Saving St. Germ (23 page)

A few people made appreciative noises, I laughed carefully, in a disguised register. But then the guy in back chimed in again:

“Whyn’t you drown
yourself
in the goddam bathtub, you stupid dickhead!”

Jay swallowed. “But L.A., hey L.A., what a c-city! We all hate it, we all l-l-love it. I mean, is this a g-great city, or what?”

I swallowed. The worst had happened, it was all coming apart: He was starting to stutter.

“Hey! Are you a great d-d-d-dickhead, or what?”

“I really love this c-city. Even when I get up in the morning and see smog, I’m happy here. R-really, I am. If there’s an i-inversion layer—”

“A
what,
d-d-d-dickhead?”

Jay smiled into the lights. I could see sweat streaming down his face. “An ... ah, i-i-inversion layer—”

A few other drunks were joining in now. “A
what,
d-d-dickhead? A
wh-wh-what
?”

I got up. I don’t know how it happened but I was on my feet, brushing tables and mumbling “Excuse
me
” and I was stumbling up the steps to the stage in the dark. I fell down and bumped my knee, but I kept moving. Then I was onstage. The lights were white-bright, blinding, and for a second, I froze. I always think I’m just a mind: I had a body. A visible form for people to look at and judge. Black jeans and sweater, little black heels. I felt enormous.

The hecklers were yelling things I couldn’t understand. Then I saw Jay looking at me. He had backed away from the mike. I could never describe the look he was giving me. I suppose if your wife died, then suddenly showed up in bed with you and a new lover, it might approach that gaze. But I’d recovered myself now; nothing could stop me. I marched to the mike. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the emcee gesturing at Jay,
What gives
?

I stood in front of the mike. The room reeled before me, then slowed down. The hecklers were wild, whistling, stomping and making kissing noises.

“H-hey,” someone cried, “maybe your f-f-fuckin’
girlfriend
is funnier than you.”

“Shut up,” I said into the mike.

My voice surprised me. It was bigger and calmer than I thought possible, given my state of mind.

“Shut
up
,” I repeated, and the room actually fell silent.

“You like that word ‘
dickhead
,’ huh? You think that’s a funny word,
dickhead
?”

I squinted out into the audience trying to find the dread heckler. My words echoed.

“This is my husband. Standing right here. Yeah.” It was eerily silent. “Here’s his problem. He’s too
smart
for you—talk about dickheads, you guys need to pull jockstraps over your ears to keep your thoughts straight! You need a condom to keep your head dry when it rains! Hey,
you’re
such a dickhead that when you come, your I.Q. drops forty points! Which means, in fact, you can only come
twice
?”

I was dimly aware of laughter but my fury hadn’t abated enough for me to really hear it. Where does this shit come from? I wondered, shocked, in the back of my mind.

“You know, I just wanna tell you jerks something. My husband” —I gestured again at Jay, who looked paralyzed—“
Jay,
gets up here and tries to entertain you. Tries to be funny—but what can you do when people just don’t
get
it? Hey, I’m a biochemist—I know what it’s like! He uses a phrase like ‘inversion layer’ and that bozo over there thinks an inversion layer is when he barfs in his Cheerios.”

Laughter. Then: “Hey
Mrs.
Dickhead, why don’t you sit down? On my face! We’ll talk some
biology
!”

“Hey Slick!” I cried. “Don’t give me any
shit.
I know who
you
are. You couldn’t take high school biology because they wanted to put you on the
syllabus
.”

“E-Esme?”

I heard him, but I didn’t turn.

“You wanna know something? As a biochemist, I can tell by looking at you, pal, your DNA is DOA. I can look at you, pal, and see what went wrong with the family genetics. Oh yeah, old Uncle Walt, he was a great guy but he kept trying to fuck trees. And all those cousins intermarrying ...”

People were laughing, but now Jay was standing beside me.

“P-please get off the
stage,
Esme!”

“Hey, Mrs. Dickhead, if you’re a scientist, what’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”

I glanced at Jay. I couldn’t quite bring him into focus.

“You want to know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is? The Second Law of Thermodynamics is like Murphy’s Law: Everything eventually screws up.

