The Bride of Catastrophe (29 page)

That was the illusion Stetson used to tempt his customers: style, he suggested, could save you from the pain of mortal life. Passing between the racks, where pants and skirts hung each two inches from the last, an anxiety crept over you: Were you allowed to touch the clothes, or only to buy them? Approaching the triptych mirror that stood like an altar at the back of the store, you realized you
had
to buy something, or be doomed to remain a pouchy, stringy mess of flesh, a wretched thing that ought to have been aborted and would scuttle forever beneath the gaze of the divine.

I was to fix every rack the instant a patron walked away from it. If a sweater was disarranged, I was to take the pile to the counter and refold each one around a Plexiglas form. But Stetson tore his hair: I left the unitards stuffed into their cubbies, the one-of-a-kind ascots tumbling over each other on their pegs. I felt uncomfortable following people around and straightening up behind them, as if by trying on clothes in a clothing store they'd done something wrong. Perfection tempts vandalism: LaLouche was the physical manifestation of Stetson's pose, which, like all poses, infuriated me. It reminded me of my parents, pretending to be successful adults while they neglected all the small, true things and their lives eroded beneath them. Wherever I saw pride now, my lip curled and I considered what must be festering under it.

So I refused to give in to Stetson's aesthetic (his word, and if I heard it one more time I was going to dump one of the spare, cool Japanese flower arrangements over his head). This in itself was strange, since I was usually just looking for opportunities to give in (even by taking this job, I was continuing to reshape myself into the stylish woman Philippa had hoped to make of me). But there was a light burning in Stetson somewhere: when he looked, he really wanted to see, and this struck a corresponding spark in me. I kept pulling and tugging at the pose, hoping for a glimpse of what lay beneath.

As he did, in turn, to me.

“I'm glad for you, of course,” he said, “I'd love to be happy enough to hum all the time, but I'm not, and exuberance is
not
the LaLouche mien.” He marked a few pages in
W
magazine, so I could study the posture (disdainful, aloof) and facial expression (vacant, bored unto hostility) proper to haute couture.

“Sophistication, Beatrice, is about being above things like humming,” he explained, seeing my eyes stray over toward FrouFrou, the shop across the street, where a rainbow of feather boas was blowing in the doorway. The salesgirl stood amidst them chewing gum, wearing a bustle.

“Beatrice?” He snapped his fingers—satirizing himself, and I smiled. “Beatrice, a customer?”

Yes, another one of the depressed women who looked to Stetson's clothes for salvation. When I asked if I could help them, I really meant it: I was always hoping they'd ask me what they ought to do with their lives.

“Oh,” I said to this woman, who was watching herself, and the infinite chorus line of identical selves, each wearing a jaunty but inexplicably buttonless alpaca coat, in the triple mirror, “Do you live in a warm climate?”

No, she said, she lived up in Colchester.

“Oh, well, that's a nice, sheltered spot,” I said, having recognized my error and trying to back away. “I'm sure the winters in Colchester are very mild.”

“Excuse me?” Colchester was about twenty miles north of Hartford.

“I mean,” I said, “It's so hilly there. It's the winds, the winds on the plain, that you have to watch out for. In a climate like Colchester's, you could wear that right through November. And then by March, by March you'd be wearing it again, in a temperate place like Colchester. And it's so nice to have a dressy coat like that—not that it's
so
formal, just a little much for everyday, though now I think about it, not really enough for evening. And it can get cold in the evening.”

I wanted to shut up, really I did. But I was coming to know too much about shopping. Nobody needed that coat, or this catsuit, no one would fall ill for the lack of one of the beaten gold necklaces in the locked case. You'd never guess it, though, from their faces—the men hunched and monosyllabic, grateful to be allowed just to buy something instead of having to speak their feelings. And the women, trying to believe in the gift, wrapping themselves in the heavy fabrics, turning at the mirror, joyful in the beauty the clothes seemed to give them without realizing it was they who were giving their beauty to the clothes. No sooner had I swiped the credit card than I would see the face grow uncertain:
Was
this that supernatural raiment, bound to confer grace upon its wearer? Or just another stretch of rayon under which the shoulders of its cowering owner, so confident in the mirror only a minute ago, would soon slump again?

