The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Oh, my God, Larry’s present!” she said suddenly. “I forgot!”

  “What do you suppose it is?”

  Sylvie looked up at me with big, naughty eyes, not unlike the eyes of a child who has just decided to spread peanut butter on the cat. She’d done that once, and another time had pushed an impeccably dressed real estate agent off the little log bridge into the brook, because Ma didn’t want the house to be sold. “It felt so good,” she’d said both times, when I asked what had possessed her. Simplicity was allowed to Sylvie. Being a good student, a good girl, had left me without the satisfaction any natural human would feel, kneading peanut butter into fur.

  “Let’s open it,” she said.

  “No!’ I already knew Ma’s longings too deeply; I didn’t want to see them in the flesh. Sylvie went to get the package out of the cabinet.

  “I guess he couldn’t find a box.” It was an awkward shape and the thin paper printed with jolly Santa Clauses had been wrapped around it like a tourniquet, secured with yards of Scotch tape. “We’ll wrap it up again. She won’t know.”

  “Sylvie!”

  “He’d have told me what it was if I’d asked.” People had always confided in Sylvie—everyone has so much to tell, and when you find someone who’ll be honestly fascinated, of course, you’re only grateful.

  “Really, I think we ought to look,” Sylvie said, “in case it’s something that’s not such a good idea. They’re on the outs, him and Ma.”

  “So I gathered. Why?”

  “Oh, who knows, with her? He did something, or said something … I don’t know, and neither does he but Ma won’t talk to him and he’s just desperate to make things right.”

  At this, she tore off the wrapping, abruptly, like a child stuffing a cookie in his mouth before Mother can say no. And there it was—

  “A gun?” Sylvie said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s chocolate, and you take off the foil.” But Sylvie was shaking her head and the minute I set my hand on it I knew it was real.

  “Why?”

  “I cannot guess,” Sylvie said.

  We looked at each other with as much excitement as alarm. Mine, of course, was an educated excitement: I had studied Chekhov and knew that a gun over the mantelpiece in the first chapter will go off by the end. We both knew that a gun added something to a story, and this one was bound to add a new chapter to our lives.

  * * *

  “YOU KNOW, I think your mother has made an excellent choice,” Philippa observed. “Most men don’t have a clue in the gift-giving department. This guy obviously loves and understands your mother and knows exactly what sort of thing will please her.”

  “Philippa!” I said (in a shocked whisper; I was huddled under a blanket on the couch so Ma wouldn’t hear me), but I had to laugh. Philippa’s parents lived in her mind as vengeful gods enforcing immutable laws. They did not suffer drunken brainstorms and rush out to buy flocks of sheep or ping-pong ball factories. They’d never asked themselves if they were happily married; they’d never dreamed of divorce. They didn’t fall desperately in love with figments of the imagination, nor fly into sobbing rages when those figments failed to come alive … banishing the former beloved back to the netherworld, only to lie pounding their fists on the ground, hoping to raise the dear figment again. But if they had done all this, and one or another of their shades had arrived on Christmas Eve with a gift-wrapped pistol, they would have given the pistol back. What good were they, to a woman whose term of highest praise was “lurid”? None.

  * * *

  “HE MISSES me,” Ma said, with tears in her eyes, turning the thing in her hands. “He misses me; he wants me to know he’s thinking of me.”

  “Flowers are more customary,” I said.

  “Oh, flowers! Oh my God!” she said. “What an idea! I cannot even imagine Larry carrying a bunch of flowers.”

  “That is the point.”

  “Oh, Beatrice,” she looked at me with great tenderness—not maternal feeling but the sympathy of a missionary toward her dear aboriginal flock. I did not understand love, did not understand men, the way she did.

  “He knows I’ve been frightened here, all by myself,” she said. Having so few resources, she made use of everything. The fear would draw Larry to her, make him feel stronger and more confident, less her student and more her protector. Soon he would forget that she’d been supposed to guide him. “He wants me to feel safe.”

