Only a Paper Moon

Catherine expected Albert home nearly an hour ago, along with some of the other officers from his unit. Once a month, Catherine had the younger, unwed boys over for dinner, to ensure they got a proper home cooked meal at least once in a while. Yet, every chair around the dining room table remained vacant. A roast on the table sat coldly, flanked with a cheap bottle of wine and wilting flowers, and Catherine had given up on laying out flatware. Even in his absence, it was easy for her to see why the younger officers admired Albert; he was a strong figure. His broad frame and the brevity with which he spoke left no room for insolence. When Albert’s patrol car pulled up to a scene, a certain sense of relief swept over other officers. He was the cop they all aspired to be. She certainly missed his presence.

Catherine reluctantly walked into the kitchen to start cleaning up dishes from the meal preparation. As she moved along the length of the tawny counter tops, she turned the radio on, softly, allowing Sinatra to ease the silence out of her home. A wispy strand of auburn hair slipped out of place, and stood against Catherine’s skin like a flame. Irritated, she tousled the hair back into place and began to fill the sink with dishes. She examined each dish as she placed them in the sink, making note of every crack and chip. They were hand-me-downs from her parents, well past their prime. She washed them gently, as not to further damage them, and immersed herself in worries over where Albert and the poor boys could be.

Last week on the news Catherine heard the story of a woman who was brutalized near Mussolini’s Italian Eatery uptown. While she waited for her husband to bring their new Cadillac around from the gated parking lot in the back, a hooded man accosted her from behind. The crook ripped a string of pearls from her neck, spreading tiny globes throughout the cracks on the sidewalk. The villain then beat her, landing blows on her face first, spreading thoroughly to the rest of her body before running off. Her husband found her on the street corner, as his car’s headlights washed over her crumpled body. Catherine imagined the woman now confined within a hospital room, trapped by stark white walls and linoleum.

It terrified Catherine to imagine Albert and the young boys among these criminals. For all she knew he could be laying in an alley, gasping for air, while his stoic eyes staring down the barrel of a gun. The thought of Albert dying occupied Catherine’s mind on a near daily basis. She knew absolutely that Albert would die a hero, most likely within the next year or so. She would don a lavish black dress at the public ceremony where the entire town would pay their respects to the terribly young widow. The mayor would relay the expected comments about a dying serviceman and not a word more while shaking her hand. All things considered, it would be a pleasant affair, like swallowing a pill.

As Catherine’s mind began to wander into another curious murder scenario, static screeched through the radio. Catherine jolted stiffly upwards, dropping a plate on the median of the sink, sending shards of porcelain into the murky dishwater. The static subsided into a foreign code announcement, before allowing President Eisenhower’s latest campaign speech to fill the room. Catherine pushed up the lacey sleeves of her blouse, and delicately skimmed the broken dish out of the water as she listened to Eisenhower’s booming voice announce his campaign against “Communism, Korea and Corruption!”

The blatant hatred in Eisenhower’s voice felt oddly reassuring to Catherine, as she considered how communism infiltrated her own community. Catherine’s town was neither particularly large nor small, and instead sat awkwardly in the middle of the continuum. There was enough people in the town to create a crowd, but rarely enough to create any real excitement. That is, until the unthinkable incident at Affton Heights Theater uptown, just down the street from Mussolini’s.

Catherine recalled her acquaintance with the local playwright as a charming experience, in spite of his recent descent into espionage and all around civil disobedience. Catherine could not say Mr. Asher was attractive, at least not in the physical sense. His eyes sat oddly low on his face, and his hairline receded much too high. However, Catherine found his wit and the liveliness behind his words absolutely amorous. Catherine and Albert made it a point to attend the local productions when they could, before Mr. Asher’s plays moved on to bigger stages. As Mr. Asher became more recognized in the elitist theater circuit of the Capital, Catherine assumed it would only be a matter of time before he left this town and outsourced his creativity elsewhere.

Mr. Asher continued to parade through Catherine’s thoughts as she pulled the drain plug out of the sink, funneling yellowed water out of sight. While listening to Eisenhower conclude his attack upon the traitors of America, she grabbed a dish rag .One at a time, Catherine ran the rag along each dish, vanquishing every water droplet in her path. Static sputtered out of the radio, replacing Eisenhower, and soon subsided into something much more pleasant. The music was lively, akin to the jazz played at the theater. Dancing along with nothing more than a washcloth, Catherine imagined herself sitting in the theater, next to Albert. He always went to his barber before attending a play, and his rigid blonde hair formed perfect right angles in alignment with his temples. Always pristine, Catherine thought, as she tapped her foot along to the beat.

