The Last Girls (31 page)

“Why don't you just turn it off?” asks Catherine, sweet reason personified.

But he never does. He can't. Instead he clicks over to the weather, which calms him down immediately. He loves the music on the Weather Channel, for one thing. All that light jazz. Or maybe you call it fusion. It's so upbeat, that bouncy vibraphone. He loves the pleasant weather girls in their nice little suits or sometimes a dress and jacket, he loves Dr. Stan Goodman, the lightning expert from NASA. He loves to know the temperature in Dallas, in Richmond and Seattle and Rome. He loves the Doppler radar system and the lake effect snows. His love for the thirty-six-hour forecast is exceeded only by his love for the extended forecast which covers five to seven days, now
that's
what Russell calls a forecast! It's encouraging to think that anything can be predicted five to seven days ahead, it gives him hope for the future, strength to carry on. The Weather Channel is what Russell has instead of prayer.

“It's going up to eighty today,” he might call out to Catherine as she goes down the hall with a load of towels. Or, “Light rain predicted for afternoon.”

“It's
already raining,
” Catherine called back once over her shoulder. “Why don't you just look out the window instead of at that damn television all the time?”

But Russell merely shook his head, clicking. She doesn't understand. And actually, Russell knows that the weather is random:
weather is the basis, in fact, for chaos theory. Edward Lorenz's work at MIT in the early 1960s provided a lot of insights into systems with nonlinear properties, such as the weather. Lorenz showed that as one parameter changes, others alter in a way that is not in direct proportion to this change. This means that the weather will
never
precisely repeat past patterns, and deep down, Russell knows this. The weather cannot be predicted.

Yet the “butterfly effect” seems true as well: the theory that one tiny disturbance in the air can create a major weather occurrence elsewhere at a later time, because of the interconnectedness of the atmosphere. Makes sense to Russell. He's lost a couple of women and several clients this way, through tiny insignificant indiscretions that have come back against all odds to haunt him. And a lot of good things have happened to him, too, possibly as a result of some kind little thing he did for somebody else, years ago, if he did any. He thinks he did. He hopes he did. Like a little deposit in the karma bank, creating a positive butterfly effect. Makes more sense than believing in some big God guy up in the sky zapping people left and right just whenever He feels like it, whether they deserve it or not. If such a God does exist, then He's a shit, and Russell doesn't want to have anything to do with Him. But hell, if you think about this stuff too much, you'll go crazy. Better to kick back, go with the flow, let that sweet jazz wash over you along with the five-day forecast …

“Good afternoon.” Russell nods to the purser as he crosses the gangplank onto the
Belle.
He takes the steps two at a time—Cabin Deck, Texas Deck, Promenade Deck. Then he heads for the stern, where the only TV he can remember seeing on this whole boat is located at the open-air Calliope Bar. Sure enough, there it is, tuned to baseball. Shit. Some old geezer in seersucker pants and a red bow tie sits slumped over the bar, talking to the bartender, a muscular young man who's snapping towels and moving things around industriously despite the off hour and the heat. “Yes sir!” he says to Russell, startling him.

“Jack Black on the rocks,” Russell tells him. He climbs onto a stool. “Hello there,” he says to the old guy, clearly a drunk, beside him.

“Afternoon,” the old guy says. His nose is red and bulbous, spread out on his face like some kind of growth, or maybe it
is
a growth. Russell can't stand to look at it.

“How about switching over to the Weather Channel?” Russell asks the bartender, who nods and says, “Just a minute,” snapping his towel in the air. Actually these are not ideal conditions for watching TV, you have to lean way back in your chair which is really a stool with a back on it, the kind of chair that could tip right over, exactly the kind of stupid accident that could happen if you're not careful. The world is full of these accidents just waiting to happen. And then where would you be? Miles from a hospital, out here in the middle of this muddy river—but then Russell remembers the forty ENT doctors from Indianapolis, and calms down. He sips his drink.

“You watching the game?” he asks the old guy who says, “Hell no,” as if the whole idea is ridiculous. He's got some kind of stuff in his hair, it's all matted down on one side. Russell is not even going to imagine what that could be. And yet the old guy looks familiar. A former client? Hell, could be anybody. “Hey, buddy,” he says to him, “where you from?”

