Special Topics in Calamity Physics (79 page)

"He's fantastic."

"I've often wondered what happened to him. Thought of him the other day when I came across a Virginia Summa article saluting Mideast policies in
Proposals.
I could just hear Garry howling with laughter. Come to think of it, I haven't seen an essay of his in a while. Well, I suppose it's tight these days. Mavericks, nonconformists, those who march to the beat of their own drum, speak up, they're not finding the same forums they used to."

"He's managing."

Obviously, if a corner of one's life ended up covertly cultivating a shocking amount of slime mold, one must switch on unflattering fluorescent lights (the cruel kind of chicken coops), get down on one's hands and knees and scrub
every
corner. I thus found it necessary to investigate another thrilling possibility: What If June Bugs were not June Bugs, but Spanish Moon Moths
(Graellsia isabellae),
the most captivating and well bred of all the European moths? What If they, too, like the bogus professors, were gifted individuals Dad had meticulously handpicked for The Nightwatchmen? What If they only
pretended
to bond vigorously to Dad as lithium does to fluorine (see
The Strange Attractions of Opposite Ions,
Booley, 1975)? I wanted it to be true; I wanted to pull my boat up next to theirs, rescue them from their wasted African violets and quivery-voiced phone calls, from their tepid waters with nothing flourishing in them, no reefs, parrot or angelfish (and certainly no sea turtles). Dad had left them stranded on that boat, but I'd set them free, send them away on a powerful Trade Wind. They'd disappear to Casablanca, to Bombay, to Rio (everyone wanted to disappear to Rio) —never heard of, never
seen
again, as poetic a fate as any they could hope for.

I began my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Jessie Rose Rubiman,
still
living in Newton, Texas, and
still
heiress to the Rubiman Carpeting franchise: "Mention his name
one
more time—know what? I'm still considering finding out where he lives, coming into his bedroom while he sleeps and chopping off his doohickey. That's what that son-of-a-bitch's got coming to him."

I ended my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Shelby Hollow: "Night watch? Wait—I won a free Indiglo Timex?"

Unless June Bugs were skilled actresses in the tradition of Davis and Dietrich (suitable for the A movies, not the B or C movies), it seemed evident that the only moth flying through this sticky night, doggedly figure-eighting (like a confused kamikaze pilot) around every porch light and lamppost, refusing to be deterred even if I switched out the lights and ignored her, was Hannah Schneider.

That was the startling thing about this business of abandonment, of finding oneself so without conversation, one's thoughts had the entire world to themselves; they could drift for days without bumping into anyone. I could swallow Dad calling himself Socrates. I could swallow The Nightwatchmen too, hunt down every whisper of their workings like a private detective desperate to find The Missing Dame. I could even swallow Servo and Hannah as lovers (see "African Egg-Eating Snake/'
Encyclopedia of Living Things,
4th éd.). I could assume Baba au Rhum hadn't always rattled and Mmmmed; back in the st
ringy-haired summer of 1973, no
doubt he'd cut an arresting rebel figure (or resembled Poe just enough that thirteen-year-old Catherine decided to be his Virginia forevermore).

What I
couldn't
swallow, couldn't stare at with the naked eye, was
Dad
and Hannah. I noticed, as the days drifted past, I kept tucking that thought away, saving it like a grandmother for a Special Occasion that would never come. I attempted and sometimes succeeded diverting my mind
(not
with a book or play and, yes, reciting Keats was an idiotic idea, boarding a rowboat for refuge in an earthquake) but with TV, shaving and Gap commercials, prime-time melodramas with tan people named Brett declaring, "It's payback time."

They were gone. They were giant specimens splayed in glass cases in dim, deserted rooms. I could stare down at them, ridicule my stupidity for never noticing their blatant similarities: their awe-inspiring size (personas larger than life), brightly-colored hind wings (conspicuous in any room), their spined caterpillar beginnings (orphan, poor little rich girl, respectively), taking flight solely at night (their endings swathed in mystery), boundaries of their distribution unknown.

