The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Men!” Philippa said. “You—yes, you—gotta love ’em.” She didn’t, but she had to study them, if only to turn the tables. The poster over her desk was a Brassaï photograph of Henri Matisse studying his model. Impossibly lush, her one arm crooked behind her head, her hair falling in a thick dark wave, nipples wide and deeply colored, curves of breast, abdomen, inner thigh complementing each other, her lips soft, her eyes bored, and Matisse? A sharp beard and pencil, narrow little glasses, his lips pressed tight as he considered exactly how to distill her to a line. He would not be dreaming her dreams that night; he couldn’t care less what they were.

  “Typical,” I said, telling Philippa how Sid was rereading all the same sci-fi novels he’d read the year before.

  “It’s the natural male genre,” she said. “In science fiction technology is the dynamic force, there’s none of this relationship stuff. It’s all about … oh, you know…” (She whisked her left hand around in the air) “… escaping the atmosphere, if you know what I mean. Docking in space and all.” She laughed. “It’s a relief for them! Docking modules do not entice them, confuse them, docking modules do not ask for understanding, nor offer it … no, docking modules just do what men made them to do and then drift into some other orbit and spin.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it’s restful,” I said grimly, though I felt anything but grim. It was late winter, early evening, and the sun shone pale behind the low wet clouds. A blank canvas, ready for spring. The radiators were ticking and I felt drowsy and content, ready to talk the afternoon away.

  “Where would we be, without them?” she asked suddenly, with a cackle.

  “It’s true,” I said. “You wake up in the middle of the night and there’s a snowplow going by, the lights are flashing on the ceiling, and the whole rest of the world is cozy in bed and…”

  “Men are out there, working to keep you safe!” she said.

  “Men Working!” I crowed. “My favorite street sign on earth!”

  The conversation was arrested momentarily while she considered which was her favorite street sign, and whether everyone has a favorite street sign, and concluded, “But no, it’s women who think like that; men just turn left or right or whatever.” And we burst into laughter, me shaking my head at the hopelessness, she crowing at her victory over it—it being the arduous project of trying to love a man.

  A man. Not Sid, whose metallic coldness I’d used to know for timidity, and taken into my heart along with his terrors and his persistence at the guitar. A man, a romance, a story for Philippa, to whom the heterosexual world was exotic as Tangier.

  “Keep me informed!” she called down the hall after me, and that night, while Sid and I made love, I couldn’t help noticing the way he kept his finger in me while he entered as if he was holding open a page; nor my disappointment that he couldn’t catch me up and pull me under, overwhelm me like a wave. It was the wave I was looking for; Philippa understood. Of course, she’d said, one wants the incontrovertible force that holds you tight, pulls you under, tosses you onto the shore again, exhilarated, changed. Yes, she understood me, I was thinking, as I came; crying out: “Sid, Sid, oh Sid!”

  As soon as he fell asleep, I’d be feeling around on the dresser for a dime—Philippa would be waiting for my call.

  So, life stabilized. I had the man I loved after all, I had to consider myself happy. Spring broke up through the mud, patches of green appeared, and then apple blossoms and, by some miracle, they continued my scholarship. “I can’t believe it,” I said to Philippa, “I thought they wanted to be rid of me.”

  She managed to look knowing and mystified at once and I went home for the summer with the knowledge I’d be back in the fall.

  * * *

  AND THERE they were, all of them—the cats hissing at me from the roof, Teddy and Dolly regarding me with huge eyes as if I were a member of that fabled species, the Visitors from the Outer World. The bedroom window was boarded over where the tree had fallen in. “Oh, we get the north light,” Pop said breezily. “It might not be enough for a Sweetriver girl, but it’ll do.” He’d given up trying to placate Ma; now he was baiting her—she’d have her view over the marshland back the minute hell froze over. Valu-Spot was using our ping-pong balls as their in-store brand. Did I know how many thousands of sales that guaranteed? In no time we’d be on top of the world.

  Meanwhile, my bedroom was full to the ceiling with ping-pong balls. “Don’t make a scene about it, for God’s sake,” Ma said.

