The Bride of Catastrophe (9 page)

“Beatrice, what did I suggest, about getting some more—form-fitting—clothes? And didn't you promise me you were going to look into some kind of pomade or something? Because the hair is—” She paused to search for a suitable adjective, but it was too late.

“Philippa…” I said, sitting down hard and covering my face with my hands, which did not prevent a tear from running down my chin and plopping onto her notes. She'd been working on her book, figuring out how all the little pieces of life fit into her overarching theory,
her
key to all mythologies. One of her exclamation points swelled and blurred.

“Now. Beatrice.
Now
…” she said, looking very badly alarmed, as if she was afraid my tears were going to wash away all her efforts, and speaking to me like the unruly student I was. “Beatrice, we
must
not, we must
not
 … we … What if soldiers cried on the battlefield? Where would we be? Enslaved! And certainly if
soldiers
can keep from crying on a battlefield,
you
can manage…”

“Philippa, I love him!” I said, smearing the words together with sloppy feeling. “I need him, I'm lost without him.”

She'd had a moment to collect her thoughts, now she could interrupt with confidence. “You
what
? You're “
lost without him
”? Beatrice, I find that very hard to believe. You weren't lost without him two months ago, why should you be lost without him now? Listen, males spill their seed and die. That's their purpose on earth. It's essential that a man spread his genetic material as widely as possible. Of course you received his nightmares by telepathy! Women are born to nurture, and nurturance depends on empathy, which, at its highest intensity, becomes telepathy. But you can't expect that in return, not from a man anyway. It's not what they're made for.”

She hurried on, piling up intellectual sandbags against the flood. After all, she said, a man is aware that once there's a child, he'll be cast aside. Did I know, for instance, that female bees sting the males and stuff them alive into the honeycomb to protect the stores of food for their young? “Stuffing behavior” it was called—how loyal would
I
be to a gender that was willing to use me as a living bottle stopper? Of course I was distraught—quite understandable, but …

“Which one is it?” she asked. “The one you pointed out across the cafeteria?”

I nodded, miserably. It hurt me to think of Sid, his long bones that I'd felt were part of me, his air of living at a great distance from ordinary things.

“That one looked like a physics major!” she said.

“He
is
a physics major,” I admitted, and after a minute, “What do physics majors look like?”

She drew back a little, twinkling all over, ready to press her point home. “Physics majors, my dear, are psychically extraterrestrial. They mean to impose a grand plan on the universe.” (She gestured to show that I
was
the universe.) “They imagine they can
think
their way out of orbit!” She threw her head back, laughing, then reined herself in, pursed her lips, and added, in precise, campy diction: “However, they are wrong.”

“He was my celestial twin!” I insisted, but it was my last sob of the day.

“I have never
heard
anything so preposterous!” she said, making a show of sputtering. “Your
celestial twin
? He is your
polar opposite. My God
, he belongs on Easter Island. No, no, I don't say he wasn't worth your while, it will serve you very well, in the end, to have had an experience with a type like that. You want to try
all
types.…” she turned to size me up again, and nodded briskly—yes, she had been right the first time, she was always right.

“Yes,” she said, laughing a little nervously, “yes, I'm sure you'll try all types. I don't see any problem there.”

And suddenly I was as curious as heartbroken; the process of my sophistication was begun.

Five

T
HE FINANCIAL
aid director laid my father's tax return out on his desk, to show me an “adjusted gross income” in the minus six figures. A man who had lost two hundred thousand dollars in a year had once possessed that same amount. Did I understand?

I did not. My father only borrowed that money, I insisted, it had never really been his. But, this forbearing man asked, setting a box of Kleenex discreetly before me on the desk, could I see that this showed my father had spent two hundred thousand dollars in the last year?

At the sight of the Kleenex I, who always tried to do as expected, began to cry.

