Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  Maureen does not look at the castle. Instead she says, in a tone that applies a sympathetic overlay on exasperation, “By May, you’ll probably be in more of a vacation mood.”

  “I know yes would be the best response here, but the truth is I don’t know what kind of mood I’ll be in a couple of months from now. Or even tomorrow. Too much is going on. In my life, but also in my head. Do you remember that carnival ride? I don’t know why I’m reminding you about old carnival rides. Your father probably built one in your backyard. So it was a cylinder and you strapped yourself standing against the inside wall. And then it started spinning and then it started tilting—”

  “The Round-Up!”

  “Exactly. But you don’t fall forward off the wall. On account of centrifugal force. That’s me. I’m spinning, but the spin is what’s keeping me from peeling off the wall. That’s kind of why I don’t want to see that therapist you recommended.” Maureen has therapist recommendations in the same way she has a stash of pills for every minor mood problem. “I’m sure she’s brilliant, but I know she’s going to want to slow down the ride. And I’m afraid that’s when I’ll fall off.”

  Maureen doesn’t say anything. Cate wishes she would say something indicating she gets it. But she doesn’t. Her mouth is moving around a little from side to side. As though she’s sucking on a small, intensely flavored candy. Cate tries to wait this out, but in the end, blinks first.

  “Do you think we should sign up for the day tour of the famous whiskey distillery?” These sentences are so difficult to form. Her dread of the trip moves sluggishly through her veins. She’s not sure if it’s the trip, or the implication it holds that she and Maureen will still be together in a distant May. What so recently looked like the stable, portion-controlled life she was aspiring to now comes with a sense of suffocation.

  Maureen has been maybe three of the four pushpins holding Cate’s Plan C to the wall. She rounds up a few doubts and tries to give her the benefit of them. So her ethics are a little sketchy. So for a while she was going steady with her sister. So what, really? Nobody’s perfect. She still often enjoys Maureen’s company, and if she’s circumspect, she could hang on to that without giving up the small, secret piece of Dana she has. She just has to keep Dana in a back pocket. As soon as she has formed this thought she’s ashamed of it. If she were the truly decent human she’d like to be, she’d be honest about what’s going on. Which would be the beginning of the end of her and Maureen. But she’s not there yet.

  She doesn’t know what to hope for. A bittersweet breakup in April? A quarantine put on all the Hebrides, Inner and Outer, on account of some species-jumping sheep pathogen? Maureen helpfully moving on to someone else? Maureen catching Cate sneaking around with Dana? Even that would be better than Cate having to introduce the matter of breaking up in some quiet conversation in a private place, a conversation begun with throat clearing. Tonight would be a perfect opportunity, but she just can’t do it. Tonight will not be even a slim chapter in her autobiography: Profiles in Courage.

  Then it’s Maureen who clears her throat. “I feel terrible about this, but the thing is I’m not going to be able to come to New York for your opening night. ZordorWorld is opening that weekend. They’re freaked out about costume malfunctions. There will be a hundred and eighty employees rigged up as intergalactic functionaries, and so they figure something will for sure go wrong, and I need to be there when that happens. I’m so sorry, honey.”

  Here is where human life gets ridiculous. After all her internal distancing, instead of being relieved in this moment, Cate finds herself a little miffed that Maureen is blowing off her big moment.

  opening night

  Usually Cate stays with a play through the first or second preview night. If everything is going smoothly, her work is done. With Blanks, though, she wants to see the impression it makes on the opening-night crowd, spot the critics, count the curtain calls, duck the champagne corks popping at the after-party. It’s a beautiful, fragrant nocturnal flower. She wants to be there when it unfolds.

  An hour before the theater doors open, she’s double-checking the tech they’re using to project Vita’s letters of seduction, passion, and eventual dismissal onto a sepia screen above the writing tower where Vita (her body double is Ally Wilber, a totally unfamous actress with a long, bony frame) sits at her desk, her back to the audience, writing on an iPad. Ally is in place now, fooling around, writing, Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, over and over.

