Calamity and Other Stories

by Daphne Kalotay

  “Not like this,” Mr. Curtin said, and closed his eyes. I’d never seen anyone listen so attentively to a piece of music. He stayed like that for minutes, while Charlie Dibbs poked around at the fruit in his sangria. When Mr. Curtin remained silent, Charlie Dibbs began to look bored, and went so far as to try to rouse Edna LeBlanc with a tap on the elbow. She let out a hearty snore.

  Finally Mr. Curtin opened his eyes and spoke. “If only life could be like this.”

  This statement appeared thoroughly unsatisfactory to Charlie Dibbs, who stretched his limbs, half stifled a belch, and said, “Whoa—that eggplant dip’s already getting to me.”

  “Oh, good, you’re still here.” It was my mother, walking over, slightly wobbly. “I was thinking, Cole. I was thinking that maybe you could play for us later on.”

  “Well, only if you think people would want to hear—”

  “Oh, of course, of course,” my mother told him, unaware that some wine was spilling from her glass. “Gordon. Gordon! Come help Cole roll the piano onto the porch.”

  “If it’s a problem—” said Mr. Curtin.

  “Not at all. Gordon! Come here and help Cole—”

  “I heard you,” my father called from the lawn. “In a minute, okay? Jerry wants to show me his Ford.”

  When my father returned, he made a big deal about pushing the piano, though it was on wheels, through the door from the family room onto the porch. I heard him telling Jerry Waslick, after Mr. Curtin had sat down to play, that used pianos often sounded better than brand new ones.

  Mr. Curtin, meanwhile, closed his eyes and began to play Scarlatti. Callie, who liked to be part of a show, came and stood next to him as if she might be needed to turn pages. Public attention never flustered her, and with her honey-blond bob and perfectly straight bangs (the sort of thing my curls could never manage) she looked neat and efficient; you wouldn’t have guessed that really she barely even practiced her scales. I stood tenuously behind her, to show that I too was a part of all this.

  No one was really listening, but my mother and Helen acted as an audience, leaning back on the wicker loveseat directly across from the piano, their hair a tangle of blond streaks and dark curls. Helen rested her head on my mother’s shoulder, while my mother whispered things that caused them both to giggle. They were holding hands. Helen whispered something back, and both of them burst out in a loud cackle just as Mr. Curtin settled into a pianissimo section of the sonata.

  Perhaps it was that double laugh that caused Mr. Curtin to look up. He saw that my mother had flung her head back, and laugh-tears were at the corners of her eyes. Helen, smiling, absently ran her finger along my mother’s arched neck. My mother turned her head to Helen and, still laughing, placed her lips on Helen’s mouth. That was when Mr. Curtin stopped playing. In the absence of music, Jerry Waslick’s voice could be heard, saying, “. . . but we thought a canoe might be better.” I turned to see my father standing with him, along with Charlie Dibbs and Tom. Only my father had looked up absently to see why the music had stopped. This all took place in a matter of seconds, and yet I can see so clearly, in stop-action, my father’s gaze following that of Mr. Curtin, until it found my mother reclined there on the wicker furniture, her mouth already withdrawing from Helen’s. For a brief moment my father looked as if he had bitten into a bad grape. But then his very posture changed. He let his hands drop to his sides in an awestruck way and regarded my mother and Helen with the same lonely, powerless look I had seen so many times on Mr. Curtin’s face. Behind him, limp on the piano bench, Mr. Curtin, too, stared at them.

  My mother and Helen weren’t even kissing any more, just laughing in a tired way. If you had blinked you could have missed it. Callie did; she was leafing through my sheet music, making sure we were playing all the same pieces. My mother put her bare feet up on the wicker ottoman and took another sip of white wine. My father was returning to his old self now, and looked around with little jerks of his head to see if anyone had noticed the kiss. “Yeah, the Delaware Water Gap is nice,” Jerry Waslick was saying, “but the mosquitoes will kill you.”

