Mendocino Fire (7 page)

What he wants to say:
The whole world could have gone on lying. Gone on fucking up weather and watersheds and the marrow of little kids' bones, and I could have stayed steady, I would have been able to
bear it, day after day, as long as there was you, here in our house, you to come home to, you whole and sane and beautiful and telling me the truth.
What he says, keeping his tone even: “Can you see why that bothers me? You should have waited to talk to me, we could have decided together how to deal with the rug. That's how people who trust each other behave.”

“No, something needed to be
done
. You can trust me to see things as they are, and to act. You were used to such com
pliance
, with Susannah. After her, Nina, Shmina, who from everything you say and despite her supposed feminist credentials was basically this
mouse
. Now there's me, and, right, you and I don't know everything about each other, and we never will, and what matters is how—you're leaving? David?”

The road unwinds before him in moonlight, rough as ever, and he takes its curves too fast, absorbing the adrenaline hit whenever a clump of cholla looms in the headlights, or a redoubt of sandstone. Once a coyote ghosts across the road, and the station wagon fishtails to a halt, swallowed in its own dust. The wipers squeal, clearing the haze, dirty rivulets rippling horizontally as David picks up speed, the desert laid out for him in luminous swipes, loss a particular taste in his mouth, a rising bitterness he can't swallow away, his heartbeat manic, though it had been calm enough while he stood listening to Jade. There are no boys in the car to heed the warning, but David lectures.
Careful, careful. You'll get there. You'll find it. It was there once, it will be there again. Have a little faith
.

But the oil drum perched on the spur of rock is empty, turned over on its side, rocking when he nudges it with a toe, its trash blown over the rim, he supposes, scattered across the floor of the arroyo, rags fluttering from prickly pear, shards variously glinting. She left the rug here, she said. That must have been around
sunset. It's unlikely that anyone has driven the road since then. The wind has been hard at work, lashing and moaning: Could the rug have been lifted and sailed over the rim? Here is the trail, wide enough to suit deer or two small boys but tricky for a grown man, stones kicked loose by his missteps, preceding him in clattering showers, his descent entirely audible, if there was anyone to hear. The interior of that listing refrigerator is pierced by spokes of moonlight: bullet holes. Paperbacks cartwheel past, shedding pages. When he picks his way among the wreckage, he meets another moon, hanging in the unsmashed headlight of a wrecked truck, the starry refraction of light coming from some earthly source. David makes for that glow eking out from under the tilted wing of an airplane. The throb in his jaw is worse, the pain in his back nagging, but apart from that, he feels good, looser, a little winded but freer, defiant, trying to recall the last time he pursued something, some aim or intention, under the night sky.
Twenty years ago.
With the other four, his brothers, prowling a mesa in the dark, tossing survey stakes over the rim after pouring sugar in a backhoe's gas tank. Nothing he does now can compare with the satisfaction of that sabotage, with its clean, unequivocal high. He's grown old, tame as office air. Jade had revived him, for a time.
Ow.
When a chip of stone grazes his chest, its sting—and the primal weirdness of being struck by a flying object in the dark—brings David entirely awake, but when he squints around, there's only the gusting sand, cholla rearing up spookily to his left, his shadow dipping and lengthening as he hikes toward the glow—a campfire, maybe. Something pelts his chest again, then his arm, and before he can shield his eyes he's assailed by a whirlwind of grit and twigs. Bewildered, he walks right into it, grazed, poked, showered with debris, leaves, twigs, and flying sand. If she were with him, Jade would
hide her face against his chest, and he'd shelter her as best he could, her ferocious lawyer-hair lashing his face, and even with the wind whipping and scouring they could protect each other. David reels along blindly, and from the way his lungs strain he understands he must be shouting, though he can't hear himself over the wind. This is what he has seen happen to small bald-headed children: death blows you away while you struggle, the truth, the outrage, dying in your throat. Flinging a last handful of grit, the blast relents. David has passed among the cholla unscathed, and here is the shelter under the airplane's wing, from which a lantern is suspended, shining down on a boy and a girl, entwined on his rug, its arabesques dimmed, its choir of blues bleached to lunar grays and faint violet. The boy is fast asleep, but not the girl. The girl is awake. She tightens her arms around her boyfriend, and lifts her chin defiantly. She's got the inky hair favored by punked-out runaways, a fright wig trailing sharp fangs over her forehead, the pinched-together brows and eyeholes whose expression can't be deciphered. When he takes another step toward his rug, she flashes a palm. Stop. He takes another step, and gets both palms. She wants nothing more than to stop him, and he stops. It all stops, moon, love, breath, heartbeat. David sprawls there, feeling the hardness of the ground, the nerve-revival of panic, the terror that she won't know what to do, that she's stoned and can't help. The wind dies down and the moonlight blinks and he doesn't know what comes next on earth. No one knows. But there are footsteps coming toward him, and if there is any chance of saving a life through the sheer force of one's love for it, he is already saved.

