Another Perfect Catastrophe (11 page)

“The mayor's dance is at midnight, and I would like you there to turn me around the floor.” She fingered his wedding band. “I know these things aren't fun for you, but it's the one favor I'm asking. Please don't disappear on me.”

“I'm just looking at some of the displays,” he said. She smiled. She was really sweet, he knew. This was the consensus among their friends.

“See anything good?” she asked.

T watched a show about the way teenagers ignore death,” he said, “and I toured the hall of pioneer nipples.”

A look of small panic crossed her face. He was talking too loud.

“You'll have to show me those sometime,” she said.

He nodded. “I'd like to.”

“Go easy on the champagne, and don't forget the dance, please, Jeremy. This really is important to me.”

“Haven't I always been there when you needed me to?” This was a line he'd heard on a TV show somewhere. He stood close to her, speaking in a quieter voice.

“Yes, you have.” She squeezed his arm. “Come find me.”

“Midnight,” he said. “Got it. Promise I'll be here.” He thought drunkenly of Cinderella.

He felt his way down the back stairs by the faint red glow of the fire escape signs. His steps gave a hushed echo on the stair skids, the thick base of the champagne bottle tapping the handrail as he descended. He walked through the halls, calling for Celina in a hoarse whisper. He passed mannequins dressed as redcoats and as colonists with muskets and fake plastic horses, and others clothed as Rebels and Yankees. The set faces were lit from above, the clothes too new-looking, as if they had come from Wal-Mart. Jeremy fell into the habit of speaking to these figures as he passed, showing them the twenty-first-century miracle of his digital glow-in-the-dark wristwatch and his cell phone, asking if they had seen a blonde dressed as a cop. He told the plastic Yankees that they should not attack on Christmas Day.

Finally he found her, in a large room set aside for special visiting exhibits, the current one titled “The Atomic Age.” Celina sat cross-legged on a love seat inside someone's re-created living room from 1955, watching Milton Berle on a boxy black-and-white TV. Outside the fake window was a bomb shelter shaped like a small RV, air vent jutting upward, one wall cut away and replaced with Plexiglas, the olive-drab shelves stacked with Wheatena biscuits, Ritz crackers, and steel cans of water. He sat beside her, the vinyl upholstery squeaking beneath him, the two of them surrounded on three sides as though they lived in some fourth-grader's diorama.

“You found me,” Celina said, smiling. He handed her the food, spilling some on the beige carpeting. He felt clumsy, as if he somehow had failed her instead of doing her a favor. She lifted a forkful of Watergate salad to her mouth. He undid the foil and wire on the champagne and popped the cork. It ricocheted and landed on the end table, atop a copy of
Life
magazine with Dwight Eisenhower on the cover.

“You got him,” she said. “I come down here to goof off. Don't tell.”

“Who would I tell?” he said. “Hey, Uncle Miltie, see that she's fired.” At this, she laughed out loud, as if he had finally hit some resonant spot. He watched her laugh, the way it just came out of her all at once. He decided that he loved this in her. On the tiny screen, Milton Berle was wearing a dress and trying to kiss Danny Kaye. The audience howled. Celina chewed, drank from the bottle, then passed it to him, and he drank. Nothing had ever tasted so good, and he drew long, fizzy swallows until his eyes watered. He saw her with clarity as his drunkenness increased, saw the small imperfections of her nose and the thin, hard lines around her mouth. She was almost pretty. Celina tipped her hat back on her head and leaned against the love seat, shutting her eyes against the lights. She stood up suddenly and changed the tape in the VCR hidden under the TV cabinet. Jack Benny flickered onto the gray screen, frowning and holding his violin. Across the hall, in another room, Jeremy could see more of the enlarged photos of microscopic animals, the hairy legs and dangerous pinchers. It surprised him that such a small world could be so fierce.

Celina drank. “Where's wifey?” she asked. This annoyed him suddenly, her calling Jean “wifey,” as if subtly mocking him for being married to her.

“My wife, Jean, is upstairs, being awarded and feted.”

“Are you happily married? Or do you secretly hate it?”

He looked at her. There was a tiny smear of sauce on the corner of her mouth. “I know your type. You think it's smart to ask questions that put people on the spot.”

