Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "People who tell a good story are amazing," said Leulah sitting up eagerly in her chair.

  "The house alone was straight out of Gone with the Wind. Enormous. White columns, you know, and a long white fence and big magnolias. Built in eighteen-something. It's in southern West Virginia, outside of Findley. He called it Moorgate. I-I can't remember why."

  "Have you been to Moorgate?" asked Leulah breathlessly.

  Hannah nodded. "Hundreds of times. It used to be a tobacco plantation, four thousand acres, but Smoke only has a hundred and twenty. And it's haunted. There's an awful story about the house—what was it, I can't remember. Something to do with slavery . . ."

  She tilted her head, trying to remember, and we leaned forward like first graders during Story Hour.

  "It was just before the Civil War. Dubs told me all of this. I guess the master's daughter, beautiful, the belle of the county, she fell in love with a slave and became pregnant with his child. When it was bom, the master had the servants take it down to the basement and put it in the furnace. So every now and then, during thunderstorms, or on summer nights when there were crickets in the kitchen —Smoke was very specific about the crickets—you can hear a baby crying, way, way down in the basement. In the walls. There's also a willow tree in the front yard, which had supposedly been used for beatings, and if you go up to the trunk, carved faintly into the bark are the initials of that girl and the slave who loved each other. Dorothy Ellen, his first wife, hated the tree, thought it was evil. She was very religious. But Smoke refused to cut it down. He said you couldn't pretend the terrible things in life didn't happen. You can't clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It's how you learn. And try to make improvements."

  "That's one old willow tree," Nigel said.

  "Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean?" She happened to be looking at me with a very intense look, so I automatically nodded. But in truth, I did know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis—if you read their definitive biographies, you learned that even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them deep into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of only four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid.

  "He sounds dreamy," said Jade.

  "Sounded," said Nigel very quietly.

  "So were you two, uh . . . ?" asked Charles. He let the sentence make its own way into that renowned motel bed with sandpaper sheets and proverbial shrieking mattress.

  "He was a friend," Hannah said. "I was too tall for him. He liked women who were little dolls, porcelain baby dolls. All of his wives, Dorothy Ellen, Clarisse, poor Janice. They were all under five feet." She giggled girlishly—a much-welcomed sound—sighed and rested her head in her hand, the pose of an unknown woman one came across in some second-hand biography, in a black-and-white photo accompanied by the caption, "At a Cuernavaca party, late 1970s." (It wasn't her biography, but the portly Nobel Prize-winner she sat next to; but so arresting were the dark eyes, the sleek hair, the strict expression, one wondered who she was, and didn't want to keep reading when there was no other mention of her.)

  She talked on and on about Smoke Harvey, through the warm Valhalla chocolate cake, through the selection of English Farmhouse Cheeses, through two piano renditions of "I Could Have Danced All Night." She was like Keats' Grecian Urn left under a running faucet, overflowing, unable to stop herself.

  The waiter returned her credit card and she still didn't stop talking. Frankly, at this point, it made me a little edgy. As Dad said famously after his first date with June Bug Betina Mendejo in Cocorro, California (Betina managed to air her every piece of Dirty Linen at Tortilla Mexicana, telling Dad how her ex-husband, Jake, stole everything from her, including her Pride and Ego): "Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation."

  "Anyone want the last selection of English Farmhouse Cheese?" asked Nigel, pausing only for a second before helping himself to the last selection of English Farmhouse Cheese.

  "It was my fault!' Hannah said.

  "No, it's wasn't," said Charles.

  She didn't hear him. Sticky redness had oozed into her face. "I invited him," she said. "We hadn't seen each other in years, exchanged a few calls, sure, but, you know, he was busy. I wanted him to come to the party. Richard, whom I work with at the shelter, had invited some of his friends from all over the world—he'd worked in the Peace Corps for thirteen years, still keeps in touch with a lot of the people he worked with. An international crowd. It was supposed to be fun. And I sensed Smoke needed a break from things. One of his daughters, Ada, had just gotten a divorce. Shirley, another daughter, had just had a baby and named it Chrysanthemum. Can you imagine, a person with the name Chrysanthemum? He called me up, howling about it. It was the last thing we talked about."

