The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Beatrice?” He snapped his fingers—satirizing himself, and I smiled. “Beatrice, a customer?”

  Yes, another one of the depressed women who looked to Stetson’s clothes for salvation. When I asked if I could help them, I really meant it: I was always hoping they’d ask me what they ought to do with their lives.

  “Oh,” I said to this woman, who was watching herself, and the infinite chorus line of identical selves, each wearing a jaunty but inexplicably buttonless alpaca coat, in the triple mirror, “Do you live in a warm climate?”

  No, she said, she lived up in Colchester.

  “Oh, well, that’s a nice, sheltered spot,” I said, having recognized my error and trying to back away. “I’m sure the winters in Colchester are very mild.”

  “Excuse me?” Colchester was about twenty miles north of Hartford.

  “I mean,” I said, “It’s so hilly there. It’s the winds, the winds on the plain, that you have to watch out for. In a climate like Colchester’s, you could wear that right through November. And then by March, by March you’d be wearing it again, in a temperate place like Colchester. And it’s so nice to have a dressy coat like that—not that it’s so formal, just a little much for everyday, though now I think about it, not really enough for evening. And it can get cold in the evening.”

  I wanted to shut up, really I did. But I was coming to know too much about shopping. Nobody needed that coat, or this catsuit, no one would fall ill for the lack of one of the beaten gold necklaces in the locked case. You’d never guess it, though, from their faces—the men hunched and monosyllabic, grateful to be allowed just to buy something instead of having to speak their feelings. And the women, trying to believe in the gift, wrapping themselves in the heavy fabrics, turning at the mirror, joyful in the beauty the clothes seemed to give them without realizing it was they who were giving their beauty to the clothes. No sooner had I swiped the credit card than I would see the face grow uncertain: Was this that supernatural raiment, bound to confer grace upon its wearer? Or just another stretch of rayon under which the shoulders of its cowering owner, so confident in the mirror only a minute ago, would soon slump again?

  I had to keep talking. There was very little I could accomplish on this earth, except maybe to save this woman from buying that coat. Our eyes met in the mirror. Hers glittered with irritation—just what was I trying to tell her? She ran her hand along the sleeve—it was so soft, and I guessed, looking at her, that she had not known much softness. She was not the glamorous customer Stetson imagined for himself (such a person did not exist in Hartford), she was heavy and in the middle of her disappointed face her lipsticked mouth glowed a brilliant cherry red—she’d come out this morning to try to feel pretty and hopeful—why did I want to wreck it?

  “I love it,” she said with defiance, and twirled like a little girl, a smile lighting her face for a minute while the unsecured lapels flew out. “It’s so luxurious, but it’s not too dressy, you could wear it with jeans, you could wear it with a suit,” she piped—almost exactly the copy from the W ad—and she pressed her face into it, inhaling the jasmine scent Stetson steamed into everything so that it would still smell of LaLouche as long as it was new and full of possibility.

  “Have you seen the hats and mufflers?” I asked. She was determined, her Visa was platinum, and once she crossed that line and handed it over, she’d be good for another fifty at least. “Hand-knit from the wool of free-range llamas, all vegetable dye, and very warm—they’d fill up that open spot in the coat.”

  She took one of each and grabbed a cashmere lap robe as she passed the display. Total: $675, and it wasn’t yet noon.

  “Which is marvelous, Beatrice,” Stetson said. “It is, but it does not fold the shirts. I mean, what is this, an origami elephant? Is this the trunk flapping here?”

  It was a sleeve. Sloppy folding, secret reading, casually reminding a customer that his magnificent purchase must never be exposed to sunlight or soapy water—with these amulets I tried to ward off mercantile despair, the sense that the whole world might be as cool, precise, and empty as LaLouche.

  “No reality, Beatrice,” Stetson had said when he found the radio on. “Shoppers torn between alpaca and vicuña should not have to listen to the news from Zaire.”

  “I like reality,” I’d countered, though this, like most sentences spoken on earth, was wish presented as fact. The news frightened me to death and I just hummed all the louder when it came on. I couldn’t listen, couldn’t look at the world outside, for fear of what I’d see. Still, though, I dreamed of being the kind of person who read the newspaper, who dared to find out things—I aspired to it, badly as it frightened me.

  He’d smiled, ruefully—he was getting to know me a little, he sensed the layers of meaning under the things I said; he liked knowing those layers were there. “Here’s a little reality for you, dear,” he said, opening The Courant to show me a man who’d strangled his girlfriend’s seven-year-old daughter when he discovered she’d been unfaithful.

  “I’ll take vicuña,” I sang.

  “That’s my girl,” he said. I rearranged my posture to look more like one of the mannequins, then started laughing and gave it up, so he had to laugh too.

  “That’s my boy.” His eyes flicked wide at the condescension before he remembered I was repeating what he’d just said to me.

  “One thing I do know about is the vise grip of love,” I told him.

  “I believe you,” he said, with surprise. I didn’t usually speak with so much authority. He turned his wide brown eyes on me with warm curiosity, so I was moved to grab a bunch of sweaters and fold.

  * * *

  “SO, BEATRICE, have the waves rolled over the shore, as it were?”

  “I suppose you could say that,” I said.

  “And you haven’t called to report?”

  One didn’t admit defeat to Philippa, only triumph. I decided to try and distract her.

  “Too busy,” I said. “I’ve got a new job. Selling very chic clothes.”

  Her silence seemed to have a dry quality.

  “It’s true,” I piped, aware she’d find it bizarre. “At the most fashionable store in Hartford.”

  The silence became somewhat dryer, as if I’d said “the warmest beach in the arctic.” But this did make it seem more likely that a congenitally styleless person like me might be an acceptable salesgirl there.

  “Well. Congratulations,” she stumbled, but caught herself. “I expect you’ll make an excellent salesperson. You’re so—natural.” “Natural” was not her highest term of praise. Lee, I thought, would value my artlessness properly; she herself had such simplicity. And I gave my memory of the night with her another little tweak toward the good, and missed her even more. Who’d have guessed that by flouting my parents, I’d find a way to flout Philippa too?

  * * *

  “YOU DIDN’T call me,” Lee said.

  The woman’s not supposed to do the calling; seeing my nature, my mother had drummed this into me early. “I thought you didn’t want me to,” I mumbled. I’d just gotten home from LaLouche and I was a different person than I’d been when I last saw her, four whole days ago. Hearing her voice, I felt ashamed all over again of the way I’d forced myself on her.

  “I did—want you to,” she said, or this is what I thought she said, but she was barely audible and this gave me some courage.

  “I thought you said I overstepped—”

  “Should I bring a pizza over for dinner? Would you like that?” she asked.

  “Lee, I … I’m so sorry about last night. It was wrong, so wrong and I never will again if only you’ll give us the chance we deserve. I hardly know you, but there’s something between us that’s … transcendent, I guess you could say. I feel so much when I look in your eyes, I know there’s such a wonderful possibility there. Please forgive me, please give me another chance. You have such grace and intelligence, there’s a deep understanding in you, it would just be terrible if I never got to
know you.”

  I felt all this just then with such fervent intensity that I didn’t care whether or not it was true. Love is the most important, most elusive thing there is. You only had to take one look at my parents to see this. If they’d been murdered, I’d have become a detective. If they’d been paupers, I’d be a banker. But they were victims of love, so this set my course: through vigilant scholarship, innate talent, and plain hard work, I would become an expert on that subject. Then I could bring it down from the mountains, or up from the canyons, or wherever—see there was enough for everyone, that no one was left stumbling parched through a desert again. I’d be the woman who found the cure.

  Hearing Lee’s step on the stairway, I opened the door to a face I had to struggle to recognize, after all the permutations it had gone through in my mind. She kept her eyes down, afraid of what she’d see in me, but she needn’t have worried. We were women; our weakness was attachment, not isolation.

