The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  Alan asked what she could recommend for an upset stomach, and when she finally raised her head to answer him, he was so startled by her appearance that he involuntarily took a step back from the counter. She had very white skin, a pointed nose, and red frizzy hair that surrounded her head like a nimbus of fire. She seemed an anomaly in this land of dark-skinned Cajuns. What was she even doing here? The tag on her pink smock said “Lydia.”

  Alan blinked. Had she said something?

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, what kind of upset stomach do you have? Does it feel like gas? Heartburn? Nausea?”

  “Burning. Like what I imagine an ulcer would feel like.”

  “Ooh. That can’t be good.”

  She came around from behind the counter. Even in the dull glare of the fluorescent lights, she looked radiant. Beneath her frumpy smock she wore a snug gray skirt and low-heeled black pumps. And no stockings, which seemed to him wildly provocative at the time. He followed her to a shelf of stomach medicines. She walked with a wonderful lazy swish of her hips, talking over her left shoulder with a wonderful, lazy drawl.

  “You’re not eating right?”

  “I don’t think it’s that.”

  “Do you drink? Smoke?”

  “No. I’m, ah, a high school science teacher.”

  She laughed once, “Ha! That would do it.” She bent to the shelf of medicines and handed him a bottle of milk of magnesia. “Try this.”

  He took the blue bottle. He didn’t want to leave. He bought six dinner mints at the counter just to prolong his time with her for a few more seconds.

  The next evening he returned to buy some aspirin, and the night after that some Vick’s VapoRub, and then again for some more stomach medicine. He still had that burning in his gut; in fact, since he met her it only seemed to be getting worse. She asked about his classes and about his parents back home in Baton Rouge. He asked about her. She was vague about her family. But she loved the movies and talked about Hollywood actors and actresses as if she knew them all personally. Debbie Reynolds had bought a new house for her and her mother in Brentwood. Cary Grant was going quail hunting with his friends that weekend in England. Hedda Hopper, in her gossip column, was still calling Ava Gardner a home wrecker, but anyone who looked at her could tell it wasn’t true, and didn’t Alan think she was just divine?

  The Barefoot Contessa, that new film with her and Humphrey Bogart, looked like a good one. Ava played Maria Vargas, a poor but proud Spanish cabaret dancer who gets discovered by a rich Hollywood producer and then goes on to marry a real live count. It was supposed to be very sad and romantic—the movie opened and closed with Ava’s death, which in Lydia’s opinion sounded like a terrible way to begin and end a story. “But I’d love to see it just for Ava and Bogart. What a great pair. Don’t you think?”

  Alan agreed with whatever she said. Yes, that did sound like an interesting movie. He wouldn’t mind seeing that himself. When was that showing? Did she know?

  Finally, on the sixth night as he lingered at her register, she slapped his small wrapped package of cough medicine down on the counter and said with something like exasperation in her voice: “Look, if you want to ask me out, just ask me.”

  He would always remember that as the moment he definitely, irrevocably fell for her. The sensation was like dropping into a bed of feathers. He felt his stomach relax, and the burn in his gut vanished in a wisp, pfft!

  That weekend he drove her to Thibodaux to see the movie. As they walked together along the sidewalk, he was struck by how carefully upright she carried herself, as though, with her high heels and erect posture, she was making a studied effort to raise herself above her peers. He bought them popcorn and Cokes in the theater and they took their seats. When they showed the preview trailer before the newsreels and cartoons, Alan didn’t have high hopes for the movie; it looked like the kind of overripe story that he normally avoided: “The world’s most beautiful animal! Spanish gypsy! Café society dancer! The Barefoot Contessa will shock you, provoke you, excite you, as no other film ever has!”

  But when the film began, Lydia was instantly caught up in the story. She sat so still that she appeared spellbound. He looked back and forth from her profile to the screen, wondering what she was seeing there. The light and colors flickering across her pale skin seemed to him to be the projection of her own secret dreams and thoughts playing out across her face. He imagined that this must’ve been what Lydia looked like when she was asleep, and seeing her so unguarded, so exposed, moved him in unexpected ways. When the pregnant Ava got shot at the end, Lydia gasped aloud and grabbed his arm in genuine shock and dismay, so that he wanted to hug her shoulders and kiss her hair and whisper, There, there. It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream.

  After the lights came up and they stood from their seats and started up the aisle, the effect of the film lingered. Even as they left the theater and began walking along the sidewalk, it felt as if the movie hadn’t ended but instead was continuing with another reel, one that now featured them and the town they were in, and the stores they passed, and the people and cars on the sidewalks and streets. When Lydia took his arm and squeezed it, he knew she must’ve been feeling the same thing. That oak tree with its autumn leaves lit by a streetlight; that orange neon sign above a clothing store; that man in the hat lighting a cigarette on the corner; and that woman they passed with the red lipstick who tossed her head back when she laughed: they were all in the movie, too, a romantic story about a scientist and a shopgirl out on their first date in a small southern town. Alan wouldn’t have been surprised to find that when he next opened his mouth to speak, his words came out in song, and the passersby, the man in the hat and the lady with the lipstick, lined up for a dance number and joined in at the chorus.

