The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Most nights I go to her place. She’s good at folding,” he said, making light of it, but I saw how he intended to live with her in a safe, neat world, keep this dark place a secret of his own. Tracy was beautiful, in a warm, inviting way, and she’d gotten to know Stetson because she loved to shop at LaLouche—I’d seen her through the window there, closing out the cash register one evening, so certain in her movements, as if she had no question that she was where she ought to be. Probably her customers would buy capes and unitards and whatever just in hopes of becoming like her. But I knew Stetson’s qualms about her, and from his voice, his hands, his slightest gestures, I knew he loved me. I kissed him, just at the corner of his mouth, and ran out the door, before anything could happen to shatter my perfect vision.

  * * *

  LEE WAS at work already when I got home, and I didn’t have to be at the library until ten, so I made myself a cup of coffee and called Philippa.

  “So there, you’ve found the perfect solution!” she said tartly. “How many cars did you say he’s wrecked?”

  “Well, six, but that was before he got sober,” I said.

  “He’s just like your father, one day maybe he’ll crash a plane.”

  “We can only hope, Philippa,” I said, giddy. I had Stetson, and so, I could have Philippa back. She was all ears, ready for my new adventures.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess a junkie will make for a nice mix with your sister’s beau.”

  “He’s not a junkie,” I said righteously, but I was thinking that he’d damn well better be a junkie, because that was part of why I loved him—for the raw intensity of his need, his willingness to lie and cheat and court death and disaster to assuage it. I was going to be Stetson’s drug now.

  “I stand in support of a woman’s right to choose her own catastrophe,” Philippa answered, as staunch as Emma Goldman. “And if this is the only way you can escape from that, that woman—”

  “Philippa, I can’t leave her. What are they all going to say about me? And they’ll be right, too. I’ve been such a—a bull in a china shop, here. Lee moved into the city because of me, and now I’m going to leave her here alone? I promised her I’d stay forever.”

  “Are you twenty-two yet?” she asked.

  “How old was Dorothea Brooke?”

  “Oh, oh, Dorothea Brooke? So what, she’s a character in a novel. A novel whose author threw herself out a window on her wedding night! Nobody, Beatrice—not you, not George Eliot, but least of all the members of the Hartford Lesbian Support Group—is ever going to solve the problem of love.”

  “Oh, Philippa, I do love you.”

  I heard one of those little fluttering sounds she made when she was nervous and added: “But, not that way, not that way!” In fact, it suddenly occurred to me that I ought to introduce her to Reenie.

  “Marry the junkie, by all means. Mazel tov. And may you marry often!”

  * * *

  THEN, LEE. I told her a bit of the truth: that I’d been upset about all the family troubles and just felt so restless I had to go out. She’d said she understood, that we’d talk when she got home, but that right now she’d better call the police and tell them to stop looking for the car.

  “You called the police?”

  “The car was gone,” she said. “You have to make a report or the insurance doesn’t cover it.”

  Of course, it came down to insurance. It wasn’t that she despised me, even though she had every reason to; she was simply following protocol. She would follow protocol until she was fitted into a regulation-sized box and lowered into the appropriate hole. How womanly, I thought, with a raging frustration. How complacent, how determined to be good. And as we lived in an age when good girls were frowned on, she, and the rest of them (I included Dolly and Sylvie and my mother in this category, as I crossed my clenched fists at my chest, to keep myself from putting one through the wall) were looking for culprits: men, bad men, who discouraged their ambitions, who kept them down. Well, I was going to hop into Stetson’s sidecar and drive right through the picture window of convention into the world of truth.

  “Hello,” Lee said to me in the Aetna parking lot, when I went to pick her up after work. She didn’t look at me, didn’t want to see my face.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry, Lee, but I…” I took a deep breath and was filled with doubt.

  “You shouldn’t go out at night in that neighborhood,” she said. She was angry and she was going to make it a matter of my welfare, because it wouldn’t do to be angry on her own behalf. “You’re going to get killed.”

