Special Topics in Calamity Physics (32 page)

Finally, after logging photo number twenty-two (Patsy made that word all her own,
foe-toe)
Zach and I were finally granted permission to leave. We were heading out of the living room into the neat beige foyer when Roge stealthily passed me a cloth napkin full of bonbons he ostensibly hoped I'd traffic out of the house.

"Oh, wait," said Zach. "I wanted to show Blue the Turner. I think she'd like it."

"Of course!" said Patsy, clapping her hands.

"Just for a second," Zach said to me.

Grudgingly, I followed him up the stairs.

For the record, Zach had held up remarkably well during his encounter with Dad when he picked me up in his Toyota. He'd shaken Dad's hand (from the looks of things it wasn't a "wet washcloth," Dad's pet peeve), called him "Sir," jumpstarted a conversation about what a beautiful night it was going to be and what Dad did for a living. Dad gave him the thrice-over and answered in stark replies that would've frightened Mussolini:
"Is it?"
and "I
teach civil war."
Other dads would have felt sorry for Zach, recalling their own wobbly days of adolescence, and they'd take pity, try to Make the Kid Feel Comfortable. Unfortunately, Dad decided to Make the Kid Feel Small and Less Than a Man, simply because Zach hadn't known, innately, what Dad did for a living. Even though Dad knew the readership of
Federal Forum
was less than 0.3 percent of the United States and hence only a handful of individuals had scoured his essays or noted his romantic (a June Bug would say "rugged" or "dashing") black-and-white
foe-toe
on display in "Contributors of Note," Dad
still
didn't like to be reminded that he and his educational efforts weren't as recognizable as say, Sylvester Stallone and
Rocky.

Yet Zach displayed the optimism of a cartoon.

"Midnight,"
decreed Dad as we walked outside. "I
mean
it."

"You have my word, Mr. Van Meer!"

At this point, Dad wasn't bothering to hide his You've-Got-to-Be-Kidding face, which I ignored, though it quickly dissolved into his This-Is-the-Winterof-My-Discontent look, and then, Shoot-If-You-Must-This-Old-Gray-Head.

"Your dad's nice," Zach said as he started the car. (Dad was an infinite number of things, yet clammy-handed, sigh-by-night Nice was the one thing the man absolutely wasn't.)

Now I trailed after him, down the airless, carpeted hallway, which he presumably shared with his sister if one went by the his-n-her hallkill along the floor and the onslaught of sibling odor (smell of athletic socks bullying peach perfume, cologne competing with fumes off a limp gray sweatshirt and threatening to go tell mom). We walked by what had to be Bethany Louise's room, painted gum pink, a pile of clothes on the floor (see "Mount McKinley,"
Almanac of Major Landmarks,
2000 éd.). We then passed a second bedroom, and through the crack of the not-quite-closed door I made out blue walls, trophies, a poster of an overcooked blonde in a bikini. (Without much imagination, I could fill in the other obvious detail: held captive under the mattress, a ravished
Victoria's Secret
catalogue with the majority of its pages stuck together.)

At the end of the hall, Zach stopped. In front of him was a small painting, no bigger than a porthole, illuminated by a crooked gold light on the wall.

"So my father's a minister at the First Baptist Church. And when he did one of his sermons last year, 'The Fourteen Hopes,' there was a man in the congregation visiting from Washington, D.C. A guy by the name of Cecil Roloff. Well, this guy was so inspired he told my dad afterward he was a changed man." Zach pointed at the painting. "So a week later this came by UPS. And it's real. You know Turner, the artist?"

Obviously I was familiar with the "King of Light," otherwise known as J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), having read Alejandro Penzance's eight hundred-page X-rated biography of the man, published only in Europe,
Poor and Decayed Male Artist Born in England
(1974).

"It's called
Fishermen at Sea"
Zach said.

