Mendocino Fire (21 page)

I had feared finding all of California alienatingly new, but where he lived was a comradely neighborhood of mostly neglected Victorians, none very fanciful, shaded by trees as old as they were. His place was the guest cottage—“So it's small,” he cautioned, on the drive over—belonging to a Victorian that had decayed past any hope of renovation. The old house had eventually been replaced by a single-story studio-apartment building, and once he bought the place, these rentals became the most reliable part of his income. Whenever he could, he avoided teaching, he said. His minding about precariousness (if it was) was embarrassing. It was proof that he was
older
. Even if they could have, no one I knew in New Mexico would have wanted to use the phrase
reliable income
in a sentence about themselves: jobs were quit nonchalantly, security was to be scorned. With the help of an architect friend—a former lover, he clarified as if pressed; and never do that, never renovate a house with someone you're sleeping with—all that was stodgy and cramped had been replaced with clarity and openness, as much, at least, as the basically modest structure permitted. This preface sounded like something recited fairly often. The attic had been torn out to allow for the loft bedroom, its pitched ceiling inset with a large skylight, its wide-planked floor bare, the bed done in white linen. The white bed was like his saying
reliable income
—it was the opposite of daring. No man I had ever known, if it had even occurred to him to buy pillowcases and sheets instead of sleeping on a bare mattress, would ever have chosen all white. Sleep
lessness and guilt were catching up with me, and there was the nagging feeling any house tour gives, of coercing praise. I was irritated that in these circumstances, to me costly and extraordinary, the usual compliments were expected. “Beautiful light,” I said. The narrow stairs to the loft were flanked by cleverly fitted bookshelves, and more bookshelves ran around the large downstairs living room, onto which the galley kitchen and bathroom opened, and on another wall were doors leading to his study and the guest bedroom that would be mine, because, he said apologetically, he couldn't sleep through the night with anyone in bed with him—it wasn't me; he'd never been able to. Would that be all right? Of course, I said. I sat down on the edge of the twin bed.
I can get the money somehow, I can fly home tomorrow.
Even as I decided that, he sat down beside me. “When I think you could have gotten on that plane. I would be wondering what just hit me and how I could ever see you again.” In that room there was a telephone, and he left me alone with it.

He had his coffee shop, and when he was done working, that's where he liked to go—at least, before me that's where he'd gone. Time spent with me, in bed or talking, interfered with the coffee shop, and with research in the university library and his circuit of bookstores and Saturday games of pickup basketball, but for several weeks I was unaware that he had altered his routines for my sake. From the congratulatory hostility of his friends, I gathered that women came and went. “Your free throw's gone to shit,” said Billy, owner of the shabby, stately Victorian next door whose honeysuckle-overrun backyard was a storehouse of costly toys—motorcycles, a sailboat. “How I know you have a girlfriend.” I would have liked to talk to someone
who knew him—even Billy, flagrantly indiscreet—about how I was faring in my anxious adaptation to his preferences, whether I was getting anything wrong. Other women had lived with him: What had they done while he was writing in the morning? How had they kept quiet enough? One was a cellist—how had
that
worked? His writing hours, eight to noon, were nonnegotiable. If he missed a day, his black mood saturated our world. But this was rare.

The check came, for the story. Forwarded by my husband, whom I called sometimes when I was alone in the cottage, and blue. “You can always come home, you know,” my husband said, and I bit down on the question
Why don't you hate me?
He knew me well. “Look,” he said. “People get into trouble. We get in over our heads. It's not only you.”

The renovated cottage was close enough to the university that, days when he was teaching, he could ride his bicycle. Covertly, I began to hold it against him that he was honoring his responsibilities, meeting his classes, having conversations about weather and politics. My syllogism ran: what love does is shatter life as you've known it; his life isn't shattered; therefore he is not in love. Of the two of us, I consoled myself with the idea that I was the
real
lover. But, really, why did it matter so much? The question of who was more exposed emotionally would have struck him as crazy, my guess is. But either my willingness to tear my life apart had this redeeming authenticity, or the pain I was causing my husband was callously—even violently—pointless.

By now I had learned something about the women before me, including the Chinese lover whose loss he still wasn't reconciled to, though it had been years. I stole her picture and tucked it into
Middlemarch
, the only book in this house full of his books that belonged to me, and when he admitted to not liking Eliot
much I was relieved to have a book which, by not mattering to him, could talk confidentially to what was left of me as a writer, the little that was left after I was, as I believed I wanted to be, stripped down to skin and heartbeat and sex, never enough sex, impatient sex, adoring sex, fear-of-boredom sex.

The immense sanity of
Middlemarch
made it a safe haven for the stolen photograph. Whenever I went back to Eliot's novel, I imagined the magnanimous moral acuity with which the narrator would have illumined a theft like mine, bringing it into the embrace of the humanly forgivable while, at the same time—and how did Eliot manage this?—indicting its betrayal of the more honorable self that, in her narrator's eyes, I would possess. But I didn't go back often; sex and aimless daydreaming ate up the hours I would usually have spent reading, and when I went up to the loft, I left the book behind—I didn't want him noticing it. He had a habit of picking up my things and studying them quizzically, as if wondering how they had come to be in his house, and if he picked up
Middlemarch
there was a chance the photo would slip out. If I fell asleep in his bed after sex he would wake me after an hour or two, saying
Kid, you need to go downstairs.
On the way down I ran my fingers over the spines of the books lining the stairwell. If you opened one it would appear untouched; he recorded observations and memorable passages in a series of reading notebooks.

My scribbled-in
Middlemarch
stayed on the nightstand by the twin bed, and I had hung my clothes in the closet, but that didn't mean I felt at home in the room, with its dresser whose bottom drawer was jammed with photos. What did it mean that this drawer, alone in all the house, had not been systematically sorted? Near the bottom of the slag heap was an envelope of tintypes: from a background of stippled tarnish gazed a poetic
boy, doleful eyes and stiff upright collar, and I wanted to take it to him and say
Look, you in 1843
, but that would prove I'd been rifling through the drawer, and even if he hadn't said not to, I wasn't sure it was all right. His childhood was there, his youth, the face of his first author photo. Houses and cities before this one. His women, too, and I dealt them out across the floor, a solitaire of disparate faces: I wanted to know their stories. No doubt I did know pieces, from his work, but here they were, real, and I would have listened to them all if I could, would have asked each one
How did it end?
When he was writing he would sometimes knock and come in and rummage through the pictures, whose haphazardness replicated memory's chanciness. As with memory there was the sense that everything was there, in the drawer—just not readily findable. Disorder is hospitable to serendipity; was that the point? When he found the photo he wanted he didn't take it back to his desk but stayed and studied it, and when he was done he dropped it casually back into the hodgepodge. If I opened the drawer after he'd gone, there was no way to guess which photo he'd been holding.

There were things that happened during sex that felt like they could never be forgotten. Recognitions, flights of soul-baring mutual exposure, a pitch of ravishment that seemed bound to transform our lives. But, sharing the setting of so many hours of tumult—the bed—and tumult's instruments—our two bodies—these passages lacked the distinctness of
event
and turned out to be, as far as memory was concerned, elusive. And there was sadness in that, in coming back to our same selves. By midsummer, something—maybe the infuriating inescapability of those
selves, maybe an intimation of the monotonousness sex could devolve into, if we kept this up—caused us to start turning sex into stories. Sex with me as a boy, the one and only boy who ever caught his eye, a lovely apparition of a boy he wanted to keep from all harm, but who one day was simply gone; sex as if he was a pornographer and I was a schoolgirl who began, more and more, to conjure long-absent emotions, tenderness, possessiveness, even as the schoolgirl became more and more corrupt, telling sly little lies; the sex we would have if, after ten years' separation, we saw each other across a crowded room; sex as if I had just learned he'd been unfaithful to me with one of his exes; sex as if I'd been unfaithful; the sex we would have if we broke up and after ten years ended up in the same Paris hotel for some kind of writers' event, a book signing maybe, and sometimes it was his book and sometimes it was mine; sex with me in the stockings and heels of a prostitute, with him as a cop, me as a runaway desperate for shelter, with him as a woman, with the two of us as strangers seated near each other on a nightlong flight.

