“Probably,” said Cook. He sensed a rising protest from Beth and quickly added, “But if Beth feels ignored, that’s significant.”
Dan laughed unpleasantly. “Which way are you going to have it?”
“What?” said Cook, even though he had heard and understood him.
Dan groaned and stared out the window. “This topic has failed. I’m going to go change. Then I’m going to work on the roof. I get pleasure out of tangible achievements. Roof work—that’s where you’ll find true happiness.”
Cook watched Dan head for the stairs. He waited, and when he heard Dan’s footsteps overhead, he said to Beth, “I can’t get him to talk about his work.”
“I don’t know why not,” she said. She gave Cook an indifferent look, as if the issue didn’t concern her.
“Where did you go in your car after the phone call?”
“To the record store. A new Bartok CD I’ve been waiting for came in.” She laughed. “What did you think? I was off having an affair?”
“No no.” Cook hoped he sounded convincing. The idea had indeed occurred to him.
“Yes you did.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Only a man would think I was having an affair. Relax. I don’t operate that way.”
“Of course you don’t. Another question. What did you and Dan fight about this morning?”
Beth sighed. “I woke up feeling discouraged about us. Dan can read my moods—it’s one thing he’s good at—and he got mad. Said he could tell I was having a ‘bitch attack.’ That’s what he calls them. He says I’m moody. But people are moody for reasons. It’s because of thoughts they have. Something suddenly starts bothering them. He doesn’t understand that. He never says to me, ‘What’s bothering you? Tell me what’s bothering you.’”
“He doesn’t?”
Beth gave Cook an unpleasant frown. “You say that like you’ve heard him do it. Don’t you believe me?”
Cook shifted in his seat. “It just seems odd that he wouldn’t ask.”
“He’s too busy getting mad.”
“Okay. Another question. Considering how he stormed out of the house when he went to work, I expected the two of you to be arguing when I came downstairs. How did you patch things up?”
“We just started talking.”
“That’s it?”
“Sure. Why are you so surprised? Is this stuff that foreign to you?”
“No. I just—”
“Didn’t you ever do that with your old girlfriend—what’s her name? Didn’t you ever end a fight just by talking about something else?”
“No,” said Cook, suddenly angry. “Never. I think it’s a stupid way to end a fight. And this stuff isn’t foreign to me, damn it. We lived together for a year.”
Beth’s eyebrows shot up and down once, quickly. ‘I didn’t know that. A year. That’s a good start, at least.”
“What—you pulling rank now because you and Dan have been together longer?”
“Not at all. Don’t get so testy.”
“Why don’t you go on TV so you can get some applause for it?” Cook felt as if he were having a bitch attack—and he rather liked it.
“What?” She seemed baffled.
“You know what I’m talking about. People on TV, like contestants on a game show—when they say, ‘Herbert and I have been married forty-seven years,’ everyone claps. I hate that.”
“You should love it,” Beth said.
“Love it all you want. I hate it.”
Cook fell silent. Dan had come into the room during this exchange. As he watched, he made no effort to conceal his amusement. He looked at Cook and said, “Topic success?”
Cook stood up.
“If I might change the subject at this juncture,” Dan said, pronouncing the words fastidiously. “Jeremy, do you still plan to help me or should I—”
“I’ll help,” Cook snapped. “I said I would.”
Dan grinned. “Good man.” He seemed exhilarated by Cook’s flare-up with Beth. He led Cook outside. “Hey,” he said. “Some damn fool threw the ladder in the ivy. Pretty silly, hunh?”
“Listen,” Cook said. “Since I’m helping you, you help me. Answer some questions about your job, for Christ’s sake.”
“Three,” said Dan. “Since you put it that way, I’ll answer three. Three questions for the sake of our three-personed God. Ready? Go.”
“Well, did you start your present job right from college? I don’t even know that.”
