Catastrophe Insurance

In the afterglow of making love in Jerry's car one warm spring night in 1954, Pam said: "We both were abused, neglected, unloved children. I still have scars on my body from my parents' beatings. Your scars are mental. You have no family you can depend on. Your parents ignored you. When you needed them, they were never there. Neither of us ever felt we belonged to anyone."

For Pam, this was serious talk, unlike her usual compulsive good humor. She said, "Let's promise always to be each other's catastrophe insurance. No matter what happens, we'll always know there is one person in the world who will come if we really need someone. We'll each have someone to belong to: we'll belong to each other."

Pam had always been afraid of becoming as crazy as her mother. "If I'm ever put away," she said, "you'll come get me and take me to live on a farm somewhere far out in the country. We'll live where the routine is simple, where no one but you will see or judge me. If you are ever very sick, I'll come and take care of you.” Neither of them would ever commit suicide without first giving the other a chance to try to stop it.

That spring, they often talked about their catastrophe insurance, although – because Jerry was supposed to go away to college in the fall – they did not expect to marry. Jerry never expected they would keep their promise; rather, he expected they would lose touch with each other, and the importance of their pledge would fade. Jerry was wrong. At the end of two empty years as a creative writing major at Stanford, during which he had made no friends, his favorite professor said to him, "Your writing is formally correct, but lifeless. Don't you have anything to say?’ After that, Jer refused to go back to school. The next fall, Pam and Jerry suffered through elaborate, expensive, embarrassing family formalities culminating in an exhausting wedding ceremony.

During their week at the Shasta Honeymoon Lodge, Pam and Jerry felt out of phase with the couples with whom they shared a table in the “handsome rustic dining room overlooking our pleasant honeymoon lake, with its quiet, private coves and soft, serene deep waters (see photo).” Perhaps the others had also not waited for a ceremony. It was obvious, nevertheless, that sex was still excitingly new for them. Pam and Jerry felt decades older. After the draining wedding preparations, and nerve-fraying last-minute pressures, they craved rest, not sex.

The third morning at Shasta, they stayed in bed, skipping breakfast. “I want a baby soon,” Pam whispered. “Just think, the two of us, Mom and Dad!” Jerry was frightened. He did not want to share Pam with anyone. Briefly, he thought of trying to avoid sex near the middle of her month, but realized that this would never work without her active cooperation. He was not sure enough of her love to do anything that would explicitly deny what she wanted. It was easier to do nothing, and let any positive action be hers. Pam simply stopped taking the pills. Thirteen months later, he went with her to the gynecologist's office to hear him confirm the positive pregnancy test. Pam was radiant. On the way out of the medical building, Pam saw her former high school gym teacher. She ran up to the old maid. “Miss Fellstine, guess what, I'm pregnant!” she almost shrieked. Miss Fellstine was properly congratulatory. Jerry felt constrained to act pleased, although inwardly he was panicked. He did not feel ready for fatherhood. The baby on the way was Pam's, not his,

When Pam gave birth to a little girl, Susan, Jerry was attending a meeting of the Paper Industry Association. Susan was born with severe spina bifida and lived eleven months.

“You're lucky,” the doctor told them. “Now you can concentrate on having another. You won't be burdened any more.

To help Pam cheer up, Jerry scheduled a surprise week away for the two of them in a resort hotel in Yucatan. He told her the good news in the limousine on the way back from the cemetery. Pam cried silently the rest of the way home, went directly to bed, and refused to leave her bedroom, eat, or speak.

Though Jerry had not wanted the baby, now that it was dead, it felt to him as if Pam had somehow betrayed him. She was not the perfect wife he needed to make his family the perfect family, to show his parents, to show the world, that he was flawless. Nevertheless, he felt obligated to try again to console her. The next evening when he came to bed, she lay quietly, eyes closed, face blank. He climbed in next to her and pressed his naked body against hers. When she did not respond, he said, “Maybe we should be happy with just each other. It could happen again. It could be something in the way your womb works.

As he remembered it later, Pam's response was instant. Suddenly, he felt in his groin the worst pain he had ever felt. He screamed, expecting Pam to help him. Instead, she rolled on top of him and began scratching his face, tearing at the skin around his eyes

Afterward, he was confused and bewildered. No one had hit him in anger since second grade. He felt that he would never be able to trust her again. But he decided that it was something he should have expected, considering how her parents had treated her. He decided that Pam was still covered by their catastrophe insurance: He would not end the marriage. He would not resist if Pam decided she wanted to try for another baby.

Pam did not conceive again. After three years, she insisted they begin the humiliating fertility specialist tour. Jerry joked that he would have to send a valentine each year to a certain test tube at the fertility clinic.

