Chemistry and Other Stories

The Projectionist’s Wife

One warm December morning forty years ago I stood in a grove of oak trees, the blood on my face confirming what I already knew. At my feet lay what the old deer slayers called a hart — a big male with antlers sprouting like coral from its forehead. My right hand gripped a Browning 30–30, the rifle I’d raised earlier that morning to defend Mrs. Merwin, the projectionist’s wife, a woman who came from a place that did not exist.

“Drink up,” my uncle had said earlier that morning as he handed me a cup of coffee. “You can’t be snoozing when a deer comes your way.”

I nodded, too sleep-dazed to speak. The grandfather clock chimed five o’clock as I sipped the black coffee, ate the gravy and cathead biscuits my uncle made as I dressed. We spoke in whispers, because my mother and aunt still slept in the back rooms. My father had died when I was eight, leaving behind a son and a twenty-nine-year-old widow, who now spent what remained of her early adulthood working inside the town’s paper plant. My uncle, besides giving my mother and me a place to live, served as a surrogate father. He taught me how to use a saw and ax, catch and clean a trout, and hunt — first tin cans scattered on a hillside, then squirrels and rabbits, finally, at age twelve, deer.

Often my first cousin Jeff or my uncle’s neighbor Luke Callahan hunted with us. I liked Jeff but did not care much for Mr. Callahan, a red-nosed, scarecrow-thin man who drank too much and told jokes I did not understand. Unlike Jeff, I hadn’t been blooded yet, my only shot a flash of antler behind trees. I’d watched enviously the previous November as my uncle and Mr. Callahan dipped their hands in the warm blood, reddened Jeff’s face as if the blood was war paint.

“You ain’t a man till you get blooded, boy,” Mr. Callahan had said, looking at me as he tasted the deer blood on his fingers. “I killed my first deer when I was ten.”

“All Russell needs is a decent shot,” my uncle said. “He’s shot targets all summer so he wouldn’t get rusty. He’s been hitting them too. His time will come, Luke, and he’ll be ready.”

And I was ready to be a man. I saw my body’s readiness in the stubble on my chin, the way I’d sprouted four inches over the summer. I felt a readiness inside me as well, not as I waited in that deer stand but in the darkness of the Enlo Cinema.

The theater Mr. and Mrs. Merwin ran was the one exotic place in a town I always remember in shades of gray, in large part because of Carolina Paper Company, whose twin smokestacks sooted the whole valley. Most of Enlo’s adults worked inside that mill. They all seemed to wear an ashy pallor, as if it were papier-mâché instead of flesh wrapped around their bones. But it was more than the paper mill, the grown-ups it swallowed for eight hours each day, or even the highland weather when so many days passed in a monotone of fog and drizzle. It was the surrounding mountains themselves, the way they cast huge daggers of shadow over the valley, blocked any distant gaze as we moved beneath in the gloaming like cave fish.

And this was why stepping into that theater lobby was like stepping into a radiant dream — the multihued coming-attraction posters, shelves of bright-wrapped candy, the popcorn machine’s yellow lambency. Mrs. Merwin was a part of that brightness. She dressed bright as a parrot from head to toe, the cloth tight against her skin, mouth rimmed scarlet with lipstick, a woman literally from nowhere who’d suddenly appeared in Enlo’s midst. It was she who allowed me entrance, sitting in the ticket booth like a fortune-teller, exchanging the coins my mother had reluctantly given me for two hours’ respite from a dreariness that seeped through my skin to my very bones.

Mrs. Merwin was the only person in town I could imagine describing as glamorous, not only how she dressed but how she smelled, her perfume ordered directly from Europe, Mr. Lusk the postmaster said. She spoke a different English as well, faster, sounding out her g and d endings. Even her first name was glamorous, a consonant-thick montage no one in Enlo but her husband could pronounce.

Mrs. Merwin told those who asked that she had been born in a country that no longer existed. Her parents were descended from nobility, but they had lost everything in the war, even their country. Whether what she said was true no one really knew, except perhaps Mr. Merwin, who’d brought her back from Europe as his war bride, but he was a gruff man who said little even to his kinsmen, a man who had no children of his own and little use for those who entered his theater.

Mr. Merwin was a projectionist, a man most comfortable in the hunched darkness of his profession. When the last ticket was sold, he left his wife to attend the concession stand, disappearing through the curtain next to the bathrooms and up the winding metal stairs. There was no balcony, so he sat alone up there, a wizard who brought forth nightly illusions with a weave of his hands as he threaded film through the projector and the movie sputtered to life. But Mr. Merwin seemed to cast a spell on everyone except himself. Perhaps as the source of that mirage, he knew too well that the bright worlds holding his audience transfixed were mere celluloid, easily bottled up in the gray canisters he exchanged in Asheville every Thursday morning. Mr. Merwin appeared immune to the spell his wife cast as well, as terse with her as he was to any child.