“No. I went to a place called the Defense Mapping Agency. It’s in the city—‘Right here in St. Louis,’ as Judy Garland says. You ever see that movie?” Dan’s manner was bright, but falsely bright.
“And you went from there to Beth’s father’s and brother’s place, I take it. What’s the name of it?”
“The name of it? It’s ‘Beth’s Father’s and Brother’s Place.’”
Cook cocked an eyebrow.
“We’re going to change the name, though. I’m insisting on it. I’ve told them to change it or I would walk. That’s the hard-ass expression—walk. So they’ve caved in and met my demands. Now it’ll be ‘Dan’s Father-in-Law’s and Brother-in-Law’s Place.’” Dan gave Cook a strange, almost mean look.
“I don’t get it,” said Cook.
“I don’t either.”
“What?”
“Is that your third question?”
“No. It’s this: How do you feel about what you do for a living?”
Dan took a deep breath, puffing his chest out more than Cook would have thought possible. “It’s a family business. But I’m not family and I’m not a businessman. That about sums it up.” He looked at Cook. “You want more? Okay. I joined the business for the money and for the novelty of it. What Beth said about it fitting in with my cartography was bullshit. There was no continuity at all with what I’d done before. I was burned out on my job and my dissertation—never finished it. I felt like a failure. It was a scary time. Beth’s father and brother invited me into the business, and I threw myself into it—you know, acting on panic. I had to prove myself. And I did—I really did. But …” He had grown animated, but now he sagged. “I hate it. It’s a bore. I don’t want to live the rest of my life playing buy low, sell high. You know what I mean?”
“Does Beth know how you feel?”
Dan smiled oddly. “One would think so.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Just what it says. Look, I think you’re on your fourth or fifth question.”
“Earlier, when you said ‘believe it or not’ about your being needed at work, was that a reflection of how you—”
“Stop. No more. Time for work.”
“But—”
“Time to play roofer. Do you want to be Hanke or Farmer? Farmer was drunk, so you better be Hanke, in light of this big problem of yours.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Cook said, and Dan laughed and they went to work.
After a titanic struggle to get the ladder from the street up against the house, Dan climbed it to the roof of the dormer over Cook’s room. From there he handed tiles down to Cook, who was more safely installed on his little balcony, stacking them. Dan seemed energized by the work, and he made constant wisecracks from his perch and sang snatches of songs Cook failed to recognize.
When Robbie came home from school he yelled with delight from the sidewalk at the sight of his father on high. He hurried upstairs and came out on the balcony and asked if he could join him. Dan said no, out of the question, it was too dangerous. Robbie whined. Then he complained about the Hershey Kisses—two days now without dessert at school. It was a crime! he said.
Cook manfully explained that he had eaten them. He apologized and promised to buy Robbie a bag. Robbie frowned and said, “Nice move. Mom and Dad blamed me. I told them I didn’t do it.” He held his frown, then suddenly broke into a grin and said, “Hey, this is great. You know what the worst thing about not having any brothers or sisters is? It’s getting blamed if
anything’s wrong. When my friend Tommy does something, his mom and dad can never figure out if it was him or his brothers or sister that did it. But here, I’m always the guilty one. But that’s all changed now. With you here, if you do stuff like this, Mom and Dad won’t know who to blame. How long you staying for?”
Cook laughed and said he didn’t know. They went to work. Robbie helped Cook stack the tiles. The balcony had grown crowded with them, so Cook handed them from there to Robbie in his room, and Robbie put them in a corner. Cook noticed Robbie’s eyes roaming over his desk now and then, apparently looking for clues to the linguist’s activities. Finally, Robbie grew tired and went downstairs.
A bit later, while Dan was resting—straddling the dormer ridge and facing forward, as if he were about to ride the entire house off into the sunset—he looked down to the street and said, “Who’s that?”