Ten years later, this can happen to her: someone can set his coffee cup down on the counter instead of in its saucer, and she can, for that, love him. Who is he? No one, a colleague she likes but who isn't important or especially close to her—no one she has ever imagined herself
with
. Office politics tend to sweep them, if not into collusion, at least into a nicely practical kind of empathy. There is relief for each of them in understanding the other, when they understand so few people around them, and he has supported her at key moments, strategically, in a manner that prevents his seeming too much her
friend
. That would be resented, as friendships are in offices—someone would set out to sabotage it. So they meet in amiable secret: it means nothing. He would say—it's one of his phrases—it's not
hugely significant
. She likes and admires him, but would be
careful about saying she knows him, careful about asserting any kind of claim to his attention.

He rarely drinks coffee. He's doing so now, he's explained, because of insomnia the night before. Until this morning she hasn't known that he resists setting the cup in the saucer just as, ten years ago, her first husband did. She relied on it: really, she waited for him to set his cup down on counters or tables rather than in saucers, and this sense of
waiting for
this or for some other gesture or inflection unique to him
was
her sense of what it was to love. It was a thing she loved, his resisting the convention by which the presence of the saucer compels the placement of the cup, a thing he did that no one else did, and she hadn't expected to encounter that habit again, or, encountering it ten years later, to feel love. To have a fraction of an instant's love exacted from her for someone she does
not
love: What does it prove about love, about
this
love (she means not love for the man sitting next to her, but love for her ex-husband), about what you can know about what you feel? You think you are aware. You perceive that you are drawn to the angle of your father's cheekbone in an otherwise unknown face, you understand that the presumptuous way your wrist is taken hold of and a thumb is run across your palm (she is thinking of meeting her second husband) works on you because in your family intimacy had had so much distance to cross it had needed the power of presumption, there had had to be something intractable about it, really, or it couldn't have existed at all. You believe, in short, that you are informed about what you feel. An intelligent consumer, a diligent recycler, a woman who, the second time, married wisely and well. You allow for contradictions and gaps because it is wise to. You have never before hit a wall like this—never run into some way in which you are truly, blindingly wrong about yourself. Because a
man sets his coffee cup down alongside his saucer, you can conceivably love him. It would be no less love than what you feel for your husband, yet this can't, in any reasonable, enlightened view of things, be true. She wants to gape in her companion's face, or to shout, to offend or alienate him so that he, dismayed, will assume responsibility for maintaining distance.

He gets it. Something's gone awry, and his voice is unsure, fractured by hesitation, when he says, “Okay, what?”

“Nothing.”

He says with a plain kind of gentleness, no wiles, no manipulation, only a rightful affection for her in his voice, “Come on.”

“You could be my first husband.”

“Oh? Would I want to be?”

