Calamity and Other Stories (7 page)

Now that he has allowed himself to think this, Sergei cannot stand it. He must apologize to her. Not for his own behavior, which he knows will not change, and not for having taken the scrap of paper, which she’ll never know, but for whatever it is that has made her so sullen, whatever caused her to sit on the plastic chair that day and cry.

Or perhaps it was Sergei, just Sergei and nothing else, that made her cry. After all, he disgusts her.

He wishes he had not taken the money, knows that that, too, must disgust her. There must be something he can do about it, prove that he is not so disgusting. He thinks of what he can tell her, that in fact he is donating the money to the town Police Department, or to the Committee for the Elderly. Anything to stop this. How many times have they yelled cruel things back and forth? He is tired of hurting, his back and his feelings. All that incivility, what a waste of energy. That’s it: he will say that the money is going to the Hazardous Waste Board.

He takes a breath and says, “About that money.”

The tall girl says, “You hit the jackpot there, didn’t you?” This must suddenly strike her as funny. Like a rainbow or some other naturally occurring wonder, apparently shocking the girl as much as Sergei, a surprised smile breaks across her face.

“Hit the jackpot,” Sergei repeats. “That’s good. I guess I did. Something good. For once in my life.”

“Or maybe twice in a life,” says the girl, tilting her head slightly. “I’d like to think it’s at least twice.”

The Man from Allston Electric

Rhea couldn’t help but feel sorry for the man from Allston Electric. He had fiddled all afternoon at an electrical outlet in her drafty living room only to emerge rumpled and disappointed, muttering, “Can’t do it.” He found Rhea in the kitchen, where the fluorescent light turned him gray under the eyes. “Nope. Wire’s dead.” Though he said this definitively, it was clear from his tense jaw that what the man wanted more than anything at that moment was to be able to revive the wire and impress Rhea.

Sitting at the nicked kitchen table, which she’d turned into a computer desk for the day, Rhea felt a small rush of pleasure. She was grateful for any admission of failure. She was tired of everyone always saying, Of course it can be done, Rhea, of course your love life can be renewed, your career saved. All around her the facts screamed: No! Yet even her closest friends at first remained hopeful after learning that Gregory had moved out. Though they saw for themselves that his dented Civic was no longer accruing tickets at the curb outside, and that Rhea no longer wore the little green-beaded bracelet he’d given her, they passed along books with titles like
When Love Isn’t Enough
and spelled out names of therapists who had saved various relationships—or at least prolonged them for months, sometimes years. Rhea’s mother, meanwhile, insisted that Rhea would find someone better, as if Gregory were a vacuum cleaner that had stopped working.

Rhea never allowed herself to say to her, What if
nothing
gets better? She woke up every morning at seven o’clock in the pale yellow bedroom she had once shared with Gregory, and wished for good news. It wasn’t a conscious wish, more like a vague hope that was there when she awoke and gradually diminished as the day waned. Mornings seemed to hold possibilities, the way the light shone in through the little window across from the bed, tattooing slant rectangles on the wall where Gregory’s desk had been. His chess magazines, Rhea realized months after he moved out, still sat in a little pile in the corner. One day Rhea would bring them downstairs to the recycling bin; she knew this. But she also knew that she could not do it yet, though the magazine pile was gauzy with dust.

The living room, on the other hand, no longer showed any sign of having been inhabited by anyone other than Rhea. Her fiberboard bookshelves and filing cabinets cluttered the side of the room ruled by her large oak desk. Atop one of the shelves, tucked in an oversized manila envelope, was the wad of dissertation—on apostrophe in the Petrarchan sonnet—that she had completed a year earlier. Though it had won her much praise in her department, no one seemed to want to publish it. The library had a typed copy that no one would ever read. Rhea had received numerous direct-mail offers to have her work bound in book form, with an engraved leather cover. The mailings kept coming, like those twelve-CDs-for-a-dollar music clubs.

Each day Rhea sat in front of her hand-me-down computer writing job applications, query letters, and proposals for postdoctoral fellowships, all the while listening to the classic rock station on the radio. When advertisements came on, she grimaced at the mottoes of the world:
Be all that you can be! Just
do it!

For this reason it was a relief to see the man from Allston Electric standing in her kitchen doorway, his worker’s hands shoved shamefully into the pockets of acid-washed jeans, explaining that he couldn’t do it, that no one could, that the power line was broken somewhere behind the wall, irreparable. “Problem with these prewar buildings,” he went on. “I can see they haven’t kept this one up too good.”

