Mendocino Fire (8 page)

Another thing, stranger still: she had called him from the hospital room after the twins were born. She'd let the phone ring longer than ever before, seventeen or eighteen times. During labor her chapped lips had begun to split open in tiny cuts; she'd panted and blown her way through the night, only to end, that morning, gazing into the anesthesiologist's neutral downward gaze. Her left arm rattled inside the webbing that bound it at a rigid right angle to her body. Her hand quaked and
convulsed, and her teeth chattered. She'd asked, “Am I supposed to shake like this?” He'd said, “Some do.” She told him, “My
body's
scared,” meaning that she, herself, down in the deepest core of self, was somehow fearlessly calm and lucid, however she appeared to him. He gazed down, masked, feelingly or unfeelingly, it was impossible to tell. Her husband was let into the room, and he too was wearing a mask, and each boy in turn was lifted in the doctor's hands, squalling. There was a feeling of its having nothing to do with her, of her being pushed aside or neglected during this turn of events, in which the babies were hauled into the newborn world. This feeling had gone away when she nursed the twins, one after the other. Once they were in the nursery, and her husband had gone home to sleep, she had dialed the rare, familiar number. It was another instance of not knowing what she was doing, of dissociating, because again,
again
, she hadn't been able to speak. It was his voice, though: she'd needed his voice. And, that time, after his voice left, a dog was barking. She remembers the pain of smiling with cut lips to hear a dog barking like mad in what was surely his backyard.

This evening she crosses her legs, upright on the edge of the bed, listening to his phone ring. Today, today, she will say, “It was me, all those times,” and he will say, “I was sure it was; but why?” She won't answer directly, but instead will tell him, “Someone reminded me of you today. God, so
much
.”

He answers. This is probably more than luck: maybe, unconsciously, she structures it a little, calling at times when he's likely to be at home. Well, assuming he's continued freelancing journalism, his job during their marriage, he works at home, and probably most calls
are
for him. Not counting that time his wife picked up after he'd abandoned the receiver, and however much the odds are against it, she's never gotten his wife or one
of his kids, only him. Now he says “Hello” twice to be sure of what's happening. He's never said, “I know who you are.” He's never said, “Don't call here again.” He's never, out of curiosity or the need to assert his authority over events, hit star sixty-nine, which would cause his phone to dial her number, and if some digital readout on his phone informs him of her number and its area code, if he's fairly sure his caller is her, he's never tested this conclusion by saying her name, he's never sought to resolve the mystery. Though weeks separate the calls, it takes him only few seconds to understand something like “This is
this
again.” He never hangs up, just lays the receiver on the counter. When he does so now, she thinks
Good.
Today, if he had demanded to know who it was, she really would have told him. His laying the receiver down on the counter means they get to go on like this a while longer. The room he's in is the kitchen, of course. She listens. Water runs from a tap.

A pot or kettle clicks down on a stove burner.
Do you still make terrible coffee?
she thinks.
Or has she taught you how to get it right?
Probably barefoot, he crosses and recrosses the kitchen. But how long can this last? What is in it for him? Distantly, his wife calls for one of the kids—that particular rising, questioning inflection is maternal, and the voice is irked in a way that's also maternal. She knows this intonation well. She knows it's tenderness in yet another disguise. If the voice calls for him, she knows, or if his wife approaches the kitchen, if there's any chance of her spotting the receiver left lying on the counter, he will hang up the phone before he can be caught. This is, somehow, their agreement. As long as it hurts nothing, she can listen all she wants. Whoever she is, he lets her have this piece of his life.

Q:
    
Examine the proposition that for each of us, however despairing over past erotic experience, there exists a soul mate.

