Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  In the backseat, Julia was crying.

  “What is high comedy?” Charlotte asked.

  “High comedy is a mirror of the way we live—our lives inverted,” Sam said coldly. “And it’s supposed to make us laugh at ourselves.”

  “Well, this didn’t make people laugh in the right places,” Oliver said.

  “Then I’ll work on it until it’s funny enough,” Sam said.

  He parked the car, opened the door to the backseat, where Julia was sitting, and reached in to take her hand, which she refused.

  “I’m sorry, Julia,” he said.

  Julia covered her eyes and climbed out of the car, peering through her fingers.

  “Have a little faith,” Sam said, following Julia down the sidewalk to the front door, where Noli was waiting for them. “I’ll make it funny. Funny enough for television.”

  That night Sam lay in his bed wide awake in the heat and darkness, looking out the window at the blank space of black where the stars ought to have been, and promised himself, crossed his heart and hoped to die, as he used to do when he was small, when he did hope to die, that he would not let his family down.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHICAGO WAS hot for June and windy along the lake, the city skyline, glistening like silver rain, blinding Sam and Charlotte as they walked along the jogging path off Lake Shore Drive. Sam slipped his arm through Charlotte’s.

  “Plum is going to China, I suppose you heard,” Sam said.

  “I heard.”

  “She has plans to unite the women of China against someone, the Chinese men, I imagine,” he said. “She’ll miss the Fourth of July with us.”

  “She always misses the Fourth of July with us,” Charlotte said.

  “I know,” Sam said. “Thank God for Jaggers.”

  “Thank God for Jaggers?” Charlotte looked at Sam in his new wire-rimmed specs. He wore his regular uniform: faded jeans and Nikes, a cotton Oxford with the sleeves rolled up, one of his father’s ties, this one red-and-black-striped, wide, distinctively seventies. Seeing him, who would imagine he was anyone other than a student, probably Midwestern, the eldest son in a conservative family, Republican, Lutheran?

  “Why are we thankful for Jaggers?” Charlotte asked.

  “Because he’s not going to China,” Sam said.

  “Then I suppose we can expect to have his company for the rest of our lives,” Charlotte said.

  The sun was bearing down on them with almost physical force, and Charlotte pulled the wide-brimmed straw hat she wore over her forehead so it shaded her eyes and she couldn’t see in front of her, only under the sides of the hat, an edge of moving lake, a battalion of black tree trunks.

  “It’s hot,” she said.

  “And you’re wearing too many clothes.”

  Lately, Charlotte was always in costume, even at Columbia University, from which she had graduated in May with a degree in comparative literature.

  Other than the broad-brimmed straw hat, which might have been worn by a mother of the bride at a garden wedding in the late fifties, Charlotte wore a long A-line mustard-yellow skirt, a Mexican blouse embroidered at the neck, and boots. She liked white cotton gloves in spite of the heat. Fond of the styles of the fifties, when her parents had grown up, she always wore gloves and frequented thrift stores.

  In college, she began to dress in a series of changing looks, discovering that dress was like a house with the blinds shut, the front door locked against uninvited guests. Inside, Charlotte was the perfectly sane, quiet, assessing McWilliams, the compass for the direction of their lives. Her feet were steady on the earth, and under her skin, that whirl of blood and hormones and bile, her heart beating, beating, the climate was generally temperate.

  That morning they had visited Second City, the comedy club where they would be playing. They had spoken with the producer and checked the stage and seen the brochures announcing the summer season.

  “Do you like the way we’re billed?” Sam asked.

  The Second City billing had them playing off and on throughout the summer, beginning in July, twice during the week, and Friday nights as a warm-up act—twenty minutes, time for a single segment. Tuesdays and Wednesdays they were the main attraction.

  PLUM & JAGGERS: sibling comedy troupe—3 kids and a dog—Dysfunction meets hilarity. Join the ’90s. Remember your own childhood bliss.

