Another Perfect Catastrophe (18 page)

She'd smiled, breathed a little laugh through her nose. “It's sweet, though, honey. It really is.” They sat on the warm hood of his car looking up. Weimer cursed a second time at his mistake, retracing his steps, trying to think how he could have missed a letter.

“It's scary up there,” he told her. “You don't realize how high it is.”

She cupped his cheek and let her eyes move over his face. They'd been married for four years, had lived through the death of her mother and two early miscarriages. How could he fault her for wanting a little buoyant romance to balance out all that dark and heavy-laden love?

She'd worn her hair shoulder length, then, and had to keep tucking it behind her ears. “You see the irony here, though, don't you?” she said.

“I commit the big act and screw it up, right? Next time I break the law, I'll get every detail perfect, okay?” He picked at the dried paint on the backs of his knuckles.

She closed her eyes, briefly.
“Next
time, leave out the ‘M' or the ‘R.' “She shook her head. “Don't you
see?
You just illustrated what I've been saying for four years. T is missing. You.” She tapped his chest.
“I
. See?”

Weimer looked back up at the fuzzy black letters, high above the town.

Shawna reached up, rubbed his cheek with her thumb. “Just how you are, right? I mean, tell anyone we know that T is missing from your declarations of love, and all they'll question is your grammar.”

Then, like all things, that day passed and faded. Things seemed fine. Six years went by, filtered through the familiar. Shawna began making the ceramic serving platters and place settings in bulk, production work, racks and racks of them in her basement studio, and selling them steadily. (He asked her once why she'd quit making the sunflower fish sculptures she'd made in grad school; she only shrugged and said that the place settings were what sold.) And they had their baby now, a girl seven months old, little and pink and mewling, who Shawna kept between them in bed at night so that his sleep was mostly a vague awareness of not rolling over. The baby (“She has a
name,”
Shawna had said, just before he'd left for Utah) had been mostly Shawna's enterprise, another project she'd taken on and sometimes invited him to look at. Things had evened out at work and he taught his intro physics and calculus classes from yellowing notes, happy that he didn't teach current events, that the basic facts of calc and physics never changed. And then one day he had a conversation with a young woman about a mutual student. She had dark, wet eyes, that small gap in her teeth, and she asked him if he wanted to go get a beer. He hesitated only half a second before saying okay.

Now, in the wan and chilly desert, Weimer wondered at the smallness of moments, how the fuckups can turn on so insignificant a thing, ushered in by a pair of syllables thoughtlessly uttered, or by an “I” missing from a water tank. Weimer shook the rattle can and sprayed a big Day-Glo
OK
, the word that had brought him so much trouble, on the left rear fender, then X'd it out. He sprayed that missing
I
right in the middle of the trunk. A little life revision, by proxy.

They finished the Impala in swoops and whirls of orange and green, spraying over the rust holes and dents, the paint staining their fingertips. Still, Lisk would not say what plans he had for the car, only that the new day would inform. As his final act of mystery for the night, Lisk pulled from the trunk a broom, a roll of duct tape, and a cinder block, setting these on the dusty front seat. A TV magician, readying some elaborate stage illusion.

Inside, their house was done mostly in books and Wal-Mart furniture—pressboard shelves, beanbag chairs, a couch covered with a bedspread. Weimer was touched by how ragtag and undergrad it looked, how impermanent. But Lisk and Maysoon had more permanence than any couple he knew. He watched them now, sitting in a room that lacked a TV, lacked a coffee table, lacked a pile of magazines featuring cake recipes and diet plans. Maysoon knelt behind Lisk and carefully combed out his thin rope of hair, her small, hard muscles moving as she brushed and rebraided. They had been together close to twelve years, had moved at least half a dozen times to increasingly remote areas of the country, cut off from the restaurants and malls and grocery stores that in Weimer s mind anchored a regular life. They were like the Japanese high-rises he taught his sophomores about, built to twist and flex so as to withstand earthquakes. Maybe that was it. His own existence—his and Shawna's—had been too rigid, and thus prone to early destruction.

