Tinderbox Read online

  “Sure.”

  Larry watches his daughter carry the platter, an oven mitt and a long spatula squeezed under an arm. Adam had inherited Myra’s graceful form, hidden now under his middle-aged tire and schlumpy gait. In Caro, it is his mother’s body reincarnate—the heavy breasts, the short legs—and his own narrow, deeply set brown eyes. He watches his daughter the way he might watch a patient or even a stranger, with an odd distance between them that he would not say distresses him but leaves him feeling disconnected from himself, his love for her absolutely there but out of sight, like the shed on the distant edge of his land.

  She smiles at him as she sets the platter next to the grill. A wave of gratitude passes over him that she has always been sweet to him, that, unlike Adam, she has not held the divorce against him. Not that she isn’t tough. She had driven a hard bargain when she wanted to buy her apartment, but he had admired her shrewdness and not resented her for it. Like her mother, who has always been meticulously fair with him about money, something he knows from his divorced friends is virtually unheard of, his daughter holds firm to a standard of reasonableness and equity.

  Larry puts the salmon on the grill and hands the platter to Caro to take back inside. He sits on the stone wall of the terrace waiting for the steaks to cook on the first side. When the children were little, he’d been besotted with them. He’d prided himself on being a hands-on father: changing diapers, giving baths, taking the children on Saturdays to the park so Myra could have some time for herself. Saturday nights, there had been a standing babysitter, and he and Myra would go out to dinner, laughing that they seemed mostly to talk about the kids, on occasion leaving before dessert, unable to stay away any longer from their sleeping babes, and then, after paying the babysitter, having sex, sometimes on the living-room floor, while Myra chastised him about Caro and Adam being able to hear them if they awoke, but mostly in their bed, where Larry would marvel that he lusted even more for his wife since they’d had children together.

  Then came the miscarriages, each at ten to eleven weeks. Myra had braved the first and second with a stiff upper lip. Her gynecologist reassured her that one out of four conceptions miscarry. Larry can no longer remember the exact order of things after that: the progesterone suppositories, which left her so sluggish she could barely stay awake; her parents dying within ten months of one another; her decision to use the money she’d inherited to go to graduate school. Another miscarriage, this time with so much bleeding he had to rush her to the emergency room. The night he called her a selfish bitch, Jesus fucking Christ, he yelled, we have two beautiful children who you’re fucking neglecting now, either sleeping all the time or off at your useless classes. He still remembers the devastated look on her face as she took her pillow so she could sleep on the couch, and then, in the middle of the night, hearing her throwing up in the bathroom and realizing she was pregnant again.

  After the sixth miscarriage, he found himself devising excuses to stay later at the office. He would look up at the clock and it would be nearly eight. With the children already in bed, there seemed no reason not to go out to eat by himself. No reason not to schedule the racquet ball games he’d always squeezed into his lunch hour for after work.

  The less time he spent with his kids, the less satisfying the time with them became. He no longer knew which was Adam’s latest favorite bedtime story. He missed Caro’s transition from bathtub to shower, was not aware that she had made it to the twelves on the multiplication table. On the rare evenings when he was home before the children went to bed, Adam would insist that his mother read to him and Caro would forget to give him a good-night kiss. Myra stopped leaving food covered with foil for him in the fridge. Then came the night when he told his receptionist, Sheri, who, he had to admit, he’d hired in part because of her enormous boobs, and his nurse, who hated his receptionist for those appendages, to go home, he would lock up. His nurse called out a goodbye as she left. Was he truly surprised when Sheri appeared at his office door with her blouse unbuttoned and her size D brassiere on display?

  9

  Larry flips the salmon steaks, basting them with the marinade Betty made. Through the kitchen window, he can see Betty putting pats of butter on the corn, Caro tossing the salad.

