The Bride of Catastrophe (6 page)

Three

“A
N AUTODIDACT
,” Philippa said sharply. “Everyone is, really.” Sadness, lostness, were not qualities favored by the Italians, and trailing one's fingers in a current … well, it was
not
the act of a conqueror. She did me the kindness of ignoring my pathos so I could step out of it and push it aside. In my pale face with its eager, uncertain expression, she saw something she'd long been waiting for—a tabula rasa, on which the volumes of Sayresian discovery ought to be inscribed.

“Excellent, though,” she said, “excellent that you cast a cold eye already at such a young age.”

“Excuse me?” Casting a cold eye did not come under “excellent” at home.

“That you can look closely, you're not blinded by feeling.”

I glanced across the desk at her, furtively—I wanted to see the face that valued my estranged curiosity.

She saw I was moved, and waved it away. “Pray continue, Beatrice,” she said. “I mean, we have Clytemnaestra with her axe, we have—”

“It
was
,” I said happily, “it was Greek! Straight out of Aeschylus!”

“Euripides,” she corrected me. “Bloodier.” She blinked. “Beatrice, why didn't you have any furniture?”

“Oh, you know…”

“No,” she said. “I don't.”

“Me neither, really,” I said. “I mean, we had to sell it.”

The people who bought it had come from the continent of reality: they'd sold their dairy farm to be developed as a golf resort, and now they were buying things—our furniture, and a small plane. They were young and vital and their six kids went to school with me. The father talked about his pilot lessons while his wife smiled a beautiful red-lipsticked smile and shook her head over men and their toys. I stared at them with what I knew was naked hunger. I'd have liked to hypnotize them, so I could examine them and find out what made them the way they were. They laughed very heartily with my father and then they got up from the couch and their men came in and took it away.

A few months later, the man took his wife up on his solo flight, and descending for a better look at their old place, he lost control, crashed the plane, and they were both killed. It seemed as if they'd died of their prosperity. My parents couldn't get over the magnitude of this folly—they gathered us and held us all tight there in the empty living room, their heads bowed over us as if we'd narrowly escaped such a crash ourselves.

Success wasn't going to get its hooks into us. Pop's last venture, a radio station whose signal barely reached as far as the Poconos, had gone belly-up, but he had a new idea: he was going into ping-pong ball manufacturing. The sport was wildly popular, after Nixon's opening to China, and the balls could be bought ready-made—in huge, featherlight boxes, from Japan. We poured them into big machines like concrete mixers, tumbled them in pumice until the seams were smoothed, then dried and sorted them, and shrink-wrapped them on cards printed
THEODORE WOLFE SPORTING GOODS, INC.
ValuSpot was going to carry them in all of its 235 East Coast stores. At dinner Pop would take out the Sotheby Parke Bernet catalog of Distinctive Homes and tell each of us to choose our favorite estate.

“Sweetie, I can't afford that kind of thing!” he exclaimed, peering at me as if in fear for my sanity, when he caught me assuming I'd go off to college.

He'd said it would only be another year before we had to choose between the saltwater farm in Maine, and the miniature castle in Bermuda. I had to go away from there, I had to. I'd die if I had to live in a miniature castle with him.

“I don't suppose you remember,” Ma said, “that your father and I lost substantial income when we had to give up the farm.” She was constitutionally unable to love me and my father at once—now
I
was the murderer and the whole story of the car crash had fallen out of her mind. I tried to remind her, but she said not to be ridiculous, it happened years ago, for heaven's sake, everyone makes a mistake now and then. And rabbits were an awful hazard: she'd seen three dead in the road while driving home from work that day.

That's right, work: Had I thought she wasn't up to it? Well, she'd show me, and anyone else who dared to question her. Her zeal had trumped her timidity, and all the fears I'd lived to protect her from had evaporated one day. She was teaching remedial English at my high school suddenly, but I pretended not to notice.

