The Bride of Catastrophe (26 page)

It ended, we were dashed on the shore. “Thank you, thank you!” I said to Lee, laughing. “Oh, but let's not stop yet.”

She was hardly smiling, I realized suddenly. Her expression was ninety percent tension, with some kind of entreaty just beneath.

“You were talking to Reenie,” she said in my ear as a new song, a heavy, joyless pounding, began.

“Well, as much as one can,” I laughed, happily disdainful of my one ally, now that I was with my heart's object. I remembered how Lee had looked at dinner and I wanted to set her fears to rest, to assure her I had no interest in Reenie at all.

“Did she say anything?” Lee asked.

“That she likes Milwaukee better than Chicago,” I said.

Lee laughed, shy and happy. “She's so funny,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. “I've got a terrible crush on her,” she admitted.

“Reenie!” I said, turning reflexively to look at her, so I could figure out her attraction and master it for myself.
What can she see in Reenie?
I thought, and at the same time:
Reenie sees plenty in me.

“Don't stare,”
Lee said, and out of fear of my “staring” pulled me in tight. We waltzed for a moment like a couple of prom dates, in time with some old song in our heads, while the disco music slammed on.

“Oh,” Lee sighed, “it's such a relief to
tell
someone.” She smelled so sweet, of laundry detergent, I wanted to gather her in and bury my face in her shoulder. Reenie was so natural—she said into my ear—like a colt, didn't I think?

“Yes,” I said, thinking furiously that Reenie probably had about the intellect of a colt, and at the same time, that Reenie was at least perceptive enough to recognize
my
charms. I held Lee tight, tight as if I'd had a knife at her back. I already wanted her, but now I had to have her.

Five

I
KNEW
one person who had studied love in its every incarnation, from the time of immense, waddling fertility goddesses to the advent of leather and chains. One person who could have been curator in the museum of love.

“Philippa?”

“Ye-es?” (This spoken with her characteristic wary irritation.)

“It's Beatrice,” I said, trying to sound as if I thought this would please her.

“Beatrice.” Her wariness ticked upward: she thought she'd gotten rid of me.

“I wanted…” I said, but my voice caught in my throat. I wanted to show Philippa I was in love with someone else, so she'd know I didn't need her, wouldn't fear me and run away.

“Now, Beatrice, I thought we'd settled this.”

“I wanted to ask your advice about something,” I crashed in, but I was so hurt at her assuming I was calling to pester her, when I'd been so good, put my tail between my legs and fled the minute she told me to go, hadn't called her all summer even though I was lost and she was my guiding star, that my accursed voice broke and I felt a wave of tears rising.

“Beatrice,
Beatrice Wolfe
,” she said. “Stop this at once!”

“You've already rejected me, Philippa,” I said—drily, because I had a glimpse of some absurdity here that I'd never quite recognized before. “You don't have to repeat yourself. I'm calling for romantic advice—there's a
woman
here that I—well, Philippa, I've met someone wonderful.”

“You've … you
have
? In Hartford?”

It did sound unlikely. “Yes,” I said, smugly. Philippa might need Rome; let me show her what I could make out of the insurance city. “I wish you could meet her, Philippa, she's wonderful. So self-contained, so authoritative.”

“Hmm, authoritative,” she said. “That
does
sound piquant.”

“But Philippa, she's in love with someone else,” I moaned.

“Not insurmountable,” she mused. I heard ice cubes—she was pouring herself a drink. Settling into her chair, ready for the next chapter. Now my eyes really did fill with tears. “She only just met you, you can hardly expect her to drop everything right away. In fact, you wouldn't want it—you need that tension.”

“I do?”

“Yes,” Philippa said, with sharp pleasure. She was an encyclopedia, she only wanted to be opened to the right page. “Of course! You want her to yearn, you want her to suffer the distance between you, so she'll feel the relief when you cross it! If she doesn't suffer, she won't know the strength of her own feeling.”

“How can she have any feeling for me? She just met me last night!”

“You just met her last night, too!”

“But that's different.”

“What's her name, what does she do?”

“Lee Schuyler, she works for the Aetna.”