These games always began the same way. Ceremonious, the invitation, proper and respectful in inverse proportion to the derangement solicited.
What if you are. What if I am.
We never talked about this, and though either could have said
Let's not go there
, neither of us ever declined a game described by the other. The inventing of roles was spontaneous, their unforeseeableness part of the game's attraction, but a special mood, an upswell of lurid remorse, alerted me whenever I was about to say
And then after forever we see each other again.
In these scenarios where we had spent years apart, the lovely stroke was our immediate recognition of each other—not, like other emotions we played
at, a shock, not a wounding excitement, but an entrancing correction to loss. All wrongs set right.
And we look at each other. And it's like—

While he wouldn't drink any coffee that wasn't made from freshly ground Italian dark roast and he had a taste for expensive chocolate, he seemed mostly indifferent to food and never cooked. What had he done when he was alone? Was it just like this, cereal, soup from cans, microwaved enchiladas? Should I try to make something—would that feel, to him, to me, stickily wife-y? He liked bicycling to the farmer's market and would come back with the ripest, freshest tomatoes. He taught me to slather mayonnaise across bakery bread, grinding black pepper into the exposed slices before covering them with another slice, taking fast bites before the bread turned sodden, licking juice from wrists and fingertips, the tomatoes still warm from basking in their crates at the market, their taste leaking acid-bright through the oily mayonnaise blandness, the bread coarse in texture, sweet in fragrance. There was at least a chance he'd never told any other lover about tomato sandwiches. After weeks of not caring what I ate, I had found something I couldn't get enough of, and as soon as I finished one sandwich I would make another, waiting until he was out to indulge, and it didn't matter how carefully I cleared away the traces of my feast, he could tell, he was quick with numbers and probably counted the tomatoes.

Really the entire cottage was saturated with his vigilance; his keen eye for detail was now directed at me. When I went elsewhere, tried working in a café (not his) for example, it was as if the house were still with me, its atmosphere extending to the unrocking table where I sat with my books and my legal pad
and my cup of coffee with cream and two teaspoons of brown sugar stirred in. At that table I could not do a dirt road in New Mexico. I could not do a wife steeping in cold bathwater while her husband scissored the heads from poppies and black-eyed Susans. Neither could I do my new existence.
He
would not walk into a story of mine. He could not have sat down in an armchair of my imagining, or awakened in a bed beside a narrator in some way me. The world we were in was replete with narration, and it was his. After a couple of hours, I gave up trying.

He was sitting with Billy on Billy's front steps and greeted me by saying, “Everest redux.” Billy said, “Can I have a kiss for luck? Leaving for Kathmandu early in the
A.M.
Oh, and forgot to tell you”—turning to him—“Delia's going to house-sit. I don't want to be distracted on the Icefall by visions of Fats wasting away in some kennel.” Fats was his skinny, hyper border collie. “Only good vibes. Last year, when I got up into the death zone, I hallucinated my grandmother.” Exaggerating his Texas drawl: “‘Time you
git
back home.' Actually one of the Sherpas looked a whole lot like her. Brightest black eyes. See right through bullshit, which you want in a Sherpa or grandma. I lied a lot when I was little, like practice for being in the closet. So, Delia. Fats loves her. So, she'll be staying here.” He said, “Always smart not to leave a house empty,” but I knew Billy was curious if I would show that I minded, because Delia was his most recent ex, the lover before me, and thinking
Only good vibes, right
, I said, “Fats will be happy” and kissed Billy on his sunburned forehead.

I gave up on the coffee shop, but when I tried writing in the afternoons in the guest bedroom, sitting up in the twin bed with a
legal pad on my knees, he would wander in and start picking up various objects—my traveling alarm clock, my hairbrush—and I would drop the legal pad and hold out my arms. Maybe because he was becoming restless, or was troubled by what looked, in me, like the immobilizing onset of depression, he talked me into going running, and that was how we spent our evenings now, on an oval track whose cinders were the old-school kind, sooty black, gritting under running shoes. On days after a weekend meet, the chalk lines marking the lanes were still visible. The infield was grass, evenly mown, and after running he liked to throw a football there, liked it even more than he ordinarily would have because football figured in the novel he was writing, about two brothers whose only way of connecting with each other was throwing a football back and forth, and he needed the sense impressions of long shadows across summer grass and the grain of the leather to prompt the next morning's writing. When he held a football, his tall, brainy self came together, justified. Pleasantly dangerous with the love of competition, though at the moment all he had to compete with was me. When he cocked his arm back and took a step, tiny grasshoppers showered up. The spiral floated higher, as if the air were tenderly prolonging its suspension, and took its time descending. The thump of flight dead-ending against my chest as I ran pleased me. He had trouble accepting that I could throw a spiral, though he might have known my body learned fast. I couldn't throw as far, and he walked backward, taunting for more distance. Taunting I took as a guy-guy thing; my prowess, modest as it was, made me an honorary boy, and was sexy.