  I waited for her to say she shouldn’t have called the police, but she didn’t. I was glad—I was chalking up sins against her, waiting until I had enough so I could leave. From that time on, every little sentence she spoke added a new brush stroke to the awful portrait I was painting, in preparation for the great moment when I would turn it on her in accusation. I didn’t say anything more about that night, just went back to our life as it was laid out. In another era, Lee would have been married and would have thought herself happy, but for a vague dissatisfaction and a few embarrassing dreams. Really, so little had changed.

  That weekend we went shopping for a salad spinner, and tried about twenty models.

  “This works just right,” Lee said at home. “Look, the leaves are dry and crisp and perfectly fresh.” I tried one and pronounced the thing an extremely intelligent choice, thinking—I came to transgress and instead I bought a salad spinner.

  Everything was just as it had been, except that I couldn’t stop singing. All that time, I’d known it made Lee uncomfortable for some reason, so I’d keep it down to a tiny hum if she was around. But now, old Gershwin songs, hymns, Gilbert and Sullivan, Donna Summer … rushed through me all day. As long as I was singing I felt Stetson was beside me, doing his job, living his life, quiet and steady and on the way up. And Lee was tense as if she guessed this, though she said it was just that she liked the quiet. On I went, absentmindedly, singing as I folded the laundry or lugged the garbage down the back steps, singing with no thought for anything but the memory of Stetson whispering in my hair.

  Ten

  “I DON’T necessarily think a stint in prison would be the worst thing for Butch,” my father said, sounding grandly reasonable. “It’s only fourteen months, and really, it may be just the structure he needs.”

  He faded into a philosophical musing on the subject of youth and age, which I didn’t like to disturb by reminding him that we were discussing the future of his grandson, whose father was going back to prison for violating his parole.

  “And you’ve got to consider the possibility that this is for the best,” he said, rousing himself to the subject. “Sylvie feels badly now, but that life was hard on her. She’s strong, she can do just about anything, and she’s got her whole life ahead. Some time apart, it might do them both some good.”

  “Like the way parents used to send their daughters on a Grand Tour for a year, to take their minds off their beaux.”

  “Exactly,” he said, unaware I was mocking him.

  “How’s Dolly?” I asked.

  “She’s taking a nap.”

  “She’s home from school?”

  “She hasn’t been to school since the accident.”

  “She’s still in pain?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s just that she doesn’t see the point, anymore.”

  “But…”

  “She forgets things,” he said. “She stares off. And these schools out here, they don’t have a lot to offer. We get public TV on the satellite, we watched Macbeth last night, she’s getting a fine education right here.”

  “Why does she forget things? Does electric shock make you forget things?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Could you ask the doctor?”

  “Sweetie, it’s obvious, isn’t it? She wasn’t forgetful before the lightning. Now she is.”

  “It sounds like that, but I d
on’t know, and suppose she had a stroke, from the shock, or something. You know there are things they can do so people can regain their abilities.”

  “Very interesting, if true,” he said wearily.

  “A doctor would know,” I persisted.

  “They don’t know everything, sweetie.”

  “No, but they know more than we do about medicine!” I said, feeling like I was about to have a stroke myself. I could hear his ancient, stubborn insistence—Just because your mother thinks you’re so smart, etc. And I thought how hard I’d tried to agree with him, to show him he was right so he’d love me. Indeed I am a fool.

  “Pop, she can’t just drop out of school,” I said.

  “She will be fine,” he said. “She’s going to stay here with me. She’s my daughter.” He said this with peculiar emphasis, as if I wasn’t. “And I’m sworn to care for her, for the rest of my life.” His tone had a swell of patriotic goodness in it, which I mistrusted entirely.

  “But, she wants to grow up and go to college and get married.”

  “Bea, she’s deaf, she’s so dizzy she can barely stand up, she can’t remember anything and she’s lost the use of her arm!” he said. Really, that he had to put up with such imbecility!

