The Bride of Catastrophe (47 page)

I watched it too, and when it was over I kept staring, until somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up to see the Israeli Philharmonic performing live in Tel Aviv. The volume was down so far that I couldn't hear the music, but the sight itself was beautiful—all these musicians working as a body. How well they must know their conductor—they were attuned to the slightest change of his face. How lucky, to be a strand of that music, a member of an orchestra, to bring all of yourself—every instinct, thought, and movement—to work, toward a beautiful end, studying and studying, trying and erring until there was no further need of thought and it was natural, it was music.

The eye of the camera closed in on a bassist, a young man. He was too tall, with a raw, alert face that seemed to be watching and taking counsel from everything around him. Not the kind of face you usually see on television: that mask of glamour that commands adoration and holds those who adore it at bay. That's what we think beauty is. The beauty of this man's face, its rapt concentration, filled me with grief and longing, and suddenly, with hope.

“I'd like to sleep with that orchestra,”
I heard myself saying.

A most inconvenient insight, but the minute I had it, I felt a revolution start, in every single cell. I went to the door of the bedroom and was almost surprised to see Lee asleep there. If my thoughts had the power they ought to have, she would already have evaporated. I could hear her small—righteously small—voice, cautioning me not to swim out so far, and suddenly I wanted to swim the ocean, swim all around the world. Fascination was anathema to her. I'd fallen in love with her stolidity. And she had given me what I'd needed: someone to rebel against.

It's a great night for a drive
, I said to myself, with mutinous joy, and I snapped the car keys from their hook and took the steps downstairs as lightly as a kid. Outside, a man stood at the cemetery's edge, but it was four in the morning, too late even for prostitutes. I waved to him and he pretended not to see me. No doubt he thought he was just looking for sex. If only something so simple could be true.

I'd forgotten what it was like to drive. To steer, with a touch, a silent, powerful beast along the street, while the world moved past as if on a conveyor belt, to see the dark city lay its avenues open before me—should I turn left, through the college gates, or right, toward the wealthy suburbs where the people who could bring themselves to grapple with the world in daylight were dreaming now in their downy beds? It didn't matter—what would have been impossible in the daytime traffic was effortless now and I crossed the city like a child skipping through an empty house, turning down Main Street under the banners proclaiming, “Hartford Swings” in honor of the Big Band Festival, up Asylum Avenue through the insurance sprawl, and down Park Street past the library. Mr. Klipsch was asleep in the doorway and I felt as fond, seeing him, as if he was my brother. The light was on in the back window of the bakery—Mrs. Arruda would be at work there. It amazed me, but I was coming to know people, to be a part of this place.

Ahead, on the horizon, I saw a thin, rosy line, and heard Ma's portentous: “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning,” her voice taking the drama of nature for her own. Who knew, who could guess where I was headed, what would happen? Behind me a state trooper turned out of his roadside lair, and my heart jumped, but he passed me and a moment later I saw him sweep smoothly in beside a disabled newspaper truck, blue lights flashing a silent message: even here on the highway in the last hour of the night, you are not alone. Dawn bled upward until the sky was tinted as pale as old petals. So I was driving east. Of course. Stetson's place was east, just across the river. I was going to see Stetson; it was the most natural thing in the world.

Nine

“D
ID I
wake you up?”

“Well, it's, like … five-thirty?” He was standing in the doorway of an apartment so small I could see all of it over his shoulder: a convertible love seat that, pulled out, took up the whole living space, and behind it, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom door. No one would ever guess that its resident was obsessed with folded sweaters: there was a pile of dirty clothes in the corner and one of dirty dishes in the sink.

“What is it? What's the matter?” Stetson asked, beckoning me in, and sitting down on the end of his bed, still half asleep, his hair sticking up every which way

“To answer that, I think I'd have to write a book,” I said. How
could
I explain it? Say that I'd decided to move to Middlemarch? That my father had been mauled by a tigress and when my own stripes started to show, I'd had to take drastic action? Or, my mother dreamed of getting out of debt by writing a sex novel, but sex was a mystery to her, so I had to figure it out? Or, the Israeli Philharmonic seemed to need a woman and Grace Jones said she needed a man?