  "What'd he do for a living?" asked Jade quietly. "He was a banker," Nigel said, "but he also wrote a book, didn't he? Devil'sTreason or something." Again, Hannah didn't seem to hear. "The last thing we talked about was chrysanthemums," she said to the tablecloth.

  The darkness in the fan-shaped window had soothed the room and the gold chairs, the fleur-de-lys wallpaper; even the dowager chandelier relaxed a little, like a family finally rid of an affluent guest and they could now squash the seat cushions, eat with their fingers, remove their stiff, uncomfortable shoes. The kid at the piano was playing, "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man," which happened to be one of Dad's favorites.

  "Some people are fragile as-as butterflies and sensitive and it's your responsibility not to destroy them," she went on. "Just because you can."

  She was staring at me again, minute reflections of light dancing in her eyes, and I tried to smile reassuringly, but it was difficult because I could see how drunk she was. Her eyelids sagged like lazy window shades and she was trying too hard to herd her words together so they jostled, bumped, stepped all over each other.

  "Grow up in a country," she said, "a house of-of privilege, endless commodity, you think you're better than other people. You think you belong to a fucking country club so you can kick people in the face on your way to acquiring more things." She was staring at Jade now and said things as if biting it off the end of a candy bar. "It takes years to overturn th-this conditioning. I tried my whole life and I still exploit people. I'm a pig. Show me what a man hates and I'll show you what he is. Can't remember who said that. . ."

  Her voice went dead. Her teary eyes drifted toward the center of the table, bobbing around the rose centerpiece. All of us were sort of madlyeyeing each other, holding our breaths in mutual queasiness—what people do in restaurants when a soiled drunk person walks in and starts shouting through a mouthful of kernel teeth about working for The Man. It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place. I'd never seen her speak or behave in this way, and I doubted the others had either; they stared at her with sickened yet fascinated expressions, as if watching crocodiles mate on the Nature Channel.

  Her teeth snagged her bottom lip, there was a little manifestoed frown between her eyebrows. I was deathly afraid she'd go on about needing to go live on a kibbutz or relocating to Vietnam where she'd become a hash-smoking beatnik ("Hanoi Hannah," we'd have to call her) or else she'd turn on us, chastise us for being like our parents, odious and square. Even more frightening was the possibility she might cry. Her eyes were wet, murky tide-pools where things unseen lived and glowed. I felt there were few
things in the world more horrific than the adult weep—not the rogue tear during a long-distance commercial, not the stately sob at a funeral, but the cry on the bathroom floor, in the office cubicle, in the two-car garage with one's fingers frantically pressing down on one's eyelids as if there was an ESC key somewhere, a RETURN.

  But Hannah didn't cry. She lifted her head, looking around the dining room with the confused expression of someone who'd just woken up in a bus station with seams and the button of a shirtsleeve imprinted on her forehead. She sniffed.

  "Let's get out of this fucking place," she said.

  For the rest of the week, even a little bit after that, I noticed Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68, was still sort of alive.

  Hannah had brought him back to life like Frankenstein his Monster by her deluge of detail, and thus, in all of our heads (even that of the painfully pragmatic Nigel) Smoke didn't really seem dead, but simply offstage somewhere, kidnapped.

  Jade, Leulah, Charles and Milton had been outside on the patio as Smoke lurched to his death (Nigel and I simply told the others we were "amusing ourselves inside," which technically was the truth). They were plagued by the If Onlys.

  "If only I'd been paying attention," said Lu.

  "If only I hadn't smoked the rest of that joint," said Milton.

  "If only I hadn't been hitting on Lacey Laurels from Spartanburg who just graduated from Spartan Community College with a major in Fashion Merchandizing," said Charles.

