Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "Jade will have to swing by and pick you up then," she announced matter-of-factly. "It's just as well. The house is difficult to find. This Sunday. Twoish, two-thirty. You like Thai food?" (She didn't wait for my answer.) "Every Sunday I cook for them and you're the guest of honor from now until the end of the year. You'll get to know them. Gradually. They're wonderful kids. Charles is adorable and sweet, but the others can be difficult. Like most people they hate change, but everything good in life is an acquired taste. If they give you a hard time, remember it's not you —it's them. They'll just have to get over themselves." She gave one of those housewife commercial sighs (kid, carpet stain) and waved away an invisible fly. "How do you like your classes? Are you adjusting?" She spoke quickly and for some reason my heart was hitch-kicking excitedly in the air as if I was Orphan Annie and she was that wonderful character played by Anne Reinking who Dad said had spectacular legs.

  "Yes," I said, standing up.

  "Wonderful." She clasped her hands together—sort of like a fashion designer admiring his own fall line. "I'll get your address from the office and give it to Jade."

  At this point, I noticed Dad in the Volvo, parked by the curb. He was probably watching us, but I couldn't see his face, only his splotchy outline in the driver's seat. The windshield and windows mirrored the oak trees and the yellowed sky.

  "That must be your ride," Hannah said following my stare. "See you Sunday?"

  I nodded. Her arm lightly around my shoulder—she smelled like pencil lead and soap, and, oddly enough, a vintage clothing store—she walked me toward the car, waving at Dad before continuing down the sidewalk toward the Faculty Parking Lot.

  "You're absurdly late," I said, pulling the door closed.

  "I apologize," Dad said. "I was walking out of the office when the most appalling student marched in, held me hostage with the most mundane questions—"

  "Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about."

  "Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre." He started the car, squinting in the rearview mirror. "And that, I deduce, was the meddling woman from the shoe store?"

  I nodded.

  "What'd she want this time?"

  "Nothing. Just wanted to say hello."

  I intended to tell him the truth; I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare to be that rivalry which occurs between apes"—but then we were accelerating past Bartleby Athletic Center and the football field where a crowd of shirtless boys leapt into the air like trout as they hit soccer balls with their heads. And as we rounded the chapel, Hannah Schneider was directly in front of us unlocking the door to an old red Subaru, one of the back doors dented like a Coke can. She brushed her hair off her forehead as she watched our passing car, and smiled. It was the distinct, secret smile of adulterous housewives, bluffing poker players, consummate con artists in mug shots and I decided, in that split second, to hold onto what she said, cup it tightly in my hands, setting it free only at the last possible second.

  Dad, on Having a Secret, Well-Laid Plan: "There is nothing more delirious to the human mind."

  VIII

  Madame Bovary

  There was a poem Dad was quite fond of and knew by heart, entitled "My Darling" or "Mein Liebling" by the late German poet, Schubert Koenig Bonheoffer (1862-1937). Bonheoffer was crippled, deaf, had only one eye, but Dad said he was able to discern more about the nature of the world than most people in possession of all their senses. For some reason, and perhaps unfairly, the poem always reminded me of Hannah.

  "Where is the soul of my Darling?" I ask,

  Oh, somewhere her soul must be,

  It lives not in words, nor in promises,

  Mutable as gold hers can be.

  "It's in the eyes," the great poets say, "

  'Tis where the soul must dwell."

  But watch her eyes; they glisten bright

  At news of heaven and of hell.

  I once believed her crimson lips,

  Marked her soul soft as winter's snow,

  But then they curled at tales dismal, sad;

  What it meant, I could not know.

  I thought her fingers, then, her slender hands,

  'Cross her lap, they're delicate doves,

  Though sometimes cold as ice to touch,

  They surely hint of all she loves.

  Aye, but there are moments she waves farewell,

  I confess my Darling I do not follow,

  She vanishes from view 'fore I reach the road,

  Windows bare, house quiet and hollow.

  And at times I wish I might read her walk,

  Like a sailor his map o' the sea,

  Or find instructions for her looks,

  Explaining all she hopes will be.

  How curious such an enlightened life!

