A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  “Yum,” said Jane Louise.

  “He’s actually very charming,” Sven said. “I got drunk with him once when we published the Eskimo nookie book.”

  “He sounds perfectly delightful,” Jane Louise said. “Does he have fancy luggage stickers from famous hotels plastered all over him or just tags from old Cunard boats?”

  “Both,” Sven said.

  “Thank you for your input,” said Jane Louise.

  “Don’t let him lean on you,” Sven said. “He has that sort of ‘Help me, I’m a helpless genius’ appeal.”

  “Erna goes in for that sort of thing,” Jane Louise said, although she was not entirely sure she was herself immune.

  “She likes a large, slightly ruined object with a kind of raffish, masculine charm,” Sven said.

  Jane Louise gave Sven a long, thoughtful look.

  “You ought to write for women’s magazines, Sven,” Jane Louise said. “You have a lot to impart to us gals.”

  “Women’s magazines should write about me,” Sven said. “See you round the campus.”

  Suddenly Erna, looking flushed and wearing a perfectly tailored old plaid suit, appeared with Hugh Oswald-Murphy in tow.

  He was a large, florid, handsome, ruined man with a graying boy’s haircut and eyes full of scrutiny and appeal. He walked right up to Jane Louise’s desk and extended his great big paw.

  “How d’you do, my dear?” he said. “You’ve been so frightfully nice about all these delays, Erna says. Oh, my!” he said, as Jane Louise stood up. “With child!”

  “I guess you mean knocked up,” said Jane Louise, giving him a dumb look. She figured that Hugh Oswald-Murphy was one of those men who respond well to a really dumb-appearing woman.

  “Children,” he said. His voice was loud and low, like a bear growl. “How angelic. Such darling creatures. Have hundreds!” he said. “I do.”

  “Gee,” Jane Louise said. “Really? Hundreds?”

  “Eight,” he said.

  “How many mothers?” Jane Louise said.

  “Now, Jane,” Erna said.

  “A fair question, Erna,” Hugh said. “Five.”

  “Gosh,” Jane Louise said. “Five. It makes me feel quite humble.”

  Hugh Oswald-Murphy gave her a look of reappraisal.

  “This young woman is having me on, Erna,” he said.

  “She’s not as dumb as she looks,” Erna said.

  Jane Louise felt that some day it would be enjoyable to kill Erna, right on the street, in some morbid, painful, and very humiliating way.

  “She doesn’t look dumb a bit,” Hugh Oswald-Murphy said.

  Jane Louise had been called many things in her life, but never dumb. She gazed with hatred at Erna, who was almost panting. It was sad to see someone in such obvious throes of sex longing, although Hugh Oswald-Murphy did not appear to Jane Louise as much of a worthy sex object. He was too visibly self-concerned, self-referential, and self-absorbed. Even Sven, who was nothing more than an arrow waiting to be shot, was probably capable of some state of thrill or thrall, although love and transformation were doubtless not in his emotional vocabulary.

  One of the things Jane Louise most loved about going to bed with her husband was the total change in his aspect. Gone from his features was what she called “the Marshallsville Face,” that pleasant visage he turned to the world to protect himself and make himself invisible. In her arms he was rapt, impassioned, ardent, hungry, and given over to feeling. He longed for her and made it clear. It melted her to see him in this condition: She was addicted to it. That she could work this change on him and make him happy gave her more than hope. It thrilled her and made her wonder if people really did have some deep center and if the soul of another did not necessarily, as Chekhov says, lie in darkness. She hoped that deep might actually call to deep in this internal way. It lightened her darkness. She had never felt this with another soul. She did not feel that if you went to bed with someone like Hugh Oswald-Murphy you would find anything more than the person now sitting in a chair across from her.

  “I was thinking,” said Hugh Oswald-Murphy, “that this charming young woman and I might have a chat about the type and the photos, Erna, and then we might all go out and have a bite.”

  “Yes,” said Jane Louise dreamily. “A bite.”

