by Cai Emmons
Matt grunts.
“I’m just saying that it never hurts to tell a woman your true feelings. Are you listening?”
“Yeah, Mom. I’ll take it under advisement.”
Marie sighs and stands and stares down at him for a moment. Her face is shaded, but he sees chips of white sky through the lace of her flyaway hair. “I know you’re too old for me to be giving you advice. I understand that.” Her hand grazes Matt’s bare back as she heads to the house.
Moments later Ivan comes out with a rattling tray of tea and sandwiches. Matt rises to help. “Sit, son! I’m not so old I can’t carry tray. Ham with horse radish. You mother brings pickles.” He lays down the tray, beaming at Matt. “We spoil you so you come back.”
Marie arrives with a second tray of condiments and pickles and carrot sticks and wedges of sliced pear and oatmeal cookies. “He forgot the napkins. He never remembers the napkins.”
“Meh,” Ivan says. “Picnic.”
Marie removes items from the trays and serves them each a plate with a sandwich and a mug of tea, and Marie and Ivan eat contentedly, chatting about what to plant where. Marie wants a pink dogwood. Ivan wants to expand his herb garden. They act as if their tenure in this house, on this plot of land, will last forever. Matt listens to them from a great distance, as if he’s been shot into space and is orbiting the Earth, seeing things simultaneously from aloft and from ground level, on the other side of a portal from which he can’t return. He loves his parents and has never felt so separate from them. If he and Bronwyn were ever to couple and marry, he can’t imagine their life together would be as circumscribed as Marie and Ivan’s life.
Elasticity, plasticity, ductility. Durability, fusibility, malleability. Temper, tenacity, thermal expansion. These were the things Ivan thought of—maybe he still thinks of these things. He used to extol the virtues of copper pipes. For all the cost savings, he hated using PVC. What am I? young Matt would ask Ivan. Fusible? Durable? Elastic? Plastic?
Whatever he once was, it’s different now.
45
Bronwyn arrives at work at 11:00 a.m., just before they open for lunch, and works until closing at 10:00 p.m. She needs to pay her rent, but more importantly she needs to keep herself busy, focused on something beyond the scent of the air, the cloud masses, the pressure gradients, the fronts gathering out to sea, and those further west or north or south.
The hostess job is easy as jobs go: taking reservations, greeting customers and ushering them to their tables, handing them menus, wishing them a good meal. It is almost entirely social, and once again, her appearance matters far too much. Devon, the manager, stressed this in her interview. She is the first thing customers see of the restaurant, an important first impression. He inspected her shamelessly with his eyes, like a TSA employee, or a dermatologist evaluating moles. Face, hair, breasts, belly, legs. A full frontal inspection. He asked her to get a manicure, told her of the owner’s preference for high heels and dark dresses with low necklines—though not too low—makeup—but not too much. No red lipstick. She must look sexy in an understated way. He asked her to role-play, pretend she was greeting customers. Good evening. Do you have a reservation? Come this way. He wanted to hear her vocal register, make sure she had no unusual accent or embarrassing tics. For god’s sake, this isn’t NPR, she wanted to say.
Devon concluded she would be fine, despite her lack of experience. Bronwyn did not mention her stint at WVOX on her resume, said she was taking a break from graduate school. Fortunately Devon didn’t recognize her. Perhaps he doesn’t watch TV, or not that station. At any rate, he seems to like her reasonably well, though he still watches her a little too relentlessly, as if expecting her to slip up. She’s a quick study, she knows how he wants her to be, and she stays on top of things. It isn’t the first time things haven’t gone her way and she’s had to buck up. Her mission now is to firm up her boundaries, and to that end she wears panty hose that cinches her legs and belly, and an underwire bra that clamps her upper torso in place. Begin with the body, she thinks.
A pitfall presents itself in the form of the three commandeering picture windows that line one side of the restaurant, displaying a view out to the harbor where a wide canvas of ocean and sky delivers moment-to-moment reports on the changing weather. Most of the patrons request tables adjacent to the windows though every table offers some kind of view. Bronwyn has schooled herself to avert her gaze when guiding customers to their tables. Once there, pulling out chairs and distributing menus, she keeps her back to the ocean. Still, sometimes she lets down her guard, and her eyes slide inadvertently to the glass, and even the sight of a slight rippling on the water, the sun angled and gold and engendering prisms, makes her pores open and widen, and she must retreat as quickly as possible to her podium in the windowless foyer.
Tonight a mother and daughter come in. They walk through the front door arm in arm, the daughter resting her head against her mother’s shoulder. The sight stirs an unexpected moment of yearning in Bronwyn. She thinks of Diane. Then, as the duo approaches the podium, the daughter jerks away from the mother, unhooking her arm.
“I know. I will,” the daughter says. “You’ve said that a million times.”
“Whitmore for two,” the mother says, her smile brittle. “A table by the window.”
Bronwyn checks her seating chart, aware of the daughter’s eyes on her. The girl, in her mid teens perhaps, is dressed in jeans and a sassy red blouse that shows off the parrots tattooed on both shoulders. She is halfway between girlhood and womanhood and still feels the call to be truculent. It is so long ago that Bronwyn had a mother to resist. How much simpler those days were. Though now, of course, there is Diane.
