For a while they worked in silence. Dan seemed to be working outward from the center—as good a plan as any.
“Want to know why I’m doing this? In case we sell the house. That’s right—I’m preparing for our divorce. If it comes to that, I don’t want to spend time here sprucing the sonofabitch up. I want it to be all ready, so I can make a clean break. Does that surprise you? I mean, that I’m planning for it?”
Cook’s foot had broken through a box and was stuck. He yanked it out and almost fell down in the process.
“You’re real good at this, aren’t you?” Dan laughed. “Look at this. A sewing machine. Used once, maybe. She never sews. You sew? You want it?”
Cook shook his head.
Dan set the machine to one side. “I’ll just put it here so I can trip over it later. That should be fun.” He sighed. “That’s why the roofers were here. Getting the place ready for the old heave-ho, just in case. I wonder if Beth thinks I’m doing all this for general improvement, or what. It makes her happy, I know that much. She’ll look down here and say, ‘Great job, honey.’ And I’ll think yeah, sure. But it’s got to be done. We’ve got to be ready to sell it. If we kept it, Beth’d stay here and I’d be in an apartment, but the sonofabitch’d need repairs—it always does—and she couldn’t do them, so she’d call me, and I’d come trotting over with my little toolbox … When I think about that, I say no way. No way.”
Ten
When they took a break for lunch, Cook went to the refrigerator, planning to throw a dry, minimal sandwich together and get through it as quickly as possible. Dan told him to sit down and said he would fix both of them lunch. Cook gestured that he wanted to help, mainly by clutching at his heart and throwing his hands out from it—not exactly American Sign Language, but it did the trick. Dan pointed to a tall oak hutch across the kitchen and told Cook the seasonings to get from it.
As Cook tracked these down and delivered them, Dan went to the food processor, put two slices of bread in it, and created bread crumbs. Cook almost yelped like a savage at the sight. Then Dan got some milk and some things that he called turkey fillets out of the refrigerator. He poured a small amount of milk into a bowl—Cook knew not why—and took the seasonings Cook had fetched and added them to the bread crumbs, not measuring them but just shaking them in with a hey nonny-nonny. He stirred these up, making a pretty speckled sight. Then he dunked the turkey fillets into the bowl! Cook was sure now that Dan was playing, just horsing around with the ingredients until Beth got home. When she did, she would yell at him and chase him out of the kitchen.
But Dan pressed on as if his actions were in the service of some goal he had envisioned from the beginning. He set the moistened fillets into the seasoned bread crumbs in such a way that the crumbs actually clung to the fillets, as if by magic. Then he set these into a skillet, which was somehow already at hand, hot, oiled, and ready. As Cook watched the fillets begin to sizzle, the word “breading” leaped to his mind. Seeing its etymology reenacted before his eyes gave the event a wholeness and a beauty that made him feel unworthy.
On a separate burner, Dan heated up some succotash. Succotash! Cook liked the word almost as much as he liked the name Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. He even liked the food itself. But he hadn’t eaten it in years. That was part of his food problem. He forgot about foods and tended to fall back on the same two or three dishes over and over.
A hot lunch. Cook hadn’t had a hot lunch outside of a restaurant since the time his mother—herself no ace in the kitchen—had heated up some canned soup for him when he was sick. Dan and Cook sat down to eat at the round glass table on the deck. Three minutes after they had started, Cook was done. Dan stared at him in wonder, his mouth halting in midchew. Cook wished he could explain. Awful food—his regular fare—was best eaten fast. This meal deserved to be eaten slowly, but Cook always went on automatic as soon as a fork was in his hand. He rubbed his tummy for Dan.