  “I think it’s amazing, Sam,” Charlotte said. “Amazing what you’ve done.”

  “Thank you, Charlotte,” Sam said, a rare happiness building like fever, a lightness in the fetid summer air that was almost joy. “Joy.” What a lovely word, he thought, like bells. A pure sound undiminished by the thickness of the air. His team. His troupe. Plum & Jaggers on the lips of people as they left the theater.

  “It’s too hot to be out in the sun,” Charlotte said.

  “We’ll head home, then,” Sam said. “I want to check on Oliver.”

  “Why?” Charlotte asked. “I’m sure he’s at work.”

  “I’ve just had a feeling about him this summer. He’s been distracted, and he doesn’t look well,” Sam said. “When I went into the bathroom this morning, he was looking at himself in the mirror and asked me if the reflection I saw in the mirror in the morning ever looked like the face of a stranger.”

  “That happens to me all the time,” Charlotte said.

  “Of course. To me, too. But it doesn’t happen to Oliver.”

  Sam was twenty-three in the summer of 1990, Charlotte twenty-one, and Oliver at twenty had two more years until he graduated from college. Julia, at seventeen, had finished as much as she wished to of high school. During the summers while Charlotte and Oliver were in school, they played in comedy clubs, mostly in Washington, where they still lived in the rented house on Morrison Street with William and Noli. But in 1989, at the suggestion of a scout who had seen their act at the Laugh-Track in northern Virginia, they went to Chicago, playing at several small clubs, and people in the business had taken note of them. By the end of the summer, Second City had invited them to be a part of their next summer season.

  They lived on the second floor of a large duplex in Wicker Park and had day jobs: Oliver painting houses in Hyde Park on a crew with a friend from college, Julia on the breakfast shift at a coffee shop, Charlotte in the main library at the University of Chicago. Sam, who had saved enough money housecleaning during the winter to get by for a year, wrote at a corner table of Sharpey’s down the street from their apartment.

  Their place was large and dirty, with the faint but constant smell of a decomposing animal and garlic in the air.

  A vocalist called Swoon lived in the apartment beneath them, with some other musicians whom the McWilliamses had not met, but they knew Swoon, and recently Julia had begun to fall asleep at night imagining his splendid face on the pillow beside her.

  This early afternoon Swoon was on the front porch when Julia got back from her morning shift at the coffee shop, and he smiled to see her coming up the walk.

  Julia had a startling loveliness, a kind of coltish, awkward gait, a surprise in her bearing as if she was expecting an accident to happen, some emergency for which she was not prepared.

  Swoon patted the step of the porch for her to sit down.

  “You are a sight for these sore eyes,” he said.

  Julia smiled.

  “That’s a cliché,” she said.

  “Well, it’s a heartfelt cliché, my beauty.”

  She sat down next to him, leaned into his shoulder.

  “I’m exhausted. You kept us awake practicing last night.”

  “You should have come on down and told us to lay off,” Swoon said.

  “I couldn’t. We have to practice ourselves,” she said.

  “You do your funny stories all night long?”

  “Once, I took off my clothes.” Julia s
hrugged. “That was funny.”

  “Onstage?”

  She nodded. “Sam hated it, but people in the audience laughed a lot.”

  “Sam.” Swoon looked over at her, his lids half closed.

  “He’s my older brother. I thought you’d met him.”

  “I know he’s your brother,” Swoon said. “He’s someone to reckon with.”

  Julia wrapped her arms around her knees, resting her chin on them. “He’s in charge of us,” she said. “He’s been in charge of us ever since our parents died.”

  “Oliver told me about your parents,” Swoon said, leaning his head against the porch railings. “Strange the way you guys got into comedy.”

  “Maybe,” Julia said. “Except Sam says that comedy is about bad news.”

  “Laugh until I cry?” Swoon said.

  “Like that.”