  Hugh Oswald-Murphy gave her a curious stare, as if she might actually be thinking of biting him. Jane Louise flushed. These days a drowsy languor overtook her, as if the physical processes of her pregnant body had thrown a kind of warm scarf over her. She longed constantly for her bed—not to be in it, but on it, surrounded by clean pillows and wrapped in her down comforter.

  “I can’t have lunch,” Erna said. “There’s a board meeting.”

  “I would have thought that would be quite unnecessary,” Hugh said. “Now that Hamish has finally caved in and off-loaded this lovely place to those loathsome toad compatriots of mine.”

  The words loathsome toad compatriots of mine floated past Jane Louise’s brain.

  “Oh,” she said, “did Hamish sell?”

  “Oh, Hugh. You shithead,” Erna said.

  “I’m frightfully sorry,” Hugh said. “I had no idea this was still hush-hush. Pretend you never heard a thing.”

  “I heard a thing,” Jane Louise said. “What gives?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” said Erna, with a preening expression.

  Jane Louise felt a red curtain of rage flap over her eyes.

  “This affects my livelihood,” she said to Erna. “I’m pregnant, and my husband is not a political adviser. He’s a plant chemist in a tiny firm. You tell me right now, Erna, or I’ll hurt you.”

  “Good gracious,” said Hugh.

  “Calm down, Jane,” Erna said.

  “I won’t,” said Jane Louise. Her voice was definitely menacing, a tone she had never heard before. She suddenly felt a wave of protectiveness. This was the tiger aspect of impending motherhood.

  “It’s all very well for you to have inside dope,” Jane Louise said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  At that moment, Sven ambled in. “Well, well, a family huddle,” he said. “Hello, Hugh.”

  “Michaelson,” said Hugh. “Very good to see you.”

  “Sven,” Jane Louise said. “Have you been keeping from me that Hamish has sold?”

  “I just heard this morning that it’s final,” Sven said. “At least they’re publishing people and not in kitchen appliances. But Erna knows all, don’t you, Erna?”

  “She’s not telling,” Jane Louise said. “You’ll have to beat it out of her.”

  A speculative look came over Sven’s features. What a pane of glass he was! You could tell he was thinking what it might be like to smack Erna around.

  “Get out the electrodes, Janey. Let’s torture her.”

  Erna sat down. She had the manner of a teacher telling serious news to a class of preschoolers.

  “It’s the Primrose Group,” she said. “They own publishing companies in Britain.”

  “Some of which they’ve ruined,” Hugh put in cheerfully.

  “Do shut up, Hugh,” Erna said. “They own publishers in Britain, Canada, and Australia, and a lot of magazines, and they want to be a presence here. Hamish will have a ten-year contract. We’ll all be safe. They like us as we are.”

  “They like us as we are,” Sven said. “They love us for ourselves. Isn’t that sweet of them?”

  “Don’t be so cynical, Sven,” Erna said.

  “I’m not cynical. I’m realistic. I know that ‘they like us as we are’ means cheap binding from here on in.”

  “Two-color jackets,” Jane Louise said.

  “Really, I feel this is very inappropriate in front of an author,” Erna said.

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” Hugh Oswald-Murphy said. “I’ve been through this. My first book got caught in a takeover. That’s when dear Erna rescued me and gave me that nice contract with the production clause.”

  “Produc
tion clause?” Sven said.

  “It only means a sewn binding,” Erna said demurely.

  Sven groaned. “I’m going to have to find some early-nine-teenth-century printer to sew it, Erna. Nobody sews anymore.”

  “They do!” Erna said primly. “It just costs more each book.”

  “Does this man agree to a reduction in royalties?” Sven said. “To cover the cost of sewing his book?”

  “Hugh feels his books will last and ought not to fall apart when a reader of the future opens them,” Erna said.

  “Any writer would feel that way,” Hugh said.

  “I myself love notch binding,” Jane Louise said. “If Erna and Sven would get out of here, I would show you the beauty of it. They cut little notches in the signature and glue it in. It’s very elegant.”

