The Bride of Catastrophe (30 page)

“Lee!” I said, but she kept her eyes fixed, and I saw that I shouldn't press the question. “Well, you've got a girlfriend,” I told her. Philippa had said I had a bold vision.

She drew back, shaking her head.

“Trust me,” I said, full of feeling—feeling that had been lying around in my heart for years. “I just want to know everything about you, Lee. We're at the frontier together, we're pioneers.”

She looked desperately uncomfortable—but her eyes broke free of her qualms for a second and I saw a flash of light in them, as if she'd just seen something from a dream. “I love you,” I said.

People are always saying things they don't quite mean, things they only wish were true. They're likely to deny love just when they feel it most deeply. I despised this convention and was determined to flout it. “Never doubt me,” I insisted.

“You're nice,” Lee said, gazing upward in discomfort. “You're very nice to me.”

“I'm not nice,” I said, blazing suddenly. “I love you, I want you, I see my future in you, I feel at the brink of something so amazing between us.” I was boiling with sentences like these, passionate declarations. It didn't matter what I was declaring, really, or why. I wanted to hear myself say the things people dare to, when they're loved. Lee's face went through some stage of incredulity and then broke open suddenly, and I thought—
of course, she's waited all her life to hear these things, and I can say them.
I didn't ask myself whether I meant it—was only proud of my daring and its effect.

In bed later, wearing the nightgown she'd brought in her overnight bag, she told me in a childish whisper that there was one story that might give me some insight into her—one detail that had always seemed to her revealing. Then, with pride, and shame at being so proud, she told me that she held the all-time attendance record at Clear Springs Central School. She had not missed one day of school, from kindergarten through eighth grade.

She believed in order, in lawful simplicity. She didn't care about the mysteries that make people so different from each other, even though we're all so much the same, nor the memories, if they were really memories, that can haunt a person and alter the course of a life. She suspected that it was dangerous to think the way I did, trying to follow all the subtle strands of thought and feeling that wove through every moment. Things are as they are, who can really say why?

Life is to be lived, not deciphered. Lee would rescue me from all my figuring; she'd welcome me into her world, the ordinary, unexamined world whose windows I'd only peeped through before. The rain coursed down over the window, and I rested my head on her flanneled shoulder, and slept as deeply as a fugitive, safe in his cell finally after years of running. The unconscious life was the only life for me.

Eight

M
Y FIRST
paycheck came as a revelation. It was $77.32.

“Stetson, we said a hundred.”

“That
is
a hundred.” He looked uncomfortable, though, as if I'd touched on something he was ashamed of.

I held the check up for him to read. “See, it says seventy-seven dollars.”

He winced. “You don't know about taxes, do you?” he said, with tender incredulity.

“Of course I know about taxes,” I snapped, though I'd completely forgotten about taxes and it had never occurred to me that taxes might consume almost a quarter of my wage. Seventy-seven dollars was less than I'd made at the hospital, and I owed Frank two months' rent.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “You're right, I didn't realize. This is fine, no problem.” It was all written on Stetson's face—that he knew the money wasn't enough, that he couldn't afford much more, that I wasn't doing a very good job and he couldn't very well fire me but could hardly raise my salary. If I started to cry, which I was likely to do if I admitted to myself that it
was
something of a problem, that would make him more unhappy and I didn't want him to despise me.

“A sweater!” he said suddenly. “You need a new sweater! Look at these, have you seen how soft they are? Have one, take the raisin-colored one there, it's you.”

I grabbed it as if it was edible. “You, in that sweater, Beatrice?” he said, sounding sarcastic because he sounded that way even when he was sincere—“Now that's class.”