  He brought her to dinner at a restaurant up the street, and as they settled into the padded booth and picked up their menus, the feeling persisted that everything they said and did was preordained and perfect. Over their hamburger plates they discussed The Barefoot Contessa. Lydia claimed that the movie’s story paralleled Ava Gardner’s own life, and she told Alan all about the actress’s dirt-poor childhood, and the scandal with Frank Sinatra, and her affair with Howard Hughes.…

  “Huh. I did not know that,” he replied.

  They talked about Ava’s and Bogart’s characters in the movie. Lydia insisted that they were meant for each other, and that this was the tragedy at the heart of the film—the barefoot contessa was desperately searching for what could only be a substitute for the true love she was denied. Alan, enjoying the discussion, argued that while they might have looked good together on the screen, those two characters could never have been happy with each other. Bogart—or rather, the fellow Bogart played—was just being realistic about the potential difficulties of a relationship between two people as different as they were. Besides, they were both already married, and they couldn’t very well just—

  “So you think they were better off that way? Each of them stuck in their own miserable lives?”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “Even if they belonged together? Even if they were so obviously perfect for each other?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose—”

  “Don’t you think she’s an attractive woman?”

  “Why, yes. Yes, of course I do. She’s a very attractive woman. Anyone can see that.”

  While gesturing nervously with a french fry, Alan accidentally got ketchup on his silk tie. Lydia ordered him to take it off immediately, called for soda water, and sprinkled his tie with salt and dabbed away the stain with paper napkins. When she’d finished, she held up his tie for him to see. “There. Good as new, Mr. Broussard,” she said, and he thought that this, too, was perfectly executed, a moment arranged by some not-so-subtle director in the sky to demonstrate their compatibility. He was already beginning to see them as a team, not so very different from Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner in the movie: he with his good sense, she with her sensitivity.<
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  They went out again after this, and he visited her every day at the drugstore, but she never allowed him to pick her up at home; she always met him in town for their dates. Alan didn’t press the issue, but her evasiveness about her family did seem odd. Finally, on their fourth date, she invited him to her home. When he arrived she jogged out to his car to meet him. “My father …,” she tried to warn him as she led him along the broken sidewalk to her front door, but then she let it drop.

  The house was a tiny Depression-era cottage with slope-roofed addons and a barking dog on a chain in the backyard. When they walked in, her parents were standing stiffly side by side on a square of vinyl laid atop the worn carpeting in the middle of the front room, as though she had posed them there and told them not to dare move until she and her beau had left. She introduced them rather formally as Robert and Dorothy Simoneaux.

  Her mother had Lydia’s Irish-red hair and pale skin. But her father … That was when Alan saw what she’d been afraid to tell him: her father had only one arm. Or, more precisely, he had one and a half arms. The right sleeve of his white shirt flapped loose below the elbow. Alan hardly had time to register his surprise before Bob quickly proffered his left hand. Alan shook it in his right hand, their fingers gripping each other’s awkwardly but firmly, like the couplings of two railroad cars jammed together.

  Lydia didn’t give them time to talk and hustled Alan out of the house minutes later. She seemed ashamed of her parents. “Bob and Dot,” she complained. “It sounds like a drive-in diner. It sounds like a laundromat.”

  But Alan thought they seemed like decent enough people, and over the next few visits he learned what a good gumbo Dot could make, and he learned from Bob himself about his job as a salesman with a local drilling supply company, and how he got his start as a guide leading surveyors in a pirogue through the swamps and bayous around the parish, and his wildcat years as a tool pusher on rigs in the Gulf, up until the time a stupid new roughneck lost his grip on the tongs and the chain came whipping around and snatched his hand right off. He’d been fitted for a prosthetic, but he hated the damn thing; it just got in the way. One weekend Bob took him fishing out on Lake Boeuf, and Alan enjoyed it more than he ever thought he could. He liked the man’s quiet, sneaky humor, and he felt touched when Bob stopped him and showed him the proper way to scale and filet a fish, flipping and slicing it with a delicate, unselfconscious ease using the shiny callused stump of his right forearm to brace it down on the cutting board.…

  No, in spite of Lydia’s embarrassment about them, he didn’t have any problems with her parents. And that summer, as soon as he finished his first year of teaching, they were married. Just like that. They took the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles for their honeymoon, returned, and soon they were busy with all the work of setting up a home.

  He signed on for another year at Terrebonne High, and then they had their first child; and so he signed on for another year, and then they had their second child. Before he knew it, he’d become that middle-aged schoolteacher he’d never wanted to be, lecturing forever from the same old textbook, himself apparently unchanging even as the years hurtled past and his students rotated in and out of his classroom so quickly that they became a blur, giving him the impression that he was standing still while the rest of the world spun faster and faster around him.

