Assorted Fire Events: Stories

THE WIDOW PREDICAMENT

THE HANDSHAKE with Hugh Lawson turned into a soft wrestling match, a quiet force of fingers against each other along with the soft pumping motion the act required. Outside, the wind-swept rain drew itself into a lull, opening a place into which the people could depart. He leaned close to her, not too close but close enough so he could lower his voice into an intimate whisper—“I’m sorry for your loss.” She in turn said what every widow has to say to such sympathy, what she’d been saying for weeks on end to all kinds of words and advice, over tuna casseroles and cups of coffee, looking out her kitchen window (because that’s where most of the post-death rituals took place) at the long procession of the Hudson River moving through the first few weeks of November. “It’s all right,” she said, still with his hand in hers because the whole thing really only took a second — a pause before someone said it’s stopping, and another batch of people went out the door into the cool air. “I’m fine.”

They made the video on the last day of their honeymoon, at a hotel in Madrid, a grand four-star place with a glossy, empty, modern lobby and stairs that were too deep for her feet; the width of the stairs would remain with her forever, as would the white marble floor, the wood-polish smell of the elevator, and the porter who smiled nicely when he found out it was their honeymoon and told them, in beautiful, slow, Andalusian Spanish, not to have children right way, to hold off on all of that at least a year — granting them a wide, graceful smile full of white teeth.

Bled back onto the screen: shadows; bad lighting. The play of flesh and electronic failures along with the feeble light from the drawn curtains catching half dusk; it was around nine, which in Madrid in the summer seemed pretty much daytime. The curtains opened onto a bland view, the drive-up to the entry of the hotel, the street — busy with traffic — paled with that dry dusty sepia of a hot day, and lined with diseased trees. Resting on the dressing table, propped up on a couple of books, the camera framed the bed, leaving the invention of their lovemaking only to that particular square of poorly lit space and making it all seem — a week later when they watched it at home in New York — minute, static, dissolved in fuzz. The angles weren’t right. They were fucking in a normal manner. Seeing it later, they’d realized that porn flicks were distortions on a number of fronts: acrobatic, oddly real-looking unnatural positions provided visible mechanics of pump and thrust. Pornography was often more natural-looking than the real thing.

Two shapeshifters, godless ghosts. Ron hung over her like a long slab of pale moonlit flesh while beneath him, hardly visible, she lay restive, her outstretched hand opening and closing slowly, grasping air. It was this clawing of air that made her cheeks burn with shame when they viewed the tape together; when she saw that hand, waving like a child from the deck of a departing ship, the beauty of the moment became tarnished forever. It no longer belonged to the realm of memory.

He hovered over her with his arms out as she rolled onto her back. Then he made love to her while his ass, pale as a harvest moon, came in and out of focus. They’d laughed at that, the way the recording continued after they were finished, laying back on the tangled bedsheets — spooning each other. When she stood up, her scarless belly passed and moved away, out of sight. He got up, too, showing the flatness of his ass as he turned, bright as chalk, delineated by his dark tan, ripe from three weeks in the sun, reminding them both of those classic sad rear-end shots of concentration camp survivors, of the row of humiliated prisoners lined up in the Attica Prison courtyard after the riots were over.

Along the road to Fuente Vaqueros there were cork trees. He pointed them out, long and thin, bent back by the wind. Behind the bus a swirl of dust rose. They visited Lorca’s birthplace. Cool tile floors. The bed where he was rocked. He signed the book — Ron Stanford. Poet. (Soundmixer.)

The river gathers ripples of white — headlights passing over the bridge, beneath the beaded bulbs on the higher reaches. Points along the Westchester shore — parking lots at train stations, house windows, street lamps. It would be precise to say the night is pressing against the windows; there is a soft shudder of giving frames as the wind comes in hard gusts — a cold front, the news said, bringing with it what will certainly be the first snow of the year. Already Buffalo — gulping the moisture of Lake Erie — has ten inches. In a chair, legs curled beneath her, she reads Chekhov in a hardcover edition Ron purchased a month before he got the news. After that he put the book of stories aside: they don’t make sense when I try, he kept saying, and anyway I never liked Chekhov much because he’s too dry, too vestal. The only stories that counted were the messages from the labs; test results became the literature of his life.