“What the hell business is it of yours?” The old guy draws himself up with some dignity to stare at Russell. His eyes are filmed, rheumy, yellow. Might be age, might even have hepatitis and not know it. Hepatitis B.

“Aw, don't pay any attention to Mr. Stone.” The bartender flashes a healthy white grin at Russell. “He's been drinking ever since we left Memphis. He doesn't mean any harm. The only thing worries me is, I don't think he's eating much of anything either. I went and got him a hot dog for lunch today but he only ate two bites, that's all I've ever seen him eat. His wife comes by and checks on him every now and then.”

“He's got a wife? On this boat?”

“Yes sir. She's playing bridge on the Texas Deck, most likely. That's what she does all day, while he's drinking.” The bartender finally points the TV gun at the TV and clicks the channels, Russell would give anything to do it himself. “We can't pick up as many channels out here, even with our satellite dish,” the bartender says. “Let's see—”

But here it is, and here's the weather girl, Susan Abernathy, one of Russell's favorites, in a bright green suit, predicting rain. She has wound her hair up into a severe knot on top of her head, as befits a meteorologist. Sometimes Russell wonders if any of these girls are really meteorologists. Once when he was in law school in Chapel Hill, he met a weather girl in a bar who confessed that she didn't know a damn thing about the weather, all she did was turn on the Greensboro station and then repeat whatever
that
weather girl had said one hour earlier. Weather moves west to east, she had informed him, something Russell hadn't known back then, in the prime of his youth. He thinks he fucked her, too, but maybe not.

“I said,
how's that,
sir?” the bartender says in his ear.

“Oh. Fine,” Russell says. “Thanks. And I'll just have another one of these, while you're at it.” The bartender's sparkling white dress shirt is too tight across his chest. Russell used to be young once, too, and strong. Strong as an ox. He could walk all day long which he did on his first honeymoon, with Iphigenia in Scotland, striding across the moors. He married her because she was named Iphigenia as much as anything, though he loved her wild curly golden hair and her thick glasses and shyness and her devotion to literature. Russell in those days was devoted to the idea of literature while being actually more drawn to pussy, a shame and a failing. He used to quote Yeats to Iphigenia: “Only God, my dear/Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.” Finally he was too much for her, wore her out. Now she is a poet, he saw one of her books the other day in the bookstore:
The Moons of Jupiter
.

Actually Iphigenia reminded him of his mother, another shy retiring woman he loved to shock, he just couldn't help himself. His very birth had been a surprise to his parents, quiet people long told they could never have children. They taught at a communal school in New Hampshire where they raised their own food, organically. As a child, Russell mixed the granola. In adolescence he came to hate this life, the same way he hated his pasty-face father's calm voice saying “Son” which was what he always called him, never “Russell.” He hated his mother's blue-veined hands and her long thin braids and all the quivering hope in her face.

At fourteen Russell rebelled and went to public school where he played football and turned into a jock. His parents sat in the bleachers at every game but did not cheer. Russell had it on good authority that his mother covered her eyes when he carried the ball. Russell wrecked two cars and got a girl pregnant while still in high school, things his father took care of without getting too upset either, it must be said. In fact, he seemed almost proud of this huge bad boy they had raised up to be so different from themselves. When Russell went off to college, it was an immense relief to them all. After college Russell taught at a prep school for a couple of years to avoid the draft (here he met Iphigenia), and then entered law school when the marriage ended.

Sometimes we fall into situations we are made for, as was the case with Russell and the law. He could twist it, he could turn it, he could dodge to the side, he could feint left and go right, he could surprise everybody with a power surge straight up the middle, just as he had carried the ball in high school. He graduated sixth in his class, edited the law review, then clerked for a famous judge. He joined a prestigious firm in Washington, right on Connecticut Avenue. But here his cock got in the way, as it so often has since.

Women have been Russell's undoing all along. At the law firm, he fell hopelessly in love with one of the secretaries, Shannon Steele, she
of the enormous tits and the big happy grin. Before he knew what hit him, they were doing it in the coatroom, and he was taking her on sandy, passionate weekend trips to the Eastern Shore. When she left her husband (Dusty, an electrician) to marry him, Russell was the happiest of men. He loved Shannon beyond imagining, his parents never could see why. At least Iphigenia had made sense to them. But Shannon had not gone to college. She did not read; she did not care a thing about politics. She did not see the big picture. But she proved to be a genius of the everyday, a connoisseur of the moment, of the right tie and the best coffee and the matching fabric. She loved things, and Russell was well on his way to providing her with a lot of them. Best of all, she was naturally content, glad to be pregnant, glad to stay home with the children. Lauren was an easy baby, followed by Russ, who was not. Looking back on it all from this great distance, Russell remembers these as the happiest days of his life, Shannon and the babies at home, himself shooting up the ladder in his firm.

He was amazed when, twelve years into the marriage, Shannon proclaimed her boredom, then her depression. She took a job as office manager for a group of accountants. Then she fell in love with one of them, exactly as she had fallen in love with Russell, and left Russell for him. Once this happened, it seemed inevitable to Russell, who felt he should have seen it coming a mile away. He guessed it served him right. He entered a hazy and prolonged period of joint custody and serial women, one of whom—Diane—actually married him, over his not-so-strenuous objections. The truth is, he had a moment of weakness. He was exhausted. He wanted to be taken care of, and Diane seemed the girl for the job. She believed she could change him, shut him up and shape him up, and turn him back into a model middle-class husband, which was foolish, of course. He had been through things. He took a dark view. Plus, nobody can ever change anybody else, something Russell's spidery little mother remarked shortly before her death, which was soon followed by Russell's
father's death, both of them dying quickly and neatly and causing him virtually no trouble at all, leaving him a pile of Coca-Cola stock he had never known about.

Too late, too late, Russell mourned them. Now he was alone in the world, nobody to stand between him and the abyss. Nobody, nothing. Russell teetered on the edge of a black hole larger than the Grand Canyon, filled with despair. Diane left him. “I have loved you, Russell,” she said from the door, “but you bring me down.” Russell had heard this before. Diane came and went with such speed that she scarcely affected happy-go-lucky Lauren or Russ, a go-getter all the way. They stayed in Chevy Chase with their mother to finish high school when Russell moved to Tuscaloosa to join his old mentor, Judge Hancock. He had been there through several years and several unsuitable women when he met Catherine, the love of his life.

Sometimes Russell can't believe he met her so late, mourning the years they have already lost. Other times he can't believe he met her at all, wanting only to be with her constantly. He'll do anything she wants to do, such as come on this stupid boat trip, which is turning out to be kind of a kick, actually, though Catherine has turned weird on him and it's not really Russell's cup of tea anyway. Russell likes ruins, which turn him on, as opposed to dolled-up plantation houses, which do not. He likes picnics. Last summer he took Catherine to Tuscany where they found enough ruins and picnics to satisfy even him, though all those cobblestones in the hill towns hurt his feet and he was having trouble with his digestion then, too. Reflux, which can lead to esophageal cancer.

But he remembers one magic afternoon—it was almost exactly a year ago—when they picnicked in the vast sunny ruin of the unfinished cathedral San Galgano, how the light looked falling on the thick wild grass through the high round rose window; and the low, musical thrumming sound of the pigeons, oddly familiar, like a sound you think you've heard before somewhere, only you can't remember
where. At that moment Russell would have given anything to be twenty-eight again, to come here at dusk with a girl and a blanket and a bottle of wine, to be here when the light goes and the stars come out and you could look up at them through all these arches … San Galgano was real.

This is not real, these idiot white women in the columned mansions or these idiot black women selling pralines and boiled peanuts down by the boat landings, calling out “Please missah, please missah, please missah” exactly as if the Civil War and the civil rights movement had never happened. No wonder the South is so stereotyped. Southerners—black and white—insist on stereotyping themselves. They were selling Rebel flags and “Forget, hell!” bath towels and black mammy salt-and-pepper shakers at the battlefield shop in Vicksburg. Why, a Northern person on this boat, or a Californian—and there are plenty—could travel down the entire Mississippi River and go back home without ever having seen anything of the real South where people live and die and play out their personal dramas just as they do everywhere.