The Bride of Catastrophe (39 page)

“You don't understand,” she said.

The gun was an appeal to her true spirit, I knew that. There were a lot of laws she wanted to break, and Larry had sensed that, found her an instrument. He was only in remedial English; he did not know that a gun that appears in the beginning is bound to go off by the end.

“Don't let Teddy see it, okay?” I asked.

“I won't,” she said, and smiled over me with the maternal tenderness of the ages. Her dear daughter, who understood so little. She put the pistol on top of a pile of towels she'd just folded, took it upstairs, and came down looking ten years younger than she had that morning, and brushing away a tear. “
Love
is the essential thing,” she said. “And of that, we have plenty,
plenty
. Larry's coming over,” she said, the way she used to say “all clear” before she let us out of the linen closet.

I felt all my good sense twisting to splinters—she loved him, he made her happy. Against that, what argument could I make? Larry was the age she'd been when she met my father, and he came from
her
side of the tracks. She saw in him everything she'd given up when she married. Well, she was going back to the beginning, she was going to get it right this time.

Part Three

One

I
DROVE
Lee's car up to Bradley Airport, feeling the excitement associated with such places. Real people, who steer their stately and impressive lives along the wide boulevards of authenticity, often have to meet their comrades at airports. Here was a real person now, coming out through the automatic doors with his briefcase, checking his watch (he had to be somewhere, they needed his expertise).

“Hi!” I said, as one real person to another, and he blinked in confusion and looked away.

I sipped coffee at the coffee bar, stirred by the sound of the jet engines but acting preoccupied, as if this was just part of my ordinary day. And here came my very real darling, looking more dedicatedly prosaic than before, as if she'd just had a refresher course in keeping down to earth. But when she saw me, she broke into a huge, delighted smile.

“You came!” she said.

“I told you I'd be here.”

“I know. I just never—oh, I don't know,” she said. “Hi.” She gave me our look, the one that hinted at the amazing kisses, way beyond the ordinary heterosexual kisses, we'd give each other if only we were allowed.

“Home,” she said, when we got there, turning her key in the lock and pushing her suitcase through the door with her foot. She reached behind the tree to turn up the thermostat, then turned to me in the stale cold and said, “Really home, now you're here,” and kissed me, clinging against me, and I folded her in, to protect her, the way you do with women.

Then, shy: “I got you something.”

“I got you something too!” I said, as if it was an enormous, telling coincidence that we'd both bought each other Christmas presents. Well, to me, it
was
. Sid gave me one gift in our three years together: a string of coral beads. Seeing them, I'd known he meant them to represent all the things he couldn't say … and that he knew he'd lost me. I wanted to cry every time I put them on.

Lee had set a small box on the coffee table, wrapped in handmade rag paper and tied with raffia, as suggested in a
Courant
feature on gift wrapping a few weeks ago.

“Mine first!” I said. Stetson had given me a deal on a silk shirt she'd admired.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, holding it up and then turning away from me with reflexive modesty to slip it over her head. “Oh, I didn't mean for you to get me anything.” She was sincere, I realized. She honestly did not require a gift from me. I repeated her sentence—
I didn't mean for you to get me anything
—in my mind, to catch her inflection, so I could use it sometime. And fixed myself on the tiny box with a quick prayer that I'd say the right thing when I saw it, since it was going to be a ring.

“Oh, Lee, diamonds!” My eyes sparkled, my voice was hushed and joyful, both. “Are they
real?
” I wouldn't have asked except I knew they must be, and that she should have the pleasure of affirming it.

“Of course,” she said softly.

“Oh, Lee. Lee, I love you so.”

“It's like in a book,” she said. “A happy ending.”

“No,” I said. “A beginning.”

Lee smiled patiently and I felt the foolishness of my youth and idealism. No one seemed to feel the sacred mystery of love as I did … but everyone believed in sex. And Vitamin C.