  “You’re sopping,” I said. It was raining and her trenchcoat with umbrella to match was streaming. “Let me get a towel.” I dried her heavy dark hair as I’d used to see Ma do Teddy’s when he was just out of the bath, and kissed the top of her head for good measure. Then I wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, lit a candle in a beer bottle, opened the pizza box, lifted a piece out for her with the cheese trailing; here we were together, safe. The rain drummed on the roof, the maple tree scratched at the window. From this moment on we were lovers, without question. My physical presence was enough to drive her dreams of Renée away.

  “I will think of myself as an archaeologist,” I told her, “and of you as the City of Rome.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said shyly. “There’s nothing to discover.”

  “What can you mean?” I asked. “We’re just at the beginning, We have whole nights’ worth, years’ worth of talk coming. I mean, what’s your favorite supper? What’s your idea of God? What weirdo things can’t you bear, and what do you love for no reason at all? Are you superstitious? How do you suppose you came to be a lesbian? Where do you see yourself in five years?” I saw myself flowing beside her and into her like streams becoming a river, all the currents of feeling and philosophy rushing together.

  “What is this, a job interview?” She meant to be saucy but her voice turned fearful. Her eyes were not brown as I’d remembered but a pale milky blue like a kitten’s; they weakly appealed to me to stop the interrogation.

  “It’s the beginning of a lifelong conversation,” I said. “What do you dream about? What are you most curious to know?”

  “It’s the kind of stuff kids talk about, in college,” she said, squirming. “Spirituality and stuff.”

  “What do you want for yourself?” I interrupted. “What do you long for, more than anything?”

  She shrugged. Finally, in a voice so small it was almost inaudible, she said, “A girlfriend, I guess.” Then, looking down at the floor, she said: “That was my first time, with a woman, I mean.”

  “Lee!” I said, but she kept her eyes fixed, and I saw that I shouldn’t press the question. “Well, you’ve got a girlfriend,” I told her. Philippa had said I had a bold vision.

  She drew back, shaking her head.

  “Trust me,” I said, full of feeling—feeling that had been lying around in my heart for years. “I just want to know everything about you, Lee. We’re at the frontier together, we’re pioneers.”

  She looked desperately uncomfortable—but her eyes broke free of her qualms for a second and I saw a flash of light in them, as if she’d just seen something from a dream. “I love you,” I said.

  People are always saying things they don’t quite mean, things they only wish were true. They’re likely to deny love just when they feel it most deeply. I despised this convention and was determined to flout it. “Never doubt me,” I insisted.

  “You’re nice,” Lee said, gazing upward in discomfort. “You’re very nice to me.”

  “I’m not nice,” I said, blazing suddenly. “I love you, I want you, I see my future in you, I feel at the brink of something so amazing between us.” I was boiling with sentences like these, passionate declarations. It didn’t matter what I was declaring, really, or why. I wanted to hear myself say the things people dare to, when they’re loved. Lee’s face went through some stage of incredulity and then broke open suddenly, and I thought—of course, she’s waited all her life to hear these things, and I can say them. I didn’t ask myself whether I meant it—was only proud of my daring and its effect.

  In bed later, wearing the nightgown she’d brought in her overnight bag, she told me in a childish whisper that there was one story that might give me some insight into her—one detail that had always seemed to her revealing. Then, with pride, and shame at being so proud, she told me that she held the all-time attendance record at Clear Springs Central School. She had not missed one day of school, from kindergarten through eighth grade.

  She believed in order, in lawful simplicity. She didn’t care about the mysteries that make people so different from each other, even though we’re all so much the same, nor the memories, if they were really memories, that can haunt a person and alter the course of a life. She suspected that it was dangerous to think the way I did, trying to follow all the subtle strands of thought and feeling that wove through every moment. Things are as they are, who can really say why?

  Life is to be lived, not deciphered. Lee would rescue me from all my figuring; she’d welcome me into her world, the ordinary, unexamined world whose windows I’d only peeped through before. The rain coursed down over the window, and I rested my head on her flanneled shoulder, and slept as deeply as a fugitive, safe in his cell finally after years of running. The unconscious life was the only life for me.

  Eight

  MY FIRST paycheck came as a revelation. It was $77.32.

  “Stetson, we said a hundred.”

  “That is a hundred.” He looked uncomfortable, though, as if I’d touched on something he was ashamed of.

