The Bride of Catastrophe (34 page)

He swallowed. “I can't afford to keep you on,” he said.

“Stetson!”

I was doing a good job, by some strange accident. People could tell I was sincere and they wanted to buy from me. What other salesperson had ever tried to talk them out of a purchase? Sometimes they just wanted to stand up for a sweater I'd shaken my head at—they'd buy it out of stubbornness.

“I've told you I was barely making it,” he said.

“People are always saying things like that,” I said. “I mean, look at this place!” There wasn't a smudge; the offbeat neckties hung just so on the tie rack, it was all so muted, sophisticated, expensive, meant to catch the eye of such a superior class of people that I wondered how many of those people there were. “It's magnificent!” I said.

“Exactly. It cost money, too much money—I had to have everything shiny and new. I borrowed from this guy Duane who was in rehab with me, he'd gotten an insurance settlement. Now he's married, he's got a kid, he needs it. And I don't have it. If I let you go, I can pay him a hundred dollars a week.”

“But Stet—”

“I can't run out on anything more,”
he said, fists and eyes both clenched shut. He was afraid to look at me because if he saw my disappointment, he'd give in. I looked at him; I'd never seen a man who couldn't run out on things before.

“How will you manage? You can't be here all the time, you have buying trips.”

“Tracy can sit the shop for me, when she's not at school,” he admitted. “She wants to. She can do her schoolwork between customers.” He glanced down, remembering the “No reading” edict. “Listen—here's three weeks' pay, this week and two more. You go, right now, you start looking for a job, you'll have one before you know it. You ought to be putting that education to better use, your parents can help.”

“My parents don't send me money, Stet.”

“Come on,” he said, “You cannot be living on your salary here; it's a hundred dollars a week!”

*   *   *

ON THE
bright side, this meant I could pay my back rent. Dear Frank was smoking the eternal cigarette, leaning against the corner of the porch, when I got home. Corn sheaves had sprung up on every one of these little city porches, as if the people here had meditated so intently on the superabundance of American grain that their collective dream had materialized right here in Hartford.

“Chome ear-r-r-rly,” he said as I came up the walk. He sounded uneasy, but I knew that if I sank down on the step and told him I'd lost my job he would only be sorry.

I took the mail—a shampoo sample which made my heart leap as if the universe must finally have sent me the precious little gift I deserved, and a postcard from Dotsy Maven, who said there was nothing like reading the Brontës when you were actually living on the moors.

“It's a nice spot, isn't it,” I said, “it always feels cozy on this street.” It was a good feeling, saying something honest to Frank.

“One block from the bus,” Frank mused, “and a big basement, good drainage, not so cold in the winters, not with the stoves.” After a short silence, during which I searched unsuccessfully for some kind words about the plumbing, he seemed to make a decision.

“You like the new job?” he asked.

“It's great,” I said. “I have a really nice boss, that's the best thing really.”

“You found a place for yourself,” he said, nodding as he thought it over and decided that this was the important thing. “That's good. You got pension plan?”

“Oh, yes. And I've got the rent for you. I'm sorry I was so late.”

“Beetr-r-rus,” he said then, in a voice so serious that I immediately realized that my mother had killed herself—the police had called and that was why he was being so nice to me. Unless Sylvie had gotten arrested … or my father had crashed the plane.

“Beetrus, that guur-r-rl … she sleep on the couch, or, she sleep with you?”

He had dropped the cigarette and was crushing it with his heel, and while he spoke he looked down, but when he lifted his eyes I saw only consternation, and the prayer that I'd go for door number two: the couch.

“With me,” I admitted. I couldn't let him think he'd imagined it: he'd be too ashamed.

“You got to go, Beetr-r-rus,” he said.

“Okay, Frank, I will.”

“But,” he said. He'd expected an argument, and he'd hoped I'd win. “Where you go?”

“I'll find someplace,” I said, “don't worry.”

But of course he'd worry. He had worried about me from the day I signed the lease.