“Look,” I said, swaying a little, “I can explain it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics.” I paused. The three beautiful, hopeless Laws, the holy trinity of dissolution, presented themselves glittering before my mind’s eye. Maybe I could actually make them clear to these raucous Goths?

“If a rain of glass fragments fell from the ceiling right now, none of them would form into beautiful wineglasses in your hands, right? The pieces shatter into worse shatter. We call that entropy. How everything works, or doesn’t work. Things keep breaking down, things move in the direction of greater chaos, that’s how we know we’re still alive. People age, people get sick, relationships fall apart ...” I finally looked at Jay, who stood stock-still, his gaze riveted on me. I turned back to the audience. “But what you come here to see, what you came here to see tonight, was the Second Law, the breakdown. You all came to see people fall apart—see things shatter—and hey, you got it!” I opened my arms wide. “Before your eyes—entropy! The Second Law! And what about you—you all? Look at you there, the guy in the front row here, drunk, slobbering on your tie: Second Law. Look at this: You and your girlfriend look like you got hung up on a power line by your hair. Second Law. Excuse me,
you
look like a victim of designer drive-by—yes. We’re all going to hell because of a thermodynamic principle; now, isn’t that
funny
? Nothing
that
good is going to happen to you again and a
whole lot
of bad
is.
”

“Esme.”

I looked at him.

“We’re g-getting off the s-stage now.”

And somehow, we did. He freed my sweaty hold on the mike; the band started playing. People began clapping and whistling, still looking at us strangely. I nodded at everyone; I was having trouble walking.

As he steered me by a group at a table, a guy jumped up to shake Jay’s hand.

“Great
bit
—the wife coming up like that! Very odd, but it flies.”

Another guy poked me in the side as I lumbered by. “Hey,” he growled, “what’s a quark?”

I stared at him.

“A fart in the bathtub!” he hollered. “You don’t even know that one?”

“C-come
on
!” cried Jay, and tugged harder.

We stumbled out together, into the chilly night, the bright lights of the Strip.

E
NTROPY. IT WAS
the same force Lorraine Revent Atwater and I were attempting to elude on our computer screens; the luminous graphics-created molecules danced in their axes, within the alternating vector lines. If we pushed them fractally, fast enough, we might, cosmologically speaking, create a local naked singularity, that is to say, a human-made version of the start-up singularity. What does this mean? It means that we had big plans for those chiral particles. We were trying to connect them (tie them up with?) Super String Theory, with the Big Bang. But that’s another story.

It was a windless night, but Jay and I stood in an eerie vacuum of weird feelings outside the Sez Who? Lights from the honking cars on the Strip flickered over us; sightseers and cruising kids shouted and called to each other. The huge billboard Marlboro man high up over the Strip puffed white smoke from his coffin nail, staring squarely into the face of Death:
Howdy pardner.
Jay bent slightly, his hands in his jacket pockets, leaning toward me the way one leans (patiently, condescendingly) towards a child or an old person. I realized, with the slow-rotating take of the very drunk, that he was looking at me disapprovingly; I began to gather that much. In fact, I further gathered, leaning back at him, peering, that he looked really pissed off.

He spoke slowly, as if English were my second language.

“Esme, t-tell me.
Where
in all your d-delusions, did you get the idea that you could ... d-do what you just did?”

He stopped and ran a hand across his eyes.

I’d been standing by, smiling dreamily, and now I reeled back as if he’d slapped me, teetering a bit on my heels. I caught myself.

“Wait a second,
what
did you say?”

“You d-destroyed me up there!”

“Jay!
I
can’t believe ... I was
trying
to help you.”

His face twisted. “I don’t need
h-help
.”

“Those people were making fun of you. I couldn’t stand it—”

“That’s my
act,
stupid! I act like a b-bad s-stand-up, don’t you get it?”

“No, I don’t. And I don’t think
they
did either.”

“Well, Christ, how
c-could
they get it, with you ch-charging up onstage—how could they—”

“Jay, I’m sorry. I lost control ... I tried to”—I paused and looked around me—“help with the humor. And Jay, you have to admit—I was a little
funny.
People were laughing.”