  “Well, it’s not like I could sleep on the couch,” I sniffed. The living room was still empty, except for a baby rabbit Sylvie was keeping in a cardboard box (as one of the cats had eaten its mother), and a new concert grand piano. Ma wouldn’t accept less than a concert grand, though our collective musical ability could have found full expression with a glass and spoon. The piano stood for possibility, on its wide ebony legs. Ma was taking lessons; she played “Danny Boy” by the hour, tears spilling down along her nose.

  Who were these people? I’d expected to be welcomed back into this big loving family—the family we so wanted to be. Instead, I felt less at home among them than I had at Sweetriver, and I thought longingly of Charles, my Poet-in-the-Schools, of Philippa, and even of Sid.

  “Listen to me,” Ma said. “Just because you’re having a love affair—”

  A love affair? How romantic that sounded, how full of hope, of envy! I looked over at her—she was thirty-eight, she was well-nigh on fire. She had the car keys in her hand—she was going to pick Sylvie up at the ball field, wearing a halter top and a pair of cutoffs, though the decade of childbearing had exhausted her body. Her hair was raked back by her angry hand, her crow’s-feet must have been deepening right then, so narrowly was she squinting; and there was such determination in her stance that she was absolutely beautiful.

  I’d never seen this so clearly before—she didn’t draw herself up this way with us, only with outsiders. With her rivals. I’d broken the circle and joined them and there was no going back. Tears rose in my throat but I was not going to let her see me in pain, so I turned to watch the bumblebees work in the mock orange. June—I knew it by the smell of mock orange. And if I woke from a decade’s sleep and looked out to see spruce trees in silhouette against a red and purple sky, I’d know it was early December, around Teddy’s birthday. The things we absorb, through the earth of home.

  “Things fall apart, the center will not hold,” said I to myself while I tried to cook dinner on the one stove burner that was still working. All over the world, families were in disarray, centers were not holding. It wasn’t just us, it was a Subject of Literature. So, it was all right then, my pulse slowed a little. At dinner I told Pop that I thought they’d continued my scholarship because I was such a good student.

  “It’s an interesting question,” he replied. “Does one prefer a smart woman, or a nice woman? I’ve always leaned toward the nice ones myself.” It had never occurred to him that a woman might be more than the sum of the pleasure she gave to a man. But then, what chance had he had, for such thoughts to occur? Some guys went to school on the GI bill, but he couldn’t; he’d had a new baby. I hung my head.

  * * *

  “HAH!” SAID Philippa, when I reported this and the rest of the summer’s stories to her in September. “In fact, he does NOT, on the face of it, choose his women on that basis. Has your mother ever been described as nice?”

  That dispatched, we went on to the next subject, which was My Summer at Sid’s. I’d called him late that first night and told him I missed him too desperately to spend the whole summer away from him—soon I was on a train to Chicago, where his parents happily welcomed the chance to prove their progressive values by letting us shack up. They had mock orange bushes too, but when I bent into them I found they had no perfume.

  “Really? There’s a scented type?” Sid’s mother said, trying to seem interested, as she had all summer, while I followed her from room to room describing the fragrances and enchantments of
the home she had rescued me from. I was so grateful to be away from them, so I could love them properly.

  Though being away from them meant I had to be with Sid, and his sci-fi, and his guitar … emblems of his coldness, reminders that I shouldn’t dare open my heart. I’d learned, though, that it was possible to keep the legs open and the heart closed, and so we made our way.

  “I don’t know, I think I may be done with him,” I said to Philippa, with studied ennui … feeling very superior to poor weak souls—like my old self. The threads between me and my family seemed stretched to breaking: Ma felt I’d abandoned her, and she could barely manage a few civil words to me on the phone. Pop was glad to be rid of me. Dolly and Teddy were young enough that I’d simply floated out of their consciousness. Even with Sylvie, the connection was fraying. She was there, immersed in the life I was trying to wrench myself free of, so we began to see everything differently and it was hard for us to talk. I was proud that I didn’t need those parents anymore; I felt it set me above Sylvie. Now I had to learn to do without Sid too—to become cool and perfect, beyond love.