“Henny,” he said. “She—” He looked up toward the kitchen window and the curtain twitched. Henny would have heard our voices, or felt them—Frank's vibrato always hummed through the walls. I wondered how long she'd been nagging him to get rid of me, whether he'd put her off in the hope her suspicions were unfounded, or that I wouldn't pay the rent and he could evict me for that instead.

“I understand,” I interrupted. I'd wanted to shock someone, after all. And to shock someone, in the year 1978, when every bourgeois idiot was out proving himself daring and open-minded, was no mean feat. The protest years were over and there was no clear division anymore between peaceful, loving people and the kind of hateful, stodgy, warmongering racists who'd made the rest of us feel so good about ourselves when we scandalized them. So here I was, shocking Frank, who'd last read a newspaper in 1941. This was his house, his piece of the dreamland America. I was the spider under the bed—the creature from the sphere of wrongness just the other side of the veil, where everything works in reverse and kindness is really cruelty, and love, hate. Frank knew nothing of the culture whose bonds I wanted to slip. For him my little shock came in at 20,000 volts.

“I'll be out by the end of the week,” I said.

He looked straight at me, and I realized that until now, he had always gazed down or up or past me, as if he'd have felt rude meeting my eyes. Perhaps he'd known I'd see too much in his glance, and now I saw profound disappointment, confusion, and embarrassment. I searched his face for disgust or contempt or something else that would help me feel anger instead of guilt, but I couldn't find them.

“I understand,” I said. “Really.” His face softened, and he closed his eyes for a second as if he was trying to recall the way he'd used to think of me.

*   *   *

“
YOU'LL HAVE
to move in with me.”

Lee said this the way she said everything, quietly, calmly, and finally, as if she were snapping a little purse shut after counting out an exact sum of change.

I hadn't dared recognize my predicament, until she solved it for me. Now I realized how frightened I'd been and my knees nearly buckled. “Lee, you don't know—” I could hardly believe her kindness.

“It's just good sense,” she said, embarrassed. “Two can live more cheaply than one.”

My eyes filled. I loved her. “Lee, you are the most wonderful person I've ever known,” I said, feeling a tear slide down along my nose. “I'll find a job,” I said. “I can pay half the rent, for sure.”

“We'll think about that after you get settled,” she said.

A qualm passed through me like a shiver, too quickly to be understood. “As soon as I get a job, I want to pay part of it—it wouldn't be fair.”

“All's fair in love,” she said, the loaded word dragging her voice under so I caught it out of intuition rather than sound.

“No, it has to be fair,” I insisted, meaning
Because this isn't love, really
. But we wanted it to be love, love it would have to be.

“We'll be
so
happy, Lee,” I said.

“It's the practical solution,” she said manfully.

“It does seem sensible,” I agreed. With this we tiptoed past Aphrodite and crept into each other's hearts by the side door. “You're my soul,” I told her. “My heart and soul.” If I was unfit for any occupation, that left all the more of my ambition to be spent in the service of love.

“The things you say,” she mumbled, and I knew what she meant. A man would never admit such a thing. He'd see any bond as a chain, then have to prove himself by breaking it, setting out for new lands. For women, love
is
the new land.

“I say what I feel.” Truly, though, I amazed myself with all I could say to her. It's human nature to conceal love, which leaves us open to such pain—but with Lee I could somehow speak what was in my heart. Because she was a woman, I could trust her. We had a secret inner language in common, a language I'd waited years to use. “I felt it the moment I met you,” I went on, “that fate sent me to Hartford, because you were here.”

She looked terribly shy, embarrassed, frightened to death. “Don't be silly,” she said, looking down. Suppose I suddenly realized who I was talking to? She needn't have worried. No fisherman tends as carefully to his net as I did to the vision I had superimposed over Lee's face.

*   *   *

MY POSSESSIONS
made two loads in the Mustang, and the thing was done. We were together, Lee and her aspidistra and me, in her apartment with the white, white walls.

“Rest,” she said. “Just lie down and take a nap. You've been through so much.”

I pulled the duvet (the place was entirely outfitted in things whose names I'd only seen in catalogues before) up over my head and slept. She was making bean soup in the kitchen—the smell itself was nourishing, the windows steamed over and outside, the rain kept streaming.