Catherine always saw something regal in the theater, with the golden lighting and velveteen seats surrounding the stage. Before taking their seats, Catherine and Albert always admired the artwork along the walkways .Going to the theater together always gave them a false sense of culture, as though they had something to be arrogant about. Canvases of brightly colored pop culture and irony spewed ideals that neither of them understood, but they loved to look all the same. Automobiles, lips and Coke bottles emphasized in all the wrong places and colors stood boldly before them, waiting for some sort of analysis neither felt prepared to deliver.

“I think this one is about freedom, Catherine. Limitless freedom,” Albert would say, as he cocked his head artfully to the side.

“Oh, yes…. freedom,” Catherine concurred, although she only saw precisely what was on the canvas; a collage of grocery store items printed in outlandish colors. Catherine truly saw a wasted canvas.

The lights dimmed in the theater, rushing Catherine and Albert to their seats. Hidden in the darkness, she brushed her nails across Albert’s face. Waiting for Albert to return the sweet gesture, she puckered her smile. Albert stared at the stage in front of them, like stone, watching the overbearing curtains shake in anticipation of the show. She pretended to wipe a smudge off her rose tinted lips, slipping her pride back into her handbag.

If Catherine remembered anything about this particular play, it was that she did not like it. She thought it was crude, and rather dangerous in its own right. The play began with a metallic statue of Stalin toppling to the ground at the hands of the masses, engaged in a full on riot on the stage. The play ended with a Soviet leader waving an American flag while stepping on the heads of those very same masses until they no longer squirmed. Catherine couldn’t be bothered to recall the entire plot; a play was such a long thing, with so much fighting and theatrics. She instead could not help but look at the misplaced smile on Albert’s face. Catherine was a good American; she did not like the play. What she could not help but remember was how thoroughly Alfred had enjoyed it.

When the newspaper released a list of locally affiliated communists not long after the play debut, Catherine felt uneasy when she saw Mr. Asher’s name. This particular play never made it to the big stages in the Capital, and Mr. Asher seemingly disappeared overnight, for all she knew he was drifting down the Danube in the foothills of Hungary.

Catherine realized she was staring aimlessly into an empty sink, and walked over to her cupboard to retrieve a broom. She began to sweep the floors, back and forth, slipping into a soothing redundancy. Catherine always yearned for wooden floors, but Albert saw no reason to replace the linoleum. The linoleum reminded her of something troublesome; each square was much too orderly and sterile. Sometimes she caught a distorted reflection of herself in the tiles, and the misshapen contours of her face sickened her.

No matter how vigorously Catherine swept, believing that Albert was simply working late became harder to swallow. Catherine imagined Albert now, morphing the naïve young officers into crude Bolsheviks, making Mr. Asher’s plays sacred literature. Feeling a slight, unpleasant delirium, Catherine thought regretfully of when the police force in the Capital went on strike for higher wages last year. At the weekly dinners with Albert and his naïve officers, the topic sat heavily on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Initially, all the young men rehashed the paper’s headlines. They dismissed the officer’s selfishness and how subversive the message was to society. Albert responded tactfully. He aroused something in the men when he spoke of the grueling hours they shared away from home, how a paycheck never seemed to go far enough, how any day one gunshot may end it all. It was unspoken, safely unspoken, but there was a quiet agreement that the Capital officers were bold, and perhaps even brave. Albert turned Catherine’s dining room table into a Communist Manifesto.

Catherine sighed, and propped the broom against the wall. She wandered past the dining room table, taking the bottle of wine with her into the den. An entire wall of her living room was floor to ceiling windows, framing a dainty paper moon pasted behind the clouds. Immediately, she drew the curtains shut. The neighbors received no invitation into her private affairs tonight. Adjacent to the windows was a soot veiled fireplace, with Catherine and Albert’s wedding pictures adorning the mantel. She slid past a pair of paisley wingback chairs to look at the photos, wiping dust from the frames as she tried to relive the smile captured on her face. Catherine could not, and instead uncorked the bottle of wine.

She allowed herself to collapse in a chair, and kicked off her heels for the first time today. The wine tasted like a cherry medicine, overly thick and bitter, but seemingly efficient. Catherine’s thoughts of Albert became increasingly convoluted, teetering on the brink of comedy. She pictured Albert’s patrol car, pulling into the driveway of an inconspicuous white ranch house, with blooming mums along the driveway. Albert, disguised by his uniform, would knock on the door in the middle of the night without provoking a second glance from anyone. A slight woman with a remarkable resemblance to Grace Kelly would open the door, inviting him inside.