A:
    
Soul? In some fluorescent lab an egg's embryonic smear cradles a lozenge of silicon, the vampiric chip electromagnetically quickened by a heartbeat, faux-alive, while in a Bauhaus bunker on the far side of campus, a researcher coaxes Chopin from a virtual violin, concluding with a bow to her audience of venture capitalists, but for true despair, please turn to Prof. Clio Mitsak, at a dinner party in her honor, lasting late this rainy winter night, nine other women at the table, women only, for the evening's covert (and mistaken: you'll see) premise is that the newly hired Woolf scholar will, from her angelic professional height and as homage to VW, scheme to advance all female futures, and the prevailing mood has
been one of preemptive gratitude, gratitude as yet unencumbered by actual debt and therefore flirtatious, unirksome even to Clio, its object. Clio who, hours ago, hit the button for auto-charm, absenting her soul (
there
) from the ordeal of civility. Gone, virtually, until dessert. Set down before her, the wedge of cake, black as creek-bed mud parting under the tines of the fork, brings her to her senses, but then she's sorry, because the whipped cream is an airy petrochemical quotation of real cream, and the licked-tire-tread aftertaste provokes an abrupt tumble into depression. It is an attribute of the profoundest despair not to realize it
is
despair. Kierkegaard. Mitsak. She's vanished down that rabbit hole known as California, and her cell never cries
Text me.
Her past has gone dead quiet; her exes have adopted Chinese infants abandoned in train stations. This candlelit table, strewn with cigarettes ashed in saucers and wineglasses kissed in retro red, makes her want to cry out a warning. Nine hopefuls embarked on the long romance with academia's rejections: she has everything they long for, and look at her! Old! Old! Old! Old! Old! Alone! Alone! Alone! Alone!

             
It's not really there, is it, such stupidity, on the tip of her tongue? Yes it is—(she's drunk)—but wait, she's saved, struck dumb by a voice.

             
The voice can't be described as
honeyed
. It doesn't intend to flatter. Neither gratitude nor the least career-driven taint of ingratiation figures in its tone. It belongs to the woman at Clio's left, whom Clio has managed, since seating was reshuffled for dessert, not to notice. Such gaps or rifts in social obligation are the prerogative of charisma, with its sexy, butterfly-alighting attentiveness, its abrupt, invigorating
rudeness, the masochistically satisfying cold shoulder turned toward any less-than-stellar presence. Remorsefully, Clio concedes (as perhaps the voice, fractionally wounded, implies) that in doing so she has been ignoring beauty.

Q:
    
Briefly explicate Rilke's lines, “All of you undisturbed cities / haven't you ever yearned for the Enemy?”

A:
    
When that voice says, “Selfish us, we've kept you up too late. You're tired,” Clio, not yet ready to confront the source, steadies the bowl of her wineglass between two fingers and a thumb, observing the rhythm of her pulse in the concentric wine rings. The voice qualifies, thoughtfully, “No,
sad
,” italicizing with the pleasure of nailing emotion to its right name, and for this ventured precision, Clio feels the agitated relief of the solitary, whose emotions, seldom articulated for another, mostly live and die nameless. Immediately following relief comes panic, not an unusual progression, for there's no panic quite like the panic of having found something you'd hate to lose. Now we come to that oddly asocial moment when the inkblot of private gesture, proof of exigent emotion, stains the unfolding social contract: Clio can't look at this woman. Not yet. Realizing it must appear rude, she closes her eyes. A person whose composure is not only a professional asset but an actual cast of mind may become a connoisseur of her own panic, just as, for a Japanese gardener, the chance scatteration of cherry petals on freshly raked gravel beautifully illumines the futility of control: so behind her closed eyes Clio experiences, as counterpart to panic, exaltation. The Enemy!

Q:
    
The absurd and the erotic are mutually exclusive modes of perception. That is, no love object can be both ridiculous and beautiful. True or false?

