Beth hesitated. Perhaps she was seeking a link between Dan’s husbandly shepherding of her to Italy and a dead rodent. “Last week.”
“I see,” Cook said—a remark so intelligent that it created a long silence, during which Dan returned from putting Robbie to bed.
Dan looked at the two of them and called attention to the deathly stillness in the room by stopping in his tracks and saying, “Don’t let me interrupt! I don’t want to interrupt! Go right ahead!” Dan laughed riotously at his joke and sat down on the couch. Cook and Beth exchanged glances.
Cook leaned forward and took a Hershey’s Kiss from the bowl on the table. It must have been his tenth one, at least. Ever since he had quit drinking he had been a slave to sweets. His solution was never to buy candy. But as soon as they returned from the library, Beth had set this bowl right in front of him.
“Want me to put some music on?” Dan said, standing up again.
“Sure,” said Beth.
“What would you like?”
“Anything you want,” said Beth. “But not reggae, okay?”
Dan tensed. He said, “What, then? Just tell me.”
“Whatever you want. Only not reggae.”
Dan got a crazed look on his face. He turned to Cook. “Any suggestions?”
Cook felt much more relaxed now that Dan was back. “Do you have any Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf?” he asked. He had always loved this man’s name.
Beth said, “As a matter of fact we do. I’ll get it.” She stood up.
“Helluva request,” Dan muttered as he sat back down. Under his breath he said, “Whatever you want, only not reggae. Anything you want, only not what you want.”
“Oh, stop,” Beth said calmly as she looked through the records.
“You like reggae?” Dan said to Cook.
Cook, observing a private rule to be frank about his ignorance on any subject, said, “I don’t know him.”
Dan gave Cook an odd look, but he said nothing. A string quartet started up. “So,” Dan said, starting fresh, “welcome to the City That Hates Itself.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Beth said as she sat back down. “St. Louis used to be called that. Now it’s just the City That Dan Hates.”
“Are you both from here?” Cook asked.
“Beth is,” said Dan. “I’m from San Francisco.”
“Really?” said Cook. “I’m from Monterey originally.”
“No kidding?” Dan was visibly excited. He looked at Beth. “Monterey.”
Beth raised her eyebrows and smiled slightly.
“You never meet anyone from California out here,” Dan said to Cook. “The California orientation is longitudinal. It shows up on preference maps that show where people would like to live. Most people like their own latitudes—Minnesotans like the upper Midwest, Southerners like the South. But Californians are different. They like their longitude—anywhere on the west coast, from Vancouver to Mexico.”
Cook nodded. “You’re right.” Whenever his parents had traveled anywhere, it was always north or south, never east. And when he went to Indiana, his friends treated him as if he were a missionary who had taken bizarre vows. “Why are you here?” he asked.
“Graduate school—Washington University. And Beth wanted to come back to her hometown, so it worked out well.”
Cook always had a hard time processing people’s thumbnail biographies. They swallowed up the years so fast that they left him feeling mentally slow. “You didn’t meet here?”
“No. We met in college. U.C. Santa Cruz. Hell, right across the bay from you, Jeremy.”
“Ah,” said Cook, his eyes going to one of the wall maps Dan had drawn. He had studied it earlier, when he was alone in the room for a moment. It was a comic decorative map of a seaside area with architecture drawn in exaggerated style. He had thought it was the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, but he couldn’t believe he would find it here, on a St. Louis wall.
Dan said, “We met in college and got married the year after we graduated. We knew we had a sure thing. Right?”
Beth gave him a neutral look.
“Maybe not a sure thing,” Dan said. “A probable thing.” He sighed. “Maybe an iffy thing. Maybe a—”
“How about you, Jeremy?” Beth asked. “Where have you been between Monterey and St. Louis?”
Cook told them about his years—many years—at U.C. Berkeley, where he had enrolled as an ugly, bewildered freshman and emerged as a good-looking Ph.D. in linguistics. He told them about his work at the Wabash Institute. Beth listened closely—so closely she made Cook a little nervous. She asked him how old he was, and he told her: thirty-two. Her response was a frown.
Dan said, “I’m thirty-four. Beth’s thirty-three. She’s sandwiched in between us.”
While Cook’s mind filled with a specific but improbable image, Dan suggested he and Cook try to find a link in their past that spanned the seventy-five miles or so separating their hometowns. But several minutes of questions about possible mutual acquaintances or jointly attended events produced nothing. They ended up reminiscing over old Art Hoppe columns in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Then Dan said, out of the blue, “This isn’t Dittersdorf.”
Beth made a slight scoffing noise. “Sure it is.” She pointed to the album cover at the end of the living room, which she had left propped on a shelf and facing out, like a record store clerk. “See?”
Dan shook his head. “It’s Haydn. It says Dittersdorf, but there must be some Haydn on the record, too.”
“That’s impossible,” said Beth. “We don’t have any records like that. Jeremy, this is Dittersdorf, isn’t it?”
Cook furrowed his brow. He had no idea. He just liked the guy’s name.
Dan said, “It’s Haydn. There’s this thing that Haydn does. I just heard it.”
“What thing?” Beth said.