  Mr. Curtin was closing the piano now. He turned to me and Callie and said, “Nothing I could ever play could come near to the beauty of what we’ve just witnessed. That’s the tragedy of my life.”

  Old Edna LeBlanc, who had woken, was making her way onto the porch with her sister. “Tragedy,” she said to Millie, as Mr. Curtin laid his head on the covered keyboard. “It’s like I always say: these young ones don’t know the meaning of the word.”

  A Brand New You

  He sang in the shower—was singing, right now, in her shower. Annie didn’t remember him ever doing that before and couldn’t help feeling annoyed, not because she had anything against singing in the shower, but because in Ben’s case it seemed calculated, to make her think how cute he was for being the sort of person who sang in the shower. But Annie knew his ways all too well, knew that if she weren’t around to listen he probably wouldn’t even hum.

  And yet she had married him. Fifteen years ago she had married him, and eight years ago she had divorced him. And now here he was singing in her shower, having just bedded her for the first time in nine years.

  She had found him that afternoon on Bleecker, where she was killing time after her final class of the day, a summer seminar with a professor who bored her but who was supposed to be one of the greatest minds in modern philosophy. There she was, enjoying the June warmth and grime and people all around her, when she saw a man who looked like her ex-husband, with thick, wavy gray hair and matching gray eyes, and then saw, as he approached, that it indeed was him. Because she was feeling generous, she said, “Hey, you asshole!” and gave him a big kiss on the cheek.

  She could tell that he was pleased by her looks. Sure enough, he said, “Annie, Jesus, you look amazing!” but then of course had to shake his head as though he hadn’t thought it possible. Well, that was the most she could expect from him; it didn’t matter any more. A week ago she had turned forty, and she felt better than she had in years. Her dark hair was newly permed, and she was wearing the stretchy rainbow-striped tube top that made the most of her broad bust. Her close-fitting Jordache jeans, a birthday present to herself, showed how strong her legs were now. She had quit smoking and even briefly considered quitting drinking, and her skin looked the better for it.

  For a year now she had been heeding the advice of a health guru named Caleb Crantz, author of A Brand New You and An Even Better Brand New You. Together his books prescribed an entire way of living that was basically impossible to follow but a diverting challenge nonetheless. There were special foods to purchase and a special order in which to eat them, and there were suggested ways to move and to breathe. To protect the spine, for instance, Caleb Crantz advised against carrying anything. Anything. Not a shoulder bag, not a backpack, and even though Annie was now in graduate school and should have been carting wheelbarrows of books around campus like everyone else, she had made it through two semesters taking Crantz’s advice to heart. He also proposed drinking nothing but filtered water, cooking only with organic ingredients, eating eight small meals—instead of three regular ones—a day, and walking instead of using any seated form of transportation. Annie’s job at the cultural center was only three blocks away from her apartment in Brooklyn, but on class days she walked all the way to NYU, nibbling a bulgur-wheat scone at the prescribed hour and making sure to have a few small bills in her pocket in case she was mugged on the bridge. She arrived late for her classes and— because she wasn’t supposed to carry anything—without books, notepads, or pens. Sometimes she borrowed pencils and paper to take notes that she then tossed into trash bins, since she couldn’t carry them home. It didn’t matter; she had a photographic memory. That was how she had graduated at the top of her class at Bryn Mawr.

  Amazing, Annie had thought as she stood there across from Ben on the warm, littered sidewalk. Amazing that she could now be thinner and happier than she had been when she was t
hirty, stronger and more confident than when she was twenty-five. Perhaps because he was a full thirteen years older than Annie, Ben had always treated her with a certain authoritative judgment, and even as he stood there on Bleecker Street, he did that thing he always did, letting his eyes quickly scan her, head to toe, giving an approving nod. Eight years ago she would have found it annoying, offensive even, but now that she no longer had to admit to the public that he was hers, it was simply flattering. Annie could be a liberated woman and still accept compliments from an asshole like Ben. It had taken her—and so many women—all of the 1970s to figure that out.