Dan smiled tiredly and said, “Shut up.” Then he said, “Beth’s the real cook. She’s great. Never makes the same thing twice—and I wish she would, because it’s always good and sometimes I’d like to have it again. The problem is that she wants me to love cooking the way she does. She sees it as a way we could be together. She’s got this fantasy of us cooking and giving great dinner parties. It’s got a couple of flaws, though: I don’t like parties and I don’t like cooking. So she’s got another fantasy, only I’m not in it. She dreams about a perfect guy who cooks with her all the time. They go through cookbooks together and get all excited, and they go shopping for stuff at little ethnic food stores, and they spend the whole day working on these complex dishes, sipping wine and giggling through it all.” He paused. “But I comfort myself, because you wanna know what this fantasy guy is like outside the kitchen? You wanna know?” Dan got a wild look in his eyes. “He’s a fucking bore.” He laughed uproariously and settled down and ate in silence for a while.
Then he said, “I just realized something. The first time I had her over to my apartment, I cooked her a meal. Geez. I probably gave her the wrong idea. She probably thought I was the fantasy guy. But she tricked me, too. Our whole marriage is based on a geographical mistake. There I was, in Santa Cruz, as provincial as all native Californians are, and along comes Beth. From St. Louis! I said to myself, anyone who goes to college two thousand miles away from home has got to be an independent woman. So I fell for her. It was an ignorant thing to do. I didn’t know how common it was for midwesterners to leave their home states for college. I was used to the California model—staying there. I drew a false conclusion about her. She’s not independent at all. She’s the most dependent, traditional, needy—”
A knock on the wooden gate at the corner of the house made him stop. A woman’s voice called out, “Beth? Dan? Yoo-hoo. Anybody home?”
“Come on in, Mary,” Dan called. He didn’t seem to mind the interruption at all.
The gate rattled as she struggled with the latch. Cook turned around to see what kind of woman actually said “Yoo-hoo.” Would she look like her bike, with streamers and baskets hanging all over her?
She did not look like her bike. But she grabbed his attention for another reason. She was Miss St. Louis Hot Pants. Cook hadn’t seen shorts like those for quite a while. “Yoo-hoo, turn around, please,” he wanted to say, so he could inspect her rear, and she obliged, though her own reason for doing so was to close the gate after her.
She trotted up the stairs. “I saw my bike lying out in front and got worried that something happened,” she said.
Cook smacked himself on the head and was about to apologize for leaving it there, but he couldn’t get the words out in front of Dan. Such a good little Pillow agent.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” said Dan. “We’ve had a busy morning. I should have returned it.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
Cook liked her a lot. Her face didn’t add to her hot pants, but it didn’t detract from them either. She was a little too old for hot pants, but that made them even more exciting to him. What a day! A hot lunch, and then hot pants!
Dan said, “Mary, this is the college friend I told you about. Say hello, Jeremy.”
“Hello,” said Cook.
Mary smiled. “Are you here for long?”
“Mmm.” Cook looked at Dan. “Couple weeks?” he said. Dan’s eyebrows shot up. “Not if I can help it.”
They laughed all around. Mary said to Cook, “You’ll be here all alone if you stay that long.” She turned to Dan. “Aren’t you leaving next week?”
“Yep. A week from yesterday.”
Cook frowned in surprise. Was this the trip to Italy? In less than a week? Why hadn’t anyone told him?
“Got your passports?” Mary asked.
“Yep.”
Cook wondered if he would be done with his work by then. He wondered if he would even have started by then. Did Pillow know about the trip? He must not have, or he would have mentioned it. But wasn’t Pillow’s specia
l gift not mentioning things? Cook decided to stop thinking about Pillow.
“When’s Robbie’s camp?” Mary asked.
“It starts the day we leave and ends the day after we get back. We planned it so they overlap exactly.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all together,” Mary said playfully. People in hot pants, Cook observed, could get away with saying unfunny things playfully.
Mary suddenly seemed a little self-conscious, perhaps because Cook was so silent. She said, “I’ll get along and let you two reminisce about your wild past.”
Dan thanked her for the bike. Cook smiled. She turned to go. Hot pants!
Cook stood up and went after her. He could feel Dan looking up in surprise. He reached her at the gate. “There’s something wrong with your bike,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Let me show you.” He followed her hot pants out of the gate to the bike, which she had leaned against the side of the house. He lifted it by the seat with one hand and made the pedal go around jerkily with the other. “See that?” he said to her hot pants, for he was bent over and looking right at them. “See how it clunks?”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
“Let me take it into the shop for you. I should do that. It happened while I was riding it, after all.”