At 4:00
A.M.
things grew quiet, and after drunkenly calculating the three-hour time difference, Weimer decided to call Shawna, knowing he would catch her just up, bathrobe belted tightly around her waist, sitting at the kitchen stool reading the paper and drinking tea.

“So you run away and get drunk with the Mormons,” she said, after answering on the third ring. As it turned out she'd still been asleep, after a bad night with the baby.

“Lisk isn't Mormon,” he said, and right away it was going badly. Then again, what did he expect? He watched Lisk and Maysoon in the next room, asleep on the couch under a blanket.

“Right. An anarchist among the latter-day saints. I forgot.”

They both fell quiet. Her words skimmed close to old jokes between them about Lisk, whom they'd both known since grad school, only there was no joking in her voice now.

“So what are you doing?” he said, realizing how anemic this sounded.
How's it going? What's up?
“I mean, how are you getting along?”

“I nurse Annie and torch stoneware, same as always.” He could almost hear her shrug. “You aren't the only one who gets bored with the view, you know. Difference is, I don't try to improve the landscape by digging it up and planting land mines.”

“Shawna, I'm sorry.”

She sighed. “Yeah, you mentioned that before you took off.”

“You
wanted
me to take off. That's why I left.”

He voice rose sharply. “I never told you to
leave
, to run
away
from us.”

He hesitated, feeling stupid, exposed. “You never said not to.”

“Ah,
God,”
she said and gave a short laugh. “That's a big damn list, Andrew, of the things I never said
not
to do.” In their long history she called him “Andrew” only when she felt particularly angry or particularly affectionate. Now he tried to hear pieces of both, as if the edges of her love and her anger could follow opposite orbits and eventually overlap. The night he climbed the tower ladder—rust biting the palms of his hands, spasms in his legs—a stiff breeze had swayed the tower in slow arcs, a walking giant shouldering him, and he'd stood on the grated catwalk, hanging onto the rail, looking out over the matrix of light that netted the city. Earlier that afternoon, he'd shown his summer school class a PBS documentary.
The Unifying Theory of Everything
, about the efforts of Hawking and Kaku and the others to mate relativity and quantum theory. A failed effort thus far, like the medievalist physicians mating rabbits and badgers. Sitting in the darkened classroom with his half-sleeping students, he understood that he had only a little better grasp on this material than they did, that he was just another drudge watching television, that he hadn't kept up, had sacrificed his knowledge and research at the altar of steadfastness.

But as he stood there on that water tower, he remembered this much: Research was intuition, an outcome could be felt before it could be demonstrated. He'd spread his arms wide above the city and felt his own everything beneath him, a lifetime of outcomes. Shawna and their four-year marriage; his job at Bishop McGuiness; the polite distancing of in-laws and parents; his ten-year-old Honda Accord; a rented apartment near the college; the bathroom mirror that showed him a fledgling bald spot; the quiet sadness that followed the two miscarriages, when he'd held her for hours, her chin tucked into his collarbone as she cried into the cup formed by his neck and shoulder. The losses had pulled a hole in the center of their lives, a dark sloping tube that funneled them into each other, until time had spread wide the tapered edges and pushed them back into the flatness of daily life. He'd leaned on the rail, looking down upon the whole of his life, devoid of mystery, unified by little more than his own existence. He wanted to love it, tried to. But Lisk was right, he
had
opted for triviality, traded his talent for an unadorned life, for a unifying theory of nothing. Then he'd spray painted his mustered-up romance for that life, leaving himself out of it.

He sighed into the phone. “What do you want from me, Shawna?” he asked.

“I want you to tell me why men go to all the trouble to construct decent lives for themselves, then do everything they can to dismantle them.”

“I wouldn't say every man does that.”

“You're right. It's not really a law, more a probability. Does that help you understand?”

“Shawnad …”

“Come home, Andy,” she said. “We're all stretched out over eight states. Just, please…come home.”

“But…what are we doing? I mean, come home and
what?”

“Park the car. Lock the door. Kiss your daughter.”

“Kiss my wife?”