If a man bemoaned a woman as noisily as Dad ("commonplace," "strange and wayward," a "sob story," he'd called her), behind Curtain #1 of such severe dislike there was almost always a brand new Sedona Beige Love parked there, big, bright and impractical (destined to break down within the year). It was the oldest trick in the book, one I never should have fallen for, having read all of Shakespeare, including the late romances, and the definitive biography of Cary Grant,
The Reluctant Lover
(Murdy, 1999).

BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE. Why, when I forced myself to consider Dad and Hannah, did that old moving box crash into my head? They were the words Dad almost always used to describe my mother. After the fuss of
battement frappés
and
demi-pliés,
the Technicolor Dream dress, those words often showed up like unwanted, impoverished guests at a splendid party, embarrassing and sad, as if Dad was talking about her glass eye or absence of an arm. At Hyacinth Terrace, her black eyes like clogged drains, her mouth stained plum, Hannah Schneider had said the same frilly words, spoken not to the others but to me. With a stare pressing down on me, she'd said:
"Some people are
fragile, as-as butterflies."

They'd used the same delicate words to describe the same delicate person.

Time and again, Dad handpicked a cute slogan for a person and rudely bumper-stuck it to them for all ensuing conversations (Dean Roy at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville had been the uninspired "sweet as candy"). Hannah must have heard him say it once when describing my mother. And just as she'd blatantly recited Dad's favorite quotation to me at the dinner table (happiness, dog, sun) and planted Dad's favorite foreign film in her VCR
(L'Avventura)
(Hannah was now dusted, cast in ultraviolet light; I could see Dad's fingerprints all over her), she had tantalizingly tossed me that phrase, thereby letting bits of her dark secret, the hot one she'd clutched tightly in her hands, fall through her fingers, so that I might see it, follow it like the barest trail of sand. Not even when I was alone with her in the woods did she have the guts
(Mut,
in German) to let go of it, throw it all into the air so it showered over our heads, got caught in our hair and mouths.

The truth they'd hidden (Dad with Fifth Symphony ferocity, Hannah messily) that they'd k
nown each other (since 1992, I
calculated) in the movie-poster sense of the word (and I'd never know if they were
II Caso Thomas Crown
or
Colazione da Tiffany
or if they'd flossed their teeth next to each other three hundred times), it didn't garner a gasp from me —not a whimper or wheeze.

I only went back to the moving box and sat on my knees, running my fingers through the velvet splinters, the antennae and forewings and the thoraxes and torn mounting papers and pins, hoping Natasha had left me a code, a suicide letter identifying her traitorous husband just as she'd identified the part of the Red-based Jezebel that indicated it was repugnant to birds—an explanation, a puzzle to pore over, a whisper from the dead, a Visual Aid. (There was nothing.)

By then, my CASE NOTES filled an entire legal pad, some fifty pages, and I'd remembered the photograph Nigel had shown me in Hannah's bedroom (which she must have destroyed before the camping trip since I'd been unable to find it in the Evan Picone shoe box), the one of Hannah as a girl with the blonde floating away from the camera lens and on the back, written in blue pen, 1973. And I'd driven the Volvo to the Internet café on Orlando, Cyberroast, and matched the gold-lion insignia, which I recalled from the pocket of Hannah's school uniform blazer, to the crest of a private school on East 81st Street, the one Natasha had attended in 1973 after her parents made her quit the Larson Ballet Conservatory (see www.theivyschool.edu).
(Salva veritate
was their irksome motto.) And after staring for hours at that other photo of Hannah, the one I'd stolen from her garage, Rockstar Hannah of the Rooster-Red Hair, I'd realized why, back in January, when I'd seen her with the madwoman haircut, I'd felt that persistent itch of déjà vu.

The woman who'd driven me home from kindergarten after my mother died, the pretty one in jeans with short red porcupine hair, the one Dad had told me was our next-door neighbor—it had been Hannah.

I cut out pieces of evidence from every other conversation I could remember, gluing them together, awed, but also sickened by the resulting graphic collage (see "Splayed Nude Patchwork XI,"
The UnauthorizedBiography of Indonesia Sotto,
Greyden, 1989, p. 211).
"She had a best friend
growing up,"
Hannah had said to me, cigarette smoke pirouetteing off her fingers, "a beautiful girl, fragile; they were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun—for the life of me, I can't remember her name." "There are people. Fragile people, that you love and you hurt them, and I-I'm pathetic, aren't I?" she'd said to me in the woods. "Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved," Eva Brewster had said, "her friend—she didn't go into details, but not a day went by when she didn't feel guilt over what she'd done—whatever it was."

Was Hannah the reason Servo and Dad (in spite of their dynamic working relationship) warred with each other—they'd loved (or perhaps it was never anything so grand, simply a case of poorly wired electricity) the same woman? Was Hannah why we moved to Stockton, remorse over her dead best friend who committed suicide from a broken heart, the reason she'd showered me with breathy compliments and squeezed me against her bony shoulder? How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon ("Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long," wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in
The ABCs of the Cosmos
[2003]) and yet, mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation?

Yes, Not Sure, Probably, and Who the Hell Knew were my answers.

Fourteen days after Dad was gone (two days after I received the cordial greeting from Mr. William Baumgartner of the Bank of New York notifying me of my account numbers; in 1993, the year we left Mississippi, it seemed Dad had set up a trust fund in my name) I was downstairs in the storage room off of Dad's former study, weeding through the shelves piled with damaged
stuff,
most of it belonging to the owner of 24 Armor Street, though some of it was junk Dad and I had accumulated over the years: matching lamps in mint green, a marble obelisk paperweight (a gift from one of Dad's worshipful students), a few faded picture books of little consequence (A
Travel Guide to South Africa
[1968] by J. C. Bulrich). I happened to push aside a small flat cardboard box Dad had marked SILVERWARE and saw, next to it, wedged in the corner behind a crinkled, jaundiced newspaper (the grimly titled,
Rwandan Standard-Times),
Dad's Brighella costume, the black cloak in a ball, the bronze mask with its peeling paint and fishhook nose sneering at the shelves.

Without thinking, I picked up the cloak, shook it loose and pressed my face into it, a sort of embarrassing, lost thing to do, and immediately, I noticed a distantly familiar smell, a smell of Howard and Wal-Mart, Hannah's bedroom—that old Tahitian acidic sap, the kind of cologne that barged into a room and held it up for hours.

But then —it was a face in a crowd. You noticed a jaw, eyes or one of those fascinating chins that looked like a needle and knotted thread had been stuck and pulled tightly through the center and you wanted, sometimes were desperate, to glimpse it one last time, but you couldn't, no matter how hard you fought through the elbows, the handbags, the high-heeled shoes. As soon as I recognized the cologne and the name panthered through my head, it slipped out of sight, drowned somewhere, was gone.

36

Me
tamorphoses

knew something screwballed and romantic would happen on Graduation Day, because the morning sky wouldn't stop blushing over the house and Jiwhen I opened my bedroom window, the air felt faint. Even the girlish pines, crowded in their tight cliques around the yard, shivered in anticipation; and then I sat down at the kitchen table with Dad's
Wall
Street Journal
(it still turned up for him in the wee hours of the morning like a John returning to a street corner where his favorite hooker had once strutted her stuff), switched on WQOX News 13 at 6:30 A.M.,
The Good Morning Show with Cherry,
and Cherry Jeffries was missing.

In her place sat Norvel Owen wearing a tight sports jacket the blue of Neptune. He wove his chubby fingers together, and with his face glowing, blinking as if someone was shining a flashlight in his eyes, he began to read the news without a single comment, plea, passing remark, or personal aside about the reason for Cherry Jeffries' absence. He didn't even throw out a bland and unconvincing, "Wishing Cherry the best of luck," or "Wishing Cherry a speedy recovery." Even more astonishing was the show's new title, which I noticed when the program cut to commercial:
The Good Morning Show with Norvel.
The Executive Producers at WQOX News 13 had erased the very
being
of Cherry with the same ease of deleting an eyewitness' "uhs," "ers," and "see heres" out of a top news story in the Editing Room.