  Hugh peered at her, a little hungrily, she felt. Erna looked agitated, the way she always looked after a few minutes with Sven. She looked as if she would like to have picked him up by the scruff of the neck, clenched in her teeth like a mother cat, and hauled him away somewhere. Sven, on the other hand, regarded her as an out-of-control, neurotic, runaway horse who needed expert handling. Jane Louise said she would be very happy to see their taillights and asked them both to leave.

  “Marvelous woman,” said Hugh as Erna closed the door. “All those children. That husband. This job.”

  “All those children. That husband. This job,” repeated Jane Louise. “Yes, it’s amazing. How does she do it?”

  She looked into Hugh Oswald-Murphy’s face. He was very large. His enormous head sat between two immense shoulders. You felt that had he been stripped of flesh, two medium-size women could have played gin rummy in his rib cage. His very face was enormous, and he had a big, mobile mouth with lots and lots of teeth. Jane Louise tried to imagine him eating and then stopped. At the moment, life seemed quite out of proportion. He was not that huge, and yet Jane Louise visualized him as rather a Gargantua, or Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians, nibbling on what to a normal person would be an entire side of beef. He gave her an appealing look, rather in the direction of her bra.

  “Hey,” she said. “Snap out of it.”

  “I do think, my dear, that you ought to have a little more respect for a famous writer.”

  “Really?” said Jane Louise. “Well, I think you ought to have a little more respect for the person who’s going to design your book.”

  “My God, you’re a snarky young person,” Hugh Oswald-Murphy said.

  “I am not young,” Jane Louise said. “I’m old and I’m pregnant and I can say anything I want.”

  “You’re not that old, my dear,” Hugh said. “I was a very late baby. My mother was nearer to fifty than forty when I appeared. Oh, the power of women! Their internal depth. Their inner space. That procreative fire.”

  “It beats all hell out of me how we do it,” Jane Louise said. “Frankly, I’m exhausted.”

  “And yet never used up,” Hugh said, dreamily. Jane Louise wondered if he was drunk. “The replenishing source. The ewig weibliche.”

  “Oh that,” Jane Louise said, trying to remember if this was some term from literary criticism or Nazism. “The Eternal Feminine.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” Hugh said enthusiastically. This was clearly a favorite topic.

  Jane Louise wondered if she brought this sort of thing out in men, or if all men were really like this deep down inside and she was a kindly soul who didn’t mind listening to them endlessly rabbit on about these things, or if she simply didn’t know any normal men who dreamed about going fishing and did not fill up their minds with mush about the ewig weibliche.

  But, on the other hand, it really was sort of amazing, all this procreative fire. The intricacy of all those dividing cells and chromosomal patterns, to say nothing of hormonal changes. When you were pregnant, your bones got softer in order to ensure a proper birth situation. This was a neat trick, especially when you were totally unaware of it. So maybe it was right and proper that men should be in awe of it. It was fairly awesome.

  “One of my wives is an Eskimo,” Hugh was saying, and Jane Louise realized that minutes had gone by and she had been in a daze. “Amazing people, really, when you come to think of it. A beautiful person and the mother of my son, Anguuleek.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jane Louise said. “Hugh, don’t you think we ought to have our nice little chat about the design of your book?”

  “Of course, of course,” Hugh said. He mopped his brow with a large yellow-and-red plaid handkerchief.

  “Gee, that’s pretty,” Jane Louise said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Bradbury Hatters in London,” Hugh said. “I’ll send you a dozen. Is it hot in here?”

  “It’s procreative fire,” Jane Louise said. “It gets the thermostat all out of whack. Now sit very quietly, Hugh, and I’ll show you these sample pages. And then I want you very quietly to accept every little thing.”

  He gave her another unfocused look, and she knew he was not going to give her one single ounce of trouble. There was something to be said for the replenishing source. Before this minute she had had no idea how useful it could be in matters of business.

