Mendocino Fire (13 page)

He has gone bald.

He didn't write this in the letter.

They are in the doorway.

The matched intensity of their stares—hers upward and his down, the hanging nearness of his face causing the slackened musculature around his unsmiling mouth to bulge ever so slightly downward, the flicker or play of recognition versus bewilderment in his non-smile, the expressive dark holes of his nostrils, the tiny beady lights of extra liquidity that cause his eye-whites to seem especially luminously clear, the distinctness of eyelashes and their strangeness when looked at closely and how warm he is and how the same old detergent used on his clothes has a different smell from his skin and how well the smells go together, their not knowing what comes next, their happiness, the feeling of being part of a true story again, their unwillingness to look away—adds up to a feeling of
at last: us again
.

There's a chance that inside the store Bruce's wife has not seen what has just taken place, and collecting her wits Ximena says, “Sorry.” Her tone claims they are strangers. Right away she knows it's odd she lied, but he accepts her having done so.

He is even, she sees, relieved.

He says, “Hey, no problem.”

The new lover may or may not have witnessed their encounter, she might have been talking to the baby, she may have been spooning ice cream toward his gaping hole of a mouth with a
plastic spoon. There's a chance she didn't notice what happened in the doorway, but even if she had, she might have understood their mutual stare as jolted apologetic curiosity, natural when someone has just bumped into you. Ximena walks away with a quickening sense of guilt: recognized for what it was, that stare could cause problems with the new wife. She walks fast, willing him to get away with it. To be okay with the crazy intensity that overcame them in that doorway and not to let it show. Detachedly she thinks he looked good. Lucky his skull is a nice shape. The pushy cranial roundedness suits his height, his doctorliness, his air of being slightly out of it. This, then, is the other side of the betrayal coin, the way the two of them must have felt about
her
: she wants not to cause pain.

She turns around to see if she's the one being called out to.

“It felt so wrong seeing you walk off,” the younger woman says. “And then I thought, dinner. I can buy dinner, to make up for the shirt, because I can tell from your face that—well. Or cook. I can cook. Say yes.”

To be a guest inside one's own old house: it's like being a guest inside one's own body, the way you feel on a doctor's examination table, outwardly polite, inwardly full of offended resistance and asocial impulses—to insult, to make an escape. Only Robin appears at ease, her hair disciplined into a high ponytail, arms bare, lipstick on. The wine is good—“organic,” Bruce says—and the food, too, salad with grilled figs and goat cheese followed by a risotto that keeps Robin in the kitchen while Bruce and Ximena stare and stare and look away and stare again while disliking this deception, the pretense that it is not extraordinary for them to find themselves across a table from each other again.
For the sake of deceiving Robin, Ximena's style has changed. This new style is more breathless and glancing than her own, funnier, free of sorrow. More likable in general. Strangely, given that she is repressing a number of strong emotions, her English is better. Her faked detachment permits close study of the couple Bruce-and-Robin: their marriage is of the endearing kind, not so good that you feel intimidated, but not so bad that you worry for them.

When Robin had followed Ximena into the street and asked her to dinner, Ximena had said, “Look, you don't want that,” and Robin had said, “Why?” and Ximena had said, “I'm Ximena, you know, who he was with before,” avoiding the word
wife
the way she would have avoided driving a knife through the other woman's heart, as a fatal action whose aftermath would be mess and confusion, but Robin had said only, “You are? Really, you are?” and then “Why did he act like that?” and then, “Okay, this is weird. Me asking you to explain some idiotic thing he did,” and Ximena said, “I'm not great at explaining him,” and they had laughed. And Robin said, “Wrong time to say this, probably, but I love your work. I've always sort of wanted to tell you, but I never thought there would be a way. Really love it.”

Which is not something Bruce had included in his letter. But she doesn't know about the letter.

There in the street, Ximena had said, “You're kind to ask, but I don't want you to go to any trouble, and it's maybe not such a good idea, my coming to dinner,” and the other woman said, “No, it will be lovely. It's the right thing, you know, for people who've mattered to each other like you and he have, it's important for you to find some way to talk and not just to disappear forever. He was scared that you were gone. I don't know what it is like for you, and I don't mean to intrude or seem to
pressure you, but if he lost you again now it would hurt him so much. Please come. It will turn out all right—it will, trust me.”

From this whole speech, Ximena fastened onto one assertion. “He was scared?”

