Mendocino Fire (9 page)

             
It's then that two blazing wings of sensation touch down on Clio's nape, and the Beloved's palms begin to move in circles, massaging, worrying at the tension they discover, digging in, the Beloved's thumbs bookending the axial vertebra, so that Clio feels the three-dimensional puzzle-piece of bone turn as distinct as if newly wedged in place, her entire skull balanced upon the knife's point of sexual alertness, Clio afraid to move or make a sound for fear of dislodging the hands, startling them into flight. She is aware that
savage loss is the counterpart and shadow of this raw arousal and yearning, which she can scarcely trust even as she leans into it, wondering what this means, this sensual charity.

             
“Shiatsu.”

             
“Shiatsu,” echoes Clio.

             
“Mmm. Good for what ails you.”

             
The Beloved's reflection squints at the real-world Clio over her shoulder, to which she administers a comradely slap. Dismissed.

             
What ails me?
Clio wonders.
Loss. Aging. Regret.

             
So this is Eros' dark side. Always before it was Clio who inflicted the first reality check. The pangs foreshadowing abandonment, the subtly poisonous forewarning: Clio dealt those out.

             
Now we come, though it's timed wrong, to our epiphany, for Clio, academe's androgynous roué, contriver of seductions, far-flung affairs, and prolonged breakdowns—here and now, Clio encounters a possibility never before entertained: she's been unkind. Careless with others' hearts. A waster of time, a despoiler of affection. As of this moment, that Prof. Mitsak is dead. Just ask Clio, absorbed in this mirror's vision, herself and her at-last true love, the radiant-haired object of all future dreams, now rubbing a finger across a front tooth. Clio puts her hands on those shoulders and turns the slender black-sheathed body around. She feels the weird cessation of her breath in her throat—heart-stopping, she thinks—and then all self-narration, even the stabs at description that accompany the worst emergencies, stops. Though the red mouth tilts toward her, lips parting, the eyes remain open. Dazzling, desirous, repelled, unreadable.

Q:
    
Compare/contrast the roles of “body” and “soul” in the act of kissing.

A:
    
This eyes-open kiss is clumsy: neither body nor soul can readily forgive that. Seduction, it turns out, requires an almost Questioner-like detachment to ensure grace. To become a character in the story is to fall from grace. It's as if Clio, in her previous affairs, was always narrator, never simply down in the story, at the muddy, helpless level where she understood only as much as anyone else. Or less. It could be that the Beloved needs a narrator, not simply a floundering fellow character. Clio's teeth grate against the Beloved's, a terrible, nails-on-blackboard sound from which they both recoil.

Q:
    
Comment briefly on the following quotation:

Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

A:
    
All that drear winter of La Niña, Clio feels as if she's trying to keep a wine cork submerged in a bathtub using only one thumb, so dodgy and unpredictable is this love. Tamped-down love means not only sublimated energy but also ranting, pointless impatience: before long, she's sick of obsession's two-lane Nebraska highway. She welcomes any distraction, even this folder, thwacked down on her desk by a junior
colleague, younger even than the Beloved. Fading back toward the doorway, this colleague announces in an injured tone: “We really need to talk at some point after you've read this.” “About?” “About Nadia.” The Beloved, up for tenure. While junior faculty can't vote on tenure decisions, they do a fair amount of lobbying—if that's what this is—on behalf of favored candidates. Renee strains for ease, a gauche, brain-driven woman whose particular mix of ethnicity baffles Clio. African American? Vietnamese? And Czech? Irish? Dutch? Some unprecedented cat's cradle of deoxyribonucleic acid granted her that shapely mouth, pugilist's menacing nose with flaring nostrils, oily fawn skin marred across the cheekbones by an orange-peel stippling of adolescent acne. That acne, severe and untreated, suggests a raisin-in-the-sun, down-home poverty, valiantly tackled and, at this point in her young career, stringently repudiated. If Renee ever had an accent, it's gone. Or not quite: some suggestion of backwater lulls and daydreamy delta vowels remains, despite that impressive will. To suggest a chic she's far from possessing, Renee's left ear is multiply pierced; adorned with wires and rings, it seems more alert than the other, more attuned to signals and nuances. It is to this ear that Clio says, “I'll read it. We'll talk.”

             
“You don't
get
it. We expected so much from you.”
We
, the nine who held the dinner in her honor, that memorable evening.

             
In this chilly pause, Clio, love's insomniac, fails to suppress a yawn. Renee, fervent with insult, closes in, hurling herself into Clio's office's only unoccupied seat, a meanly proportioned straight-backed chair designed to discommode students who would otherwise linger in Clio's aura of disdainful indifference. Throwing one leg over the other,
leaning in, slapping the folder, Renee begins, “You were supposed to—”

             
Clio says, “‘To'?”

             
What the hell
is the expression stamped on those fine, ethnically inscrutable features. “To change things! To, not
mother
exactly, but at least
care
about our careers. If you hear the word going around that ‘Nadia's publications are a little
scanty
to qualify for tenure,' you're supposed to have her back, but no one's heard a peep from you, and Nadia—Nadia's some kind of demoralized shadow of her former self.”

