Tinderbox (32 page)

“Adam must have gone to town with that,” Larry says between forkfuls of Myra’s salad.
“You know his obsession with Frank Lloyd Wright and the fire the servant set to his
home.”

“To the servant’s own home?”

“No. To Taliesin, Wright’s home. Adam never told you that story?”

“I suppose he did. I must have forgotten.”

The waiter clears their plates, brings their entrées. Larry ceremoniously tops off
her wineglass and refills his own empty one.

“So,” Larry says, raising his glass, “let’s not waste all our time on Eva. Or Adam’s
obsessions. We’re finally having our dinner. Only twenty-five years later than I wanted.”

Myra clicks her ex-husband’s glass. “We’ve been separated for twenty-six years.”

“It took me six months to know what I wanted to say to you.”

“Well, please don’t say it now.” She touches Larry’s arm to soften her words.

“My intentions were pure in inviting you to dinner. Not that I wouldn’t drop everything
if you said you’d take me back.”

“That’s ridiculous. You just like that fiction. You’d be irritated by me within a
week. Besides, you seem to be genuinely happy with Betty. Happier, in fact, than I’ve
seen you before.”

Larry props an elbow on the table, rests his chin in the cup of his hand. He is aging
well, Myra thinks, as lean as he was at forty, his hair gray now but thick as ever.
“I am happy with Betty. The kids think she’s crude, and she is a little rough around
the edges. But she has a big heart.”

“They know that. Adam told me how nice she was with Omar when they visited you in
Willow.”

“But what about you? Don’t you miss having a man?”

Myra takes a long drink of water, which makes her feel better. In the habit of therapists
who’ve spent too many sessions hearing patients’ observations of them in movie theaters
or at the grocery store, she surveys the room to be certain none of her patients is
watching her. “At times,” she says. “When there’s a blizzard and everyone’s housebound
and I imagine I’m the only one not playing Parcheesi and drinking hot cocoa. Sometimes
in August, when I don’t want to travel by myself. But, at heart, no. I feel like I’ve
moved beyond romantic love.”

“You wrote me that after I came to the place you were staying in Tucson. When I made
an ass of myself by trying to get you to go to bed with me.”

“You didn’t make an ass of yourself. You were very sweet and sincere.”

“You didn’t seem to think so at the time. You said some pretty strong words to a guy
who could barely walk. I ended up on crutches for two weeks after that night, with
a nasty sprain.”

Myra takes a forkful of her trout. “Poor Larry. I was using every ounce of self-control
not to let things happen between us. It would never have worked. We would have just
ended up confusing the children and hurting each other again. People always think
they can go back. I can’t tell you how many of my patients spend hours on the Internet
looking for their high school crushes.”

“I’ve read that a lot of those relationships turn into something. People marrying
their long-lost sweetheart.”

“No one writes about what happens three years later.”

The restaurant is filled now, a low din in the room, the candles lit on all the tables.
“I like this place,” Larry says. “A place to eat rather than a destination to be discussed
like most of the restaurants where I seem to go when I’m here. It’s genuine—like you.”
He pauses, embarrassed, it seems, that she will think he’s saccharine, then plunges
ahead. “I still remember what my father said about you—that you had soul. I was so
hurt when he said that, because I thought what he meant was that I did not.”

Myra pushes her plate slightly to the side. She folds her hands on the table. “One
person can’t be another’s soul. And you’re wrong, Larry. You have soul. You have your
own soul, different than mine, but every bit as good.”

Myra leans over and kisses her ex-husband, father of her children, grandfather of
her grandchild, lightly on the lips.

20

During the second week Myra is in the soap-opera star’s apartment, the city has a
two-day cold spell. Ice crystals form on the windows. Looking out from the thirty-sixth
floor, it’s as though she has traveled to another latitude. Preoccupied with ice,
she reads about Ultima Thule, the mythic last stop of civilizations, about the king
penguins who march hundreds of miles each year back and forth from their glacial breeding
grounds. She imagines ships gliding through water bound by glaciers, the fractured
ice-splintered light. She recalls her beloved childhood stories. The Snow Queen who
abducted children to her crystal palace. Guinevere wrapped in furs as she was carried
off to Arthur’s castle.