“Of never seeing you or talking to you again, yes, really scared. He didn't think I knew that, but I did.”

“Well, wow, this is very understanding of you,” Ximena had said, and meant something mildly slighting, like
Are you some kind of pushover, don't you get jealous?
But this implication was lost on her, and the younger woman's smile made Ximena repent of her meanness and say, “So okay, I'll come. Tell me when to be there.”

If, after her second or maybe third glass of wine, Ximena starts to flirt with Robin, it's partly because they were able to laugh with each other like that in the street. Women flirt: it means nothing, it means you are alive. She feels the elation of playacting, she is being lovely to them, but something is wrong: the conversation is haunted by a triangular stiltedness that drives Ximena a little crazy, which she wants to remedy, because they are trying this new and daring thing of talking with each other, three people who have been in various ways badly hurt by each other, except that Robin has not been hurt, Robin got what she wanted, and Robin has never once granted Ximena a long unguarded gaze, and suddenly, somehow, that is the gaze Ximena needs, and not Bruce's. By what alchemy has desire changed its object—is this even really happening? Robin has the grace of a person who doesn't second-guess herself, whose aims are mostly kind, and you would think she is not available for flirtation, and yet here it is, quickening the air, Ximena alert to the other woman's least gesture or the minute tightening of her lips that suggests she is, sexually, no fool, and has registered what is hap
pening, and is at a loss how to repress it, unused as she is to repressing impulses, honest and aboveboard as her life is. In truth, Ximena thinks, those qualities are rarer than rare in a person she now recognizes is very, very beautiful. This is what Bruce had seen early on and why he wanted her. There is a kind of shelter obtainable from Robin's attention, a tiny house she can make for you where you can take refuge, and suddenly this is what Ximena wants.

Bruce is not aware anything is happening.

None of this occurs in language. The advance and swift deepening of attraction take place at the older, deeper level of recognition, down where the unsaid lives, and art.

After clearing the dinner plates Robin retreats to the kitchen and returns with a torte that she sets down on the table, and Bruce and Ximena glance away from each other because Ximena loathes birthdays and always has.

“It's amazing,” Ximena says. “It must have taken you hours.”

Lighting the candles—one two three, Ximena sees, a token cluster, or one for each decade—Robin explains, “It's meant to sort of redeem chocolate for you.”

“What?”

“After having it smeared down your shirt. I'm nervous about how this turned out. I'm going to close my eyes while you take your first taste.”

Did that need to sound so sexy?

It's Bruce who asks, “Why three candles?”

Robin says, “All I could find. Left over from the last cake, I guess.”

From upstairs the baby howls. Robin hesitates. Such hesitation is uncharacteristic of her, surely—the adoring mother. “I'll go,” Bruce says, having caught on at last, and Robin frowns,
upset with herself for letting it show that she is tired of the baby's demands, shaking her head but letting her husband ascend a flight of stairs whose every creak Ximena knows, as she knows his particular rhythm of stair-climbing, the habitual fraction of an instant's pause (caused by what?) on the fifth stair, the sturdy tramping tread that finishes the flight, the silencing of his footfalls by the hallway's carpeting. The baby must be in the small bedroom under the eaves. They used to talk about turning it into a bathroom.

How oppressed she has been by his watchfulness, what a relief that he's gone, even if only for a few minutes.

Ximena lays down her fork. Robin lays down her fork. They face each other undefended. It's sex. It's the laying down of forks. Ruin, chaos, sex, and recklessness, we live and breathe for what you will do with us. The candles burn between them. Robin says, “I don't believe this,” and Ximena says, “You don't believe what,” and Robin says, “This. What's happening. Whatever it is,” and Ximena says, “You can't believe it?” and when there is no answer she says, “Do you want to believe it?” and she could say
I can help you feel how true it is
, but who is she to say such a thing to this woman, when did she acquire the power to convince this other of a truth that could ruin or at least fuck up her life, which seems well worth protecting, something someone like Ximena, whose motives if viewed even in the best possible light would have to be described as mixed, should stay completely out of? But that is the last thing she wants to do: to stay out of this woman's life. She's not
capable
of staying out of her life. Worse, stranger, Robin is not capable of
keeping
her out. They are in it now. How did they do that with eyes and faces and voices, come as far as this, get in such trouble?

