"I made a statement," she said proudly as she climbed into the backseat, mashing me against Nigel as she pulled the door closed. "It was exactly like TV only the cop wasn't hot or tan."
"What was he?" asked Nigel.
Jade waited until our eyes were crawling all over her.
"Lieutenant Arnold Trask was a pig."
"You see the guy who died?" asked Milton from the front seat.
"I saw everything," she said. "What do you want to know? First thing I'll tell you, which I found really weird, was that he was blue. I'm not even kidding. And the arms and legs just flopped there. Arms and legs don't usually flop, you know what I mean? He was inflated like a raft. Something had blown him up a little — "
"If you don't stop I'm going to be sick," said Leulah.
"What?"
"Did you see Hannah?" asked Charles, starting the car.
"Sure," said Jade, nodding. "That was the worst of it. They brought her outside and she started screaming like some clinically insane person. One of the officers had to take her away. I felt like I was watching an after-school special about a mother who's not granted custody of her kids. After that I didn't see her. Someone said the guy from the ambulance gave her a sedative and she went to lie down."
In the pale blued morning, hundreds of bare trees crowded the guardrail, nodding at us, extending condolences. I could see Charles clenching his jaw as he turned onto the highway, heading back to Jade's. His cheek looked unusually hollow, as if someone had hacked at it with a knife. I thought about Dad, those awful instances he fell into a Bourbon Mood with The Great White Lie (Moon, 1969) or E. B. Carlson's Silence (1987) slung over his corduroy knee. He was known to mention what he rarely mentioned, how my mother died. "It was my fault," he'd tell not me but my shoulder or leg. "Honestly, sweetheart. It's disgraceful. I should have been there." (Even Dad, who prided himself on never dodging anything, like many people, preferred to address a body part when drunk and afflicted.)
And I hated those moments, when Dad's face, the one thing I secretly believed strong and permanent, fixed as volcanic rock Head Sculptures on Easter Island (if anyone was still going to be standing after nine hundred years, it'd be Dad). For a brief moment, in the kitchen, or in some corner of smudged darkness in his study, I saw him fragile and smaller somehow, human certainly, but forlorn, frail as tissue pages in a motel Bible.
Of course, he always recovered splendidly. He mocked his self-pity, quoted something about Man's worst enemy being Himself. And even though, when he stood up, he was Dad again, Dad, my Man of the Moment, my Man Who Would Be King, he'd been highly contagious because / was moody for hours afterward. It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upwards, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting
whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)
There was no dinner at Hannah's that Sunday.
I spent the weekend in a swampy mood: stifling afternoons of homework, thoughts about Death and Hannah leaching my head. I hated when people participated in what Dad called "Sing-along Sorrow" ("Everyone's eager to mourn so long as it's not their child who was decapitated in the car accident, not their husband stabbed by a gutter binger desperate for crack."); yet when I read the brief article about Smoke Harvey in The Stockton Observer, staring at the accompanying photo (some horrific Christmas shot: tuxedo, grin, a forehead shiny as chrome), I couldn't help but feel, if not Loss or Sadness, then a sense of Missed Conversation, what one felt on the interstate when seeing an arresting person sleeping in the passenger seat of a passing van, a secret cirrus-smudge on the window.
"So tell me," Dad said dryly, folding down a corner of The Wall Street Journal to look at me, "how were your Joycean hooligans? You didn't fill me in when you got home. Have you made it to Calypso yet?"
I was curled up on the couch by the window, trying to get my mind off the costume party by reading British chick-lit classic One Night Stand (Zev, 2002), hidden within the larger hardback Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1883-85), for Dad's sake.
"They're fine," I said, trying to sound blasé. "How was Kitty?"
Dad had had a date with her, and the fact that their dirty wine glasses were still in the sink when I returned home (on the counter, an empty bottle of cabernet), I could presume whatever drunk delusion I'd entertained about Dad's looming presence at Hannah's party, decked in the costume he himself had said made him "look like the love child of Marie Antoinette and Liberace," was exactly that—a delusion. (Kitty wore copper lipstick, and judging from the bristly strand of hair I'd found clinging to the back of the couch in the library, she brutally assaulted her locks with Clorox. It was the color of a Yellow Page.)
