Mendocino Fire (12 page)

She gives him no encouragement. If he wants to say it, let him say it.

He says it. “Why paint the same thing over and over?”

More than a year later Bruce turns up, one hazy midsummer morning, in the form of a letter. Envelope, stamp, handwriting. A letter.

Hey X,

I'm hoping you won't just rip this into little pieces.

I want to believe you can look back on what we had without pain, but you would say that like always I am imposing my version of how things should be, without asking you. For the pain I caused you, I would like your forgiveness. Please forgive me.

Occasionally somebody says you're doing well out there and I'm glad. There are developments in my life, too. This is Robin holding Clem, who just said his first word. He had me wrapped around his finger from day one.

Listen X, make them treat you right out there in the Heart of Darkness and if you get back this way give me a call.

p.s. Happy 37th—be well.

She's no expert at telling babies' ages, but this one has to have been conceived long before they broke up. For
months
he had kept this secret. In those months she had kissed him, she had told him what she dreamed last night, she had done his laundry, she had confided her fears. He must not have known what to do; he must have been torn, hearing, under their domestic small talk,
the ticking clock of his predicament. The baby wears the kind of ominous knit cap favored by perpetrators of muggings and assaults. She makes a halfhearted attempt to tear the picture in two, but it's tough and flexible and destroying it would require scissors, and besides it's as if this picture has infinite depths and she can't see deeply enough, but that has to be shock. Disbelief, which causes this simple picture to seem strange. The baby's expression—opaque, lordly, insolent, dire—suggests the laserbeam confidence of the utterly beloved. He has been caught in the middle of a lunge, resisting the arms that hold him.

It is degrading to have lost him to so white a face, pale to its barely-there lashes and with the pointy rat nose sometimes seen on the monochromatically fair. But the mouth! The mouth is done in lipstick of a carnal, crude, trashy red, a third-world mouth, a Cuban mouth, and Ximena can't help wondering if the lover feels the need to mitigate her whiteness, if the ethnification of her mouth is owed to competitiveness with Ximena, about whom he must tell stories, feeling as he always has about Ximena's life, that its tragedy rubbed off on him and persists even now as an aura, the tingling persistent glamour of violent death. Ximena packs, biting her lower lip as she shoves notebooks and BlackBerry and reading glasses into her messenger bag, needing at last to confront him, to tell him that his theft of her life, his lover's theft of her
mouth
, has to stop, fifty miles of highway vanishing before she pulls over to dig out her cell, cancel her birthday dinner with Daniel, and ask can he feed Bad Cat while she's gone? Sunk deep between walls of corn, the yellow line sucks toward an irresistible vanishing point.

Ximena paints moonscapes across which the lunar wind blows esoteric litter, a tumbling bowler hat, a black dress, glowing rubber balls, flying scraps of paper bearing scribbled handwriting. They don't work for everyone, far from it, but her paintings are sought after, collected, given the minor awards that foretell greater awards in the future, deemed sufficiently
interesting
to justify lucrative visiting-artist stints and, out of the blue, the associate professorship at Iowa. No doubt her story plays a part, and the famous photograph.
LIFE
had caught her father, three days before his death, resting his bearded cheek against Ximena's hair while she toyed with his watch. She remembers this photograph from inside. That is: the feelings whose outward expression makes this photo memorable—the feelings that cause anyone seeing it for the first time to pause—were her feelings. Or: half of them were hers, the other half her father's. Usually undemonstrative, he had laid his cheek against her hair, his contentment in his child's presence, contentment of the kind almost anyone can feel, combined with weariness almost beyond comprehension. The tiny deliberate steps that undid his wristwatch were the most intimate actions Ximena had then ever performed on or with another body, and she loved him for letting her do them. Without the watch his forearm was a rakishly black-haired length of wild creature, tendony, bony, full of authority and life force, capable of great quickness, of (she had sensed it even then) violence. A man's arm, which she had set free. Ximena made the watch glide snakelike up her own thin arm, concentrating with a child's rapture in sensation—which can appear in a photograph as mere reverie—on bringing time to a halt.

