An Atomic Romance (12 page)

20

Another shock: Julia was waiting for him when he arrived home from his shift, soon after seven. After he quieted Clarence, she emerged from her chartreuse Beetle dressed for work and appearing fresh scrubbed, her hair still a bit damp.

“Plutonium!” she cried. “What’s all this I’m hearing about plutonium?” Her face was pinched and anxious.

“Somebody forgot to mention it,” he said, giving her a quick hello kiss. He noticed yesterday’s paper and today’s lying together, an intimate couple, under a weigela bush.

“Is there a lot?”

He stooped for the papers. “No, no. We would have known. It would have registered on our TLDs.”

She reached for him and pulled him close. “I hate this,” she said. “I’m afraid you’re not safe.”

“Don’t worry, honey.” Fumbling with the papers, he tried to embrace her.

Suddenly she loved him, he thought. Clarence was barking, as he always did whenever he saw Reed with his arms around a woman.

Julia said, “You know, we’re going to pull the lid off of something one day and the whole world is going to collapse into it. What do you know about this plutonium?”

“It’s made in a nuclear reactor,” he said, opening the side door for her. “Hush, Clarence.”

“Well, I know that! And I know the plant doesn’t have one.” She stood in the open door, forgetting to go through. Clarence entered before her. Reed guided Julia in, lightly touching her trim, firm behind.

In the kitchen, while he worked on coffee, he tried to soothe her fears. Had she lost a little weight? Her eyebrow pencil had been applied unevenly, making her left eyebrow seem fashioned with a T-SQUARE. Clarence stayed beneath the kitchen table, near Julia.

“How much plutonium do you think is out there?” she asked.

“It can’t be much. Just a smidgen.” He grinned. “About as much as you could get in your pocket.”

“I wouldn’t put any in my pocket!” She laughed. Again, she held on to him, her head on his chest. He hugged her tight. “I’m so worried,” she said.

“I don’t think it will amount to much. Anyway, it’s not gamma rays. You can be in the same room with it and not get dosed.”

“But I still wouldn’t want to be around it.”

He stroked her hair and tried to utter assurances. “There’s fifty million gallons of all kinds of radioactive waste at that plant in Hanford, Washington. And what about Rocky Flats? They had Dumpsters overflowing with it. But they cleaned it up, and we will too. This is nothing compared to all that. It
can’t
be that bad.”

He broke away from her to pour water into the coffeepot.

“There’s no safe level,” she said.

He measured the coffee grounds slowly, precisely, as if he were still working with dangerous chemicals. “It can’t have been much, or we’d all be dead by now,” he said.

“Damn, Reed, I’m outraged! Why aren’t you?”

“What good would that do?”

“I hope you haven’t been in contact with it,” she said.

“You know I’m always careful. I shower and scrub at work like I was trying to get cat piss out of upholstery.”

He turned on the coffeepot, then held her shoulders and gazed directly into her eyes. “I don’t like it—and sure, I’m a little rattled.”

“What are they saying at the plant?”

“Oh, they’re downplaying it. PR’s working overtime.” He selected two clean coffee mugs from the dishwasher. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure everybody there knows much about plutonium. Anyhow, they’re not going to get their jockstraps tied in a knot over it. It might cut off circulation.” He grinned. “They don’t know what to think.”

She had hung her shoulder bag on one of the ladder-back chairs. She lifted it and began rummaging in it, as if she had brought along some cancer statistics. He stared out the kitchen window and thought about his love for her. It was as though he were meditating, holding a single thought, to steady himself.
We’re in this together,
he thought. But he would never tell her about his exposures. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him, and he didn’t want to scare her off. She zipped her bag and hung it on the chair.

“Did you want the blue mug with flowers on it or this tall, skinny one?” he asked when the coffee was ready.

“The blue one’s fine. Thank you.”

“You pick up a couple of hundred millirem a year just for living, you know,” he said, pouring coffee. “Hell, there’s americium in smoke alarms. Americium, the patriotic transuranic.” He grinned.

“You still don’t have a smoke alarm,” she pointed out, glancing at the kitchen ceiling.

“So you want me to invite more carcinogens into my home?”

