The Bubble Reputation

by Cathie Pelletier

  “She must still be asleep,” Rosemary heard Lizzie, whispering now, outside the door. Footfalls crept softly down the hallway, and then disappeared downstairs. Rosemary thought of Uncle Bishop’s huge, white belly cascading like bread dough down over his purple-and-yellow swimming trunks, which said Prince Edward Island Lobster Carnival, an eyesore. Small children at the Bixley Pool considered him the bogeyman.

  “Uncle Bishop says this is your last chance,” Lizzie announced. She was back at the bedroom door. “I told him you were still asleep, but he says he knows better. He says you’re lying in bed, wide-awake, watching the birds.”

  Rosemary said nothing. She kicked her toes beneath the sheet and waited for Lizzie’s footfalls to disappear again. But the heat of the day was bombarding the house, with its high old-fashioned ceilings. It was rising up to the bedrooms and prompting her to consider a swim, not at the Bixley Pool but at the Bixley River, a half mile from her house, where it teetered in pools above a buildup of immense boulders, and where crayfish and inch-long trout darted into shadows and behind rocks.

  Rosemary flicked on the yellow aluminum fan that sat near her bed on the floor. She turned its face upward, as though it were a beaming sunflower, and felt the cool spray of breeze spiral over her. She heard the mailman’s car pull away from the box outside in a flurry of pebbles. The flag on the mailbox would now be down, her letter to Michael, William’s friend, would be gone, on its way to Portland on such a hot June day. Rosemary had some questions for him, finally, about those last days in London. She heard a small whine coming up Old Airport Road and thought about her ultralight man.

  “Pterodactyl,” she said aloud. Primitive bird-watching. But the whine turned into an automobile as it got closer, and finally, the sound of pebbles once more against tires, it pulled noisily into Rosemary’s yard. Uncle Bishop, no doubt about it. He’d had just enough time, ten minutes, to drive over. She heard a door slam and wondered what expression the Datsun had on its face. Sighing, she pulled on her jeans and then found her favorite denim shirt, worn thin by many washings. She tied the tail ends up in a knot, a sturdy blue rose. Mugs waited patiently at the bedroom door for it to open and then bounded down the fifteen steps and out into the kitchen. Rosemary knew this was the exact number of steps because one quiet autumn evening, when the fireplace was bursting and snapping with seasoned hardwood, and a cold rain was fingering its way across the big church windows, she had turned to William, who lay next to her, his head sharing her pillow in front of the fire, and she had asked him. For no reason. “How many steps are there going upstairs, William?” And he had answered easily. “Fifteen.” As far as Rosemary knew, there could’ve been forty. Or six. She paid no attention to the obvious. “How many steps, William?” It was so like him to know the correct answer. “I counted them, once, so I’d know, Rosie, how many to expect when I get up at night and come downstairs without turning on a light. I’m never afraid of falling that way.”

  Fear of falling was Rosemary's personal fear. She was always terrified of tumbling down the steep stairs at night, its hardwood, shiny steps little terraces of ice. Dangerous. And she was afraid of falling out of an airplane. Perhaps a stewardess, fixing a false eyelash, would lean unknowingly on the handle to the emergency door, and it would burst open, sucking up all the passengers close enough to be caught in its vorticose mouth. A rainy autumn night, earthbound, with an orange fire and a fiery wine, and William, and a fear of falling. Where? Down to China?

  “Do you think Icarus was afraid?” Rosemary had asked William. There was a print of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus hanging in a do-it-yourself frame on the wall. A print among dozens of prints. Their favorite paintings. “Was Icarus afraid when he fell? Did he cry out?” And William, as he began to undo the buttons on her flannel shirt so he could slip a hand inside to hold her warm, braless breast, had said, “Icarus knew his limitations. He knew he could only go so high. He chose his own death, Rosemary, and that’s what is so acceptable about it. Like a mountain climber. No one forces him to climb. He goes of his own free will. He knows one day the rope might saw across a sharp rock. Or his footing will be a fraction off. And then the fall, with plenty of time to think about his life. And of how his body will look at the bottom, spread-eagle and bloody on the rocks. No, Icarus wasn’t afraid. He was enchanted by the blue swirl of the sea beneath him and the warm yellow of the sun above. It was all color, and then it was over.”