  From time to time he would look back on that night at the drugstore and wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t stopped—if instead of stepping inside for medicine, he had walked on, taken a turn around the square to settle his stomach. In his dreams he would actually sometimes see that other Alan, the one he might have been, wearing a white coat and goggles and working in a sophisticated-looking research laboratory. Or he would spot him, that other Alan, while watching another Apollo launch on TV with his family: look, there he was, sitting in front of an oscilloscope, twirling knobs and listening on a headset as Mission Control began the countdown.

  But that other Alan, he knew, was just a fantasy, as distant and irretrievable as his own childhood. There was no going back. He was who he was. Life had delivered him here, where, twenty years later, he was winding down yet another semester of freshman Earth and Space Science. He was a schoolteacher now. Now and forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “AND that’s how it happened,” he told me, ending his story. “As fast as that. Ka-boom! Here we are. Mr. and Mrs. Alan Broussard. For better or worse, till death do us part.”

  My father gave a quick, stiff smile across the table. He picked up his turkey sandwich and resumed eating. The lettuce crunched between his teeth; a dribble of tomato and mayonnaise fell to the plate. I picked up my own sandwich and took a few bites.

  I liked my father’s version of the story well enough, but hearing it now left me oddly unsatisfied. It sounded almost too neat, too easy to be true. And what was that note of regret I thought I detected at the end? I got the feeling he wasn’t telling me everything.

  Besides, his story didn’t really answer my questions about Gabriella. What about that mysterious attraction that drew people together in the first place? How did that work? And how did he know that he loved her? And that she loved him? How could you ever be sure?

  When I asked him this, he stopped chewing. We had never talked seriously about these things before, and he seemed to recognize the urgency in my voice.

  “What is love, basically? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Right.”

  He set down his sandwich. “Hm. That’s a good one, all right. Well, okay, let’s see.”

  He began by saying how, in biology, there was actually a whole science of attraction. Those who studied this could explain it better than he could, but basically, it involved hormones, pheromones, estrogen levels, things like that. Looking at it in terms of evolution, he said, it was well known that females of a species were attracted to partners whose physical features and behaviors indicated that they would be good providers and protectors, whereas the male preferred females who looked like they would produce healthy offspring. When one met a potential mate, he or she communicated his or her interest through certain signals, certain sounds and gestures. He talked about courtship rituals among animals, such as the bird-of-paradise in New Guinea, which spread its feathers and danced and hung upside down from a tree in order to lure females.…

  He must’ve seen he was losing me, because he stopped talking.

  “That doesn’t help, does it?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  He sighed. He took off his glasses and began cleaning them with his handkerchief. Without them on, he looked naked and vulnerable. Gray purses of flesh hung below his eyes, and his nose appeared thinner, bonier. A paler, older version of my father had taken his place across the table—a man almost a stranger to me. He grimaced slightly, as though he were experiencing again the indigestion he’d felt all those years ago in the drugstore. When he spoke again, it was with effort.

  “Look, I’ll be honest with you, Junior. It’s difficult, this business of love. When you’re young, your head’s filled with all these romantic notions that you get from songs and stories and movies, telling you how great and magical and mysterious love is. How it’s going to last forever. Love love love. And sure, that’s good, that’s fine. That’s part of being young. You need that kind of … kind of belief.”

  He grimaced again, a single twitch on the left side of his face.

  “But as you get older … as you get older, you realize that those are just, you know, stories. They’re kind of like fairy tales that we tell each other, tell our kids, to keep us going. Because they’re not real, you know. Not really. Real life isn’t like that, not like in movies and songs. Real life is about hard work, and family, and responsibility. So as you grow older, you buckle down, you get busy with your job, you try to do good work, try to take care of your family. And pretty soon you don’t worry about love so much anymore. Maybe you stop thinking about it altogether. And I’m not saying that’s
bad. That’s just the way it is. That’s part of growing up. That’s what they call becoming an adult.”

  What was my father saying? That the story about the boy and the girl in the drugstore wasn’t true? Or that he didn’t love her? Or she him? Or, worse, that love didn’t even exist? That it was just a made-up story for children and fools?

  I felt queasy. It was like he had led me to the edge of a bottomless pit and pointed over the side. I could feel the chilly air rushing up from the black depths, smell the rank odor of death. Take a good look, he might’ve been telling me. See? There’s nothing there. Nothing at all.

  He put his glasses back on and gave a quick sniff as he settled them into place on his nose. When he lifted his head, the light coming in from the window fell on the lenses so that they were like two small, flashing shields.

  He stood up and brought his plate to the sink. He stopped behind me and quietly rested a hand on my shoulder.

  “But hey. Don’t worry about all that. You’re still young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Now’s the time for you to be having fun. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  But too late: the damage had been done. He’d taken that white worm of doubt and planted it in me. He might have called it a healthy dose of skepticism, or even objective reality. But his worm would stay with me, and even though I could tamp it down, forget about it for weeks at a time, the worm would always be there, a wriggling reminder of my worst fears:

  That life wouldn’t get any easier as I got older. If anything, it would only get harder as I grew up to the realization, as he apparently had, that all our beliefs were built on a flimsy scaffolding of stories, and that happiness was nothing but a wish and love was only a lie.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT