The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “I can’t believe it; you were there,” I repeated, thinking that if Lee’s hair had been long, which it must certainly have been back then, she’d have looked just like the woman at Kent State who had knelt beside her friend’s body and shrieked at the heavens.

  “I suppose I was,” she said, writhing a little. “It didn’t really get to us. I mean, there were some troublemakers. I mean, not troublemakers, I don’t mean that, but you know—I wasn’t in with that crowd.”

  I hadn’t realized such a wave could sweep over a person and leave him or her unchanged, but looking at Lee—at her hair-brush, actually, which sat ready on top of her purse in case her inch of hair should become disarranged—I saw it was true, that she was more normal even than I’d dreamed. I’d kept my fascination with normality secret, even from myself—as one might when wishing for anything forbidden—to make love to another woman, say. Now I found I was trembling. Here was a gentle, quiet woman, the perfect antidote to myself. To touch her would be to lay hands on everything I’d ever longed for. Of course she didn’t want me: Why should she? But I’d convince her to love me and when I had, I’d have conquered the world.

  “No troublemakers in Levittown,” I said.

  “Well, not at Central Penn U.” A light rain was falling, and with it the first yellow leaves from Frank’s maple tree, which stuck to the windshield like paper cutouts on a schoolroom window. The comfort of fall—the chill, the dark, and the pleasure of drawing inward against them—came over me. Lee made no move to leave and I felt she expected something from me, but I didn’t know what it was.

  “Would you like to come up?” I asked, feeling finally that I’d rather take a chance on being rejected than disappoint her.

  “No thanks,” she said, with a faint laugh at my eagerness, though she still didn’t move. I didn’t like to get out and seem to reject her just when she was having the pleasure of rejecting me. So when she started to talk, I kept still and listened, even though the subject was Reenie.

  “I think she does like me,” she said, while I traced the shoulder seam of her corduroy shirt—it was as much as I dared touch her, yet. “But she’s been hurt, she’s afraid to let go. She’s attracted, but she doesn’t trust me—she doesn’t dare trust anyone, really.”

  “It’s sad,” I said, despite the corrosive jealousy that was burning through me. “She doesn’t realize her good fortune.”

  And out of the blue, Lee took my hand. We kept talking, to trick ourselves into thinking we were having an ordinary conversation, but, once we’d started touching each other it was impossible to stop, and we got twined around each other in an embrace that wouldn’t have been possible in a standard shift. I wanted to give in, as I would have with a man, but she seemed to want to do the same thing. I waited to feel some urgency from her, for her to push her tongue into my mouth or make some other forceful gesture. Neither of us seemed to know how to do this and I wondered if we were doomed to spend all night in the car. I remembered suddenly a man who had thanked me profusely and earnestly when I unbuttoned his trousers—I’d thought it was strange at the time, but now I understood him.

  “Who’s Ginny?” I asked, since an unwelcome silence had fallen.

  “She was raped,” Lee said.

  “My God. No wonder. She looks like she’s just back from the dead.”

  “It happened fifteen years ago but she only just remembered. It’s been very hard…”

  “I imagine,” I said, taking a luxurious pleasure in the centimeter between our mouths, knowing the distance would soon be closed.

  “Mm-hmm.” She responded to every move I made, but she made none herself. The rain had become insistent, my toes were cold, my neck stiff, and my bladder full.

  “Lee, I have to say good night,” I said, and now, without a word, she followed me in. We tiptoed up the steps to avoid Henny’s notice, but as I fished for my keys in the dark hallway, my telephone started to ring.

  “A wrong number,” I said, hoping I sounded like the kind of person whose relatives didn’t call with bizarre miseries at all hours.

  “Let it ring,” Lee said, but I was struggling with the lock, wondering which of them was alone in the night, hoping to conceal his or her desolation from the child sleeping down the hall, which of them was listening now to that godforsaken sound of a phone ringing in the empty room where they’d thought they’d find someone to console them. I was incapable of letting a phone ring. I fell in through the door and grabbed it.