  “Done with him?? Good God, after all we went through…!” But Philippa recovered instantly, saying, “Well then, on to the next!” with relish. We each glanced quickly, secretly, at the other, and so caught each other’s eyes by accident, and laughed.

  “Who shall it be?” she asked, scanning out the window for a likely subject. “Blond or dark? Artist, or critic? Student, or … You know, I’d think you might cast about among the junior faculty. Yes, that would provide the necessary substance; you need a guiding hand.”

  Of all of Philippa’s qualities, the one I valued most was her sense that people might fall in love with me. She gazed into my face now, as … well, as a seer gazes into the entrails of a sacrificed chicken; she could not be passive, even when gazing. But whatever she saw there pleased her, and this, naturally, pleased me.

  “Yes, junior faculty,” she decided, glancing quickly away. She herself was junior faculty. I pictured a quick, serious man in a dark overcoat, who was opening a door for me—a door under a brick arch, such as you might find at Oxford.

  “Why would someone like that want to go out with me?” I asked.

  She cocked her head, and frowned. “Your farm,” she said, “There weren’t a lot of movie theaters close by, were there?”

  “Well, there’s one in Dover Plains.” I’d been there two or three times, most notably to see Gone With the Wind, during which my mother kept pointing out how bold and dashing Scarlett was, just the way I was going to be. I’d sunk further into my seat, a Mole Who Would Be Queen.

  “Have you seen La Religieuse? Of course not. Les Biches? Persona?”

  I shook my head.

  A terrible little smile played on her face. My ignorance, it was such a gorgeous, seductive thing.

  “We have work to do,” she declared. “The movies have taken up where literature left off, after modernism.” She took a breath.

  “My child, you have many pleasures ahead,” she said, in a richly affected voice, and I started to laugh for some reason I didn’t quite understand. I looked up at Matisse with his pencil scratching, and his model, whose job was simply to be fully, nakedly, herself. Then to Philippa, her oxford shirt … her eyes, resting momentarily on my collarbone.

  She, my teacher, was studying me.

  Eight

  AFTER PERSONA, I was standing at the mirror and Dotsy came up behind me, swept up my hair, and kissed my neck. I gasped.

  “Does it make you nervous?” she asked me, steadily, as if she were the daughter not of Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler T. Maven III, but Mr. and Mrs. Man Ray.

  “No, no! But it might make Sid nervous!” I laughed, skillfully deflecting the blame, and accepting a cigarette from the slim silver case Dotsy had bought after seeing Notorious.

  The film series was a success, and from then on it, like my scholarship, was built into the Sweetriver budget. Every winter, as the snow damped us into quiet, we would gather in the auditorium to fall deeper into Philippa’s black-and-silver world, infected with an erotic miasma which caused us to helplessly fill vases with calla lilies, wear tuxedo jackets with nothing beneath, carry whiskey in flasks, and gesture with ebony cigarette holders. How lovely we were, in our disaffection! We didn’t want—not men, not anything. We were subject to no one. We drifted across the campus like so many smoke rings on the air, wearing the white silk scarves called Isadora scarves, twenty dollars apiece as advertised in the back of The New Yorker, and so long that you could wrap one thrice around your neck and the other end of it was still back there in Paris at the dawn of the modern age.

  Esmé, the film projectionist, became fascinating by accident. Seeing her skillful fingers thread the film, we all fell in love with her. She could do something that kept us in thrall. Tall and certain, broad-shouldered, her thick dark hair cut like a man’s, she had all the glamour of an RAF pilot, and it was hard to keep facing forward during the film.

  Very early, the morning after Salome, the dorm phone rang and I shuffled out of Sid’s room to hear a very husky-voiced Philippa, laughing and saying, “Well, Beatrice, I’m afraid the unforeseen has…”

  “The Unforeseen” became our code name for Esmé, whose moods no RAF pilot could imagine, and who bedeviled Philippa for the next two years. Esmé had style, which is to say that about some things—her jeans, her boots, her slicked-up hair—she was enviably certain. About other things—her feeling for Philippa was one—she changed her mind every minute, but this only sharpened her allure.

