The Full Catastrophe

by David Carkeet

  “Really? Geez—a breakthrough!”

  “I wonder if she just sat there the whole time or shouted into the phone or what.”

  “I don’t know. I guess the TV drowned her out. … You know, now that you mention it, I did hear something. I kept looking out the window. I thought it was a bird.”

  Beth laughed. It was a deep laugh, rich with honest pleasure. “You’re impossible.”

  Cook’s door problem was solved. Indeed, considering the leisurely mode into which Dan and Beth had lapsed, Cook felt he could remove the door, take it out to some shop for refinishing, and return and reinstall it without anyone noticing. In all his years of eavesdropping, both professionally and otherwise, he had rarely heard conversation as fluid as this. He hadn’t expected anything of the kind, considering his reason for being here. This didn’t sound at all like a marriage in trouble. It made him wonder if he had misread the address and come to the wrong house.

  Cook moved away from the door. Meanwhile, for some reason Robbie began to slither on his belly from the landing down the carpeted stairs. Cook grabbed his luggage and was about to suggest to Robbie that they go up to his room, when the kitchen door swung open and Dan burst through it.

  “Whoa,” Dan said when he saw Cook. He pronounced it like “woe,” only with an extreme intonation drop. “Still stuck on dead center, eh?” Dan blinked rapidly. He seemed a little flustered. Cook guessed that he was replaying his conversation with Beth, examining it for regrettable sentences. “Come on. Let’s see if we can make it to your bedroom. Here. Give me that suitcase.”

  Cook obliged. “How are the cookies?” he asked.

  Dan shook his head sadly. “Beth tries to involve me in the cooking. She tries like hell. And I try. But look at me. Look at me.” He set Cook’s suitcase down and held his hands out. Cook expected to see flippers instead of the normal-looking, rather strong hands Dan presented to him.

  “I’m not much of a chef myself,” said Cook.

  Beth called from the kitchen, “Honey, did you start the coals?”

  “Ye-es, I did,” Dan called back melodiously—but his face was a clinker. To Cook he said, quickly, as if under fire, “Listen. You go on up. Robbie can show you your room, okay? He’s quite capable, as you can see.” They both looked at him. He had frozen in his prone position on the stairs when his father had entered, as if no one would see him if he didn’t move. Cook smiled. Dan laughed with a restrained wildness. “I’m gonna have to go out the front and sneak around back and get the coals started. You got a match? No? A nonsmoker, hunh? Me too. Shit. Never mind. I think there’re some in back, unless they got rained on. If they did, I’m a goner. So. Okay? Okay. Good luck.” This last made no sense as a statement to Cook; it was Dan talking to himself.

  Cook watched Dan hustle out the front door. He decided he had come to the right house after all. Robbie roused himself, and Cook, at long last, began the climb up the stairs to his room.

  Five

  According to Robbie, the third floor was originally servants’ quarters. The ceilings were lower than in the rest of the house and the floors were of pine rather than oak. Cook found it all comfortably snug. It reminded him of the Zimmer frei lodgings he had taken in Swiss villages during a summer of hitchhiking—single rooms in the midst of strange households, where he always had to nudge family photographs aside on the nightstands to make room for his things.

  After Robbie showed Cook to his room, the boy engaged him in a brief, almost token conversation, as if he had read in some juvenile book of etiquette that one should chat for sixty seconds with a new guest in his room to make him feel at home:

  “When I get a new hamster I’ll name him Jeremy,” Robbie announced rather flatly.

  “That’s nice,” Cook said as he began to unpack. “You expecting to get one?”

  “Yeah. My last one died.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I’ll get a young one.”

  “Oh?”

  “So he’ll live longer.”

  “Ah. I thought you were making fun of my little boy’s name again.”

  “I didn’t say it was a little boy’s name.”

  “That’s true, you didn’t. You’ve got a good memory.”

  “I remember what I say, anyway.”

  “There’s an old saying: ‘A liar must have a good memory.’”