They can't kiss while Robin's baby is crying upstairs, that
can't be the sound track for their first kiss because it would be too crazy-making for both of them and for Robin too inevitable a source of guilt, and even supposing they could shut their ears to that they can't kiss across the table. One of them will have to stand and lean across, palms flat on the table, careful not to put a hand in a piece of cake, straining, and the combination of effort and delicacy would amuse both the person leaning forward and the one being leaned toward, and the furtive comedy would undercut what they would otherwise be sure to feel, the full unexpected force of their attraction. Its power to take their breath away, that is what is most deeply longed for, and they can't get at it by ridiculous leaning across this table even if the baby has stopped crying, and he has, but that means too that they have only a minute or so left to figure this out, whatever it is. Five minutes tops. How will this play out after Bruce comes back down the stairs? He may not have caught on yet but he isn't blind. He'll look from one to the other and the truth will gradually become more and more
felt
among the three of them, and the pretense that everything is all right will collapse.

In Robin's eyes the decision has been made. She stands. She leans across Ximena's own old dinner table with all its memories. Bruce didn't even bother to replace it, he didn't fear the ghosts of their life together, and if he didn't fear those, how much can it mean to him, that old life? Nothing. Not if he can sit down at this table, lift his wineglass, smile across at her without fear and trembling. The fear and trembling is done by his new lover as her lips meet Ximena's. Candle flames warm their forearms, their throats, as Ximena tilts her head to allow room for the other woman's nose, as she tastes her tongue, as she tries with her tongue to suggest the palace of inventiveness and aggression and complicity that would be sex between them, as the two of them
ease apart from each other to allow for looking—for the assessment they need to do of what this means and how things have changed. And that look is enough, more than enough, because it tells Ximena that lives can be ruined beginning right here, right now, and that the worst of the damage won't be done to her, but to these two—no, three—others, whom she might as well love, because without them she's alone in the world.

For strangeness, for fucked-upness—no kiss has ever come close. For the power of the unforeseen taking over.

Before Bruce comes down the stairs she has altered the course of the future, standing up, collecting her things, keys, the coat she pulls on though Robin says behind her, “Was that wrong? Ximena? Was it wrong?” With luck she can get out of the house before he can glimpse her expression. He couldn't hear from upstairs if she tried to explain to Robin why she has to go, and probably it would be a good thing, less memorably hurtful, if Ximena tried to give some explanation for this decisive fleeing-the-scene, but she can't both explain and mobilize her resistance to the other woman. It would be unwise even to turn and take a last look at that face. She's given Robin reason to believe that they will get away with this, that the two of them have felt something and even acted on it and now Robin can choose how much, if anything, she wants to confide to Bruce about what just happened, only why would she say a thing? Now she is almost out the door, Ximena who believes there is a way to stop time but she has not found it, Ximena who is about to do, just this once, the right thing. And painting—not the moon, not anymore. Not the moon: a face. To inscribe it more deeply in memory, she looks over her shoulder. From now on, that face.

Her students are the devotees and tenders of machines. Some of the machines are tiny and some of the machines are big. Nobody wrote down the law that students must have a machine with them at all times, yet this law is rarely broken, and when it is, the breaker suffers from deprivation and anxiety. Machines are sometimes lost, sometimes damaged, and this loss, this damage, deranges existence until, mouseclick by mouseclick, chaos can be fended off with a new machine, existence regains harmony, interest, order, connectedness. Sleeping, certain machines display a dreamily pulsing white light meaning
this machine is not dead
. Images, icons, passages of text: even in a silent room the machines are continually storing these up. The students never advance into a day or even an hour without the certainty of messages awaiting them, without the expectation of signals and signs. Rendered visible, the embrace of hyperconnectivity
would float around their heads like gold-leaf halos. During class the machines grow restless and seek students' attention. Certain machines purr, certain machines tremble; certain machines imitate birdsong. Whoever invented the software that causes the machine to sing like a bird must have foreseen not only bewilderment like the professor's but also the pleasure her mistake, if visible (it is! Flushed from her lecture notes, her gaze swerves around the room), gives to those in the know—that is, her students. For the fraction of an instant that either makes or breaks her authority (she would say she is not interested in
authority
)—the fraction when exhilarated hardwired startlement tips into that laughter-inviting cognitive slough, bewilderment—the professor can't make the correct attribution. For her and her alone, among the two hundred and forty-three listeners in the lecture hall, that realistic sequence of ascending trills equals “bird.” To observe her puzzlement is to know that a bird flits through the wilderness of her brain, to understand that in the professor's experience song emanates from a creature. Her students find this endearing: she can't help letting it show that she belongs to the world that preceded theirs.

Her face gives her trouble as a teacher. Irony has inscribed certain lines; insincerity, others. The insincerity is estranging—estranging her from herself, that is, for she feels, inwardly, like the most honest person on the planet. Inwardly she is plain and kind, emotionally Amish. But outwardly, no. Outwardly she is a professor. With a mocking lift of her brows, she has more than once accidentally silenced a student, and been stunned that it happened so fast. Now she strives, facially, for serenity. As a child in the depths of a great museum she was struck mute by
the impersonally eloquent eyes painted onto the linen wrapped over the face of the mummy—no detachment, no trace of aversion, rushed to defend her huge, vulnerable heart from the perfect painted face tenderly laid against the true, hidden visage whose corruption seduced the imagination into graphic detail. That was going on right below the painted face whose uncanniness told her
I was alive
, whose individuality, almost completely submerged in stylization, was more poignant for having barely made it through. For the first time she comprehended death. Once, a real person had spoken through those lips,
a person
had looked out from those eyes pointed at both ends. That was why they took children to museums. She had been meant to understand this great thing they all understood, whose inevitability they could somehow (she did not see how) bear, which they expected her to spend the rest of her life knowing: death, first recognized in the depths of the museum, would be alive for her now her whole life long, and could never be un-seen. They had afforded her neither preparation nor protection, and this treachery, this cold willingness to let her see what she saw, could not be explained. Inconceivable, the demented precision of this blow aimed at her by forces pretending to be benign. Hours later, in the backseat of the station wagon trundling south on the highway leading away from the city, she had fallen asleep. When she woke, she was looking out of eyes pointed at both ends.

Once another professor, a handsome old charmer and taunter, had asked her by way of flirtation what she wanted on her gravestone. For years, long after losing touch with this professor, who had left for a university on the opposite coast, she thought about the question. She wrote and rewrote her gravestone, always with
him in mind, recalling that particular moment at the party when he had come up to her and with two fingers touched the inside of her wrist, exposed because of the way she was holding her glass, and then, as if his somewhat intrusive but tolerated touch required its counterweight in charm, he had smiled a beautiful male smile within a dark beard and asked his question, and she has been answering him ever since, though he died years ago.

Her by-now-experienced soul (but her heart is no bigger than it was when she was a child) gazes out through pointed eyes at students whose great museum is all of literature. Her corner of the museum is in English, which she has always loved—which she will love to her dying breath. Here come students. Why do
they
love it? What do they want? Is the end of such love inevitable, will there be a last English major? Will he be eyebrow-pierced and tattooed, a prowling, scanning searcher-boy invoking the name David Foster Wallace, could she be that raggedy ann–haired anorexic cross-legged in the last of four chairs in the hallway outside the professor's door, this girl with tattered
Golden Notebook
upheld? They come. They are enthralled. The professor likes how enthralled they are. It is an old thing, a deep thing, to be enthralled. While enthralled they are beautiful. She could swear that an enthralled reader nineteen years old is the most beautiful animal on earth—at least, she's seen one or two who were, in their spellbound moment, the incarnation of extremest human beauty. They were not themselves. Literature looked back at her from their eyes and told her certain things she was sure they ought not to have understood at their age. They had gotten it from books—books with their intricacies and the things they wanted you to know about love and death that you
could have gone a long time not knowing if you had not been a reader, and which, even when you were a reader, you saw as universal truths that did not apply to
you
.

When the professor sees that a student loves a certain sentence, her heart lifts as if she's been told
Great news! You will never die!
Why does it feel like this? That book in that student's hand has nothing to do with her. It's just luck she's in the same room.

