The Full Catastrophe

by David Carkeet

  “I know,” Beth said over her shoulder. She rolled the portable dishwasher from the sink into a little storage closet. Its wheels screeched horribly.

  Dan scooted his chair back from the table. “Okay. I’ve been wanting to clean up the basement. That’s the plan.” He stood up.

  Beth turned around. Her face was blank but her mouth was slightly open.

  Dan seemed to sense something was amiss. His motions suddenly became less fluid as he eased away from the table and headed for the basement door.

  “You’re kidding,” Beth said.

  “Me?” said Dan, stopping. He looked at Beth. “I’m not kidding. It’s a mess down there.”

  “I can’t believe you.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head. “You overwhelm me,” she said softly.

  “You overwhelm me too, honey. Now can I go clean the basement?”

  “You go to hell.” She said this sternly, but then her lips quivered and she seemed about to cry.

  “Hey,” said Dan, going to her. “What am I missing here? Come on. I’m sorry if I missed something. Tell me.”

  Beth said, “You’re missing the whole point. Why is he here?” She jabbed a finger at Cook. “He’s not going to learn anything watching you move a bunch of junk around.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said slowly and thoughtfully. “He’s here to watch us talk. I guess I could talk out loud while I work. Would that be okay, Jeremy?”

  Cook held his body language in check, declining to respond. He didn’t want to be part of Dan’s plunge onto the rocks. It was as if Dan were trying to be stupid.

  “He’s supposed to watch us together!” Beth yelled. “Jesus Christ!”

  “Okay okay okay,” Dan said in instant surrender. “I was just in the mood to clean the basement, all right? You know what it’s like to be in the mood to do a rotten job? You’ve got to take advantage of it. There’s a lot of work to do around the house—”

  “How about working on our marriage?”

  “Fine. We’ll do something together.”

  Now that she had him, she didn’t want him. “Forget it,” she said, turning back to the sink. “Do whatever you want.”

  “No, honey,” Dan said, reaching for her. “Come on. Don’t do that. You’re right—we’ll do something together.”

  Beth let him hold her, though she seemed a little stiff. “I just can’t believe you sometimes,” she said.

  “I know. I’m awful.”

  “So what do we do?” Beth said, easing away from him.

  Dan went slowly back to his chair as his mind lumbered into action. Total redemption required that he propose a common activity acceptable to Beth but not wildly out of character for him, for then his proposal would seem insincere. Cook figured he was a goner.

  “I don’t suppose you’d want to help me clean the basement.”

  “No.”

  “It needs to be done. We could do it together.”

  “No. I’d hate that.”

  Dan had regained some ground there. Cook was sure of it.

  “Yeah,” said Dan. “I guess it’s not very romantic.”

  Cook held his breath. But Beth said nothing.

  “Shopping?” said Dan.

  “I’d love to,” said Beth, showing more feeling toward the subject than Cook would have thought possible. “But you’d hate it.”

  Dan got a sadly crazed look on his face, and he whined plaintively, “Can’t we meet somewhere between shopping and cleaning the basement?”

  Cook found the silence generated by this question deeply discouraging.

  “It’s a lovely day,” Beth said, her eyes drifting to the window.

  “Want to go for a bike ride?” said Dan.

  Beth smiled. “Great idea”

  “Good,” said Dan.

  They turned and looked at Cook. He was obviously bike-less. Their stares made him feel like an obstacle to their reconciliation.

  Beth said, “Robbie’s bike?”

  Dan shook his head. “Too small.”

  “Could he trot alongside?”

  “He doesn’t strike me as a trotter. You a trotter, Jeremy?”

  Cook shook his head.

  “How about Ron’s bike?” said Dan. “Can you call Mary?”

  “Could you call her? I don’t feel like talking.”

  “You don’t have to talk,” Dan said. “Just ask if we can borrow Ron’s bike.”

  “You do it, honey. I’d have to talk.”

  “Why would you have to talk?”

  “I just would.”