“Doing what?”

“I don't know. What does anyone who works for an insurance company do? They go there, thousands of them, every morning, and they don't come home until night. They must be doing something.”

“It
is
mysterious,” she conceded. “Where does she live?”

“I don't know.”

“Well,” she sputtered. “Do you have a phone book? Look her up, for God's sake.”

“Willbrook,” I read. “That's way south of here.”

“You've got to go down and take a look at it,” Philippa said. “Research is always the first step. Then you'll know how to proceed.”

“I'll go down tomorrow, if I can find the right bus.”

“And keep me informed!” she said. “Okay. 'Bye.”

Keep me informed.
I was just repeating these words to myself, in triumph, when she called me back.

“Where was she born?” she asked. “What sign is she? What does her father do?”

“I don't know, I don't know!” I said happily. I had Philippa back, what did anything else matter? I had Philippa back and I was going to make a good story out of Lee Schuyler for her.

*   *   *

AND THE
next day, feeling for the first time in months as if I was doing something for a good reason, I left the hospital after my shift and walked straight past my usual bus stop to catch the number twenty-one for Willbrook. Dietary aides did not live in the suburbs; I waited with a couple of nurses, half expecting them to recognize my motive and turn me in to some authority. This fear—that I would overstep one of the boundaries that everyone else held sacred, and be discovered as an impostor, ridiculed and cast aside—would ordinarily have paralyzed me, but now I didn't care. My duty was clear; I had to keep Philippa informed.

Here it was!
QUAIL RUN TOWNHOMES, A PLANNED COMMUNITY
. A bank of steel mailboxes (Schuyler, 32B), a winding road with yellow speedbumps, parking spaces with stenciled numbers. I was at her door (dove gray, with no nameplate, no wreath of dried flowers, just a door). She was on the first floor, though, so I could look in through the slider, heart in throat, to see: white drapes, with a sensible thermal backing, an aspidistra, a round table on which stood a conch shell whose glossy inner surface scrolled open invitingly, and a photograph in a Plexiglas frame.

We'd had an aspidistra once, a gift from my father's sister. They're not very attractive plants, they never flower, but nor do they wither—to own one is to be certain that one thing in your living room is really alive. Ma saw hers as a bourgeois menace that would attract other conventional objects to itself until our world filled up with them and we became like everyone else. She'd tried to drown it but it only bloated, so she tried to parch it, but the water it had absorbed in the drowning attempt held it for months. Finally, she put it in the basement, and a year later it was, miraculously, dead, dry, and brown.

“I was not going to let
that plant
emerge victorious,” she'd said, but I of course had been rooting for it. And here it was, sitting calmly beside a shell picked up on a beach vacation and a picture of someone Lee loved.

She loved someone; she might, possibly, come to love me. Waist-deep in the shrubbery outside her kitchen window, reminding myself to note for Philippa the feminine qualities of the conch, I felt determined that I
would
come to live with Lee and her aspidistra here at Quail Run. Live with her, live like her, my pulse slow, my thoughts calm.

I ran back up the long driveway to the bus stop, skipping over the speed bumps the way I used to skip down the school hallways when I was little. What a relief to be back on the old familiar treadmill, working toward love! The pounding pulse, the desperate inner pleading with a nameless god whose silence would leave me to learn the ways of another heart—the essential subject, the only one important enough to keep my attention. I took the bus back all the way to the Aetna Insurance Company, where Lee must be leaning in a doorway now, having a quiet conversation. Would she walk down the street for lunch? Was there a chance I'd cross her path? The idea of catching her in an act of normality, seeing her buy a pack of cigarettes or admire a dress in a shop window, made my heart jump.

*   *   *

THE SHOP
I found myself standing in front of, called LaLouche, was a glass temple to the goddess of chic, and I imagined Lee going in there, choosing a few exquisite pieces and buying them without my million hesitations (were they too expensive, too pretentious, did they make me look fat, or silly, or like I had no idea at all what I was doing, etc.?). The faceless mannequins in the window leaned back against the air with their endless arms outstretched. One was carrying a stack of cashmere sweaters in muted, nameless colors, another was standing behind a card that read
SALES OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE
.