“Has there been trouble? An illness maybe … or…?” Was there some other reason my father couldn't have spared a bit for my tuition? He looked at me with bafflement and concern. He was a ruddy WASP in corduroy trousers, whose handshake and ringing voice had come down to him through generations of wealth and confidence—such blessings can cramp a man's imagination. I went over the possible answers: Teddy had climbed up the ladder-back rocking chair, and when it started to tip, had clung to the television set, which came over on top of him. He needed
twenty-two
stitches. (Why does one boast of one's sutures? But one does.) The white pine that had towered beside the house, which Pop had been meaning to cut down, had come down of its own accord during an ice storm, smashing out the whole bedroom window. Days later Ma found a perfect bird's nest on her dresser top among the scarves. And the demand for ping-pong balls was not what they had expected, but Pop insisted sales would “bounce back.”

That was the important thing, after all—to meet the vicissitudes with a smile. The sob that shook me arose from depths unfathomable. We were poor, poor, I insisted—my mother cooked on a single burner because mice had taken over the rest of the stove, Sylvie did without orthodonture though her teeth were crowded into her face so that, in just the moment of perfect delight when a woman is most beautiful, she seemed to turn into a vampire. After all, it wasn't as if I were an only child; the others needed things—
shoes
, for instance. A struggling ping-pong ball company absorbs cash like a sponge, everyone knew that. My God, if losing two hundred thousand dollars in a year didn't impoverish a family, what on earth would? Did he really think it was so important that I have the opportunity to explicate Sexton's “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” that I should take the bread out of children's mouths?

He sighed, he checked the clock, he began again.

*   *   *

“
IT
IS,
in fact, a lot more sensible for you to study ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator' than for you to give up and go home,” Philippa said.

“We can't afford this. They need me there.”

“Water safety!” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Water safety, ever studied it? What do you do when someone is drowning? Or, no, what would you do if you saw a number of people, all drowning together in the middle of a lake?”

“Sit on the bank reading ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator'?”

“Well, better that than jumping in to join them!” she said. “They are drowning in American anti-intellectualism!”

“God, I thought it was debt.”

“Same, same!” she said. “You could get a student loan. You should go forward, Beatrice.

“You should not go home. If you want to understand the disintegration of the WASP tradition, you'd do better to read Robert Lowell.”

She was my thunderbolt; I loved to watch her teaching, her eyes darting as if thoughts were pinging back and forth in her head like badminton birdies, while she lit each cigarette from the last until there were too many birdies, and too many cigarettes, in play, and she blinked and shook the head to clear it, and rapped her pointer on the blackboard and asked, “Miss Wolfe,
may
we assume your full attention is focused on the text?”

It was, it was! “Okay,” I said, and rushed to the library to get
Life Studies
, and to the bank to get a loan.

*   *   *

I'D STARTED
sleeping in Sid's bed, since he was always with someone else. It was strange comfort, the smell of his shampoo on the pillow, the warmth of the down quilt he'd brought from home. But it was the best I could do. There, at 3:11 one morning, I was awakened by a full, soft kiss. I
knew
, I had always believed that a kiss like this would come, and that when it came, I'd be ready to give myself over completely, courageously. It was almost exactly what I'd imagined, this gentle responsiveness, a will to shape one mouth to the other again and again. I reached up tenderly, taking the dear head in my hands, eyes closed, lips parted to inhale the other, whose lips were cool and whose woolen coat smelled of the night air. Night air? I shook myself awake and pulled away, and the kisser stood bolt upright in alarm.

“Who are you?!” I asked.

“Who are
you
?” she replied.

It was Cindy Crowe, the girl from the bathtub, the one who was so free of the scourge of jealousy—I suppose Sid was spending the night with the sensual type. Cindy stalked out of the room and I heard her door slam shut—I pictured her taking Sid by the neck and smashing sense into him—in, of course, an utterly nonjudgmental and jealousy-free way. I turned over and pulled up the blanket. Philippa was going to
love this
story.