Meanwhile, Jerry made too much money as a featherbed no-show executive in his father's paper products company. They lived expensively, entertained richly, and traveled to out-of-the-way places that were supposed to be interesting. Jerry grew increasingly bored. To compensate, he increased his alcohol consumption at their nearly nightly parties. But alcohol was a downer, and he needed a stimulant. He tried coke. Eventually, he spent a year at a “rest” home.

Pammi rarely visited him, though she telephoned almost every day and wrote regularly each week. “I get too depressed on my drive back,” she explained, “and somehow that always translates into frustrated horniness. Besides, it's a three-hour drive for little more than an hour of visiting.”

At the rest home, Jerry met Gerda. She came twice a week to visit her husband, Matt, Jerry's room-mate. Matt surprised everyone by suiciding one week before he was due to go home. Six weeks later, Gerda came to visit Jerry. “I noticed no one seems to visit you,” she explained. Gerda was ten years older than he, a former milk-bacteriologist, hypochondriacal, mother-obsessed, anxious, and desperate. Jerry decided their relationship was not a betrayal of Pam: Gerda was the over-solicitous mother he had never had.

He expected to come home to the Pammi he had left: a saccharinically submissive and conforming suburbia wife, preoccupied with her rose bushes and Delftware. Their marriage never recovered from what he found: the phone never stopped ringing; often it was a different man. “Tell Pammi Tommy B. called,” a voice might say. “Tell her I'll be back in town on the 21st, and that I hope you'll have cleared out by then. Hope you don't mind, pal. You're her brother, aren't you?” It was not that he minded that Pammi liked and needed sex – he minded that she had gotten to like and need it so much more while he had been away.  His sexless continuing "friendship" with Gerda somehow compensated for his inability to satisfy Pam. 

Gerda's dining-room table was white enamel, matching the white-enamel paint walls. “White is the best color,” Gerda explained. “It makes it easiest to see dirt. I can't stand dirt! Here,” she added, “eat your soy steak. Male hormone is bad for health, so if men avoid animal food they are less unhealthy.”

“Marry me, Gerda.”

“What?! Do you know what you're saying? I don't appreciate your not being serious. If I marry you, you'll have to give up all your addictions. Do you really think you can? I won't have alcohol in my house, or drugs, or anything improper – you know what I mean – I'd rather not talk about it.”

“That's why I need you. I need someone to keep me off the bottle and off coke.”

“I would never forgive you if I discovered you were too weak to control yourself. I expect control. I respect control. Remember: you will have to give up every addiction, not just alcohol and drugs. I wish I knew why testosterone makes so many men disgusting!”

Pam moved to Buffalo to live with her unmarried brother (now dead). Once or twice a year, Jer has been appearing at Pam's door on a “business trip” that temporarily satisfies his sex and drink hungers. For both of them, a bitter non-marriage, but the best they can manage.

Jerry feels that again and again over the years he has betrayed himself and whoever was foolish enough to trust him. Now, it seems that Pammi is about to get a special, industrial strength dose of betrayal.

Two days ago, Monday, March 10, 1975, her telegram came – the one he always expected to send her. He stands next to her bed. The air in her hospital room tastes like water left exposed in a refrigerator overdue for cleaning. She struggles to sit up, using her hands to shove herself up from the stale-looking sheets. This simple act causes her to breathe rapidly. Her gaunt cheeks flush. Her skin has become thick and coarse. Wrapped around her head, bandages hide her once blonde hair.

 “Did you have a good trip, darling?” This trite concern is not like her intense, quirkily humorous, imaginative persona.

 “As good as could be expected, considering how worried I was about you. What ails you?” Trite for trite.

 She smiles at that. She is glad to hear he worried. It gives her a chance (as he had hoped it would) to reassure him. This, he hopes, will reassure her, too.

 “Don't worry, darling, I'll pull through now.” The triteness is uncanny. She flashes him a brave smile, and then, like a character in a grade-C soap opera, her smile dissolves into tears as she falls back onto her pillow. She sobs, conventionally pale, supine, crying silently with her eyes closed. He realizes she is dying. With an obvious effort, she stops sobbing and opens her eyes. In a faint, breathless little-girl voice, she asks, “What did you tell Gerda?”

He had decided to tell Pam the truth. “I told her I had a sudden business conference in Niagara.”

“Wasn't she afraid you'd see me here?” He senses that she wishes Gerda knew the truth.

“She thinks you're back on the Coast. About six months ago, I told her I heard you had moved.”