“Have you seen the classifieds?” I asked when I woke up.

“It's on the étagère,” Lee said. She said “étagère” the way Ma said “public relations”—as if it was a key to the domain of legitimacy. It set me on edge, but everything set me on edge now. What I was searching for was not to be found in a catalogue. I looked for it in Lee's eyes and she averted them for fear of disappointing me. She was afraid I'd see her reaching for something that was beyond her, that was ridiculous to try for. Our neighbor upstairs had come home the day before with a reproduction of a spinning wheel, which he'd carried up the stairs on his back. I'd mistaken it for a harp at first.

“He got a good deal on that,” Lee said, “they go for thousands now.” She didn't think it a forlorn thing, standing alone in a suburban living room far from sheep or wool. She didn't wish it was a harp, she liked it as a spinning wheel, a reminder that peace, prosperity, happiness might be attained, so long as one kept the proper schedule—spinning, dying, weaving, and so on. I wanted transcendence; she preferred to do without aspiration, to keep things small. She was looking for the daily effort, the weekly result.

I took the classifieds down from the étagère (freestanding bookshelf) and admonished myself to emulate her.

“Don't get hung up on looking for a job right away,” she said. “Take your time. You're not a shop girl, you'll find something that fits your talents. Here…” She took the newspaper out of my hand and folded it back to the front-page photo of Anita Bryant looking so complacent, so comfortable in her hatred. If she despised homosexuality, then homosexuality must be a great thing. I took Lee's hand with a sudden spring of pride. “
Relax
. You've got plenty of time.”

But I'd dreamed I was on a voyage across a thick, oily ocean, carrying my mother's head in a sack. She wouldn't be able to hear, see, or breathe until I could fit it back to her body again, but I was afraid to open the sack, because suppose the head got lost? So I lay in a deck chair in the sun, with the water roiling, trying to forget this responsibility and feel how beautiful everything was, though I knew something incomprehensibly awful was ahead of me.

“Why do you dwell on these things?” Lee asked me, when I told her the dream at dinner. Yesterday she'd found me sketching a penis, now this.

“I don't dwell on them,” I said, guiltily—I had never thought of it that way, but no doubt she was right. The thing to do was look ahead, not back. “You're not interested in your dreams?”

She looked quickly away. “Not particularly,” she said. “Not with a
burning fascination
.”

“Burning fascination” sounded suspiciously like a phrase of mine, and she said it with queasy condescension. She was guilelessly buttering a biscuit—and the soup smelled so good, and soon I'd be back under the quilt, dreaming again.

“It's delicious,” I said.

“It's the slow cooking,” she said. “I don't have those kind of dreams.”

“What kind of dreams do you have?” I asked, with too much interest, so that I got a quick shrug, and after a long pause, an answer spoken so softly I could hardly hear:

“I dream I'm flying, flying with women, over the housetops, over the ocean, you know, it's always the same.”

“Always?” I asked.

She nodded. “It's beautiful,” she insisted, “it's not carrying my mother's
head in a sack
.” She glanced heavenward. Was this what she had been doomed to, through homosexuality? To associate with morbid persons like me?

I wanted to stop dwelling on things, to look away from the abyss at the center of everything. One was supposed to ignore it: to work, shop, and cook, and then there was television, and nice dinners out. This was real life, just what I'd waited for. Every morning Lee cautioned me not to tire myself as she left me alone in the little apartment for the day. I'd water the aspidistra, read the want ads, circling the ones I might call when I got my courage together, then fall, exhausted, back into bed. When I awoke I'd search the drawers and cabinets, looking for the key to Lee's soul. I knew there must be more to her, some kind of secret, maybe something sinister and exciting but more likely just something sad: a packet of old love letters, or some memento of Reenie. The kind of thing my father found in Ma's drawer. I wanted to feel the knife of jealousy against my bone again, the better to savor my new satisfaction. But I found nothing. Had Lee lived thirty years without accumulating any ticket stubs or pressed roses?