Resting against her leg, the phone rings.

Hugh’s voice seems woody and resonate over the phone and she is certain that this is the first time she has really listened to his voice, although they had exchanged bits of talk at the preschool, gathering the boys, and of course the other night, in the bar’s vestibule.

“That’s all right. I mean, sure, I was just sitting here.”

“Oh, I just thought. Well, I wondered if you might want to have a cup of coffee sometime, maybe dinner.”

“I’d like that,” she says, holding the phone against her ear with her shoulder, walking to the window, seeing the shroud of her face until she’s close enough to see the lights and the water and the bridge.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be. Well, I mean I wasn’t certain if this was exactly the right time and everything.”

He seems eager to get off the phone, but a date had to be set.

“I have a sitter. Jenny. So any night’s fine,” she says.

“All right then.”

They settle on the next Wednesday, December 12, and she pauses long enough to make him think she is penciling it in because she says, “I’ll pencil it in and call Jenny,” and as soon as the phone is back in the cradle she picks it up again and calls Jenny.

“I have this tape,” she tells Meg in the kitchen. They’re sipping coffee, lifting the cups slowly. An old river house, the kitchen is on the bottom floor. A barge lulls up the river outside.

“Of me and Ron, on our honeymoon. Doing it.”

Meg sips her coffee, draws a finger across one brow, and looks away from Grace out at the bare dirt of the garden and past that to the line of marl formed by the outgoing tide. The sun glimmers off the slick muck.

“He’s not even cold yet,” Meg says, lightly enough to make it a joke.

Grace imagines the steaming corpse up on the hill behind the hospital, buried with celebrities and nonentities alike. Steam rising up through the thick soil and the tree roots and the burlap winter turf. Meg looks at the tape, lifts it into her fingers. Her nails are long but she knows how to handle things with them.

“Can you, like, see much?”

“See much?”

“Yeah, I mean I tried that once with — what’s his name? — well, we could hardly make anything out, really.”

“Well, we used an old camera, and the lighting sucked, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

Meg stands, smooths down the sides of her skirt and looks out again at the view, and then goes into the playroom.

“Maybe you should toss it,” she says, coming back with Billy, zipping his coat up to his chin. Billy looks at them betrayed, and says, “I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna go.”

“We’ve gotta go or we’re not going to make it to Dr. Drake’s,” Meg says. She leans close to Grace and whispers, “He’s got a series of booster shots to look forward to.”