             
“Shadow?”

             
“Me, I fantasize obsessively about burning down this building.”

             
“But Nadia? She's a demoralized shadow?”

             
“Even to confess this fantasy probably gets me on about five different lists right now.”

             
“I haven't noticed anything wrong with Nadia.”

             
“Well: you seem to be avoiding her.”

             
“No. No, no. Not avoiding her. Why would I avoid Nadia? No.”

             
“Avoiding all of us, then.”

             
“You appear to have found me.”

             
“Right at home in this building I burn down ten or eleven times a day.”

             
“If you burn it down, what will you do?”

             
“Ha! Even in daydreams I blow out the match. Even in my head, where you'd think I'd have no fear, I can't touch the flame to the shitty carpet. This place! Can't you get a little more involved? Unless you're willing to get your hands dirty, her tenure meeting's gonna go in a truly ugly direction. ‘Scanty'! She has two books! Would you like the figures
on just how many junior female faculty this place has
ever
tenured? Because I find that figure impressive. It's a very round number. Zero! And, excuse me for noticing, but the last male this department gave tenure to had only one—uninteresting, I think—book and a couple of
derivative
articles, yet his shit was never called ‘scanty.'”

             
“Okay,” Clio says.

             
“Okay what?”

             
Down the hallway, a door opens, closes, and is locked, the homeward-bound deconstructionist whistling, the melody trailing down the floor before vanishing into the elevator, not before lodging itself in Clio's mind.
Miss my clean white linen, and my fancy French cologne.

             
“I'll peep,” Clio says distractedly. “I'll get Nadia's back.”

             
“Her books are
really good
. You've read them, right? Look, did I—?”

             
“Did you?”

             
“Offend you.”

             
“There's truth in what you said. I haven't been very engaged.” Gently, but sick of gentleness, disliking the baiting way this woman hangs her sentences in the air.

             
“Your advocacy will be a game changer, you know that, right?” A pause while this antagonist wonders how far she can push her luck. “Nadia
really needs you
, is the thing.”

             
“I'll do what I can.”
But it's really not my ho-ome.

             
“I would open a florist shop,” Renee says. “After I burned this building down. Since you ask.”

             
“You know what I think about?” Clio says—not, in the moment, even faintly surprised, though in retrospect she will marvel at this question, at having done, next, something so unlike herself, telling a truth, and why, when no good comes
of such slips? “A bookstore on a downtown corner in some rinky-dinky town. Rare books, first editions.”

             
“But you're famous. You can make waves. You're not at their mercy.”
You have everything I want.

             
“There are days, lately, when I don't love books.”

             
“You're losing your soul.”

             
Clio reflects on the justness of this observation. “People open bookstores because they want their souls back.”

             
“It works. I know bookstores whose owners have
gotten
them back.”

             
They laugh, and then don't know what to do with the silence that follows.

             
“Does Nadia know you came to me?”

             
“Nadia. Girl is
losing
it. Sleepless, skinnier than ever, keeps printing out articles about former professors who end up homeless or hoarding cats or whatever. But, no, we've never talked about you. I think she thinks you've got reservations about her work.”

             
“What gave her that idea?” In fact, it's true: in the cool scholarly part of her soul Clio doesn't much like Nadia's books. Trusting this secret assessment, with the rest of her judgment compromised by love, would be unwise, and Clio has intended all along to vote yes, has meant, in short, to do the right thing, or at least the least
wrong
thing. Whichever way it goes, next week's meeting will cause pain: either the pain of Nadia's being granted tenure and remaining near but unpossessable, or the pain of her being refused tenure, thus vanishing forever from Clio's life. If not even a starry glimpse of the object of fear and desire is possible, what will become of that life?

             
And yet, freed on this, the first afternoon in our story
that can safely be called
spring
, lugging her laden briefcase, Clio surrenders to the lightness of soul hidden within each Friday, taking the stairs in long-legged, traipsing descent, her voice pitching
up!
and
up!
precariously, caroming off cinderblock as if the stairwell were a gigantic cement shower stall, quick with resonance, echoing and amplifying:

             
“Oh, I

             
“Could drink

             
“A case

             
“Of you!”

             
You!
flung into the rainy outer world as Joni Mitchell, trailing rags of her ethereal voice, charges across the asphalt only to find, wading in a slow circle around a rusted-out wreck of a car in the flooding parking lot, Nadia, head bent under the assault of the rain, carrying something, now and then pausing to hammer with her fist at the car's Bondodappled hood. Clio suffers a twist of emotion she can't at first recognize. Before, encountering Nadia unexpectedly, she has experienced a number of emotions—shame of a particularly rich, basking intensity, or a pitiless, wired kind of happiness—but never before has any response to Nadia been as temperate as this: disappointment.

             
“This is all I can
fuck. Ing.
Take.”
Fuck
and
ing
are blows.

             
It's been two months since they have exchanged more than cautious
hi
's, passing in the hall.