Rhea nodded and took a bite from a ripe pear. She was constantly hungry. She had, for the past year, been snacking nearly every hour (bananas, peanuts, Swiss chocolates on sale that week) and felt heavy with extra pounds, though she hadn’t actually gained weight. In fact she was skinny, as she always had been. It had crossed her mind at one point that perhaps she had a worm of some sort, but she knew deep down that this wasn’t so, and that it would, like everything else in life, pass. She looked at the man, of whom she had been only vaguely aware since telling him, two hours earlier, the whole little story, complete with sound effects, about the lamp she had turned on, and the hissing noise, and how she used that outlet all the time, since it was the only other one where she could plug in her computer, which had a cord with three prongs, and on which she was revising her doctoral dissertation.

The man from Allston Electric had looked straight into her eyes as he listened, frowning at appropriate moments. He then lowered his chin to his chest and said gravely, “We can’t have this interrupting your career.”

He had approached the outlet with vigilance. But now he looked let down—let down like no repairman Rhea had ever seen. The old building was in poor shape; for the consequent affordability Gregory had selected it, and for this reason Rhea was able to continue renting the apartment alone now that Gregory was gone. The landlord hadn’t visited the place in years, and appliances were often keeling over in melodramatic ways. One day the oven spontaneously caught fire; a sudden flame like a blow-torch scorched a loaf of zucchini bread Rhea was baking. When the smoke subsided, Rhea saw that an entire section of the oven was nothing but ash. In the “Description” column of the receipt the next day, a repairman scrawled “exploding oven” as if it were a common occurrence.

Always men came to fix these problems, and looked pleased when Rhea—with her dark hair and wide-set, if slightly uneven, eyes—answered the door. The man from Allston Electric hadn’t even swaggered into the apartment the way the men usually did, winking and wielding tools. He had knocked lightly on the door, twice, with a slight pause in between. When Rhea opened the door, he was holding a battered black toolbox, perfectly still, with his feet apart in a way that made him look like someone had told him not to move. He said, “Allston Electric,” and followed Rhea to the living room. There he had worked conscientiously, quietly. But it hadn’t paid off; the line was still dead.

“I came with a Band-Aid, and what you need is open-heart surgery, you see what I’m saying?” he told her now. “Replacing the dead wire, that’ll mean knocking out the whole wall.”

“But I need to be able to use that outlet.” Pear juice was dribbling down her wrist, and Rhea felt, if only for a moment, utterly discomposed.

“The best I can do for now is tie up the dead wire and connect the existing line to the busted outlet. I just gotta call my boss now, though. To let him know that it’s surgery, not a Band-Aid. Mind if I use your phone? He always has me check in.”

The man from Allston Electric held the phone to his ear a few moments before someone picked up. Rhea watched him speak into the receiver. He was slight and freckled, in his late twenties like her, Rhea guessed. As he spoke to his boss, the muscles in his jaw tensed. “Swear to God,” he was saying, “I checked everything. Line’s dead, man, I swear.”

There was something almost handsome about him, Rhea decided, but in a way that more than anything proved the great distance between “almost” and “handsome.” A perfectly nice nose, but too big for the fine-boned face. Rhea watched the man’s lips move and noted that although he had a nicely dimpled jaw, his mouth was small in relation. She felt inexplicably saddened, watching this face with its various pleasant features. They were features that must have once seemed to hold much promise, but that he had somehow never grown into. Probably, Rhea concluded, people had told him when he was a child that he was good-looking, and now he was spending the rest of his life realizing that it wasn’t necessarily true.

“He wants to see for himself,” he told Rhea when he put down the receiver. “He’s coming here—Mike, my boss. He wants to make sure.” The man bit at the corner of his lip. “It’s like he doesn’t believe me.”

“I’m sure you did everything right,” Rhea said, though she had no reason to think that, really. To demonstrate her reasoning, she added, “You were in there a very long time.”

“Yeah, thanks,” the man said. “I don’t know why Mike doesn’t trust me. He gets that way sometimes. But I don’t say anything about it. Mike, he’s my fiancée’s brother. I don’t want to cause any problems in the family, see.”

“When are you getting married?”

“Two months. We’ve been together two years. Lucky for me. My mother was really starting to harp on me, and then Laura, she was, too, talking about her biological clock, you know.”

Rhea nodded. She had recently turned twenty-eight and was certain that she wouldn’t fall in love with anyone in time to create a baby.

“Well, yeah, so there was some pressure to, you know, tie the knot.”

Rhea was going to tie the knot with Gregory, and then one night three months before the wedding, when they were driving home from a late movie, Gregory pulled his car over just off Storrow Drive, put on the parking brake, and said in a frightened voice, “I can’t do this.” Rhea thought she would probably wonder for the rest of her life if throughout the entire movie he had been worrying about what he was going to say to her.