“I couldn’t let you do that,” she said. “Forget it.” She put a hand on his shoulder.
FIRE IN THE LOINS!
“Stand up,” she said. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
FIRE! But she’s married, Cook said to himself, and the fire died down. But her husband is a bike nut, he said, and the flames leaped back up.
“I know who you are,” Mary said matter-of-factly. “Beth told me about you. I hope you can help them. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
At this reminder of his professional obligation, her hot pants seemed to unfurl and suddenly cover her legs all the way down to her shoe tops. Cook sighed. Then he thought about her offer. Could she help?
“You can answer a question for me,” he said. “Has Dan ever made a pass at you?”
She was only mildly shaken. “No,” she said.
“How long have you known him?”
She thought. “Three years.” She smiled. “It’s funny, now that you mention it. Dan makes sexual jokes all the time, but only when Beth is around. They aren’t flirting jokes at all. I mean, they aren’t about me and him, as if he’s hinting at something. Actually, they’re about him and Beth more than anything else. Beth doesn’t seem to mind. She usually laughs, in fact. But when he’s alone with me he doesn’t do it. He’s almost formal.” She tilted her head to one side and looked at Cook. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
“It’s a good sign that he hasn’t, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“Ron would kill him if he did. He would just kill him.” Cook swallowed. “Does Dan know that?”
“No, no. Dan wouldn’t fool around. He just wouldn’t. I know the type.”
Cook nodded soberly, implying he knew the type, too. His eye fell on her bike. “Can your husband fix this?”
She smiled ruefully. “Yeah. I wish he spent as much time on me as he does on these bikes.”
The siren call of hot pants was faint this time. Cook thanked her and said goodbye.
Dan had returned to the basement, where he was working to the sound of some music Cook was unfamiliar with. Instead of joining him right away, Cook went into the dining room, took THE HORROR! from his shirt pocket, and opened it on the table. He crossed out his most recent theory—“He’s a prick”—and entered a new one below it: “Money.”
A number of things led him to do this. Above all, Dan simply didn’t seem like a prick. Occasional prickishness toward Beth did not make him a permanent prick. And he hadn’t been a prick during the crisis with the roofers; that had been painful for both Dan and Beth, and true pricks didn’t feel pain. Also, a prick would have made a pass at Hot Pants. Cook had come close to doing so, and had felt more like a prick the closer he got. Dan was unhappy—of this Cook was sure. But he wasn’t a prick.
Money. Cook sat and studied the word while Dan stomped boxes and called out snatches of lyrics. Since money was something Cook seldom thought about, it took some effort—like fashioning a long sentence in a foreign language. Dan and Beth were certainly well-off. No—that suggested too much money. They were comfortable. No—too little. Quite comfortable. Yes. Quite comfortable. The house was way oversized for them: six bedrooms for three people, and more chairs and sofas and tables than ten of them could use. Their two cars seemed fairly new, though Cook hadn’t looked at them closely or noticed the make of either. Beth, being a schoolteacher, probably didn’t earn as much as Dan did as co-owner or whatever he was of this printing plant he didn’t seem to want to talk about. The plant, though, came from Beth’s family. Was that important?
Cook leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Money. He reviewed the strained moments he had witnessed thus far to see what role it played: (1) in the first conversation Cook had heard after his arrival, Beth had briefly chided Dan for abandoning Cook to watch the ball game on TV, for letting the cookies burn, and for leaving her mother hanging on the phone; (2) there had been the snap and sizzle of complementary schismogenesis in the kitchen when Dan had wanted to talk and Beth had wanted to cook; (3) Beth had chided Dan at dinner for being indiscreet about Cook’s function in front of Robbie; (4) Beth had chided Dan for not understanding what “our books” meant; (5) Beth had been peeved by Dan’s identification of the alleged Dittersdorf quartet as a Haydn; (6) Beth had chided Dan for wanting to clean the basement instead of working on their marriage; (7) Beth had cried at the next display of Dan’s dodge-’em attitude, when he pulled away from them on the bike path; and (8) they had played tug-of-war over the two roofing crews.
