Disasters in the First World

by Olivia Clare

  “Oh wow,” I’d said.

  “Really, I’m a psychiatrist who writes poetry,” the guy had told me. “I have a little book. I mostly write for myself.”

  “I know one poem by heart,” I now said to Richard in the bar called something-Olympus-something. “It’s called ‘A Poem for Strangers.’”

  “Oh yeah?” said Richard.

  “‘A Poem for Strangers,’” I said. “I don’t know who wrote it.”

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  “‘Hello.’” I paused. I looked up. “That’s the poem.”

  “Say it again,” he said. “The whole thing. One more time.” He closed his eyes.

  “‘A Poem for Strangers.’ ‘Hello.’”

  “Oh,” he said, opening his eyes. “Hello.”

  I told him how I’d driven from the winery back to my hotel in Santa Rosa in the dark, into and out of the streetlighting, strip malls, Yum-Yum Burger, Goody Yogurt. Cartoonish names, American fast food. I’d had too much wine. Cat piss, I mean. At first I drove in the wrong direction, to the wrong hotel. A grubby place. I parked in the lot anyway, watching a couple next to a van unload their two children, a gray dog with spots, some luggage, and coolers. A family trip, maybe. The wife’s hair tied up on top of her head as she lifted and set down their objects. She looked stressed and busied yet pleased with it all. Some people are chosen to live that way.

  “What does that mean?” said Richard. “Some people are chosen—”

  “I don’t know what I mean. They get to live like that.”

  “You’re saying you want that. Living that way. That’s it?”

  “You pretend to know lots of shit,” I said. “No one wants anything. Nobody. I don’t.”

  “Sure.”

  “Just coolers,” I said. “A van. With spots.”

  “Is that right?” he said. “Hey, you. Hey. Do you want to see my kid? Isn’t that funny, I have a kid?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  He took out his phone and swiped through photos of a miniature girl. She was beautiful.

  “That’s Roxanne at her birthday party in LA,” he said. “We used to live in LA. I used to manage bands. Rock bands. Isn’t that funny? I don’t normally tell people that. I feel like I can tell you,” he said. “Rock bands. My god, did I just say that?”

  He put his hand next to mine on the bar, watched for my reaction.

  “You haven’t asked me anything about myself,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I could be really interesting. You’d have no idea.”

  “Tell me,” he said, putting his phone away. “I’m sorry I haven’t. I really want to know.”

  “I don’t want to now,” I said.

  “No,” he said, tapping my hand with his finger. “Hey, you. Hi. Please.”

  “We can just go.”

  “Can go?” he said.

  “We can go where it is you want.”

  My hotel room was in a separate building. Large and modern and dark. Inside, a young woman lay crumpled, asleep at the bottom of the stairs, her head beneath her arm, like a bird’s beneath its wing. I almost stepped over her but worried about her dignity as I might worry about mine. A corsage—she looked young enough for a prom—was pinned to her dress.

  I put my hands on her shoulders, shook her. “Please, love. Please wake up. It’s late.”

  “It’s ten-thirty,” said Richard.

  “Get up,” I said to her. “One, two, three.”

  Without opening her eyes, the sleeping woman woke. “My arm’s sleepy. It’s asleep. It’s sleeeeeeep.” She rose up from under her arm and laid her head back on the bottom stair. She tore her corsage with its safety pin from her dress and gripped it and seemed to sleep again. I tried to take the open pin from her hand.

  “Give it to me, love,” I said to her. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  She let me take the corsage and close the safety pin. I returned it all to her and closed her fingers back over the battered petals. Then Richard and I went up the stairs. I pushed the key card into its slot, walked in, let him in. He looked at me and put his hand on my cheek.

  “What am I doing?” he said. He was acting out disappointment in himself.

  “You can leave if you want,” I said.

  But I wanted him there. We took off our shoes. There was the sweaty, earthy smell of someone’s feet, maybe mine. He brought me to the white bed big as a boat and rubbed my back. I’d spent a lot of money on the room, money I didn’t quite have, but I felt justified, a reward for having no one to share it with. There was a whirlpool tub, but I wouldn’t tell him that.

  “I’m married.” He stopped, sat up on the bed. “I have a wife. We’re very attached.”

  “You and everybody,” I said. “Fine.”

  “Okay?” he said, rubbing his nose. He lay down again, rubbing my thigh. “Hi, you.”

  We were kissing, lying the wrong way on the bed. I wondered about his wife without feeling sorry for her. He’d probably called her to say good night when he’d gone to the bathroom at the bar, and she’d felt assured and had gone to bed. I looked to see if he’d taken off his socks and his bare feet were on my pillow, his feet where my head would be later, my hair.

  “We should stop,” I said. “We should really stop. I need to go to bed.”

  “But I can rub you like this,” he said. “Just until you fall asleep. I’ll help you fall asleep.”

  I took off my dress for him to rub my back, and it felt good for a few minutes. But the room and his hands were so cold.

  “I have to go to bed,” I said. I turned my head to him but stayed lying on my stomach.