A:
    
The voice's owner, perceiving an invitation in Clio's half-empty glass, leans in with the bottle, startling Clio, whose closed eyes have prevented awareness of her proximity. Clio jumps, diverting the airborne artery of wine, which leaps about, bathing her wrist, spattering her dessert plate, splashing from the table's edge into her black silk lap. The voice's owner fails to right the bottle until wine rains from the table's edge, pattering into flexing amoeba shapes on the polished floor, the voice's owner apologizing manically—yet as if she anticipated some need for apology?—and setting the bottle down with a thump.
I'm so so sorrrrry.
It is Clio's lap that the voice's owner bends toward, still uttering wild
sorries
, so that Clio's first image of her is of her hair, red and in torment, copious, strenuous, anarchic hair, writhing, heavy, ardent, gorgeous hair tricked into confinement, knotted at the nape of a neck so smooth and white its single mole seems to cast a tiny shadow. The tip of Clio's tongue so covets the mole, which stands out like one of the beads of Beaujolais stippling her wrist, that she scarcely experiences the swabbing of the napkin at her lap—thus, for the sake of the imagined, missing out on the thrill of the actual, and immediately repenting this, the first loss within the kingdom of true love.

             
“This is
so
not working,” says the woman, turning to blot at Clio's wrist while Clio memorizes every detail of the profile of her future. Too much forehead, baldish and vulnerable-looking, as is often true of redheads, a long nose with a bump at its tip, the smart arch of the lifted eyebrow, thick eyelashes
dark at their roots, fair to invisibility at their tips. A fine chin. A neat and somehow boyish ear exposed by the tension of the trammeled hair. Why boyish? Unearringed, Clio notes, not even pierced, a sexy virgin petal of lobe. Under the fine chin, the hint of a double, a faint softening in a line that should ideally run tensely along the jaw to the downcurve of the throat. This is true of redheads as well, Clio thinks, this appearance of laxness in certain secret places, as if the body, where it can, resists the severity of the contrast between pale skin and vivid hair, and asserts a passivity, a private entropy, counter to the flamey energy of red. Clio is forty-two to the other's twenty-something: fact. Fearful fact.

             
“Don't worry, we can get you cleaned up,” says the younger woman, “so come on,” standing to take Clio's wrist, leading Clio down a long and shadowed hallway, the din of apologies—everyone's, chorused yet random, like Apache war cries—fading behind the two of them, then gone entirely, Clio surrendering to the sexiness of being
led
, for the other hasn't released her wrist and hasn't turned around, and for the length of that fatal hallway Clio obediently pursues this most unexpected of persons, the Beloved. Under Clio's hot gaze the knot of passionate hair at the Beloved's nape, screwed so tight in its coil, releases red-gold strands flaring with electricity.

Q:
    
The following quotation is taken from Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations:

. . . a face which inspires fear or delight (the object of fear or delight) is not on that account its cause, but—one might say—its target.

   
Discuss.

A:
    
Prof. Mitsak's new condominium comes with its own scrap of California, backyard enough for two spindly fruit trees, a futon of gopher-harrowed turf, and an inherited compost heap. It's still winter, the trees' tracery of bare branches unreadable as to kind, but Prof. Mitsak thinks of them as plum trees because sex, for her, was born with a theft: of her grandmother's plum jam, the old woman watching, from the corner of an eye, the child's fingers crooking over the jar's rim, sliding into lumpish, yielding sweetness, the old woman giving the plaintive laugh peculiar to that kind of vicarious delight, witnessing a pleasure one essentially disapproves of, which costs one something—in her grandmother's case, a steely domestic rigor and a wicked Methodist conviction about the virtue of self-deprivation.