  “Ma?”

  “Don’t you see, Beatrice?” she asked, gazing intensely into my eyes. “Don’t you see? He’s giving me something from his world, he’s showing me what he can do for me. It’s a token of love.” What depths this word held for her; I could hardly look. “I sent him away,” she whispered. Her tone was from the wrong movies: tearful, overwrought. Philippa wouldn’t have let these films into her festival. But poor Ma had only been to the teachers’ college. I was the one whose mother made sure I got a real education. “I told him to get out of here and never come back. I told him he was a boy with a crush on his teacher, that he’d misunderstood me. I told him everything I told Jeff Rush.” Jeff Rush was the high school principal.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, angry at my stupidity, or her own—who could tell, and anyway what was the difference? A daughter’s idiocy is only her mother’s brought to bloom. “Because he doesn’t love me, not really. He has some kind of fantasy, but it’s not me. I need someone who loves me.”

  “Well, you can’t expect—”

  “I know!” she said, with the sharpest grief. “I know. I can’t expect anyone to love me.”

  Why did she have to grab half a sentence and jump off a cliff with it like that?

  “So there,” I said gently, pointing to this gun. “He does love you. He brought you a gift.”

  She nodded, looking down at it as if she wanted it to promise her something, so that I knew she’d put it in a drawer like her love letters, and consult it daily or hourly as a talisman, until she’d gotten used to it and it lost its power. She cried so sadly, I was afraid I was going to cry with her. And then what? We’d be lost. We were clinging by our fingernails already—we had one job, Sylvie’s waitressing—between us. By some accident of grace we had roofs over our heads. We had venison, thanks to Butch’s reckless driving, and Teddy had liberated a bit of light.

  “You’ve got to give it back to him,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a gun,” I said. “You need a license for it, and you don’t have one. So it’s illegal to have it, it’s a crime.”

  She laughed, incredulous at my naïveté. “Innocence is a luxury some people can’t afford,” she said, worldly-wise. “We can’t all be like you.”

  Oh, she was proud, and with good reason—her spirit, her intelligence were immense. And what strength she had needed, to keep herself perfectly still as one era after another bound her to the rack! But she’d been good, she never struggled, never let her ambition surface except when she looked into my eyes.

  As she did now, her mascara leaching into her crow’s-feet with her maudlin tears, ridiculous, yes, but not without magnificence. She was a giantess of promise, struggling up and out of the depths, dripping with the old notions of femininity, bellowing her fury and confusion that something so potent, so able as herself should find no path forward in the world. And to see her, to feel all the pity and admiration, yearning and fear, that I did in her presence, was to be very, very glad I had Lee, and the strangeness and forbiddenness of my own life. It worked against her like garlic against a vampire.

  “You don’t understand,” she said.

  The gun was an appeal to her true spirit, I knew that. There were a lot of laws she wanted to break, and Larry had sensed that, found her an instrument. He was only in remedial English; he did not know that a gun that appears in the beginning is bound to go off by the end.

  “Don’t let Teddy see it, okay?” I asked.

  “I won’t,” she said
, and smiled over me with the maternal tenderness of the ages. Her dear daughter, who understood so little. She put the pistol on top of a pile of towels she’d just folded, took it upstairs, and came down looking ten years younger than she had that morning, and brushing away a tear. “Love is the essential thing,” she said. “And of that, we have plenty, plenty. Larry’s coming over,” she said, the way she used to say “all clear” before she let us out of the linen closet.

  I felt all my good sense twisting to splinters—she loved him, he made her happy. Against that, what argument could I make? Larry was the age she’d been when she met my father, and he came from her side of the tracks. She saw in him everything she’d given up when she married. Well, she was going back to the beginning, she was going to get it right this time.

  Part Three

  One

  I DROVE Lee’s car up to Bradley Airport, feeling the excitement associated with such places. Real people, who steer their stately and impressive lives along the wide boulevards of authenticity, often have to meet their comrades at airports. Here was a real person now, coming out through the automatic doors with his briefcase, checking his watch (he had to be somewhere, they needed his expertise).