  Strangely, thinking back, he’d not been angry at Sheri for calling Myra. He moved his clothing into her apartment in Yorkville, never arguing with Myra about the children’s visitation schedule, which he let her set, all the while certain that after Myra finished her Ph.D. and the renovation on the brownstone she’d bought with her inheritance, they would have a serious talk in which they would agree to stop this silly charade about getting divorced and he would stop fucking Sheri and move into the house with the children and her.

  When, eight months after he’d moved out, he phoned Myra to suggest a dinner, the venue, he imagined, for the serious talk, she seemed already to know what he intended to tell her.

  “We’re collaborating so well about the children,” she said. “Let’s not ruin it by saying a lot of painful things that we won’t be able to forget.”

  “What do you mean?” A bitter taste was filling his mouth.

  “Larry, don’t ask me.” For a moment, he thought perhaps she was crying. “The answer is no. It’s as no as no can ever be. I cannot go backward. I’ll have my Ph.D. in a month. The children and I are moving into the brownstone in June.”

  “We have our entire lives before us. The kids are only eight and ten. Think of them. How much happier they’d be if we got back together.”

  “You should have thought about that before you slept with Sheri.”

  “Sheri is nothing. Something that never would have happened had we not been falling apart.”

  “And why were we falling apart? Have you thought about that?”

  The truth was he had not.

  “Your father told me it was because you couldn’t tolerate the pain I was in.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “He took me out to lunch, right after we separated.”

  Then he did something stupid, something he can understand only as desperation, desperation at the vision of his life stretching before him, the life of a divorced father, the distance that would develop with his children, the shallowness of Sheri and the others who would follow. Or perhaps it was hurt that his father, who had hardly talked with him since he’d moved in with Sheri, had talked, instead, with Myra. “We could keep trying,” he said. “We could get pregnant again.”

  He heard Myra suck in her breath. Then the line went dead.

  In the morning, he called a realtor, who by week’s end had found him a two-bedroom apartment in a building with a garage and health club. He gave Sheri three weeks’ severance pay and a pair of gold earrings. He went to Bloomingdale’s and in an afternoon bought a leather sectional couch, a glass coffee table, a dining-room set, a king-sized bed for the master bedroom, twin beds for the room where the kids would stay on their alternate weekend visits, and a wall unit for the expensive television and stereo equipment he purchased the next day. He leased a Porsche for the garage and bought a silk bathrobe that he hung in his closet for the want-to-be models and actresses happy to sleep with a thirty-nine-year-old cardiologist with plenty of money for nice restaurants and weekends in the Hamptons. And still, all the while, he imagined that sometime, not now, but not too long from now, when the time was right, he’d have his dinner with Myra and his life would return to … the word he thought, over and over, was normal.

  After two years had passed, he had to acknowledge that this time was not going to come. He fell into a depression that left him with a pit in his stomach and unable to sleep, which he dug himself out of by the move to Tucson to join a practice that even in his sickened state of mind he had the instinct to know would make him rich.

  With his move, he had seen the children for two weeks each August, during the time between Christmas and New Year’s, when he’d stay in a suite at the Stanhope (even Adam unable to resist the pl
easures of room service and television in bed and a visit to F.A.O. Schwarz), and then during their March break, when Myra would bring them by train to Tucson to stay with him in the house he’d bought on the west side of town, a Spanish-style casita with a ten-stall barn and a four-car garage and a gunite pool with an attached hot tub. Myra would do a house exchange with a retired French professor from the University of Tucson, an arrangement about which Larry had been deeply grateful, since Adam, even at thirteen, would not have been able to manage ten days without seeing his mother.

  Each year, he picked up what he still thought of as his family at the train station, the children grumpy, dragging the backpacks out of which they’d lived for two days, Myra astonishingly crisp in her tailored pants and white blouse. Because of his car sickness, Adam would sit in the front seat, Caro and Myra in the back, while they drove to the French professor’s house, a bungalow near the university, close enough to shopping that Myra didn’t have to rent a car. He’d carry Myra’s suitcase to the front door while she hugged the children goodbye, reminding Adam to take his allergy medicine, the pill at bedtime, the nose spray in the morning, promising Caro that she’d call them every night.