             
It will be spring by the time the trees, if their blossoming proves they're not plum, can disappoint Clio, and by spring she hopes to be eating and sleeping again, done with writing and rewriting letters, actual, insane, ink-and-paper letters that she never sends, done with twisting herself into yoga asanas meant to impress the younger, suppler Beloved, who will never observe her contortions. In Clio's previous experience of heartbreak, she's been its cause. On heartbreak's receiving end, she proves hapless, self-pitying, wincing, vindictive. A forgetter of goddaughters' birthdays, a serial umbrella-loser. Winter rains down on her head, pelting her with the icy spite of finality: she will never tip a baby bottle toward the mouth of a Mei or Ming, or click wedding ring against steering wheel in time to Mozart. Her most parodied gesture becomes the convulsive shake of the head with which she assumes the lectern, flicking raindrops across her notes, rousing the microphone to a squalling tantrum as
water pings against electronics. In each lecture Clio seems to be trailing after some earlier, more brilliant Clio, even as she had followed the Beloved, she of the
sturm und drang
hair, down the fatal hallway. How can love do this, alienate one from oneself? One's necessary, tenured self? All winter, this is the lone relief built into every pitiless week: white-knuckling it at the podium, Clio suffers the loss of something other than the Beloved.

             
Fridays can be very bad. As junior faculty, the Beloved isn't always required to attend faculty meetings, but sometimes she must. So there is this torment, certain Fridays, of having to sit on the far side of a slab of exotic wood from some plundered rainforest, studying the span of the Beloved's cheekbone, a revelation of human perfection. Like human perfection, shadowed. The corner of the Beloved's mouth has an unwarranted tendency to break Clio's heart. That is, the corner of this mouth now and then deepens into a near smile. Suppose everyone were capable of disarming everyone else thus, by the merest turn of a head, by the flicker of an eyelid or the premonition of a smile: then all relations would be grounded in wonder, then everyone would be taken hostage by the immensity of what it is possible to feel.

Q:
    
True or false: In narrative, desire is scarcely born before it encounters an obstacle; neither can exist without the other.

A:
    
Following the Beloved down that fatal hallway,
you
, in your Questioner's detachment, would have kept your wits about you, and would have observed, on the fourth finger of the Beloved's left hand, the diamond whose flash was hidden by
the wonder veiling Clio's mind. Well: she is only a character, much of her own story is lost on her.

             
In that multiply mirrored ladies' designed for blissful immersion in one's reflection the Beloved rinses Clio's trousers under a golden faucet. She twists and wrings out the trousers, then carries them to a dryer on the wall, tapping its round silver button, dangling the black legs in the sirocco so they weave happily, gusting into the Beloved's own body, then fainting away.

             
“Really, you don't have to do this. You should be out with the others.”

             
“
I
spilled the wine all over you.”

             
This washerwomanly penance is cute, they both think.

             
“Why did you say, before, ‘sad'?” Clio asks.

             
“Maybe everyone is, when a dinner party drags on and on. If we had a reason to leave, we'd leave. If we don't have a reason, that's sad. You don't seem to have a reason. Or”—she catches herself—“is it rude to say that?”

             
When she turns Clio makes a fig leaf of her hands. “No, honest.”

             
“And I was surprised, you know? One always thinks of famous people as having everything figured out. Here. I think you can try these now.”

Q:
    
Susan Stewart writes:

The face becomes a text, a space which must be “read” and interpreted in order to exist. The body of a woman, particularly constituted by a mirror and thus particularly subject to an existence constrained by the nexus of external images, is spoken by her face, by the articulation of another's
reading. Apprehending the face's image becomes a mode of possession. . . . The face is what belongs to the other. It is unavailable to the woman herself.

A:
    
What was the question?

Q:
    
What do you make of that?

A:
    
Clio, hiking her trousers up, finds the Beloved stretching lazily, her real and mirrored arms uplifted, fingers interlaced, palms ceilingward, fox-red tufts of underarm hair bristling, black dress hiked midthigh-high: flirtatiousness or ravishing unself-consciousness, and for her watcher, no knowing which. So exigent is Clio's confusion that she cracks her knuckles and then remembers how she had hated it when her
mother
did that. The memory stamps out several little wildfires of desire, Mother's is so derisive a shade, and Clio was never out to her. The perfect antidote to desire, skinny Mother materializing, upright backbone and the witty incision of her neat, ungiving Methodist smile. Just
try
thinking back through this woman.