The Full Catastrophe

by David Carkeet

  “That means you knew Mom, too. They were in college together.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t know her as well, though.”

  Robbie was silent for a while. Dan had taken over pitching, and they watched him toss some warm-up pitches to the catcher. The first batter came to the plate, but after a couple of pitches a player on the opposing team stood up from the bench to make a complaint. Cook heard him yell something about an arch, and he asked Robbie what the problem was.

  “He wants Dad to lob the ball more. Dad’s coming in too flat.”

  The man had meant to say “arc.” Dan’s first baseman, a woman, picked up on the mistake and yelled at Dan to put more St. Louis Arch on the ball, and Dan laughed, and the third baseman, a man, yelled, “Yeah, Dan. Put some more Jefferson Expansion National Memorial on the goddamn ball,” and Dan laughed again. The entire infield took it up, and they urged Dan to put all sorts of St. Louis landmarks on the ball. The joke seemed to escape the Loop Merchants Assn. player who had lodged the complaint. He just watched the action stolidly.

  “How’s your survey going?” Robbie asked.

  Cook went back on alert. “Hmm?”

  “Your survey. How’s it going?”

  “Fine.”

  “Who’ve you talked to besides Mom and Dad?”

  “Oh, people in the neighborhood.”

  “Like who?”

  “Oh, Mary across the street. The old guy next door. People in the Loop.”

  “What do you ask them?”

  “Say, is this guy the right batter? Wasn’t a woman supposed to bat next?”

  Robbie looked at his scorecard. “He’s the right one.” They watched him ground out to the second baseman. Robbie marked his scorecard and said, “What do you ask them?”

  Cook cleared his throat. “Well, first I ask them if they were born and raised in St. Louis. They have to be natives.”

  “Hunh?” Robbie made a face.

  “‘Native’ means someone who was born and raised in the area.” Etymology! Cook thought. A guaranteed conversation killer. “It’s from the same Latin word that gives us ‘nativity.’ We get lots of words from that root. We get—”

  “Hey, I’m a native. Interview me.”

  “I will,” said Cook.

  “Go ahead.”

  “No, no. I’m saving you.”

  “But I want to hear what you ask them.”

  “Okay. Let me think of a good example.” Cook knew nothing whatsoever about the St. Louis dialect—not even if there was one. He would have to fall back on general principles. He watched the second batter hit a ground ball to Dan, who threw him out at first. Robbie marked his scorecard. Then he turned and looked at Cook.

  “A long time ago,” said Cook, “linguists came up with a bunch of words to ask people all over the country. If people say certain words, then a linguist can tell where they’re from.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, how would you call a cow?”

  “Hunh?”

  “How would you call a cow?”

  “I don’t know. Dial nine-one-one?”

  Cook laughed. “No. I mean in person. If you were standing at a fence, looking at a cow in the field, and you wanted to call her to you, what would you say?”

  “I’d say, ‘Hey, cow, get your buns over here.’”

  “Exactly,” Cook said without hesitation. “And that identifies you as a St. Louisan.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. The use of ‘buns’ is typical of St. Louisans.”

  “Dang,” Robbie said, fascinated. “Did Mom and Dad say that, too?”

  Cook thought for a moment. “They probably would. I haven’t asked them yet. Don’t warn them. I’ve got to surprise them with the question.”

  “What else? This is neat.”

  “Let me think.” Cook wandered far and wide over his mental linguistic atlas, beating the bushes for an example. “What do you call the long thing you sit on in your living room?”

  “A ‘couch’?”

  “Right.”

  “Or a ‘sofa,’” Robbie added quickly.

  “Do you say ‘sofa’? Do you actually say it?”

  Robbie’s face went sheepish in a way Cook recognized: bad-informant guilt. “Not really.”

  “When I was growing up I had an unusual word for a couch. I called it a ‘chesterfield.’” Cook said this proudly. It was the only interesting thing in his dialect. But the ball field rang with Robbie’s laughter.

  “Dang!” he said. “That’s so dumb. How come you called it that?”

  Cook shrugged. “There’s this little area in California where people say ‘chesterfield’ for couch. If they have it in San Francisco, your dad probably grew up saying it, too.”

  “You know what? My teacher says ‘davenport.’ She calls a couch a ‘davenport.’”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Nebraska.” Robbie rolled his eyes. “She’s always talking about how wonderful Nebraska is.”

  The bases had become loaded as they talked, and Robbie suddenly dropped linguistics and focused intently on the action on the field. Cook watched, too—watched two runs score while Robbie groaned. But then a woman flied out to the center fielder, who was playing way in, almost at second base, and Dan’s team came in to bat.

  Cook suddenly realized that although the game before him provided a natural opportunity for sexual or sexist comments, he hadn’t heard any from anybody. He had noticed that the outfielders shifted along gender lines, playing in close when women batted, then going back out for men, but he decided that that wasn’t sexist—it was simply pragmatic. In fact, the whole game was a study in accommodation, as if everyone on the field had said, “We know the sexes are different, but we can still play ball together, and here’s how we do it.”

  While Dan’s team scored some runs, Cook’s attention drifted. He looked up at the nearly full moon just clearing the trees in the east. It was dusk, and something in the fading light made him think of Wabash, with its Sunday picnics lasting into the night. But suddenly someone behind Dan’s team bench threw a switch on a pole, and the lights high over the diamond came on, spoiling that brief blend of daylight and moonlight. The lights brought flying insects, which brought out the nighthawks—or maybe the nighthawks had been there all along, and he just now noticed them. They made their funny buzzing noises high above, zigzagging in pursuit of dinner on their odd angular wings. He knew these from Indiana, too. Paula had always looked up and laughed when the nighthawks came out.

  After a few more innings, just when Cook was wondering when it would be over, it was, and the players were shaking hands. Dan’s team had won, judging from Robbie’s noises of satisfaction, though no great celebration broke out on the field. It was just men and women shaking hands as if they had finished a day’s work in satisfactory fashion.

  Cook waited in the bleachers for the crowd to thin out, but it took a while. As the team gathered their equipment, there was a lot of talk and laughter. Dan was at the center of it, replaying incidents from the game and teasing some of his teammates. They all seemed reluctant to break up, and did so only after Dan eased away, his equipment bag over his shoulder, calling out good-nights to everyone.

  They drove home. Beth took a shower while Dan and Cook read the paper and Robbie practiced the piano. Then Dan helped Robbie with his math homework. Cook settled in the recliner in the sun-room and listened to Dan and Robbie talk about “magic numbers”—the name Robbie’s teacher had given negative numbers to take the scare out of them. As Cook watched, he kept expecting Robbie to denounce the label as childish, but Robbie seemed to accept it as a natural name.

  When they were done and Robbie was packing up his papers, Dan told Robbie he was particularly delighted with the way he had solved one of the problems. Robbie mentioned that his mother had helped him with it, and Dan suddenly became undelighted. Robbie seemed not to notice this. He kissed his father good night, said good night to Cook, and went upstairs to
bed. Shortly afterward, Beth came into the sun-room, wearing pajamas and a robe. Dan immediately told her that he wished she wouldn’t help Robbie with his math—she could help him with anything else, but in math it was crucial that he know exactly what Robbie knew, in order to challenge him without discouraging him, and if she helped him, then things would get all confused. Beth seemed a little put out, but she just said okay.

  They read for a while. Or rather, Dan and Beth read and Cook pretended to. He kept thinking about what had just happened. In the past, Cook had been impressed with the way Dan helped Robbie—with his geography, at the word processor, every chance he got. On the face of it, Dan was more involved in the boy’s education than Beth was. But because Beth taught all day herself, it was only natural that tutoring Robbie fell to Dan. Cook had no problem with this. What bothered him was that Dan had shown a bullying, superior side just now. He seemed to be saying that Beth was an idiot to think she could help Robbie with his math. Of course, Dan would have denied this; he would have said he was just advocating good pedagogy. But Cook, in Beth’s place, would have felt bullied.

  “It’s still early,” Beth said, tossing her magazine aside. “Want to watch a movie tape?”

  “Sure,” said Dan. “If we don’t fight about it.”

  “We won’t,” Beth said. She looked at Cook. “Not in front of company.” Cook smiled.

  Dan went to a green notebook on the TV stand—his directory of videotapes he had recorded. He opened it and read. “The Third Man?”

  Beth made a face. “Don’t you have it practically memorized?”

  “I like the music,” Dan said as he continued to scan the list. “Local Hero?”

  “Another musical favorite. No. We’ve seen it too recently.”

  “Zorba the Greek?”

  “We have that?” Beth said with interest. “Sure. It’s been a lifetime since we saw it.” She turned to Cook.

  “Great,” said Cook, though he recalled, with unease, a certain opposition in the film between scholarliness and sexual vitality.

  Dan picked out the tape and put it into the VCR. The movie wasn’t at the beginning of the tape. He began to search for it, but every time he ran it something other than the movie appeared on the screen.

  “Kojak?” Beth said. “Wrong Greek. What’s he doing on there?”

  “I don’t know,” Dan muttered.

  Cook sensed a tension in the air, and he asked them about it. Hunching over the VCR, Dan said he was tense, he was. He explained why. Recording movies was his responsibility, because Beth hadn’t mastered the timer on the VCR. This meant that Dan bore the blame in case of failure—in case the recording ended before the show did, or as sometimes happened, he taped the wrong show altogether. Dan reported this with interest—with more than interest; with fervor—as if he was seeing an unfair pattern of responsibility and recrimination for the first time. Beth made no comment.

  A burst of music with opening credits told them that Dan had finally found the movie. He did a Greek dance to the couch and said, “I’m off the hook, Jeremy. Off the meat hook.” He settled down and put an arm around Beth. Cook kicked his shoes off and leaned back in the recliner, relieved that he could stop thinking about their marriage for a couple of hours.

  Some minutes later, as they were traveling to Crete, the Englishman asked Zorba if he was married, and Zorba said something about being a man, and therefore being stupid, and therefore being married. Dan and Cook chuckled. Zorba went on to say he had a wife, children, and a house, and he labeled this state of affairs “the full catastrophe.” Dan and Cook laughed loudly.

  Beth’s silence drew a glance from both of them. Then they looked back at the movie. But after a moment, Dan abruptly leaned away from Beth and put the movie on “Pause.”

  “What,” he said.

  She looked at the screen and said nothing.

  “What,” Dan said again.

  She jerked her head at the TV. “Just play it,” she said.

  “Come on.”

  Still looking at the screen, she said, “How can you laugh at that? How can you?”

  Dan made a noise. “Lighten up, will you?”

  “I’m here, Dan. I’m working on being right here with you. But I guess you don’t want that. You want to be on that boat, don’t you?”

  Dan groaned. “God, it never ends. Look, it’s a funny line. Jeremy laughed, too.”

  “Jeremy? Does he count?” Beth looked at Cook. “He’s on that boat. His position’s clear. But how can you laugh at that—especially now?”

  “It’s funny,” Dan said loudly, almost shouting. Then something occurred to him. He pointed a finger at Beth. “You laughed at it in Santa Cruz. I remember. You did.”

  Beth scoffed. “How on earth can you remember that?”

  “I do. You did. We both did. We laughed and laughed.”

  Beth gave a toss of her head. “If I did, it was because I was young. I was a slave to your view of things.”

  “And now I have to be a slave to yours? That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Beth said nothing.

  Dan sighed. “Look. Can’t you just enjoy the line? ‘The full catastrophe.’ It’s classic. It’s a classic view of marriage.”

  “It’s not my view.”

  “Okay. Fine. It’s the classic male view, then. Zorba’s speaking for men everywhere. He’s saying that men don’t want to settle down. You can’t blame the two men in the room for laughing.”

  “Yes I can.”

  “Blame nature. Blame natural selection. Blame Darwin.”

  “What?” Beth seemed newly irritated.

  “It’s not in a man’s nature to settle down. Natural selection always favors reproduction, right?”

  Beth sat still. She would not cooperate. She would not say “Right.”

  Dan pressed on. “If men hang on to their freedom and try to fertilize everything in sight, then there’ll be more offspring. So natural selection encourages that—it makes men what we are. But there’s no point in promiscuity in women—no reproductive point. One fertile guy is all it takes. So settling down is easier for women.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” said Beth. “Besides, people don’t have to be limited by their animal nature. They can rise above it.”

  “Sure they can,” Dan said. “But you’ve got to recognize that my nature is different from yours. Mine makes it hard for me to make a commitment. I’m not saying this because I think it’s hopeless or anything. I just want some credit.”

  Beth rolled her eyes. “Great. Congratulations.” She shook her head. “It’s just an excuse for not working on the marriage.”

  “No,” Dan said firmly. “It’s an explanation for why working on the marriage—Jesus, I hate that phrase—is harder for me than it is for you.”

  “So why get married then?” Beth asked Dan. He looked overwhelmed by the question, caught off guard, completely blank on the subject. Beth turned to Cook. “Why do men marry? Why do they waste our time?”

  Cook roused himself, sitting up a bit in the recliner. “In my experience,” he said—though his experience was limited to Chapter One of The Pillow Manual—“men marry because it’s time for them to marry. Being unmarried has become a disadvantage. They see marriage as a stabilizing thing. They do it so they can concentrate on their careers.”

  Beth made a funny noise in her throat. At least, Cook thought she did. But when he looked at her she seemed surprised at his attention.

  “Women are different,” Cook went on. “Women marry in order to have this overwhelming experience, this big, transforming … thing. So you’ve got a built-in conflict: women marry for the sake of a big change, and men marry so that things will stay the same.”

  “The full catastrophe,” Dan said, this time with Zorba’s accent. He stared at the TV screen, where Anthony Quinn was stuck in a freeze-frame, his eyes at half-mast and his mouth open as if he were about to spew baklava across the poop deck.

&nb
sp; Beth looked at Dan. “Well? Does the shoe fit? Is that why you married me?”

  Dan made a funny face. “It was so long ago.” Beth seemed about to speak, and he added quickly, “It doesn’t matter now. Even if that did play a role—the desire for stability—I would never offer it as a reason to stay married now.”

  “That was my next question,” said Beth. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  “Really? Are you really sure?”

  “As sure as I can be. What is this?”

  Beth faltered. “I mean just in a general way,” she said quickly. Something in her face caught Cook’s attention—something like fear.

  “You mean, do I value stability in a general way?” Dan asked. He seemed confused.

  “Yes,” said Beth. Cook watched her. She seemed to be encouraging Dan’s confusion.

  “Sure,” Dan said, shrugging. “Stability’s nice. But it’s not a good reason to stay in a bad marriage.”

  Beth nodded, satisfied—though with what Cook couldn’t have said. He was sure Beth had just experienced something strong. The evidence was the way her discomfort had affected him.

  Beth suggested, in a fresh and innocent way, that they go ahead and watch the rest of the movie and try not to talk anymore. Dan pushed a button on his remote control, and the movie started up.

  It wasn’t like Beth to suggest they try not to talk. Cook thought about why she had done this, and about the fear that had touched her. He thought he had it pretty much figured out by the time the boat carrying the two men reached the end of its voyage.

  Fifteen

  Cook woke up the next morning hot and sweaty from a night of bedclothes-wrestling. As he sat on the side of his bed and stared through his headache at the floor, he wondered what the point of not drinking was if he could still wake up feeling like this.

  After a shower and shave he felt a little better. He went to his desk and unfolded THE HORROR! before him

  She’s a bitch.

  He’s a prick.

  Money.

  He’s a failure.

  He crossed out the last entry and wrote a new one:

  She thinks he’s a failure.