  “She’s like Joan Crawford,” Philippa would say to excuse her. If you were like Joan Crawford, you had license to transgress, because with every transgression you created a new story, you lifted your mistreated lover up with you onto the silver screen, and the thing would last, it wouldn’t just evaporate like ordinary loves and angers.…

  I, styleless, had to rub angry shoulders with the little people, in the cheap seats. Even if it was possible for me to become like Esmé, it would have meant treading perilously close to becoming like my mother. So I was not sorry when Esmé went to New York for the weekend and returned wearing a wedding ring.

  “Back to her high school boyfriend!” Philippa sputtered. “This is regression, Beatrice, and I do not intend to be tormented by someone else’s regression. Some of us do not allow romantic troubles to stand in our way. I mean, one is reeling, one is seeing double. But, is one weeping?”

  She was not. In fact, she was rereading The Importance of Being Earnest, because she was my thesis adviser and the subject was Oscar Wilde. I loved him because he made sense of life by turning it upside down, and Philippa agreed that given the times we lived in (how the Puritans must have smiled, looking down to see their efforts bear fruit in the seventies: all the tight-lipped, denim-clad goodwives, pious about recycling and whole grains and sex!), Oscar was the right guiding star. Philippa was impatient with him for wimping out and becoming a Christian during his years in prison, but she could quote him, chapter and verse, and as the year went by, we could slap lines down on each other like kids playing cards.

  I was still with Sid, still trying for some kind of purity in myself, a full openness to the world which would atone for my parents’ withdrawal from it. At night, when Sid had put his guitar away, finished his quarks, and just wanted to swarm over me in the dark, I tried to offer myself wholly. He adored me in the dark, when his face couldn’t betray his need. He was cold, so I redoubled my tenderness, determined that his strangeness would dissolve in my warmth, if only I could let him in deep enough. This had not, and would not, happen, but as long as I was narrating my quest for Sid’s inner self to Philippa, it seemed within reach. She laughed about it—her own quest was to impose her will on Western civilization, and she’d never once thought about Esmé the way I did about Sid.

  “But she’s a woman, her essence is available,” she said. “I mean, was available…” She laughed a little, and banished the thought. “She’s already a
ging, losing her edge,” she said with a shrug. “She’s not what she was that first night.

  “Wilde engineered his own fate,” she said suddenly. “He had a thousand chances to avoid it and he let every one go past.”

  We were driving into Troy, New York—home of Boxers and Briefs, the nearest gay bar. Things are rough when your idea of excitement is going out for a drink in Troy, New York, but there it was.

  Boxers and Briefs was up a back staircase above a pizza joint, a huge room with all the necessities: mirrored ball, a few plastic tables and chairs, four speakers, all larger than I was, and a few men and women scattered in small, awkward-looking groups around the sides of the empty floor.

  “Predation is a part of gay culture,” Philippa explained. “Yours is an agrarian attitude. You want to farm a love, grow it, tend it, and finally, pluck it. Not surprising, considering your background. I am more of a hunter-gatherer. I swoop down at midnight and return with my prey.”

  I nodded.

  “Now,” she said, “Have you ever cruised?”

  “Cruised?”

  “Yes, you know, cruising?”

  “I think of it as kind of a man thing.”

  She drew back, one eye wide and incredulous, the other narrowed and calculating. This was her characteristic expression—a thing was only allowed to surprise her for a second before it went under the microscope, to see where it would fit into her theories.

  “A ‘man’ thing, exactly. Because it’s an eye thing. A woman’s eye is the window of her soul … a man’s is a crowbar. Do you see?”

  She stood up and rearranged herself, adjusting a bra strap and pulling up her corduroys. “Watch closely,” she said, and tromped off around the dance floor, stopping every few steps to cock her head like a robin listening for a worm. The only people dancing were two women in late middle age, both done up in perfect high-cowboy style, with brass-tipped boots and wide belts, doing a careful, slow swing to Donna Summer. The women our age looked wretchedly awkward, either gawky or massive, clinging to each other in the shadows.