“I don’t know why she stays with that old grump,” my aunt said one Sunday. She, my mother, and my uncle lingered at the dinner table as I oiled the Browning in the front room and pretended not to listen. “He should have known better than marry a woman that much younger. I wouldn’t be surprised if she just up and left him.”

“Where would she go?” my uncle asked. “Her country doesn’t exist anymore.”

“So she says,” my mother said. “I have my doubts about that, about a lot of things she’s claimed. We know what that war did to Arthur Merwin. He’s got scars and a Purple Heart to prove it. Besides, he gives her enough money to buy those fancy clothes and French perfume.”

“That could be her money,” my aunt said, “and probably is. I’ve never known a Merwin that was more than one paycheck from the poorhouse.”

“Well, all I know,” said my mother with finality, “is that a woman who dresses like that is looking for trouble, and sooner or later she’ll find it. As a matter of fact, I hear she’s been finding it for a while now. I suspicion Arthur knows what’s going on too.”

At the time it was easy to believe my aunt’s and uncle’s sympathies were more admirable than my mother’s. Those nights as I sat in the darkened theater I sometimes glanced back at the beam of light aimed at the screen. I wondered if Mr. Merwin was watching not the movie but the audience, and that made me feel uneasy. But I could not be sure what he was doing up there, since the light was too bright to look at for more than a moment.

What I do know is that when I was fourteen, his wife was as beautiful as any of the screen goddesses I watched in his theater. On Friday or Saturday nights I sat a few rows behind the girls in my ninth-grade class, girls whose bodies grew more curved and mysterious daily. I anointed myself with my dead father’s Aqua Velva and it wafted over the rows between us like a promise that I too was growing up. What they were becoming, Mrs. Merwin, with her hourglass figure and low, throaty voice, already was.

I waited until the MGM lion roared and IN CINEMASCOPE appeared in five-foot-high letters. Only then did I leave my seat, make my way blindly up the inclining carpet toward the red-glowing exit sign. The lobby was empty now, just me and Mrs. Merwin.

“What will you have, Russell?” she’d ask as I inhaled an odor like a field of flowers, and it was as if the smell rose like vapors into my brain and made me groggy, for inevitably I’d forget what I’d planned to order. Once I finally stammered out a few words, Mrs. Merwin would hand me my drink and whatever I’d chosen to eat. As she leaned forward to place the money in the metal box, I could see the globes of her breasts, the dark V between them. Then I’d sit back down in the dark, dazed by the wide worlds projected on the screen, by the girls who sat with me in the dark, but most of all by Mrs. Merwin.

IT WAS A late December Thursday when I discovered Mrs. Merwin was also part of the gray valley outside the theater. I was out of school for Christmas, and my uncle Roy, Luke Callahan, and I were hunting. The older men had given me the stand closest to the dirt road, only yards from the dead end that marked the boundary between my uncle’s land and state game lands.

“Don’t shoot toward the road,” my uncle reminded me. “We’ll be back at eleven. If it starts raining we’ll meet you at the house.”

“Don’t let the haints get you, boy.” Luke Callahan smirked, and they disappeared into the deeper woods, only the sound of their footsteps crushing the leaves, then nothing.

The sun was nowhere to be seen. Fog swirled around the deer stand like a current, and the wood planks swayed and creaked as if I were on a raft. I waited for the sound of deer hooves, trying not to think about the old woman who’d lost her way in these woods years ago. She’d been found by my grandfather, days dead, her back against a tree trunk as if waiting for him. Some people claimed she still walked these woods.

The curtain of fog did not lift as I crouched in the stand, the rifle cradled in my lap. Only the closest trees were visible, and the woods remained silent, no squirrels rustling the leaves, no crow cawing from a treetop. I checked my watch. The hands had moved so little I raised my wrist to my ear. Everything — trees, sound, time — seemed lost in the fog.

Then I heard the crackling of leaves, close, maybe thirty yards away, and coming closer, and despite what my uncle had told me I raised my rifle toward the road, peered into the scope, my thumb on the safety, index finger on the trigger. I heard voices, one voice I knew — then silence. They had stopped walking, stopped talking. I waited, the rifle still pressed against my shoulder, still aimed.