  “Sylvie’s having a baby,” Ma said, with Clytemnestra’s grief.

  “You know.” I sat down and gave up all hope.

  “You know? Who told you? Your father, I suppose. How long have you known?” she asked.

  “She just called,” I said, feeling my mother might otherwise have insisted that Sylvie was just going to have to get rid of that baby, and do it right the next time: tell her mother first. “Just this minute.”

  “I’ve been trying for hours.”

  “I’ve been in and out.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. Beatrice, I’m going to give up, I can’t go on with it.”

  “With what?” I heard my insolence as soon as the words were out. And I’d felt so sympathetic to her, before I answered the phone.

  “Am I going to go through my life without being loved?” she asked me, her sorrow going over to rage. “Is that just my fate? Will I never—”

  I’d been so alone with her all those years, I’d absorbed all her feelings and tried to filter the poison out of them, but it never worked and now I wanted to smack her for adding the sad violins and black borders as if I didn’t know already that her heart was broken, as if I hadn’t worked and worked to fix it all this time.

  “NO,” she said. “Of course you don’t see what I’m saying. Why should you? Well, it’s just too bad—if people don’t understand, so be it. I’ve spent enough time trying to convince people to like me. I’m looking for money, now, Beatrice. Money and power. That’s what it’s all about.”

  Brassy dame—what’d she do with the weeping orphan?

  “My life is over, over,” she said now, sorrow gone over to rage. “But you wouldn’t understand that, you with your brilliant career.”

  I put my head down on the table, trying to keep hold of my tongue. Lee sat on my bed, smoking, leafing through my New Yorker, and acting as if she wasn’t overhearing my conversation. I wondered how much longer she’d wait for me. I willed myself to kindness; kindness saves time.

  There is a divine presence in the heavens, I guess, because she said suddenly: “I hear thunder, I’ve got to get off.”

  “Things are going to be all right, Ma, really,” I said.

  “I said there’s thunder,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  And she vanished, leaving only some weird emotional residue, like the Cheshire cat. The apartment was damp and cold—when I’d left for the party it had been a sultry night. Now the windows were swollen in their jambs, but the phone call had given me a kind of desperate strength and I forced them shut tight one by one.

  “Whatever the problem is, slamming things isn’t going to help,” Lee said, in the tone of a third-grade teacher.

  “You’re right,” I said, and sat down beside her, expecting she’d kiss me, and that love would blot Sylvie and Butch, and their trailer, and their baby out of my mind. At least I would not be getting pregnant—using love as a trap, and getting caught in it myself—the way Ma and now Sylvie had done. This alone sent a wave of desire through me, and I imagined Lee and myself swirling into each other like two currents in a slow river. But she kept still beside me.

  What was she doing here if she hadn’t come to make love? What was she expecting? I lived to do whatever was expected of me—to succeed as my mother wished, or fail as my father wished, or hopefully both, so as to repair all the damage between them and keep everything whole. I knew a man would want me to switch off everything except instinct, lie back, give in, divine all his secrets, and transform myself
without even realizing it, to match his dreams. With a man, you just take him into yourself, his gaze first, then his cock, then his heart. You feel him thrust into you, know he wants you. It’s all so easy, I thought now, though of course I’d never thought so before.

  I kissed Lee again, waiting for some vigor to seize us, feeling her stroke my arm, so gentle, so irrelevant. Where was Philippa, my hyperkinetic darling? She would never have just sat there—she’d quote something, she’d make love to me.

  “Sometimes it helps if you push a window up a little farther before you try to pull it down,” Lee said, trying to help, and a rough, angry instinct overtook me—I’d show her about slamming things! There was a vessel in her that needed to be broken so its essence could be released, like a vial of smelling salts. I clutched her suddenly, with a sharp, chiropractic snap—pure machismo. In an emergency, break glass, I thought.

  And rightly, because she recognized the gesture and at once, her arms were around me in earnest. I took her head in my hands and kissed her for real. We had reached the necessary understanding, I hardly knew how.