Dad looked confounded by my question. "How shall I answer that? Let's see. Well, she's lively as ever."
If I felt the Everglades, I couldn't imagine what Great Dismal Swamp Hannah was trudging through, when she woke up in her strange blank bedroom in the night and thought about Smoke Harvey, the man whose arm she'd squeezed like a giddy teenager when she was on the stairs, a man now dead. That Monday, however, I was marginally reassured when Milton found me at my locker after school. He said Charles had gone to see her on Sunday.
"How is she?" I asked.
"She's okay. Charles said she's still kinda in a state of shock, but otherwise peachy."
He cleared his throat, stuck his hands in his pockets with ox-in-sun slowness. I suspected Jade had recently tipped him off to my feelings—"Gag's gaga over you," I could just hear her saying, "like so gone, like fixated"— because lately, when he looked at me, a shabby smile drifted across his face. His eyes circled over me like old flies. I suffered no hope, no daydreams, that he felt anything similar to the way I did, which wasn't lust or love ("Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times," Dad said) but acute electricity. I'd spot him lumbering across the Commons; I'd feel struck by lightning. I'd see him in the Scratch and he'd say, "Howdy, Retch"; instantly I was a light bulb in a series circuit. I wouldn't have been surprised if, in Elton, when he trudged by my AP Art History class on his way to the infirmary (he was always on the verge of measles or mumps), my hair rose off my neck and stood on end.
"She wants to take us to dinner tonight," he said. "Wants to talk about what happened. Can you make it at five?"
I nodded. "I'll have to make up something good for my dad."
He squinted. "What chapter are we on?"
"Proteus."
He laughed as he turned away. His laugh was always a big bubble rising through a quagmire: one gurgle and it was gone.
Charles was right. Hannah was peachy.
At least she looked peachy initially, when Jade, Leulah and I were ushered by the maître d' into the dining room and saw her waiting for us, alone at the round table.
She'd taken the others to Hyacinth Terrace restaurant before. It was where she took them for special occasions—birthdays, holidays, someone's grand achievement on a Unit Test. The restaurant attempted, with the intensity of any dedicated Emergency Medicine physician, to resuscitate Victorian England with a "heady culinary voyage that artfully blends The Old with The New" (see www.hyacinthterracewnc.net). Housed in a pristine green and pink Victorian house, the restaurant was perched on one side of Marengo Mountain and resembled a depressed Yellow-shouldered Amazon Parrot desperate to return to its natural habitat. Walking in, one could see no sprawling view of Stockton from the giant fan-shaped windows, nothing but that notorious local fog frothing off the greasy chimneys of Horatio Mills Gallway's old paper mill twenty-seven miles east (now Parcel Supply Corp.), a haze with a fondness for hitching a ride on a recurring Westerly and smothering Stock-ton's valley like a maudlin lover in a humid hug.
It was early, approximately 5.15 P.M., and Hannah was the only one in the dining room ap
art from an elderly couple eating by the window. A gold, five-tiered chandelier at the center of the room hung like an upside-down duchess shamelessly exposing to the paying public her ankle boots and froufrou petticoat.
"Hello," Hannah said, as we made our way to the table. "The boys should be here in ten minutes," said Jade, sitting down. "They had to wait for Charles to finish practice."
She nodded. She wore a black turtleneck sweater, a gray wool skirt and the starched-and-pressed expression of someone running for office in the heat of an election, moments before he/she is to appear on a televised stage for a debate. There was a series of nervous gestures (a sniff, swipe of the tongue over teeth, a smoothing of skirt) and one weak attempt at conversation ("How was school?") with ensuing lack of follow-up ("I'm glad."). I could tell she was planning to say something very specific to us on this Special Occasion, and I grew worried as I watched her press her lips together and smile at her wineglass, as if mentally reviewing her cordial-yet-threatening greeting of the candidate of the opposing party.
I didn't know what to do. I pretended to be enchanted by the giant menu with the dishes floating down the page in lacy handwriting: Puree of Parsnip-Pear Soup with Infusion of Black Truffle and MicroGreens.