  “Whatever size you have now,” she tells the tech guy who’s running the projection, “Double it.” Then, “Yes. Perfect.”

  From there she goes onstage to unnecessarily fuss with some fake clematis climbing the tower wall. She’s just burning off nervous vapors, like everyone else. Backstage, the air is alive with hope and vanity. Molly and Lauren are in a tight huddle with Judd Shoemaker, working on a small dialog revision for Harold Nicolson. Costumes are checked back and front. Ruby Pepper tries to engage Cate in a silly bit of conversation.

  “I’ve just rushed down here by the tube,” she says in an annoying impersonation of someone out of breath.

  “Right,” Cate says. She seriously doubts the London Underground even existed in Virginia Woolf’s time. She waits until Ruby is gone, then Googles it, and unfortunately finds it opened in 1863. Still, she has a hard time picturing Virginia hanging from a strap next to someone eating “crisps” from a bag.

  When she sees Gladys coming out of her dressing room in fit-pitching mode about something or other, Cate decides to get up out of the oncoming fray and climbs to her reliable perch, the fly gallery, to watch the audience settle in. She’s not expecting to see anyone she knows. Maureen is at the amusement park. Neale is feeling too fragile to navigate crowded airports. This seemed reasonable when she announced it, and Cate said she totally understood, but really, she doesn’t. She took it as one more piece of the distance Neale has been throwing between the two of them.

  Then, midway through her scan, in one of the back rows of the orchestra floor, on the aisle stage left, she sees Dana. Or someone she thinks is Dana, but Cate’s desire that it be Dana fills in the rest. She can’t be sure, because she can’t make out details at this distance, and then the house lights are dimming and the curtain is going up on Vita’s living room. The old phone, heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil, goes off on the end table, its huge, jangly ring drawing Vita, handsome in breeches, in through the garden door to pick up the receiver and shout, a little breathless, “Hullo? Yes? Well you see I was all the way down by the moat” to begin the play.

  * * *

  Looking down on her work as the play rolls out, sets thick enough to accommodate big characters, she is happier than she’s been in a long time. She holds still a moment to feel her accomplishment. She designed these sets. She’ll get to make others for plays as good as this one. She saved her friend. She has a fabulous dog. Dana is possibly sitting in a partially obstructed seat at the back of the theater.

  * * *

  When the lights come up for intermission, the bad seat occupied by the real or imagined Dana is empty. Cate goes out to the lobby, then onto the sidewalk in front of the theater, then into the crush in the ladies’ room, but she’s nowhere to be found. The mystery buzzes inside her in a low register through the rest of the play, and through the after-party until she is exhausted, on her way to the hotel in a cab, when it occurs to her that Dana—if it was her—has moved to the unsupervised area of the playground.

  erasure

  She comes home looking forward to spooling out her success for Graham. The reviews of the play have been mostly terrific. (One from a theater site was so critical, though, it set everyone off their pins until they agreed to gently set it aside as a peculiar outlier, a singed edge on their success.) Two print reviews singled out Cate’s sets for praise. Molly and Lauren want to talk with her about something new. She’s coming in on a high, but also agitated. She needs Graham’s gravity and Sailor’s happiness just for her bei
ng happy.

  But Sailor isn’t swishing back and forth on the other side of the apartment door, and doesn’t come out from Graham’s room. She goes in to look. The room has been cleared out. Cleared. The stupendous bed is gone, the folding tables and rolling office chair. The Ikea bureau. The garments that had been hanging in the closet. There’s a surgical look to the scene. He probably wiped his DNA off the light switch.

  A note is stuck to the door.

  Sailor’s at Eleanor’s.

  Can you pick him up soon?

  Thanks for everything.

  Her cell announces a new message, this one on the latest encrypted app Graham installed on her phone. She opens it; it’s a photo of him, an old picture she took during an early stretch of their marriage. A farm field in Michigan where they stopped once for him to pose in front of a creepy rural oddity. A brick right triangle poking out of the ground, a door on its high end. Clearly an enclosure covering the steps of a staircase going down into the ground, ground situated in the middle of nowhere.