  “Two more minutes.” He closed his eyes. Then opened them. He was saving this. Saving some image of my face or thighs. Remembering it for later.

  I didn’t want him, didn’t want this. And tried to think forward to the next day at the wedding. Tried to think about my friend. I tried to bring back the image of the family at the grubby hotel. I saw parts of them. Spots on the dog, the mother’s hair on top of her head. Her picking up the coolers and putting them on the ground. I wanted to remember every­thing about her.

  “But you can’t,” I said aloud.

  “What?” said Richard.

  “You won’t remember her.”

  “Who? Who, you?” said Richard. “Of course I will,” he said, drily kissing my back.

  “I really have to go to bed,” I said.

  “Two minutes,” he said.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m serious.”

  “God. You’re so fucking beautiful.”

  “I’m so fucking tired.”

  I got up and shook my arms out, a gesture I can’t explain. As if I had wings that had gotten wet. I went to the door, standing in only my pantyhose.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I get it.”

  He put on his shoes and balled his socks in his pocket and walked out without looking at me. I closed the door right after him and turned up the heat on the thermostat. I picked my purse up off the floor and found a rubber band and put my hair in a high bun.

  I was brushing my teeth when I heard someone jiggle the doorknob.

  “What are you doing?” I said through the door.

  “That woman on the stairs is still there,” Richard whispered. “I wanted to come tell you.”

  “So? Let her sleep.”

  “And I forgot to tell you a bedtime story,” he said. He jiggled the knob. “You need a story.”

  “I have to go to bed. Stop doing that.”

  “You need one.” He sounded about to pretend to cry and jiggled the knob rhythmically. “You can’t sleep without it.”

  I heard his body slide down the door to the floor. He sat there. I went to the bathroom to rinse out my mouth and toothbrush. He wa
s there when I came back. I could hear him breathing or mumbling.

  “Hello?” I called to him through the door. “Are you asleep?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s bizarre out here.”

  I needed him to leave. And I thought: I was the girl asleep at the foot of the stairs. With the corsage. I’d sleep all night and all day tomorrow, with no strange man at my door. I’d sleep as she slept.

  “I’m so tired,” he said. “There’s no one else in the hallway.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s nobody. I’m it.”

  “Some people live that way,” I said. “Just live like that, no one there. They’re meant to.”

  “I already,” he said, “know that.”

  Santa Lucia

  Edward drives Nola to the west edge of town, skidding, almost purposefully, down unplowed, unlit roads. He turns onto the main street—lit hotels, coffeehouses, a bookstore selling two of his books. For driving in winter, he wears a badger fur hat that matches his beard, and he’s petting her ear, so small it’s nearly nothing.

  There’s a public garden, dense with roses in spring and summer, then a foreclosed house with a cast stone fountain; they’ve passed the house many times; this is when Nola invents something for him.

  She says, “You know who lived there.”

  He says, “No.”

  “The town witch.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Oh, yeah. She grew trees with poison berries. All the birds died. She made pies and gave them to her neighbors.”

  “She didn’t bring me any pies,” he says.

  “That’s because this was too long ago,” Nola says. “Before you were born. She would have liked you, though, I think.”

  He’s thirty-two years older than Nola. He met her last spring in his undergraduate seminar on the Victorian novel, though he hates the cliché of the professor-student romance. But we’re past that, she always says. She graduated in May.

  “Are you coming over?” he says.

  “I want to.”

  He lives in a house he bought with his first wife, when he smoked in his study and ashed on his lectures, lectures he cared for, boxes of them, hadn’t he? He has a daughter, just here at Thanksgiving, studying law in California, the daughter of his second wife, Christina—Christina, who moved elsewhere.

  On his desk are the stacked Russian hardbacks. A photograph of his mother. Eyes flecked with Spain. Postcards from Christina. In the kitchen, Ivan the White barks to be let into the yard full of frosted pyracantha stems and thorns.

  “He needs to quit,” Edward says when they’re in the house. “I’m not chasing him again.”

  “You’re both very bad,” Nola says.

  They’ve gone up the stairs. The housekeeper made his bed. The room, with its corner lamps and heirloom armoire, has a carpet stained by the dog. Now it’s snowing harder, the window an off-white screen. They’ve established an order to this. A short while for him to get hard, a short while to come. Afterward he makes a little joke, one line, meaningless, to indicate they’ve shifted from whatever world of primate ritual into another of comfortable, unextraordinary, postcoital lightness. He half sleeps for ten minutes. By the time he takes her home, his breath is an old man’s.

  She cracks her knuckles in what he thinks of as carvings of sound, delicate, swift, a pianist preparing to practice, and he tells her so.

  “I ordered too much food,” he says now. “You’ll take some with you.”

  “We’ll see,” she says.

  In an act of mild perversion, he’s invited her to lunch at the faculty club, knowing it becomes, this time of day, a haunt of his department. It’s an old-fashioned banquet room with gloved waiters carrying trays of pastry and silver teapots in priestly silence.