  “You’re so beautiful,” I said, and she smiled with kindly condescension—why did I state the obvious? Of course, I thought, there was nothing more to be said, and I unbuttoned her shirt—finally—to touch her breasts, her nipples, which were so exactly like my own that my body reacted as if it had been she who was touching me. Her cigarette was burning down in the ashtray. I crushed it out. From there everything was instinct—what a relief to be back in the land of eros, the one place where I knew what to do.

  Seven

  “WE COULDN’T keep our hands off each other,” I said in the morning.

  “We?” Lee looked incredulous and pulled the blanket up to her neck.

  I tried to recall our exact movements but could not. Had I forced myself on her? Probably. I was so greedy, had wanted her so badly, it was all too likely that I’d jumped in and overpowered her. I was like that, like a man: once I sensed a possibility, I couldn’t hold back. It was always an emergency with me. Had she made love to me then from politeness alone? And I’d been filled with the joy of requited love when really I was practically raping her?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, mortified.

  “You’re impulsive, that’s all,” she said, as if she’d forgive me this one time.

  She was dressed in seconds, in the clothes she’d folded so perfectly the night before. She wet her hairbrush, leaned down, and brushed her hair vigorously forward from the nape, then carefully back from her temples, craning her neck at the mirror and licking her fingertip to address some (invisible) trouble spots before sighing that this would have to do for today. In fact she looked so neat and professional it was hard to believe I’d ever touched her. It was Saturday, but she had to lead a seminar in Cost Justification and Prioritization. She bustled in and out of the bathroom on obscure but important errands, averting her eyes.

  “I’m going to be late if I don’t go this second,” she said. I’d been going to ask her for a ride to LaLouche, but I knew I had to let go of her, if I ever hoped to see her again. She kissed me good-bye, politely, and descended the narrow stairway. I heard Henny’s door click shut as she went down the path—there’d be a better view of her from the front window now. From my own front window I watched the Mustang go off down Prentice: Who’d have guessed James Dean wasn’t driving? So maybe she was a little like him, or like the men Hollywood used him to represent—those wide-shouldered men with such terrible longing in their eyes. It’s hard (Ma and Sylvie could attest) to keep away from men like that, who seem to drink their life from us, so we can watch them grow strong and marvel at all we’ve given them.

  Nature made it so, I thought, sitting down hard on the thin cot I used for a sofa, looking up at Frank’s looping brushstrokes of swimming pool paint on the ceiling. For a man, the words “I love you” are an admission of weakness; for a woman they’re a declaration of strength. I was right to love women, I knew it, but how could I have wrecked it all with my unholy aggressions—why had I tried to barge in on Lee’s heart? I’d lost her; it was my own fault.

  And into the appalling vacuum this thought created, rushed the image of the joy we might have known if we’d really had the chance to be lovers. How we’d have fallen with fear and delight into each other’s depths, kissed in slow defiance of the urgency of desire, since we had months—years—ahead to satisfy ourselves with each other. Last night’s kisses had been movie kisses, show kisses that looked better than they felt. And now we’d lost our chance for the real kind. To lose something you’ve held in your hands already is bad enough, but to see a hope fly up through your fingers while it’s still shimmering, before all its truth, its ordinariness, is revealed—nothing stings so badly. Searching my mind for something warm to cling to, I found Lee’s flannelly scent, and the one soft curl she had allowed her hairdresser to leave, at the nape of her neck.

  She was gone, and with her, my chance for love. I’d thought she’d given in because my roughness excited her.

  So much for my attempt to join the civilized world. I’d see Lee next week at the support group, if I dared to go, and we’d be awkward and distant and try to act as if nothing had happened. All the things I’d never get to say to her! This seemed the worst of it, because, unlike my mother (I kept turning the sentences from her love letter over, working to make them so meaningful that that boy wouldn’t be able to resist her. If someone really, deeply loved her, she’d be healed and our center would hold), I could really speak my love. The phone rang; I jumped on it.