  Julia was staring at a fat man across the street walking his very small dog, conscious that Swoon was looking at her, that the look seemed to have an expectation, a kind of aggressiveness, which pleased and frightened her. She wanted to look at him. She imagined herself looking at him, pushing him gently down on his back, lying on top of him, kissing his lips with her eyes open, so their eyes were almost flat against each other, deep, black, secret ponds. She could feel that something was slipping over her, about to happen, and she wondered if she might leap on top of him. Or run.

  The man with the dog had gone up the street, around the corner; the street was empty, the air electric.

  “Have you ever been with anybody?” Swoon asked, in an offhand kind of way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like a man or a woman, someone real close.”

  “You mean sex?” Julia asked, her skin prickly, her stomach a little sick. “How come you ask?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking just this morning, just now sitting with you on the step, I’ve been thinking you’re going to have some difficulty if you don’t turn down the heat,” Swoon said.

  “If you want to know, I dream about you before I go to sleep at night and your head is on my pillow,” Julia said, leaning toward him so their arms touched. “That’s one thing I know.”

  Swoon didn’t smile. He took out a cigarette, lit it, closed his eyes.

  He was wearing jeans rolled up, bare feet, no shirt. He had taut, muscular shoulders, not large but confident, and long legs. He was thirty, perhaps less, with impenetrable black eyes, high cheekbones, a tightness in his full lips, a man without attitude but nevertheless pleased with himself in a quiet sort of way.

  “You could be bad news and not know it for a minute, not have any idea what you cause coming in a room all-girl like that.”

  “Don’t worry,” Julia said. “I have rules. Sam has us living a sort of convent life,” she said.

  Swoon had gotten up, ground out his cigarette in the dirt, and was headed into the house.

  “I don’t know what kind of convent he has in mind,” he said, “but you’re some kind of nun.”

  Julia followed swoon into the hall, through the living room to the kitchen, where he stood looking in the fridge. There was a half-eaten apple, a plastic container with something yellow in it, maybe pasta and cheese, a carton of milk, and two beers.

  “Not much there,” Swoon said. He closed the fridge. “We’ll go to lunch.”

  “Lunch sounds good,” she said. “I have money.”

  “So do I.” He took her hand. “You come along now and mind your p’s and q’s.”

  “That’s a cliché, too,” Julia said.

  “I’m all clichés, darling. Stick with me and you won’t have an original conversation.”

  Sam pushed open the front door to the duplex and followed Charlotte to the second floor. The air inside the building was suffocating, and he felt a general unease, not unfamiliar—he thought of his emotional immune system as compromised, susceptible to the smallest change in temperature. Whenever the feeling came over him, he believed someone had died and he was about to be told the news.

  So he wasn’t surprised to see the note on the door to their apartment—had expected it—a torn piece of the Chicago Tribune written in yellow Magic Marker, barely legible:

  Guys, it said, Oliver’s at the University Hospital, like in a coma. Drugs. See ya there, Trish.

  “You’ve been weird,” Trish had said to Oliver that morning on their way to work with the painting crew, driving her blue pickup like a maniac. “Ever since we got to Chicago, it’s as if you’re on drugs.”

  “Maybe I am,” Oliver said.

  “How come I didn’t know that? How come, Oliver? We’ve been together six months and I never thought you did anything but too much sugar, and maybe you’re hypoglycemic or diabetic or one of those sugar things.” She turned off the music.

  They had met in late January in an Asian History class, and by Valentine’s Day, Trish had moved in with him. Things happened quickly like that with Oliver. Trish was pretty enough, and she had an ease with men, which Oliver liked. But she also had an insatiable appetite for constant engagement, which by late spring had exhausted him. It was a problem Oliver had with women. He was always ending up with someone who had taken over his bedroom, sometimes his shirts and boxer shorts, and wouldn’t leave.

  “So what kind of drugs are you on?” Trish asked.