  Ben looked basically the same as before, with a firm build and healthy tan, though his face was older, almost dignified. He had wrinkles in places Annie didn’t usually think of as wrinkling: at the tops of his cheeks, and across his nose when he smiled, which he was right now. When he cocked his head, the afternoon sun highlighted where the skin between his ear and neck sagged. Annie wondered what changes the sun revealed about her. All she knew was that it felt wonderful on her bare shoulders, on her scalp, heat being absorbed through her dark hair, her dark jeans. The tube top hugged her lovingly.

  Ben said that he was in town for just two days, since he lived in Chicago now, had for the past four years. He told Annie things that she didn’t even hear; she was busy being amused by the fact that she had once believed—truly believed—that she would be with this person for the rest of her life.

  They proceeded into a bar with windows that opened out onto the street. While panhandlers and drug dealers did their business a few yards away, Annie and Ben had three margaritas each, since summer was finally here and it was that kind of evening—especially in the city, where June was really the only truly enjoyable month of the season. Then Ben offered to walk her home and, when she told him she had moved back to Brooklyn, asked if he could “see” her “place.” They both knew what that meant, and so Annie broke another of Caleb Crantz’s edicts and, taking Ben with her, rode the subway home.

  Though she’d had sex with him many, many times before, doing so yet again made clear to her that even a photographic memory could not fully recall a person’s body, or the things he liked, or the way the parts of him worked, or any of the important information, really. She had to figure things out all over again, and so the episode was something of an ordeal and hardly satisfactory. And now she had to lie here on the still-moist sheets and listen to him bellowing a Hall and Oates song in her shower.

  Well, she reasoned to herself, pulling the sheet up across her waist, the last time we did this I was a completely different person. Back then I was angry all the time. I barely had my own life. Now I have a job I like and a schedule that suits my needs. I’m studying for a Ph.D. I have my own runty little apartment, without a roommate, without a husband (without proper heating or insulation—but that was another issue). Back then I’d never slept with anyone else; now I know what all is out there.

  She had made it through those first awkward throes of women’s liberation, survived the confusion and the fury. This was a new decade. Annie placed a pillow behind her neck and gave the curls of her perm an encouraging little squeeze. When the phone rang, she grabbed the receiver and said, “Yep!”

  “Annie Blechinger?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Ah, Annie, is Magda. I am calling to see how the revitalizing cream is working.”

  Well, now, this was a surprise. Annie sat up and turned a guilty eye to the congregation of small but substantial-looking glass bottles atop her bureau. Magda from the Erno Laszlo counter had convinced her, in a moment of weakness, that they were going to save her life. That was last week, the day before her birthday, the day that she panicked and bought the Jordache jeans. “Tomorrow I’ll be forty,” she had explained to Magda, who reigned over the makeup counter in a chic-looking lab coat. “You know how it is. One day you’re forty, the next thing you know you’re sixty.”

  And gorgeous Magda, with eyes like Sophia Loren, had nodded gravely and reached for a jar of revitalizing cream.

  Now she said, “I want to make sure you are pleased with the results.”

  Annie looked at the bottles that sat waiting on her bureau and felt the full burden of ownership. She noted how a simple bit of sexual tussling seemed to take care of the ills all those bottles claimed to cure. She said, “The truth is, Magda, I’m going to have to return most of this crap.”

  “You are unhappy with the products?”

  “I hate to tell you this, but I haven’t even used them. I haven’t even opened them up.”

  “Not even the revitalizing cream? You will like it, I guarantee. I call you in a month, when you see how you like it.” Magda hung up before Annie could say another word, while Ben’s voice floated from the bathroom. You’ve got the body, now you want my soul. . . . He was shutting the water off.

  So that was how these makeup counters worked, Annie thought as she replaced the receiver in its cradle. They found you a product and hounded you at home, to make sure you were hooked for life. She had been aware even as she was buying them that the creams were a mistake. They were nothing she could afford, and she’d had to break Caleb Crantz’s rules to lug them home. But now that she was forty she knew better. Never again would she cave in like that.

  I can’t go for that, no, no—no can do. . . .