  Robbie frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “If he has a bad memory he’ll forget what lies he told and end up saying things that don’t fit together.”

  “Oh.” Robbie seemed subdued.

  “I’m not saying you’re a liar,” Cook quickly added.

  “I know. Is that real gold?”

  Cook followed his eyes. He was looking at his shiny briefcase latch. “No. It’s paint or something.”

  “Oh.” Robbie heaved a leave-taking sigh. “See you later, I guess.”

  “Okay. Can you tell your mom and dad I have some things to do up here? I’ll be down in a bit.”

  Robbie jabbed a fist in the air and said, “Right on.”

  Cook wasn’t aware he had made a political statement, and he smiled quizzically as Robbie left. He began to unpack. He found two empty drawers in the dresser and half of an armoire free. Apart from these two pieces there was a double bed, a nightstand, a small, ill-painted yellow desk, and a long, overflowing bookcase, which he browsed in between trips from the open suitcase to the dresser. The books were standard extra-room fare: mixed collegiate liberal arts paperbacks, outdated self-improvement texts, and the odd bizarre title like The Pipe: A Photographic Celebration. There were also lots of novels by people he had never heard of. But he saw some old friends there, too—Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence. God, Lawrence. Did anyone still read Lawrence? He thought of the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with his perennial “fire in the loins.” It always reminded Cook of what they yelled in mines when they blasted: “Fire in the hole!”

  His room was long, running nearly the full width of the house, and windows filled most of one wall. In the midst of these was a glass door leading to a small balcony. He was pleased to see that his room faced the street. It would make it easy for him to observe comings and goings, if he needed to.

  When he was finished unpacking he took The Pillow Manual from his briefcase and sat down with it at the little yellow desk. He reread the cheerless verse from Proverbs on its blue cover, evidently the Pillow Agency motto:

  He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.

  That morning in Pillow’s conference room Cook had frowned over this sentence, searching it for hidden encouragement. He had finally given up and tackled the first chapter of the manual—two hundred dense pages on the history of matrimony in Western culture—beginning it with good intentions, then skipping major portions of it, then guiltily going back and skipping them all over again. Thus looping and skipping, like a daydreaming child on his way to the candy store, he had made it to the second chapter, “The Pillow Agency Today”—a title that reminded him of industry films about oil and electricity with lots of zippy music. Here he found names and addresses of dozens of married couples. A single brief comment concluded each entry. “Will get better and better” was the hopeful comment for one marriage. But another read, “Pattern will continue: Bill having affairs, Peggy forgiving him, until death of one or both.” Another read, “All this marriage needs is a little more money.”

  The Wilsons were not listed. Cook assumed this was the dead file—completed cases. It would be up to him to sum up their lives when he was done—a task that at the moment seemed ridiculously beyond his reach.

  Chapter Three, though promisingly titled “Methods,” was Pillowesque in its informational stinginess: every page of the chapter was sealed except for the first, which contained an “Unsealing Schedule”: “Day One—Read Pages 227–228,” “Day Two—Read Page 229,” and so on. Pillow had pointed this out to Cook upon tende
ring him the manual, cautioning him not to read a word of this chapter until he was “on the job site,” as he put it, and then to read only what that day’s schedule allowed. He warned Cook that the manual was “subject to inspection” to ensure that the reading schedule was being adhered to. At the time, Cook had had a rebellious urge to unseal the whole damn thing right there in front of Pillow, just to see him come apart.

  This was Day One, and he was on the job site, so it was time to do the dirty thing. He slid his hand under the first sealed page and popped the pink tab at the right margin, surprised at the pleasure it gave him. He turned to the popped page and read:

  DAY ONE

  Have a regular social evening.

  Demonstrate your conversational competence.

  Ask 25 questions.