  Oliver closed his eyes. A headache was coming on him like a car crash and he was braced for it. He wished Trish Bryant would evaporate and in her place there’d be an angel. He couldn’t remember why he had been so fascinated when they met.

  They parked in front of the large gray clapboard in Hyde Park, and Trish got out of the truck. Already the rest of the painting crew had arrived and were setting up on the front porch, passing out coffee and doughnuts. Oliver leaned his head back against the front seat. He had a sense that his legs were locked in a slow-moving paralysis headed upward toward his heart.

  “Trish?”

  She leaned in the window of the truck and handed him a banana. “Potassium,” she said.

  “Do I look funny to you?” he asked.

  “You look normal. Too skinny. Eat your banana.”

  He peeled the banana, put the peel in the glove compartment, and actually felt better after he had eaten.

  “I think you should quit this comedy thing,” Trish said, walking across the yard with him. “It’s not your shtick. It’s your brother’s, and he frightens me.”

  Oliver got out of the truck, put his hands in his pockets, and followed her across the yard.

  “I really mean it, Oliver. I’d feel weird all the time if I had to play that stupid talking dog Sam insists you do.”

  “I play a lot of roles, not just a dog.”

  “Whatever,” she said, opening her thermos, handing it to him. “Chamomile tea. No sugar.”

  “No thanks.”

  Mark Naples, who ran the paint crew, was on the porch giving out assignments.

  “We’re starting outside today,” Mark said to him. “Have you done exteriors?”

  “Not much,” Oliver said.

  “We go from the top of the house to the bottom,” Mark said. “It’s a piece of cake unless you’re afraid of heights.”

  Oliver looked up. The house was three stories high, with a pitched roof.

  “I’m not bothered by heights,” he said.

  But he had a sudden vision of the ladder in the sky and him on it and the ladder swaying, and he knew he was going to die before his feet were firmly on the ground again.

  “We do the trim first, and these windows won’t be so hard because they haven’t had many paint jobs on them,” Mark was saying. “We’re using this godawful red color and white on the trim.”

  “What about the living room? That’s not done yet,” Oliver said. “I could do the living room while you guys do the trim.”

&nb
sp; “It’s too hot to paint inside today, even with fans.” Mark adjusted the extension ladder against the back of the house. “Are you okay, Oliver? You look a little sick.”

  “He’s been weird all morning,” Trish said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be on this ladder,” Mark said.

  “No problem,” Oliver said, taking hold of either side of the ladder, giving it a reassuring shake. “If you’re interested, my potassium is A-OK.”

  He finished his coffee, picked up the material he needed, sandpaper and a scraper, and started up the ladder.

  What happened and had been happening since May, since exams at Columbia, was an aura inside his head. He’d feel a separation as if a piece of his brain on which he regularly counted for a sense of well-being had come dislodged and in the vacancy was an aura, a kind of vaporous rainbow that he could actually see, although it lived inside his brain. Then the aura disappeared and there was either terror or a terrible headache. He preferred the headache.

  At the top of the ladder, his hands wet with nerves, he concentrated on the details, at this particular moment sanding with large-grained sandpaper the loose paint and cracks on the sill of a third-story window. The window looked in on a child’s bedroom with a white canopy bed and a white spread, and on the spread a white cat, which caught Oliver’s attention. He wondered was it actually a cat he saw sleeping at the bottom of the bed or did he project a white cat there because he wanted one to complete the perfect picture. That is what he was thinking when the cat moved, stretched its long, slender legs, arched its bony back, and jumped off the bed to the floor. Oliver was pleased it had been a cat and not in his mind. He was not, as he sometimes thought, imagining things. The cat was real, and so was he, and the hands at the end of the extension of his arms were his hands and also real. And that was when he fell.

  A careless moment of inattention, a sudden dizziness, a loss of confidence, terror. Both feet went backward on the rung, simply lost their grip. The heels went down, and the toes slipped.

  When Sam arrived at the University Hospital, Oliver was in a small dark single room, the television on mute.