It had now been over a year since Gregory had left, over a year since Rhea had felt a man’s bare arms around her. Over a year since she had felt the sureness of sitting next to Gregory at a party or in a restaurant and knowing that afterward, without awkwardness, they would go home and get into the big, messy bed and make love. In the morning she used to wake up and, always, find him already awake, composing ideal mates on a miniature magnetic chessboard. Even if she didn’t move, just opened her eyes, he would always notice the moment she awoke, reach over and clumsily brush his palm along the side of her head.

Now there were just men. Rhea had gone on dates with a number of them in the past ten months, at first with something close to enthusiasm, and later with something more like dread. The last date she had agreed to was weeks ago, a friend from an internship back in grad school. He took her to a South End restaurant, and when they finished eating, Rhea checked the time and said with surprise, “It’s later than I thought.”

“What time is it?” the man had asked, and then reached over and turned Rhea’s wrist toward him to glance at her watch. Afterward, in her mind, Rhea saw this action over and over again, this perfectly nice young man reaching over before she could realize it, taking her wrist in his hand, and each time she disliked him even more, until she knew that she never wanted to see him again.

There was another man, too, whose phone calls Rhea wasn’t returning. He was a good seven years younger and ended his telephone messages by saying, “Later.” He wrote little e-mails titled “Howdie!” and “Chow!”

The one she liked was the one it could never work out with. He was the former boyfriend of her best childhood friend, so that even now that he was single there was no chance of a future with him.

Rhea hadn’t had sex in over a year. It struck her as phenomenal that she had survived, that people all around her were somehow surviving alone in single beds. Not so much without sex; what surprised Rhea was the fact that she had gone for over a year without feeling her hand in another warm hand, or her arm about another’s waist, had not leaned over to quickly kiss Gregory on the cheek, just a momentary, automatic, almost involuntary action. That unwanted hand on her wrist at the restaurant was nothing like Gregory’s easy, relaxed hand on her thigh, or her neck, or her shoulder, which had known it had a right to be there.

Rhea hadn’t felt anything like that in more than a year. There were moments when such thoughts were enough to stop her mid-motion. She would find herself staring at the kitchen cabinet, reaching up for a bottle of vitamins, and then realize that her arm was sore: how long had she been standing there like that?

The man from Allston Electric was leaning on the Formica counter. “Mike said he’d come here as soon as he could, but I don’t know how soon. I’m really sorry about this. Man, I hope he doesn’t find some way to fix it that I didn’t see.”

“What if he does?” Rhea asked. “Can he punish you?” She didn’t mean for this to sound menacing, but it came out that way. The man from Allston Electric stood up straight and raised his eyebrows.

“Well, he can’t fire me, since he’s Laura’s brother. What he’ll do is, he’ll tell Laura, and then Laura’ll say, when I get home tonight, ‘Mikey says you screwed up big-time at work today,’ and then she’ll look at me like this and wait for me to explain myself. Like she wants me to prove that I’m worth marrying. And I’ll have to say something smart back. To reassure her.”

Never had a repairman been so forthcoming, Rhea reflected. But the man continued.

“One time Mike clipped the wrong wire, and I caught it. Sort of saved the day. And I told Laura, and she looked so relieved, like it was all she wanted to hear. Like she’d had doubts about me, you know?”

“My ex was like that,” Rhea said, surprising herself. “I think he needed constant proof that he’d made the right decision in falling in love with me. I remember one day I complained about a professor of mine. I thought that Gregory would comfort me. He just gave me this look, as if maybe the whole time he’d been wrong to think that I was intelligent.”

“I know that look,” said the man from Allston Electric.

“I could tell what he was thinking,” Rhea continued. “That maybe I was just some mediocre student. And the thing is, that made
me
start to wonder if maybe I really
was
mediocre. And that made me start to doubt Gregory himself: because why was he with me, if I was mediocre?” Rhea remembered what had happened next. How, if only momentarily, their entire relationship had seemed to her nothing more than a union of two unworthy souls, a mistake that could be snuffed out with the tip of a finger. But Rhea had never acknowledged to Gregory this pattern of thought, and so they had never spoken about it.

She supposed that Gregory had had no such doubts about Jeannine Piolat. He had met her while in Paris for a conference on Contemporary Phenomenology. This he told Rhea that same night after the movie, as the Honda deposited exhaust at the side of the road. No, Jeannine was not a philosopher or an academic. She was a dancer in an avant-garde troupe whose performance he just happened to have seen. Rhea imagined a long-haired woman with a translucent scarf around her neck.