  “She needs physical therapy!”

  “Oh, sweetie, we’ll get some of that, it’ll make her a little more comfortable, but … it’s hardly going to cure her.”

  “Why is that?”

  “They don’t know very much about this,” he explained sadly. “They can’t say with certainty what will happen.”

  “Exactly.”

  His patience was thinning. “You’re not here, honey, you haven’t seen it.”

  He was right, of course. I changed my tack. “Pop,” I said, “People manage with all kinds of handicaps. People in wheelchairs, people with Seeing Eye dogs, people who have to hold their pen in their teeth.”

  “Well, I guess some people accept their lot with more grace than others,” he said, overruling me. “Dolly has everything she needs, right here. She has a father who loves her and will take care of her even if she can’t realize all her dreams.”

  His voice twisted bitterly at this reference to my grandiose ideas, such as the one in which I might succeed where he’d failed. And a chill ran over me. I’d certainly failed Dolly. She was his.

  “You’re two thousand miles away from this, honey,” he said. “Leave the problem to me.”

  * * *

  “SHE CAME into the world stubborn,” said Ma. She’d called Dolly when she knew Pop was out and found her strangely without affect.

  “When she was four months old she pushed my breast away as if the milk was sour. It’s just the way she was. So I say to myself, if I failed, I failed. One out of the four of you isn’t so bad. You know, maybe my mother didn’t love me, maybe Dolly doesn’t love me, but I did the best I could.”

  And her voice, which had been sweetly pleading, as if she were an inspirational speaker looking out at herself from The Great Television on High, snapped back into comic focus: “I mean,” she asked, “how bright can a person who chooses to live with your father really be?”

  * * *

  “NO,” STETSON said again. “I can’t. I can’t really even talk on the phone right now.” It was the third time I’d called him, and with each one, I felt more foolish. He’d drop his voice and make one excuse after another—no one who heard him would have guessed how he’d spoken to me, less than a week ago.

  “Okay,” I said, “I get it. There isn’t anything to say anyway. ’Bye, Stet, and I’m sorry about all this.”

  “No, no, wait! No, you’re right, we should talk,” he said then. “We shouldn’t leave it this way.”

  So we met down by the river because nobody but derelicts ever went there, so we wouldn’t run into Tracy or anyone she knew. And when he saw me, he reached out reflexively, just enough space between his arms for me to walk into them and stay there forever.

  “Hi, Stet,” I breathed, feeling like the last little piece was fitting into some perfect universe and now all the keys would turn and all the locks fly open and sunlight would flood from the sky. “Oh, hi.”

  He held me tight for one second, then motioned for me to sit down—on a cracked vinyl boat seat that had washed up there on the bank.

  “The reason I’m not … not going to…” Stetson said, “is, because of my recovery.”

  “Your recovery?”

  “Before I left rehab,” he said, “I asked how I was going to know if I was getting off track, going wrong. And they told me, ‘You know right from wrong, you’ll know when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be.’”

  “But, Stet,” I said. “It’s real feeling, between us. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a teenaged mumble, so far from the arch fashion talk he’d used when I met him that I had to smile.

  “So.”

  “Just because it’s real doesn’t make it right. Tracy’s planning our wedding, she’s counting on me.”

  “But you’re not in love with her!”

  “I’m not even sure I know what being ‘in love’ means,” he said. “But I have a good sense with her. I’m not crawling with needs and jealousies. It’s peaceful. Arranged marriages are supposed to work very well.”

  “It might be peaceful with us too,” I said. Like all lovers, I was lying, offering whatever I thought might win me his heart.

  “Tracey’s dad’s in AA. She gets the whole thing,” he said. “I may have to sell the shop, I don’t know yet. I’ve got to give Duane’s widow the money I owe him, she’s broke, and Tracy wants to go back to Missouri where her parents live.”

  “What would you do there?”

  “Get a job.”