  Cook made a face. “Have a regular social evening” was close enough to “Have a nice day”—or the even more putrid “Have a good one”—to enrage him. There was a bit of a paradox in the directive, too, on the order of “Be spontaneous!” The sentence about his conversational competence instantly made him feel he didn’t have any. “Ask 25 questions.” Did it matter what they were? An odd exercise, even by Pillow’s standards. But at the bottom of the page, Cook noticed a “Turn, please,” and he did, for the sealing tab had held two pages, not just one. On this second page were the questions—standard queries about courtship and the like, with instructions that Cook was to put them to each partner while the other one was absent and then to collate the responses. The tape recorder in his possession was to be used for this exercise only. The instructions concluded with the promise of a courier to arrive on the following day to snatch the recorder from him, guaranteeing compliance. Pillow ran a tight ship. Cook looked for encouragement there. Didn’t methodological uniformity imply methodological soundness? Not really, he said to himself. Shut up, he said to himself.

  Cook took the tape recorder from his briefcase. He established to his satisfaction that he could work it (it was a more recent model of the same Sony he had used with tinier informants at Wabash), and he went downstairs for a regular social evening of good old-fashioned conversational competence.

  As Cook pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen, where the family was gathered, he experienced a fresh crisis of confidence. He tried to beat it back with an eager display of friendliness, saying, “You’ve made your house very comfortable.” He overdid it a bit, braying the sentence.

  “You think so?” said Beth, looking at him from the refrigerator, where she was kneeling and wrestling with a vegetable drawer. “I’m not really happy with a lot of it.”

  Cook lacked a follow-up remark, as he always did when he was insincere. Dan was standing near Beth, his hands extended toward her in the obvious posture of a man thwarted in midutterance.

  “Did I interrupt?” Cook asked. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” said Beth.

  Robbie said, “It’s not all right when I do it.” He was carrying a tray of plates and utensils from the kitchen into the sun-room at the rear of the house.

  “Go on with whatever you were doing,” Cook said.

  Dan, obeying Cook without acknowledging him, resumed speaking to Beth. Cook stood still and listened. Dan was telling her about something that had happened at work. But there was trouble at the receiving end. Beth was not all there for him. She was moving briskly from station to station: from refrigerator to counter to spice rack to sink, nodding and interjecting “Mm-hmm” and “Wow” at the right spots, but obviously not listening. Dan began to talk faster and louder. He gave the impression that he was physically following her, even though he stood in one place the entire time. Cook watched and grew agitated himself. Dan’s story climaxed just as Beth finished her work. She picked up a platter, and with a brief laugh signaling not amusement but only the end of this failed speech event, she presented him with his reward: a big raw fish.

  Dan accepted the fish without a word and went through the sun-room and out the back door. If he was angry, he hid it. If Beth knew he was angry, she hid it. But Robbie, making a trip into the kitchen, sidestepped his father as if sensing he could easily be bowled over.

  Cook remained standing across the kitchen from Beth, thinking. There was a technical name for what he had just seen Dan and Beth do, but he couldn’t think of it. Beth turned to see if he was still there, reacted with surprise when she saw that he was, but quickly smiled and offered him a drink.

  “No, thanks,” Cook said.

  “First time in St. Louis?” she asked as she turned back to the counter, where she was chopping something.

  “Yes. I’ve passed through here, but that’s all.”

  “It’s a nice city,” she said—with emphasis, as if he had asserted the opposite. “It’s a great place to raise a family, and you can get anywhere in twenty minutes.”

  “Sounds good,” said Cook. He had no family and didn’t want to go anywhere.

  “Ooh. Dan didn’t take the oven mitt out. He’ll probably need it.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Cook, grabbing it from the counter.

  “Can you remind him not to overcook the salmon?”

  Cook said he would do that. He walked into the sun-room, a large room with an almond-tile floor and a curve of tall casement windows looking onto the backyard. It was obviously an addition to the house, joined to the kitchen by French doors. Robbie was seated at the table with an open book on his plate.

  “You’ve set a very nice table,” Cook said to him.

  “Give me a break,” Robbie said without looking up.

  Cook stepped out the back door onto the wooden deck. He trotted down the stairs to the brick patio, where Dan was hunched over a barbecue kettle.