“No, not here,” Mrs. Merwin said. “It’s too close to the road.” She stepped out of the fog, and into the crosshairs of my rifle, one strap of her dress pulled off her shoulder, lipstick smeared on her face. A man I did not know followed her, a half-empty whiskey bottle in his hand.

“Yeah, here,” the man said, grabbing her arm with his free hand, snatching the quilts from her and dropping them on the ground.

“No,” Mrs. Merwin said. “Please, Lance, not here.”

He yanked the dress strap lower with his free hand, a pale breast fully exposed now.

“No,” she said and pushed him away.

The man stepped closer and slapped her, the sound sharp as a rifle shot. The left side of Mrs. Merwin’s face flushed scarlet. I saw the imprint of his hand and my thumb released the safety.

“Leave her alone,” I said, the gun trembling in my hands.

They did not see me at first, and it must have seemed the voice of God speaking from above. Mrs. Merwin covered her bare breast with one hand, pulled the strap up with the other. The man stood absolutely still, his hand open as if to slap anyone else who came near.

Then they found me, the man seeing the rifle, Mrs. Merwin seeing my face, or so it seemed, for the man’s first words were “Put that rifle down, boy.” Mrs. Merwin said, “Hello, Russell,” as if I’d just stepped up to her ticket booth. I did not lower the rifle. I kept it pointed at them, the barrel wavering like a compass needle.

“Put that rifle down, boy,” the man repeated.

“You hit her again I’ll shoot you,” I said.

“It’s okay, Russell,” Mrs. Merwin said. “He didn’t hurt me. He’s my friend.”

I thumbed the safety back on, lowered the rifle.

“Come down here,” the man said, but I wasn’t coming down.

“Russell,” Mrs. Merwin said. “This is not what it seems.” But it was exactly what it seemed, and we all knew it. No one said anything else. No one moved. We were like actors waiting for a cue that never came.

“We’re leaving now, Russell,” Mrs. Merwin finally said, picking up the quilts. “I hope you won’t say anything about this. People might not understand.”

The man started to say something, something threatening from his tone, but Mrs. Merwin hushed him.

“Please, Russell,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

She turned then, walked back toward the road, the man following her. They disappeared into the fog like apparitions.

ENLO IS A small town, and though I did not go to the theater in the following weeks, I eventually saw Mrs. Merwin. It was a cold afternoon in February, and my uncle had dropped me off to pick up a prescription while he ran some other errands. As I entered the drugstore I saw Mrs. Merwin across the street. She was dressed in a brown overcoat, her broom swaying back and forth as she swept the sidewalk in front of the theater. She was waiting for me when I stepped back outside.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” she said.

I didn’t want to meet her eyes, so I looked past her to where the paper mill’s smokestacks smoldered like snuffed-out birthday candles.

“I want to thank you,” she said, “for not telling. I made a mistake. That man that was with me, I’m never going to see him again. I wanted you to know that, Russell.”

I nodded, still not looking at her. I shoved my hands in my pockets and waited for her to finish whatever it was she felt compelled to tell me.

“What you did, trying to protect me from him, that took courage. What I’m saying is, in all this you’ve been very grownup.” She smiled. “You’ve been my knight in shining armor.”

She turned then, clasping the lapels of her overcoat, and walked back across the street. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the drugstore, hands in my pockets, watching her disappear into the theater.

I knew she was right about my being a man. I had killed my deer that same morning, less than an hour after I’d seen her and her lover in the woods. I heard leaves crunched softly and slow, deliberate footsteps moving toward me. I thought it might be Mrs. Merwin’s lover. I aimed the rifle into the gray swirl for the second time that morning, not knowing if I could pull the trigger. Then the deer stepped into the crosshairs of my scope. I took a deep breath, held it, aimed for the shoulder, and squeezed.

“A perfect shot,” my uncle said later as he and Mr. Callahan kneeled beside the deer, rubbing their hands in the blood that pooled on the flank.

“You’re a man now,” Mr. Callahan said, reeking of whiskey as he and my uncle dabbed my face, a drop dribbling onto my lips. The blood tasted like metal.

THE FOLLOWING SPRING Mrs. Merwin left her husband and Enlo. Most people assume she went back to Europe, looking for a place that no longer existed. I remember her at odd moments — when I smell a certain perfume, see an attractive woman dressed in a colorful outfit — and the past comes into focus, in such vividness it is almost tactile. I also think of her husband, years dead now. At age fifty-four I see him as I could not at fourteen, not so much an ill-humored wizard as a weary clockmaker god threading the stuff of dreams through the projector’s metal maze, then onto the second reel so he might watch in impotent solitude as his work slowly unraveled before him.