Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  A smaller invasion of Cate’s individual privacy is Graham’s open-ended presence in her apartment. Her spare room has been taken over with command-post electronics and a giant bed he had delivered soon after he arrived. It goes up and down, can be hard or soft, hot or cold. Plus, it vibrates. Other than this anomalous room, her apartment is of a piece, a set of sorts. Well, of course it would be. The play would be titled 1944. She’s fascinated by this period, which she knows mostly from a love of its movies. She loves the furnishings, the reliance on hats, the cavalier smoking, the enormous cars. She has combed junk shops for old furniture from these days gone by, reupholstered several pieces herself in dark mohair. Maroon and moss green. She painted the walls the color of a paper bag. Possibly too much bamboo. A heavy, standing ashtray is surrounded by a population of emphysemic ghosts. She enjoys standing in one room or another, surveying the total effect, also the small pieces that make it up. Her bedroom furniture is of a heavy, dark wood with lighter panels of inlay. She has an indigo chaise by the window, lampshades with fringe. Framed and hung rotogravure portraits of movie stars from the studio days.

  Graham is spoiling this “curated” (she only ever uses this word to herself) environment. But he’s a good friend, not to mention he bought the apartment for her.

  When she gets out of the shower, she can hear him chatting with Lucille Rae. On the screen of one laptop, Lucille Rae is peering seriously at the camera. Behind her head and shoulders are shelves crammed full of teddy bears. She appears to be sitting on the teddy bear subway at rush hour.

  Graham holds up the laptop and Cate waves at it. “Hey, Lucille Rae.” Lucille Rae lives in the Black Hills in South Dakota, which she’s certain lie on top of huge hidden bunkers filled with recorded phone calls.

  Having come farther into the room, Cate catches a whiff of mustiness off Graham, mustiness and herbal supplements. When did he start looking and smelling like a nut? He’s developing tics. Rotating his head to get a crick out of his neck. Picking at his fingers, tearing up the cuticles until they bleed. He doesn’t wash his hair, wears it pulled back in a greasy ponytail. When did he start sleeping in his clothes, or maybe it’s that he’s working in his pajamas? Hard to tell with the garments—there’s really no other way to describe them—he wears. Hemp and unbleached cotton, drawstring closures. He looks like someone who has an entourage of naive followers.

  Fate dealt Graham a joker. He only intended his big, cheerful play to be a temporary financial solution. He wanted to make a play to which you could bring your nephew, your lover, and your great aunt. He didn’t allow himself any artistic intentions, just stuck to the template of combining surefire elements of Broadway blockbusters. These included:

  cuddly animals;

  amateur detectives;

  inspirational songs about possibilities, potential, romantic happiness, durable friendship, and beating the odds; and finally,

  audience interaction (children pulled onstage from their seats to dance with Petey Panda and his friends; an audience-chosen ending).

  He put all this into a jumberator and what came out was Pand-a-Rama!, which by now has had two Broadway runs and has four touring companies roaming the world, a movie version, a novelization, a video game, and a line of detective panda action figures. He will never have to work again in his life. He will always be famous for this unsinkable piece of junk.

  What the indignity bought him is endless time to write and produce plays that are brilliant but so obscure and opaque hardly anyone comes to them. The shows are elaborate puzzles the audience must solve. People don’t want to work this hard for their entertainment, or take notes in the dark (he provides lighted pens). Or come three nights in a row to see all the acts necessary to complete the “geopolitical acrostic.”

  His obsession with surveillance has taken over his writing. The play he’s working on now takes place in a single room, underground. There are only two characters. They are not friends; they’ve just been assigned together to the room. They wear identical gray jumpsuits. They are both listening in on phone calls. Their only interaction with each other is when they take off their headsets for a coffee break. They only talk about the coffee, although coffee may be a code word, also stale cookie. It is never clear who they work for, who is benefiting from their machinations. They might or might not be facilitating something that might or might not be a zero-sum endgame, and the winners are not going to be regular people, or even, necessarily, humans.