  Dan looked up, but just for a moment. He was concentrating hard on the grill. “First time in St. Louis?”

  “Yes, not counting the times I passed through.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said sourly. “The Great Flyover.” He had been holding a knife and fork poised above the salmon, and now he suddenly plunged them into it, making a deep slice. Cook saw several open scars from previous slices, even though Dan had just put the fish on. Dan was wearing a chef’s apron with loops at the waist for utensils. Two spatulas dangled there. Bumptious lettering across the front of the apron read, NOW WE’RE HAVING FUN!

  Cook said, “I’m supposed to tell you not to overcook it.”

  Dan raised his eyes more slowly than Cook would have thought possible without humorous intent, but there was clearly no such intent here—Cook knew this when Dan failed to return his strained grin. He just stared at Cook.

  Cook said maybe he would have a look around the yard, and he eased away, casting a final glance at Dan. Hovering over the fish, he looked like a ravenous heron on the prowl in shallow water. Cook wondered why Dan was so tense. Was it Cook’s mere presence? Was he angry at Cook for interrupting his story in the kitchen? Or was he angry at Beth for not listening?

  “Complementary schismogenesis,” Cook said to himself, softly. That was the name he had tried to remember in the kitchen. In The Woof of Words—Cook’s surprisingly popular general introduction to linguistics—he had devoted a tidy chapter to this concept, originally developed by some anthropologist whose name he could never remember. Complementary schismogenesis was what happened when person A did something that irked person B, so B did something in response that made A do even more of the thing that irked B, which made B do his thing even more, and so on. It could all take place quite unconsciously. The classic metaphor illustrating it involved a married couple under an electric blanket with dual controls that have been switched by mistake. The wife wakes up cold, so she turns the thermostat on her nightstand up; this raises the temperature on her husband’s side of the blanket, so he wakes up hot and turns his thermostat (actually his wife’s) down, so of course she turns hers up even farther, and so on.

  In the kitchen, Dan had had a story to tell. But Beth had had a meal to prepare. Dan talked. Beth cooked. Dan, reacting to
Beth’s inattention, talked harder. Beth, fighting the distraction, cooked harder. The repulsion was mutual and meticulously balanced. Complementary schismogenesis. It was a killer concept.

  Cook walked slowly along the edge of the lawn, looking at the flower beds, which he liked for their signs of nonfanatical maintenance. He appreciated the human touches—the dead marigolds that should have been removed some time ago, the soccer ball lying in the impatiens, smashing them. At the back of the yard he spotted a little cross made of Tinkertoys, with a tiny mound of fresh dirt in front of it. Robbie’s hamster.

  Cook made his way back to the grill. Dan was still leaning intently over the fish. He suddenly swore and stabbed the fish with his knife, then grabbed at the two spatulas on his waist loops, struggling with them like a double-holstered greenhorn in a shootout. He freed them and wrestled the fish off the grill. He set it on a wooden platter, where it promptly broke into several small pieces.

  Breathing heavily, Dan said, “There’s a two-second window when it’s ready. I missed the window. It’s overdone.” He laughed bitterly and looked at Cook. “You got a dumbshit cook, it’s gonna be a dumbshit meal, right? What’s she expect?”

  Cook shrugged. “For my part, I don’t care. I don’t like food much.”

  Dan frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Cook shrugged again. “I just don’t like food.”

  Dan looked wildly perplexed. “So what do you do instead?”

  “Oh I eat, like everybody else. But it bores me.”

  Dan laughed softly. “I’ll try to make it interesting for you by giving you a job. I want you to say the fish is perfect. Say it’s the best goddamn fish you’ve ever had.”

  Cook forced the grin of a jovial conspirator. “All right. I’ll do my best.”

  “Sound like you mean it.”

  “I will.”

  “Here we go.” Dan led the way up the stairs.

  Beth greeted them at the back door and took the platter. “Gee, honey,” she said. “It looks like mashed potatoes.”