  I held the check up for him to read. “See, it says seventy-seven dollars.”

  He winced. “You don’t know about taxes, do you?” he said, with tender incredulity.

  “Of course I know about taxes,” I snapped, though I’d completely forgotten about taxes and it had never occurred to me that taxes might consume almost a quarter of my wage. Seventy-seven dollars was less than I’d made at the hospital, and I owed Frank two months’ rent.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right, I didn’t realize. This is fine, no problem.” It was all written on Stetson’s face—that he knew the money wasn’t enough, that he couldn’t afford much more, that I wasn’t doing a very good job and he couldn’t very well fire me but could hardly raise my salary. If I started to cry, which I was likely to do if I admitted to myself that it was something of a problem, that would make him more unhappy and I didn’t want him to despise me.

  “A sweater!” he said suddenly. “You need a new sweater! Look at these, have you seen how soft they are? Have one, take the raisin-colored one there, it’s you.”

  I grabbed it as if it was edible. “You, in that sweater, Beatrice?” he said, sounding sarcastic because he sounded that way even when he was sincere—“Now that’s class.”

  One afternoon while he was out pricing display racks, his mother called. I’d never considered that he might have a mother, but he did, and she, having lost a leg, and most of her vision, to diabetes, was lonely and needed someone to talk to. So she talked, chewing too, or so it sounded, while Wheel of Fortune played in the background, interspersed with commercials for hospital beds and orthopedic pillows. Josip, as she persisted in calling him, had been such a nice little boy—did I know, she collected commemorative plates and Hummel figurines and even as a two-year-old he had never so much as chipped one? After his father left, he’d done everything with her, even watched the soaps every day. Then he’d figured out how they could make ends meet, when she was desperate and he was hardly more than a boy
—that was how he got into trouble, it wasn’t his fault. She talked on and on and I listened with all my heart, as I did every time I got my ear to the world’s door.

  “How much?” Stetson asked, holding up the pink “while you were out” slip where I’d noted her call.

  I tried to act mystified, but he waved a hand. “She always tells the sales clerk, Beatrice,” he said. “Otherwise I might be able to wiggle out. How much?”

  “Seven hundred,” I said, “though … she said … it might be closer to a thousand, really.”

  “A thousand it is,” he said, writing the check. “Anything else?”

  “I think she’s lonely,” I said.

  “Very astute of you, Beatrice,” he said, “but I meant, were there any other messages?”

  I shook my head. I shouldn’t have peeked behind the curtain. He loved clean, well-lighted places, he was determined to raise himself into the lifeboat with the survivors and leave the wreck behind. And the survivors, you know they’d been traveling first class. If he wished to live among them, they must never guess about the Hummels, the sweet, greasy smell of the little apartment, any of it. No reality.

  “When I first saw you,” he told me, “I said to myself, ‘That’s class. That’s old money, man. She’s a woman of wealth and taste and all you need to do is dress her, Stet.’”

  So, I was pulling it off. Or rather, as Stetson was also an impostor, he had to live by the impostor’s code: believe in the disguises of others as you would have others believe in your own disguise. Expose another, even in your own secret heart, and the whole house of cards comes down. If Stetson had had the good fortune to matriculate at Sweetriver College, he might have become friendly, as I did, with Thaddeus Standish Alden, whose father, the lumber magnate, had singlehandedly deforested an entire northern range. Thad’s paintings were the pride of the school, proof that Sweetriver was at the cutting edge of the postmodern, not at all mired in Abstract Expressionism like people said. His taste ran to the color black, whose many forms and depths you would not, if you didn’t know him, have guessed. He used to knock on my door at midnight to borrow ten dollars and offer confidences, such as: he loved his dog better than any human; they slept curled together and even smelled alike; he painted only with black because it was the last color in the school bookstore display, and so the easiest to steal; and he had to steal—he refused to take money from his father’s filthy hands. When his mother was taken ill one night, he came in to borrow bus fare home, swearing that modern life was to blame for his troubles—in an earlier era she’d simply have been left on a north-facing slope to die. When I thought of old money I always thought of Thad, and the things that got caught in his beard.