In the morning, the first thing Cook did was try to reach Pillow. There was no answer, either at Pillow’s home or at the office. Cook was becoming panicked. He had developed the conviction, and wasn’t able to shake it, that Pillow was the only person in the world who could find Paula. If Pillow didn’t do it, Cook would never see her again.
Downstairs, Dan and Beth had already eaten breakfast and were getting ready to go. They gave Cook some hurried instructions about the house and loaded up the van.
On the way to the airport, they fell behind a truck with the state of Missouri painted on its back doors. Dan pointed to it and said, “Missouri’s got a stupid shape.”
“Compared to what?” said Beth.
“Compared to Colorado,” said Dan. “Colorado’s got a solid shape. Or California. All bumpy on the coast and nice and straight on the east side.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Beth.
“Minnesota’s got a nice shape,” Cook offered. He leaned forward from the seat behind them, an elbow on Dan’s seat and one on Beth’s.
“A very nice shape,” Dan said warmly.
“And Vermont?” said Cook.
“Very nice.”
“Tennessee?”
“Oh! Outstanding. A parallelogram.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Beth.
“It is,” Dan agreed without warning. Cook felt abandoned, all alone with the subject. He leaned back and stared out the window. Dan suddenly laughed. He said to Cook, “When Beth and I travel, I usually drive. That means she’s the map reader. Talk about material for conflict.” He looked at Beth.
She groaned and turned to Cook. “It’s awful. Dan’ll say, ‘Where’s the turnoff to such and such?’ and I won’t know how to find it. Or he’ll say, ‘How far to a rest stop?’ and I can never figure out which of those stupid little symbols means rest stop.”
“And I’ll get mad as hell,” said Dan. “Mad as hell.”
Beth looked at him, then back at Cook. “One time we were driving to California, and we were in Kansas or someplace, near the border, and Dan was asking me to check something, and I wanted to look at the next state, so I turned the page. But the atlas was arranged alphabetically, so the next map was of, I don’t know, Louisiana or something—”
“Kentucky,” said Dan.
“Kentucky. So I said, ‘Where do I look?’ and Dan said, ‘Just look up the state to the west of Kansas.’ Now, I didn’t know what state was to the west of Kansas, because I didn’t care what state was to the west of Kansas. Dan knew I didn’t know, but he wouldn’t tell me. He got mad. He got mad. I should have been the one to get mad.”
“What an asshole!” said Dan.
“It makes me mad now just to remember it,” Beth said.
“What an asshole!” Dan said again.
At the airport, Cook got out at the curb to help them with their bags. Dan insisted on a promise from Cook that he would be at their airport gate when they got back. He wanted to give Cook an immediate report on their trip. “Every little thing,” he said. “Every word, every goddamn preposition, every little thing.” Cook promised. There was a pause. On impulse, Cook told them that he had hopes of seeing Paula again, perhaps soon.
“Aw,” said Beth. “That’s nice.”
“Don’t fuck it up this time,” Dan said. He laughed cruelly. Then he surprised Cook with a hug. Cook got one from Beth too, and he watched them go into the airport, standing there and waving until a security guy told him to get back in the van and move it.
Cook had noticed that in movies whenever people opened the door to a house or an apartment, either someone was there waiting for them or the phone instantly rang. But when he returned from the airport, neither thing happened. He tried Pillow again. There was still no answer. He had a wild urge for a drink and frowned it away. Then the phone rang.
It was Pillow. “Jeremy, F. F. Sweet is coming to town.”
“Roy! I’ve been trying to reach you. I … What did you say?”
“F. F. Sweet is coming to town. To sign books. It’s in the paper.” Pillow chuckled. “Read all about it.” He chuckled some more.
“Today’s paper?”
“F. F. Sweet is coming to town,” Pillow said, “and so is F. F. Sweet.”
“What?”
“F. F. Sweet and F. F. Sweet are coming to town.” Pillow was cackling now. He sounded like a chicken.
“Goddammit, Roy. You know you can’t conjoin coreferential nouns. What are you talking about?”
“F. F. Sweet,” said Pillow, completely out of control now, “and F. F. Sweet …” He cackled and brayed.
“Roy. Snap out of it. ‘Day Six: Mrs. Pillow.’ What the hell?”
Pillow gave a stifled cry.
“Roy?”
Another stifled cry. A moan.
“Roy? Are you all right?”
After a long silence, Pillow said tonelessly, “There is no Mrs. Pillow.”
“What do you mean? There’s been a change in procedure?”
“Oh! If only it were as simple as that!”
“What are you talking about?”
“There is no Mrs. Pillow. She’s left me!”
“No,” Cook said, shocked. “Oh, Roy. I’m sorry.”
“She says I’m always at the office. She says I don’t care about her—all I care about is my work. She accused me of not paying any attention to her. She says I never help around the house. She cried. She called me a beast. She threw things at me. She threw a candle at me, a wet sponge, and a small double-A battery. She’s gone back to her mother, Jeremy. She packed a suitcase and took a bus back to her mother’s.”
“I’m sorry, Roy.” Cook tried to think of something more to say, but he was stupefied by the sheer averageness of the Pillows’ spat. It sounded like something out of a comic strip. He wondered if Mrs. Pillow made “boohoo” noises when she cried.
“I’m pretty much ready to pack it in, Jeremy.”
“No, Roy. Don’t do that. You of all people should know that a marriage has its ups and downs.”
“A marriage? I’m not talking about a marriage. My marriage is dead, Jeremy—dead as a beached whale. I’m talking about the Pillow Agency. There’s no point to it now.”
Cook clenched the phone. His first thought was of Paula. “Roy, you’re saving marriages. Don’t you realize that?”
“Bah! Can’t even save my own.”
“You don’t know that. You might be able to work it out. But even if you can’t—I mean, I don’t believe it’ll come to that, but just assuming you can’t—it still doesn’t mean you should give up on all marriages. You’re doing good work, Roy.”
“You’re just worried about your precious Hoosier,” Pillow said bitterly.
“That’s not fair,” Cook said. “I’m concerned about you, and I’m concerned about the Wilsons. What do I do next with them?”
“Who cares? Forget it. They’re doomed. They’re all doomed. I want to study something new. How about the Bushmen, Jeremy? They seem nice. Ever been to Africa?”
Cook felt short of breath. He felt as if he were dealing with a madman holding a gun to a hostage’s head. And the hostage was Paula. “Since you mentioned it, what about my date? Do you still plan to arrange it?”
“Still plan to? No.”
Cook swallowed. “Oh.”
“I don’t plan to because I already have arranged it. She’s waiting.”
“What? Where?”
“That should be obvious. Don’t bother to give me a report, though. I don’t care about any of that anymore.”
“Where the hell is she?”
“Have fun. Have all the fun you can—until you meet the horror. Ha! Then you’ll wish you were out on the Kalahari with Roy Pillow—out there transcribing those tricky consonants. Yes indeed.” Pillow made some clicking noises with his tongue.
“Roy, wait. You’ve got to tell me.”
“Tell you what? What ‘Mrs. Pillow’ means? For the record, eh? Such a tidy min
d you have, Jeremy. I admire that in a linguist. Certainly I’ll tell you. The first Mrs. Pillow left me. The activity is named in her honor. She went away. As it happens, so did the second Mrs. Pillow, the third, and now the fourth. So, what does ‘Mrs. Pillow’ mean?”
“Roy, I don’t want to play any guessing games. You’ve got to tell me where Paula is.”
“What does ‘Mrs. Pillow’ mean? Come on, Jeremy. For old times’ sake.”
Cook felt the top of his head blasting off. “Roy, I don’t give a flying fuck—”
“Very well. I’ll tell you. ‘Mrs. Pillow’ means ‘Go away.’”