The renovation of her house begins, the fire department having caused as much damage
as the fire: windows smashed to release the pressure from the hot air, floors flooded
with the water from the hoses so that blowers and dehumidifiers have to be installed
to dry out the soaked woodwork and plaster.

She cannot tolerate warm sheets, hot beverages, woolen sweaters. She turns off the
heat, drinks her coffee iced, flings off her covers. She cannot stop thinking about
the little girl she saw the first day she visited Omar whose leg was kept submerged
in a bath of cold water. Otherwise, she would scream in pain.

Prone on the soap-opera star’s sofa, she pieces together a story line, each action
illustrated as in a picture book.
A child setting fire to a house laced with gasoline-soaked rags. The drunken father
racing out. The child crouching behind the chicken coop. The mother she’d thought
was next door playing a tile game, trapped inside
.

An e-mail arrives from [email protected]. She cracks the window. A cold
wind blows across the table where she has set up her computer.

It’s eighty degrees here today. The bougainvillea on the trellis by the pool are in
bloom. Betty’s boys are both swimming.

When you kissed me in the restaurant, I had the most vivid memory of the first time
I ever kissed you—a girl I’d met seated behind a table of books who read highbrow
novels and spent her meager salary on nosebleed seats at Carnegie Hall. It’s so strange
to say this, but I saw for the first time that you were my love but that you will
not be my only love. For the first time since I threw our lives together away with
that stupid Sheri, I felt truly released.

You didn’t say who the second person was you failed. Not that I agree with your assessment
of the first.

Myra hits Reply.

You. I failed you.

21

On the day that a piece of skin
¹
⁄
₁₀₀
th of an inch thick is removed from Omar’s left buttocks and sewn onto his scalp,
Adam tells Caro that he and Rachida are separating.

“She told me about Layla,” Adam says. “She said you knew and had told her she had
to tell me.”

It is six o’clock. They are eating in the hospital cafeteria. If all goes well, Omar
will be discharged at the end of the week.

“She says she’s in love with Layla. That she would never have made it through this
without her.”

Caro tastes a piece of the baked fish, dried out from too many hours under the warming
lights. If she were alone, she would spit it into a napkin.

“Layla’s going to move to Detroit with Rachida in July. They’re both going to look
for jobs as primary care doctors there.”

It is hard to imagine Layla in Detroit. “I’m sorry.”

Adam takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “Yeah. I am sad. But I’m kind of relieved
too. The main thing is Omar. I told Rachida I want him to live with me.”

“You think she’ll go for that?”

“I don’t think she’s going to fight me on it. At least not for the first six months
while she’s getting settled into a new job. Only, I want to stay here with him. She
doesn’t know that part. I’m going to put the screenwriting on the back burner and
try to get a teaching job. I’m almost looking forward to it: being part of the mainstream,
so that days like Memorial Day and Presidents’ Day mean something to me. I’m going
to see if there are any openings at Omar’s school, since I could get half tuition
for Omar that way.”

There are so many holes in Adam’s plan, Caro doesn’t know where to start. And even
if Rachida were to agree to let Adam keep Omar in New York, how would he afford an
apartment large enough for the two of them?

By bedtime, against her will, a solution comes to her. Once she has the idea, she
wishes she could send it back to the recess of her mind from which it has escaped.
But it is so logical, so right, as she tells her mother the following Sunday, it grows
legs on its own.

They are sitting in the soap-opera star’s living room, a room at odds with the green
tea and bran muffins they are sharing.

“Right?” her mother asks. “Do you mean morally right or the best-fit solution?”

“Both. Doesn’t it seem that the two usually coincide?”

Myra tucks her legs under her. In the past week, the pain from the burn has finally
abated and, with this, the compulsion for cold. She doesn’t want to know what it is
that Caro has dreamed up. Already she can feel that it entails a sacrifice. Another
sacrifice for Adam.

“Adam and I will buy your house.”

Myra laughs. She cannot help herself. Then she feels tears come to her eyes. “Darling,
you don’t have to do that.”