My suspicions were confirmed when Charles and the others arrived, though she waited to deliver her speech until the skinny waiter took our orders then bounded away like a deer hearing rifle shots.
"If our friendship is to continue," she said in a stiff voice, sitting too straight, sweeping her hair officially behind her shoulders, "and there were moments yesterday when I really thought it wouldn't be possible —in the future, when I tell you not to do something, don't do it."
Staring at each of us, she let those words march all over the table, through the hummingbird plates and the wooden napkin rings and the bottle of pinot noir, around the glass centerpiece of roses craning their thin necks and yellow heads over the rim like newly hatched chicks desperate to be fed.
"Is that clear?"
I nodded.
"Yes!' said Charles.
"Yes!' said Leulah.
"Mmm' said Nigel.
"What you did on Saturday was inexcusable. It hurt me. Deeply. On top of everything, everything so, so awful that happened, I still can't quite fathom what you did to me. That you'd put me at risk, disrespect me so—because, let me tell you, in the only stroke of luck that night, Eva Brewster ended up not coming because her terrier was sick. So if it weren't for a fucking terrier I'd be fired right now. Do you understand? We'd all be fired, because if she had come, if she'd seen any of you, you would've been expelled. I guarantee it. I'm sure you weren't drinking fruit punch and I couldn't have pulled strings to get you out of it. No. Everything you've worked for, college, it'd be lost. And for what? A prank you thought would be fun? Well, it wasn't fun. It was sickening."
Her voice was too loud. Also jarring was her use of the word fucking, because she never swore. Yet Hyacinth Terrace gave no surprised stares, no waiterly raised eyebrows. The restaurant was meandering along like some humming grandmother refusing to accept the fact that the price of milk had gone up 600 percent since Her Day. The waiters bowed, deeply immersed in table settings, and across the room, a turnip-haired kid in a loose tuxedo walked to the piano, sat down, began to play Cole Porter.
She took a deep breath. "Since I've known each of you, I've treated you as adults. As my equals and friends. That you would treat our friendship with such flagrant contempt, it knocks the wind out of me."
"We're sorry," said Charles in a thimble-voice I'd never heard before. She turned to him, lacing her long, manicured fingers together in perfect This-is-the-church-this-is-the-steeple architecture.
"I know you're sorry, Charles. It isn't the point. When you grow up—and from the looks of things, you have a while—you learn things never go back to normal simply because everyone's sorry. Sorry is ridiculous. A good friend of mine is dead. And, and I'm upset..."
Hannah's demoralizing soliloquy lasted all through the Appetizer and well into the Main Course. By the time our attending antelope sprung through the dining room to place dessert menus in front of us, we resembled a band of political dissidents in 1930s USSR after a year of laboring in Siberia and other brutal Arctic Lands. Leulah's shoulders slumped. She looked harrowingly close to collapsing. Jade did nothing but stare into her hummingbird plate. Charles looked puffy and miserable. A doomed expression had torpedoed Milton and was in the process of sinking his entire bulky body under the table. Though Nigel showed no discernible signs of either sorrow or regret, I noticed he'd been able to eat only half of his Pride Hills lamb shank and had not touched his leek whipped potatoes.
I, of course, listened to every word she said and felt renewed sadness every time she looked at me without bothering to disguise her Utter Disappointment and Disillusion. Her Utter Disappointment and Disillusion didn't seem as severe when she looked at the others, and I was certain my observation wasn't an example of Dad's "Theory of Arrogance"—that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway play.
Sometimes, apparently so distraught, Hannah let go of the rope of her words and came to a dead stop in a silence that stretched on and on, arid and relentless as far as the eye could see. The restaurant with its shines and clinks, its fanned napkins and resplendent forks (in which you could identify microscopic things lodged in your teeth), its dowager duchess hanging there, desperate to be let down to go dance a quadrille with an eligible man of society—it all felt indifferent and damned, hopeless as a Hemingway short story teeming with mean conversations, hopes lost between their bullet point words, voices voluptuous as rulers. Perhaps it was because on my personal timeline there was a small red rectangle positioned solely between the years 1987 and 1992, discreetly labeled NATASHA ALICIA BRIDGES VAN MEER, MOTHER, but I was aware now, as ever, that between all people there were First Times You See Them and Last Times You See Them. I felt certain this was a Last Time I See Them. We were going to have to say good-bye and this shiny place served as well a setting as any to be our terminus.
