The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “They told me,” she said, “they all said you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t—”

  “Wouldn’t what, honey?” I held her tight, I rocked her back and forth—she was soft and helpless as a child.

  “Wouldn’t stay with me,” she said in disgust—at me, at herself?

  “Who is ‘they’?” I asked her. “What is this big ‘they,’ and what do you care what they think?”

  She sighed and rested against me for a minute, trying to let me convince her.

  “I’m right here, honey,” I said, and laughed to prove what a silly idea she’d had. “Sorting the laundry and singing. How much more domestic can a person be?”

  “You’re singing a song I don’t know,” she said, and I heard in her querulous voice how she was shrinking—the less I loved her, the more fearfully she clung to me and the narrower the compass of her life became. And it was worse than if I’d only fallen out of love—the stream of my life had never even flowed through this apartment. It went from my family, to Philippa, and now somehow to Stetson, and I had to follow it on. What was I doing here, where did I really belong?

  I’ve come out of the wrong closet, I thought. I’d wanted so badly to smash down a door; I’d just taken the first one I saw. I sat Lee down, but I barely needed to speak: there was a confidence in my movements now that I wasn’t acting a part anymore, and she knew what it meant. She didn’t seem to be crying so much as breaking apart in my hands. I remembered how Sid had seemed to draw power from his lack of love for me, but I couldn’t imagine how this had worked. All I felt now was sick at the sight of the mess I’d made. I held Lee tight so I wouldn’t have to face her, and stared over her shoulder at her conch shell on the table, the shell in which a young, silly person may hear her own blood rushing and mistake it for the sound of the sea.

  Eleven

  POP WAXED sentimental over his life with Dolly. “We’re not the kind of people who are constantly trying to move up in the world,” he told me. “We like this place, we like the people here, they’re the kind of folks who know how to be friendly without intruding, who let you go about your daily life without asking a lot of prying questions. But then they’re right there for you in a crisis. You know, after the accident we lived for a week on casseroles from the neighbors. No, we’re putting our roots down here. We’re going to stay.”

  “Which is great,” I said, “but Dolly’s growing up. It seems like the life there is too small for her. She needs friends, challenges.”

  “Bea, something’s wrong in her mind,” he said, “and it’s not just the accident, she was always this way. It’s not that she’s crazy, she just doesn’t understand things.” His voice dropped. “You wouldn’t believe the things she says, honey. She thinks we’re going to buy a plane. I can’t afford a plane!” he said, incredulous at her deranged ideas. “No, honey, she needs a father who can love her and take care of her, a safe place to live, and that she does have, here with me. Here we are, in big-sky country together.”

  And before I knew what was happening he was rhapsodizing, naming the tribes: Arapaho, Arikare, Bannock, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Nez Perce, Sheep Eater, Sioux, Shoshone. He set the scene for me, the braves riding through the violet shadow of Grand Teton—all of it. There was so much in him, such interest, hope, and curiosity, pleasure in the pure sounds of these words, and a willingness to love what he had, what was right there in hand. Who knew what he might have made of these qualities, if only …

  If only I could go back and change that first instant of his failure, the first small shame—I saw those praying mantises, how if they’d hatched a week later, he’d have made money, and gotten confidence, and the next thing would have been easier, he wouldn’t have been so afraid. Instead, it had created an island in his mind, a shadow mass that he tacked around, time and again, as it grew into a continent whose circumnavigation would take a lifetime—if he even dared to try. Instead, he kept in the sunny shallows, extolling the beauties of his little bay with rapt vitality. He was there with Dolly, alone under the big sky.

  * * *

  “BEATRICE, IT’S Stet.”

  “Hi,” I said—a “hi” so swollen with feeling that it embarrassed me and I said again with dry dignity, “I mean, hi.”

  “Beatrice, I have to water some plants tonight, and I was wondering if you—”

  “I love to water plants,” I said. “Oh, Stetson, I’ve missed you so much. It’s terrible, how much I think about you.” I was in the library, and there was someone waiting for me, but I could have talked to him forever. I was dying to discuss this unheard-of phenomenon: requited love.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m thinking about it half—” He caught himself being less than truthful. “Well, more than half the time.”

  “Is this the reference?” the woman who’d been waiting asked, as soon as I was off the phone. She had set two heavy sacks down on the other side of the desk. They looked like they contained all her belongings. Yes, I said, this was the reference. I was the clerk, the janitor, the reference librarian, the bouncer. Cyril had seen that I could manage and he rarely came in to work anymore.

  “Is it true,” this lady asked me, “that, if a guy’s been in a car crash, it can … you know … make his … make it crooked?” She was fat and she moved as slowly as if she were underwater, so that her face, with its expression of shame and determination, seemed to take minutes as it turned up toward mine. “Because my boyfriend, ever since he smashed up the Firebird, he doesn’t want to … you know … he says it hurts.”

  I told her he ought to speak a doctor, and gave her a flier from the community health center, but she went doggedly on: “It’s like there’s something hard poking out, right here…” she said, lifting her shirt to point to a spot near her belly button. “I mean, that’s what he says.”