“I don’t know. I can’t describe it. You’re the one who knows stuff like that.”
Beth stood up and went to the album cover, saying under her breath, “This thing.” She looked at the cover and waved it in the air. “It’s all Dittersdorf,” she said. But she gave Dan a kindly look, as if to say she wouldn’t hold his error against him.
“Check the record,” said Dan.
Beth flashed a number of responses in quick succession: irritation, then realization that Dan could be right after all, then something deeper—something worse. Dan started to stand up, but she said, “I can check it,” and he sat back down. Beth took a long time reading the record label as it went around the turntable. Then she went to a row of records in the bookcase, and after a moment’s search she took one from the shelf. She slid the record out of it, read the label, and said, “You’re right. The last person to play these put them in the wrong covers.” Her voice was slightly thinner.
Dan reached over and tapped Cook’s knee familiarly. He whispered so softly that Cook barely heard him: “She’s mad now. She’ll take it out on us.”
Eerily on cue, Beth turned and said to Dan, “Did you have both of these out at the same time?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, someone did.” Beth turned to Cook. “Why didn’t you notice it wasn’t Dittersdorf, Jeremy? You’re the one who requested him.”
“Well, actually …”
“You want me to put him on?” She held the true Dittersdorf record up.
“No, no,” said Cook.
“You want it, you got it,” she snapped, and she switched the records.
Cook sat very still, hoping this incident was over. Beth seemed to be making an awful lot out of it. Another string quartet began, indistinguishable to Cook’s ear from the previous one. Under cover of the music, Dan whispered to Cook, hissing ominously: “She’s not done.”
Beth returned to her seat. She looked at Cook and asked, “Are you married, Jeremy?”
“No.”
“Ever been?”
“No.”
“Ever come close?”
; Cook thought. Paula. Yes. He thought some more. No. He sighed. He thought of Pillow’s questionnaire—sixteen unlovables bedded in five years, zero lovables. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to write “one,” for Paula. But maybe he was just mad at her for leaving him. Maybe he was crazy in love with her. He sighed again. He hated entertaining the opposite of the thought he had just been entertaining. It made him feel as if anything could be true.
“Must be a toughie,” Dan said.
Beth didn’t smile. “The answer’s probably no, only he doesn’t want to admit it.”
“I imagine he was pretty isolated in Indiana,” Dan said. “Out in the country and all.”
“But what about Berkeley? He was there for—what did he say? Eight years?”
“Yeah,” said Dan, “but college is different. He probably came close in Berkeley, but then backed off, and out in Indiana, when he might have been more interested, it was slim pickings.”
Beth gave Dan a cool look. “Sounds like a version of your life the way you wish it had happened.”
“Not really,” Dan said.
“Don’t you wish we had only ‘come close’ in Santa Cruz?”
“I wasn’t saying that.”
“Sometimes? Don’t you wish it sometimes? You can tell me. It’s not a crime to think it.” Beth looked at Cook. “We haven’t forgotten about you, Jeremy. Just speak up when you’re ready to answer.”
Cook nodded. He had an urge to remain silent that went beyond his memory-bag of regrets over Paula. Simply put, he wanted to go on watching them.
“What would have happened?” Dan said. “I mean if we had only come close. What do you think?”
“You would have still come to St. Louis,” said Beth. “To Wash. U.”
“Yeah.” Dan laughed. “And you would have come back, too. We’d have run into each other all the time.”
“You’d have been unhappy.”
“You think so?” Dan said, surprised. Then, resigned, he said, “Yeah. I’d start looking for you. I’d call. We’d get together. Jesus. It’s like a story where a guy tries to change his life by tinkering with his past, only it comes out the same.” He took a quick breath. “Wait. Would you have lived at home?”
Beth thought. “For a while. Until I found a place.”
“Yeah. Okay. I would have met the whole gang and seen ’em in action. We wouldn’t have gotten married after all.” Dan grinned.
Cook expected Beth to react angrily to this slight to her family. Instead, she laughed softly. She looked at Cook again. “Well?”
Cook swallowed. He cleared his throat. “There was a woman named Paula.” This sentence had the ring of a prelude. Indeed, it was a prelude. But he had no idea what to say next.
“Yes?” said Beth.
Cook shrugged.
“Come on,” Beth said, almost bullying him.
“The man’s in pain,” Dan said. “Lay off, honey.”
Beth folded her arms across her chest. “I want to get some idea about what he knows. This is serious.” She looked at Cook. “There’s a lot at stake here.”
Cook said, “I know there is.”
“Dan and me. Robbie.”
“I know.”
“Our whole lives are at stake.”
“I know that,” said Cook. “You think I don’t know that?”
“This is it. This is the only kind of counseling I could get Dan to agree to.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “I think it’s a great idea.” His tone was strangely upbeat, at odds with Beth’s intensity. “The guy lives in. Right underfoot. I think it’s terrific.”
Beth said, “So I jumped at the idea—I was desperate!—but now that you’re here, I don’t know. A linguist? And a man? I was told we’d have a woman. And a thirty-two-year-old bachelor? A bachelor who’s never even come close to marriage, or if he has, he’s too tongue-tied to talk about it? What can you possibly know about commitment?” She looked at Cook. Then, as a new thought seemed to strike her, she said, “You’re not gay, are you?”