The only thing that kept me from melting onto my dessert menu was Hannah's bedroom. The objects in that room annotated her relentlessly, gave me what I felt were secret insights into her every word and dart of her eyes, every crumple in her voice. I knew it was an appallingly professorial thing to do—Hannah finishing off an entire bottle of wine by herself illustrated how distressed she was; even her hair was exhausted as it slung itself across her shoulders and stopped moving—but I couldn't help myself: I was Dad's daughter and thus prone to bibliography. Hannah's eye sockets looked gray, as if they'd been lightly shaded with one of Mr. Moats' drawing pencils.1 She sat schoolhouse-strict.2 When she wasn't berating us, she sighed, rubbed the stem of her wineglass between her thumb and forefinger the way commercial housewives notice dust.31 sensed, somewhere within the context of these singular details, within her knife collection, empty walls, shoe boxes and thatch bedspread was Hannah's Plot, her Principal Characters —most significantly, her Primary Themes. Maybe she was simply a matter of Faulkner: she had to be read very closely, word by painful word (never skimmed, pausing to make critical notes in the margin), including her bizarre digressions (costume party) and improbabilities (Cottonwood). Eventually, I'd come to her last page and discover what she was all about. Maybe I could even Cliffs Note her.
"Can you tell us about the man who died?" Leulah asked suddenly, without looking Hannah in the eye. "I don't mean to be nosy and I understand if you don't want to talk about it. But I think I'd sleep better if I knew a little about him. What he was like."
Rather than replying in a bleak voice that, in light of our cavalier betrayal, it certainly was nosy and none of her business, after a thoughtful stare at the dessert menu (her eyes fell somewhere between the Passion Fruit Sorbet and the Petit Fours), Hannah drained the rest of her wine and began a surprising and quite captivating exposition of Smoke Wyannoch Harvey: The L
ife.
A pallor hinting at acute insomnia, melancholy or the unknown illness that necessitated her having a small pharmacy in her bathroom cabinet.
A bearing that mimicked the stiff Quaker chair in the corner of her bedroom.
The tired and contemplative look on Hannah's face gave her an odd sort of fill-in-the-blankness, which made me wonder if my initial suspicions had been incorrect, that she was, in fact, that little round-eyed girl in the three framed photographs positioned on that bureau. And yet, why would she put those photos on display? The absence of her mother or father in the pictures seemed to indicate she wasn't on the cheeriest of terms with them. Yet Dad said happy photos on exhibition as a representation of deep feeling was a facile assumption; he said if a person was so insecure he/she had to have constant reassurance of all "gay ol' times," well, then "the sentiments obviously weren't all that profound to begin with." For the record, there were no framed pictures of me around our house, and the only class portrait Dad had ever ordered was the one from Sparta Elementary in which I'd sat, knees glued together, in front of a background that looked like Yosemite, sporting pink overalls and a lazy eye. "This is classic," Dad said. "That they shamelessly send me an order form so I can pay $69.95 for prints large and small of a photo in which my daughter looks as if she just suffered a great blow to her head —it just shows you, we are simply strapped to a motorized assembly line moving through this country. We're supposed to pay out, shut up or get tossed in the rejects bin."
"I met him in Chicago," she said, clearing her throat as the waiter vaulted forth to fill her glass with what little was left in the wine bottle. "The Valhalla chocolate cake with the . . ."
"White chocolate ice cream and caramel crème sauce?" he chirped.
"For everyone. And can I see your list of brandies?"
"Certainly, madam." He bowed and retreated into his peachy grassland of round tables and gold chairs.
"God. It was ages ago," Hannah said. She picked up her dessert spoon and began to somersault it in her fingers. "But, yes. He was a remarkable man. Excruciatingly funny. Generous to a fault. A great storyteller. Everyone wanted to be around him. When Smoke—Dubs, I mean, everyone important to him called him Dubs—when Dubs told a story you laughed so hard your stomach hurt. You thought you'd die."
Special Topics in Calamity Physics Page 21