The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  In the absence of visitors, the dogs had quieted down. And in the cat room as well, Claire imagined, though of course she could never know. Wasn’t there a law of physics: The presence of an observer unavoidably affects whatever is being observed? The gray cat with the sad, unforgiving glare haunted her. Louis would have a fit if she brought home a cat. He distrusted cats profoundly. Even to see one prowl across the lawn caused him great anxiety.

  “Tracy,” she said impulsively. She reached over and tapped him on the shoulder.

  He looked at her curiously. There was something so open and receptive about him, some mildness in his eyes, the turn of his mouth. He must think her an old woman composed of little more than a series of abruptnesses. She’d called him that morning to say—rather peremptorily, it seemed to her now—let’s go see about a dog for you. He needed prodding, she had noted. And he didn’t yet have a car—someone would have to drive him. So her intervention wasn’t illogical. Though one day in the perhaps not so distant future he’d have a wife of his own to prod his well-meaning intentions into the good deeds he was so clearly capable of.

  Back through that gauntlet of beseeching dogs she led him, through the metal door and into the false refuge of the cat room. The kittens took up their miserable show exactly where they’d left off. But like herself, Tracy saw past their antics, saw the older cats without her pointing them out. “Ouch,” he said.

  She hadn’t been sure why she had suddenly wanted him to see this—or rather, had no longer wanted to be alone in having seen this. That was it: she had wanted to see if he would see what she had seen.

  To point out one gray cat in particular was entirely unnecessary. It crouched warily at the back of its cage and knew her exactly.

  “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I can’t stand knowing all this is here.” And she turned and walked resolutely back out the door.

  Louis would have been merely puzzled, and perhaps she had put Tracy off as well. But once they were back in Cindi’s office—she continued her paperwork with lip-biting concentration—the young man was all brisk, regretful practicality. “It’s too bad,” he said. “A new cat in the house would really be the end of poor old Lux.”

  “To tell you the truth, it would probably be the end of Louis as well. Or at least our marriage. He has this loathing for cats which is, well, practically theological.”

  Her whimsical frankness made Tracy laugh. For better or worse, it alleviated the sting of the cat room.

  “I always suspected Louis of belonging to some secret religion,” he said playfully.

  “He does keep a black book,” she said. Which was true; she’d come across it once, on his desk, where he’d forgotten to secret it away. She’d refrained, sensibly, from opening its pages. It wasn’t like him to keep a diary.

  “A black book,” Tracy said. “The gospel according to Louis.”

  “Well,” she told him, “he has to get his strange ideas from somewhere.” The laugh they shared, abrupt and unforced, sealed their moment of collusion. She imagined how it marked the beginnings of an intimacy between them.

  “Stay for some lunch,” he urged, as if in confirmation, when she dropped him off at his house. “It’s the least I can do to say thanks for all your help.”

  She considered for a moment, then accepted. She liked the idea of Tracy Parker fixing lunch for her. He had a talent for suggesting possibilities; no doubt it made him a terrific teacher in the classroom.

  A shame he found himself exiled to a house on the edge of campus, instead of in the dorms where he belonged, and where students would, she was sure, flock to him for advice and reassurance and the simple pleasure of his company. A shame, too, that circumstances had him channeling those companionable impulses toward a dog.

  She held Betsy on the leash while he fished in his pocket for his keys.

  “We have to take off our shoes,” he said. “I keep house Japanese style.”

  The door swung open to reveal a large, bare room.

  “You should’ve seen my apartments in Nagoya and New York. They were this big.” He used forefinger and thumb to illustrate. “Each thing I own gets its own room here.”

  It was very nearly true. The living room consisted of a couple of large floor pillows, a stereo set, also on the floor, and two stereo speakers. The kitchen boasted a battered metal table and two flimsy-looking chairs. The dining room was entirely empty except for a stack of books. Through an open door at the end of the hall she glimpsed a futon, a bookcase made of boards and bricks. How different it had looked, all those years ago, when Jack Emmerich had lived here.