  “Hi!” I said, as one real person to another, and he blinked in confusion and looked away.

  I sipped coffee at the coffee bar, stirred by the sound of the jet engines but acting preoccupied, as if this was just part of my ordinary day. And here came my very real darling, looking more dedicatedly prosaic than before, as if she’d just had a refresher course in keeping down to earth. But when she saw me, she broke into a huge, delighted smile.

  “You came!” she said.

  “I told you I’d be here.”

  “I know. I just never—oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Hi.” She gave me our look, the one that hinted at the amazing kisses, way beyond the ordinary heterosexual kisses, we’d give each other if only we were allowed.

  “Home,” she said, when we got there, turning her key in the lock and pushing her suitcase through the door with her foot. She reached behind the tree to turn up the thermostat, then turned to me in the stale cold and said, “Really home, now you’re here,” and kissed me, clinging against me, and I folded her in, to protect her, the way you do with women.

  Then, shy: “I got you something.”

  “I got you something too!” I said, as if it was an enormous, telling coincidence that we’d both bought each other Christmas presents. Well, to me, it was. Sid gave me one gift in our three years together: a string of coral beads. Seeing them, I’d known he meant them to represent all the things he couldn’t say … and that he knew he’d lost me. I wanted to cry every time I put them on.

  Lee had set a small box on the coffee table, wrapped in handmade rag paper and tied with raffia, as suggested in a Courant feature on gift wrapping a few weeks ago.

  “Mine first!” I said. Stetson had given me a deal on a silk shirt she’d admired.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said, holding it up and then turning away from me with reflexive modesty to slip it over her head. “Oh, I didn’t mean for you to get me anything.” She was sincere, I realized. She honestly did not require a gift from me. I repeated her sentence—I didn’t mean for you to get me anything—in my mind, to catch her inflection, so I could use it sometime. And fixed myself on the tiny box with a quick prayer that I’d say the right thing when I saw it, since it was going to be a ring.

  “Oh, Lee, diamonds!” My eyes sparkled, my voice was hushed and joyful, both. “Are they real?” I wouldn’t have asked except I knew they must be, and that she should have the pleasure of affirming it.

  “Of course,” she said softly.

  “Oh, Lee. Lee, I love you so.”

  “It’s like in a book,” she said. “A happy ending.”

  “No,” I said. “A beginning.”

  Lee smiled patiently and I felt the foolishness of my youth and idealism. No one seemed to feel the sacred mystery of love as I did … but everyone believed in sex. And Vitamin C.

  “Come into bed with me, my rose hip,” I said. “I wanna touch your nipples.” I could say forbidden things to her, and affect her terribly. I was taking her where she’d been told she mustn’t go. I dusted a finger lightly where her nipple touched the silk shirt, and she pulled away, smiling. She was always trying to domesticate sex with those smiles. I understood. I was used to leaving the knife edge of wanting to the man, but without it, we wouldn’t continue, so I caught her around the waist and cupped her breast and dared her to refuse me. She was not one to accept a dare.

  The ring was from the nicest shop in Hartford. It was handmade, of white gold with the diamond chips inset, and once it was on my finger, I never took it off. It was ugly, unnatural to me, but I didn’t let myself dwell on it. Lee had picked it out and I was going to love it, just the way I loved her.

  * * *

  “AND WHAT, may we ask, is this new accountrement?” Stetson asked, with his old edge of satire. We were having our lunch, at the Chanticleer, where some dizzying length of time ago I’d seen a man and woman talking about she-crab soup while I leaned, faint from heat and hunger, in the shadow of Wings to Fly Productions. Stet had insisted on bringing me there, to remind me those times were really past. So here we were, embarking on a bowl of lobster bisque together, like a pair of beggar children who’d got into the palace banquet by a hidden door. I wouldn’t have had the courage to walk in if he hadn’t been with me, but our friendship made all things possible. We felt smart and beautiful and good, entitled to love and happiness, when we were together.