  “I just wanted to say thanks, for coming last night,” Reenie said. “It was really nice to see you.”

  “Oh, thank you for having me,” I said, trying to imagine why she was taking up my phone line with unnecessary gratitude when Lee might be trying to get through. She’d been caught in the shower of stardust I’d been trying to sprinkle on Lee. But at least if Reenie was in love with me, Lee wouldn’t be able to win her, so I could maybe catch Lee on the rebound.

  “I was wondering if you’d want to go see the Paw Sox with me tonight.”

  “The Paw Sox?”

  “The Red Sox farm team—down in Pawtucket. You ever been?”

  “A sports team?”

  “Um, baseball,” she said, with a dry incredulity.

  “Oh, thanks, Reenie,” I said, “but I’m just so busy, I don’t think I can take the time.” I was going to spend the weekend with Lee, if I could wrest my phone line back so she could call me. “Thanks so much for asking, though.”

  “What are you busy with?” Reenie asked, with genuine interest.

  “Work, in fact I’m late right now,” I said, which, since I was going to have to take the bus, was true.

  * * *

  DRESSED ALL in olive and carrying my coffee in a Styrofoam cup, I strode up Aetna Boulevard. I was a working girl, I had my ring of keys; soon I would unlock the high glass door, punch in the code that disabled the burglar alarm, and flick on the banks of incandescent lighting. I’d sweep the sidewalk and wash the window with Stetson’s telescoping squeegee, leaving not a streak: anyone walking past must be able to imagine reaching right through the glass to stroke the thick, soft cashmere sweater on the mannequin, whose posture Stetson had adjusted to perfect haughty languor, so you could tell she was above suffering. She lived in the gossamer armor of beauty and no man could resist her embrace. If only you could afford to buy a sweater like the one she had on!

  That was the illusion Stetson used to tempt his customers: style, he suggested, could save you from the pain of mortal life. Passing between the racks, where pants and skirts hung each two inches from the last, an anxiety crept over you: Were you allowed to touch the clothes, or only to buy them? Approaching the triptych mirror that stood like an altar at the back of the store, you realized you had to buy something, or be doomed to remain a pouchy, stringy mess of flesh, a wretched thing that ought to have been aborted and would scuttle forever beneath the gaze of the divine.<
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  I was to fix every rack the instant a patron walked away from it. If a sweater was disarranged, I was to take the pile to the counter and refold each one around a Plexiglas form. But Stetson tore his hair: I left the unitards stuffed into their cubbies, the one-of-a-kind ascots tumbling over each other on their pegs. I felt uncomfortable following people around and straightening up behind them, as if by trying on clothes in a clothing store they’d done something wrong. Perfection tempts vandalism: LaLouche was the physical manifestation of Stetson’s pose, which, like all poses, infuriated me. It reminded me of my parents, pretending to be successful adults while they neglected all the small, true things and their lives eroded beneath them. Wherever I saw pride now, my lip curled and I considered what must be festering under it.

  So I refused to give in to Stetson’s aesthetic (his word, and if I heard it one more time I was going to dump one of the spare, cool Japanese flower arrangements over his head). This in itself was strange, since I was usually just looking for opportunities to give in (even by taking this job, I was continuing to reshape myself into the stylish woman Philippa had hoped to make of me). But there was a light burning in Stetson somewhere: when he looked, he really wanted to see, and this struck a corresponding spark in me. I kept pulling and tugging at the pose, hoping for a glimpse of what lay beneath.

  As he did, in turn, to me.

  “I’m glad for you, of course,” he said, “I’d love to be happy enough to hum all the time, but I’m not, and exuberance is not the LaLouche mien.” He marked a few pages in W magazine, so I could study the posture (disdainful, aloof) and facial expression (vacant, bored unto hostility) proper to haute couture.

  “Sophistication, Beatrice, is about being above things like humming,” he explained, seeing my eyes stray over toward FrouFrou, the shop across the street, where a rainbow of feather boas was blowing in the doorway. The salesgirl stood amidst them chewing gum, wearing a bustle.