One afternoon while he was out pricing display racks, his mother called. I'd never considered that he might have a mother, but he did, and she, having lost a leg, and most of her vision, to diabetes, was lonely and needed someone to talk to. So she talked, chewing too, or so it sounded, while
Wheel of Fortune
played in the background, interspersed with commercials for hospital beds and orthopedic pillows. Josip, as she persisted in calling him, had been such a nice little boy—did I know, she collected commemorative plates and Hummel figurines and even as a two-year-old he had never so much as chipped one? After his father left, he'd done everything with her, even watched the soaps every day. Then he'd figured out how they could make ends meet, when she was desperate and he was hardly more than a boy—that was how he got into trouble, it wasn't his fault. She talked on and on and I listened with all my heart, as I did every time I got my ear to the world's door.

“How much?” Stetson asked, holding up the pink “
while you were out
” slip where I'd noted her call.

I tried to act mystified, but he waved a hand. “She always tells the sales clerk, Beatrice,” he said. “Otherwise I might be able to wiggle out. How much?”

“Seven hundred,” I said, “though … she said … it might be closer to a thousand, really.”

“A thousand it is,” he said, writing the check. “Anything else?”

“I think she's lonely,” I said.

“Very astute of you, Beatrice,” he said, “but I meant, were there any other messages?”

I shook my head. I shouldn't have peeked behind the curtain. He loved clean, well-lighted places, he was determined to raise himself into the lifeboat with the survivors and leave the wreck behind. And the survivors, you
know
they'd been traveling first class. If he wished to live among them, they must never guess about the Hummels, the sweet, greasy smell of the little apartment, any of it. No reality.

“When I first saw you,” he told me, “I said to myself, ‘That's class. That's old money, man. She's a woman of wealth and taste and all you need to do is dress her, Stet.'”

So, I was pulling it off. Or rather, as Stetson was also an impostor, he had to live by the impostor's code: believe in the disguises of others as you would have others believe in your own disguise. Expose another, even in your own secret heart, and the whole house of cards comes down. If Stetson had had the good fortune to matriculate at Sweetriver College, he might have become friendly, as I did, with Thaddeus Standish Alden, whose father, the lumber magnate, had singlehandedly deforested an entire northern range. Thad's paintings were the pride of the school, proof that Sweetriver was at the cutting edge of the postmodern, not at all mired in Abstract Expressionism like people said. His taste ran to the color black, whose many forms and depths you would not, if you didn't know him, have guessed. He used to knock on my door at midnight to borrow ten dollars and offer confidences, such as: he loved his dog better than any human; they slept curled together and even smelled alike; he painted only with black because it was the last color in the school bookstore display, and so the easiest to steal; and he had to steal—he refused to take money from his father's filthy hands. When his mother was taken ill one night, he came in to borrow bus fare home, swearing that modern life was to blame for his troubles—in an earlier era she'd simply have been left on a north-facing slope to die. When I thought of old money I always thought of Thad, and the things that got caught in his beard.

“Then,” I said, “why the dreadlocks?”

“You know, who else would look fabulous in dreadlocks?” Stet said, “Princess Margaret. I swear, if I could get Princess Margaret in here I could really do something with her. It's that whole Ivy League thing that makes the dreadlocks matter, it's seeing them where you expect a tiara. They do the same thing as a tiara, shapewise, you know. And that's the kind of thing that suits you.”

I knew he meant this as a compliment, but I was tired of having him lean back and gaze at me as if I was one of the mannequins. I turned on him.

“What's going on with your hair?” I asked him. He'd been letting it grow a little, and now it was all spiked up with gel, some new thing he was trying. “I thought you must have just gotten out of the shower, but that was hours ago.”

“It's the wet look,” he said. “It's what they're wearing—I don't like to shock you, Your Majesty, but powdered wigs are passé.”

But his sneer failed him and he sounded mostly hurt. I'd violated the impostor's code and let him know I could see through his disguise. He checked the mirror fifty times that day and by the time I left I was feeling like a vandal.