  And then the photo dissolves and the message never existed.

  vue du lac

  At the toll plaza, she takes Sailor out for a quick spin, puts him back in the car. “I will be three minutes, tops,” she tells him. “Don’t start barking like a maniac.”

  In the ladies’ room, she’s washing her hands when she feels a swift sliver, a whippy little breeze touching what she has come to think of as her new exposure. She checks to see what’s reflected in the wall’s length of mirrors. Regular women, one old but dressed like a teenager, one with two small kids she’s trying to fit into a stall with her because they’re too young to be left alone. So, all in all, a normal roadside population.

  Before that afternoon in December, she was blissfully myopic, unaware that she might need to look over her shoulder; or sideways, into doorways as she came up on them. Or to scan the mirrors in a restroom. She used to walk leisurely through parking garages, even deserted ones, even at night. She stopped to help when approached by strangers on the street wanting directions. Now a heavy velvet curtain has risen, revealing all around her a lively pageant of possible danger. She not only sees it, but feels it whispering over her skin, as though, even when she’s fully dressed, a fresh patch of nakedness has presented itself. The very peculiar thing is that this doesn’t make her frightened; rather, it enlivens her.

  * * *

  Back in the car, she drives up through southern Wisconsin, also through March. The bleakness adherent to the month is that although the Midwestern winter is past its most brutal stretch, everyone is by now beaten down, and late assaults land on what’s already bruised. A fresh cold snap holds no bracing novelty. Leftover snow is by now a pewter color that, on too many days, matches the sky. Eventually, though, at some point in March, winter gets broken. That happened yesterday. Today a watery sun hangs in a pale sky. Cate puts down all the windows so she and Sailor can smell the earth thawing on both sides of the highway.

  After getting off I-90, Cate winds chaotically around Madison a little (“Recalculating. At your next opportunity, make a U-turn,” says the nonjudgmental WAZE voice) before finding Neale’s address. The apartment is on the third story of a tan brick building in a complex of maybe twenty units with a developer-generated, meaning-free name—Wainscot Village—a featureless box fronted by a parking lot with covered spaces.

  “Come on,” she says to Sailor, opening the door on his side. “Time to get social.”

  Vestigial blue salt crunches under her feet on the metal stairs that run between the sections of the building. Sailor lags behind, peeing on several of the bushes that form a sort of hedge between the lot and the building.

  “Hey you!” she calls down to him and he focuses and follows.

  When they get to the door, Cate hears big life on the other side. Different sorts of clatter. Plates and silverware. Cabinets snapping shut with light thwaps. Voices without clear words. Orders given and taken, then laughter. Inside, Neale and Joe and Claude are getting ready for her. It’s half past noon; lunch is assembling. And though the assembly is on her behalf, she pauses before pressing the doorbell. She fears that even with the door opened she will feel just as shut away from Neale, that this visit is a formality to firm up the lie that their friendship is still solid—a lie Neale has been heavily promoting ever since she decided to make this move. Cate hates these conversations.

  She rings the bell and the door opens, revealing such a happy Neale—“Come in, come in, oh you look great”—pulling Cate by the hand.

  Claude is working at the kitchen island, slicing hard-boiled eggs, then fanning the slices open, one to each plate of also-fanned lettuce leaves, next to small stacks of green beans. He looks up and smiles, flashing teeth blindingly white, endearingly crooked.

  “Cate.”

  He’s such a handsome guy, more so even than when he and Neale were together. Five years of meditation and organic gardening have left him sculpted in that yogi way and glistening with peace. He and Neale are wearing stretchy yoga outfits. They are, Neale explains, just back from teaching a Saturday afternoon couples class. Both of them are working at two local studios while they get their act together to open one of their own. Madison, they both think, is a town with deep, under-tapped yoga potential.