“Come into bed with me, my rose hip,” I said. “I wanna touch your nipples.” I could say forbidden things to her, and affect her terribly. I was taking her where she'd been told she mustn't go. I dusted a finger lightly where her nipple touched the silk shirt, and she pulled away, smiling. She was always trying to domesticate sex with those smiles. I understood. I was used to leaving the knife edge of wanting to the man, but without it, we wouldn't continue, so I caught her around the waist and cupped her breast and dared her to refuse me. She was not one to accept a dare.

The ring was from the nicest shop in Hartford. It was handmade, of white gold with the diamond chips inset, and once it was on my finger, I never took it off. It was ugly, unnatural to me, but I didn't let myself dwell on it. Lee had picked it out and I was going to love it, just the way I loved her.

*   *   *

“
AND WHAT,
may we ask, is this new accountrement?” Stetson asked, with his old edge of satire. We were having our lunch, at the Chanticleer, where some dizzying length of time ago I'd seen a man and woman talking about she-crab soup while I leaned, faint from heat and hunger, in the shadow of Wings to Fly Productions. Stet had insisted on bringing me there, to remind me those times were really past. So here we were, embarking on a bowl of lobster bisque together, like a pair of beggar children who'd got into the palace banquet by a hidden door. I wouldn't have had the courage to walk in if he hadn't been with me, but our friendship made all things possible. We felt smart and beautiful and good, entitled to love and happiness, when we were together.

“Which fork do you use?” he asked, in a stage whisper.

“It's
soup
,” I whispered back, and we giggled tipsily. I remembered those mornings, him with his squeegee, making certain no flyspeck marred the windows while I refolded the sweaters, the aimless talk that would lead to some surprise. Every time we found something in common it was like a glint of gold. He'd gone camping in the park near our house when he was a Boy Scout. Amazing, that he'd been just down the road and I hadn't know. We counted back—it was the same year Forsythia died, so I got to tell him that story, and he shook his head, saying he'd have been the same as I was, heartsick
and
fascinated. It felt like he'd pulled out a splinter that had been festering in me for years.

“Soup. Thanks, Princess,” he said now.

“It's nothing, Your Majesty.” We smiled at each other a beat too long; he rushed to the rescue, pointing to the ring again.

“I got it for Christmas,” I admitted, seeing he was still looking at the ring. “You must be doing really well, to bring me here.”

I meant to distract him, and it worked. He smiled in spite of himself and looked around the place like he owned it. His pride gave a little tug at my heart—it was so earthly, transitory, masculine, and so well deserved. He might seem to be lost in the vapor of chic (to be perfectly chic would mean being hard and still as a mannequin, and above all earthly pain, not unlike the feeling of being perfectly high)—but he'd earned the right to eat here, day by sober day.

“It's going a little better,” he said. “Now about this ring, Beatrice. Is there something you want to tell me?”

“No,” I said, with a strangely flirtatious lilt. “No, there isn't.”

“This came from Sandalwood, didn't it?” he said, taking my hand, which looked like a water lily cupped in his. “Not one of their better efforts, I'd have to say.”

“You're jealous!” I teased, and to my amazement he blushed.

“No, no,” he insisted, “of course not.”

“I mean, you can't bear to see anyone wearing something that doesn't come from LaLouche.”

“Oh, oh, I see,” he said, with an embarrassment that engulfed us both.

I wanted to push away from the table and run out the door. But Stetson summoned himself—his very beautiful, thoughtful, open, searching self, over which the cynical manner sat like a porkpie hat on a marble Apollo—and said, with his dark eyes wide and earnest: “I meant to say that this shows a commitment, right? Congratulations. I'm about to undertake a commitment myself, so it's kind of cool we're doing it together.”

“What's that?” I said.

“We're getting married,” he said, in about the same tone he'd used to confess his drinking.

