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  With Dreis, she felt for the first time what it was like to be seen and understood by another; with her patients, she learned that the experience was equally profound when she was the one with the mirror to show them who they were, the vision of what they could be. After the divorce, there was love of nature, which she found in her garden and terra-cotta pots, in her daily walks in the park—the world transformed from the ammonia scent of her mother’s house into a thing of beauty. And then, with her fiftieth birthday, there was the piano, the awe she felt when the patterns in the Bach Inventions began to reveal themselves to her, when she could glimpse the logic of a Chopin mazurka.

  Briefly, she’d thought she might discover a love of God, but a month of Saturdays in a synagogue left her embarrassed, sadly aware that it was too late for her not to experience the rituals as false or, worse, silly. When she discovered that, for her, God is grace, the pieces fell into place. That she could do. She would aspire to live with grace, even more, to embody grace, her home infused with as much beauty and generosity as she could muster. It was with this idea, this latest stage of her teleology, that she had opened her home to Adam and Rachida and Omar, with the hope that Adam would finish a screenplay he could sell for some respectable money and Rachida would do her fellowship and Omar would march his little self through first grade. Opened her home, she’d not recognized at the time but had to now, to Eva as well. Eva with her dreams of next year in Jerusalem.

  At dusk, Myra waters the flowering beds and blooming herbs, then locks the terrace door, leaving her garden clogs on the deck. Barefoot, she climbs the stairs to the music room, where she sits down to play without the sound of footsteps overhead. She begins with the major scales, advancing by fifths, first hands separate, triple octaves, then hands in tandem, and then one ascending while the other descends, a pattern, her teacher showed her, which creates a series of chords while keeping the fingering between the hands the same. She proceeds to arpeggios, saving the sevenths for last: the progression from the joyful third, celebration of life, to the melancholic seventh, mournful reminder of its fading.

  When she first learned the cycle of fifths, it had taken her breath away, the mathematical perfection, the way the magic happens no matter the scale. As a child, she’d loved mathematics, not for the pyrotechnics of computation, but for the mystical nature of an invention that insists on utter independence from its creator, an invisible system more discovered than constructed, so that studying trigonometry or doing geometric proofs felt like unveiling the laws of the universe—as if those were not also a fiction of man. Larry had also loved mathematics. But what he loved was the use to which numbers could be put—the prediction of velocities and markets and weather patterns—a kind of exploitation, Myra had felt, of mathematics for man’s purposes rather than a reverence for its poetry.

  Larry found these thoughts of hers very sweet, very feminine. Her mind literally turned him on. He’d listen to her talk and wrap his arms around her or fondle her breasts and press his groin against hers. It took her years to realize how degrading she found this, how his actions implied that her ideas were soft next to the harder qualities of his, and how his amusement at her mind was for him a metaphor of sexual conquest, of being able to pin her against a wall or hold her beneath him in bed.

  When she’d discovered Larry’s affair and told him to leave, her father-in-law, Max, sixty-six and in his last year of work, seemed more heartbroken than his son, who, at first, seemed half-relieved. Not knowing what else to do, Max invited her to lunch. Seated across the table from her at La Caravelle, he asked her to consider the implications of her decision for the children. Silently, Myra, who in the prior five years had miscarried six times and buried both her parents, wept into her leek soup.

  Max offered her his handkerchief, which she blotched with her tears and then accidentally dropped in her soup.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s unfair of me to ask you that. Larry is just so goddamned weak. Smart but weak. He couldn’t bear your grief over your miscarriages. The girl, the secretary, receptionist, whatever the hell she is, he was trying to keep you from getting pregnant again.”

  Her head bent, Myra nodded. What Max said was so true, she immediately recognized it as something she already knew. And although it did not make her feel she could trust Larry again or remain married to him, it had changed everything, because she could no longer hate him. To the contrary, with the truth of her father-in-law’s comment in mind, she had come to feel toward Larry a mild, neutered affection, a feeling not unlike what she might have for a former schoolteacher or neighbor, an affection that allowed her to go forward unencumbered by powerful emotions.