  Larry tests the salmon steaks with a fork. “I need a serving platter,” he calls out.

  He can no longer remember how many of those March trips there had been, or on which of them he’d made a fool of himself with Myra, only that he’d already introduced Caro and Adam to Linda, whose lingerie model’s body, on exhibit in her tight T-shirts and horsewoman’s jeans and boots, embarrassed them—her spending problem, centered on shoes and handbags, still unknown to him.

  The children had been old enough to be left alone at the house for a few hours, which he did one evening while he went to check on a patient at the hospital. His patient, who’d had quadruple bypass surgery at six in the morning, was staring at the ceiling while his wife busied herself rearranging the objects on the bedside stand, preoccupied in the anxious way of people visiting someone truly ill with an attempt to be useful. Larry asked her to step outside, not because he intended to examine his patient—that would be left to the surgical resident—but rather because he knew that a break from the sickroom, which she would do only on doctor’s orders, would rejuvenate her for the long night ahead.

  When he took his patient’s hand, the man looked at him with the terror of someone whose chest has been sawed open, who in some inchoate way knew how close he had traveled to death.

  “I feel like shit.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to pull through.”

  “If you weren’t here, you wouldn’t. But you are here, and you will.”

  For the remainder of the ten minutes Larry spent with his patient, the man said nothing. He closed his eyes, not asleep, but too deeply fatigued for any more visual input. Early in his career, Larry had learned how powerful a few words of reassurance could be to his patients. It had surprised him to find this capacity in himself, a patience he had never achieved with his children or Myra or anyone else. When he’d expressed as much to Myra, she’d said, “But it’s common that a person will have his best self emerge in a context that’s less personal. It’s easier.”

  “It’s not quite real?”

  “It’s real. You’re no less real as a doctor. You’re just more conflicted about being your strongest best self outside of that role.”

  Leaving the hospital, he stopped to buy a bottle of wine. He’d told Linda he would try to drop by her condo on the way home. He lingered for a few moments, talking with the store owner about the year’s new Beaujolais, all the while thinking about Myra, about the conversation so many years ago about his best self, about the children in the casita watching television. Would Myra be at the bungalow at this hour? She’d never liked red wine; it reminded her of the Manischewitz her father had poured at Passover, the one night each year he would have wine in the house.

  He bought a bottle of an already chilled Sancerre.

  Parking outside the French professor’s bungalow, he felt absurdly nervous. There was a light on in the living room, but when he rang the bell, no one came to the door. He stood awkwardly on the step outside, shifting from foot to foot, before trying the bell again.

  “Larry?”

  He started, the awareness that the voice was Myra’s coming as he turned, his ankle twisting beneath him. He leaned against the door. “Fuck.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “I twisted my ankle.”

  “With the children?”

  “They’re fine.” He sat down on the step, gripping his ankle.

  “Let me get you some ice.”

  “You spooked me, coming out of the bushes like that.”

  “I was on the patio out back. You spooked me, coming over without calling.”

  “Can I come in? I’ll just ice my ankle and then let you be.”

  He followed his ex-wife inside. She was wearing a loose cotton dress with a sweater on top. Her long thin legs and feet were bare. From the back, she looked like a girl of twenty. The bungalow was filled with books and a perfumy smell from some flowers she had set on the dining table in the tiled front room. She brought him a dampened towel knotted with ice inside. He sat down at the table and rested his foot on the opposite chair. She had been here less than a week, but still the house felt the way he remembered their home together to have been.

  Myra handed him a glass of lemon water.

  “I brought you a bottle of wine. It’s in the front seat of the car. Only I’m too much of a klutz to be able to go get it.”

  “You haven’t told me why you’re here.”

