The Bride of Catastrophe (33 page)

“Because you're saying something you're not hearing!” I said with great anger. But it was five-thirty. “Go on,” I told him. “I'll lock up. Go away.”

*   *   *

“
LIKE ME?
They
loved
me,” Ma said on the phone. She'd made some revisions to the job letter, and the guys who were developing the old Parkington place as townhouses were considering her for the front office. “Nobody else can give them the kind of class I do, and that's what they're looking for, style, someone who will define the way people see the place. They need chutzpah, and if there's one thing I've got, it's chutzpah!” She belted this out so grandly, I expected to hear a big chorus come up behind her—
Fiddler on the Roof
meets
Anything Goes
.

“It's the red suit,” she said. “That's what carried the day.” I heard a thud in the background: her kicked-off pump hitting the wall.

“The red suit?”

Honestly, how did people like me, people who had no sense of showmanship, survive in the modern world? “Red denotes power,” she explained. “A woman in a red suit shows a man she can hold her own, that she's got the confidence, the ability.”

I saw, in my mind's eye, a woman in a power suit cowering behind a desk in fear of a ringing phone.

“So, they implied you had the job?”

She laughed. “I showed 'em what I can do for 'em, that's for sure. They're the right kind of people—
powerful
people. Everything clicked, we're made for each other. Perley took me aside and said he was very impressed. Then he put a piece of ice—out of his bourbon—down the back of my jacket! Now, that's what I call a good sign … don't you?”

I took too long to answer.

“Well,” she said, “
I
think it's a
very
good sign.”

*   *   *

LEE TOOK
me out to dinner: she loved to drive me out along the highway service road and let me choose between the steakhouse with the huge neon cactus, the Swiss Chalet, Moby Dick's, which was built to look like a clipper ship, or the Shamrock, with its real thatch roof—this was the America I was dying to be part of, a vast paved landscape studded with bright plastic replicas of exotic places.

“Tiki Hut!” I said, Tiki Hut being the most ornate, a green pagoda with a dragon breathing real smoke beside the carved doors. Inside, it was lush and dark with a real waterfall at the back surrounded by palms heavy with plastic coconuts and mechanical macaws.

“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

“B
EATRICE, 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.”