I couldn't say the word “man,” though, because Stetson was sitting there in his shorts, all too palpably representing that gender, with golden stubble glinting over his face. His shoulders, his knees, were so big and square, his chest hairless, defenseless, to my surprise. (So, all this time I'd had some image of his body in my heart. Another surprise.) And, his tattoo: what I'd thought was a dagger was the tail of a snake, whose body was wrapped and rewrapped around Stetson's chest and over his shoulders, its head menacing me from the crook of his left arm.

“What?” he asked, seeing me stare. Then: “Oh, that.” He looked down at himself and shook his head. “You see why I need to get married. I can't spent my life explaining this guy to strange women. Look.” He showed me how the creature's venomous eye was right over a vein. “When it started to pulse, it was time for the needle,” he said. “He looks like my father, actually, from a certain angle.”

What I noticed was how fully the snake was holding him.

“The thing about a tattoo is, it's permanent,” he said. “Nothing else really is.”

“I've figured it out—what the letters stand for,” I said. I almost reached out to touch them and had to remind myself I had no right.

“You have?” He grabbed a T-shirt from his pile and pulled it over his head. “How?”

“Well, I mean I can guess. ‘Don't tread on me.' I mean, more or less. Right?”

He laughed a little, and looked at me with surprise, as if he thought it strange I'd puzzle over this. “In a way,” he said. “How was the march?”

Oh, the march. “It was fine, fine. Lee got a little nervous, but otherwise, fine.”

“So, then you thought you'd come over and decipher my tattoo?”

“I got in the car and started driving, and I didn't know where I was going, and somehow I got here.”

“How do you know my address?”

“I must have seen it at the store, because as soon as I saw the sign for Tilden Street, the number 333 popped into my mind. It's just been kind of a weird night.”

He smiled, so fondly.

“Stet, I think I came here to tell you not to get married…” I said, as if I were a fortune teller who was only just seeing the clouds of prophecy resolve.

“You got in the car in the middle of the night and drove aimlessly until you happened to pass my apartment, and came up to tell me … something … which you now realize is that I shouldn't get married?”

“Yes,” I said, with some amazement, because it was the first thing I'd felt sure of in a very long time. “That's what I'm saying.”

“And,” he said, edging discreetly away from me, to fish for a pair of pants, “
why
shouldn't I get married?”

“Because…”

“Yes?” He held my eyes with a laughing challenge, and suddenly I knew why, and the minute I knew it, we stopped being able to look at each other. So, with my hands over my face, I pulled all my courage together and told myself to be honest with the man who had been so honest with me.

“Because it would be better—I mean, I'd like it better—if you—married—me.”

I stood fixed to my spot, appalled to hear myself. “I don't mean marry,” I explained quickly. “I mean—” I stamped my foot on the worn floorboard. “I have an idiotic crush on you.” I'd meant to be done with crushes, and a crush on a
man!
Pat had been
right
about me, how infuriating.

“And—” he took a breath, preconfession, “—you've noticed that I have an idiotic crush on you,” he said.

I didn't dare hear this, but I felt his arms around me.

“But,” he said softly, his head bent over mine, “you were the one who spoke it. You were the braver one.”

If tulips had sprouted out of my head right then, I wouldn't have been surprised, because his words fell on me like the first warm rain. It's true, I thought, I
am
brave, no matter how I quaver and tremble and flee—I'd been brave since that first stupid day when I went off to school in my little plaid jumper, with my mother ready to smash a champagne bottle on my bow.

“Stetson,” I said, into his collarbone.

I couldn't fit my arms all the way around him, and his smell was so heady that I could only think to say, “Stetson, you're a god!” Two seconds of heterosexuality and I'd turned into Barbie.