  The audience, he’s told Cate, hears every phone call. What he’s trying to capture, he has told her, is a very slight amount of change. Picture a vacant field on a cloudy day at five-eighteen in the afternoon, then at five-twenty.

  The whole apartment smells of chemical lemon. Which means Pledge. Which means Jennifer was here today. Jennifer is a small, amazingly industrious woman Graham pays to come in every week to clean. When she leaves, the entire apartment is immaculate. She has three cell phones (also four passports under different names; Cate went through her purse once), which she sets out on the kitchen counter while she’s cleaning; she is vigilantly poised for incoming information. Her driver’s license identifies her as Raluca. She comes to work in a fur coat. She told Cate she made it.

  She comes from terrible poverty in a beautiful setting in the Carpathian Mountains, a rural area, grindingly poor. Cate stands a little in awe of Jennifer. She has lived through extreme cold, hunger, and fear. She had three root canals done without novocaine, just gripping the arms of the dentist’s chair. She has triumphed over circumstances of poverty and ignorance and is now negotiating her way through a culture that does not value her. Still, it’s better to admire her from a little distance. To enter into a conversation is a step into quicksand. Her main topic is her various ailments. (She has so many that, if you added up all of them, Cate once figured, every single part of her body has hurt, blown up, been infested with ringworm, or suddenly prolapsed. Or itched like crazy, or, according to her, really needed to be sawed off.) She has a boyfriend, who is hiding somewhere. From Interpol. Cate didn’t know Interpol still existed. Whatever he did was not his fault. Legal maneuvers are being arranged. Things may or may not work out. Once she gets going, there’s no stopping her. She doesn’t break for breath or paragraphing. Interaction for her is you nodding at her rhetorical “Do you know what it is that I am saying?” tagged onto whatever run-on sentence. There’s no polite way to extricate yourself. If they are both at home, Cate and Graham work a system where, after ten minutes, one goes into a closet and calls the other, pretending to be someone important with something crucial to be attended to. Immediately.

  It’s easier to just be out on Wednesdays. Even Graham finds somewhere to go.

  * * *

  “Hungry?” he says now. He and Sailor have followed Cate into the kitchen. “New supplies for base camp.” He nods toward the table. Ripped-open Dean & DeLuca FedEx cartons with their arctic blocks of Styrofoam padding, their steaming packets of dry ice, clutter the surface. Large chunks of cheese, three bottles (one already open) of Pouilly-Fuissé, a package of shrink-wrapped blinis next to a jar of caviar, a crock of vegetable pâté.

  “Not really. Mostly I’m exhausted.”

  Sailor has positioned himself close by her side, which, not coincidentally, puts him near the cheese. She takes a few of the crackers billed on the package as “handmade in Abruzzo.” She imagines old women in a small factory bent over as they shape cracker dough into deliberately asymmetrical squares. “I’m just going to give him a little snack.” She unwraps a chunk of Humboldt Fog, breaks off a piece, and tucks it between two crackers. Sailor is sitting up on his haunches, his head cocked to one side. Even mooching, he looks majestic. He was less majestic when he arrived. After a few months living in the midst of Graham’s disintegrating marriage, Sailor looked middle-aged. Heavy, slow, fur clotted, one eye crusty with what turned out to be a minor infection. Since he has been here, Cate has taken him to the vet, put him on a feeding schedule, and added green be
ans to his dinner. She takes him on a couple of walks every day to supplement whatever Graham doesn’t do. They are still participating in the fiction that Sailor is his dog.

  * * *

  “Do you ever feel, deep in your heart, that Lucille Rae might be a crackpot?” Cate has just poured herself a glass of a dramatically expensive wine.

  “No, she’s not a crackpot. The crackpots are all focused on stuff that’s already gone down. Falling towers and missing planes. They’re nostalgists. Whatever bad thing that’s already happened isn’t going to happen again. At least not in the same way. It’s much harder to look ahead and beyond. To use events predictively. To form the near future, give it a shape.”

  “Okay. Then what is she digging up in hillbilly holler?”

  “Don’t call her a hillbilly.”

  “Well, she does lives in a hilly part of the country.”