“‘Go away’?”
“You’re done with the Wilsons. Case closed.”
Cook felt an instant sadness. The feeling had never hit him so quickly like this.
Pillow said, “Case closed. Agency closed.” He began to click with his tongue again.
“But what about Paula?”
Pillow clicked, sucked, and popped his farewell.
Cook screamed into the phone, but Pillow was gone. He tried to call him back, but the line was busy. He made himself calm down, tracked down a phone book, and called Topper’s. He described Paula in adoring detail, but she wasn’t there. Then he tried Pillow again, but got no response at all—not even a busy signal. Perhaps Pillow had begun to dismantle the Pillow Agency literally, starting by tearing the phone out.
Cook grabbed his keys and headed for the door. Maybe the maître d’ was wrong—maybe Paula was there, or maybe she was waiting for him outside the elevators on the top floor, not visible from the restaurant, or maybe she was in the lobby of the building. The point was she was around, somewhere near, and he had to find her.
Twenty-three
The maître d’ who could walk backward recognized Cook and worked hard with him searching for Paula, no doubt curious about what this new regular customer’s third date would look like. But she was nowhere in the building.
This left Cook with no plan. It also left him with no car. In his haste and fear that he would miss Paula, he had given up searching for a legal parking place after one circuit of the block and had parked in an alley, off to one side amidst some Dumpsters. His car had been towed as quickly as if it had vaporized. Cook stopped swearing in order to ask some pedestrians in the area where a car might go when it was towed, but all he got was gregarious speculation.
He set out grimly for the Wilsons’—a two-mile walk. He would call the airport and page Paula, or leave a message for her—something like “Leave town and I die.” He would find the keys to Dan’s car and drive there. Then, if time allowed, he would swing by Pillow’s office and rough him up a bit.
He discussed this plan with himself, quite happy with it, as he walked. But he decided he should call the airport as soon as possible. He remembered there were pay phones at the library, which he would pass if he stayed on Delmar.
When he reached the library, he saw a sign in the window announcing quite calmly that F. F. Sweet, author of A Valentine for Val, would be on hand to sign copies of his new book, Another Valentine for Val. Cook began to snort involuntarily. He read the sign again, finding it hard to concentrate. He compared the date and time of this splendid happening with the present moment, and when he saw that they matched precisely, he felt a smacking sensation, like that of two hands slapping him hard on each cheek at the same time. He peered through the window. There was a line stretching from a table, and all sorts of noisy activity. It was about to get even noisier. He reached for the door handle.
“Don’t go in there, Jeremy,” someone said. But not just someone. It was Paula.
Her hair was shorter, and she was so tanned that she looked like an Indian, but it was Paula, and at the sight of her Cook let out a shout he had never heard from himself before.
He grabbed her, held her, kissed her, pawed her, and then steered her across the street to a frozen custard place, jabbering the whole time. He sat her down at an outdoor table and bought her a cone, demanding extra toppings of Snickers chunks from the guy behind the counter, a stingy ignoramus who knew nothing of matters of the heart. Cook kept looking back at her while his order was being filled. She was wearing a loose, sleeveless white thing on top and khaki shorts with big button-flap pockets. She looked as if she had just returned from a safari.
He gave her the cone and sat down and watched her take a huge bite of the frozen custard. She always bit frozen things—ice cream, Popsicles, ice cubes. His happiness suddenly became clouded by the simple, specific fear that she would leave and he would never see her do this again. Had he made a strategic blunder by showing too much of his joy? He began to rein himself in. He knew how to do this all right.
“What were you doing over there?” Cook asked, looking across the street to the library.
“Looking for you,” Paula said cockily.
“But how did you know I would be there?”
“Your funny boss told me. Mr. Pillows.” She took another bite of her custard.
Cook frowned. “Pillow. How did he know?”