  God Himself wouldn't deign to doubt her

  Instead, I'm left a-wondering,

  Darling's shadows lurking about her.

  Dinner at Hannah's was a honey-bunch tradition, held more or less every Sunday for the past three years. Charles and his friends looked forward to the hours at her house (the address itself, a little enchanting: 100 Willows Road) much in the way New York City's celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943 (see Forget About El Morocco: The Xanadu of the New York Elite, the Stork Club, 1929-1965, Riser, 1981).

  "I can't remember how it all started, but the five of us just got on with her famously," Jade told me. "I mean, she's an amazing woman—anyone can see that. We were freshman, taking her film class, and we'd spend hours after school sitting in her classroom talking about any old thing—life, sex, Forrest Gump. And then we started going to dinner and things. And then she invited us over for Cuban food and we stayed up all night howling. About what I don't remember, but it was amazing. Of course, we had to be hush-hush about it. Still do. Havermeyer doesn't like relationships between teachers and students that go beyond faculty advising or athletic coaching. He's afraid of shades of gray, if you know what I mean. And that's what Hannah is. A shade of gray."

  Of course, I didn't know any of this that first afternoon. In fact, I wasn't even positive I knew my own name as I rode next to Jade, the very disturbing person who only two days prior had maliciously directed me toward the Demonology Guild.

  I'd actually assumed I'd been stood up again; by 3:30 P.M. there'd been no sign of her, or anyone. That morning, I'd hinted to Dad that I might have a Study Group later that afternoon (he'd frowned, surprised I was willing to subject myself again to such torture), but in the end, there was no need to give him a lengthier explanation; he'd disappeared to the university, having left a critical book on Ho Chi Minh in his office. He'd phoned to say he'd simply finish his latest Forum essay there—"The Trappings of Iron-Clad Ideologies," or something to that effect—but would be home for dinner. I'd sat down in the kitchen with a chicken salad sandwich, resigned to an afternoon of Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Faulkner, 1990), when I heard the extended howl of a car horn in the driveway.

  "I'm appallingly late. I am so sorry," a girl shouted through the inch-opened, tinted window of the blubbery black Mercedes beached at the front door. I couldn't see her, only her squinting eyes of indeterminate color and some beach-blond hair. "Are you ready? Otherwise I might have to take off without you. Traffic's a bitch."

  Hastily, I grabbed keys to the house and the first book I could find, one of Dad's favorites, Civil War Endgames (Agner, 1955), and ripped a page from the back. I scrawled a terse note (Study Group, Ulysses) and left it for him on the round table in the foyer without even bothering to sign it "Love, Christabel." And then I was in her killer whale of a Mercedes, all Disbelief, Awkwardness and Outright Panic as I compulsively glanced at the speedometer
trembling toward 80 mph, her lazy manicured hand slung atop the steering wheel, her blond hair in the cruel bun, the sandal straps XXXing up her legs. Candelabra earrings broadsided her neck every time she took her eyes off the highway to survey me with a look of "corroding tolerance." (It was how Dad described his mood waiting for June Bug Shelby Hollow tending to her acrylic nails, creative half-a-head highlights and pedicured feet—"With bunionettes," Dad noted—at Hot-2-Trot Hair & Nails.)

  "Yeah, so this"—Jade touched the front of the elaborate, parrot-green kimono dress she was wearing; she must have thought I was silently admiring her outfit—"this was a gift to my mom Jefferson when she entertained Hirofumi Kodaka, some loaded Japanese businessman for three grisly nights at the Ritz in 1982. He had jetlag and didn't speak English so she was his twenty-four-hour translator if you know what I mean—Get off the fucking road!" She leaned on the horn; we veered in front of a lowly gray Oldsmobile driven by an old lady no bigger than a Dixie cup. Jade craned her neck around to give her a dirty look, then flipped her off. "Why doncha go to a graveyard and kick the bucket, old bag."

  We darted down Exit 19.

  "That reminds me," she said, tossing me a look. "Why didn't you show?"

  "What?" I managed to ask.

  "You weren't there. We waited."

  "Oh. Well, I went to room 208—"

  "208?" She made a face. "It was 308."