  “It’s not the hill, and you know it; it’s the billy. You wouldn’t like it if someone referred to you as a Chicagobilly. Just because she wears terrycloth and her hair is fluffy, you don’t take her seriously. Did your set work tonight?” He is always happy to steer the conversation toward At Ease. Eleanor Quinn, his most recent ex-wife, the one who threw him out, plays one of the main characters. He loves hearing anything unfortunate about Eleanor.

  She’s an impressive actress; she’s only attached to this stupid production as a favor to the director. That she and Cate are involved in the same play isn’t that much of a coincidence; the world of Chicago theater is like a tangle of double-sided sticky tape.

  “My set isn’t up to the task of saving this play. Some things shouldn’t be revived. Revived implies something that was once alive. Here’s a line.” She pulls the script from her messenger bag, flips through it, then reads aloud.

  “ ‘You hate me because I remind you of your mother.’ I mean, you can’t use that line. Maybe Sophocles could have, but—I mean, really. How’s yours going?”

  “Still tinkering with act six.”

  * * *

  By 3 a.m. they have polished off one bottle of wine and half of a second, and are now walking Sailor together. Sailor loves this. He pushes his chest out in pride at showing off his family, although at this hour no one except barflies is out and about. This is a real fall night: skittering leaves along the pavement have replaced the summer’s cicada din. A Peapod truck wanders by once, then again.

  “Something is definitely off about that,” Graham says. “Do they even offer three a.m. deliveries?” But this doesn’t throw him into a spiral of worry that the van is a secret CIA surveillance vehicle. He is too distracted, teasing apart the threads of Eleanor’s complex personality. Cate doesn’t see any complexity to her at all. While she can subtly delineate any role she plays, in real life Eleanor is just a blunt instrument of ambition, also deeply unpleasant. It’s a mystery to Cate why Graham is hung up on her. In spite of the fact that, at the end of their marriage, she put a live rat in the glove compartment of his car. Cate is at a loss in advising on the more terrifying variants of love.

  the scary hand

  Down on Blackhawk at her workshop, Cate spray-paints the desk for the sergeant’s office in At Ease. The shop is a small brick building on an industrial block south of the North and Clybourn junction. The rent is ridiculously low. Her landlord appears to have forgotten her. He hasn’t raised the rent in five years. If he does, she probably won’t be able to afford it anymore.

  Warm air is coming in gusts, and she is dancing around outside the back door in a mask and goggles, dodging the paint as it plays in the wind. Her workshop is in a neighborhood of factories, but also dance clubs, and she notices that a small pack of large women who all seem to be costumed as Adele are running with peals of hilarity across the street. Warming up for some later, main event. They wave at her, possibly thinking her mask and goggles are a postapocalyptic costume.

  Shit, she thinks. Halloween. She’s late. Trick-or-treating has already begun.

  She finishes up, then tents a tarp loosely over the desk. She needs it to dry by tomorrow morning, when Stig will come by to help load it into her SUV and get it to the theater.

  * * *

  Halloween in the city has been escalating the past few years. Now the parties start the weekend before, and trick-or-treaters are a mix of kids and adults. It’s five when Cate gets to Neale’s house; the winds have died down and evening is coming in—mild, with a thin glaze of winter approaching. The crowd is already swelling. Trick-or-treaters flood the sidewalks and parkways, a renegade traffic jam, stumbling over their elaborate costumes, blinded by their masks, urged by their parents toward the candy.

  Lawns set up as small graveyards also feature zombies emerging from holes in the grass. Feet stick out of a glowing Weber. Fog billows from doorways. A couple of guys lie in their front yard moaning, knives stuck in their bloody chests. Behind one front window obscured by a translucent shower curtain liner, stooped ghouls creep back and forth, then press their palms wildly at the window as though trying to escape. Someone has hung a giant plush-toy tarantula from a tree branch over the sidewalk. It’s on an elastic string and a pulley, and drops down on one unsuspecting kid after another, so there’s about a scream a minute.

  BLOOD—5 CENTS

  with a pitcher and cups is offered at an unattended card-table stand.