Cook looked over the balcony wall and saw a white car of some kind. (Cook hadn’t been any good at identifying cars from a distance since Corvairs had disappeared from the road.) It was parked behind a pin oak at the curb, exactly at a point where the trunk of the tree obscured the driver’s seat from his view. But an arm appeared—a long, thin arm—then an entire person: a tall blond woman in a tight white dress that showed a lot of skin above and below it. She stepped from the car and looked at the house, her eyes rising slowly, as if they were mounting the ladder rung by rung, until they reached Cook’s eyes and locked on them.
Cook jumped back with a frightened shout. He looked at his watch. Five-twenty. Five-twentyish. He could hear Roy Pillow saying it. But Pillow said it with difficulty, because Cook’s hands were around his throat, choking the life out of him.
Thirteen
Cook scampered around his room, peeling his dirty clothes off as if they were on fire. He dashed to the bathroom, splashed water all over himself, and hustled to his armoire to grab a clean shirt and pair of pants. Meanwhile, Dan had yelled greetings to the woman from the roof and was making progress in establishing who she was. He shouted down that he was surprised to learn Jeremy had a friend in St. Louis. Cook listened for the mystery woman’s response, but it was minimal. Dan continued to bellow in a friendly way.
Cook groaned, grabbed his coat and tie, and hurried out the bedroom door, dressing as he ran down the stairs. Beth was just crossing the entryway to the front door, drawn by Dan’s shouting from above. Meanwhile, Robbie, installed at the living room window, hollered, “What a babe!”
“Quick!” Cook said as he hurried to beat Beth to the door. “A nice restaurant nearby. Quick!”
“What?” said Beth.
“Name me a nice restaurant. Quick!”
“Well, there are lots of good restaurants in the Loop,” Beth said thoughtfully. “I don’t know what you mean by nice, but—”
“Vava voom!” Robbie sang out.
“I want fancy,” Cook said to Beth. “Expensive. Come on.”
“Well, there’s Topper’s in Clayton,” said Beth, a little flustered. “What’s going on?”
“How do I get there?”
“Mucho foxo!”
“Robbie, stop that shouting!” Beth yelled. Frowning, she gave Cook directions to the restaurant. Cook flung open the door, shot out, and slammed it shut behind him.
The mystery woman stood on the porch like some six-foot trophy permanently anchored there. Six-foot? Yes. She went up, and she went out as well. She wore a white leather dress with no straps or sleeves or belt or anything. It seemed suspended by its own devices—though he knew it was her devices doing it. Their eyes met and Cook’s immediately glanced off in an awkward ricochet. He couldn’t look at her face. It was like looking at the sun.
“Are you …” he began, but stopped short. Christ, how should he put it? “Do you come from Roy Pillow?”
Something unusual happened to his words. They didn’t reach her. He could almost see them—a continuous stream flowing from his mouth, straight and well propelled at the outset, but then falling at her feet. Granted, his question was odd—his syntax was that of an international spy, or a Freemason deep in a ritual. Still, he had never experienced such a blunt nonresponse.
“Your collar is all funny,” she said. Her voice was flat, but because it came from her it attacked him behind the knees, making him jelly-legged. He reached up and found that one side of his jacket collar stuck up like a cowlick. He straightened it.
“Is that better?” he asked. It was an intimate thing—the little comment, the correction, the reinspection. Here, now, it was grotesque.
“I’m Jeremy Cook,” he said. His name suddenly sounded funny to him.
“I want to learn all about you,” she said. This was a lie. Cook knew it from her vapid tone as well as by pure deduction: no one who looked like this could ever want to learn anything about him.
He suggested they go to Topper’s. She said “All right” so flatly that it barely carried meaning. As they walked down to the front sidewalk he peeked at her dress. It stuck out all over—so much that it seemed animated. He imagined it moving of its own accord, with her coming along with it. On the sidewalk, he looked at her car—a Mercedes-Benz convertible with the top down. He looked at his battered Honda Coupe. “My car’s in the shop,” he said. “Can we take yours?”