  Troubles of heart, mind, flesh, and no one to look to but me. So then, I would have to help her. I lifted the Merck Manual down and opened it to “Genitourinary disorders” and she stood peering into it a long time before she could bring herself to ask me to read it aloud. After I covered kidney stones and a couple of common prostate troubles, she shook her head.

  “This is the reference?” she asked dubiously, looking around, then shouldered her parcels again and started off even slower and sadder than before.

  “Stop,” I said. “Come back here, and sit down.”

  This was the great thing about that library. I was not the most badly lost person there. And no one there expected me to save them. They wanted only a scrap of information, a heated room, a smile. That much, I could provide. I sat down in the chair opposite her, wondering who had sat with Stetson when his life came apart, who had taken his hand and helped him through. Could someone help Dolly, as I hadn’t been able to?

  “Tell me some more,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do.”

  And just at that moment, something amazing happened—a panel truck pulled up in front and a man jumped out with a book in his hand.

  “Interlibrary loan?” he asked.

  It was Gone With the Wind. I’d sent out the form like a message in a bottle, and here it came, bobbing back to me. Mrs. Arruda’s bakery telephone was busy, and I felt like running into the street and calling her with a megaphone—here it is, here it is, I’ve done something, I’ve made something happen!

  Twelve

  STETSON AND I stood together, high over the city of Hartford, backs to the dark river and the highway streaming with lights and the satiny gold of the historic capitol dome. We were contemplating something much more compelling than this, something with such amazing power that any right-thinking civilization ought to quake at the sight of one—for all they promise, all the havoc they’ve wreaked.

  “A bed,” I said.

  “I know,” he said apologetically, and I somehow found the equanimity to laugh a little.

  “I thought there’d probably be one.”

  “Yeah, they’re kind of hard to avoid.”

 
; We turned away with one unified movement—we were, as usual, in sync. And there it was, Hartford, glittering like a real city.

  “What a view, huh?” he said. “You should see the sunsets.” He spoke like a man showing off his lands to his betrothed. The place belonged to one of his customers, who traveled on business a lot, so Stetson would go by and water her plants for her.

  “They must be beautiful. Even the river looks pretty from up here.”

  “It’s a step up from my place,” he admitted, with a shudder, as if his apartment, with the old rehab bedspread, was the physical manifestation of shame. He had nothing to offer me, except love, and that—well, my parents had tried that. It was the torment of love—needing it, longing for it, fearing its loss—that had made the needle sparkle so. Stetson and I had to plant our feet on something more solid.

  “We can’t,” he said, looking away over Route 84 east, back toward Lewiston. I myself never looked east without being aware I was looking away from my family and the farm in their dream.

  “I know,” I said. All the way there, walking across the park and coming up in the elevator, I’d been steeling myself against this moment because I was afraid if he hurt me, it would set me reeling so I’d never get my balance back. I could hardly speak now, from fear, and I thought how it used to seem impossible to say anything wrong to Stetson. He’d wanted to know all my depths; he didn’t pass judgment but tried to understand. One damned kiss and now we could barely face each other.

  “Can we sit down for a minute?”

  “Okay,” he said, nervous, and willing, always willing. If I’d said, “Make love to me,” he would have, and then … we’d have been doomed to each other. That was the thing the seventies didn’t understand—how hard it is to separate yourself from someone you’ve made honest love to, in all its animal intimacy, its will to reach through the body for the soul. What makes sex electrifying is that desire, and the knowledge of the great harm love can do. We sat down on the end of the bed as if it was a tippy canoe.

  “Here,” I said. I took his hand, and he sighed in relief.

  “That’s better,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to say you couldn’t touch me at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’d…”

  “… never stop.”

  “Right,” he said, looking down with an expression I’d only seen once before, the day we kissed each other. His glow—his will to transcend and blaze forward in life—was gone, and he looked young and full of pain. Because of me.

  His hand was so big, I held it in both of mine. But though his other hand moved to join the embrace, he kept it back. This infinitesimal slight hurt me like a cigarette burn. That was the terrible thing—that I’d come to trust him so, to let him know me. He was more dangerous to me than anyone else on earth, and my mouth went as dry as if I were facing a torturer.

  “Okay,” I said, clipped as a busy receptionist. “So we know. We’ve decided.”

  He flinched. “Right,” he said. Then he laughed. “Because, you know, I haven’t been this anxious since I went into rehab. This morning Tracy was doing the books and she asked me to translate something in your handwriting, and I kept telling her I couldn’t read it. I felt like if I admitted that I could, she’d be able to see right into my heart.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Yeah. So we’ll just make a clean break…”

  I heard myself speaking with interest and surprise, as my heart was shrieking in opposition. But I was too frightened to say anything honest. I thought with fury of Lee’s telling me I always said the right thing. It had been easy to say the right thing to Lee—she had no power to hurt me. We’d been lovers without getting on intimate terms. To Stetson I always said unbelievably stupid things now. When I was near him, all I could think about was how to keep him from going away. And he—he’d come to count me with alcohol and drugs, the snares he might get trapped in, out of his own need. Maybe he was right—I hadn’t done Lee any good. But this, I thought in furious defiance—this was love. It was nothing more than a series of tiny, vivid shocks of recognition and understanding that seemed to prove a kind of supernatural bond between us—a bond that gave us new strength and hope.