I forced a generous and proud smile right over my face, instantly. “Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” he said. He sounded relieved. I made the smallest questioning look, wondering if it was polite to ask whether this meant he'd fallen in love, finally, and he must have guessed this. “Well, it's the natural next step, I mean, we've been seeing each other a year, she wants kids, you know—”

Not … “We can't live without each other”; not “We want to spend all our lives trying to do our best together.” Just—“It's the next step.”

Fortunately the waiter was sliding a glazed breast of squab onto my plate.

“She really loves me,” he said, as if this was surprising.

“Smart girl,” I said. He was smiling with such a gentle humor. I looked around the restaurant, which was supposed to be the best in town and was filled at that hour with people who felt themselves lifted above the ordinary for a moment, just because they were eating there, at cherry-wood tables with thick linen cloths, under an avant-garde chandelier of blasted steel—even the pigeons here were squab. But Stetson and I, we continued to be our ratty, hopeless, laughing selves.

He reached for the butter and I caught sight of the edge of something under his cuff.

“Is that a tattoo?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I try to keep my sleeves down.”

“Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose?”

“Purposes change,” he said. Shaking his head—“There was a time when I'd do anything to get near a needle.” He laughed. “I
still
look forward to my flu shot every year.”

“You know,” I said, shaking my head, “I just do not get it.”

“No,” he said, “people don't—the gratification.” A look of deep, secret need passed over his face, a look I recognized. Even in our deepest insanities we seemed to be kin.

“It is
so
good to talk to you,” he said. “I think it's because you're
different
, so you understand…”

*   *   *

“
WHERE WERE
you?” Lee asked, when I met her in the Aetna parking lot. She looked so upset that I automatically lied.

“Looking for a job. Where would I be?”

“You didn't tell me.”

“Well … you didn't tell me you were going to work today. Why should you? I know you're going to work.”

“The next time you're going to be out of the house for the afternoon, you call me,” she said. “I was worried sick. I couldn't imagine what had happened.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, reaching over to squeeze her hand. “I didn't want to bother you at work, that's all.”

I'd intended to tell her Stetson had taken me to lunch, but now I couldn't. Which was silly, because she'd have been pleased that I was safe and taken care of. It wasn't like I'd had lunch with Reenie or another woman. But instinct kept me quiet and I rooted around for another subject.

“Do you usually get a flu shot?” I asked her.

*   *   *

THE NEXT
day I did penance by keeping right at home where she wanted me. The phone woke me at noon and I answered briskly for fear the caller would guess the truth—that I was a very small, inconsequential being at the helm of a very large and unwieldy personality, who had to cling to her mattress so as to be ready for the inevitable smashup.

It was the City of Hartford Personnel Office, and they were offering me a job.

“We're bound by law to call the highest scorers first,” the man said hopelessly. That test! I'd forgotten all about it. “Though I'm sure you've already found something…”

“No, no,” I said happily, “nothing at all.”

Just what he'd suspected; even the highest scorer hadn't managed to find a job in nine months. Poor little Hartford, whose civic grandiosity would never be fulfilled—it was destined to sit there on its bend in the river, nervously reassuring itself of its own importance while on the highways that swirled over, around, and through it, streams of traffic carried all the vital, intelligent people back and forth from Boston to New York. Hartford had to rely on people like me.

“When do I start?” I asked, hoisting myself up on the pillow. A wardrobe was blowing up in my imagination, a closetful of pale, flowery dresses like an avenue of cherry trees in May, dresses in which I would look so lovely, perfectly in bloom, smiling like some girl in a pantyhose ad—a smile without complications.

“Did you want to know what the position is?” the dry voice asked.

“Oh, yes, of course!”

“It is a Library Technician III position, at the Oxford Branch of the Public Library,” he said, slipping into his vernacular. “City benefits, and after a period of probation you will be eligible for yearly raises, performance-based of course. You can come down to City Hall to fill out the paperwork any time, and you can start as early as tomorrow.”