His T-shirt read
ONE DAY AT A TIME
, and I kissed the Y. Then I lifted his arm and kissed the snake's oft-pierced eye. I was going to kiss everywhere anything had ever pricked him, to breathe him into myself; we were going to get to know each other the way most people only dream about.

He took my arms and held me away.

“But you
have
somebody,” he said. “And so do I.”

As I hadn't realized I was going to throw myself at him, I was ill-prepared to argue this point. Apparently his family didn't follow their hearts so doggedly as mine.

“In ten minutes,” he said, “the phone is going to ring and it's going to be Tracy, giving me my wake-up call.”

“Why isn't she here?” I asked. This was better than shrieking, “You said you didn't love her!” like the banshee I was bound to become now. (Isn't that what happens to women who fall in love with men? They dash themselves against the cliff face of the masculine heart's refusal, and go mad.)

“She doesn't come here,” he said. “See this?” He plucked at the cloth that was thrown over the back of couch, khaki polyester splattered with paint. “It was my bedspread in the halfway house.” My heart throbbed the way it always did when he was confessing.

“Most nights I go to her place. She's good at folding,” he said, making light of it, but I saw how he intended to live with her in a safe, neat world, keep this dark place a secret of his own. Tracy was beautiful, in a warm, inviting way, and she'd gotten to know Stetson because she loved to shop at LaLouche—I'd seen her through the window there, closing out the cash register one evening, so certain in her movements, as if she had no question that she was where she ought to be. Probably her customers would buy capes and unitards and whatever just in hopes of becoming like her. But I knew Stetson's qualms about her, and from his voice, his hands, his slightest gestures, I knew he loved me. I kissed him, just at the corner of his mouth, and ran out the door, before anything could happen to shatter my perfect vision.

*   *   *

LEE WAS
at work already when I got home, and I didn't have to be at the library until ten, so I made myself a cup of coffee and called Philippa.

“So there, you've found the perfect solution!” she said tartly. “How many cars did you say he's wrecked?”

“Well, six, but that was before he got sober,” I said.

“He's just like your father, one day maybe he'll crash a plane.”

“We can only hope, Philippa,” I said, giddy. I had Stetson, and so, I could have Philippa back. She was all ears, ready for my new adventures.

“Well,” she said, “I guess a junkie will make for a nice mix with your sister's beau.”

“He's not a junkie,” I said righteously, but I was thinking that he'd damn well better be a junkie, because that was part of why I loved him—for the raw intensity of his need, his willingness to lie and cheat and court death and disaster to assuage it.
I
was going to be Stetson's drug now.

“I stand in support of a woman's right to choose her own catastrophe,” Philippa answered, as staunch as Emma Goldman. “And if this is the only way you can escape from that, that
woman
—”

“Philippa, I can't leave her. What are they all going to say about me? And they'll be right, too. I've been such a—a bull in a china shop, here. Lee moved into the city because of me, and now I'm going to leave her here alone? I promised her I'd stay forever.”

“Are you twenty-two yet?” she asked.

“How old was Dorothea Brooke?”

“Oh, oh, Dorothea Brooke? So what, she's a character in a novel. A novel whose author threw herself out a window on her wedding night! Nobody, Beatrice—not you, not George Eliot, but
least of all
the members of the Hartford Lesbian Support Group—is ever going to solve the problem of love.”

“Oh, Philippa, I do love you.”

I heard one of those little fluttering sounds she made when she was nervous and added: “But, not that way, not that way!” In fact, it suddenly occurred to me that I ought to introduce her to Reenie.

“Marry the junkie, by all means.
Mazel tov
. And may you marry often!”

*   *   *

THEN, LEE.
I told her a bit of the truth: that I'd been upset about all the family troubles and just felt so restless I had to go out. She'd said she understood, that we'd talk when she got home, but that right now she'd better call the police and tell them to stop looking for the car.