Nimbly I stepped around the pair of green plastic gym shorts dead on the floor and leaned in to examine it. I guessed it probably
was
real, though it wasn't one of the "light fests" where the artist "screwed convention and took painting by the testicles!' as Penzance described Turner's hazy, almost completely abstract work (p. viii, Introduction). This painting was an oil, yet dark, depicting a tiny boat seemingly lost in a storm at sea, painted in hazy grays, browns and greens. There were slurpy waves, a wooden boat forceful as a matchbox, a moon, wan and small and a little bit of an acrophobe as it peered fretfully through the clouds.

"Why is it hanging up here?" I asked. He laughed shyly. "Oh, my mom wants it close to my sister and me. She says it's healthy to sleep close to art."

"A very interesting use of light," I said. "Faintly reminiscent of
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons.
Especially in the sky. But a different palette obviously."

"My favorite part's the clouds." Zach swallowed. A soup spoon had to be stuck in his throat. "Know what?"

"What."

"You kind of remind me of that boat."

I looked at him. His face was about as cruel as a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off (and he'd had a haircut so his Panama-hat hair didn't slant
quite
so low over his forehead) but his remark still made me—well, suddenly unable to
stand
him. He had likened me to a diminutive vessel manned by faceless dots of brown and yellow—
poorly
manned at that, because in a matter of seconds (if one took into account the oiled swell curled to strike down with vengeance), the thing was about to go under and that brown smudge on the horizon, that unwitting passing ship, wasn't coming to rescue the dots anytime soon.

It was the cause of many of Dad's outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi. It was the grounds for many of his university colleagues going from nameless, harmless peers to individuals he referred to as "anathemas" and "bête noires." They'd made the mistake of abridging Dad, abbreviating Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, watering Dad down, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).

Four years prior, at Dodson-Miner College's opening day World Symposium, Dad had delivered a forty-nine-minute lecture entitled, "Models of Hate and the Organ Trade," a lecture he was particularly fond of, having traveled in 1995 to Houston to interview one mustachioed Sletnik Patrutzka who'd sold her kidney for freedom. (Through tears, Sletnik had showed us her scars; "Steel hurts," she'd said.) Immediately following Dad's speech, College Provost Rodney Byrd scuttled across the outdoor stage like a shooed cockroach, dabbed his sloppy mouth with a handkerchief and said, "Thank you, Dr. Van Meer, for your keen insight into post-Communist Russia. It is very rare that we have a bona fide Russian
émigré
on campus"—he said it as if it were some mysterious individual who was a no-show, a very elusive Ms. Emmie Gray—"and we look forward to spending the semester with you. If anyone has a question about
War and Peace
I suspect he's your man." (Of course, Dad's lecture had covered the organ trade rife in Western
Europe
and he'd never set foot in Russia. Though proficient in other languages, Dad actually knew no Russian at all except a well-known Russian proverb, which meant, "Trust in God, but lock your car,".)

"The act of being personally misconstrued," Dad said, "informed to one's face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline—well, it can gall the most self-possessed of individuals."

There was no sound in the claustrophobic hallway except Zach's breathing, which heaved like the interior of a conch shell. I could feel his eyes dripping down me, coursing through the folds of Jefferson's crispy black dress that resembled an upside-down shitake mushroom if you squinted at it. The silvery-black fabric felt flimsy, as if it could stiffly peel away like tinfoil around cold fried chicken.

"Blue?"

I made the grave error of glancing up at him again. His face—head light-bright from the light on the Turner, eyelashes absurdly long like those of a Jersey Cow—was heading straight toward me, drifting on down like Gondwanaland, the giant Southern landmass that inched toward the South Pole 200 million years ago.