Her aunt, the older of two, a black-browed, haggard, natural-
born martyr, led Ximena through a strange world of tin roofs and dusty alleys to the site of her father's death. Across a wall of adobe bricks tottered gigantic letters in fresh paint, reds and blues and blacks unmediated, as yet, by dust. Wasps clambered in and out of the holes in the wall. Each emergent wasp, posing on the rim of a bullet hole, took an instant to compose itself. Witless witnesses to her father's death, had they cowered inside their holes, or flown out enraged? Her father's name reeled across the wall in letters whose haste suggested peril, but someone had run the risk. Once written, the name had been embellished, paid homage, annotated with signs and slogans. It was only a question of time before it would be found by obscurers and erasers of history; it was bound to be a brief-lived salute, but while it lasted it was as brave as paint could be, as loving and outraged as hands could contrive. Here was a language Ximena spoke. She needed to press against that paint, to wet her fingertips and leave an imprint of her own, but her hard aunt, seizing the thick tail of the girl's hair, yanked her back.

The girl was handed over to the younger aunt, the smarter aunt, who managed to get them both to the country across which Ximena drives, high on the sense of destiny that attends certain self-destructive decisions. Caffeine sweeps every mote of delusion from the white room of consciousness.
Now
she understands. Bruce was still sleeping with
her
when that baby was conceived with the lover, when he came inside that albino with her little smile who probably told him she was going to keep it, she was going to have this baby
with or without you
, and Bruce would have looked from one to the other of the two women in his life and seen one whose sorrow was unrelenting and one whose need had a beginning and an end. A kind of end. As Ximena's grief never will.

The town has gone ahead without her: a new traffic light on Highway 1, a McDonald's painted a shade of blue sanctioned by the Coastal Commission, a hotel at cliff's edge where once a grove of towering shaggy eucalyptus had sifted the wind. In a dim room smelling of latex paint she opens the window for the evening breeze and leans out: yes, tatters and coils of beige-green bark litter the margin of bare ground between cliff and raw hotel. Ximena slides between newish sheets, and after a time realizes that she has been awake far too long. After such a long drive sleep is rightfully hers, but this paint-stinking room withholds it, the rustle of clean sheets repels it, impersonal pillows offend it. She tosses and moans and scratches fleeting itches, waking in wan eleven
A.M.
light with a headache and a weird chemical taste in her mouth.

Which could be guilt, or the premonition of guilt.

As in: doing something that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Or planning to.

Having driven halfway across the country in order to.

If she packs now and heads back to Iowa no one will get hurt. Breakfast—no, lunch—and she'll gas the car up for the long drive back across the flat states. Finally she grasps the essential rightness of signing over Smoke River to Bruce and his lover: to have stayed would have inscribed her obsession with the two of them in the marrow of her bones. As it is, she has been free—more or less free. Out over the ocean, a horizon-wide brushstroke of fog bides its time, but until it advances on the town every edge and outline has the chill clarity of coastal light, every little shingle on every little roof diamond-exact. Even the McDonald's is pretty. Where Highway 1 is, briefly, Main Street,
logging trucks roar through, leaving a wake of diesel fumes and dancing evergreen twigs. Ximena turns pages in a bookstore, the rustle of suffering, herself older than the last time she turned pages in this corner, wiser, tucks of disappointment around her smile. Even if she did want to call Bruce, she no longer has his cell number. That smallest, most ordinary token of acquaintance, and she doesn't have it. Fuck someone for ten years. She's not even thinking about love. Not love. Just all that fucking. Think how much fucking was involved. How many times and how nakedly, fucking till he tells you you're an angel. She buys a couple of paperbacks and after paying for them can't remember their titles or what they're about. On the sidewalk she contemplates the new streetlights the town has paid for, black cast-iron columns ascending to frosted globes meant to evoke the gaslights of an earlier, more genteel thoroughfare. Who are they kidding: Smoke River had always been the surly, xenophobic logging town. Its streets had never been lit. Yet among the improvements is a storefront advertising handmade
local
ice cream.