She agreed to this but remained standing. Cook wondered what was wrong with her. Didn’t she fit in her car anymore? Had she grown since she arrived? Then it occurred to him that she wanted him to drive. But why didn’t she just get in on the passenger’s side? Ah—she must have been waiting for him to open the door for her. Cook remembered how his father used to do this for his mother, and working from that distant example, he hopped to it.
“Hey, Jeremy,” Dan yelled from the roof. “Why aren’t you taking your car?”
Cook scowled at him as he walked around to the driver’s side. His eyes dropped from Dan to Robbie, who was still at the front window, and then swung over to Beth, whose face was at a small window high up in the front door.
The keys were in the ignition. Cook studied the controls and started the car. Dan yelled something and the woman turned to look up at him, but Cook gunned the engine and pulled away. He immediately got lost in the circular confusion of the neighborhood, and before he knew it he was cruising down their street and past the house again—past a grinning, bellowing Dan.
When they were out of the neighborhood, Cook struggled toward conversation, fighting its two deadly enemies, fear and lust.
“Are you from St. Louis?” he asked. This was as close as he could get to his real question: “Where in the hell did Roy Pillow find you?”
She said yes.
“Born and raised here?”
She said yes.
“Do you like it?”
She said yes.
Cook drove. She sat. She didn’t exactly take the old conversational ball and run with it—she took a sharp needle and popped it and made him go find another one. He took a deep breath and had a thought that angered him slightly, but it calmed him, too: because this woman didn’t react normally to him, he had gone on a search for new ways to be and he had lost himself in the process. He would have to stop doing that, stop losing himself. But he would still try to meet her where she was, even if she occupied such a tiny iota that there was barely room for him there.
“What do you do?” he asked.
“You know what I do,” she said.
Cook became engorged. His whole body swelled, as if transfused from a hidden blood supply. His face and everything below it reddened, stretched, and throbbed, until he felt that to observers on the sidewalk it must look as if a tall penis with arms were driving the car.
But maybe she had meant something else—something other than that she was a million-dollar hooker hired by Pillow for Cook’s pleasure.
“Of course I know,” Cook managed to say, “but I want to hear it from your lips.”
“I’m a model,” she said—brightly? Peevishly? Neutrally? He couldn’t tell how she said it. S
he didn’t say things in any way at all.
A model. Cook pulled up to a stoplight and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. She had a curious cleavage. In addition to being beautiful, it looked muscular, as if her breasts could perform work. He wondered if they could hold up an umbrella.
“A model,” he said. “That must be interesting.” His true thought was “That must be awful,” but he owed her a lie, to match hers about wanting to learn all about him.
Luckily, Topper’s wasn’t far away, and he located it and found a parking place down the street. He remembered to hop out of the car quickly and open her door. His reward was an optimal view of her tits. They seemed even larger from above. Then, as they walked, he sneaked another peek. They looked different again! He wondered if this was why men looked at tits more than once: they were secretly hoping they might change. He remembered reading somewhere that America was moving into a tit period, with more and more women simply buying new ones. Were hers store-bought? He had no idea. He wondered what the next stage would be—buying tits that actually did change? Tits for all occasions. Maybe inflatable ones. That way, sometimes they would be small and tasteful—for trips to the library, say, or for funerals—and other times they could leap right off the map.
The restaurant was at the top of an office building. As Cook steered her to the front door, she burst into speech: “I’m hungry.”
Cook nodded. He thought about her sentence, which, owing to its rare spontaneity, he analyzed rather more than it could stand, like a psychoanalytic critic scrutinizing a knock-knock joke.
She spoke again: “This window is in need of repair.”
A big piece of duct tape was plastered across a front window of the building. “It certainly is,” Cook agreed as he opened the door for her.
“This building is tall.”
Cook decided that the sensory world was her forte. She saw and she heard, and she gave a swift and honest account. This was where he would meet her. “‘Tall’ is a perfect word for it,” he said.
“It’s cool in here,” she said.
The Full Catastrophe Page 16