  “I can’t force myself to do things I’m not good at, like play piano,” she says. “That’s what you’re supposed to say is the trouble with my generation, right?”

  Her youth, her trump, but he wonders about precocity, how many years it has, if in order to act older, one must be young.

  “We’ll eat the crabs,” he says. “And you take home the lamb.”

  The department’s fellows and one new hire, insular as a Greek chorus, sit at a nearby round table and glance over intermittently. Nola holds her palm above the table’s candle. Sleet mud streaks the ankles of her stockings. A short solemn skirt. A paisley barrette. In certain moments, he’s convinced she needs gifts. Last year, he bought her a computer, a set of dishes, many books—because he is, almost certainly, taking something from her, a few of her twenty-two years, along with her unironic inquisitiveness, for which he implicitly asks, and reverence. Reverence he feels he returns. He tells himself he most admires her strangeness, which he feels is not invented.

  “I had this colleague, he’s dead now,” he says. “He was in political science. He hated this place, but he always ordered crab and lamb.”

  “I thought it was a weird combination.”

  “I think of it as a memorial.”

  She’ll eat the lamb as soon as she’s home. Will she play with her cat, who “doesn’t like men”? She’s a year younger than his daughter, similar in a few ways—these facts upset him.

  “Why would your friend who died like me?” she says.

  “He had exceptional taste; it’s why we were friends.”

  She says, “You only talk about dead people.”

  “I don’t like to gossip.”

  Remnants of snow dissolve in the carpet. Some flakes melt at the ends of Nola’s hair, black, from her Italian father. Wind has chilled her ears and mouth into what Edward calls “frozen treats.” She’s cracking her knuckles again, quick hands, nothing like his second wife’s.

  “Tell me about your witch,” he says. “I like stories while I eat.”

  “But we aren’t driving.”

  “Pretend. I suppose she’s lovely?”

  “Edward.” It’s Charlie, his department chair, elected to that rank by a strong majority. His little suit is brown, old-fashioned. “Hello, Nola.” He gives a small bow. “Edward, I thought you hated the food here.” He says this quietly.

  “It’s the only kind I can eat,” says Edward. “I need bland, my doctor says. No spice, no salt.”

  “Can we have a talk sometime?” says Charlie. “This afternoon, maybe. It isn’t about yesterday.”

  “Which was embarrassing for everyone. We’ve got to have a real agenda at meetings.” This comes out sterner than Edward means, but he likes it and makes his hand into a fist on the table. “Some of us were just sitting there wondering what was happening.”

  Charlie looks at the new hire and fellows, sitting with some composure as two waiters serve many plates of food.

  “I agree,” says Charlie. “And I’m working on it. Anyway, there’s something else we need to discuss. Can you come to my office? Or maybe we’ll talk at the Lucy party. You’re coming, aren’t you? It’s set to snow four more inches tonight, but don’t let that keep you away.”

  “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Fine, we’ll talk then. Bye, Nola.” Charlie walks to the fellows’ table, and all of them lay down their forks to greet him.

  “What’s a Lucy party?” says Nola.

  “Nothing important,” says Edward.

  “I thought it was a Christmas party we were going to. What’s he going to talk to you about?”

  “Charlie’s a fucking prince.”

  “Who’s he fucking?” And it comes out wrong, the last word awkward. She folds her hands on the table.

  She doesn’t take the bus home—he drives her to the bookstore, promising to pick her up at her apartment for the party later. Crab and lamb swing in a bag in her hand as she wipes her boots on a mat. Charlie’s son, Andrew, usually away at a small, isolated New England college
similar to this one, stands at the front of the store with a red winter nose and a graphic novel.

  “That’s weird,” she says, as the door shuts behind her. “I just saw your father.”

  “Not weird,” Andrew says. “He lives here.”

  He lacks his father’s demonstrative eyebrows. She’s met him several times, most recently two years ago at a fraternity party when he introduced himself as Craig and his friend as Schindler.

  “Nola, is it right?” he says.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “You look older than last time I saw you.”

  “Colder?” she says.

  “Why not? You were graduating. So was my sister. I sat next to your parents.”

  “I know, they told me,” she says.

  “I remember because I gave my sister a flower necklace to wear—a real flower necklace that I made of wildflowers I’d picked on the way to the auditorium, you know, a nice gift, I thought—and it was so hot the flowers melted down the front of her dress. She wore white because she reads stacks of wedding magazines, and so her dress was stained orange. It sounds rather pretty, but she didn’t think so. She thought it was one of my jokes.”

  His frugal smile contrasts with his long story, and he’s looking at the buttons of her coat while the windows rattle from the wind. He’s still holding his book open.

  “What book is that?” she says.

  “Just rubbish,” says Andrew.

  “I like graphic novels,” Nola says. “Only if they’re well done.”

  “That’s easy. I like almost anything well done. Your friend agrees. Ask him.”

  It’s an invitation, or even a faint request, to know more about her understanding with Edward, as if she might answer, We don’t talk about books, we only screw. Everyone asks about Edward.

  “Are you going to your father’s party?” she says.