  "Oh, pu-leese," said Jade rolling her eyes, turning to stare at the freshmen and sophomores standing in line to buy their two-dollar hot chocolates. They appeared to be afraid of her gaze, as certain diminutive mammals must tremble at the thought of a Golden Eagle.

  "I'm the one who was there. How hard is it to notice some green polyester person floating facedown in a pool? I could have dived in and saved the man, done one of those good deeds that more or less guarantees entry through the Pearly Gates. But no, now I'm going to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress. I mean, it's a possibility I never get over this. Not for years and years. And when I'm thirty I'll have to be submitted into some asylum, with the walls all green and I wander around in an unflattering nightgown with hairy legs because they don't allow razors in case you feel the urge to tiptoe into the communal bathroom and slit your wrists."

  That Sunday, I was relieved to find Hannah back to her old self, spiriting around the house in a red-and-white floral housedress. "Blue!" she called cheerfully as Jade and I walked through the front door. "Good to see you! How is everything?"

  Hannah neither commented on, nor apologized for, her tipsy behavior at Hyacinth Terrace, which was fine, because I wasn't so sure she needed to apologize. Dad said certain people's sanity, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium, required getting messy once in a while, what he called "going Chekhovian." Some people, every now and then, simply had to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs. "Once a year, they say Einstein had to blow off steam by getting so inebriated on hefeweizen, he was known to go skinny-dipping at 3:00 A.M. in Carnegie Lake," Dad said. "And it's perfectly understandable. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, in his case, the unification of all space and time—you can imagine it'd get quite exhausting."

  Smoke Harvey's death—any death, for that matter—was as perfectly noble a reason as any for words to stagger out of one's mouth, for eyes to take almost as much time to blink as it takes for an old man with a cane to descend stairs—especially if, afterward, you looked as epically spic and span as Hannah did. She busied herself with Milton setting the table, slipping into the kitchen to remove a shrieking kettle from the stove, swooping back into the dining room and, as she speedily folded the dinner napkins into cute geisha fans, holding a glorious smile up to her face like a glass during a wedding toast.

  And yet, I must have been overly zealous in my attempt to convince myself Hannah was all Fiddle Dee Dee and La Dee Da, that our dinners would return to the weightlessness of Pre-Cottonwood, Pre-costume party days. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Hannah was trying too hard to make things chic and upbeat, and it was akin to beautifying one's cell; no matter what kind of curtains you hung, or rug you placed by your cot, it was still prison.

  The Stockton Observer had published the second and final article on Smoke Harvey that day, detailing what we'd already assumed, that his death had been an accident. There'd been "no indication of trauma to the body" and his "blood-alcohol level had been .23, nearly three times the North Carolina legal limit of .08." It seemed he'd inadvertently fallen into the pool, been too drunk to swim or cry for help and, in less than ten minutes, he'd drowned. Hannah had been so eager to tell us about Smoke at Hyacinth Terrace, and was in such well-adjusted spirits now, I don't think Nigel thought twice about bringing him up again.

  "You know the number of drinks Smoke would've had to knock back to get his BAC to that level?" he asked us, tapping the end of his pencil against his chin. "I mean, we're talking, for a man about what? Two hundred and fifty pounds? Like, ten drinks in an hour."

  "Maybe he was doing shots," said Jade.

  "I wish the article said more about the autopsy." Hannah spun around from the coffee table, where she'd just placed the tray of oolong tea.

  "For God's sake! Stop it!"

  There was a long silence.

  I find it difficult to sufficiently describe how strange, how disconcerting her voice was in that moment. It was neither outright angry (though anger was certainly in there somewhere) nor exasperated, neither weary nor bored, but strange (with the "a" of that word drawn out in "ayyy").

  Without saying anything more, head down, her hair quickly falling over the sides of her face like a curtain when a magic trick goes wrong, she vanished into the kitchen.

  We stared at each other.

  Nigel shook his head, stunned. "First she gets sloshed at Hyacinth Terrace. Now she just snaps—?" "You are a fucking asshole," said Charles through his teeth. "Keep your voices down," Milton said. "Hold on, though," Nigel went on excitedly. "That was exactly what she did when I asked her about Valerio. Remember?"