I had to keep talking. There was very little I could accomplish on this earth, except maybe to save this woman from buying that coat. Our eyes met in the mirror. Hers glittered with irritation—just what was I trying to tell her? She ran her hand along the sleeve—it was so soft, and I guessed, looking at her, that she had not known much softness. She was not the glamorous customer Stetson imagined for himself (such a person did not exist in Hartford), she was heavy and in the middle of her disappointed face her lipsticked mouth glowed a brilliant cherry red—she'd come out this morning to try to feel pretty and hopeful—why did I want to wreck it?

“I love it,” she said with defiance, and twirled like a little girl, a smile lighting her face for a minute while the unsecured lapels flew out. “It's so luxurious, but it's not too dressy, you could wear it with jeans, you could wear it with a suit,” she piped—almost exactly the copy from the
W
ad—and she pressed her face into it, inhaling the jasmine scent Stetson steamed into everything so that it would still smell of LaLouche as long as it was new and full of possibility.

“Have you seen the hats and mufflers?” I asked. She was determined, her Visa was platinum, and once she crossed that line and handed it over, she'd be good for another fifty at least. “Hand-knit from the wool of free-range llamas, all vegetable dye, and very warm—they'd fill up that open spot in the coat.”

She took one of each and grabbed a cashmere lap robe as she passed the display. Total: $675, and it wasn't yet noon.

“Which is marvelous, Beatrice,” Stetson said. “It is, but it
does not
fold the shirts. I mean, what is this, an origami elephant? Is this the trunk flapping here?”

It was a sleeve. Sloppy folding, secret reading, casually reminding a customer that his magnificent purchase must never be exposed to sunlight or soapy water—with these amulets I tried to ward off mercantile despair, the sense that the whole world might be as cool, precise, and empty as LaLouche.

“
No reality
, Beatrice,” Stetson had said when he found the radio on. “Shoppers torn between alpaca and vicuña should not have to listen to the news from Zaire.”

“I
like
reality,” I'd countered, though this, like most sentences spoken on earth, was wish presented as fact. The news frightened me to death and I just hummed all the louder when it came on. I couldn't listen, couldn't look at the world outside, for fear of what I'd see. Still, though, I
dreamed
of being the kind of person who read the newspaper, who dared to find out things—I aspired to it, badly as it frightened me.

He'd smiled, ruefully—he was getting to know me a little, he sensed the layers of meaning under the things I said; he liked knowing those layers were there. “Here's a little reality for you, dear,” he said, opening
The Courant
to show me a man who'd strangled his girlfriend's seven-year-old daughter when he discovered she'd been unfaithful.

“I'll take vicuña,” I sang.

“That's my girl,” he said. I rearranged my posture to look more like one of the mannequins, then started laughing and gave it up, so he had to laugh too.

“That's my boy.” His eyes flicked wide at the condescension before he remembered I was repeating what he'd just said to me.

“One thing I do know about is the vise grip of love,” I told him.

“I believe you,” he said, with surprise. I didn't usually speak with so much authority. He turned his wide brown eyes on me with warm curiosity, so I was moved to grab a bunch of sweaters and fold.

*   *   *

“
SO, BEATRICE,
have the waves rolled over the shore, as it were?”

“I suppose you could say that,” I said.

“And you haven't called to report?”

One didn't admit defeat to Philippa, only triumph. I decided to try and distract her.

“Too busy,” I said. “I've got a new job. Selling
very chic
clothes.”

Her silence seemed to have a dry quality.

“It's true,” I piped, aware she'd find it bizarre. “At the most fashionable store in Hartford.”

The silence became somewhat dryer, as if I'd said “the warmest beach in the arctic.” But this did make it seem more likely that a congenitally styleless person like me might be an acceptable salesgirl there.