“I know. But behind the feeling that I should do this, for everyone, there’s a feeling
that I want to. Having Adam with me this past month has cured me of the need to keep
everything perfect. And the house is so large. I’ll take the top floor, and Adam and
Omar can have the third floor. We can rent out your office. I’ve talked to Dad. He
says he owes Adam a down payment, since he helped me with my apartment. Between what
I’d make if I sold my apartment and what Dad would give Adam, we’d be fine.”

Myra can see it already, Caro in what had once been Myra’s room, Adam using the music
room for his bedroom and office, Omar in the room where he’d stayed before the fire.

She would leave the furniture—what survived—as her gift. On the fourth floor, the
bed frames and dressers were saved, but the mattresses had to go. On the third floor,
everything had been destroyed by flames or smoke or water. The piano had suffered
all three. It was the only item over which she cried. Afterward, she gave herself
a stern lecture. Her family was spared. Omar is recovering nicely. Objects, not even
pianos, do not deserve tears.

On the parlor floor, all the upholstered items—the stuffing infused with smoke—were
added to the garbage heap. That left the farm table, the Indo-Pakistani and Tibetan
rugs, the Empire sideboard she and Larry bought when they were first married. The
secretary Larry’s father gave them when he closed his office. The stools the children
sat on doing their homework at the soapstone counters. These items she will leave
behind.

22

Rachida departs for Detroit before dawn on the first day of July. Omar says goodbye
to her the night before. As her parting present, she gives him a cell phone. “You
can call me now, whenever you want. I programmed my number in.” She shows him how
to use the pre-set dialing. She will be back in two weeks for a visit. In August,
when his camp is over, Adam will take him on the train to Detroit.

Omar does not cry. He wanted to, he tells Adam as they walk to camp the next morning,
but he felt that he should not. They are staying in New York, Adam has told Omar,
because he has taken a job as a teacher. He hopes, he has explained, to eventually
get a job at Omar’s school, but there are no openings. For now, he will be teaching
seventh-grade English at an all-boys school.

With his baseball cap on, Omar looks like any other kid. Before he left the hospital,
the social worker had met with Rachida and Adam to counsel them on how to help Omar
with the questions he would inevitably be asked about the bald part of his head or
the headgear he might wear to cover it. “We need to help Omar understand that most
of the time children who stare at him or ask questions are not doing it to be mean.
They’re doing it because they’re curious, just as he would be if he didn’t know so
much about burns and scars.” On Omar’s first day back at school, he took off the baseball
cap to show the kids in his class where the graft had been stitched. “I can’t show
you where it came from,” he told them, “because I don’t think the teachers would like
me showing you my butt!”

Adam takes Omar’s hand as they cross the street. “Auntie Caro will be picking you
up for the next few weeks. Her school’s out for the summer, and I’m trying to finish
my screenplay before my new job starts.”

“Can Eva pick me up sometimes?”

Adam feels a moment of panic. Has no one explained to Omar that Eva will not be coming
back? Before the fire, he would have mumbled something and left it for Rachida to
talk with Omar. Now he forces himself to look at his son. “You wish Eva were still
here?”

Omar nods. “But I know she’s not.”

They reach the sidewalk and Adam releases Omar’s hand.

“Do you know where she is?” Omar asks.

“No, I don’t.”

Inside the camp classroom, Adam rubs the special sunblock they keep stored in a cubby
into Omar’s scalp. He reminds Omar to keep his baseball cap on when he goes outside
and to rinse off his head in the shower after he goes swimming. He kisses him on the
cheek and watches his son turn to join the table of children making potato block prints.

23

Caro spends the afternoon in her apartment in cutoff jeans, packing books. When the
time comes to get Omar at camp, she looks outside at the hot haze, thinks screw it,
and walks out the door as she is. Over the past few months, she has put back a few
of the pounds she lost in Morocco, but the seesaw of secretive nighttime eating followed
by daytime starvation has blessedly not returned. No weaving and unraveling. Rather,
she feels as though she has settled into the body she was meant to have: no tire of
shame hiding her shape, but still flesh covering her bones.