He wanted our tectonic plates to collide, forcing one on top of the other so molten material from the earth's interior gives rise to a wild and unstable volcano.
Well, it was one of those sweaty moments I'd never had before except in dreams, when my head was in the cul-de-sac of Andreo Verduga's arm, my lips by his alcoholic cologne in the dead end of his neck. And as I stared up at Zach's face hovering at the intersection of Desire and Shyness, patiently waiting for a green light (even though there wasn't a soul around), you'd think I'd flee, run for my life, lie back and think of Milton (throughout the evening, I'd been engaged in covert Neverlanding, fantasizing it'd been
he
who'd met Dad,
his
mother and father who'd squirreled around the living room), but no, at this bizarre moment, Hannah Schneider slipped into my head.

I'd seen her at school just that afternoon, right after sixth period. She was dressed in a long-sleeved black wool dress, a tight black coat, moving unevenly down the sidewalk toward Hanover carrying a cream canvas bag, her head bent toward the ground. While Hannah had
always
been thin, her figure, particularly her shoulders, looked unusually hunched and narrow, dented even—like she'd been smashed in a door.

Now, caught in some gluey moment with this kid, feeling like I was still in Kansas, the reality of her getting so close to Doc she could count the number of gray hairs on his chin felt gruesome. How could she stomach his hands, his rocking-chair shoulders or the next morning, the sky sterile as a hospital floor? What was
wrong
with her? Something was wrong, of course, yet I'd been too preoccupied with myself, with Black and the number of times he sneezed, with Jade, Lu, Nigel, my hair, to take it to heart. ("The average American girl's principal obsession is her hair—simple bangs, a perm, straightening, split ends—to the breathtaking rebuff of all else, including divorce, murder and nuclear war," writes Dr. Michael Espiland in
Always Knock Before Entering
[1993].) What had happened to Hannah to make her descend into Cottonwood the way Dante had willfully descended into Hell? What had caused her to perpetuate a marked pattern of self-annihilation, which was obviously replicating at an alarming rate with the death of her friend Smoke Harvey, the drinking and swearing, her thinness, which made her look like a starved crow? Misery multiplied unless it was treated immediately. So did misfortune, according to Irma Stenpluck, author of
The Credibility Gap
(1988), which detailed on p. 329 one had only to suffer a tiny misfortune before one found one's "entire ship sinking into the Atlantic." Maybe it was none of our business, but maybe it was what she'd been hoping for all along, that one of us would unstick from our self and ask about
her
for once, not out of snoopy intrigue but because she was our friend and obviously crumbling a little bit.

I hated myself, standing there in the hallway, next to the Turner and Zach still hovering on the edge of his dry canyon of a kiss.

"You have something on your mind," he quietly observed. The kid was Carl Jung, fucking Freud.

"Let's get out of here," I said harshly, taking a small step backward.

He smiled. It was incredible; his face had no expression for anger or annoyance, just as some Native Americans, the Mohawks, the Hupa, had no word for purple.

"You don't want to know why you're like that boat?" he asked.

I shrugged and my dress sighed.

"Well, it's because the moon shines right on it and nowhere else in the picture. Right here. On the side. She's the only thing that's incandescent," he said, or some other word-of-the-day response to that effect, full of oozing lava, lumps of rock, ash and hot gas I opted not to stick around for because I'd already turned and headed down the stairs. At the bottom, I again encountered Patsy and Roge, positioned right where we'd left them like two shopping carts abandoned in the cookie aisle.

"Isn't it something?" Patsy exclaimed.

They waved good-bye as Zach and I climbed into the Toyota. Big smiles fireworked through their faces when I waved and shouted out the unrolled window, "Thank you! Look forward to seeing you again!" How strange it was that people like Zach, Roge and Patsy floated through the world. They were the cute daisies twirling past the mirror orchids, the milk thistle of the Hannah Schneiders, the Gareth van Meers snared in the branches and the mud. They were the sort of giddy people Dad loathed, called
fuzz, frizz
(or his most contemptuous put-down of all,
sweet people)
if he happened to be standing behind one of them in a checkout aisle and eavesdropped on what was always a painfully bland conversation.