  She wasn't fooling anyone. "You wrote 208," I said quietly.

  "I did not. I remember perfectly—308. And you totally missed out. We had a cake for you and a lot of icing and candles and everything," she added sort of absentmindedly (I was bracing myself for tales of hired belly dancers, elephant rides, whirling dervishes), but then, to my relief, she leaned forward and with a haughty, "God, I love Dara and the Bouncing Checks," turned the CD way up, a heavy metal band with a lead singer that sounded as if he were being gouged by bulls at Pamplona.

  We drove on, not a word spoken between us. (She'd resolved to shake me off like a hit funnybone.) She checked her watch, winced, huffed, damned stop lights, road signs, anyone abiding the speed limit in front of us, proudly surveyed her blue eyes in the rearview mirror, brushed specks of mascara off her cheeks, dabbed her lips with glittery pink lip gloss and then more glittery lip gloss so some of it started to ooze off the side of her mouth—a detail I didn't have the guts to point out. In fact, driving to Hannah's made the girl so apparently restless and anxiety ridden, I couldn't help but wonder if at the end of this nauseating parade of woods and pastures and nameless dirt roads, and shoe-box barns and gaunt horses waiting by fences, I'd find not a house, but a black door barred by a velvet rope, a man with a clipboard who'd look me over and, when ascertaining I didn't know Frank or Errol or Sammy personally (nor any other titan of entertainment), would declare me unfit to enter, by inference, to continue living.

  But at last, at the very end of the twisting gravel road was the house, an awkward, wooden-faced coy mistress clinging to half a hill with bulky additions stuck to her sides like giant faux pas. As soon as we parked by the other cars and rang the bell, Hannah swung open the front door in a wave of Nina Simone, Eastern spices, perfume, Eau de Somethingfrench, her face warm as the living room light. A pack of seven or eight dogs, all different breeds and sizes, crept nervously behind her.

  "This is Blue," Jade said indifferently, walking inside.

  "Of course," said Hannah, smiling. She was barefoot, wearing chunky gold bracelets and an African batik caftan in orange and yellow. Her dark hair was a perfect swish of ponytail. "The lady of the hour."

  To my surprise, she hugged me. It was an Epic Hug, heroic, big budget, sprawling, with ten thousand extras (not short, grainy and made on a shoestring). When she finally let go, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it the way people at airports grab the hands of people they haven't seen in years, asking how the flight was. She pulled me next to her, her arm around my waist. She was unexpectedly thin.

  "Blue meet Fagan, Brody, he's got three legs—though it doesn't stop him from going through the garbage — Fang, Peabody, Arthur, Stallone, the Chihuahua with half-a-tail—accident with a car door—and the Old Bastard. Don't look him in the eye." She was referring to a skin-and-bones greyhound with the red eyes of a middle-aged, midnight tollbooth collector. The other dogs glanced at Hannah doubtfully, as if she were introducing them to a poltergeist. "Somewhere around here are the cats," she continued. "Lana and Turner, the Persians, and in the study we have our lovebird. Lennon. I'm in desperate need of an Ono, but there aren't many birds that show up at the shelter. Want some oolong tea?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Oh, and you haven't met the others yet, have you?"

  I looked up from the black-and-tan Chihuahua, who'd snuck over to me to consider my shoes, and saw them. Including Jade, who'd flopped down onto a half-melted chocolate couch and lit a cigarette (aiming it at me like a dart), they each stared with eyes so immobile and bodies so stiff, they might have been the series of paintings Dad and I scrutinized in the nineteenth-century Masters Gallery at the Chalk House outside Atlanta. There was the scrawny girl with brown seaweed hair, hugging her knees on the piano bench (Portrait of a Peasant Girl, pastel on paper); a tiny kid wearing Ben Franklin spectacles, Indian-style by a mangy dog, Fang (Master with Foxhound, British, oil on canvas); and another, a huge, boxy-shouldered boy leaning against a bookshelf, his arms and ankles crossed, brittle black hair sagging across his forehead (The Old Mill, artist unknown). The only one I recognized was Charles in the leather chair (The Gay Shepherd, gilt frame). He smiled encouragingly, but I doubted it meant much; he seemed to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken costume distributing coupons for a free lunch.