  Almost as many adults as children are in costume. Pennywise the evil clown is popular this year, along with a strong perennial contingent of SpongeBobs. A significant part of the population has made its own costumes, some so idiosyncratic you have to ask, “What are you?”

  * * *

  “I went out for a look earlier. We’ve got some stiff competition this year,” Neale says as she hangs a cardboard sign in the front window, drawn to approximate neon tubing:

  BATES MOTEL

  VACANCY

  “What do you think?” Joe says about his costume. He has just come out onto the front porch. Kiera is right next to him. She’s wearing a lime-green jacket and dark green tights. Joe has on a white dress shirt he asked Neale to get him at Value Village. This now has the initials NV markered in monogrammy letters on the front pocket. He’s also wearing a Richard Nixon mask he must have found at one of the pop-up costume shops along Clark.

  “We’re together, that’s what you have to think about,” Kiera says.

  “You’re green with envy!” Neale says, and both kids start laughing so hard they have to hold each other up. Sailor jumps up on both of them, to join in the fun.

  “Do you think everyone will guess right away?” Joe says, his voice boxed in by the mask.

  “No,” Cate reassures them. “It definitely takes some putting together. I didn’t get it until your mother did. What’s the Richard Nixon part, though?”

  “Just I don’t like my face so much tonight. The mask is good.” Cate wonders what this is about, this self-consciousness. He is a beautiful boy.

  They’re itching to go. Sailor thinks he’s going with them, which he is not.

  Cate thinks Joe is a boy out of his time. He lives in a culture he has created to the side of his peers. The good thing about this is Neale doesn’t have the standard-issue parental concerns. She doesn’t have to worry about him spending too much time on video games, since he doesn’t play them. She doesn’t have to worry about him getting a concussion on some playing field, since he is not interested in team sports of any kind.

  His interests are obscure. The noise music. According to Neale, he listens a lot—maybe too much?—to William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, essentially the sounds of a tape wearing out as it plays over and over for hours. And of course, there are the Mexican Porno Nuns. He’s also into film history. None of the other kids are, and so he watches old movies, sometimes with Neale, but more often by himself. He can stream almost anything he wants from the twentieth century. They go downtown to the Siskel Center or over to the Music Box for what he calls the “theatrical experience.” Neale is grateful for Kiera’s presence,
Theo’s too, to dilute Joe’s solitude.

  “I can drive you over,” Neale says.

  “Actually, it’s like two blocks away,” Joe says. “At Michael’s house.”

  “Don’t cut through the vacant lot,” Neale says.

  “I know. We won’t. I mean of course we won’t.”

  * * *

  Once they’re gone, Neale says, “What’s up with ‘actually’? Suddenly it’s all over the place. Isn’t ‘actually’ supposed to imply a mistake being corrected? I don’t believe I said anything that would require a correction.”

  “I think it’s a little snippiness entering the larger conversation. I get it all the time. Like I call someone’s office and an assistant answers and I ask if I can speak with Mr. Boomba and she says, ‘Well actually, he isn’t here.’ ”

  “I’ve noticed that, too. It’s probably part of something bigger. It’s probably hooked up somehow with that voice sales clerks use at Banana Republic, high-pitched and so insanely cheerful you’re supposed to understand it’s ironic. That it means they hate their job and think you look fat in the sweater and are an idiot to pay as much for it as you are.”

  They set up their candy distribution point on Neale’s front steps. They offer fun-size Snickers from an orange plastic bowl with a creepy gray-green rubber hand coming out of its center. A motion detector sets off the hand whenever someone reaches for the candy. At the moment, it’s responding to five grabby little Spider-Men.

  THANK you!!!! the creepy hand screeches in a loud, witchy voice while it squirms around a little. Other times the hand cackles HAP-py Halloween!!!!

  Sailor is unflapped by these spasms; if he has to go past the hand to get the candy, he will. Cate gets him to move around to her other side and puts the bowl between herself and Neale and he simmers down. Being part Lab, he’s in general a laid-back guy. He leans against Cate, watches the action, plots how to get back around to the Snickers.