  Well, all right, she would. Of course she would. But wasn’t that life? A series of lapses. Like the margaritas and the subway ride and Ben here in her shower. Mistakes were things you made over and over again. You had to forgive yourself. No one could play by all the rules. Annie certainly never had.

  Ben stopped singing and emerged from the bathroom rubbing a washcloth over his wet hair. “What a picture you make, Annie. You have such a great shape.”

  He came toward her, naked, smiling the same square-jawed smile he had employed repeatedly to get basically whatever he wanted. Yet he wasn’t a bad person; Annie always made that clear, despite continuing to refer to him as “that asshole.” She made certain it was understood that that asshole had possessed enough good qualities to keep her hanging around for a good seven years.

  Ben sat down on the bed, then rolled onto his side, propped up on an elbow to face her. “I was thinking, in the shower, about that time in the Poconos. When it snowed all day. Remember?”

  Annie smiled, a bit wickedly. “And you made us walk all the way around that goddamn lake just so we could feel like we’d done something besides fuck all day.” She gave him a tiny shove and then admitted, “Yeah, that was fun.”

  “And the snowflakes covered your hair,” Ben said. “They were so thick and coming down so fast, they didn’t melt right away, and I looked at you with your hair all white and thought, That’s what she’ll look like when she’s eighty years old, so beautiful, with long white hair.”

  Annie pulled herself up on the backs of her arms. “Aw, Ben.” And then, trying not to sound annoyed, “You never told me that.”

  “It was just an image,” Ben said, shrugging his shoulders slightly. “I believed it.”

  Annie looked into his eyes to see if he were telling the truth. Though they were still a bright gray, his eyes were somehow different from before. It wasn’t just the crow’s-feet. There was more depth to them, Annie could have sworn it. How had that happened?

  She said, “Aren’t you lucky I ran into you today.”

  “I am.” And then he asked, “So—are you going to tell Eileen?”

  Annie gave a loud, squawking laugh. People had told her it sounded obnoxious, but she didn’t care. “Is that what you want to know, then? Is that all you’re worried about?”

  “I just meant—”

  “I can’t believe you still care what she thinks.”

  Ben had never liked Eileen, who was Annie’s best friend from college and wasn’t easy to impress. He said it was because Annie told her everything and in doing so had turned Eileen against him, but Annie knew the real reason. Ben couldn’t stand the fact that
Eileen was the one woman who had never fallen for his handsomeness.

  That’s the way it was with men like Ben, who had grown up cute and had nothing but their looks to lose, who could wait until they were practically in their forties to settle down, who saw no reason for any woman to tell them no. They expected adulation and didn’t know what to do with women like Eileen, who had never been won over by Ben’s winking eyes or fawning remarks. She had never even pretended to like him.

  Ben had always had a whole circuit of admirers he flirted with regularly. Really they were just shopgirls, counter girls, waitresses. It was for them, not Annie, that Ben used to rub gunk into his bangs, pat on cologne, clip the hairs that peeked out from his nostrils. There was the girl in the dry cleaner’s, and the woman who cut his hair, and the gal at the deli counter. Ben made his rounds. Sometimes Annie was with him and witnessed as he complimented some teenager on her lovely green eyes. It was one of the things that had become unbearable. But for years Annie had just stood there next to him trying not to notice.

  Now she said, “Of course I’m going to tell Eileen. I tell her everything.”

  Even as she said it, though, she was deciding that she wouldn’t. For one thing, it was embarrassing. Also, it might be a fun challenge for Annie to see if she could keep her own secret. Now that she was forty it was probably time she started trying to build some strength of character.

  Ben said, “You haven’t changed a bit, I see,” but not in an especially bitter way.

  With his face so close to hers, Annie was able to see now what hadn’t been there before, what made his gaze seem deeper. There was fear, that was what it was, written into those lines around his eyes. Fear and loss, because Ben too knew, finally, what it felt like to barely exist for a whole set of younger people. He too knew what it meant to walk into a room and not even be noticed. He who had always turned heads.