  “This isn’t where you live,” she observed. “This is where you’re camped out. I’m sure we’ve got some spare furniture in the attic we can send your way.”

  It was another intervention, she realized.

  “Actually, I like it like this,” he told her. “I have this feeling too much stuff would just distract me.”

  She stood in the middle of the depressingly empty room. “From what?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  They looked at one another for what seemed an unconscionable stretch of seconds. “That’s a very good question,” he said, with a seriousness that struck her as more melancholy than she’d intended to provoke.

  They might have said more, she thought later, but just then, her nails clicking loudly across the bare floor, Betsy returned from her exuberant exploration of her new abode.

  Lunch, Tracy warned, was leftover lentil soup from the night before. As he heated it on the stove, she sat precariously on one of those flimsy chairs and watched him, in jeans and a white T-shirt, barefoot, little more than an overgrown kid, really, playing house for the first time in his life. He must be quite lonely. She tried to think of a young woman she might introduce him to, but no one occurred to her. Despite everything, she and Louis led a fairly circumscribed life.

  Beneath the table, Betsy napped at her feet. Claire hoped she hadn’t railroaded Tracy into this.

  “I’m afraid all I’ve got to drink is water,” he told her.

  “Water’s fine,” she said.

  “I drink a lot of water,” he went on. “I try to keep my system flushed out. I stopped eating meat about a year ago, and I can’t believe how much better I feel. I could just feel my arteries unclogging.”

  On the counter she had noticed many brown bottles of vitamin supplements. She’d have to alter the evening’s menu.

  The soup, when she tasted it, was surprisingly subtle.

  “You made this from scratch?”

  “I love to cook,” he explained. “The secret here is cumin. Just a little, that I add right at the end.”

  He brought out peppery goat cheese, some crisps, two tawny pears.

  Perhaps he wasn’t just camped out here. Perhaps he knew exactly what he was doing. There was a kind of luxury to this pared-down life he’d set up for himself, something inherently unsteady but at the same time sure-footed.

  As she cut into the ripe flesh of a pear, she said, “I hope I didn’t seem pushy this morning. I hope I haven’t foisted a dog off on you.”

  With his bare foot he caressed Betsy’s sleeping back. His toes were long and bony. “No, no,” he told her. “Motivation was exactly what I needed. My trouble is, I think about things, but then I never put them into action. So this is a good lesson. It’s empowering. I need to transfer more of what happens up here”—he pointed to his head—“into reality.”

  So he was not like her husband at all.

  She had fallen in love in her own strange way one rainy evening the day before Thanksgiving on a downtown sidewalk in Poughkeepsie. The year was 1956 and she had graduated from Barnard in the spring, a late May ceremony that also came off in the rain, a fine drizzle differing from this bleak November version only in its warmth, and serving to link the two moments as major milestones in her young life.

  Libby had met her that afternoon at the train station, all hugs and kisses and tears-through-smiles, the first time they’
d seen one another since Claire’s five-month pilgrimage with her mother through the capitals of western Europe. There was so much to talk about, a flurry of catching up, a torrent of words, and then the big news, withheld for various reasons from the voluminous letters Claire had found waiting for her at a succession of hotel desks but now blurted out in the capacious brick-vaulted hall of the station three minutes after Claire’s arrival: Libby was engaged to be married, a June wedding to—no surprise, really—the man whose quickly ascending star Claire had been able to trace with little difficulty through the course of her friend’s rhapsodic missives.

  Though, still, it was shocking. Shifting her suitcase from one hand to the other, she had said, “I’m so happy for you,” wondering if her tone matched the words and thinking, So why was that the one thing you couldn’t tell me? Did you expect to break my heart or only to tap me, gently but firmly, into my place?

  Her heart, she had discovered in the last half year, was of durable stuff. You could test its mettle with a hammer. Europe and distance had further tempered it.

  “At least I think I’m happy for you,” she revised. “When do I meet him?”

  “The sooner the better,” Libby told her. “In fact, he’s waiting for us outside in the car.”