She shrugged. “I hate small talk. Just another name for bullshit.”

“To answer your question, I'm happy if I don't think about it too much. Married happiness is like, I don't know…an autonomic response.”

“What's that mean?” she asked.

“Like your heart beating or your eyes blinking. You don't have to think about it.”

“Or don't
get
to think about it,” she told him. As she said this, he was hit by recognition: this was
their
old furniture, his and Jean's, or something very much like it, castoffs from his in-laws the first year they were married, when being poor felt like fun. He pictured their cramped apartment, the rusted, leaky toilet, the plumbing that would groan and honk in the middle of the night, and how in the dark, wedged together in their bed, he would make Jean laugh by telling her that Harpo Marx was trapped in the wall. He looked around, remembering the low-slung aqua-colored vinyl couch, the coffee table shaped vaguely like an artist's palette, the abstractly designed ceramic ashtrays. In the mock kitchen were a Formica table and chairs, metal cabinets painted bright yellow, and vintage Tupperware displaying a Jell-O mold and green bean casserole. Everything plastic, fake, more so even than it had been then. Preservation, he supposed, equaled history.

“My wife and I used to live here,” he said. “Except we didn't have a bomb shelter.”

Celina wiped her mouth. “You're kind of a quirky guy.”

He shrugged. Jack Benny faded out and a commercial for Texaco came on the screen. “And what about you?” he said.

“I'm not that quirky.”

He took a cracker from her plate and bit it. “But are you married?”

“I live with my boyfriend. He sells cars. He's learning to play the drums.”

Jeremy nodded and looked at his watch. In twenty minutes the mayor's dance would start and Jean would be looking for him. He closed his eyes a moment, weighing the drunkenness inside him.

“Bored with me already, huh?” Celina said. “It's the job, not me. The boredom just clings to me.”

“You're not boring,” he said. “Do you plan to work this job all your life?”

“No,” she said. “I want to be a nurse. Either that or euthanize dogs for a living.”

He looked at her.

“I'm
joking,”
she said. “Except about the nurse part. Lighten up, Jerry.”

“Jeremy,” he said. On the screen, Dr. Joyce Brothers stood locked in an isolation booth on
The $64,000 Question
. Out the window, surrounding their bomb shelter, stretched a lawn of bright green Astroturf.

“I hate all this phony newness of everything,” Jeremy said.

“Hey, this stuff is fifty years old. Older than me by a mile.”

“Old but new,” Jeremy said.

“You want older, like antique?” Celina said. “Jerry wants to go back in time.”

He drank, and she wiped his chin with her finger. “Isn't that what everybody wants?” he said.

“Not me, buddy. Nothing back there I want.”

He grinned. “You're the here and now, huh?”

Celina drank from the champagne and handed it to him, then stood. “Come on,” she told him. “You want old, I'll show you the off-limits stuff.”

She led him out of the Atomic Age, through darkened halls and along back stairways, past a display on extinct mammals, past dugout canoes, mannequin conquistadors and explorers. They entered a door posted AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Inside, Celina skimmed her flashlight along a row of empty glass cases to the back of the room, where an artificial cave had been built against one wall. The outside was unfinished, the concrete and wire mesh and fiberglass exposed; the inside walls were textured and painted to look like limestone. Beneath Jeremy's hand the mouth of the cave felt like the real thing, a solid, permanent opening into the earth. Somewhere above them, he heard the shuffle and murmur of the party, the faint bass notes of Don West's keyboard.

“It's a new exhibit they're building on early man or something,” Celina said. “We aren't supposed to be here. At least,
you're
not.”

It was approaching midnight. “I have to go soon,” Jeremy said, slurring a little. Celina nodded. He undid his tie and stepped into the cave, imagining that the air felt cooler, damp. The cave was at least twenty feet deep, the back wall a black-painted sheet of plywood. He thought of the airplane with its fake controls.

“Where are the department store cave dwellers?” he asked.

“Still on order, I guess. All the mannequins come from either Indonesia or Pittsburgh.”

“The two seedbeds of civilization.” He stepped farther inside. On the floor were three metal plates where the mannequins would be bolted down.