She smiled, acknowledging the contradiction in her thinking. She sat at the table, sipping her coffee. In her lab coat and Dutch clogs, she seemed surprisingly fragile. Her concern for him made him feel elated; his fear that she didn’t want to be around him because she might get contaminated took a twist.

He sat down in the chair nearest her and touched her forehead lightly. “I don’t like to see your pretty face all scrunched up with worry.”

She sipped more coffee. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s better, but she just sits in her apartment.”

“Is she able to go out to lunch?”

“I guess so. We haven’t tried it.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Reed! You should take your mother out to eat or for a drive, if she’s doing so well. And you have to keep her mind active.”

“Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Do you feel all right?”

“I never have anything wrong with me but my usual minor maladies. Or Merry Melodies.”

“You mean Porky Pig? Or Bugs Bunny?” She smiled, warming to him.

“Bugs was my guy.”

“I think Clarence loves me,” she said distractedly, pushing the dog’s nose from her lap.

“Let him sniff your hand. There. Good Clarence. Good boy. Julia’s sweet.” Julia gave the dog her hand, then moved it to Reed’s leg. He said to Clarence, “She’s so good I’m going to take her in my bedroom and love on her and leave you outside. You’ll just have to be jealous!”

He was embracing Julia, and she was responding, her hands caressing his face. He was glad he had showered at work, and again he reassured her about that. She had come back to him. He relaxed, and they let some kind of mutual grief flow between them.

“I’ve missed your lip gloss so much I was tempted to go buy myself a tube of it.”

“You can borrow mine,” she said, as he was kissing her.

“I want you,” he mumbled.

“I have to go to work,” she murmured.

“This won’t take long,” he said.

She laughed. “Hey, not
that
fast!”

A memory of a cartoon, Pluto the Dog, flashed through his mind. He felt like Pluto, feeling a bit dumb and simple at the moment, overcome with stupid desire. Hastily, he shooed Clarence into the backyard, promising him his breakfast soon. When Reed returned and saw her standing by the door of his bedroom, he thought too late of his dirty sheets.

“Do you want to see a movie this weekend?” he asked, trying to slow down his approach.

“No, I’ve seen enough movies for a lifetime.”

“Friday night let me take you to that fancy place where you dab your bread in a puddle of olive oil.”

“I want their lobster penne,” she murmured, as she began removing her lab coat.

“You got it.”

On Friday, after his shift ended, he didn’t sleep. Jacked up on coffee, he whirred through his house, cleaning it for Julia. He laundered the sheets, scoured the tub. He mowed the yard, trimmed the hedge, washed his truck. Sex on Tuesday morning had been so spontaneous that they both gasped at its pleasure.

“What a swell idea,” she had said.

Mr. Como’s was a white-tablecloth restaurant known as a combo-bistro. Historical photographs of the town covered the walls—old street scenes with department stores, even a series of construction scenes from the plant. Reed and Julia sat next to some 1930s photographs of factory workers.

Mr. Como was not serving lobster penne that night. The seafood special was grilled salmon drenched with lemon aioli sauce and rosemary orzo studded with yellow-pepper-and-portobello tidbits.

“I think I had a date once with Rosemary Orzo,” Reed said as the waiter recited the specials.

“She was my roommate,” Julia said, flirting with Reed.

The salmon was good. The breakfast-hour sex in the dirty sheets earlier that week had been exceptional. If he were writing a review, Reed would say it was delectable, with the pièce de résistance coming last. The restaurant was noisy, blaring like heavy-metal music, but he didn’t mind.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

He could not hear her reply. She was savoring her rosemary orzo. “What a neat picture,” Julia said, touching an old photograph on the wall beside her. Workers posed at a pants factory—mostly women in thin floral dresses. “All these women with their eager country faces. This would be during the Depression? And see that man up there at the top, with his arms folded and his elbows sticking out? I guess he’s the paterfamilias.”

“The pot of what?”

“Paterfamilias.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you said ‘pot of camellias.’ ”

“It’s noisy in here,” she said, laughing.

“I’m deaf,” he said.