“I just realized.” Aware he needs more to go on, she withholds; she lets him wait, she wants him to; it is the first consciously
unequal
moment they've experienced, her inflicting this brief interval of suspense upon him. This is the answer to the rightful affection in his voice: for her part, no affection, none, and the absence of reciprocal affection lets in sex. “I don't know why I didn't see it before.”

He says, with the satisfaction of someone too intelligent to be flattered (who is nonetheless pleased), “We look alike?”

She's not going to tell him what it is. She wants no self-consciousness to intrude in his way of setting his coffee cup down or she'll never get to see it again. She says, “There's something.”

“Is that good?'

“I'm surprised.”

“Good surprised?”

“I can't tell.” She considers. “Good, I think. I haven't thought about him for a long time.
Can
you go years without thinking of someone you once loved? It makes a life seem very long.”

“What?”

“That you could love someone for years. Then forget them for
years
.”

“Then remember them? I've felt that. There was this girl—my first wife.” He'd like her not to have caught
girl
, a word potentially problematic: his status in the office has much to do with his being deemed progressive. “We were married three weeks.”

“That long?”

“No one takes this story seriously when I say three. It was a mistake, but at the same time, we were serious, we were in deep. And I guess I haven't done that that many times.”

In his voice, the sudden amplitude of truth telling, the sense of language widening out, of constraints loosening. This, the shift to self-delighting spontaneity, is what she's always hoping for in her dealings with others: she sees that now, even as she recognizes her inward wish to end this conversation before the rapport between them twists toward franker, sexier seriousness. When she prods her empty torte plate across the counter, it's so that the scrape of china across Formica will stand in for her voice, so that he will be interrupted by something other than her protest, and also so that, theatrically, she can read her watch. “God! I've got to run.”

He says ruefully, “You stopped it.”

She's shrugging into her coat. There's a cottonwood leaf on the coat's shoulder, and he picks it off. He rubs his palms together, the stem between them, and the leaf twirls. Says, “Okay. Something happened. I understand something happened, but not what. You're not going to tell me what, are you?”

“No.”

“At least you don't lie. At least you don't say, ‘Nothing happened.'” He shakes his head. “I'm lost.”

She smiles. “You know when to leave things alone.”

“But I don't know. It's you who's decided to leave. There's only one of us who understands what just happened. But okay. I guess you know what you need to do.”

She smiles again, not as pleased with him as she was a moment before, not as pleased as she was with herself. “I'm still learning.”

But it's not true—or, rather, it's so newly true that she can't accept it. Sitting down with him, fifteen minutes ago, she would have said with perfect conviction that she knew all she needed to know about herself. It's odd to think that her sense of herself has ruptured, that she must now conceive of herself as
still learning
, as unfinished and anxious, necessarily vulnerable to surprises and intrusions, because it's only by the narrowest of margins that her decision to get out the café door triumphed over her desire to lean nearer, to prolong her smile until its very duration transformed it into proof of willingness.

Outside, the high-altitude October radiance causes a darker blue to melt across the photosensitive lenses of her sunglasses. Her reflection skates across a plate glass window. One mannequin appears to have thrust a hand through the glass. That is, on her side of the glass, her wrist meets the pane; on the exterior, positioned to match her wrist, her upturned hand is fastened in place. Someone, probably a child, has dropped five bright blue gumballs in that hand. The other mannequins sport garter belts and laddered silk stockings, and seem to have just roused themselves from a tumultuous, sexy group sleep, like a gang of puppies. A horse wanders down the street: it takes her a moment to understand that there is a rider, and the rider is a police officer. The parking garage smells of oil-stained cement and deep shade; the way shade smells in the desert, even in an industrial setting, is one of the pleasures of her western state.