“No.”
“You could tell us.”
“I would. I’m not.”
“It would be much better if you were. That would be fine.”
“I’m not.”
“Blast the luck!” said Dan.
“Listen,” Cook said. “Let me say something.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve got a point, Beth. I don’t know what I know about commitment. But the question is what do I know about language. You two need to learn how you behave verbally with each other. I can tell you. I really can.”
“I believe you, Jeremy,” Dan said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Beth could have said something nice. But she didn’t. She just sat. Cook wished she hadn’t done that.
He also wished he didn’t have to administer the cursed questionnaire from The Pillow Manual. It was getting late, and he was afraid Beth would complain when he brought it up. But he had to—it was a Day One assignment.
“I’m supposed to ask you some questions,” Cook said. “They’re up in my room.”
“Good,” said Beth. “Let’s get cracking.”
Cook tried not to look surprised. “Who wants to go first? I have to ask each of you separately.”
It was established that since Dan would be rising early to take Robbie to school, he should go first. As they discussed this, Cook was surprised to learn that Dan would be coming back home in the morning instead of going to work. He had arranged to take some time off and would be home for as long as he could manage. Also, the school where Beth taught had just completed its term. Cook, Dan, and Beth would simply be there—would simply be.
Cook went upstairs for his tape recorder and list of questions from The Pillow Manual. He reviewed his performance thus far. He couldn’t really say he had had a regular social evening. In the normal course of things, a hostess wouldn’t challenge a guest’s capacity to make a loving commitment. As for demonstrating his conversational competence, he had been a perfect antihero. Every time he had opened his mouth he had felt like Harpo Marx honking his horn. There remained the twenty-five questions. With luck he would ask them without losing much more of his face, and the sun would set on Day One.
He returned to the living room, where Dan awaited him with his hands folded on his lap like a good boy. While he put the questions to Dan, Beth busied herself with some laundry in the basement. When it was her turn, Dan showered and went to bed.
When Beth’s turn was over, Cook said good night to her and, mindful of the courier due the next day to take the tape recorder, stayed up until nearly three in the morning transcribing the responses, editing them (including one major cut), and collating them. To what end he did this he didn’t know, though he assumed it was so that he could study them someday.
This was what he got:
Q: How long have you been married?
DAN: Eight and a half years.
BETH: Eleven years.
Q: Describe your courtship.
DAN: Well, we met at a party. We hit it off right away. It was kind of neat—you know how a party has a flow and you drift around and get interrupted and separated from people all the time? Whenever that happened to us we made a conscious effort to get back together. It was clear what was going on. It was kind of exciting realizing that. I asked her if she wanted to come over to my place, and she said sure, and that was that. (Pause) Is Beth gonna listen to my answers? (Pause) You don’t think so? You don’t know? That’s pretty bizarre.
BETH: He pursued me. (Laughs) It’s funny how traditional it was. We met in our senior year, and Dan kept asking me out and I just kept going. As I look back, I think I fell for him for the wrong reasons—he was good-looking, funny, lively. Not wrong reasons, exactly—just insufficient reasons. But underneath that there were some right reasons that I didn’t even know about, and those are the things I’ve come to love about him. I almost feel lucky about that. I sure didn’t plan it. I didn’t know what I was doing. Say, does Dan get to hear w
hat I say here? (Pause) You don’t? Who’s running this show anyway?
Q: Was there a formal proposal of marriage?
DAN: You mean, like down on my knees? Or do you mean one of those cute things like hiding the engagement ring in the dessert or something? Don’t make me sick.
BETH: No.
Q: How did you decide to get married?
DAN: Beth pushed for it. It was in our fifth year of school. Beth was getting her teaching credential, and I was picking up some courses in economics—I didn’t know what I was going to do, professionally. We were living in this great little cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was an unheated place, colder than hell on winter mornings. Her folks were antsy about our living together—our “situation,” they called it. They’d complain about it every time Beth talked to them on the phone, and she started stewing about it, and she kept stewing about it, so I finally said what the hell, what’s the difference? And we got married.
BETH: Dan will say it was because of my folks, but it wasn’t. That’s just an idea he’s stuck on. Basically we picked a date together. We both wanted it.
Q: What quality do you like most in her/him?
DAN: Her warmth.
BETH: He’s a great father.
Q: What quality do you like least in her/him?
DAN: Her coldness.
BETH: He doesn’t know how to be a husband.
Q: How important is it to you to understand the inner life of your spouse?
DAN: Hey. That’s an interesting question. Sure, I’d like to know what makes her tick. Why not? Couldn’t hurt.
BETH: Are you kidding? What else is there? I think about Dan almost as much as I think about myself.
Q: Who initiates most of the talk?
DAN: Who initiates it? I guess sometimes I do and sometimes she does. It’s pretty even.
BETH: Me.
Q: Describe a typical good talk.
DAN: We both come home from work in a good mood and tell each other funny stories about what happened that day.
The Full Catastrophe Page 8