Bronwyn leads the two to their table. Her gaze is averted from the window, but still she apprehends the sudden change in the light, the dusk darkening more quickly than usual, like a sudden eclipse. She can’t resist a glance. Boats speed into the harbor like insects. The sky is alarmed, almost greenish, and lanced by a shaft of copper light. Her pores dilate. She blinks hard. The colors are so improbable.
“Hey,” says the girl. “I’ve seen you on TV. You’re that weather woman, aren’t you?”
Bronwyn forces her gaze away from the harbor, ekes out a smile. “I was,” she says, handing them menus. “Enjoy your dinner.”
She returns to her station, reeling. No one else is reacting to the sky’s strange colors. A storm is definitely coming in and, though she never listens to weather reports these days, it’s surprising that no one at the restaurant has mentioned it. Is it possible she was imagining the sky’s strange color? No, she feels it—the molecules out there organizing for something. She needs to get home, slide into bed, cover her head, and cauterize such messages. She’ll ask Devon if she can leave work early.
A lull in the activity. She idles at her podium, can’t defend herself against the assault, the too-familiar loop of sight and sound. The spectral image of Earl’s face, his droopy lip, his aquamarine eyes. Ganglial lightning. A monumental funnel cloud coughing up cars, trees, tiny babies. Grottos of fire opening and closing like mouths. The sizzling, growling clamor of it all.
Customers push through the front door. She steadies herself with both hands on the podium. She pastes on a smile. Good evening. Do you have a reservation? Your name please? This can’t continue forever. Maybe time will deliver her back to normalcy. Perhaps drugs would help. She tells Devon she isn’t feeling well and reluctantly he releases her. It is full-on night now, black and starless.
About to start her car, she suddenly freezes, sensing someone in there with her. She hears him breathing, a sound that amplifies until it fills the car with a giant huffing. She almost calls out. The breath is on her neck now, quieter. Light and warm. Stroking. Her fear melts. His fingertips rake her loose hair. The warmth of his torso rises from the back seat to cowl her bare shoulders. She basks in these sensations without turning to look at him. When she finally turns, there is no one, only the intangible ambushing
phantom of yearning.
46
When school begins again in September Diane is not ready. The summer has been too short, too hot, too fraught with worry that hasn’t been alleviated by the brain scan. The unpleasant weather has been compounded, says her friend Harvey Baumgarten, by local air pollution with high levels of ozone.
There is no news of Bronwyn, and Diane is hungry for news. What is Bronwyn doing? How is she faring? Who else thinks of her? Diane has sent multiple emails without getting any response. She called once or twice. Professional concerns aside, the girl could be going mad, and Diane can’t help feeling responsible. She was too harsh. She should have been more inquiring, more open-minded as Joe would have been. Ever since she told Joe about her experience in Mexico he has made it his business to find examples of amazing feats of supernatural human achievement. The monks in the high Himalayas who can raise their body temperatures. Stories about successful mind readers and prophesiers. He is determined to pry open the slight crack he’s found in Diane’s certainty about the world. He wants her to admit to her ignorance. And she does admit to ignorance—she is sadly ignorant about so many things—but still, she has to draw the line somewhere. It’s lucky Joe is who he is because anyone else would drive her crazy with this project of his. As for Bronwyn, none of Joe’s cockamamie ideas sheds any light on her situation. It’s the silence from Bronwyn that tortures Diane—an invisible wall erected between them that is the strongest rebuke.
Diane’s curmudgeonly frame of mind is not helped by her busy fall schedule. She has two big grant applications due in the next month and shortly after that she will be going to Siberia to investigate a serious problem with the Arctic Cloud Project—Dmitry Retivov, the new Russian director of the Tiksi weather station, has been withholding data, and no one knows why. He has not responded to her emails, or anyone else’s, so her colleagues on the project have nominated her to find out what’s happening in person. She has never met Retivov, but she knows he has a reputation for being surly. She is not looking forward to the trip at all. After that she has business trips booked straight through the spring of next year. She has always loved traveling, seeing new sights and meeting people, exercising her language skills, but recently she finds herself becoming, like Joe, a terrible homebody. She hopes it’s just a phase.
Making matters worse is the fact that, despite the heat, she’s been eating too much and too frequently, like a bear on the verge of hibernation made ravenous by scarcity. Oh, suck it up, Diane, she tells herself, things could be worse. You could have dementia.
Today she has cleared her afternoon for the young man, Matt Vassily, a reporter who claims to be a friend of Bronwyn’s. He didn’t reveal what kind of friend he is to her—perhaps lover, perhaps not—and he didn’t want to state his purpose over the phone, but that was fine. He was direct, efficient, said he was a journalist, though he wants to meet for personal not professional reasons. They made a plan to lunch in Harvard Square.