In the center of a roundabout, a paved orbit around a central island whose white gravel is set with concentric circles of a kind of agave she happens to know are called foxtail after the slender oblong upheld sleekness of their array of pointed leaves, the professor watches while bicycles skim past within arm's reach, hundreds of bicycles. If she stood here long enough she could easily witness the whirling transit of a thousand bicycles, with her as their still center. Either extinction or a drastic diminution of population worldwide is inevitable within their lifetimes, according to research well known by the students. Here we can make some really big, really simple connections: we can cease to care, for a moment, how it
looks
to make big simple connections instead of subtle small ones. So. The same world that warns them of extinction bestows toys for them to carry, to key, to rub with their thumbs in swift ovals, to insert into those apertures called, in
Hamlet
,
the porches of mine ears
, natural distance between brain and music annihilated, the cacophony nudged deep, close, too close to the species' most exquisite bones. That is the point of the ten thousand toys. They are not about strangeness and newness after all. They seek innateness, sensual invisibility,
the body's quality of being not-there to itself. In their insinuated proximity they elude the soul's attempt to differentiate between soul and soulless. Which is basically all that literature has ever cared about, and why it will
never cease to be loved
. Sure, tell that to yourself, the professor tells herself. The strap of her heavy leather messenger bag rests on her left shoulder, crosses her chest, and fits below her right armpit, an arrangement completed with an inevitable creasing of her jacket, which is black or any of the dozen shades of gray in her closet; not much variation there, not much risk. The bag itself is revolved until it rests snugly against her back, a trick learned from students in the nick of time, just before her neck acquired a permanent ache from one-shouldered weight carrying. Calculate it sometime, the weight of the books you have lugged in your life. Would it equal that of a house, a ship, a small mountain? Bicycles rush at her from nineteen directions. No one hits anyone. Just how this is accomplished—by what unerring divination of one another's intentions and how many hundreds of swift corrections—she wants to know, to see, or if she can't see it, if she's not quick enough to perceive the glance that averts disaster, and she's not, then she wants at least to be close to it, she needs to know that it happens, that it goes on and on happening.

Her heart has always been the same size as it was that long-ago Sunday when she first saw those eyes pointed at both ends, and she has always felt the same to herself. Secretly, because people are supposed to go through enormous changes, to mature, she wonders if there is something wrong with her, to feel such consistency between who she is now and who she was then when she looked down into those alive-dead eyes. Is something wrong with
still being who she was as a child, or is she fine? What book can answer that? Many of them seem to intuit the existence of this question
from her
, however far away she is in time from the writer of the book, however remote, and in this context the right adverb to modify
remote
is
impossibly
. A great many of the books she loves most
hold
this question. It's in there somewhere, the question, if not the answers, and why is it enough, in reading? Why is it beautiful simply to find your own questions?

Long ago, when she was a new professor with a new professor's keen motivation, she took the trouble to think of really good answers to certain questions students asked, and the trouble she took then has paid off ever since, because the answers can be revised according to the times, some needing more revision than others, but her original responses continue to strike her as sufficient, and form a sort of core around which revision can take place, and the questions haven't changed. Really there are only twelve or so main ones, at least in her life. Around those, a haze or shimmer of worries and intimations that can't quite materialize into questions. Anxieties like droplets lacking the particles of dust or grit they need to coalesce into clouds. Things they fear. Questions she could not answer anyway.

In her mind she answers the professor, who is no longer alive to hear what she wants on her gravestone—not that she plans to have a gravestone, because she wants to be cremated, and despite her fear of death is consoled by the notion of ending up as ashes, why she's not sure: their vulnerability to dispersion suits her, as does their incorruptibility, the fact that nothing further can
be done to ashes, that in their lack of ambition regarding immortality ashes are the opposite of those eyes she gazed into in the museum. In her mind he asks his question, which for all she knows he's in the habit of asking as a disconcerting, cut-to-the-chase,
what are you really like?
refinement of flirtation whose bad-boy contempt for the usual niceties at least some women would respond to. She had responded, not in the way he hoped, not with equal and opposite impudence, but with the awkwardness of needing to think before talking, an awkwardness despised at her university, a trait she mostly hid, but not that evening and not with him, and he hadn't liked that, and hadn't liked her answer, so they parted and not long afterward lost touch and she was left answering him in her mind, saying yes, there was something she'd like, just one word, on her gravestone.
Reader.
And in her mind he loves this answer.

For instance, a student will ask whether reading critically and interpreting—beginning to study
literature
—will cause the student to stop loving reading, because the student thinks there's a risk of this, and that is what the student never ever wants to happen. And what is the answer? Is it right to reassure the student, when after all the professor doesn't know how it will go for that student, she knows only how it went for her? Well, she says, in my experience, she says, the more someone learns about an intricate thing, like, say, the human heart—the more a surgeon knows about that heart, right?—the deeper
in
, the more beautiful the thing seems, and by
thing
I mean a heart or a book, either one. Then the student says thank you and goes away. But the professor does not know any heart surgeons and has never asked any of them if what they feel is wonder. She made that up.