  Fifteen steps. Every night since William had died and she’d gotten up in the dark to let Mugs in or out, she had counted them. One, two, three. If she fell and died, how long would it be before they found her? How long before all the plants turned sere and brown in the windows, and the birds abandoned the empty feeders? How long before the cat, wan and weak, could no longer jump upon the sill and press his face against the glass? Four, five, six. Nights when she’d had too much wine, she made sure she was counting accurately by counting slowly. Seven, eight. Had William flown too high? What was it that threw him out of the sky and onto the bespattered floor of his London flat? “Icarus chose his own fate, Rosie, and that’s what was so acceptable about it.” Nine, ten, eleven.

  That night with William in front of the fire, Rosemary had thought about fire, that gift given to man by the sky, by the heavens, by the gods who let a frenzied finger of lightning bolt down four hundred thousand years ago, so that a frightened then delighted Peking Man could take it with him, back into his icy cave. William had put his glass of wine aside and rolled over onto his stomach beside her, a hand undoing the zipper on her jeans while Rosemary stared at the painting on the wall. Icarus’s visual obituary. His death, framed. And the rain had beat steadily against the house, run like rivers out of the roof gutters and downspouts, and lightning had lit up the backyard, illuminated the feeders full of swollen millet and bloated corn. “Was Icarus afraid, William?” she asked again, as she stared at the print of Icarus trying to marry the cosmos. “Did he cry out?” as William eased her jeans down over her hips and pulled them off. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. And the old house had rattled as if a mythical storm were passing overhead, a parade of centaurs and gorgons, griffins and minotaurs, in a frenzy of wings and snorts and bellows, while far below in the black, labyrinthine house, William and Rosemary made love, in front of the ancient notion of fire, in front of Icarus, frightened and plummeting into the sea, in front of Mugs, who licked his paws and watched the goings-on with detached amusement. Fifteen. At the bottom of the stairs, Rosemary came face-to-face with a dark-haired, pleasant-looking man.

  “There’s a large gentleman sitting out on your swing,” Philip said, extending his hand in greeting. “He’s wearing very unusual shorts, and he seems to be crying.”

  As Lizzie and Philip drove off to do some minor shopping in Bixley, Rosemary brought two glasses of cabernet out to the backyard and handed one to Uncle Bishop. She noticed the sky-blue Datsun pulled sadly up to the porch steps. It looked as if it were about to weep. She sat next to him on the wooden swing and they pushed off a few times with their feet to set them in motion. He had stopped crying, but his eyes were reddish, puffy. To top off his Prince Edward Island Lobster Carnival swimming trunks, he was wearing an extra-large, navy sweatshirt, sans arms and torn a bit about the neck.

  “So you didn’t go swimming at the Bixley Pool,” she said. On Uncle Bishop’s feet were brown sandals with red toenails painted onto the ends, beneath Uncle Bishop’s own pale-pink toenails. Where did he find such things?

  “Pee sea,” said Uncle Bishop. “Twenty-five percent chlorine and seventy-five percent kid urine.”

  Rosemary watched as two baby robins, the spots on their chests like brown freckles, flapped away in the birdbath she’d put under the wild cherry. The silvery grasses, growing back at the edges of the yard, rippled in a soft breeze that crept up Old Airport Road. She waited. Sometimes Uncle Bishop wanted to talk. Sometimes he wanted to rant. It was anybody’s guess.

&
nbsp; “I hate the Bixley Pool,” Uncle Bishop said. “No one under thirty should be allowed in it. It’s just like Loch Ness anyway. A few inches down is all you can see. And it’s choppy as hell. It should be condemned.” He picked at a mosquito bite.

  It was a ranting kind of day. Between the posts of the arbor, Rosemary saw the remains of a spider’s web, an orb weaver’s, the strands now torn and dangling softly, the art destroyed. Rosemary had read about spiders. One in twenty, five percent, tend to be geniuses, working out problems about the web, remodifying, bettering, excelling. Many late evenings, she had watched the orb weaver at his job and had wondered if it was the work of a genius unfolding before her eyes. Funny, but in the sharp light of day the web was nothing more than broken strings, no longer a dangerous, shimmering trap for the helpless fly, the fluttering moth. “Levels of consciousness depend upon the light,” William had always said. That must apply to spiderwebs as well.