  “I don’t get a chance to prepare myself?” Claire asked with mock dismay.

  It reassured her to see that she was far calmer about this development than her friend, who’d presumably found that weeks of getting used to the prospect had made her more rather than less anxious.

  “I thought I might lose my nerve,” Libby confessed. “This makes me extremely nervous right now. This meeting, I mean. You know everything about me, and nothing about him.”

  And what does he know—about anything? Claire wanted to ask, but out of sudden sympathy refrained. Instead she said with some honesty, “Let’s say I know enough about you to trust you’re making the right decision. How’s that?”

  “I hope you mean it.” Libby clutched her friend’s free hand and led her toward the entrance and the black Dodge pulled up just beyond. “Remember, we had a pact. We pledged ourselves to be realistic. The world is what it is.”

  “The world is what it is,” Claire confirmed. “Am I giving you any reason to doubt that?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  She was disappointed that Reid Fallone was not more handsome; even so, he was handsome enough. His gaudy tie impressed her with its sense of adventure; that was the thing she first noticed about him. Beneath that rumpled gray suit, then, lurked a certain wildness. She could appreciate that. She was glad for Libby.

  To her he was exceedingly, though not excessively, attentive. There was a poise to his overtures. He jumped from the car to take her suitcase. He shook her hand with warmer enthusiasm than her hand was usually shaken. He was a man who clearly loved women: their gestures, their habits, their legs. That was fine. There was nothing wrong with that.

  He taught school, the youngest of three brothers who stood to come in for a certain amount of money at some point in their lives. He was in the first flush of success, she could tell, and pleased to be acquiring a wife as some tangible emblem of that success. Already he was speaking of the family they planned to raise—a brilliant family, she could tell. She saw Libby ensconced in triumphant motherhood, surrounded by her lively brood. The picture formed itself so clearly in her head.

  With a single stroke life had changed—her sense of its capacities, its boundaries. They had been roommates together at Barnard during a time when the world was settling in for the long haul of a cold war. The Bomb loomed over everything. Spies and traitors lurked—in friends, family, perhaps even in oneself. So the official story ran. To compensate, the two had invented other lives, a private world meant to augment the stifling, suspicious America that hemmed them in on all sides, and from which, by virtue of their out-of-date qualities—style, sophistication, subtlety, the three Hisses, they called them, after some unfortunate headlines that were dominating the news—they felt themselves hopelessly estranged.

  They explored certain avenues of resistance, had once even ventured to a smoky lesbian bar in a Greenwich Village basement, only to retreat shuddering from the grotesques that inhabited that particular gateway to hell. Perhaps for a moment, in a certain light, their world had looked lesbian to them, but that had clearly only been an optical trick, some mad illusion performed with mirrors and scarves. Much more to their tastes were the glittering worlds that unfolded on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera; they even felt at home amidst the male couples opulent in their black ties and tuxedos, though the desire to follow their lead into tuxes never held much appeal for either of them. They were who they were. They found a peculiar comfort in one another.

  Then all that fool’s paradise ended. They commenced adult life in the warm rain; Claire went abroad for five months of museums and opera; she returned. She hadn’t really thought the end would happen quite the way it had, and that surprised her.

  No less of a surprise, though, was the discovery of how quickly life could move on. Nothing ended. Only hours later, waiting in line for a movie on Main Street—part of Libby’s strategy for the weekend, to head off any possibility of a long chat à deux—she found herself taking in the young man who’d been foisted off on her. A blind date, the first she’d ever been on in her life. Libby and Reid had sprung it as a cruel surprise. Or perhaps the intent was only kindness. She couldn’t tell. If it was to be a time of momentous changes, then why not allow oneself to be swept along?

  It was hardly love at first sight, because he wouldn’t look at her. Wouldn’t meet her eye. He stood with his hands in his pockets and gazed distractedly off into space. There was nothing, however, to see except streetlights in the drizzle, the occasional car, the anonymous facades of Main Street’s shut-up stores. And yet he looked around so peculiarly, as if searching something out. As if trying to see anything but her.