After all,
I
was in advanced placement. From the moment my freshman English teacher had explained to us that the reason we were reading “irrelevant” books (the Bible;
The Odyssey
) was that all people need to have some common ground, I'd read anything that might count as a classic. I was going to exorcise the family metaphors (rabbits, Nazis, and all), and learn the language of the civilized world. Nothing pleased me so much as lifting some huge famous book down from a high shelf, thinking how I was going to absorb it and become like its characters. I was too young to understand Anna Karenina's plight, or Russia's, but I pushed on chapter by chapter, thinking “So,
that's
how love progresses,” and stumbled out of my room in the evenings vaguely expecting to see the peasants coming up the dirt road with the hay. I was diligently preparing myself, for life in the nineteenth century.

One morning I came downstairs in my nightgown, beat an egg, put a match to the front burner, and a flame as if from a blowtorch whooshed up into my face.

“I don't know why,” I sobbed to Sylvie, “but whenever something bursts into flames I just go crazy!”

She commiserated so sweetly, holding an icepack where my eyebrow had been. I'd always been anxious, for some reason—some people are just born that way. Sylvie lifted the stove hood to reveal a mouse nest thick as a pillow; building it, they'd run back and forth over the gas line, leaving tiny tracks that finally wore it through.

Oh, to live beyond reach of spontaneous combustion! My mother was pulling fistfuls of mouse-nest fluff out of the stove, hips moving to “Stoned Soul Picnic” on the radio, when I decided to get away for a few days, take the train to New York to visit the Poet-in-the-Schools who had turned me on to Coleridge that winter. “Red, yellow, honey, sassafras, and moonshine,” Ma sang, with all the promise of the times in her voice: yes, the age of Aquarius was come, it was a paradise like childhood was meant to be, with bright colors and sweet smells and something warm in the oven—only this time, the grownups got to play. She bid me a distracted farewell.

I was fourteen—Charles (my poet) called it the Age of Consciousness. He'd talked about poetry as if it were a religion, but a plain, hardworking religion in which transcendence would be attained through the daily effort at seeing deeply and transmuting that vision into words. His hair was thick and unwashed; his face pale and puffy, with dark circles under the eyes. Every one of my hungers was engaged: he'd show me the marvels he had discovered in sorrow; he'd let me bathe him. He recognized my avidity (my eyes were like an infant's hands—sticky from grasping at things to suck). “You with the red sweater and the … cheeks, can you give me an example?”

The other teachers were too polite to mention my blushing, or the inner state it revealed, so I assumed that Charles, as a poet, was more deeply perceptive than they were, and I blushed worse, watched closer, listened more carefully …

*   *   *

“
EDUCATION IS
naturally an erotic process,” Philippa said.

“It is?” I blinked and looked across the desk at her. In my trance, I'd almost forgotten who I was talking to.

“Of course!” she said, eyebrows slashed in amazement at my ignorance. Everything about her face—thin straight nose, high cheekbones, lips set in amusement or disapproval, and especially those sharp eyebrows—was definite, and her expressions always seemed to telegraph her thoughts precisely.

“What about schoolmarms, and glasses, and everything?”

“Have you ever seen
Mäedchen in Uniform
? The movie about a girl's school?”

I shook my head.

“I think you'd like it.” She laughed a little, rueful and tender, as if she knew all too well what I'd like. “They're all locked up in this school together, smouldering…”

I took a quick look at her and rushed back to the subject of Charles's place on East Third Street. It was nearly without furniture, just like home. There was a waterbed, a park bench to be used as a sofa, an immense red and purple painting that seemed to pulse when we were high, and the mimeograph machine on which Charles printed
Walleye
, his journal. The apartment was infested with rats and cockroaches instead of mice and chickens, and its oracle was not a woman but a three-dimensional astrological calendar on which the ephemera were meticulously charted in relation to Charles's own personal cosmology. His boyfriend, Barry, a set designer for an avant-garde theater company, was in and out, carrying the necessary objects for the current production, which centered on a few moments in the life of a geisha, during which she was masturbating in a rain barrel.

It was not, in short, “a farm.” But, a cocoon—we drifted home from the theater in the middle of the night, amid the stragglers hanging around the Fillmore in hopes of a last glimpse of Janis or Jimi, got high and fell asleep curled together on the waterbed, in our clothes, with the record player set to repeat so Van Morrison was still singing “Caravan” when we stretched in the morning light (the apartment had once been someone's wide-windowed parlor), and tumbled out onto Second Avenue for a hot bialy from Ratner's. I have never lived anyplace more benign. I knew I ought to go home, but days passed and I felt too cozy. Then somehow I'd spent my return money on a Burmese llama coat, and safe in the llama's stench, my own hair as wild and matted as its fur, my glasses looking Ono-ish rather than owlish, settled in for another happy East Village evening.

