Now who’s being negative?”

  “It was a joke.”

  A moment later, she says, “Remember, I did say when we were coming in that it looks like the Riviera. Even though I’ve never been to the Riviera.”

  “The way we imagine it, right?”

  “And I like the name Lover’s Cove. I do. I just meant—well, Lover’s Cove. A marina and shops. You know?”

  “You think it should be a line of heart-shaped beds surrounded by roses?”

  He can make her laugh. It’s one of the things she loves about him. “Yes. Vibrating beds.”

  “Oh. And surrounded by mirrors. Canopied by mirrors.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to overdo.”

  Now he laughs. “The cove of honeymoons.”

  She waves this away. “Is, um, honeymoon, is that, like, a weird custom of these island people?”

  “I don’t know what else to do, Julia.”

  “Another little joke.”

  “I wish I had a tape of you earlier.”

  “Well.” She draws in a breath and holds it a moment.

  “That was classic.”

  It comes to her that she doesn’t really like the way he uses the word classic. And he uses it a lot. She says, “I think I’m entitled to feel disappointment. Don’t you feel it?”

  The sun’s obscured now by clouds and sea mist, far off. The boat, the last one, will arrive soon. They see it in the wide expanse of aquamarine and far blue water, cutting through the chop of breezy late afternoon on Emerald Bay. The water in that distance is a darker blue than you would believe can exist anywhere outside of a child’s drawing, and there are the pearly twin sluices of foam where the bow is cutting through it.

  “So your ex-father-in-law worked here.”

  “Odd-sounding phrase when the person’s passed away,” she says. “Ex-father-in-law.”

  “I’d like to ride the semi-sub. Looks like a cool trip.”

  “I think it was the only good memory he had.”

  “Poor man, and that was underwater.”

  “Well, he’s gone now.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Sixty-nine. I really liked him, you know. He treated me sweetly.”

  “Sixty-nine’s a good long life. Maybe he thought he’d had enough.”

  “If that’s a joke it’s not funny. And his father and mother were still alive when it happened. Ninety-two and ninety-six.”

  Blake nods. “We should all.”

  “No,” she says, smiling. “Not all of us.”

  Again, they’re quiet.

  Sitting here next to him, not touching, with an upset stomach and the beginning of a headache, watching the approaching boat, she thinks how the whole day has become fraught with unbidden surges of memory from the other marriage: everything she did wrong, back then; everything Will did to push her away. It’s discomfiting. She has become aware that some part of her wills these thoughts, consciously entertains them, like a kind of half-conscious intellectual experiment, attempting to sort through the difficulties of those years as though, disappointment being general and so acute now, it’s all part of some as-yet-undiscovered condition, a chronic something that has found a path through her experience, running toward some mysterious thing, surprising and awful: the island where Kenneth Broley was once young and happy, the stresses of being around Eunice, the man’s suicide, her failed marriage, and this suddenly complicated week, all somehow linked.

  How odd that a place, being only that, can carry so much power to confuse and trouble you.

  It’s true that she and Blake are in need of a change, even at this early stage. Their luck has been off. That’s how they think of it and talk about it. He’s an unrecorded songwriter, still waiting tables at the Hilton on City Drive in Orange and playing the clubs when he can. He’s a fine singer and performer of his own songs. She teaches in the community college where they live, in Long Beach. They’ve been together almost three years, married for two, and have never even had a weekend to travel alone. They did without for months, saving every penny, for this, six days at Catalina.

  “You can’t see this mess with Charlotte as something I chose,” he says now.

  “I’m not doing that. Okay?”

  The boat’s engine becomes audible as it nears. It sounds like coughing.

  Presently, she says, “You know, in her mind I’m a mistake you’ve made.”

  “Oh, stop that.”

  “Well. It’s true—my being older. I mean she said it. Eleven years is a long time. You heard her.”

  “Eleven years is a long time. And she was talking about how long I’ve been waiting tables. That was not about our age difference. We’re ten years—I mean you’re ten years.”

  “It’s one month shy of eleven, and you know the trouble with you, darling? You never see the underside of anything. She was talking about our age difference. She doesn’t like me and you know it.”

  He leaves a pause. Then, in the tone of someone muttering to himself: “I think you’ve both just missed being the best of friends. You keep misfiring, that’s all.”