The cruising cars are tourists, but it's late enough in the year that traffic across town is light. She feels as if she's been waiting all day to drive. Sometimes driving is like this, a kind of consolation that's taken your measure and suits you exquisitely. She realizes also that she likes being alone. She has no idea how long she has wanted to be alone, because it's not a desire that can easily be teased apart from the mix of calculation and confusion, misgiving and worry and relief, that makes up her workday, yet now it's an available luxury: when she gets home neither her husband nor the boys will be there. Her husband has taken the twins to soccer practice. She wants them gone, and they will be—rarely does domestic life offer such a happy intersection of desire and circumstance. There is an early-evening vacancy to the suburbs, a kind of careful otherworldliness, and she's aware she is about to laugh as she bends to retrieve one of the twins' baseball gloves from the lawn. She holds the glove to her face and breathes in grass, leather, sun, little boy. She thinks if any neighbor came up and she turned her brilliant eyes on him he'd be frightened, he'd have to think it was something bad. Facing this imaginary neighbor, the glove still tipped against her face, she does laugh. She laughs into the leather palm hollowed so that the flying ball can lodge there, perfectly clasped. That rush, the exhilarated momentum of attraction, the assurance of sexy
fit
between two bodies, could have become the decisive factor. It had wanted to dominate, it had wanted to divert and disrupt, and it had felt wonderful.
She could have done anything.
It's a realization she has to hate if she is not to hate her life. In her husband she loves calm, wit, sanity, even a certain resistance to her. If she said of the marriage, “We understand each other,” she would mean something far more like “We have a deal” than “We know everything about each other,” but “We have a deal”
is cold and can be dismissed, and her marriage is neither cold nor dismissible. A child in a yellow slicker passes by on the sidewalk, kicking leaves, and for a moment everything seems set right, all dangers safely behind her.

The first thing she does, on entering the house, is start to undress. Her husband likes to tease her because she always stands just inside the closed front door and eases one black heel off, then the other, always heels, always black, then tilts her pelvis forward to unzip herself behind. Sometimes she hangs her jacket over a dining room chair on her way through, and her earrings chime down into the delft dish where her husband leaves his car keys and change. Once she's in their room she gets into the clothes that feel like her, his oldest sweatshirt, her black leggings, her feet bare as she crosses the room, and, without thinking at all, sits on the edge of the bed and dials.

Because it's not true that she hasn't thought of her first husband in years. She thinks of him. She forgets thinking of him, she forgets doing this, she forgets all of this, yet it happens. She knows his number. He still lives in the midwestern town where they had lived together. The very first time, she had only to call directory information and say his name. There had been two listings under that name, she was told—which was the strangest part, for her, of what she was doing. An improbable coincidence, another person bearing his unusual name in such a small town; it had seemed to diminish him. Of course she hadn't known his address, and the first number wasn't his. He had answered on the second number's fifth ring. She's not sure how many rings it takes to be truly importuning, and his voice had in fact sounded impatient, bothered by something happening elsewhere in the house, his attention only nominally with whoever was on the phone. He'd had to ask, “Who is it?” He'd waited. He'd asked
again, “Who is it?” She could not say who it was. She couldn't answer him, and she couldn't hang up. She hadn't wanted to trouble him, but she had acted just like someone who wishes to cause that curious kind of trouble, the suspensefulness and uneasiness of not knowing who's called your house and then refused to say anything.

When he'd hung up, that first time, she'd tapped his number out again, an electromagnetic refrain she already liked the way she'd always liked his name. She meant to say, “It's me, that was me before, I was just so surprised by your voice that I couldn't speak,” she'd meant to apologize, to embark on some sort of conversation, to tell him something of her life, to ask about his, but when he answered, she was silent again. Haplessly, helplessly, yet with some sense of this act as—bizarrely—expected by him, she was silent, and then he'd done an odd thing himself: he'd left the receiver off the hook and, it seemed, walked away.

After a minute or two she could hear his children's voices, muted as if they were running through a hallway, and then his wife had come into the room. A refrigerator door opened and closed. She could hear something—milk?—poured, and then his wife said, with that gaiety peculiar to women talking to themselves, “What's this doing lying here?” and after two tentative and unanswered “Anyone there?”s hung up the receiver.