  She was far more interested in observing Reid and Libby together than paying attention to this diffident young man. Still, she roused herself to make an effort—even to the extent of boldly taking his arm as he showed their tickets to the usher and they moved into the theater.

  Forty years later, the only thing she could remember about the movie was the image of a black-haired man getting out of a car to have coffee at a diner in the desert. Perhaps he was a killer on the run. She couldn’t recall. His hair was intensely black, his features handsome and brooding. If she remembered correctly, he wore a black shirt, black jeans. Even the clear blue sky above him seemed dark with foreboding.

  Afterwards, they themselves had coffee at the diner down the street, the four of them squeezed snugly into a booth, she and Libby on one side, with Libby facing her fiancé and she facing, finally, her blind date. There was no choice but for him to look at her. There was nowhere else to look. He had fine, nearly feminine features; masculine but fastidious gestures. He possessed the air of someone who kept himself on a short leash. From his high school days of cross country—this, for some reason, Reid had advertised about his friend—something of the runner still lingered. Some love of distance and open spaces, of freedom and solitude. He would not hem one in. She could see that about him.

  She could also see that he took no initiative on his own; he was purely reactive. His vagueness was a shield for sharper qualities he declined to let show. Throughout the evening’s conversation, he had followed Reid’s lead—cautiously, though not without his own leavening of dry wit. They were an oddly matched pair, teachers at the same boys’ school, each in his way full of the life of the place, their students’ antics, their foibles.

  Reid regaled them with tales of the boy they called the Little Lord: a royal refugee from some Balkan kingdom the latest war had erased entirely from the map. His family had escaped to New York with what seemed to be the entire treasury of their country. His sisters had sewn rubies into their undergarments. The Little Lord, Reid intimated, had even secreted an especially large one in a certa
in body cavity (they all smiled indulgently at his risqué talk). From that particular trauma the poor fellow had not yet recovered. He lived in a constant fear that he would be kidnapped, or even assassinated. None of the other boys were supposed to know who he was, but his upbringing made his aristocratic origins next to impossible to conceal.

  The subject of the Little Lord roused her date from his distraction. For the first time he grew animated. He joined in to tell them how the boy’s parents sent a limousine up from New York every Friday to retrieve him for the weekend. How the other boys generally wished him good riddance, his behavior toward them was so ineffably haughty and aloof. One afternoon, Louis came out the front of the building to find the Little Lord looking frantic beside the unattended limousine. Having just passed the driver in the corridor, he was able to convey what he assumed would be a reassuring message: the driver had stepped inside to the lavatory to wash his hands.

  Wash his hands, cried the Little Lord. Yes, of me!

  “He’s very sweet, thoroughly miserable, quite lost as a matter of fact,” Louis told them in conclusion.

  “And without Louis’s protection would long since have fled the Forge,” Reid added. “His parents think the world of Louis. They invite him down to their box at the opera. Can you imagine? Louis is in heaven. Opera’s what he lives for. Or rather, on—like some men depend on their sirloin.”

  She waited in vain for Libby to volunteer a word about their own opera-going days. Those clusters of young men looking handsome and refined in their black tuxes. She had envied them their world, because so clearly it was theirs. She and Libby were at best strange interlopers, only marginally more at home in the opera house than in that basement bar in the Village. But then the lights went down, they all turned their faces to the golden stage where night after night marvelous worlds unfolded in which nothing or no one was ever too strange to exist.

  Perhaps Libby had never understood that in the same way she had. But perhaps, on the other hand, Louis would. She studied his handsome face for signs, and when he caught her staring at him, for a long quizzical instant, the first of the evening, their gazes held fast. In his eyes lurked uncertainty, a question mark. Despite his caution, he gave himself away as one of those refined young men to be found milling about so elegantly and aimlessly during the intermission of Tannhäuser or Lohengrin, sweet, thoroughly miserable, more or less completely lost.