  CHAPTER 28

  After Christmas it became wet and sleety, and then it snowed. Teddy was at a conference in Germany, the headquarters of his company. Had he gone in for petrochemicals he could have avoided spending his life worrying about money, just as Jane Louise had missed her big chance to get into corporate graphic design, something in which she had no interest whatsoever. She liked book publishing and book design, and she was stuck with the sort of meager salary it brought her, just as Teddy loved to figure out the nontoxic, the noninvasive, the safe, and the benign. As a result, they never had very much money, and now that there would soon be three of them, their worry about money became more concrete.

  Jane Louise lay under her down comforter, watching the snowfall against the streetlight and reading Hugh Oswald-Murphy’s Arctic masterpiece. She had now read it twice. On either side of her was a copy of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Arctic Manual and Knud Rasmussen’s People of the Polar North, which Mokie called People of the Polish North. She seemed to be unable to stop reading about snow houses, ice packs, seals, and people who left their elderly alone to starve when their number was up. This landscape, totally inhospitable and remote, held her in thrall. When Teddy had mentioned that someday when their unborn was a teen and if they had any money, they might take one of those Arctic tours, Jane Louise was horrified. “Go there?” she said. “Are you kidding? It’s too cold!”

  “Then why are you reading all this stuff?” he had asked, and Jane Louise had looked up from her nest of pillows, looking dewy and beautiful, and had given him a gaze of total confusion. “I don’t know,” she said.

  She didn’t know, except that in the Arctic no one worked for a publishing company that had just been sold, or for a small firm of do-good plant chemists who might go bankrupt at any minute. Furthermore, Jane Louise had a suspicion that her landlady, Mrs. Berger, was thinking of selling the building. This sort of thing did not happen in the Polar North.

  The telephone rang her out of a doze. It was nine o’clock at night, and she could see that the sleety snow had turned into large, lacy flakes almost the size of Queen Anne’s lace.

  It was Teddy. “Hi,” she said sleepily. “What time is it there?”

  “It’s afternoon and it’s freezing. What’s it doing there?”

  “Beautiful snow,” Jane Louise said. “Guess what? Hamish sold the press.”

  “Who to?”

  “Bunch o’ Brits,” Jane Louise said. “I was very rude to Hugh Oswald-Murphy today.”

  “Good for you,” Teddy said. “Did he behave?”

  “I made him sit up and bark like a dog, and he was very good after that. How’s the food?”

  “Everything has talons or hooves,” Teddy said. “These guys are very big on game with berries, and lots of meat for breakfast. I’m dying for a salad. Listen, th
ings are not wonderful here.”

  “In what way?” Jane Louise said. A wave of anxiety was beginning to curl over her like a threatening wave.

  “They may sell. They may refinance. They may go under. A Swiss company wants to buy them,” Teddy said. “Anyway, there’s a wage freeze.”

  “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “No bonus,” Teddy said.

  “Well, that’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “I was counting on it,” Teddy said. “With the baby coming.”

  “It’s all right,” Jane Louise said. “We have insurance. We paid for the crib. It’ll be all right, although Mrs. Berger has been nosing around.”

  “She’s going to sell the building,” Teddy said.

  There was a long silence. The telephone was not Teddy’s thing. He didn’t much like being forced into a situation in which speech was necessary.

  “It’ll be okay,” Jane Louise said. “She isn’t going to sell it for a long time.”

  “You don’t know that,” Teddy said.

  “Hey,” Jane Louise said. “How about telling me how much you miss me, and we’ll talk about our housing problems when you come home.”

  “I miss you,” Teddy said.

  “Well, I miss you,” Jane Louise said. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to collapse.”

  These, of course, were the sort of consoling things Jane Louise often wished Teddy would say to her, but there was no reason in Teddy’s mind to reassure Jane Louise that her dwelling space wasn’t going to be sold out from under her, since Teddy had no way of knowing if this was going to happen or not, or when. He took things as they came and dealt with them, leaving Jane Louise in a state of anxiety.

  It was hard for Teddy to believe her when she told him how anxious she often was. The Jane Louise he knew and loved was brazen. She had hopped right into bed with him and loved him from the first. She was open and aboveboard in her feelings: In fact, he thought of her as fearless. Furthermore, she was as snarky as Hugh Oswald-Murphy said she was, and she had never let any bully push her around.