  “Why? You just say, ‘Hi, Mary. Listen. We have a friend here who needs to borrow a bike. Can we use Ron’s?’” Dan’s wooden delivery seemed to ridicule Beth for failing to recognize how little would be required of her. Cook tensed, expecting her to retaliate. But she didn’t get angry at all.

  “Just do it. As a favor. All right? I’ve got to change.” She left the kitchen and went upstairs.

  Dan looked at Cook. “She’d have to talk. Figure that out.” He got up and dialed. While he waited for an answer at the other end, he said to Cook, “They’re neighbors, across the street. Hey—I should have had you call. I’d like to see you act it out over the phone, without speaking.” Dan threw himself into a violent charade to suggest this, then abruptly stopped.

  “Hi, Mary. Listen. We have a friend here who needs to borrow a bike to take a ride with us. Can we use Ron’s?” He winked at Cook, apparently to show him how easy it was. “An old friend from college … Yeah … Santa Cruz, right … No, first time in the Gateway City … Yeah. Anyway, listen … Yeah, we’re about to go out and … It’s a great day. Sure is. Listen, can we borrow Ron’s bike? … Oh? You have to do that? … Okay. We’ll be here. Bye.”

  Dan hung up and said to Cook, “She’s got to call her husband for permission. Jesus.” He sat down at the table. “She’ll call back.” He sat still for a moment, then stood up and went out the swinging door to the bottom of the stairs and yelled the news to Beth. Cook heard a faint, obscure response. Dan returned and sat back down. He drummed his fingers on the table.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre? That she would have to get his okay?”

  Cook shrugged.

  “I mean, if they called here to ask for my bike, Beth’d say, ‘Sure, take it, have fun.’ What’s the big deal?” He looked at Cook’s cup. “More coffee?”

  Cook nodded.

  “A bike,” Dan said as he took Cook’s cup to the coffee maker and refilled it. “What can you do to a bike?”

  Cook was silent on the subject.

  “The guy—Ron—is a bike nut, so maybe it’s an expensive one.” He set the coffee in front of Cook. “He’s a fusspot. Maybe all bike nuts are. You think so?”

  Cook tried to signal fairly strong agreement, wanting to make it clear, however, that his agreement was based not on actual experience with bike nuts but merely on a lifelong partiality to hostile generalizations. It was a tough concept, and he almost threw his neck out trying to convey it.

  “I wish to hell she’d call. Jesus. You see a pattern here, Jeremy? My wife won’t let me do what I want to, so I commit myself to a new want, which I don’t really want, but in time maybe I will, because if you can train a dog, you can train a husband, right? So I call Mary, and she won’t let me do my new want, which I don’t even want anyway.” He froze and studied the phone, as if he could make it ring that way. When it didn’t, he walked to the window and looked out onto the backyard.

  “‘Work on our marriage,’” he said. “I’m working. Look at me. I’m working right now. I’m working so fucking hard I—”

  The phone rang and Dan grabbed it and said hello. His shoulders sagged. “Hi, Rose … Yeah … Hey, I’m sorry I left you hanging on so long yesterday. The doorbell rang and I had to answer it … Yeah, just for a couple days. To fix up the house, spend some time with Beth, you know. Lemme get her.” He set the phone down, grimaced, and went to the bottom of the stairs, where h
e yelled at the top of his lungs, “Beth! It’s your mom!” Beth called out something in response, and Dan muttered and returned to the phone.

  “She’ll be right here, Rose.” He added with a laugh, “Honest, I promise. Yeah. Bye.” He set the phone down and said in a whisper to Cook, “I’m gonna go across the street and see what the story is. When Beth picks it up in the bedroom, can you hang this up?”

  Cook nodded and watched him go. He sipped his coffee. The kitchen was wonderfully quiet with Dan gone. Cook’s eyes came to rest on the phone. He wondered if Beth and her mother were going to say anything interesting—about Dan, for example. You never knew where data might lurk. He slipped out of his shoes and tiptoed to the phone. It was a wall phone, and Dan had hooked the receiver precariously on the top of it. Cook didn’t touch it, for fear of making noise. He contented himself with snuggling up close to it. Despite his necessary distance from the earpiece, he could hear Beth’s mother breathing as she waited for her daughter. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. He listened, feeling that they were becoming intimate, in a sense—though in what sense he wouldn’t have been able to say.

