The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “What do you think?” Lee asked.

  “I love it!” I breathed. Before I met Lee, I’d been out to dinner maybe three times in my life. We had a scorpion bowl—rum and tropical juices served in a hollow coconut with two red-tasseled straws. And a pupu platter: crisp fried wontons tied with ribbons of chive, pork pinkened by a sweet marinade and laced on skewers, tiny pancakes, some kind of glistening red roe like beads—a two-year-old’s paradise of edible toys. I twirled my paper umbrella like a top on the table.

  “I’ve heard of pupu platters, but I’ve never had one before,” I told Lee, who smiled with secret delight and said, “Try the rangoons.” She had eaten hundreds of pupu platters, she went shopping at the mall, she traveled for work sometimes and thought nothing of landing in Indianapolis or Little Rock, checking into her hotel, ordering room service, or maybe going down for a drink in the bar—unheard-of sophistications.

  “Did you call your mother?” I asked.

  “Mm-hmm. The blood pressure’s down and they say if he walks a mile a day, everything ought to be fine.” Her father had a little heart trouble and they worried.

  “Anything else?”

  “No, everything’s fine. She was sewing the badges on Jennie’s Brownie uniform.” Jennie was Lee’s niece, daughter of the CPA brother whose wife, to everyone’s bewilderment, didn’t sew.

  “Do you want to drive up and pick apples on Sunday?” she asked.

  “You’re amazing,” I said. “How is it you can guess just what I’d want to do most?”

  “You’re not hard to please,” she said tenderly.

  This was why she loved me. I worked hard to phrase things the way she liked them, to say, “Well, she disagrees with me,” instead of “She’s psychotic!” or “He has a little heart trouble,” and not, “He is doomed, doomed!” She appreciated my effort. It left me without stories, though, so we ate in silence.

  “Will you come by LaLouche tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Lee said. “Wouldn’t it—?”

  “Wouldn’t it what?” I said. “I want Stetson to meet you.”

  “Why?” she said with a little grimace. I’d made the mistake of repeating his confession to her, because I’d wanted to relive the warmth it had raised in me, but she found it repugnant and had suggested I look for another job.

  “Because I want to show you off!” I said.

  She shook her head, but a smile of broke over her face, seeing I wasn’t ashamed of her.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m nothing special.”

  It was her ability to say this, to think it, to move through the world every day in the quiet, calming belief that she was nothing special, that fascinated me. I’d had no idea a person could think such a thing and survive.

  “Don’t you want to meet him and see the store?”

  “I’ve been in there before,” she said.

  My fortune cookie said: PEACE AND COMFORT, ALL THE DAYS. I read it with a prick of fear.

  * * *

  THE NEXT day, awkwardness made friends of Stetson and me—we banded together against it. He got a phone call and I heard him talking quietly and intensely, soothing, pleading, then obstinate, so that I couldn’t help wondering.

  “Women!” he said, seeing my curiosity, and I laughed.

  “The impossible gender.”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “It would be sexist if you’d said it,” I said.

  “We wouldn’t want that.” We laughed, together.

  “I am not in love with her,” he said, and he looked to me with a plea. “I’m not. I mean, I love her dearly, but there’s not that—” He searched for words, finally put his hand up and yanked a fistful of air as if it was a rope let down from a helicopter—a saving thing. I knew what he meant: love that goes beyond reason and pulls you into a new realm—and you’re frightened, and more alive. In all the recent commotion I’d nearly forgotten about this kind of love, but the sight of Stetson’s gesture was such a visceral reminder I had to look away so he wouldn’t see how it moved me.

  I nodded. “What way is it?” I asked.

  About to answer, he looked with sudden anger at his hands, as if they had betrayed him.

  “I don’t know what way it is,” he said. “I think, is it just me? Afraid of commitment, the typical thing? I mean, my marriage (he gave the word marriage a mocking emphasis) lasted six weeks. I was in love with her.”

  I smiled ruefully. I knew what he meant, too well.