  "It's Rosebud again," Jade said. "Smoke Harvey's another Rosebud. Hannah has two Rosebuds— " "Let's not get graphic," said Nigel. "Shut the fuck up," said Charles angrily. "All of you, I— " The door thumped and Hannah emerged from the kitchen carrying a

  platter of sirloin steaks.

  "I'm sorry, Hannah," Nigel said. "I shouldn't have said that. Sometimes I get caught up in the drama of a situation and I don't think about how it sounds. How it might hurt someone. Forgive me." His voice I thought a little hollow and bland, but he went over with rave reviews.

  "It's okay," Hannah said. And then her smile appeared, a promising little towrope for all of us to grab onto. (You wouldn't be surprised at all if she said, "When I lose my temper, honey, you can't find it anyplace," or "It's the kissiest business in the world," one hand poised in the air, holding an invisible martini.) She brushed Nigel's hair off his forehead. "You need a haircut."

  We never mentioned Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68, around her again. And thus concluded his Lazarus-like resurrection, fuelled by her boozey Hyacinth Terrace monologue, our If Onlys and Might Have Dones. Out of empathy for Hannah (who, as Jade said, "must feel like a person who killed someone in a car accident") we tactfully returned the Great Man—a latter-day Greek hero, I liked to imagine, an Achilles, or an Ajax prior to going mad ("Dubs lived the lives of a hundred people, all at once," Hannah had said, baton-twirling that dessert spoon expertly in her fingers like a late-night Swingin' Door Suzie)—to that unknown place people go when they die, to silence and ever afters, to cursivy The Ends materializing out of blackand-white streets and his-and-her deliriously happy faces pressed together against a soundtrack of scratchy strings.

  Rather, we returned him there for the time being.

  Women in Love

  ‘I'd like to make a minor adjustment to Leo
Tolstoy's oft-quoted first sentence: "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family

  - is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy."

  The Holiday Season was, without fail, a special time for the Van Meers.

  Since I was very small, over any December dinner, during which Dad and I cooked our acclaimed spaghetti with meat sauce (J. Chase Lamberton's Political Desire [1980] and L. L. MacCaulay's 750-page Intelligensia [1991] were also known to join us), Dad was fond of asking me to explain, in great detail, how my latest school was getting into the Holiday Mood. There was Mr. Pike and his Infamous Yule Log in Brimmsdale, Texas, and Santa's Secret Shoppe in the Cafeteria Featuring Twisty Rainbow Candles and Crude Jewelry Boxes in Sluder, Florida, the Forty-Eight-Hour Toymaker Village Hideously Vandalized by Spiteful Seniors in Lamego, Ohio, and one appalling recital in Boatley, Illinois, "The Christ Child Story: A Mrs. Harding Musical." For some reason, this subject made me as sidesplitting as Stan Laurel in a two-reel comedy for Metro in 1918. Within minutes, Dad was in stitches.

  "For the life of me," he said between howls, "I cannot comprehend why no producer has realized its untapped potential as a horror movie, Nightmare of the American Christmas and such. There's even enormous commercial promise for a number of sequels and television spin-offs. St. Nick's Resurrection, Part 6: The Final Nativity. Or perhaps, Rudolph Goes to Hell with a certain ominous tagline, 'Dont Be Home for Christmas.' "

  "Dad, it's a time of good cheer."

  "So I am thus inspired to good cheerfully inject fuel into the U.S. economy by purchasing things I don't need and can't afford —most of which will have funny little plastic parts that suddenly snap off, rendering it inoperative within weeks—thereby digging myself a debt of elephantine proportions, causing me extreme anxiety and sleepless nights yet, more importantly, arousing a sexy economic growth period, hoisting up droopy interest rates, breeding jobs, the bulk of which are inessential and able to be executed faster, cheaper and with greater precision by a Taiwanese-manufactured central processing unit. Yes, Christabel. I know what time it is."