I imagined that if I went in to apply, the owner might become hysterical and try to chase me out with a broom, as a guest of ours had when a flying squirrel fell down the chimney one time. But whoever got that job would have a view of this intersection—she could watch all day for Lee. I didn't even dream of winning her, just of seeing her go quietly, competently by. Starvation hadn't done it, sweating in the bowels of St. Gerasimus hadn't done it—but now, for the first time since I'd arrived in Hartford, I really,
really
wanted a job.

So I pulled open the high wide door and strode toward the counter, where a languid and infinitely supercilious man in a green silk shirt leaned against the wall and regarded me skeptically.

“You're looking for a job,” he said, as if he were a soothsayer.

“How did you know?”

He laughed very slightly, tore an application form off a pad, and handed it across to me with a black and gold fountain pen ten times the weight of the St. Gerasimus ballpoint in my purse. It had a good effect on my handwriting, so that the application
looked
interesting. By the time I'd filled it in, I heard the proprietor's voice behind me, asking me if I could start that afternoon. He'd used the time to walk around and examine me from every angle, and he'd decided I would do.

He himself looked like a maharaja, or maybe more of a goatherd—someone from an exotic storybook. His silk shirt flowed over broad shoulders, and his jeans were pressed, his boots had brass at the toes. He had stubble instead of hair, like he'd shaved his head and then thought better.

“But,” I said, “how can you tell I'd be good?”

“Instinct,” he said, with amazing arrogance, and reading my name off the top line: “Instinct, Beatrice Wolfe.” That was how he'd gotten so far in this business, he said, that was how he could know that, in spite of my apparent mousiness (he paused to let this remark sink in), I had potential.

“Stetson Tortola,” he said.

“What?”

“That's my name,” he said drily, stepping back, his eyes ticking over me as if he was registering my various capacities on some internal seismograph, then giving a quick nod. Yes, he was sure of it: he could
do
something with me. “Does it surprise you?”

“No, no—why would it surprise me?” I was always careful not to seem surprised—otherwise someone might guess I didn't know anything.

“Ever considered dreadlocks?” he asked.

I had not.

“Well, you ought to,” he said, holding up a picture of Bob Marley that he apparently kept behind the counter for this purpose. “Dreadlocks would be just the thing. Sometimes a change of image is necessary.”

I peered into the mirror, disappointed.

“I don't know.” I wondered if he'd ever considered wearing deerskin, or an old T-shirt, because his face didn't go with his clothing—it was a wary, curious face, not the mask of narcissism I knew from Sweetriver and would have expected from a man in silk.

His eyes flicked over me and then around the store, looking for imperfections. He saw a sweater out of place and stepped around me to get to it as if I were a boulder in the road.

“What weekly salary would you need?” he asked.

Salary, my God. The word was barely in my vocabulary. Ma had made a salary, in her teaching days, but she took it in cash; she liked peeling off twenties to dazzle the pharmacist or the veterinarian with her insouciance, show how little she cared for it all. Money was the antithesis of love; so we didn't associate with the kind of people who made salaries.

But then of course, we didn't associate with anyone. “I'm not really sure,” I said. Then I remembered what my father had said. “Would a hundred a week be okay?”

He darted a glance at me and I wondered if I'd asked too much.

“Would ninety be better?”

“No, no,” he said, “I'm sure I can manage a hundred.

“This a gift from Mom?” he asked then, plucking at my blouse. “Quite a look. Get something off the rack over there,” he said. “I mean, assuming you can stay today.”

Something in his voice mocked the idea that I might have anywhere else to go. He'd seen through me, knew more about me than I'd told him somehow. For him, fashion was art, and retail sales its attendant philosophy—and by this standard, I was an imbecile. LaLouche clothes did not stoop to flattery—no, they demanded that their wearers live up to their rigorous, if mercurial, standards. If you couldn't manage to look smug in a hacked-off sheath and furry leggings, pigment-dyed in two complementary shades of mustard, then you weren't the LaLouche type and would have to creep across town and get yourself something polyester at Sears.