  He heard a door open upstairs, followed by footsteps and the click of the extension. Then he listened hard.

  “Got it!” Beth yelled.

  Cook lurched away from the phone.

  “Got it!” Beth yelled again. “Hang it up!”

  He rattled a kitchen chair noisily at the table, then stomped to the phone, which he hung up definitively.

  No eavesdroppers down here, lady. Not a one.

  The three of them rolled through Forest Park, Dan in the lead, then Beth, followed by Cook, who kept falling behind. Mr. Bike across the street had been unreachable at the office, so Mr. Bike’s wife had donated her own vehicle to the cause. It was a three-speed clunker, festooned with plastic flowers and laden with so many wire baskets that Cook felt as if he were riding a cyclone fence. One of the pedals developed a slip shortly after they set out: on every revolution Cook’s right foot coasted freely for several inches before engaging again in any kind of useful propulsion. He had an urge to hop off the bike and give it a shove out into the street traffic.

  Dan seemed to be having a hard time throttling down, and he pulled ahead even farther. Beth dropped back and fell in alongside Cook. She apologized for the condition of his bike and offered her own to him. He shook his head and struggled manfully on.

  “Look at Dan,” she said. “I swear. He’s just dying to go faster. He hates slow bike rides. I used to think it was just a male thing—a fascination with speed. But I know better now. I can’t talk if we go fast. So we go fast.” She sighed. “Control. It’ll get you every time.” She glanced at Cook. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask any questions about it last night in your questionnaire. Who controls things? That would be a good question.” She looked ahead at Dan, who was pulling away so gradually that it was hard to tell he was doing it. “Dan hates being in the car with me because I’ve got him trapped. That’s what he’d say. Just ask him. Why’d he marry me if he doesn’t want to talk to me? Who am I supposed to talk to?”

  They rode on in silence for a while. “What he does,” Beth went on, “is he declares certain subjects forbidden. I can’t tell him my dreams in the morning. Too boring. I can’t talk about problems at my school for too long—I reach his limit real quick there. Even stuff that concerns us. I like to talk about the future, sort of dream out loud, fantasize. Nope. Nothing about the future, except for short-term stuff, like upcoming trips. Oh, Robbie’s education—that’s another exception. We can talk about that. But not about me, not about my hopes.” She laughed bitterly. “I guess his goal is to eliminate all topics, one by one, until nothing’s left, and I’ll be mute. His father—that’s another forbidden subject. He’s all alone. Dan’s mother died a couple years ago, and he lives in an apartment in South San Francisco. He’s retired—used to be a Muni bus driver. Now he never sees anybody. He’s a total recluse, the unhappiest man I know. Can’t talk about him, though. Dan says it’s a hopeless case, there’s nothing he can do, so no more talk about it. The subject is closed.”

  Beth’s voice had become slightly hoarse—with unhappiness, Cook guessed. He looked ahead. Dan was so far in front that the dips and bends in the bike path kept taking him out of view.

  Beth heaved a huge sigh and made a valiant shift of subject, pointing out the houses across the street from the park—some of the finest houses in the city, she said. She called them “mansionettes” and said most of them dated from the turn of the century. She named the styles for him: Italianate, Georgian, Greek Revival, and when all else failed, American Eclectic. They were all set well back from the road. Cook noticed that there was absolutely no sign of life about them—no little children playing on the grass, no one unloading groceries. The houses seemed to exist independently of people, just for themselves.

  Beth said, “Look at that one—the French one with the porte cochere.”

  Cook plumbed his Romance vocabulary and figured out that she meant the gray limestone house with the little drive-up porch on the side: the coach-port. It had forbidding lines and a yard heavily shaded by trees that looked like magnolias. Did magnolias grow in St. Louis? He turned to Beth, wishing he could ask her.