  To their right, the semi-sub comes slowly into the cove, back from its last excursion of the day. Beyond that, there’s a cabin cruiser from whose bow a girl shouts and jumps. Two young men and another woman stand at the gunnel and watch her flail in the water. She has something bright yellow in her hair and the water takes it. They all look to be having fun. The girl shrieks, laughing. Earlier today Julia went down to the beach and put her feet in the water, and it was cold, cold. She heard someone a few yards from her say that you’d expect it to be warmer off Southern California. She thought of Eunice then, too. And that was before she knew Charlotte was coming.

  In less than an hour it will be dark.

  “I thought yesterday was glorious,” Blake says, as if to prove a point.

  “It was. And we had a beautiful day and a lovely night. A lovely morning.”

  “Well, that’s something, right?”

  She looks at the buildings along the cove, the hotel where they have their room. The Hotel Macabe. The top of a forking lamp post conceals part of the façade. It looks like the wing of the letter r and it’s blocking part of the letter e. “Take a look at the sign over the hotel from here.”

  He turns his head slightly.

  “The way that big lamp pole—look at that. The top of it’s blocking the sign—see? It looks like it says ‘Hotel Macabre.’ ”

  “I see the lamp pole.”

  She takes hold of his face. “Tip this way, just a little,” and she lets go. “See?”

  “Oh, okay. Sure. That’s funny. If you want to read it that way. Hotel Macabre. Hey, we’re staying at the Hotel Macabre. Wish you were here.”

  “The Hotel Macabre. Sounds like a fright flick.”

  He smiles. “Right.”

  A moment later, she says, “Everything looks different now.”

  “She kept the old man off me when we were kids, Julia. And now the least I—I mean she sounded terrible.”

  “It’s fine, really. I’m over it. Okay? Maybe it’ll actually be good to see her.”

  “Maybe?” he says. “Actually? That’s like suppose and nice, isn’t it?”

  “Okay, okay. Stop it. I’m trying, God.”

  “We’ll come back again and make it a real honeymoon. Things’ll pick up.”

  She watches the girl in the water of the cove. They have money, surely, being able to afford a sailboat and all that equipment. How can they stand the cold water? One of the men has jumped in and bobs near the girl, spitting water in a high arc.

  “I wish you liked her more,” Blake says.

  “I don’t know her. I’ve only been with her four times. And one of those was our wedding.”

  “I know she can be rude,” he says. “Always been that way. I think she may have some form of Asperger’s.”

  “That’s an excuse you hear these days for rud
eness, and anyway, isn’t there something they can do to diagnose that?”

  “She’d have to be willing to take the tests, though. If there are any.”

  “Don’t you think it would be cool if it was called the Hotel Macabre?”

  “Cut it out,” he says. Then: “She can’t go back this time. He won’t let her. You should’ve heard her. ‘I’m fifty and fat and nobody wants me.’ I never heard her cry like that. I mean it—never heard her so low.”

  “They looked happy when they came to LA and we went up to meet them. They seemed fine even when they were bickering, like they were that time in Ann Arbor.”

  “Longest three days of my life.”

  “But she was funny in LA. We weren’t the slightest bit tense.”

  “I was.”

  “You didn’t show it.”

  “I told you I never liked him.”

  After a pause, Julia says, “I still can’t believe she just up and flew to Santa Ana without calling. And then she criticizes the fact that there’s a statue of John Wayne in the airport. The airport’s named after the guy.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything to you about that,” Blake answers. “That’s just—that’s how she is.”

  “I thought you were laughing about it with me.”

  “Let’s just forget about it.”

  “But to call from there—as if you’d be waiting for her.”

  “I said forget it. Please. You’re turning everything into a negative. The hotel isn’t the Macabre. It’s the Macabe, for God’s sake.”

  “That was a simple observation about the lamp post. Jesus. It was supposed to be funny.”

  A bad moment later, he says, “Tell me about Eunice.”

  She knows he’s merely seeking to change the subject. But she goes on. Perhaps this is best: a way to get past the disquiet they both feel. “Well—what to say about Eunice without being negative.”

  “Yuck yuck,” he says. “Tell me.”

  “Okay. Let’s start by saying that Eunice had new and different ideas about relationships. She was so innovative about it that she didn’t ever have to get a driver’s license or write a check or work a job. She taught her lucky husband to be so happy taking her everywhere she had to go, and, oh, how inspiringly adept she was at letting him know where he was going off the track. He just adored being kept up on all the ways he could improve. Every single day of his life.”