“Kill the light,” he told her. She shrugged and clicked the flashlight, the bulb wire a faint orange glow behind the lens. He heard the jingle of her keys, the squeak of her leather holster as she stepped over the ropes and toward him. Sounds came more fully to him now, the noise of the party upstairs muffled through a heating duct, carried along the currents of filtered air. His eyes pulsed in purple steaks and flashes against the dark. Celina's fingers brushed his wrist. She took hold of his sleeve.

“This is weird,” she said. “I'm glad I'm not blind. I would hate that.” Jeremy heard through the faint
whoosh
of air the sounds of spoons stirring in coffee cups, champagne glasses clinking, Don West playing slow, intermittent chords on his synthesizer and talking to the crowd. There was a short crackle of applause, then a burst of laughing like noise rising out of a radio speaker. The rough wall of the cave came up behind him as he felt his way, and he let himself slide down, sitting on the hard floor.

“Where are you?” Celina said. As his eyes adjusted, she became a faint, blue-white glow. “Can we sit? I'm tired.”

“Here,” he said, taking her hand. He could smell on her a faint odor of garlic mixed with the champagne. As he raised his hand to her, his wristwatch moved like a firefly in the dark cave, flashing 11:53. He pushed it up under his sleeve. The sounds of the party faded in and out, layers of laughing and dancing and music and silence. The air vent blew down on them, cooling their skin. It would be good to have a fire, he thought. Celina sat next to him, their shoulders touching.

“This is
so
cool,” she said. “I can almost see you. Like I can, but only sorta, like a really faint star at night.”

“You smell good,” he told her. “You smell like food.”

She laughed. “You just want everybody to like you, don't you?” she said. He heard her moving around, settling in.

“Same as anyone. That could be the theme of this entire museum. Except the dinosaurs and insects; they don't give a shit.”

“I like you pretty good,” she said. “You gave up a whole party to hang out with me.” She patted his hand, groping a little to find it. Above him he heard different off-key singers trying drunken verses of “All I Want for Christmas,” and he pictured the handheld mike making its way around the room, past his empty seat, Jean sitting, twisting her napkin, watching the stairwell doors. He spoke quickly.

“Ask me some more questions,” he said. “Ask anything.” He wanted to tell her every thought that came into his mind, as if by words he might make her understand who a Jeremy Barseleau is, who he had become in forty-three years.

“Hmmm.” She was silent. “Tell me one time when something really broke your heart. Or someone.” She leaned against him.

The question panicked him a little. He tried to think of Jean in some setting that had moved him deeply, brought him to real sadness. There was the time not long after their marriage, in a walk-in clinic at the hospital, when they were told they could not have children. But he could remember only the long first days of silences and averted glances that came after, how Jean had joked them out of themselves until through time the loss seemed only a mild disappointment, like a picnic rained out. Since then, it had never seemed that they really
needed
children. He ran through other things in his mind, old girlfriends, sad movies he might have seen, deaths of distant relatives, watching his parents as they aged. All of these things seemed remote now, fuzzy around their edges. Then he remembered something, and quickly turned to Celina.

“This will sound silly,” he said.

“Yeah, probably so. Just try me.”

“It's a little thing, really. Once, Jean and I were at this company picnic at Hagenstone Park. The usual, cooking burgers, swimming in the lake, volleyball. I was hot and sat under a tree and watched this other family, not part of our group.” Jeremy shifted his legs. “This is stupid,” he said.

She took his hand and squeezed it. “I don't care. Tell the story.”

“Anyway, they were all doing the usual stuff, too, and the kids were bawling over fruit punch or something, and I saw what must have been an uncle, an overweight guy in tattoos and this mesh shirt and tinted glasses, he's away from everyone, with the family dog, some little mutt on a leash. The guy has the leash looped around his ankle and he's inside this narrow patch of shade trying to work this big corkscrew into the ground so he could tie up the dog.”

Jeremy took a deep breath, feeling words gather in him. In the dim quiet echoed the sound of a synthesized fanfare upstairs, then the deep tones of the mayor's voice. He could feel Jean's waiting. Words spilled out of him.