  She was crying. Her bike began to weave.

  “What is it?” said Cook. “Stop, Beth. Stop your bike.”

  She came to a jerking halt, nearly tipping over when she put her feet down before the bike had completely stopped. She looked ahead. Dan was well out of sight now, long gone. She began to cry more heavily.

  Cook stopped beside her. He said, “Maybe he’s just gone ahead a bit and he’s waiting for us. He’s probably waiting. Don’t you think so?”

  Beth cried. He reached out for her. As they awkwardly straddled their bikes, he held her against his shoulder, letting her cry there and patting her back. It was all he could think to do.

  Nine

  “He’s a prick, Roy.”

  “Oh come now.”

  “I mean it. He’s a prick.”

  “No pricks allowed, Jeremy. Pricks need not apply. The Pillow Agency will not have them. You can’t save a marriage with a bitch or a prick in it.”

  “Yeah? What if one slipped through?”

  “Out of the question. Hang on.” Pillow put Cook on hold before he had a chance to protest. As he stood at the pay phone in the restaurant entryway, he kept his eye on the rest room door for Beth. At her suggestion, on their way home from the park they had stopped for coffee at this place—a Greek restaurant named Zeno’s. But as soon as they sat down, Beth had gone into the bathroom. This had left Cook with limited options—sitting alone at a restaurant table, which he always hated doing, or … calling Roy Pillow? Incredible as it seemed, talking to Pillow was actually preferable to conspicuous solitude.

  Pillow came back, armed with a witticism: “You must be on a different calendar than mine, Jeremy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Has a great deal of time passed since you last telephoned, by your reckoning? By mine, it’s been just a few hours.”

  “Good, Roy. Very clever.”

  “I shall say goodbye now.”

  “Wait, Roy. I’ve got an unhappy woman here.”

  “Mmm.”

  “What should I do? And don’t tell me the goddamn Pillow Manual will be my guide.”

  “Speaking of which, you shouldn’t be talking, even to me. You must foster the observer’s attitude. That’s the ticket. Goodbye, Jeremy.”

  Cook swore, sighed, and returned to his table. Beth was still in the bathroom. If she didn’t come out soon, he would have to send someone in there to check on her. This was something he had never done before, but things like this probably happened when you got involved with people. You had to ask strangers to go into the bathroom for you.

  The door to the kitchen was right behind him, making him jump every time it swung open. He could switch tables, but then to the other patrons he would look li
ke a malcontent as well as a loner. What were all these people doing in a Greek restaurant at ten-thirty in the morning? Didn’t they have regular jobs somewhere? Were they all Pillow agents? He looked at the menu cover. Zeno’s. There couldn’t be a real Zeno in the kitchen. Some classics-loving show-off had named the place. Cook wished a Chapter 11 on him.

  Thoughts of bankruptcy led Cook naturally enough to his sex life. It had been nearly four months since he had had one. Could he still do it? He reviewed it, the way one might recall how to change a tire before a long trip, reminding oneself where the important tools were and brushing up on points of access, safety procedures, and the like. Yes, he could remember it—just barely. But how could he apply this fading knowledge? He knew only one woman within hundreds of miles, and he was supposed to be saving her marriage.

  Of course, there was the date Pillow had threatened him with—a prospect he had successfully kept out of his mind for at least five minutes. Cook had been on one blind date in his life. It was in college. By any measure, it was not a success. He recalled its climax, an hour or so into it. He had been walking with the girl and another couple on a sidewalk bordering a large, dark, empty field. Without a moment of thought, as if he were controlled by aliens who had wired him up, Cook had bolted, sprinting across the lot at top speed and disappearing into the night. For lasting guilt, there was no single act in his life, from birth to the present, that he regretted more than this one.

  A waitress came to his table and he ordered a cup of coffee. He took a sheet of yellow legal paper from his pocket and unfolded it on the table. Under the heading THE HORROR! was the terse hypothesis he had written the night before:

  She’s a bitch.

  He studied it for a minute, then crossed it out and entered a new one: