“Tell me about the couple,” Rita said. Cook had always liked that conversational move—“Tell me about”—and he practiced it whenever he got the chance. It was the clearest signal of genuine interest. But you couldn’t say “Tell me all about.” Just “Tell me about.”
He started with Beth. He described her as objectively as possible.
“Sounds like a bitch,” Rita said.
Cook thought he should present the other side. He told her about Dan, and he had barely finished narrating one incident when she interrupted with a laugh.
“What a prick,” she said.
They finished their entrees at exactly the same time. A moment before the waiter removed their plates, Cook observed that Rita was as indifferent to food as he was. The evidence for this was that without either of them noticing, he had mistakenly eaten the chicken she had ordered, and she had wolfed down his beef.
The waiter asked if they would like coffee. Cook looked at Rita. She looked at him. They said no simultaneously. Cook hoped she was in a hurry for the same reason he was.
They walked to Rita’s car, which was parked right in front of the building. She snorted at it. “It’s a rental. Completely out of tune. It’s so easy. Why don’t they keep ’em in tune?”
“We can take mine,” said Cook. “It’s parked up in the next block.”
“Nah. Get in. We’re in a hurry, aren’t we? Important business.” She laughed.
As a driver she was like Cook—aggressive, defensive, and harshly judgmental. She made wisecracks about other motorists as they traveled along the edge of Forest Park: “Nice signal,” “Turn, dickhead,” and “C’mon, Pop, drive it or park it.” She also made passing comments on the golfers in the park, slowing down once to watch one old fellow’s drive go awry. She laughed cruelly.
But Cook was bothered. Rita didn’t seem to care about the mood she was setting with her reckless sarcasms. Her tone implied that she was indifferent to their destination and what they were going to do when they got there. She acted as if they were on their way to a hockey game, or to a tour of a slaughterhouse. In other words, she wasn’t being very romantic. Cook jerked slightly in his seat with this thought. The word was almost completely unfamiliar to him. He wanted to say to himself, “I didn’t know you cared.”
But he recognized her behavior well enough. It was a kind of cool disinvestment. She was protecting herself. She didn’t want to put too much stock in the upcoming event. If Cook had been driving, he probably would have done the same thing. Simply being in the passenger’s seat had given him a fresh perspective.
He decided to step outside himself even further. He touched Rita’s shoulder and said, “I’m really looking forward to making love with you.”
She looked at him. Her mouth popped open into a smile—a warm smile. “Me too, Jeremy.”
Cook was heartened by her response, but not for what it did for their moment together in the car or even for what it might do for their time together afterward. He was heartened because if she could come out from under her protective cover when encouraged to do so, it meant that he could, too.
Eighteen
“There was sex, Roy.”
“Ah. I knew there would be. Let’s hear about it.”
“Which part?”
“Everything. I plan to learn a great deal from this report.”
“Let me be sure I understand it first, okay? I’m still reeling. Rita is basically … me.”
“Yes.”
“She’s Jeremy Cook with tits.”
“Nicely put.”
“And yet she can’t be a perfect equivalent. Surely you can’t have found such a person.”
“Of course I can. I did.”
“But—”
“My questionnaire is a most delicate instrument, Jeremy. I hope you’re not going to tell me you had a problem with her.”
“Well, yes and no. She’s great—funny, lively, and lots of other things, and sex was the easiest thing in the world. Hell, it was almost too easy—like being alone. Not alone, exactly, but … I don’t know. I could barely tell what she was doing from what I was doing, if you know what I mean.”
“Mmm.”
“But it was great. I was instantly comfortable with her.”
“As comfortable as you are with yourself.”
This gave Cook pause. “She made me a little uncomfortable with myself, actually. She made me see something I wasn’t too happy with.”
“Nonsense.”
“I mean it. I liked her, but I didn’t want to be her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She’s not giving enough.”
Pillow made a protesting noise. “What could you have possibly wanted from her that she didn’t give you?”
“I wanted whatever people mean when they say that.”
“What?”
“I’m new at this, Roy. Bear with me. I felt a certain … distance.”
“Doggone it, Jeremy. Don’t change your tune on me now. Is this the man who slept with sixteen women in five years and found nary a one of them lovable?”
“Well …”
“I matched you two on the basis of how you answered my questions. If you feel differently now, you’re the one to blame. Don’t come crying to me. I won’t have it.”
“I’m not coming crying to you, Roy. I’m just telling you how I felt about her.”
Pillow sighed. “This is a very disappointing report.”
Cook was suddenly afraid Pillow was going to hang up on him. “While I’ve got you, Roy,” he said, looking at The Pillow Manual open before him, “‘Day Four: Missy Pillow.’ What the hell?”
Pillow gasped. “Don’t tell me you’re done Pillowing. Don’t tell me that.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
“But you must be if you … How can you possibly be done Pillowing?”
“I’m fast, Roy. Okay?”
“Pillowing can go on for weeks. For months!”
“Too late, Roy,” said Cook. “I’ve turned the page.” Pillow made some unhappy noises. “In light of your breakneck pace, I must say that if this assignment fails, I wash my hands of it. Don’t come crying to me if it blows up in your face.”
“I won’t come crying to you, Roy.” This seemed to be Pillow’s phrase for the day. “Just tell me what ‘Missy Pillow’ means.”
“Missy Pillow is my daughter, Jeremy. By my first wife. As a child, she loved to visit her grandparents. She just loved it. The grandparents are the parents of one spouse, but they are the in-laws of the other spouse.” Pillow paused as if momentarily overwhelmed by this realization. “‘Missy Pillow’ means to visit the in-laws.”
“Sounds simple enough.”
“So you feel you know what to do?”
“Sure. We visit the in-laws. No problem.”
Pillow chuckled. “Got you.”
“What?”
“Got you. I get ’em every time.” Pillow chuckled some more. “Which in-laws did you think of?”
“Beth’s parents. Dan’s in-laws. Why?”
“Why didn’t you think of the other pair?”
“Well,” said Cook, suddenly defensive, “they’re not a pair, for one thing. Dan’s mother is dead.”
“Since when,” Pillow said peevishly, “does spousal death make the surviving spouse not an in-law?”
“What’s your point, Roy?”
“My point is that in every marriage one pair of in-laws looms large, and one pair looms small. The staff out in the field always picks the pair that looms large—automatically, without even thinking of the pair they’re ignoring. It tickles me every time. Now, may I change the subject?”
This was always a dangerous proposition, but Cook said yes.
“This morning,” said Pillow, “I discovered a new thinker in my reading—a German fellow. He believes that happiness is to be found not in the mating of true opposites, which we tested with mixed results on your first date—”
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��With wretched results.”
“—nor does it lie in the mating of mirror images—our most recent experiment. He believes that our original family constellations dictate the harmony of our future pairings. He says that people do best in a marriage that duplicates their sibling relationships. A younger brother of a sister should marry a woman who herself is an older sister to a brother. Each partner will then fall into accustomed roles of nurturer and nurtured. His theory extends even to the friends we have. A man who has an older brother tends to seek out friends who have a younger brother. Are you with me?”
“What about only children?”
“What do you care?” Pillow snapped. “Now, your sister is older than you, correct?”
“Yes.”
“My questionnaire tells me that your last date—Rita—is younger than her brother.”
“So?”
“That’s why it didn’t work. If she were older than her brother she would have been perfect for you. You would have married her.”
Cook laughed. “You sound pretty convinced, Roy.”
“Why not? It makes perfect sense.”
Cook had never seen Pillow in intellectual action. It was rather frightening. “You just discovered this guy’s ideas this morning? I wouldn’t go applying them all over the place already. Science doesn’t work that way. Take it slow, Roy.”
“I should note,” Pillow went on, “that the logical extension of this theory is that men should marry their sisters.”
“I suppose it is.”
There was a pause. Then Pillow said, “Your sister—is she married?”
Cook laughed. “Yes.”
“A sound marriage? Not on the rocks at all?”
“Come on, Roy. Get serious.”
“We have to be open to new things, Jeremy. They called Ponce de León a madman, too.”
“He was.”
“Oh.” Pillow seemed disappointed.
Cook heard the click of Pillow’s call-waiting signal. “You want to get that, Roy?”
“No. It’s just Mrs. Pillow.”
“Go ahead. I’ll wait.”
“I’m telling you it’s just Mrs. Pillow. She’s always calling me at the office.”
“You say that like it’s an annoyance, Roy.”
Pillow made an astonished noise. “How dare you Pillow me!”
Cook laughed.
“You think it’s funny?” Pillow said angrily.
Cook sobered up. “Sorry, Roy. I thought you were joking. I didn’t mean—”
But Pillow had hung up on him.
Cook went downstairs. His family was still not back from Big Muddy, even though it was after dinnertime. He went into the kitchen, sliced an apple, and put a gob of peanut butter on the plate, into which he would dip the apple slices. He had seen Robbie do this and admired the simplicity of the dish. It would be as good a dinner as any. He took the plate into the living room and set it on the coffee table. He stood at the window as he ate, staring out.
In the park across the street, a woman was training her dog on a leash. She would take a few steps and then make a sharp turn without warning; then came another few steps and another sharp turn. The dog was supposed to follow. Cook watched the woman do this for ten minutes solid. He imagined her walking like that without the dog—she would look like an idiot. He decided she looked like an idiot even with the dog.
He turned away from the window and sat down on the couch. His plate was empty. He had eaten the apple slices without being conscious of them. He remembered a theory that Paula had once volunteered: that Cook’s oft-proclaimed boredom with food was really a comment on his feelings about people. In today’s world, she said, food was a vehicle for social interaction. Rather than frankly say he hated people, Cook said he hated food. This was the theory. Cook, of course, had immediately objected to it.
He looked around the room. Everything his eye touched told a story about Dan, Beth, or Robbie, as if he had known them for years—the bowl on the coffee table, empty of Hershey Kisses; Dan’s decorative maps on the wall; the record shelf (“This isn’t Dittersdorf”); the computer in the dining room, where Cook had come upon Robbie playing a game called “Paperboy” and had said, “You know, Robbie, when I was a boy I really was a paperboy,” to which Robbie had said, “Get out of town.” Cook’s eye fell on the piano. He had bragged to Robbie that he could play it—a blunder, because Robbie had been after him ever since to play a duet with him.
Robbie intrigued him. He faded in and out of childhood like Wordsworth. Sometimes he seemed almost adult—in argument, or in laughter. He had a rich belly laugh that didn’t threaten to shatter skulls, as some children’s laughter did. But at other times he was clearly just a boy. He was certainly all boy at the piano. He had a single style—fast and loud, legato be damned. Cook had read somewhere that whenever John Philip Sousa tried to extend his range by writing a ballad, conductors would direct it at march tempo; Robbie did the same to whatever came his way. Beth was patient with him, though. Cook had overheard her giving a brief lesson to him, and she hadn’t commented at all on his goose-stepping rhythm. She just let him play that way, as if confident he would outgrow it.
Her own piano style was markedly different. Everything she played was slow. Beethoven, Schumann, Gershwin—whatever it was, it was slow. The past four days she had been working on “The Man I Love.” She played part of it every day, one new measure per session. She had told Cook that was the only way she could learn Gershwin. She worked hard at it. One night after dinner, she had played the same phrase at least fifty times. Cook, sitting in the living room, had let out a mock scream of one driven over the edge—a yahhh! Beth had stopped playing but had not turned around. Dan had looked up at Cook from the couch and shaken his head soberly at him. The message was “Don’t ever do that again.” When Beth resumed playing, Cook didn’t do it again.