  “He’s arranging our salads,” Neale explains. “Because he’s French. No careless tossing for them. Take off your parka, give it to me, do you want something to drink?” Cate was just about to grab a can of pop from the refrigerator, the way she always does. But then she remembers this is a different household. She tacks around, stays put, and says, “By ‘something to drink,’ do you mean a juice that’s bluish green?”

  “I got diet ginger ale for you. I’m the perfect hostess. Do you want ice?”

  “Why not?”

  Neale grabs ice cubes out of the freezer, inadvertently putting herself in the way of Claude’s reach for something on a high cabinet shelf. He kisses her at the temple, just a brush of lips. For some reason, Cate didn’t factor romance into Claude’s return. She thought that part was all over for them, that the new arrangement was just about calming things down for Neale, and helping out with Joe. This doesn’t make Cate jealous exactly, but it does prompt a need to cheer herself up with a little schadenfreude, which means scanning all of the apartment’s terrible design elements.

  Everything is tricky here, pretending to be what it’s not. Press-board cabinets with a “walnut” veneer. Formica in a “granite” pattern. White metal folding closet doors with a “wood” grain. Windows with plastic inserts to make the glass look paned. Everything removed miles and miles from the walnut forest and the Italian granite quarry and the old-world mullion shop. Although the apartment does exist in the physical world, it is in a way, virtual. The air is thin—warm and dry as it comes out of the floor vents. She can see that Neale has tried to overlay this bleak rental unit with domestic touches that wouldn’t have occurred to her back in her old house, where function was the only consideration, where form didn’t even bother to follow. Here, though, a fake fireplace has been filled with a grate and an arrangement of birch logs that will never be burned. On the far wall, though, a sliding glass door to a balcony reveals a real fire inside a small grill, which is currently aglow with coals. Claude goes out and slaps on two tuna steaks and sits on a bent lawn chair to oversee their progress from raw to raw-but-seared.

  He knocks on the glass and waves Cate outside.

  “We have, you see, a très belle vue du lac.” And he’s technically correct. A narrow strip of lake is definitely visible between two other apartment buildings jammed in closer to the water. Which is very still, the ice just having melted. Neale complained on the phone about the saws of local ice fishermen, saying she’d probably be bitching about the engines of powerboats in the summer. But today all is very blue and still.

  Rationally, Cate understands Neale’s move. Everything she has done to put space and change between herself and the assault is understandabl
e. Although Cate was there to save her, she was not reliably around once Blanks started sucking her away. Meanwhile, Neale couldn’t be alone—how could she be? So she got free of the city and her neighborhood and her house and her hovering parents, grabbed a husband out of marital retirement, and bolted with him in tow, and this is where she landed—a manageable town surrounded by farms and prairie.

  Nonetheless, Cate hates the move and takes it as a personal rejection. And is jealous of Claude. Her strongest emotions are particularly resistant to reason. And because of this, they stick out, obvious and pathetic.

  * * *

  Sailor has gone off on his own mission, to find Joe. The two come back through the hallway, wriggling around each other in a comic way. Sailor loves who he loves.

  Joe fills a bowl with water and sets it on the floor. Cate tells him, “I got you something, some Basinski you may not already have.” She pulls the album out of her backpack.

  “Oh man, it’s the white vinyl Deluge. Look, Papa.” The accent is on the second syllable. Cate particularly hates when Joe gets all Frenchy with Claude. “Thanks, Cate.” He comes over and gives her a sideways hug, banging his hip against her. Something has pulled him closer to her, she’s not sure what.

  “How’s it going?” she asks him. He has grown a little just in the few weeks since she’s seen him. He is sliding into his teens. He at first seems not to have heard her but then says, “It’s okay. Really. Different, but okay.” He’s a little diplomat; he wants everything to be okay again for his mother. Also, he’s thrilled to have his father back. He’s not thinking this might once again be a temporary situation. Claude has, in the past, followed up hugely interested with not so interested after all.