  “Then there was Lisa—we lived together three years…” He shot a quick glance at me, trying to guess how much further he could go … and paid me the huge compliment of continuing. “Though I barely remember it. Junkie love…” He laughed and shook his head. “We were so busy looking for the next fix we never paid much attention each other.”

  “That’s a help,” I said, and he smiled to himself, looked down, then gratefully up at me. I loved to hear Stetson confess. He trusted me to trust him. We seemed to be on a brave errand together: trying to step into the swirling mess of life to try and retrieve a few small truths. We had the time for this because few customers ever stepped into the store.

  “Now,” he said, “It’s all calculation—will she make a good wife? A good mother? I hate ‘dating.’ I’m always thinking too hard to feel.”

  “I know just what you mean,” I said. “And you know, you probably do love—”

  “Tracy.”

  “Tracy. More than you know.” I was folding sweaters, making a show of competency. So like a man, to torment a woman with an ideal of love like that. He looked at my pile of sweaters with resignation.

  “She’s a great little worker, I have to say,” he said. And suddenly. “I love this! You are a woman, and you love women. You’re the perfect adviser.” Stetson was thirty-five years old, but I seemed to know more about love than he did, because he’d lived in twilight so much of that time.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been a great success with women,” I said.

  He smiled at me. “Aren’t we a perfect pair?” The word “we” went straight to my heart. I looked quickly away from him, not wanting him to see he’d made me happy.

  “But you think about women all the time,” I said. “You have to, to run the shop. You think about what we want, what makes us look good, how to trick us into buying it—Did you always want to own a clothing store, even when you were little?”

  “Nah,” he said, making a face. More and more, we talked like teenagers together, dropping our g’s, saying “yeah” and “nah” and generally acting as if we were leaning against our high school lockers. Not that I’d ever been like that in high school. “I wanted to be a doctor.”

  He looked down as if he’d expected me to laugh at him. “Kids always want to be doctors,” he said. “I’d never have got through the math.”

  “You’re a whiz at math!” He’d do the week’s accounts in the time it took me to change the vacuum cleaner bag.

  “I failed it big-time,” he said. He shook his head. “After my father left, everything was so screwed up, I couldn’t think about stuff like that.” Then he gave me his sidelong, preconfessional glance.

  “I always felt like a doctor, with my needle,” he said. “Sooo skillful, tap, tap at the syringe, getting it all just right…”

  “Mixing up something for the pain,” I said.

  “Idiot.”

  “Lost kid.”

  “An accident waiting to happen,” he said, but he was looking at me with his eyes wide and his hair sticking up so funnily, he made me think of one of Sylvie’s baby birds, and I wanted to feed him something.

  “You’ve done your penance, don’t you think?” He’d worked on a road-paving crew in Kentucky, to pay off his debts after rehab; that was where his physical strength came from, and why it embarrassed him.

  “You never finish a penance like this,” he said grimly.

  As he walked away, though, he suddenly stretched his arms
out and did an effortless pirouette—arms spread wide, head back—in the middle of the store.

  “How’d you learn to do that?”

  “I didn’t know I could,” he said, looking at me in surprise for a second as if maybe I’d put a spell on him.

  Eleven

  “BEATRICE, DO you have a minute?”

  “Philippa, why are you whispering?”

  “Because—well, I’m not sure,” she admitted, beginning to speak in a normal, piercing tone again. “I was wondering if you could give me a few details, pertaining to a rather delicate matter.”

  “What?”

  “How long is an erect penis, exactly? I mean, I came into contact with them occasionally back in college but I’m looking for a more recent example. And there’s the matter of oral sex—is it a lollipop-type arrangement? And circumference … circumference is very important.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve decided to try an experiment,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a date,” she said. “With a man.”

  “What for?” I asked. I felt like suing her for breach of contract. I did the living, she provided the commentary. This was one thing I’d thought I could count on.

  “I’m just giving up on women,” she said. “They’re so lumpen, so predictable.”

  “Tallulah Bankhead wasn’t lumpen. Nor predictable, from what I can tell.”

  “Tallulah Bankhead is dead. Now for some reason it’s not about sex, it’s not about love, it’s not even about dreams and fantasies—it’s about politics, or some kind of moral superiority. You can’t just be fascinated, you have to agree with these women to go to bed with them, you have to hate the same people they hate, it is so boring. Lesbianism is just not what it used to be.”

  “Agreeing with people has never been your strong suit,” I said.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  Lee had just come in and she didn’t like my talking to Philippa. She said that it made my voice get hard, that we laughed in a mean way. “I’ll send you a little diagram,” I whispered, hung up, and ran to kiss her.

  * * *

  “BEA,” STETSON said, in his hesitant, penitent way, and I turned toward him expectantly. “Beatrice, I—”

  “What?” I asked. Usually we both loved his confessions. He’d save things to tell me, for the pleasure of shocking me or making me laugh, and because, as he put things into words for me, he took them out of his imagination, where they were formless tormentors, and turned them into solid objects, things we could examine until they lost their power. He’d watch my face as I listened, and that alone must have given him some kind of absolution, because I was fascinated with his determination to face his failures, and grateful that he trusted these stories to me.

  “I’m running out of money,” he said, eyes closed, and shoulders squared. “I can’t—”

  “Now, Stet—Josip—” (we’d agreed to try going back to his real name) “it has not been that bad this fall, and we haven’t even started the holiday season yet, not really. Don’t let your confidence down now—you need it.”

  He swallowed. “I can’t afford to keep you on,” he said.

  “Stetson!”

  I was doing a good job, by some strange accident. People could tell I was sincere and they wanted to buy from me. What other salesperson had ever tried to talk them out of a purchase? Sometimes they just wanted to stand up for a sweater I’d shaken my head at—they’d buy it out of stubbornness.

  “I’ve told you I was barely making it,” he said.

  “People are always saying things like that,” I said. “I mean, look at this place!” There wasn’t a smudge; the offbeat neckties hung just so on the tie rack, it was all so muted, sophisticated, expensive, meant to catch the eye of such a superior class of people that I wondered how many of those people there were. “It’s magnificent!” I said.

  “Exactly. It cost money, too much money—I had to have everything shiny and new. I borrowed from this guy Duane who was in rehab with me, he’d gotten an insurance settlement. Now he’s married, he’s got a kid, he needs it. And I don’t have it. If I let you go, I can pay him a hundred dollars a week.”

  “But Stet—”

  “I can’t run out on anything more,” he said, fists and eyes both clenched shut. He was afraid to look at me because if he saw my disappointment, he’d give in. I looked at him; I’d never seen a man who couldn’t run out on things before.

  “How will you manage? You can’t be here all the time, you have buying trips.”

  “Tracy can sit the shop for me, when she’s not at school,” he admitted. “She wants to. She can do her schoolwork between customers.” He glanced down, remembering the “No reading” edict. “Listen—here’s three weeks’ pay, this week and two more. You go, right now, you start looking for a job, you’ll have one before you know it. You ought to be putting that education to better use, your parents can help.”

  “My parents don’t send me money, Stet.”

  “Come on,” he said, “You cannot be living on your salary here; it’s a hundred dollars a week!”

  * * *

  ON THE bright side, this meant I could pay my back rent. Dear Frank was smoking the eternal cigarette, leaning against the corner of the porch, when I got home. Corn sheaves had sprung up on every one of these little city porches, as if the people here had meditated so intently on the superabundance of American grain that their collective dream had materialized right here in Hartford.

  “Chome ear-r-r-rly,” he said as I came up the walk. He sounded uneasy, but I knew that if I sank down on the step and told him I’d lost my job he would only be sorry.

  I took the mail—a shampoo sample which made my heart leap as if the universe must finally have sent me the precious little gift I deserved, and a postcard from Dotsy Maven, who said there was nothing like reading the Brontës when you were actually living on the moors.

  “It’s a nice spot, isn’t it,” I said, “it always feels cozy on this street.” It was a good feeling, saying something honest to Frank.

  “One block from the bus,” Frank mused, “and a big basement, good drainage, not so cold in the winters, not with the stoves.” After a short silence, during which I searched unsuccessfully for some kind words about the plumbing, he seemed to make a decision.

  “You like the new job?” he asked.

  “It’s great,” I said. “I have a really nice boss, that’s the best thing really.”

  “You found a place for yourself,” he said, nodding as he thought it over and decided that this was the important thing. “That’s good. You got pension plan?”

  “Oh, yes. And I’ve got the rent for you. I’m sorry I was so late.”

  “Beetr-r-rus,” he said then, in a voice so serious that I immediately realized that my mother had killed herself—the police had called and that was why he was being so nice to me. Unless Sylvie had gotten arrested … or my father had crashed the plane.

  “Beetrus, that guur-r-rl … she sleep on the couch, or, she sleep with you?”

  He had dropped the cigarette and was crushing it with his heel, and while he spoke he looked down, but when he lifted his eyes I saw only consternation, and the prayer that I’d go for door number two: the couch.

  “With me,” I admitted. I couldn’t let him think he’d imagined it: he’d be too ashamed.

  “You got to go, Beetr-r-rus,” he said.

  “Okay, Frank, I will.”

  “But,” he said. He’d expected an argument, and he’d hoped I’d win. “Where you go?”

  “I’ll find someplace,” I said, “don’t worry.”

  But of course he’d worry. He had worried about me from the day I signed the lease.

  “Henny,” he said. “She—” He looked up toward the kitchen window and the curtain twitched. Henny would have heard our voices, or felt them—Frank’s vibrato always hummed through the walls. I wondered how long she’d been nagging him to get rid of m
e, whether he’d put her off in the hope her suspicions were unfounded, or that I wouldn’t pay the rent and he could evict me for that instead.

  “I understand,” I interrupted. I’d wanted to shock someone, after all. And to shock someone, in the year 1978, when every bourgeois idiot was out proving himself daring and open-minded, was no mean feat. The protest years were over and there was no clear division anymore between peaceful, loving people and the kind of hateful, stodgy, warmongering racists who’d made the rest of us feel so good about ourselves when we scandalized them. So here I was, shocking Frank, who’d last read a newspaper in 1941. This was his house, his piece of the dreamland America. I was the spider under the bed—the creature from the sphere of wrongness just the other side of the veil, where everything works in reverse and kindness is really cruelty, and love, hate. Frank knew nothing of the culture whose bonds I wanted to slip. For him my little shock came in at 20,000 volts.

  “I’ll be out by the end of the week,” I said.

  He looked straight at me, and I realized that until now, he had always gazed down or up or past me, as if he’d have felt rude meeting my eyes. Perhaps he’d known I’d see too much in his glance, and now I saw profound disappointment, confusion, and embarrassment. I searched his face for disgust or contempt or something else that would help me feel anger instead of guilt, but I couldn’t find them.

  “I understand,” I said. “Really.” His face softened, and he closed his eyes for a second as if he was trying to recall the way he’d used to think of me.

  * * *

  “YOU’LL HAVE to move in with me.”

  Lee said this the way she said everything, quietly, calmly, and finally, as if she were snapping a little purse shut after counting out an exact sum of change.

  I hadn’t dared recognize my predicament, until she solved it for me. Now I realized how frightened I’d been and my knees nearly buckled. “Lee, you don’t know—” I could hardly believe her kindness.

  “It’s just good sense,” she said, embarrassed. “Two can live more cheaply than one.”

  My eyes filled. I loved her. “Lee, you are the most wonderful person I’ve ever known,” I said, feeling a tear slide down along my nose. “I’ll find a job,” I said. “I can pay half the rent, for sure.”