She's sitting at a table when, on the other side of fogged plate glass, a woman pauses to stare, the baby on her hip. Bruce's new wife, from the photograph. Staring at Ximena? No. Of course not. At the menu. Wondering if the ice cream's organic, if it's safe for baby, or for her given the allergies that must come with that pallor. See her private half-smile, because the baby's tugging on a lock of her hair and that's cute—it feels cute, Ximena can almost feel how it feels. Tug, tug. If this is hate it is small-scale, tight in its focus, and not fun, not energizing: it simply means you see clearly. You concentrate. Because here she is. Her eyebrows have been replaced with the single moronic band of her backward baseball cap, her hipster jeans try too hard, her Converse sneakers say she's already afraid of getting older, but in
this war, which this girl has no idea is a war, it's Ximena who's the loser. This girl has a greater claim on the world than she has. First there's the baby. That is a claim. Then there's Bruce. This girl can be awkward and foolish and inept, and still when he wakes and yawns and rolls over this is the face Bruce sees, those are the eyes looking back at him and not Ximena's, and as long as he wants her eyes looking back at him she has a hold on this world, and Ximena, who has lost his gaze forever, has no hold at all.

It's true what her lawyer said. Ximena has never met this person before. This person squats. The baby dismounts. Across black-and-white checkerboard tiles the toddler advances with the lordly shamble of a drunk who finds himself charming. Advances toward
Ximena
, his surreal little monkey hand with its actual greedy fingers seizing the cup on her table just as she jerks it away, their grabs clashing, the chocolate orb slobbering down her shirt to her lap, cradled there till she jerks her legs apart and lets it plop to the floor, his slow mother dragging the toddler back, vehemently apologizing, but it's clear she hopes for interruption, forgiveness, kindness, because he's a baby after all and maybe what happened was even kind of funny. But Ximena wipes theatrically at the chocolate Rorschach blot. She can't help thinking this person is a bad mother, letting this kid walk right up to strangers, steal
food
from them, and then expecting to hear
Don't worry about it
even as the kid picks up the orb from the floor and dabbles it at his mouth, which causes his mother to say
Don't sweetie that's nasty.
At her sharpness the baby throws the lumpen chocolate, which skids along the winding smear of its own melting. They all watch. Suddenly the mother thumps down on her ass with her legs stuck out on either side of the baby, letting her exhaustion show, and Ximena, who has had no
intention of pitying her, feels the swift unfolding of empathy, this woman or girl close to tears from embarrassment and not knowing what to do. No lipstick today, her lips barely a shade darker than her skin, fair except for the grainy redness flaming up her throat, an odd way to blush but interesting to watch. “Look, I am sorry, it's his age, there's a lot going on at one year old, all day he's been crazy to get away from me, I'd like to buy you another ice cream, please let me buy you another ice cream, what were you having?”

“Oh no, no, really, no need for that, it's all right.” She didn't intend to say anything so nice and is surprised.

“I'd like to. Chocolate, right? Please. It would make me feel better.”

Ximena doesn't say
Look, the ice cream cost a dollar seventy-nine, the shirt was three hundred bucks and is maybe my favorite piece of clothing in the world.

An aproned girl has emerged from behind the counter to crouch with a wet rag and dustpan, muttering
No problem, no problem, you guys, no problem.
In the relief from tension afforded by her mopping, the two strangers look right at each other. When their eyes meet there's the kind of click you get when your gaze meets a gaze of equal, kindred but not rivalrous, intelligence. Likeness like this—likeness of minds? in the slant taken on the world?—is rare, the affinity arising from it unmistakable, yet in this case it is worse than useless. Nothing can come of it. The baby sucks his fist, and his mother says to Ximena, “Let me make this up to you.” Ximena shakes her head. “But your shirt is ruined.” Fine, it's fine, really, she's got to get on with her day, seriously don't worry about it, Ximena self-conscious as she stands, dismayed that her blotched shirt has engendered this fresh round of apologies, saying it's nothing, deciding to get
out of there but wanting a last glance at this person she meant to dislike—to hate—and looking over her shoulder she walks right into an entering customer who says, “Oops,” and then, “Hey,” and then, “Wow,” and she is staring up into the eyes that are Bruce.