And why? So what if Stetson had seized with earnest solemnity on “the wet look,” or any look at all? Surely everyone ought to be able to worship as he likes? I was ready to turn out the world's closets, upending bureaus and slitting mattresses until I found the jewels life was hiding from me, and I was infuriated to see Stetson's devotion lavished on superficial things. Because I'd caught a glimmer of something deeper in him, and when it seemed to fade, I felt he'd betrayed me, sided with Lee to show me that the precious essences I'd dreamed of, the deeper insight and broader understanding, were no more than figments of a naive college girl's imagination.

Next morning he came in with the hair soft and dry, sticking up in little tufts. “Like it, Beatrice?” he asked, with his usual lofty acidity.

“I love it,” I said, because he looked sleepy and rumpled like he'd just woken up, and because I knew he'd done it for me. “You should grow it out a little.”

He smiled, almost shyly. “Nah, it gets unruly,” he said.

“God forbid,” I said, fluffing up my own mop. “Wouldn't do to let it run wild.” But since I spent most of my waking moments trying to change myself to meet somebody else's ideal, I was terribly struck by his changing something in himself for my sake.

“Did you used to wear it long?” I asked him.

He almost flinched, for some reason, then got himself together and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “It looked just like yours.”

“Horrors.”

He smiled immensely. “Then it got caught,” he said, keeping his eye on me to see my reaction. “In the axle of a car I was stealing.”

“Why were you stealing a car?”

“Had to get somewhere,” he answered, happy to have shocked me.

“Like, a hospital?” I asked. He held back a minute more but then, the pressure was getting to him—he wanted to tell his story.

“To see Jimi Hendrix,” he admitted. “I saw this Jeep just sitting in a driveway, the houselights weren't on. I knew the back door would be unlocked, I knew the keys would be hanging there. That's how people are, they can't really believe—”

“Some guy is just going to drive off in their car.” I looked at him sternly, like a third-grade teacher.

“Exactly,” he said, laughing. “But I just got on Eighty-four, in the pouring rain, and I got a flat tire. Man, you have never seen anyone change a tire so fast.”

“One of those miracles of strength, like guys have in a war,” I said.

“Exactly. Except, I try to stand up, and my hair is wound in the axle. And while I'm lying there trying to get it out, there come the police.”

“What happened?”

“Guy had scissors in the glove compartment, cut me loose, wished me well.”

“He liked you,” I said, thinking this cop must have seen the same thing I did in Stetson, a vital goodness that would make it impossible to imagine him a thief. “He just naturally helped you.”

“Or, he was just stupid. Anyway, the next day, I left the car up the street with the keys under the seat. I'm sure it worked out.”

“So, does this mean I have to watch my purse?”

“No, no, of course not.” He looked protective, as if I could count on him to keep me safe from that old self of his. “I don't do stuff like that anymore.”

He was even talking differently, his irony was gone and he was watching my face like a guy watching a slot machine, to see how I'd take the story. I took it very well—like the money for his mother; it was a glimpse of something real, something solid in Stetson—something that wouldn't change with the fashion. Just the phrase “stuff like that” had an adolescent ring that touched me. He could have been some guy on my school bus, before Sweetriver got me in its clutches. I disapproved of myself, but I couldn't help liking his criminal spirit—I recognized it as if it were my own natural way.

“No, now you're a fashion guru,” I said.

“Oh, I'm just a drunk, Beatrice,” he said jauntily. “Recovering, but basically, a drunk.”

“Stetson!” His mother had hinted at this, and he probably knew it, but his telling me meant something different. It went into my heart like a hatpin.

“Once maybe, but not now.” I swept my arm out to remind him what a palace he'd made. “It's impossible for me to think of you that way!”

“Then you're wrong as usual, Beatrice,” he said, ducking into the back room.

Nine

“I
F IT'S
a girl, we'll name her Seraphina,” Sylvie told me. Her voice had a child's confidence—a thing so fragile, anyone could crush it—but she trusted me, she put it in my hands. Our hearts still contained the same vision, like two lockets with matching pictures enclosed.