  “Do you think we got the idea for lace and doilies and stuff like that from spiders?” Rosemary asked Uncle Bishop, who simply stared at her with his puffy little eyes.

  “I’m sitting here with my heart on my sleeve,” Uncle Bishop said, “and you’re talking about doilies. Does the word suicidal strike a maternal chord in you?”

  “You have no sleeves,” Rosemary reminded him.

  “All right, I’m sitting here with my heart on my arm,” he said.

  “Well, you weren’t talking about your heart,” said Rosemary. “You were ranting about the Bixley Pool.”

  “I don’t rant,” Uncle Bishop protested. “Miriam rants.”

  “You both rant,” Rosemary said.

  Uncle Bishop pushed them off again on the swing and they swayed nicely. Rosemary hoped the chains would hold. It was like swinging with Orson Welles. Someone would mutter “Rosebud,” and they would crash to the patio below.

  “Do you know that Mrs. Abernathy puts cookies in her bird feeders?” Uncle Bishop asked. The swing creaked as he shifted his weight, lifted the right leg up, and crossed it heavily over the left one. “And yesterday she put ice cream out there. If those goddamn birds had teeth, they would’ve fallen out by now.”

  “It’s all in how you perceive the birds,” said Rosemary. “Mrs. Abernathy tends to be a little too anthropomorphic.”

  “I don’t rant,” Uncle Bishop said again.

  “You rant,” said Rosemary. “How’s the dollhouse coming?” She shooed away a large bumblebee that came suddenly out of the zinnias. “Did you get any further along?” Uncle Bishop was gazing at a chickadee as he sipped his wine.

  “I’ve wired the dining room and now there are lights in there, thank God,” he said.

  The dollhouse pattern had come from one of his magazines on the subject, but he had thrown the blueprint away and designed his own house. He had even built all the midget furniture. This was the second house he was on now. The other one was sitting silently in his basement workshop, black-windowed, covered with a plastic sheet, waiting for some imaginary family to take up residence. “I wouldn’t want a family with children to move in,” Uncle Bishop had said, thoughtfully, as he proudly displayed the first dollhouse to Rosemary and William the day he finished it. “Kids would just ruin that white rug in the master bedroom.” Rosemary had been astounded at the minute workmanship that Uncle Bishop’s sausagelike fingers were capable of. They hardly seemed adept at opening beer cans, yet here was consummate work in the tiny brick fireplace, the brassy doorknobs, the cushiony divan. Work small enough to be done by spiders, yet Uncle Bishop’s large, mannish hands had accomplished it, there in his basement beneath the earth, cavelike perhaps, like the early artists. Miriam had seen it all differently. “A fat homosexual hanging little drapes in tiny windows,” Miriam had ranted. “He’s even got itty-bitty towels in the bathroom and toothbrushes a fingernail long. And he says he’s only going to let an imaginary gay couple move in. Is that or is that not reason to move from Maine?”

  It was true that Uncle Bishop had all those things in the dollhouse. He even had a tiny plastic cat—one that looked uncannily like Ralph—curled on a braided rug in front of the hearth. And there was a cat’s bowl by the kitchen door, small clothes on little hangers in the closets, pictures on the walls, dishes in the cupboard, a china cabinet full of wonderful treasures. “I wish I lived in this house,” Rosemary had said, that night with William, in the basement workshop, as Uncle Bishop straightened a wishlike afghan on a Louis XV chair in the parlor. “I’d let you move in, Rosie,” he’d said. And then he had closed the door to the dollhouse, straightened the plastic plants on the steps outside, and turned off the miniature porch light.

  “I need to lay the linoleum in the kitchen,” Uncle Bishop said now. He was thinking of the work that needed doing in the new dollhouse. “What you must realize about the people who build dollhouses,” William had told Rosemary, that same night as they lay in bed talking about Uncle Bishop’s wonderful hobby, “is that, after a while, they live in them.”

  “I hung a beautiful little Renoir print on the wall going upstairs,” Uncle Bishop said. “But I’ve just been sitting here thinking about it. Even if I let someone move in who has no kids, they might still have a party. People going up and down the stairs to the bathroom might knock it down.”