  Before Larry’s infidelity, she’d visualized the four of them—Larry, Caro, Adam, and herself—as a four-sided form: a square, a rectangle, a parallelogram, a quadrilateral, a tetrahedron. Afterward, they became a pentagon: the fifth position occupied first by the receptionist and then by each of Larry’s subsequent two wives. When she invited Adam, Rachida, and Omar to stay with her this year, she imagined again a four-sided form. Now, though, there is Eva. Again, a fifth.

  6

  The week that Caro, Adam, Omar, and Eva spend with Larry and Betty proceeds with surprising ease. Larry has purchased a month’s membership to the local country club. Each morning, he leaves with Eva and Omar to spend the day teaching them the rudiments of golf and tennis, buying them lunch at the clubhouse, goofing around with them on the shuffleboard court. Around noon, Adam disappears into his room with the door closed, at work on his rewrite of The Searchers, and Betty heads out to go shopping for what she calls antiques—napkin rings, a ceramic spoon rest, a wooden duck—leaving the pool area deliciously free for Caro to read and swim.

  Every day, over breakfast, Larry and Adam debate the merits of various Westerns in preparation for the choice of the evening’s viewing. Caro had forgotten that Adam’s love of these movies came from her father, who now sees them as a ratification of his decision to move to Arizona. For Adam, it is as though his expertise about Westerns compensates for his being unable to do any of the things the men in these stories routinely do: ride a horse, shoot a gun, woo a woman, punch a man. With Eva’s reaction to The Searchers, Caro at first worries about her watching the other movies Adam and her father choose, but whatever bothered Eva in The Searchers does not seem to do so with The Magnificent Seven, The Naked Spur, Stagecoach, Shane.

  On Wednesday afternoon, the phone rings while Caro is at the pool. When Adam fails to pick up, Caro races down the steps.

  “Hey,” Rachida says.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Only I have to cancel coming up. I’m on call.”

  Caro can hear the tension in Rachida’s voice. “I’ll find Adam.”

  “Just tell him, okay? I’ll talk to him when Omar calls before bed. I’ve got to get to rounds.”

  “Sure.” Caro looks at her watch. It is two o’clock. From what she remembers with her father, rounds are usually first thing in the morning and then at the end of the day.

  Annoyed that Adam didn’t answer the phone, she knocks on his door. She knocks again and then, in the way of family members, turns the knob.

  The door is locked. “One minute,” Adam calls out. She waits, wondering what the hell she is waiting for.

  When Adam opens the door, he looks disheveled. The blinds are shut and the bed is unmade. There’s a musky smell in the room. Her stomach turns.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Just a little snooze.”

  “That was Rachida. She can’t come this weekend. She’s on call.”

  Adam knits his brows. “How can she be on call? She was on call last weekend.”

  Caro examines her brother. Everything needs to be trimmed: hair, beard, fingernails. She hates feeling caught between him and Rachida. “That’s what she said. She said she’d talk to you about it tonight.”

  7

  It is past midnight when Myra hears Rachida come in. Unable to fa
ll back asleep, she sits in her office with a blanket over her knees, looking out at a milky moon hovering over a treetop. She tries to read, her concentration pierced by memories of the Willow house, where her children now are, and the early years of her marriage, before the call, before everything halted, when she’d spent so much time there herself.

  The call. For years, it had felt as though it had taken up permanent residence in her consciousness, that she was locked in its confines, in the supra-intensity of those moments. Now, though, it has been years since she has thought about it at all.

  Still, it’s all there: Caro in the kitchen doing her third-grade homework; Adam in the tub, blowing bubbles through a wand, just old enough to be left alone in the water, with firm instructions not to stand up while Myra went to answer the phone in her bedroom.

  “Is he home?”