“What’s he boss of, Jeremy? What kind of outfit is it?”
Cook suddenly realized he couldn’t tell her. She would say he was unfit for the job, and they would fight and she would leave. He said nothing.
“I heard about Wabash folding,” she went on. “I was so sad. I have such nice memories of the place. You’ll have to tell me where everyone ended up. But I’ve been worried about you. What do you do? You a marriage counselor or something? That’s what your boss said.” She took another big bite. “Come on. Tell me.”
Cook sighed. She was always way ahead of him. It drove him nuts. “I’m afraid to.”
“Afraid? Why?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“So what?”
“We’ll fight.”
“I hope not.”
“You’ll leave.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You left before.”
“You wanted me to.”
Cook fell silent.
“You don’t deny it,” she said.
Cook took a deep breath. “I keep feeling like I’m going to cry.”
Paula leaned forward. “Is anything wrong? Has someone died? I mean it. Are you okay?”
“I’m just so full of emotion. Seeing you.”
Paula looked at him strangely. At first she must have thought he was joking, because her body tensed. Then she relaxed slightly.
“What are you looking at?” she asked suspiciously.
“You.”
“Why? It’s not like you.”
Cook wanted to say, “Because I love you.” And more. He wanted to say he would follow her on his knees wherever she went. And he would start right now—he would drop to his knees and crawl under the table and hug her bare brown legs. That was what he would do.
But instead, he said, “How did my boss get you to come here?”
Paula smirked behind her custard. “I’ll tell you in a minute. First tell me what you do.”
What the hell, thought Cook, and he told her. Paula did laugh, a lot, but only where Cook wanted her to, and he told her more and more of the kinds of things that made her laugh—he knew how to do this. He found he could do quite a good imitation of Pillow. What a joy it was to share his experience of this man with her! But even as she laughed, Cook could tell she was interested in Dan and Beth’s fate.
“So what’s going to happen to them?” she asked.
“I think they’ll be all right. Dan knows he has to change.”
“But can he?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Men hate to change,” she said flatly.
“Everybody hates to change. How would you like to change?”
“I don’t need to.”
“But if you had to. Look, what’s marriage? It’s being close, right? It’s wanting to be close.”
“Sure,” she said.
“Who spends more time being close with people before marriage—men or women?�
��
“Women.”
“By a long shot, right?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. That’s the whole point. Men are untrained for marriage. When they say ‘I do’ they should immediately add ‘But I don’t know how!’ After the wedding, they’re in for years of wondering what’s wrong, or maybe years of thinking nothing’s wrong, and one day the wife turns to the guy and says, ‘Something’s wrong,’ and he’s dead from that moment on—it’s either change, buddy, or burn in hell for the rest of the marriage. Now, just pretend it’s the opposite. Pretend that marriage required all the things men are good at—withdrawal, toughing it out alone, hiding feelings instead of just blurting them out. Could you change into such a person?”
“God, it would be awful. Who would want to?”
“But that’s the fix men are in. We’ve got to change just as much.”
“But it’s a change for the better.”
“I know that. But nobody else does.”
Paula smiled. “I think maybe there are one or two other guys out there who know it, too, Jeremy.” She studied him. “So you really believe this stuff? You’re not just parroting what I used to tell you?”
Cook frowned. “You never told me this.”
“But I did. Word for word.”
“I don’t think so.”
Paula laughed and shook her head. When she did this, her short hair shook slightly. It used to flow over her shoulders. He liked it this way. He had managed to touch it when he hugged her, and he liked the feel of it. He grew nervous again. She was already halfway through her cone. When she finished, what reason would she have to stay? But she’d shown up for his date. That meant something, didn’t it?
He said, “You were going to tell me how Pillow got you to come here.”
Paula winced—an inscrutable wince. “He told me I had to come to St. Louis or someone would sue me.”
“Who?”
“F. F. Sweet.”
The Full Catastrophe Page 29