  As they swung quietly, Rosemary imagined a boisterous crowd, perhaps at Christmastime, partying it up in the dollhouse, which would be sheathed in spruce boughs and pine cones and spicy red candles. And the little kitchen would be bulging with plates of hors d’oeuvres, canapés and caviars, shrimp cocktails, pâtés, plum puddings. And the guests, elegant and mysterious beneath the mistletoe, would, sometime after midnight, become loud and happy, clinking their fluted glasses of champagne, their martini glasses ringing out like brief songs from the baby grand in the parlor. And the blazing Christmas tree, with its thimble-sized packages, would cast blue, red, and green reflections out across the feathery drive, where the potted plants sat dreaming beneath the artificial snow. Would it be just past the stroke of midnight, on this synthetic Christmas Eve, that a man, resplendent in a black tuxedo with satin lapels, dark trousers, and bow tie, a martini glistening in his hand beneath the chandelier, would corner a young woman on the stairs? And would this young woman, demure in floor-length red satin, regal in white pearls about the neck and wrist, who had caught his eye among the festive crowd all evening, would she gush girlishly, leaning back against the wall to steady her heart, to steady her champagne notions? Would it be then that her pearl-white shoulder would wrench the painting from its hook to send it crashing down the stairs, the frame twisting, then breaking, causing all the partygoers to gather at the foot around the broken Renoir? And there above the guests would be the lovers, blushing and embarrassed, a married man and his ripe little berry of a mistress, caught in the act, a Christmas party ruined.

  “Flagrante delicto,” Rosemary said. “Caught red-handed.” And the red would be a satin red. “Caught with his hands full of red satin.”

  “What?” asked Uncle Bishop. His wineglass was empty and he twirled it idly about his plump fingers as though it were a baton. “You sit here and talk about doilies and satin for no apparent reason and yet you say that I rant.”

  “Which Renoir is it that you have hanging on the stairway wall?” Rosemary asked, not wanting him to know she had peopled his dollhouse with revelers, had thrown a party the minute his back was turned. What must the house look like now? Were the rugs spotted with alcohol? All the little dishes sticky with food? Were the ashtrays bulging with imported cigarette stubs? Were all the presents opened and the tree lightless? Was the cat confused and hungry by the empty bowl near the kitchen door? “People who build dollhouses eventually live in them,” William had said. And for nights after he died, nights when Rosemary could not find sleep, she had imagined herself sitting up in one of Uncle Bishop’s dainty Louis XV beds, beneath the Barbie-doll spread he had so lovingly crocheted for
that purpose.

  “Girl with a Watering Can,” said Uncle Bishop. “I think I’m going to move it upstairs where it’ll be safe. The Japanese pay top dollar for that stuff these days, you know.”

  “Do you want another glass of wine?” Rosemary asked him, and took the big hands so capable of tiny work up into her own. They were cold, clammy. He shook his head. No more wine. “Do you want to talk about Jason?” Again he shook his head.

  “I’d better be going,” he said. “It makes me nervous to think about that Renoir hanging there on the stairway. That was really stupid of me. Do you think my homeowner’s insurance will cover it?” He lifted himself from the swing. Rosemary knew that if he didn’t want to talk, there was no use to pry. Uncle Bishop was like Mrs. Abernathy’s telepathic morning glories. He would unfold when the time was right.

  She walked with him over to the Datsun. She was about to mention that perhaps he should give the poor truck a bath when she heard the unmistakable whine, as if a motor scooter were coming up Old Airport Road. Nearly tripping over a startled Mugs, she raced around the Datsun and out into the front yard just in time to see, disappearing, the red-and-yellow flash of the ultralight man, with his insect motor and goggle-eye glasses, soft as a dream over the treetops, and then gone. He’d been blazing all kinds of trails in the sky over Bixley. Had he been going back to BJ’s? Should she go back and look for him? Now the sky was empty. There was nothing left to prove he had even been there. There were no pinkish puffs of clouds left, like bread crumbs, to mark his trail.

  “So that’s the ultralight man Miriam says you’re obsessed with?” Uncle Bishop asked. “I’d be suspicious of anyone who can’t do a snap roll.”

  “I’m not obsessed,” said Rosemary. “I just told her that if she’s ever at BJ’s, and sees a man in a red-and-yellow suit, to call me.” She was now embarrassed to think about this. She had asked Miriam.