“No—”

A ripple of panic gripped his stomach. “You see? So what's the point?”

“The
point
is that you have work to do. Heavy lifting of everything you undid.” The baby began crying in the background. “You know what? Your whole problem since the start is that you think you can be in this marriage, but not
really
in it. Like love is this toy train you get to wind up once in a while and send around the track. It gives you a laugh, it—”

“Shawna…”

“Shut
up.”
He'd never heard her so angry. That was how his brain, his good, dependable brain, formed the words:
I've never heard her so angry
. That was the best it could do, a cliché in the face of his life unraveling. When he left she'd been sad and quiet, and now his absence had given her sadness room to grow, to bulk up into anger.

“You are going to learn.” She hesitated, breathed. “I don't care if I have to make you write it five hundred times, our marriage is not a goddamn toy train. I want you to
hear
me.”

“I do. I hear you.”

She was quiet a few long seconds. The baby made gurgling sounds, Shawna holding her now. “You know what it is, Andy?” she said, calmer now. “It's a
real
train. It's a Mack truck. And if you don't know what I mean by that, or
can't
know, we're done.” She wasn't even crying. There was no dampness or mush to her words, only that quiet snap, a lightly balled fist. He told himself he deserved no less.

After the phone call he spent three hours sitting up in a chair, dozing. At one point he woke up and walked out onto the deck, surprised at the chill in the air, and bent to look through the eyepiece of Maysoon's Dob. He saw only the blackness of empty space (he liked to impress this on his students, that three quarters of the universe was a vacuum, made of nothing), until he pivoted the telescope on its base and the gibbous moon filled his vision, so bright and sudden that he took a step back. The clarity of its pocked landscape, its craters and oceans of dust, moved him so, he had to look away and draw a breath. Somehow it made him sad, in a way the phone call hadn't. If he'd been a poet or even a gifted enough physicist, he might have fashioned the metaphor: himself…the moon, a satellite to his own place of origin, cold and distant and dead, but always, always falling toward home. Did that work? He imagined Shawna's reaction to the idea, to his romanticizing his own detachment, making a big, sad moon of his remoteness. Sometimes when they made love, Shawna would grab his hair in both hands and pull his face down to hers, eyes to eyes, forcing his gaze down on her. Here is where metaphor fell apart, he thought, as he sat on the couch and wrapped himself in the blanket. The moon's distant gaze never failed, and if you pulled it down, it would kill us all.

Lisk woke him with coffee and a shove. Weimer had fallen asleep on the deck, and his clothes were full of dew, like sequins, his head not as bad as he'd feared it would be. Maysoon stood puffy-eyed in the kitchen, making pecan pancakes, singing to herself. As they ate, Weimer could tell that Lisk was hyped up. He kept downing coffee, darting his eyes as he chewed, rubbing his hands on his camo pants, talking too much about nothing.

“The big boy gets wired, doesn't he?” Maysoon said, smiling.

“Come on,” Lisk said. “It gets too late in the day and we'll have to worry about those fuckers out racing their cars.”

“Who?” Weimer said. “Where?”

“On the salt flats. Lawyers with their Volvos, playing race car.” He poked at the orange juice carton with his fork. “Let's get moving.”

Lisk stacked the dishes in the sink while Maysoon pulled a gun case from under the couch. Inside was the old prototype of the machine gun Lisk had sold to the Saudis, along with a nickel-plated shotgun and several handguns, large caliber from what Weimer knew. These they carried out and set in the backseat of Lisk's other car, an old Ford Bronco he'd had forever, which at some point he'd made into a convertible by cutting off the top with a chainsaw. They checked fluids on the Bronco and the Impala.

“So we're going hunting?” Weimer said. “That's your surprise? You disappoint me, Lisk.” In grad school once or twice Lisk had dragged him into the woods to shoot at turkeys, and Weimer had never liked it. Too cold, too early in the morning, too wet and messy.

“Yeah, you tell me an hour from now if you're disappointed or not.”

Weimer nodded. “Speaking of disappointment…” he said, and proceeded to tell Lisk about his drunken phone call with Shawna.