“Esme. People were laughing
at
you. Th-there’s a difference.”

“Well, shit, you oughta know.”

“This is my b-business! What do you know about it?
Nothing!
Do you kn-know what I was going to d-do next? The f-follow-up I do, when I g-get heckled like that is t-to use my st-stutter. I
use
the stutter! And it’s really f-funny.”

“I’m sorry.”

He threw me a quick, bitter glance.

“You’re so far out of t-touch you don’t even know it, Esme. Plus you’re stinking drunk. Your kind of help I don’t need.
Ollie
doesn’t need this k-kind of help. You’re c-crazy, Esme. And if what you did tonight isn’t proof, I don’t know what is.”

I took a deep breath, trying to slow things down.

“Jay. I couldn’t stand the way those people were mocking you.”

My throat was dry and my shin began throbbing. I reached down and felt around and winced. I’d bruised it badly climbing onto the stage. As I bent over I felt the tears overflowing down my face. They surprised me. Everything this evening had been a surprise to me.

“W-where’s your car?”

“Over there.”

I pointed and he set off in the direction of the parking lot behind the club, me limping behind.

We stood in front of the jeep as I rummaged in my purse for the ticket to give to the parking attendant. I could feel myself sobering up. I began to shake with cold. I felt perfectly calm now, but the tears kept falling.

“Jay. I came up onstage because I love you. I came to this club tonight because I love you.”

“Too
late,
Esme. And a
l-lie.
You don’t
get it,
do you?” He flinched, then spat the words out. “I tried to understand
you.
I even r-read your science books. You never tried to know
me.
”

“Why do you think I’m here tonight? Because I—”

“Being f-funny was the only thing I had that was mine. I was a s-stand-up, it was mine.
Now
you’ve taken that away, too. You were trying to make me look like a
fool.
”

He turned his back on me, talked over his shoulder. His left leg shook as if it were running on a separate engine of anger. The attendant pulled up in my car and I handed him a bill.

“Can you drive?”

“Drive? Why wouldn’t I be able to drive?”

He sighed. “Do you want me to d-drive you home?”

“Of course not.”

I let myself into the car with injured dignity, then rolled down the window as Jay knocked on it.

“You’re
funnier
than m-me, Esme. You’re s-smarter than me. OK? Does th-that make you happy?”

“No,” I said, “that doesn’t make me happy.”

He put his head down on the car roof for a second, then lifted it, cocked it, and looked in at me.

“Wh-what were you t-trying to do tonight?”

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. “I wanted to save you—something I had neither the power nor right to do. I tried to do something really dumb—an act of chivalry. Do you know what I mean?”

He stared, then his mouth twisted and he pulled away.

“Go h-home, Esme,” he said. “Sleep it off.”

“S
O YOU REALIZED
that you loved him—and then you, like, screwed it up,” said Rocky. “I mean, that’s what you’re saying.”

“I screwed it up? How?”

“How? How? Your husband is standing on a stage in front of a club filled with people ...” She stopped to scratch her eyes and feel around for her glass. It was two-thirty in the morning. “And you leap up from your seat and jump up onto the stage, grab the mike from his hands and begin tellin’ jokes. And you ask me
how
?”

“I did not tell jokes. I talked about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” I stared at the bottom of my glass. “And I told them off.”

“Yeah, well. You sort of ... hijacked his act, right? Did you think he’d be real
happy
about your stealing his thunder?”

“Well it wasn’t exactly thunder, it was more like static. I stole his static.”

“Let’s go back. To the part where you suddenly go leaping up.” She laughed and shook her head, obviously enjoying this. “You got this feeling inside for him, right? Real desire to protect him.”

“I’m tired,” I said. “It’s almost three.”

Rocky poured herself more tequila.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing as what you did tonight. It’s fucking amazing to me. But how can you, who are a damn smart person, be so fuckin’
stupid
?
This
is the question we gotta answer! This is the question!”

“Yeah, well, if you come up with a definitive answer let me know. Maybe I wouldn’t have to think about theory anymore.”

Rocky dropped her head to one side, drunk but hanging in there.