The prospect of this meeting has buoyed Diane, and so she has arrived at the Harvest Restaurant early and is sorry to see, sitting in the corner, a former colleague from Wellesley, a historian named Tom Geronimo, who she will eventually have to acknowledge. Not surprisingly he’s with a young woman, a creamy-skinned twenty-something, his student no doubt. It’s still remarkable that Tom hasn’t been terminated for one of his indiscretions with students, but he is a gifted self-promoter, always hyper-impressed with his own steady stream of publications. He writes mainstream historical biographies that he publishes with trade publishers and they always sell quite well, a fact he advertises shamelessly. As for the sexual dalliances, he seems to feel they are part of his tenure agreement. The administration has always overlooked his improprieties, believing his recognizable name attracts students to the institution. Diane has no use or respect for him, but she has never made her opinions known to him, a fact for which she reproves herself.
She spots the young man in the foyer, scanning the tables. He wears jeans and a sports jacket, and it occurs to her that she rarely sees young people dressed this way, not the students she teaches certainly, who tend to favor a slovenly-cum-cool look. Perhaps the sports jacket is de rigueur for a journalist. He speaks to the hostess now, sure of himself, but a little anxious-looking too. Oh my, how these young people move her unexpectedly.
At the table he extends his hand—“Matt Vassily, you’re Dr. Fenwick, I assume”—smiling as if they are old friends meeting after months apart. The smile is spontaneous and winning.
“Diane, please.”
He nods and grins again. Whatever’s bothering him, it has not hijacked his ability to grin.
“Shall we get the ordering out of the way? I’m having the salmon. But everything here is good.”
He studies the menu and she studies him. His hair is amusingly prominent—dark and slumped on his head like a felted handbag. Most men would cut it shorter, but he has left it alone, and offshoots have followed gnarled, kudzu-like paths behind his ears. He is on the short side, and sinewy. His eyes stand out too; set in a swarthy face, they are a dark chocolate brown. The fact that he is not conventionally attractive makes him more likeable, Diane thinks, and even if he were downright ugly that smile would be more than adequate compensation.
They dispense with the ordering quickly. He is decisive, burger and salad, simple tastes, he says. The waiter disappears and Matt looks around.
“This is a nice place.” His head snaps back to her. “Do you know why I’m here?”
“Not exactly, no. Something to do with Bronwyn, I’m assuming. But you’re going to tell me. She’s not in any trouble is she?”
“Not that I know of.”
Diane leans forward, feeling the movement marking her as a co-conspirator. “So she’s alright?”
“Yes and no.” He draws in his lips and fingers his utensils and stares down at the red table cloth. “I know she told you about her—thing. Right?”
“Her ability to fend off bad weather? You don’t believe she can do that, do you?” The impossibility of this conversation, the improbability of it.
“Well, that’s why I’m here—”
“Did she send you?”
“God no. She told me you two had a falling out?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. A difference of opinion, certainly. I hope you’re not here to try to convince me of anything.”
He hesitates, sizing her up. “I was trained as a journalist and good journalists are always skeptical. It’s the kiss of death to be too gullible.”
“Okay.”
“Let me backtrack. I used to work for The Meteor. A tabloid. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it—”
“You’re the one who wrote that terrible article?”
“No, I definitely did not. My boss wrote that. I don’t work there anymore. I quit. It’s a crappy paper.” He shakes his head and draws a deep breath and forges on. “My boss had read about Bronwyn and sent me to interview her. He thought she was, you know, another interesting, farfetched story. I’ve done my share of interviews with people who claim to have seen aliens and flying saucers. People who talk to their plants and channel ancestors through a cup of coffee. Yada, yada. So I went to interview Bronwyn expecting—well, that she’d be another one of those weirdos. And I saw right away that she was someone I had to take seriously.”
Diane laughs. “Oh, yes. She’s definitely a person one must take seriously.”
He upends his water glass and drinks the entire thing without stopping. When he lays it down again he’s breathing heavily, and his face is curiously labile, as if all his emotions have converged there and are cohabiting restlessly. Something pained at the center of his bafflement tells her he’s in love. The restaurant’s din rises around them and seals them in the unexpected quietude of loud noise.
“So, when I found out my boss wrote that stupid story without even meeting Bronwyn, I quit. But I knew she’d think I wrote it. I tried to apologize to her and set the record straight, but
she wouldn’t respond to any of my messages.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“I guess you’d say I got a little obsessed. I couldn’t stand that she was thinking I’d write something like that. So finally I went to her house to find her and her lawn was all black. Burned. It was strange because the house itself was fine, but there’d obviously been a fire outside. So while I was there for some reason she did answer my call and by then she was in California. I realized—or I surmised—that she was there to stop those fires.”
“That’s a rather radical conclusion to come to.”
“I could tell from the outset she was really convinced she could do this stuff. So—”
“Did you think she could do these things?”
“Of course not.” He frowns and removes his jacket and hangs it on the back of his chair. Dark circles of sweat yawn up from his armpits, belying his eroding composure.
“Okay,” she says, “we’re on the same page then. But for some reason, you took her seriously anyway.”
“Wait—it gets more complicated. I knew I had to go to LA, just to see. I was—okay, am—maybe a little obsessed. When I arrived it was all over the news about how this one fire had gone out, really suddenly for no apparent reason. No one could explain it. Did you hear about that?”