  It was a woman’s voice, loud and demanding, so that Myra, with her mind still on Adam in the tub, jumped to the easiest conclusion: a patient who had somehow gotten hold of their number, even though Larry kept it unlisted so that patients would have to go through his service to reach him on evenings and weekends.

  “Where is he?”

  In fact, Myra could not say. She had stopped trying to keep track of Larry’s schedule. Sometimes he arrived home in time to kiss the children good night, sometimes not. There were women she knew from the playground who considered taming the hour of their husband’s return home as the index of their control in the marriage, but on her end, aside from wishing the children would get to see more of their father, it didn’t much matter. Her evening routine with Adam and Caro, in fact, went more smoothly when Larry came home after they were asleep. On those nights, she would sit with him while he ate a reheated plate of whatever she’d prepared earlier for the children, her mind already on the reading or other work she needed to do for her next day’s classes.

  The woman on the other end of the line began to cry.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” Myra asked.

  “You can tell that prick if he doesn’t leave you, he’s going to be sorry. Real sorry.”

  “Excuse me,” Myra said. Her voice was small and hollow. “I have to get my son out of the bath.”

  Myra hung up. Her heart was pounding so wildly she had to sit down on the edge of the bed. The phone rang again. She let it ring and ring. When she finally picked up, the woman screamed, “Eight months. Eight goddamned months.” She made a sound that was either a sob or a laugh. “That bastard’s been screwing me for eight goddamned months, telling me goddamned lies.”

  Myra hung up again. She leaned down to unplug the phone. Already, the phone was ringing again. The jack was behind the bed, and she had to go onto her hands and knees to reach it. When she stood back up, she held on to the headboard to keep from blacking out.

  In the bathroom, Adam had moved on to playing with his pirate boat. At seven, he was on the verge of becoming too old for playing in the tub. Too old for bubbles and pirate boats. Too young to go through a divorce, but in the time she’d walked from her bedroom back into the bathroom, she’d seen into the months and years ahead to what would happen.

  She got Adam out of the tub, dried him, and sent him to get into his pajamas. Then she knelt next to the toilet, a wave of nausea yielding the dinner she’d had with the children. The eight months made perfect sense. It coincided precisely with the last time she and Larry had had sex, with the polite chill that had fallen between them. With the way that her marriage had come to occupy fewer and fewer of her thoughts, slipping lower on her list of priorities, behind the children, behind her classes, behind her work with Dreis on the backlog of grief she felt about the six miscarriages which had left her afraid to try again but still longing for another child—a longing Dreis had gently begun to show her had its origins in never having felt longed for herself, her parents’ deaths having made finite what had never taken place.

  She rinsed out her mouth at the sink. She knew women who had gone insane with jealous rage after discovering their husbands’ affairs. When her neighbor downstairs had learned in the ninth month of her pregnancy that her vain husband had slept with another woman on an out-of-town business trip, she put as many of his prized Ferragamo shoes as she could fit into the oven and roasted them until they turned into something resembling beef jerky. Another woman from the playground tore her husband’s photographs of his mother, who’d died when he was eleven, into confetti and then, weeping, flushed the pieces with her wedding ring down the toilet. Afterward, she begged him to come back.

  Myra washed her face. The woman had sounded thirtyish. Myra imagined her having peroxided blond hair and big breasts. She imagined Larry atop her, thrusting and grunting. She imagined the woman sucking Larry while he sat upright in his desk chair, swallowing his cum, the way she could never bring herself to do. She imagined Larry mounting the woman from behind and holding on to her squishy breasts.

  The images had brought with them a sharp pain that started in her throat and moved into her gut. The pain was not about Larry touching someone else. It was not because she wanted to be the woman. The images brought pain because, with this breach, she knew she would never again be able to sleep in the same bed with Larry or let him touch her in any way. They brought pain because this was the father of her children, the man with whom she had conceived eight times (with this thought, which came after the good-night kiss she gave Adam and the chapter of Little Women she read to Caro, the sobs came hard and fast), because now there would be no more children and Adam and Caro would have to be told all the stupid unbelievable things children of divorce are told about how their parents no longer love each other but will still always love them.