The background music was drowned out by the loud chatter in the crowded room. He stopped trying to speak. He wondered whether she had thought he didn’t know the word
paterfamilias
and so was covering for his ignorance. He concentrated on his salmon and braved the mound of tricolored, julienned roots. He smiled at Julia. She smiled back and mouthed something. He couldn’t hear her words. He felt anxious, as if something were closing in on him, filling up his ears with cotton. The place was so loud. He began to sing. He sang “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” She kept smiling at him, kept eating. He chugged through a couple of the verses, feeling that he was boarding the train. The pants makers in the photograph seemed to shoot glances at him. He launched into his next selection, “Wake Up Little Susie.” No one in the restaurant—not the waiters, nor the patrons, nor the bartenders—noticed that he was singing. Everyone was busy—jawing, guffawing, gossiping, gulping, guzzling. Julia was smiling at him as though she loved every note. But no one else seemed to hear. He switched to “The White Cliffs of Dover,” an unexpected challenge. He was sweating, and little caffeine-powered butterflies fluttered around his heart. When he finished, Julia applauded, and the waiter came and cleared away the dishes.

He listened to his messages while Julia was in the bathroom. His answering machine held a message from Burl. “Hey, Reed, I’ve just got one call, and I didn’t have a lawyer, but they picked me up and I’m in the city jail. I did a naughty—D.U.I. Can you bail me out, good buddy?”

“Why don’t I just say a prayer for you?” Reed said aloud to the machine.

Julia appeared, tucking her toothbrush into her purse. “I brushed my teeth,” she said.

“Burl’s in jail,” he said. “And he expects me to bail him out.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not the first time. Burl goes to the liquor store, buys some whiskey, and starts drinking in the parking lot. The cops have learned to wait for him to open his pint and pull out into the road.”

“What are you going to do?” Julia asked. Frowning, she slid out of her clogs.

“He can wait till morning,” Reed said. “It’s his chance to practice yoga. And a jail cell would make a great meditation space.” His voice didn’t hide his disappointment in Burl.

“Go ahead and get him,” Julia said. “I need to go home and get some sleep anyway.” She entered her clogs again.

“No, you don’t,” Reed said, grasping her waist.

“Maybe I won’t go right away,” she said, easing into his arms.

Reed telephoned the jail and told the turnkey, who sounded like a teenager, that he would fetch Burl in the morning, like a dog boarded at a kennel. “I want to be with you,” he said to Julia.

In bed, he felt like a little boy, snuggling up to her. “I missed you,” he said.

“I missed you too. You’re so good to be with.”

“We’re good together, aren’t we?”

“It feels right. Your arms are so hard and smooth.”

“You have a nice feel, too, your sweet cheeks and your shiny nose.”

She giggled. “Remember this?” She touched him with her long, angular fingers.

He spent a long time caressing her, shushing her, smoothing her hair, smooching. He wanted to make it last, to allay her fears and move her close to a hypnotic state. Being with Julia was like being in a luxurious spa. She was warm, liquid, steamy. He thought about being in a hot-tub with her and wished he had one. He decided to price hot tubs as soon as he got a chance.

They lay curled together, the stereo playing
100 Piano Master-pieces.
In his mind, she was playing the piano. He didn’t know what would ever become of him, but he wanted this moment to last. After a while, when they were sitting up, talking, he told her about the dream of the woman shooting herself. Although the vividness of it had faded, he couldn’t forget her children’s pictures taped to the dashboard. The woman might have rearranged and caressed and considered those photographs for hours before she pulled the trigger, he said.

“That’s awful! Why would you dream that?”

“My dreams don’t have anything to do with me,” he told her. “It’s like I’m going to the movies and watching someone else’s story. I didn’t tell Burl about that dream, because he would say it’s a premonition.”

“Ha! Not that a hundred women didn’t shoot themselves somewhere just today.” Julia punched the pillow, her breasts moving against the sheet like a gentle surf. She said, “I could predict right now that a woman is going to get in her car with a gun and go shoot herself. I don’t know who or where, but you can be sure it will happen.” She shuddered. “Those psychics you hear about—they’re just playing on something like that. A premonition of the probable.”

Reed was aware of Clarence barking at traffic, but he didn’t want to interrupt this train of thought with Julia.

He said, “So in my dreams I see some scene about somebody else, somebody I don’t know and have no involvement with. Detached dreaming.”