“You're further gone than I am!” Charles had just said, with a mad laugh that had engendered a madder one in me (despite the fact that he'd had five mushrooms and I'd only nibbled the edge of one), when the phone rang. Charles's face went white as if slapped when he answered it, and he handed it to me.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” my mother asked me, in a voice straight out of a Bosch painting (Charles liked to dazzle me, and the day before, we'd gotten high in the women's room at the Met so as to try a new perspective).

“Ma,” I said. “I—”

“You what? You couldn't care less about me? There's no need to explain that, it's perfectly obvious. Do you know how hard it was to get this number?”

How had she managed? I tried to remember if I'd told her Charles's name.

“How dare you just walk out like that? What were you thinking?”

“I … I told you I was going,” I protested, feebly.

“You did not tell me you weren't coming back!”

“I was coming back … just…”

Didn't want to. But Charles gave me the money for the ticket, and in the station he kissed my forehead and said, “Stay well, my conscious one.”

A true compliment, and from a Poet-in-the-Schools. When I looked out to wave to him from the train, I saw he was panhandling. He flashed a bill to show me the train fare was no problem, and I fell into a sleep full of magical dreams, as if I'd just left an enchanted forest such as childhood is said to be.

*   *   *

THE COAT
frightened people; seeing me in it, they knew I didn't mind being stared at, so they couldn't guess what I might do. I was of course the same good girl I'd always been, just trying to be what my mother wanted—flamboyant, beyond the pale. A layered look—hairy coat, timid girl, and then, so deep only a Poet-in-the-Schools could see it: a dragon of ambition, who would singe whatever she breathed on! No wonder my cheeks were blazing. I walked the halls of Wononscopomuc Regional High dogged by the vice principal, who had sniffed out the secret drug references in popular music—the scent of llama meant danger to him.

These were the times into which I, strange fiddlehead, unfurled: I wore the coat to the weekly peace vigil on our village green. Ma didn't like it: true, a nation was burning, but then she herself was liable to burst into flame any minute and would I have kept vigil for her? Stricken, frozen, she gave me that mad look and I kept a light, friendly tone and got the hell out, into a cold, clear spring day, the kind that brings everyone out for a demonstration. The flower children arrived in their VWs, the democratic ladies came down the hill in their Volvos, we were all together, we had a clear purpose for once. One of my friends from school brought a thermos of milk and a hash brownie in tin foil, and there we stood on the threshold of life, giggling ever louder. “Please, this is a
silent
vigil,” the minister's wife kept saying.

“Have you ever heard the word
love
?” I asked, with a delicious combination of insolence and sanctimony, “because that's what this is
supposed to be
about.”

If there was one thing more fun than baiting the vice principal, it was making a liberal chase its righteous little tail!

Repeating this story for Philippa, I looked up, expecting to see her stern finger pointing toward the door, but she was smiling, with something like glee.

“There
is
that,” she said, catching my eye, and there was an air of conspiracy between us suddenly—we'd have liked to build a little cherry bomb together and set it off under some pious ideal. Amazing, to have a meeting of mischief like this, with a teacher.

After all, education
is
naturally an erotic process—from the time of Miss McGinty, I had studied in order to bring myself close enough to the teacher that I could catch a hint of her perfume. My high school English teacher, a nice man in Sansabelt slacks, had read Faulkner's Nobel speech to our class with great feeling, so that I credited him with those sonorous ideals and had set out to consume him. He wanted to go over my midterm paper and help me refine my understanding of verisimilitude, but I rejected the chair he offered me and knelt on the floor at his feet. I could barely keep myself from running my hands up his thighs. He'd inch his chair back, then I'd shuffle, on my knees, a little closer, then the chair would do its little hop, until he was up against the bookcase and decided to lose the verisimilitude and let my peculiar notion of reality stand.