  8

  For their last evening in the Willow house, Larry suggests that they grill salmon steaks. Betty buys corn on the cob and tomatoes from the farmers’ market and Caro and Omar bake brownies for dessert. Adam, Larry notices, actually changes his shirt.

  Eva and Omar ring the terrace with citronella candles, paltry defense against the mosquitoes, so they can eat outside. The divide in the family about the merits of the house had been mirrored in the divide between who did and did not get bitten by mosquitoes. Larry and his mother, Ida, had been eaten alive; Max (always lobbying to dine on the terrace), Myra, and Adam had never been touched.

  Larry sprays his arms and legs with insecticide and, out of homage to his father, takes his glass of wine outside. He turns on the grill. The last time he can recall eating on the terrace was with Myra. It must have been her suggestion, to please his father, who, she argued, had paid his doghouse dues for the house.

  His father had loved Myra from the moment Larry introduced them. A woman with a soul, his father announced. Myra was twenty-three, an assistant at a publishing house. Larry was thirty, in the last year of his cardiology residency. He had slept with thirteen girls, the first few, girls from his set, well versed on the pros and cons of Bergdorf’s versus Bendel’s, with good tennis serves and strong opinions on the diamond settings they expected. He had broken off two engagements, one because he’d developed an aversion to the way the girl smelled, the second because he’d decided after six months of her endless complaining—how her dresses came back from the cleaners, the temperature of a consommé, the hours he watched baseball on television—that he would rather kill himself than spend the rest of his life listening to her.

  It had been a fluke that he even met Myra, at a book party, an event he never would have attended had another resident, a cousin of the author, not brought him along on the way to a bar they frequented. It was the first time he’d been at a book party and he’d not known quite what to do. Myra was behind the table where they were selling copies of the book. She had small breasts, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a thin prominent nose that made it impossible to call her pretty but that he would later realize made her quite beautiful. She was dressed in a long Indian skirt and embroidered shoes. He bought a copy of the book so as to be able to talk with her. />
  She was like no girl he’d ever dated. She read Rilke in French and Marcuse and Virginia Woolf and grew dozens of plants in her tiny apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone on Seventy-fourth Street. She spent her meager salary on tickets for nosebleed seats to hear Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations at Carnegie Hall. His mother, disapproving of Myra’s clothes, unhinged by her stillness, the strangeness of a girl who didn’t make chirpy entertaining conversation, pursed her lips before issuing a damning She seems very nice.

  Larry had understood his father’s comment that Myra had a soul to mean that he himself lacked depth. It hurt him because he had chosen cardiology precisely because of the metaphors, which he believed, about the heart. It hurt him because he knew it was true. He was loud. He drank a lot. He loved to play tennis, ski, watch sports on television. He’d been fucking regularly since he was fifteen. He and Myra, he believed, were yin and yang. With her, he believed, he would gain access to a river of meaning that ran beneath the surface of things, a river he’d been aware of on rare occasions, sometimes after sitting with his mother in synagogue for most of the Yom Kippur day, once when his father had taken his brother, Henry, and him on a mule trip into the Grand Canyon and they’d slept outside so they could watch the shooting stars.

  And indeed, at first he and Myra had felt like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together. He’d taught her to ski, lifted her high in the air, skis and all, when she’d made it down the bunny slope the first time, her cheeks red, her eyes glistening with pride. He’d taken her on her first airplane ride, to a hotel in Puerto Rico where he’d ordered rum drinks for them both from the swim-up bar in the pool and chartered a sailing boat for the afternoon. And although she had been shy and inexperienced in bed, she’d let him teach her about her body and then his.

  Caro pokes her head out the door. “Are you ready for the fish?”