  “Be kind to an injured guy and go get the bottle of wine and then I’ll tell you.”

  When Myra returned, it was with the bottle of wine, two glasses, and a corkscrew. She gave him the corkscrew and he opened the bottle, pouring each of them a glass. She sat in the chair next to him and took a small sip. He took a large one.

  “I just wanted to talk with you. I never get to talk with you.”

  “Is Linda with the kids?”

  “You know about Linda?”

  “They told me about her. They said she’s very nice.” Larry knew that his children had said no such thing. “Caro said she’s very glamorous and a skilled horsewoman. You must like that.”

  “They’re by themselves, watching TV. It’s fine. The house has an alarm, but it’s so safe out there, I usually don’t even lock the doors.”

  “You left them with the doors unlocked?”

  “Of course not. I locked up tight. And no one could get past the dogs.”

  “Maybe we should call them.”

  “I called before I left the hospital. They were watching M*A*S*H.”

  Larry took the ice off his ankle. Like most doctors, he hated being a patient. Luckily, he had his mother’s stolid constitution, so years would go by without his suffering more than a winter sniffle or summer cold. He could recall only one occasion during the years they’d been married that he’d been sick enough to stay in bed. Instead of enjoying Myra’s ministrations, the bed trays she’d brought him, the cool washcloths she placed on his feverish forehead, he’d snapped at her.

  “So what did you want to talk about?”

  He bit his tongue so as not to blurt out That I still love you. “There’s nothing specific. I just miss you.”

  “I miss you sometimes too.”

  He took Myra’s hand, so cool and light after his patient’s clammy paw. “It was a mistake, what I did.”

  She put down her glass of wine. “I haven’t eaten yet tonight. This will go to my head and I’ll do something I regret.”

  He leaned toward his ex-wife. He took her other hand so that both of her hands were cupped between his. “Do something you’ll regret.”

  He edged his chair next to hers, cringing at the screeching sound of the legs on the tile. She let him kiss her. She tasted the same. She smelled the same. He kissed her several times. His brea
th deepened. The bedroom was behind them. If he stood, would he be able to lead her there?

  Her hands were on his chest. She pushed him back and stood up.

  She moved to the armchair, curling her legs under her. He hobbled, one shoe on, the other off, to the couch. She looked at him with what at first glance, in the dim light, seemed like amusement, but, on second glance, did not.

  “You sure know how to make a guy feel ridiculous.”

  “Don’t talk to me about making someone feel ridiculous.” She covered her eyes with her fingertips, pressing along the sockets. Had his ankle not been throbbing, he would have gotten up from the couch and pried her fingers away. Instead, he waited for her to lower her hands.

  “Some women might feel flattered to have the man who cheated on them then try to cheat with them on someone else. But I just feel debased. I’m sorry to sound cruel, but in my professional opinion, you don’t know what you want. This is pathetic, your being here, my letting you touch me.”

  He had not waited for her to kick him out again. He’d gathered up his shoe and left.

  10

  Adam comes through the kitchen door with an empty platter. He scampers, barefoot, like a mole emerging from a burrow. Larry feels the familiar irritation at his son rising in him, curbs the impulse to tell him to put on his goddamned shoes.

  He lifts the first of the salmon steaks from the grill onto the platter.

  “Boo!” Startled, Larry turns toward the voice. Omar is climbing out the casement window. “Boo, Grandpa! Boo!”

  “Jesus,” Larry says. Eva climbs out behind Omar. She giggles as she straightens herself up. “I nearly dropped the fish.”

  “I scared you?” Omar asks. He smiles shyly.

  “Nearly scared the pants off of me.” It is good to see the kid acting like a kid. “Your father used to do the same thing—crawl out of the window to come to dinner. Spook us.”

  Adam laughs. “I used to pretend I was one of Mamah Cheney’s kids jumping out of the dining-room window after the servant set the house on fire.”

  Eva stares at Adam.