  “Which fork do you use?” he asked, in a stage whisper.

  “It’s soup,” I whispered back, and we giggled tipsily. I remembered those mornings, him with his squeegee, making certain no flyspeck marred the windows while I refolded the sweaters, the aimless talk that would lead to some surprise. Every time we found something in common it was like a glint of gold. He’d gone camping in the park near our house when he was a Boy Scout. Amazing, that he’d been just down the road and I hadn’t know. We counted back—it was the same year Forsythia died, so I got to tell him that story, and he shook his head, saying he’d have been the same as I was, heartsick and fascinated. It felt like he’d pulled out a splinter that had been festering in me for years.

  “Soup. Thanks, Princess,” he said now.

  “It’s nothing, Your Majesty.” We smiled at each other a beat too long; he rushed to the rescue, pointing to the ring again.

  “I got it for Christmas,” I admitted, seeing he was still looking at the ring. “You must be doing really well, to bring me here.”

  I meant to distract him, and it worked. He smiled in spite of himself and looked around the place like he owned it. His pride gave a little tug at my heart—it was so earthly, transitory, masculine, and so well deserved. He might seem to be lost in the vapor of chic (to be perfectly chic would mean being hard and still as a mannequin, and above all earthly pain, not unlike the feeling of being perfectly high)—but he’d earned the right to eat here, day by sober day.

  “It’s going a little better,” he said. “Now about this ring, Beatrice. Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “No,” I said, with a strangely flirtatious lilt. “No, there isn’t.”

  “This came from Sandalwood, didn’t it?” he said, taking my hand, which looked like a water lily cupped in his. “Not one of their better efforts, I’d have to say.”

  “You’re jealous!” I teased, and to my amazement he blushed.

  “No, no,” he insisted, “of course not.”

  “I mean, you can’t bear to see anyone wearing something that doesn’t come from LaLouche.”

  “Oh, oh, I see,” he said, with an embarrassment that engulfed us both.

  I wanted to push away from the table and run out the door. But Stetson summoned himself—his very beautiful, thoughtful, open, searching self, over which the cynical manner sat like a porkpie hat on a marble Apollo—and said, wi
th his dark eyes wide and earnest: “I meant to say that this shows a commitment, right? Congratulations. I’m about to undertake a commitment myself, so it’s kind of cool we’re doing it together.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “We’re getting married,” he said, in about the same tone he’d used to confess his drinking.

  I forced a generous and proud smile right over my face, instantly. “Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” he said. He sounded relieved. I made the smallest questioning look, wondering if it was polite to ask whether this meant he’d fallen in love, finally, and he must have guessed this. “Well, it’s the natural next step, I mean, we’ve been seeing each other a year, she wants kids, you know—”

  Not … “We can’t live without each other”; not “We want to spend all our lives trying to do our best together.” Just—“It’s the next step.”

  Fortunately the waiter was sliding a glazed breast of squab onto my plate.

  “She really loves me,” he said, as if this was surprising.

  “Smart girl,” I said. He was smiling with such a gentle humor. I looked around the restaurant, which was supposed to be the best in town and was filled at that hour with people who felt themselves lifted above the ordinary for a moment, just because they were eating there, at cherry-wood tables with thick linen cloths, under an avant-garde chandelier of blasted steel—even the pigeons here were squab. But Stetson and I, we continued to be our ratty, hopeless, laughing selves.

  He reached for the butter and I caught sight of the edge of something under his cuff.

  “Is that a tattoo?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I try to keep my sleeves down.”

  “Doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose?”

  “Purposes change,” he said. Shaking his head—“There was a time when I’d do anything to get near a needle.” He laughed. “I still look forward to my flu shot every year.”

  “You know,” I said, shaking my head, “I just do not get it.”

  “No,” he said, “people don’t—the gratification.” A look of deep, secret need passed over his face, a look I recognized. Even in our deepest insanities we seemed to be kin.