  “All day I thought about us, here,” he said, looking sheepishly back at the bed.

  “Did we have a good time?” I asked grimly, and he shook his head and refused to meet my eyes.

  “It’s wrong,” he said, with dull insistence.

  “We’d make rotten adulterers,” I said, to comfort him. There was a wild luxury in the word we. And it was something to be proud of, our innocence, our inability to lie.

  “I used to be good at deceit,” Stetson said. “Real good.”

  “I’m sure you were, angel.”

  “But I can’t, now.” He shook his head firmly and I felt him steel himself, the immense block of muscle life—work, that is—had made of him, against me, and what he called my rationalizations. A lot easier to call it sex, make it a craving like the others, not to be given in to by such a strong man. I felt a pulse of pain deep inside, where we ought to have fit together. If things had been different, if we didn’t both live on thin ice, couldn’t we have found a way across to each other?

  “So, if I just hold you and say ‘I love you, I love you,’ that’s okay then?” I said, daring to trace the vein that ran down from his neck over his shoulder and along his arm, thinking how much of a man is visible—his bones and sinews, his erection—while a woman is a smooth vessel, a shape to be filled with dreams. “I love you,” I said, my voice failing me, because I was saying it for real.

  “You have to go home,” he replied.

  To another night of Lee’s silent misery—comforting her, or pretending not to see, while we waited for the month to run down. I wished I could pass a hand over her face and make her forget me, return her to her crush on Reenie. They’d have been content with each other, content to the point of love.

  Stetson and Tracy might be content, if I got out of the way. I hoped to be content someday myself. First, though, I had to repair the rift between my parents (not between the people, but between their voices in my mind). I turned Stetson’s hand over and traced his lifeline across his palm—it was broken early, then ran straight and deep for a while until it diffused and trailed away. We could try to unite ourselves, make a true family—the hardest thing to do—but the combined troubles of our lives were so heavy, they’d sink the most buoyant love.

  “I see your future, Stet. It’s clear sailing from here,” I lied, and lifted his hand to kiss the truth away.

  He laughed, or tried to, and stood up, with obvious relief. He needed to move, I needed to cry: it comes to the same thing. We were going to grieve for each other according to gender, the way we did everything else.

  “You won’t forget me—”

  He laughed, looking skyward. Then he hugged me, reflexively, and I felt him kiss my neck, while I tried to get my arms around him one more time. I wanted to feel it all, there in his arms, but if I let myself, I’d never walk away. And suppose I did let my guard down, and he didn’t?

  So I put my lips to his with one little chaste kiss, walked out into the very nicely appointed hall of Riverview Heights, and pushed the elevator button, down.

  “Beatrice!” he called, his voice raw, and I wheeled around.

  “Don’t push first floor, push lobby,” he said, laughing a little at my eagerness.

  “Oh, okay.”

  “First floor is really second floor,” he said. “That’s the French way.”

  “Thanks, Stet.” As soon as the door closed I put my cheek against it, for the cool, and thought: there, I’ve escaped a person who in a huge emotional moment starts talking about elevator buttons. Then I remembered how he’d said he never knew anything like real love, and thought how we’d made the beginning of a real love together, like children planting a radish seed in a garden, expecting something magnificent to grow. I thought that when I was old and
dying and had forgotten everything else, I’d still remember the feeling in our kisses. In the lobby, I was crying, and I walked down Main Street crying in defiance, thinking everyone who saw me ought to envy me for having lost him, and for knowing what a loss it was.

  Thirteen

  “IT’S OUT of the ordinary, that’s for sure,” I said, with what I thought was great generosity.

  “What do you mean?” Ma said. “It’s a June wedding. They’re common as grass.”

  Sylvie was getting married. I alone remembered how she’d brushed marriage off, saying she’d never get herself stuck that way. Now that Butch was in prison, though, things were different, and no one could believe I was so callous as to suggest Sylvie refuse his proposal.

  “He needs me, Beatrice,” she said, with eyes flashing.

  “It’s a happy ending,” Ma said. “That’s what I like about it. You three will all be together, and that’s what matters in the end. I don’t believe anything should stand in the way of love. Now, let’s see. The dress is new, and this will do the rest for you.”

  It was a gold pin in the shape of a lizard, with two sapphire eyes, and she fixed it to Sylvie’s collar with fond ceremony: it had been her grandmother’s.

  “Something old and borrowed and blue!” she crowed.

  We were standing in the parking lot of the Brimfield County Prison, where Butch was to be held for one more night before he went to serve out his sentence in the state penitentiary, which Ma and Sylvie kept referring to as “the pen,” much as, had he been off to Harvard, they’d have spoken of “the yard.” They wanted to belong somewhere, to speak the local patois, and if that meant using little pet names for various crimes and their punishments, so it would have to be. Sylvie was chain-smoking but still nervous; she jiggled baby Jesse in such frantic rhythm. I expected him to cry, but he slept peacefully in the crook of her arm, dressed in an elaborate christening gown and looking round and fresh as a scoop of ice cream.