 This pleases her. As she smiles, he glimpses her familiar perceptive, witty self. She is reassured that he has been planning to go on seeing her. Turning on her right side, she cups her head in her hand, exposing the terrible way the skin hangs loose between her chin and her emaciated neck.

“I never thought I'd use the catastrophe insurance. I always thought you would. I'm glad I had to use it first. I want you to go on living and loving, Jer, now that I'm dead.” She stares at him blankly.

“Don't talk nonsense, Pam. You're going to get well.”

She starts to speak again, as if there were no interruption:

“You can leave Gerda and not be guilty. You can find yourself a nice, sweet little girl and settle down in Oshkosh and write menus.” They used to talk about his switching from selling paper products to writing – but he had felt unqualified to write anything more sophisticated than a menu.

“I would be a two-time loser. No ‘sweet little girl’ would want me. Get well, Pam, I need you.”

“Would you marry me again?”

“Yes, Pammi, yes! I would!” With this bit of feigned sincerity, he knows he has lost her whether she recovers or not, because she would never forgive this lie. He wants Pam to live more than he wants her to be his. Besides, he doubts that it matters.

“What will you do with Gerda? Give her back to her mother? Jer, you never could chloroform the kittens when the experiment was over.”

“Gerda needs me, but so do you. And I need you: Two against one.”

“Let's stop this dumb improv, Jer. I'm not going to get better. I have a brain tumor, or some sort of cancer of the head and the body and the gut and the bones. I'm turning into crud. I think I got it from licking brass doorknobs, or maybe I had athlete's foot of the crotch and it spread to my brain. Maybe it climbed up the big nerve I have reaching down there.”

Just then, a doctor enters the room, mercifully interrupting his image of Pam drooling idiotically. The doctor is a short man with an oily, sweaty face. He needs a shave. His face looks as if it always needs a shave. He looks like a shrunken, greasy, young Richard Nixon.

“Mr. Johns?”

Jerry nods. “Doctor?”

"I'm Dr. Gombeck. Can we talk a minute? Mrs. Johns needs to rest now. You can see her again after supper.”

They walk down the hall to a beautifully decorated lounge large enough to accommodate scores of people. No one is in it, and all the lights are off. With the heavy blue-green drapes drawn, rather than a bright March afternoon, it seems about nine P.M. of a late summer day. The blue Scandinavian couches seem to shimmer and blur, as if with heat.

“Although you remarried, you are still on good terms with her?”

“Yes.”

“"I'm glad to hear that. She has no immediate family. She speaks of you often and called for you when she was delirious.”

“When was that?” He blurts the question, losing the calm professional air he tries to assume with medicine men.

“When we did the exploratory operation on her brain, we realized it was hopeless.”

Jerry says nothing.

“We think she has a week – two at most. She won't be conscious toward the end. These things go very fast, thank God! She has pulled herself together because of your visit, but tonight you'll see what's really happening. When they get tired, it shows more. However, you can help us make her more comfortable.”

Jerry still has nothing to say.

“By the way, I'm the neurologist. The surgeon on the case was Dr. Pulse, like what you take from the wrist. He'll probably come by tomorrow morning. I'll be on call most of this afternoon if you have any questions. Why don't you go across the street and buy yourself a drink? She won't be ready to see you again for at least a couple of hours.”

Jerry walks slowly down the hall to the stairway. For some reason, he has to walk down, not ride the elevator. He feels very tiny as he walks through the lobby. Outside, he feels even smaller. The vista of the hospital grounds, about seventy feet from the doorway to the street, seems as vast as the Great Square in Rome. From somewhere inside his mind, a dry wind seems to whip autumn leaves across the dusty sidewalk.

He takes the path to the parking lot, then slowly drives the rented car toward the outskirts of town, carefully obeying the traffic laws. In the airport car-rental parking lot, he sits in the car, remembering the night when they made their promise. He thinks about how, before the promise, they made love. He tries to remember how it felt. Now, he feels numb.

He knows he tried to love her. He always wanted to love her, or someone. Something was missing in him or in her or in both of them. At least, he never struck her. At least, he never treated her the way her parents did. At least, he wanted to love her.

Now, the promise, the contract, is due for payment. He is about to get drunk or catch a plane back to Gerda, or go back to the stateroom where she is about to weigh anchor for her last voyage – leaving without him, leaving him alone.

After two hours sitting motionless and chilly in the car, his bladder forces him to go into the terminal building.

He sends her a wire (25 words, counting punctuation): “Bon voyage. Love. From one terminal to another. Wish I could travel with you. Too much unfinished business. Au revoir”

He reserves space on a night Y-class flight back. With the money he saves by going Y-class, he buys himself a quart and buys Gerda a stuffed dog: she collects them.