  “That shop means everything to you! It’s your own creation, and your diligence has made it work!” I was furious with him suddenly, feeling him back away from me, maybe from everything. “I’d help you do what you want,” I said. “Help you find your way…”

  “You barely know your own gender,” he said, so sweetly I just laughed.

  “So, we’d be lost together!”

  “I don’t want to be lost anymore,” he said, with a flash of real anger. “Listen,” he apologized, “what I mean to say is that actions have consequences. I owe money, I have to pay it. I’ve asked Tracy to marry me. I gave my word.”

  He was already looking at me in a kind of puzzlement that might at any minute slip into censure. Was I really so unscrupulous as to betray all these promises, for sex? Because what could it be, except sex? I, Princess Margaret, wasn’t going to risk my whole life on a desperate drug addict, was I? That would be as crazy as trying to live on a hundred dollars a week. It made him mistrust me. The saddest thing, sadder than thinking I’d never feel him inside me, was knowing that, if I’d never gone over there, never told him how I felt, he’d have kept coming to visit me, to tell me every little thing. The great, deep pleasure of my life was—had been—trying to put true things into words so I could tell Stetson, and now I’d ruined it all.

  “I’ll go,” I said, and stood up, and he jumped up.

  “No!” he said.

  For the first time that night we looked in each other’s eyes—and everything we’d said fell away. He kissed me, his cheek so smooth I knew he’d shaved especially for me. He tasted as clear and pure as the water from the spring at home.

  “I want to touch you,” he said—the last, the worst of his confessions.

  I spread my arms as if he’d said he wanted to frisk me, and he held his hands half an inch from my body and followed the curves down as if he thought really touching me would send him straight to hell.

  Then he closed his eyes and said, “Now, we have to go home.”

  We walked up the bank holding hands, and he waited with me at the Park Street bus stop. “We’ll be friends,” he said. “Deep, true friends.” As I stepped up onto the bus, though, he pulled me back and kissed me so deeply I felt we must be falling out of Hartf
ord, into another dimension. But no. The late bus riders glanced at me with what I assumed must be envy.

  * * *

  HE LOVED me. It was the most amazing thing I could know. The only thing I needed to know—I trusted it, against everything else in the world. The physical joy of it had already changed me. When I went to the supermarket I felt like falling on my knees in the produce aisle: the eggplants were so smooth and lustrous, it seemed a miracle. I turned my key in the library lock every morning with a light heart: I knew the feel of that lock, knew that if it stuck, I could just slip the key out a little and it would go smoothly. I was a competent member of bourgeois society, doing part of the day’s work of the world. I had made a little difference on Park Street, and somewhere ahead of me was the gorgeous life Stetson and I would have together. (I imagined us living inside a rose.)

  I was getting the laundry together to lug to the basement, singing “Copacabana,” and I stopped for a minute to cha-cha through the little drum section before dropping as far as I could into the bass: “Don’t fall in love.” Louis Armstrong couldn’t have done better.

  But I felt a wave of disapproval and turned to see Lee behind me, looking as if she’d seen a specter.

  “Listen, couldn’t you just get earplugs? I realize I’m not Edith Piaf, but I like singing and if I don’t do it here I’m entirely likely to let loose in the library, and we don’t want that, do we?”

  “Everyone can hear you.”

  “And?”

  “I can’t hear myself think,” she said, and I heard that pinched Levittown thing in her voice, as if I were disturbing the peace. A wisp of my mother seemed to waft through the room—my holy conflagration of a mother who would surely have burned away to ash by now if not for her plentiful tears. Lee was her very opposite. Except in one way: she didn’t want me to stray outside the boundaries of our alliance. She’d have liked to know I was always asleep there in her bed, a sort of footwarmer. She could manage to seeing me swim into deep water, but the singing was just too much.

  And as there was perfectly good reason for her to feel this, it sent me into a rage. “Oh, were you trying to think?” I asked satirically, and she burst into tears. “Lee,” I said, “Lee.” She was crying as if something was thawing in her, breaking apart, floating away.