  "Why don't you introduce yourselves?" Hannah said cheerfully.

  They said their names with paint-by-numbers politeness.

  "Jade."

  "We've met," said Charles.

  "Leulah," said the Peasant Girl.

  "Milton," said the Old Mill.

  "Nigel Creech, very pleased to meet you," said the Master with Foxhound, and then he flashed a smile, which disappeared instantly like a spark off a defunct lighter.

  If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester at Hannah's were just that, or, to quote one of Dad's treasured characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost era of silent film: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces."

  I sort of like to think the same was true back in those days at Hannah's (Visual Aid 8.0). (Forgive my regrettable rendering of Charles—and Jade for that matter; they were much more beautiful in real life.)

  Charles was the handsome one (handsome in the opposite way of Andreo). Gold-haired, mercury-tempered, he was not only St. Gallway's Track and Field star, excelling at both hurdles and the high jump, but also its Travolta. It wasn't unusual to see him sliding between classes engaged in a shameless, campus-wide soft shoe, involving not only known Gallway beauties but also the less physically heralded. Somehow he was able to twirl one girl away by the Teacher's Lounge just as another rumbaed over to him, and they pachangaed down the hall. (Amazingly, no one's feet were ever stepped on.)

  Jade was the terrifying beauty (see "Tawny Eagle," Magnificent Birds of Prey, George, 1993). She swooped into a classroom and girls scattered like chipmunks and squirrels. (The boys, equally afraid, played dead.) She was brutally blond ("bleached to the hilt," I heard Beth Price remark in AP English), five-feet-eight ("wiry"), stalked the halls in short skirts, her books in a black leather bag ("Guess she's Donna fucking Karan") and what I took to be a severe and sad look on her face, though most took it for conceit. Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening, but flat out wrong. Although Bartleby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturds's three-member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue and Maxim covers above c
aptions, "You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers to reveal a disturbing truth: you could have thighs like that and still walk. She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition and there wasn't a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact you'd only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces.

  Nigel was the cipher (see "Negative Space," Art Lessons, Trey, 1973, p. 29). At first glance (even at second and third), he was ordinary. His face — rather his entire being—was a buttonhole: small, narrow, uneventful. He stood no more thanfive-feet-five with a round face, brown hair, features weak and baby-feet pink (neither complemented nor marred by the wire glasses he wore). At school, he sported thin, tonguelike neckties in neon orange, a fashion statement I guessed was his effort to force people to take notice of him, much like a car's hazard lights. And yet, upon closer examination, the ordinariness was extraordinary: he bit his nails into thumbtacks; spoke in hushed spurts (uncolored guppies darting through a tank); in large groups, his smile could be a dying light bulb (shining reluctantly, flickering, disappearing); and a single strand of his hair (once found on my skirt after sitting next to him), held directly under a light, shimmered with every color in a rainbow, including purple.

  And then there was Milton, sturdy and grim, with a big, cushiony body like someone's favorite reading chair in need of reupholstering (see "American Black Bear," Meat-Eating Land Animals, Richards, 1982). He was eighteen, but looked thirty. His face, cluttered with brown eyes, curly black hair, a swollen mouth, had a curdled handsomeness to it, as if, incredibly, it wasn't what it'd once been. He had an Orson Wellian quality, Gerardepardieuian too: one suspected his large, slightly overweight frame smothered some kind of dark genius and after a twenty-minute shower he'd still reek of cigarettes. He'd lived most of his life in a town called Riot in Alabama and thus spoke in a Southern accent so gooey and thick you could probably cut into it and spread it on dinner rolls. Like all Mysteriosos, he had an Achilles' heel: a giant tattoo on his upper right arm. He refused to talk about it, went to great pains to conceal it—never removing his shirt, always wearing long sleeves—and if some clown during P.E. asked him what it was, he either stared at the kid as if he were a Price Is Right rerun, barely blinking, or replied in his molasses accent: "Nunna ya goddamn business."