As for Dan, he played what Cook thought of as a “sarcastic” piano. He deliberately overplayed grandiose pieces, accompanying them with moans and shouts. He trivialized Chopin’s “Polonaise Militaire” with this method. He was sarcastic with light pieces as well. On one occasion, Cook listened to him bark laughter all the way through “The Happy Farmer,” and then play it in a minor key, sobbing. This was followed by “The Missouri Waltz”—a lovely arrangement of it, but Dan embellished it by bellowing Trumanisms throughout: “The buck stops here!” “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!” During this strange festival, Beth had said to Cook in the kitchen, “You’re a new audience for him.” Cook doubted this and said that Dan didn’t even seem to know he was within earshot. Beth shook her head. “He knows,” she said.
Cook took his empty plate into the kitchen and rinsed it. He went back to the window and stared out for a while. The woman and her dog were gone. Perhaps the dog had turned on her and chased her down the street. His gaze fell on Beth’s car, parked at the curb. Parked against the curb, from the look of it. Even from this distance he could see the damage on her wheels and hubcaps that Dan had complained about. He stared at them for a while. Then he decided to go upstairs and take a shower.
Ten minutes later, even under the stream of water, he could hear Robbie’s noisy footsteps on the second floor. He smiled and quickly finished his shower and got dressed.
When he came into the living room he found Beth lying on the couch, listening to a Mozart flute concerto. Her arm was raised across her eyes, shielding them. Cook slowed as he entered, not sure whether to stay. Beth opened her eyes and looked at him for a moment, then gave him a small finger-waggle of hello with the hand across her eyes.
Cook heard a shout from the deck. Through the windows he could see Dan and Robbie playing Ping-Pong.
Beth sat up and blinked her eyes. She ran a hand through her hair.
“How was it?” Cook asked.
“It was great,” she said without emotion. “I’m sorry we’re so late. We had dinner on the road. The kids were hungry.”
“How’s the camp?�
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“It’s great,” she said, again blandly, almost sadly. “Robbie liked it, the people are nice, they seem to have good values. It looks just fine. Can you turn that down?” She pointed to the CD player.
Cook turned the volume down. “So … No problem?”
“No problem. He starts on Sunday. It looks like both his friends are going to go, too.”
“You don’t sound happy enough.”
Beth smiled weakly. “I’m just tired.”
“Have you been crying?”
“No.” She looked down. “Yes.”
“You want to talk?”
She shook her head. “Just the same old thing.” She looked up and said in a thinner voice, “Not quite the same old thing. I think it’s over.”
“No.”
She nodded insistently. “I think it is.”
They were silent for a moment. Dan came into the room and gave Cook a cheerful hello. Behind him, through the windows, Cook could see Robbie still playing Ping-Pong, now with one of his friends from down the street.
Dan seemed charged with energy. He said to Beth, “You call your mom?”
“No.” She seemed to have to struggle to say more. “Why?”
“She’s going to be curious about the camp. She’s probably going to call any minute. Might as well beat her to it.” Dan performed a strange finger-snapping routine involving both hands. He acted as if he might burst into song at any moment. “And they were coming over Sunday, but that’s when Big Muddy starts, so we’ll have to cancel that.”
Cook was about to speak, to say that he would like to see some sort of get-together, but Beth roused herself and beat him to it. “I wonder if they could come tomorrow.”
“That’s kind of soon,” said Dan.
“They’ll come. I’ll call Bruce, too.”
Dan made his deep “Bruuuce” noise. “I meant it’s kind of soon for us to get ready.”
“What’s to get ready? We’ll grill some fish and hamburgers, I’ll make a salad, and you and Robbie can make some peppermint ice cream.”
The Full Catastrophe Page 23