Six

“F
IRST, YOU
must withdraw from that harem,” she said, speaking the word
harem
with a relish that suggested she was as jealous of Sid's possibilities as she was disapproving. She'd shown us a slide of an Ingres harem scene to illustrate the romantic sensibility—the women turning their faces and their full, round breasts toward the painter without the slightest modesty, nor curiosity. They were so complete in their beauty they needed nothing else, while I ached all over.

“You don't have to prepare a legal brief, just explain that it is your unfashionable misfortune to have love and sex all tangled together, apologize, and let them go their enlightened way.”

“Once I start talking to him, I'll accidentally throw myself weeping on the ground, grab his ankles, and beg him for love,” I explained.

She started to laugh, because she saw me starting to cry. “No, you will not, because we will have rehearsed it and you will have practiced
not
throwing yourself on the ground!”

“I can't, Philippa,” I said brokenly. “I love him.”

A smile flickered on her face and I heard the drama in my voice, a strand I'd pulled out of the movies—a false strand.

“You will
act
as if you are above this sort of longing,” she decreed sharply. “There's no need to actually
feel
that way. When you feel as if you're at his mercy you will—silently—repeat this mantra: ‘I
want
you, and I
will
have you.' Just remember that, and keep cool. Do you think you can do that?”

I can do anything, I thought suddenly. “I want you, and I
will
have you,” I said.

“That's exactly right, try it again.”

“I want you, and I
will
have you,” we said, together, with the kind of conviction that does not allow failure.

“You know, you could dance to that,” I said. “Like, a tango.”

I started to sing it, and she said, “Yes, Beatrice, I think you've got it!”

“The rain, in Spain, stays mainly on the plain…” I sang, really expecting her to sing along, but she remembered her professorial stature, opened the door, and I spun out into the hallway, breathing chalk dust and pipe tobacco and wondering, for the first time in weeks, what was for dinner that night.

*   *   *

DOTSY WAS
moussing up her blonde helmet at the mirror. “It looks so
normal
,” she said with furious frustration. “No matter what I do, I look like a Long Island housewife,” she said, moving as if to tear the hair, and its ordinariness with it, out of her head.

“I mean, I
want
to be normal,” she explained, with a sweet sigh. “Like
you
, you know.” I could hear her condescension toward me, though it was very, very slight, and leftover, really, from the time when she had thought it ignominious that I'd never skied Gstaad. By now it was Gstaad that looked ignominious—the real action was at the edge of life, Avenue A or someplace. It was the same as I used to feel crossing the state line on the school bus—as if I'd gone over some edge into a more squalid—more authentic—world. Who could blame poor Dotsy for wanting to go over that edge? Or for thinking she could transport herself with a salon product? She grew up on Long Island, after all.

“I want to, but I'm not, I never will be,” she said, with such breathy hopelessness that a man would have caught her in his arms to reassure her. I, however, knew too well that a determination on unconventionality could leave a person doomed to dine forever on puffball.

“I got into Arbileth's poetry section,” she announced, very much as Percy Shelley may have announced he was sailing off to war.

“Congratulations, that's wonderful!”

“But, my hair.”

“Come on, let's go get dinner.”

“I'm not hungry,” she said. She had passed beyond such things.

*   *   *

THANKS TO
Philippa,
I
was ravenous. I walked into the glare of the cafeteria as if I were walking out on a stage, tray in hand, dazzled by the choices—chicken parmesan or vegetarian nut loaf, broccoli or carrots, peach cobbler or chocolate pudding. During my first weeks at school, I had been really overwhelmed by the bounty of the cafeteria, with its huge bowl of yogurt and all the different fruits and honeys and cereals. What would my mother have said? I wanted some of everything and my hunger embarrassed me so that I could barely peep out a request for “gravy” on my mashed potatoes. Tonight, I was a little different, because Philippa and I had nearly sung “The rain in Spain” together. Sid was eating with the sensual type, and I went out of my way to pass their table so as to smile with benign disinterest as if I were a completely poised and self-contained person and they had never feasted on my entrails while I looked helplessly on.