Cook found his review a little discouraging. So many flash points reached in so little time—about eighteen hours. And Beth certainly did a lot of chiding, didn’t she? And where was the money in these disputes? Cook couldn’t find any—not even pocket change.
The doorbell rang. Cook put THE HORROR! back in his shirt pocket and went to the door. It was a tense, goateed courier, who told him he had a pickup to make for the Pillow Agency. Cook stared at him in wonder, then realized what he wanted and went upstairs and got the tape recorder. Beth drove up as the courier’s van pulled away. Cook watched her get out and open her trunk. He went down to help her with the boxes she was taking out. She told him her classroom at school was being replastered and she had to get her personal items out of there for the summer. They made three trips from the car to the storage room on the third floor, carrying boxes of books, music, and small percussion instruments—triangles, castanets, maracas—that rattled pleasantly in transit.
All the while, Cook stayed behind Beth and kept a close eye on her, in part because he was still warming down from Hot Pants, and in part because he had always been a sucker for short jeans skirts like the one Beth was wearing. There was something about them—something having to do with access. Regular jeans were closed to him, whereas jeans skirts were open. Because the two garments were related—cognates, as it were—the idea of access always came as a nice surprise, like a forgotten holiday popping up on the calendar. And Beth’s legs, which were girlishly muscular rather than the thin, elegant things destined for hosiery, were just right for a jeans skirt.
When they came back downstairs from their last trip, Beth gave Cook a nice smile and thanked him for his help, which immediately made him feel guilty for viewing her sexually. She said, “Geez. He’s listening to reggae again. Every chance he gets …” Her voice trailed off and she went into the kitchen.
Cook went back down to the basement. The cleared circle was much wider, and when Cook resumed working he noticed that the junk was more varied. He would hold up objects for Dan’s judgment—should they be kept or thrown out? Dan looked at them: tarnished silverware, a to
aster oven, a dented brass chandelier with cut-glass pendants. “Pitch,” he would say. The overriding principle was “pitch.”
The basement door opened and Beth came down the stairs. Beth and Dan’s last contact, about the roofers, had ended ambiguously, with no clear winner or loser. Cook wondered how they would be with each other now.
Beth sat down on a lower step and watched them. Dan turned off the music. She said he didn’t have to do that, she didn’t mind it. But Dan said he was about to quit for the day. Beth said the basement was looking great. Dan asked how her conferences had gone. She said fine—two more and she would be done for the year. She reminded him that tonight was the last night of a German film they had wanted to see at the Tivoli, and she said that Tommy’s mother had agreed to have Robbie over if they wanted to go to the seven o’clock show. Did they? Dan said sure.
This was all friendly enough. Functional but not cold. To Cook it sounded like everyday stuff.
“I guess Jeremy’s coming, too,” Dan said. He began to turn off the basement lights, pulling one bulb string after another. “You can’t get shed of him, as they say in these parts. Oops. Sorry.” He looked guiltily at Beth. “I didn’t mean to make fun of St. Louis. It’s a city on the comeback, a great place to raise kids, you can go anywhere in twenty minutes, it has a great—”
The doorbell rang. “That’s Robbie,” said Beth, pretty much ignoring Dan. “He’s lost his key again. I’d better get him started on his homework if he’s going over to Tommy’s. We’ll eat at six, guys.” She went up the stairs.
Dan looked after her. “Hmm. ‘Guys.’ She usually reserves that for Robbie and me. You’re one of the guys, Jeremy. What do you think of that?”
Cook showered and dressed for dinner, choosing one of two identical pair of khakis and one of the six knit shirts—all primary colors—hanging in his armoire. He hurried with his socks and shoes, not because he was late but because he heard some lively piano playing and wanted to get nearer to it.
The Full Catastrophe Page 12