“It is so good to talk to you,” he said. “I think it’s because you’re different, so you understand…”
* * *
“WHERE WERE you?” Lee asked, when I met her in the Aetna parking lot. She looked so upset that I automatically lied.
“Looking for a job. Where would I be?”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Well … you didn’t tell me you were going to work today. Why should you? I know you’re going to work.”
“The next time you’re going to be out of the house for the afternoon, you call me,” she said. “I was worried sick. I couldn’t imagine what had happened.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching over to squeeze her hand. “I didn’t want to bother you at work, that’s all.”
I’d intended to tell her Stetson had taken me to lunch, but now I couldn’t. Which was silly, because she’d have been pleased that I was safe and taken care of. It wasn’t like I’d had lunch with Reenie or another woman. But instinct kept me quiet and I rooted around for another subject.
“Do you usually get a flu shot?” I asked her.
* * *
THE NEXT day I did penance by keeping right at home where she wanted me. The phone woke me at noon and I answered briskly for fear the caller would guess the truth—that I was a very small, inconsequential being at the helm of a very large and unwieldy personality, who had to cling to her mattress so as to be ready for the inevitable smashup.
It was the City of Hartford Personnel Office, and they were offering me a job.
“We’re bound by law to call the highest scorers first,” the man said hopelessly. That test! I’d forgotten all about it. “Though I’m sure you’ve already found something…”
“No, no,” I said happily, “nothing at all.”
Just what he’d suspected; even the highest scorer hadn’t managed to find a job in nine months. Poor little Hartford, whose civic grandiosity would never be fulfilled—it was destined to sit there on its bend in the river, nervously reassuring itself of its own importance while on the highways that swirled over, around, and through it, streams of traffic carried all the vital, intelligent people back and forth from Boston to New York. Hartford had to rely on people like me.
“When do I start?” I asked, hoisting myself up on the pillow. A wardrobe was blowing up in my imagination, a closetful of pale, flowery dresses like an avenue of cherry trees in May, dresses in which I would look so lovely, perfectly in bloom, smiling like some girl in a pantyhose ad—a smile without complications.
“Did you want to know what the position is?” the dry voice asked.
“Oh, yes, of course!”
“It is a Library Technician III position, at the Oxford Branch of the Public Library,” he said, slipping into his vernacular. “City benefits, and after a period of probation you will be eligible for yearly raises, performance-based of course. You can come down to City Hall to fill out the paperwork any time, and you can start as early as tomorrow.”
* * *
“THE PERFECT place for you to begin,” Philippa said. It had certainly made for a good excuse to call her. “Government would be an excellent arena for your talents. The civil service is strangling for want of fresh thinkers. It is a very good sign for the City of Hartford that they had the foresight to hire you.”
“It’s a library technician, it’s not—”
“In fact I wonder that I never thought of politics for you! You’re interested in people, you’re open to things, and you have a natural authority—from managing those parents, I suppose … but why stop with them? Yes, yes, I see it quite clearly, Connecticut politics, that’s the place for you.” My heart was sinking; she sounded just like my mother.
“Philippa, it’s a CETA job … its make-work for pathetic people…”
“Beatrice, it’s a beginning,” she said, and I thought of her back at home, watching her father with his bricks and planning her own life accordingly: upward, course by course by course.
* * *
“CONGRATULATIONS, HONEY, it’s wonderful,” Lee said, sounding crestfallen. Driving toward City Hall next morning, she stopped to wave in every other car, and for pedestrians who looked as if they might consider crossing.
“Drive! Just drive the damned car, will you!”
“There’s nothing wrong with careful driving.”
“If we go any slower we will be in reverse!” Now she decided it was her civic duty to stop and pick up a rolling trash barrel.
“Imagine, I did the best of everyone who took the test,” I said, and she looked over at me with a tight little smile.
“Yes, and what stiff competition.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not exactly the Harvard entrance exams,” she said, as we approached, finally, and I saw what a beautiful building City Hall was, modeled on the Acropolis, stately and graceful, built before anyone could guess that the city would rot away around it. “Do you really think you should take this job? We don’t need the money, and now, if something better comes up you’ll miss it.”
I hadn’t seen a paycheck in three months. When I needed a new bottle of shampoo I agonized over putting it on the shopping list and going deeper in debt to Lee. She protested that we lived together and these things didn’t matter, but I felt she was trying to buy my soul.
“This so-called job doesn’t even demand four years of college. It’s not your level, and it’s in a terrible neighborhood, and you’ll be there until eight o’clock.”
“Which everyone knows is when the ghouls come out.”
“I can’t talk about this,” she said suddenly. “It’s not a good idea, that’s all.”
“Lee,” I said, “this is the first time anyone has ever suggested to me that library science was a high-risk profession.”
After I filled out all the forms, they told me I had a month to move back into town—“City employees have to live in the city,” snapped a personnel receptionist, drunk with her power over me.
Two
“WE’LL BE so happy, Lee. We will,” I said, standing at the window of our new place, three blocks from the library. The Courant had done a feature story on the neighborhood, describing it as an “urban oasis, vibrant with growth and change … holding the flavor of the islands from which so many of its residents have recently arrived while benefitting from gentrification, thanks to the new population of ‘young professionals’ (this, as we knew, was a rhyming euphemism for “homosexuals”). Looking down Hereford toward Governor, we saw the emphatic lettering (“Your Problem All Solved!”) of the signs for Capitol Jewelry and Loan, Casteneda’s Furniture—(“No Payments till Fall”) and San Juan’s, a convenience store with barred windows where young mothers could exchange WIC vouchers for rum. And out the side window, the curved iron gate of the cemetery, flanked by a cedar whose two trunks diverged from a single root.
“Look,” I said, “just like us!” Though the cedars were not softly merging but struggling apart.
She smiled, embarrassed. “You’re crazy.”
“Crazy about you. Our own place. Together,” I said, and she relaxed a little. She hadn’t wanted to move, of course, but she’d understood it was necessary for “my career” and she was a very good sport, always. “We’ll go to the Symphony and be home in five minutes,” I said.
“Three minutes to work,” she replied, without much conviction, but then, conviction seemed loud and impolite to her. Her voice was always faltering in the middle of a sentence as she asked herself whether she was saying the right thing.
“The woodwork here is amazing,” I said. She loved woodwork, and our landlord, a Baptist minister who was so busy in the right-to-life movement we figured that as long as we didn’t have abortions he’d let us be, had left it the natural wood color she liked.
“It really is nice,” she agreed.
“Lesbian Nation!” I said, fist up. Pat and Susan lived up the block and had had us over for dinner once already, Susan wearing
a nightgown of flannel thick as velvet and Pat pouring cocoa with curmudgeonly good will, saying she’d never, in all her days, expected to find herself amidst such a hen party, next we’d be doing each other’s hair.
“I love it,” I proclaimed, settling beside her on the couch we had miraculously pushed over the stair rail into the room. “It’s so cozy, like off-campus housing,” I said.
“It’s off-campus all right,” Lee said, getting up to look out the window. “We better get the curtains up before dark,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we don’t want to incite … well…”
“Incite what?”
“Did you read the paper?” she said. “The Canyon Rapist? He’d see women through their windows and know they were alone. We have to get curtains up right away.”
“Lee,” I started, but she wouldn’t have it.
“It’s a risk,” she snapped. “It’s just that simple.”
Blame the insurance industry, all those actuaries sitting there calculating risks all day. But looking over at her, I closed my mouth. Her face was tight—exhausted but resolute. My idea of city life came out of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—I saw myself reading on a fire escape, with a big geranium beside me and my hair pulled back in a bow. For Lee the move was in every way a step backward—a huge risk—but she had taken it because she was in love. Thinking this, I closed my eyes and saw us sweep each other into an embrace so graceful and muscular, it must come either from a dream or Nijinsky. I owed her an immense debt, and I was going to love her the way I’d always wanted to be loved.
“Oh, Lee,” I said. “I swear, fate brought me to Hartford so I could be with you.”
She squared her shoulders a little against sweet talk.
“Honey, it’s going to be fine,” I said. “No risks for you, not here with me.” I reached to pull her in but she stood up instead.
“I’ll just tack up a sheet for now,” she said, carrying a chair over to the window. “Have you seen the hammer?”
The window shattered in front of us. A wheel of flame opened beyond it, and we ran screaming into the stairwell, where we met our new neighbors, the Lopez family, who were screaming too. Out on the street, someone shouted: “It’s the transformer, the transformer blew,” and we began to understand that the world hadn’t burst entirely into flames. Lee sank onto the steps—her knees just buckled. Three hours later, in bed, with cardboard tacked over the window, I held her as tight as I could, arms and legs around her, and felt her shaking so hard I thought her bones would break like cups in an earthquake.
“It’s over,” I said. “It’s over, there’s nothing to be afraid of now.” But even I knew that in truth, it had just begun.
* * *
“SHOTS RANG out on Hereford Street last night,” the newscaster said, very brightly, on the next day’s news, as if he had forgotten that gunshots meant anything except higher ratings. It had been a kid with an air rifle, trying to hit a squirrel on the wire.
“We have to get a deadbolt,” Lee said, turning away from the TV. It was the first thing she’d said for hours. We’d kept unpacking by rote. The landlord said someone would be over to measure for new glass the next day and the plywood would be off by the end of the week. For now, the television was the closest thing we had to daylight.
Lee sat on the sofa, then jumped up and went to the kitchen and looked out through the little porch over the garage. “It’s getting dark,” she said, with dread. Her face was set like her mother’s, in the pictures I’d seen—a face that seemed to have become sadder and sadder, year by year, until the mouth turned down even when she smiled. She had absorbed this blow, would absorb others, but beyond that, there was no energy, no desire.
She’s old, I thought. She was thirty-nine years older than me, but if expectation is the measure of youth, she was ancient. She looked forward to nothing—she had no obsessions, nothing she was determined to see of, or say to, the world—she’d be content, as she had told me many times, if we could just live here, safe and together, for the rest of our lives. Once I said, “Lee, when you love somebody you want to love their history too, their whole family, their town, and their ambitions, because it’s all a part of that person—don’t you understand?”
No, she’d said, shaking her head fondly at my little eccentricities. She did not understand.
“I’ll call a locksmith tomorrow,” she said.
From that moment, she shrank and shrank. Loud noises gave her palpitations. If I got home a half hour late I’d find her in tears. She refused to ride the bus because of the gauntlet of doorsteps between our house and the stop, populated by guys with boom boxes and beer cans in paper bags.
“Don’t go down there,” she said. “If you need to go somewhere, I’ll drive you.”
Suddenly she stopped still and her face went white as if she’d just heard a scream.
“Lee,” I said, “what is it? What’s wrong?”
“My heart,” she said, pressing one hand, then both, to her chest. “I don’t know.” She lay down on the couch and closed her eyes. “Feel how it’s beating.”
I found her pulse—it was wild.
“Should I call a doctor?”
“Just don’t go down there,” she said, in a broken whisper. “Don’t go down there. Just don’t go down there again.”
Three
“C, OR B?” This was the question posed to me, with liturgical solemnity, by Cyril Tremblay, Branch Librarian, my latest supervisor.
“Excuse me?” I smiled enormously. He was testing me, I guessed; he wanted to gauge my bibliographical knowledge somehow … “C, or B?” I repeated.
“C, or B?” he affirmed, with great irritation, as if I was a lackadaisical student stalling for time. He was a tall man, his square head jutting forward, a vein pulsing in his forehead as if thought was heavy labor for him, each idea a new stone to be lifted to the top of a high wall. His question sounded like the great ones—to be or not to be? either/or? C, or B? I could not answer.
“It’s simple enough,” he thundered, coming so close I could smell his winey breath, holding a copy of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s collected works up in front of my face. “C, or B?”
“Do you mean, how should you file it?” I asked him.
“What else would I mean?” he said, with a small fury.
“C?” I asked, bracing for a blow.
“Do you think so?” He squinted at the book, touching the C of Compton and the B of Burnett in some kind of bewilderment. “We hardly have room in the C’s,” he said, and then sadly, acquiescing, “But, you think C?”
“I do,” I said, feeling I’d spoiled everything. He disappeared into the stacks with the book and when he returned, he seemed winier yet. I was helping a woman who wanted to read Gone With the Wind, but I didn’t understand how the interlibrary loan procedures worked and I asked him to explain. He looked at the loan form vaguely for a long time and said finally:
“You don’t want that.”
She looked perplexed.
“It’s soap opera,” he said. “You don’t want it. I have the definitive history of the Civil War. It’s a personal copy, but I’ll bring it in for you tomorrow.”
“Gone With the Wind?” Mrs. Arruda persisted. She was from El Salvador and she worked at the bakery up the street, selling brilliantly colored, cloyingly sweet cookies that were hard as flint. She had very little English but here she was at the library, determined to get some.
“You’ll actually learn something,” Cyril said, giving her a hard look—was she going to sink into philistinism, when he was offering a chance to learn as much as he knew? The more Cyril drank, the more censorious he became somehow; it was strange.
She faltered, glancing over at me, properly embarrassed. “Thank you,” she said with confusion. She’d come over from the bakery, with its portraits of Christ in thorns on one wall and Frank Sinatra on the other, looking for something romantic that would pull her into the new language—she couldn’t live
up to Cyril’s standards.
“Shall I send for Gone With the Wind too?” I asked. Everyone else wanted Harlequin romances and auto-repair manuals.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “thank you.”
When she was gone, Cyril said, “I don’t bother with interlibrary loans. Too much paperwork and they always send the wrong thing anyway.” Seeing my face, he said, “They don’t read them, they don’t return them, then we’re to blame. If I see one in the thrift shop I’ll pick it up for her.”
I frowned; he became exasperated.
“We can send for it,” he said, “but it will not come. Interlibrary loan is a good idea. The world is full of good ideas. Urban renewal, for instance; an excellent idea.”
He looked out at the concrete square across the street. No one even wanted to walk there—they kept in the shade of the buildings and strode through only if there were no other choice. hunched as if there might be a sniper on one of the roofs nearby. There was a dry fountain in the middle, but not a single tree.
“Busing was certainly a very high-minded idea,” Cyril said. “Look at this—” he held them up, a thick pink sheaf of overdue notices. “Some of these are a year old. The people they’re addressed to don’t live here anymore, or they took out the books when they were in detox and now they’re using again, or, now here’s one—what do you suppose that address is?”
“115 Spring Street?”
“The homeless shelter,” he said. “The book was due in January. What do you suppose the forwarding address might be? Oh, and here’s a favorite: ‘Undeliverable, Building on Fire.’
“There,” he said, chuckling—sad things cheered him up, they proved he was right about life. “You’re beginning to see. You did the chairs back there, did you?”
Mr. Klipsch, in his many overcoats, sat at the back table all day when it was raining. He was incontinent and his urine took the finish off the chairs. It was my job to wipe them down after he left. Lysol in one hand, lemon oil in the other, I headed to my task, but heard a loud, importunate voice behind me suddenly.
The Bride of Catastrophe Page 30