Catherine knew Albert accepted her offer, and slipped inside the mostly empty house of his mistress. Her blonde hair was pinned up, framing tomorrow’s curls. She blushed after realizing how disheveled she looked, while Albert insisted she was stunning. An impartial observer would find the whole situation quite romantic, Catherine thought.

Albert and his mistress made small talk, Catherine assumed about the weather. Albert always had something to say about the weather. He hated humidity and the way the damp air made his uniform stick to his arms during the summer, when he was forced to roll the windows of his patrol car down. Then it occurred to Catherine that perhaps Albert spoke of more interesting things than rainclouds when he was with this other woman. Albert revealed to her his war stories and the death of his friends, topics foreign to Catherine. He told her about living in Birmingham when he was younger, and how unforgettable a southern summer night truly is. He told her he had fallen in love once before and how it faded so dismally over the years into something like contempt. He told her how thankful he was they met, as they made their way into a back bedroom.

The bottle of wine was empty now, cast down atop the carpet. As Catherine began to follow Albert into the concubine’s bedroom, a knock at the door saved her from such revolting thoughts. Catherine felt unbalanced and stumbled up out of her chair. It was nearly eleven o’clock at night, and she knew Albert must have forgotten his keys. As she staggered to answer the door, it swung open.

A stout nurse entered room 216, removing a metallic pair of earphones as she cleared the doorway. Her sneakers rubbed against the linoleum, producing a shrill whine as she walked into the room. She observed her patient, standing blankly in front of the doorframe. The woman was frail and nearing the age of 85. Her white hair had begun to fall out, and the curvature of her spine became more pronounced each day. The bags under her eyes made it apparent she had not slept all night, and the wrinkles all over her body made it apparent she had not truly slept in years. On the table beside her bed, a plate of oatmeal and sausage sat coldly, flanked by a glass of water and a care chart, waiting to be checked off.

“Cathy, could you not sleep again?” the nurse asked. “We’ll make a note of it on your chart so that Dr. Bower can adjust your medication. I need to check your blood sugar now, and I’m telling you you’re going to have to eat that oatmeal sweetheart or you’ll feel just awful.”

Catherine did not respond, nor did Catherine understand. She simply stood back as a spectator, as her world unraveled. The bottle of wine dissipated into a crumpled magazine, with pages haphazardly ripped out. Her fire place devolved into a barred window, overlooking a rundown parking lot cluttered with plain cars. She felt the ground grow cold under her feet, as linoleum ate away the safety of her warm den. Catherine stared in horror as this demonic woman crept closer.

The nurse picked up Catherine’s chart, to ensure the night staff properly executed Miss Cathy’s care. The stark letters atop the page read “Monet Geriatric Psychological Therapy Center.” The nurse skimmed the columns on the chart, approving each check mark. She read the comments section last. Refusal to sleep, eat and generally cooperate with staff. Blood sugar low, check again in morning.

The nurse scoffed, irritated they allowed Catherine to skip dinner, and she began to walk over to Catherine. The nurse reached for her hand to guide her over to the bed, but she quickly pulled away as Catherine screamed, quite loudly. Catherine flailed at the peculiar woman, carving deep scratches into her face in the process. The nurse flinched backwards instinctually as she prepared to execute the normal routine.
“Miss Cathy, I know you’re tired but we have to do this. Why don’t you sit on the bed? I can turn on the TV for you, you can relax and then I can just leave you be for awhile, ok?”

“Go to hell,” Catherine hissed, as she spit little white pills on the floor.

“Now Cathy, why did you go and do that?”

The nurse bent down, retrieving the medicine Catherine hid under her tongue overnight. Before she had the chance to fully stand up, Catherine was atop her, kicking and biting and screaming. The nurse wrapped her arms around Catherine’s waist while still crouching, forcing her into a chair.

She quickly backed away from Catherine and pressed a button on the intercom imbedded within the wall.

“Code Red in 216, all available personnel to 216,” she shouted over the static.

In a matter of seconds, two other nurses walked in the room, interrogating Cathy’s nurse for an explanation. As Catherine screamed and attempted to bolt out of the hospital room, the situation quickly became self explanatory. The two nurses grabbed Catherine’s arms, forcing her back over to her bed.

Catherine did not understand the nurses explain how quick and easy pricking her finger would be. She did not see their hopeful smiles as they told her a sedative would make things much simpler. She did not realize they were putting her in restraints. She did not see their faces or even hear their voices.

All Catherine felt was white walls and linoleum closing in on her. All Catherine heard was Eisenhower bellow “Communism, Korea and Corruption!” All Catherine saw was Albert finally walk through the door, with the Communist regime oozing out of the tip of a syringe aimed directly at her heart.