Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Obviously it wasn’t fantastic what Dad was doing, making perfectly realistic women act like — well, as if they were determined to resurrect old story lines of Guiding Light —but I did wonder if it was entirely his fault. Dad never lied about the fact he’d already logged his one Great Love. And everyone knew one was the maximum of Great Loves a person could stumble upon in a lifetime, though some gluttonous people refused to accept it, mistakenly muttering on about seconds and thirds. Everyone was quick to hate the heartbreaker, the Casanova, the libertine, completely overlooking the fact that some libertines were completely candid about what they wanted (excitement between lectures) and if it was all so appalling why did everyone keep flying onto their porches? Why didn’t they spiral off into the summer night, expiring with peace and poise in the soft shadows of the tulip trees?

If Dad wasn’t home when a June Bug unexpectedly materialized, I was to follow his specific instructions: under no circumstances should I allow her into the house. “Smile and tell her to hold on to that fabulous human quality which, unfortunately, people no longer have the slightest sense of— pride. No, there was never anything wrong with Mr. Darcy. You may also elucidate that the saying is true: it will all feel better in the morning. And if she still insists, which is likely — some of them have dispositions of pit bulls with bones — you’ll have to let drop the word police. That’s all you need to say, poelease, and with any luck she’ll fly from the house — if my prayers are answered, from our lives — like a chaste soul out of hell.”

Now I was tiptoeing downstairs, more than a little nervous (it wasn’t easy being Dad’s Human Resource) and just as I reached the front door, she rang the bell. I looked through the peephole, but she’d turned to look over her shoulder at the yard. With a deep breath, I switched on the porch light and opened the door.

“Howdy,” she said.

I froze. Standing in front of me was Eva Brewster, Evita Perón.

“Nice to see you,” she said. “Where is he?”

I couldn’t speak. She grimaced, burped “ha,” and pushed both the door and me to the side as she walked inside.

“Gareth, honey, I’m home!” she shouted, her face upturned as if expecting Dad to materialize from the ceiling.

I was so shocked, I could only stand and stare. “Kitty,” I realized, had been a pet name, which she’d doubtlessly had at some point in her life and resurrected so they’d have a secret. I should have known — at the very least thought about it. They’d had them before. Sherry Piths had been Fuzz. Cassie Bermondsey had been both Lil’ and Squirts. Zula Pierce had been Midnight Magic. Dad found it humorous when they had catchy names that tripped off the tongue, and his smile, when saying this name, she probably mistook for Love, or, if not Love, some seed of Caring, which would eventually grow into the massive vine of Affection. It might be a nickname her father gave her when she was six or her Secret Hollywood Name (the name she should have been called, the one that would have been her passport to the Paramount lot).

“You going to speak? Where is he?”

“At dinner,” I said, swallowing, “with a — a colleague.”

“Uh-huh. Which one?”

“Professor Arnie Sanderson.”

“Right. Sure. ”

She made another sulky noise, crossed her arms so her jacket winced, and continued down the hall to the library. Dimly, I followed. She sauntered over to Dad’s legal pads neatly stacked on the wooden table by the bookshelves. She grabbed one, ruffling the pages.

“Ms. Brewster—?”

“Eva.”

“Eva.” I took few steps closer. She was approximately six inches taller than me and sturdy as a silo. “I–I’m sorry, but I don’t know if you should be here. I have homework.”

She threw her head back and laughed (see “Shark Death Cry,” Birds and Beasts , Barde, 1973, p. 244).

“Oh, come on, ” she said looking at me, flinging the legal pad to the floor. “One of these days you’re going to have to lighten up. Though with him, yeah, I got you — it’s a tall order. I’m sure I’m not the only one he keeps in a constant state of terror.” She moved past me, out of the library, down the hall toward the kitchen, affecting the air of a real estate agent inspecting the wallpaper, rugs, doorjambs and ventilation in order to determine a price the market could bear. I understood now: she was drunk. But she was a concealed drunk. She’d vigorously zipped up most of the drunkenness so it was scarcely visible, only in her eyes, which weren’t red, but swollen (and a little bit sluggish when they blinked), also in her walk, which was slow and forced, as if she had to organize every step or she’d topple like a FOR SALE sign. Every now and then, too, a word jammed in her mouth and began to slide back into her throat until she said something else and it coughed out.

“Just taking a teensy-weensy look around,” she muttered, trailing her chubby, manicured hand along the kitchen counter. She pressed PLAY on the answering machine (“You have no new messages.”) and squinted at June Bug Dorthea Driser’s ugly cross-stitch quotations hanging in rows along the wall by the telephone (“Love Thy Neighbor,” “To Thine Own Self Be True”).

“You knew about me, didn’t you?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Because he was weird that way. All the secrets and lies. Remove one from the ceiling and the whole thing collapses on top of you. Nearly kills you. He lies about everything — even ‘Nice to see you,’ and ‘Take care. ’” She tilted her head, thinking. “Any idea how you get to be a man like that? What happened to him? Did his mother drop him on his head? Was he the nerd who wore an ugly brace on his leg and everyone beat him to a pulp at lunchtime—?”

She was opening the door leading down to Dad’s study.

“—If you could shed some light on that it’d be great, because I, for one, am pretty con found ed—”

“Ms. Brewster—?”

“—keeps me awake at night—”

She was clunking down the stairs.

“I–I think my dad would prefer that you wait up here.”

She ignored me, walking the rest of the way down. I heard her fumble with the switch to the overhead lights, then yank the chain of Dad’s green desk lamp. I hurried after her.

When I entered the study she was, as I both expected and feared, inspecting the six butterfly and moth cases. Her nose was almost touching the glass of the third case from the window and a small cloud had formed over the female Euchloron megaera, the Verdant Sphinx Moth. It wasn’t her fault she was drawn to them; they were the most riveting things in the room. Not that Lepidoptera displayed in Ricker cases was an unusual thing (“Let’s Make a Deal” Lupine told Dad and me they were a dime a dozen at estate sales, and could be purchased on the street in New York City for “forty big ones”), but many of these specimens were exotics, rarely seen outside of a textbook. Apart from the three Cassius Blues (which looked quite dreary in comparison to the Paris Peacock just next to them — three wan orphans standing beside Rita Hayworth), my mother had purchased the others from butterfly farms in South America, Africa and Asia (all of them supposedly humane, allowing the insects a full life and natural death before collection; “You should have heard her on the phone drilling them about the living conditions,” Dad said. “You’d have thought we were adopting a child.”). The Cairns Birdwing (4.8 in.), the Madagascan Sunset Moth (3.4 in.) were so luminescent, they looked as if they weren’t real, but crafted by Nicholas and Alexandra’s legendary toymaker, Sacha Lurin Kuznetsov. With the most dazzling materials at his fingertips — velvet, silks, furs — he could craft chinchilla teddy bears, 24-carat dollhouses in his sleep (see Imperial Indulgence , Lipnokov, 1965).