“Well. Congratulations,” she stumbled, but caught herself. “I expect you'll make an excellent salesperson. You're so—natural.” “Natural” was
not
her highest term of praise. Lee, I thought, would value my artlessness properly; she herself had such simplicity. And I gave my memory of the night with her another little tweak toward the good, and missed her even more. Who'd have guessed that by flouting my parents, I'd find a way to flout Philippa too?

*   *   *

“
YOU DIDN'T
call me,” Lee said.

The woman's not supposed to do the calling; seeing my nature, my mother had drummed this into me early. “I thought you didn't want me to,” I mumbled. I'd just gotten home from LaLouche and I was a different person than I'd been when I last saw her, four whole days ago. Hearing her voice, I felt ashamed all over again of the way I'd forced myself on her.

“I did—want you to,” she said, or this is what I thought she said, but she was barely audible and this gave me some courage.

“I thought you said I overstepped—”

“Should I bring a pizza over for dinner? Would you like that?” she asked.

“Lee, I … I'm so sorry about last night. It was wrong, so wrong and I never will again if only you'll give us the chance we deserve. I hardly know you, but there's something between us that's … transcendent, I guess you could say. I feel so much when I look in your eyes, I know there's such a wonderful possibility there. Please forgive me, please give me another chance. You have such grace and intelligence, there's a deep understanding in you, it would just be terrible if I never got to know you.”

I felt all this just then with such fervent intensity that I didn't care whether or not it was true. Love is the most important, most elusive thing there is. You only had to take one look at my parents to see this. If they'd been murdered, I'd have become a detective. If they'd been paupers, I'd be a banker. But they were victims of love, so this set my course: through vigilant scholarship, innate talent, and plain hard work, I would become an expert on that subject. Then I could bring it down from the mountains, or up from the canyons, or wherever—see there was enough for everyone, that no one was left stumbling parched through a desert again. I'd be the woman who found the cure.

Hearing Lee's step on the stairway, I opened the door to a face I had to struggle to recognize, after all the permutations it had gone through in my mind. She kept her eyes down, afraid of what she'd see in me, but she needn't have worried. We were women; our weakness was attachment, not isolation.

“You're sopping,” I said. It was raining and her trenchcoat with umbrella to match was streaming. “Let me get a towel.” I dried her heavy dark hair as I'd used to see Ma do Teddy's when he was just out of the bath, and kissed the top of her head for good measure. Then I wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, lit a candle in a beer bottle, opened the pizza box, lifted a piece out for her with the cheese trailing; here we were together, safe. The rain drummed on the roof, the maple tree scratched at the window. From this moment on we were lovers, without question. My physical presence was enough to drive her dreams of Renée away.

“I will think of myself as an archaeologist,” I told her, “and of you as the City of Rome.”

“Don't be silly,” she said shyly. “There's nothing to discover.”

“What
can
you mean?” I asked. “We're just at the beginning, We have whole nights' worth, years' worth of talk coming. I mean, what's your favorite supper? What's your idea of God? What weirdo things can't you bear, and what do you love for no reason at all? Are you superstitious? How do you suppose you came to be a lesbian? Where do you see yourself in five years?” I saw myself flowing beside her and into her like streams becoming a river, all the currents of feeling and philosophy rushing together.

“What is this, a job interview?” She meant to be saucy but her voice turned fearful. Her eyes were not brown as I'd remembered but a pale milky blue like a kitten's; they weakly appealed to me to stop the interrogation.

“It's the beginning of a lifelong conversation,” I said. “What do you dream about? What are you most curious to know?”

“It's the kind of stuff
kids
talk about, in college,” she said, squirming. “Spirituality and stuff.”

“What do you want for yourself?” I interrupted. “What do you long for, more than anything?”

She shrugged. Finally, in a voice so small it was almost inaudible, she said, “A girlfriend, I guess.” Then, looking down at the floor, she said: “That was my first time, with a woman, I mean.”