There will be a cocksure quality to Hugh’s voice; he’ll be wearing a brown tweed sports coat and a unfashionable wide tie of navy blue and red stripes; he’ll have the leathery skin of a man who spends time outdoors; his knuckles have thick wrinkles that disappear when he makes a fist, and he has the kind of hands, fingers wide, flat-tipped, that can wield a pick with ease, clutch hunks of igneous rock, fist shale samples. Of course his interests will be varied and he’ll say to her that he — tike she — is very interested in music, and she’ll say that she was a music major in college, even did some composing afterwards, a few pieces for piano, one for a small ensemble orchestra preformed at a new music festival in Brooklyn before the kids came along and she gave it up, or rather sidetracked it, put it on the back burner. He’ll mention his theory on Glenn Gould’s Bach, that the very secret to the universe lies between the discourse — the give and take between voices — on his Goldberg Variation, the first fast mono one, not the later one where he slowed stuff down and made even more noise — creak of his seat and his perpetual hem and haw along with himself, and that it has something to do with the way Gould pointed the notes, plucked them, and never used his sustain pedal. Hugh get misty-eyed just talking about it. She’ll gently mock him by mentioning how fashionable it has become to love Gould. He’s hip, she’ll say. There was that movie about his life. Drugs did him in. He did drugs in. Everything as fine as his playing gets twisted by fashion, turned into a prop, a commodity, a slot. Nodding and agreeing, he’ll mention his love of Indian myths, Native American stories — whatever the hell you want to call the lore of dispossessed progenitors … After dinner they’ll have a cognac at the bar downstairs before they pass out into the cold, newly fallen snow. First storm of the year. The roads shut down. The sidewalks empty. He’ll walk her to the house — his own is up the hill, and he’ll have to backtrack to get home, but he’ll insist he doesn’t mind. When they get to her house, Jenny, lying on the couch but not asleep, will sit up but not stand when she sees him. She occasionally babysits for Hugh’s youngest boy — but suddenly he seems unfamiliar. She’ll nod the way you’d nod to a passing stranger (“He was coughing a bit. He’s getting something,” she’ll say.) Down in the kitchen — getting her boots on — Jenny will ask, How was your date? In a soft, conspiratorial voice. His footsteps thud overhead as he moves around in front of the bookshelves, poking titles with one of his fingers It was fine. All right. She’ll try hard not to connect with Jenny’s eyes, beset with a calm judgmental passivity. He’ll be sitting in the big reading chair when she goes back up the stairs; he’ll be fingering a copy of Dubliners, flicking the pages with his thumb as if he were speed reading the thing (or perhaps a book of Eliot poems; or Gary’s battered Winnie the Pooh-anything really to indicate a secondary interest in books, to divide his attention); he’s moving his eyes over her black turtleneck sweater, licking the smooth underside of her chin with his glance — and that’s how she’ll think of it, later, feeling his groping finger spider over her bra clasp; it’s all right to lick someone with your eyes, to manifest your touch in different ways. What one might see as succumbing — swiftly undressing, actually helping him figure out the arrangement of the little hooks, laughing lightly at it, letting him enter her after only a few minutes of foreplay, his hands ungraceful and stupid in their windshield-wiper waves across her breasts. What one might see as a betrayal of Ron, might for her be nothing but a decisive fake to the universe. A grace. A giving to her pain. The tightness in her throat finally easing after two months. The gooseflesh along the inside of her arm, a cool tingle of nerves, fading with orgasm.

Meg, can you fuck your way out of grief? She’ll say it suddenly in the kitchen, another day, weeks later. The same setup: having coffee in the kitchen while the kids play in the other room. Except it’s February. Almost two months have passed. For the first time in years the river is frozen. Hunks of ice clog the sides, pounded up into piles. Last night, on her fourth date with Hugh, she went to a movie at the new multiplex; a late dinner at a bad Italian restaurant; then upstairs to her bedroom where he made love to her for the first time from above and behind, nothing but air and his sliding; the simplicity of the position, the way he loomed over her but didn’t touch her except for the plunging, got her thinking about empty space. It was too easy. That position, her face in the pillow. How good it was. Meg pauses a moment, looks into her eyes, and then abruptly squeals and says her name — Grrraace Smith — elongating it like she’s announcing a talk show host, and then stands and moves over to her, giving her a girlish hug, small, quick clasps. What’s on your mind? Guiding Grace to the table and making her sit down. And right then she’ll tell her about doing it with Hugh, confess how good it was from the start that very first night when she just went ahead and slept with him, and how she feels guilty about it but knows that there isn’t anything wrong with getting pleasure out of her body. He has good hands, she’ll say. He goes just the right speed. I’m so ashamed. I mean it hasn’t been that long since Ron died and the truth is, I mean it’s so horrible to say but I feel like, well, I feel I have to say it. He’s better than Ron was, maybe, I mean maybe I’m fooling myself, maybe I don’t remember or it doesn’t matter — after all, he’s gone physically, at least, and all that, and I shouldn’t be comparing, right, shouldn’t even put them side by side, but that’s only natural, isn’t it? And, yeah, well I have to admit that even when Ron was fine, before he got sick, you know, things weren’t so great in that department even then, at least I didn’t know they weren’t great but now I do; I have to compare, can’t help it, and I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that even though he’s kind of awkward at times, he’s a hundred times better than Ron ever was because, well, because of something, his rhythm, I guess — he’ very musical. He’s fantastic, a virtuoso performance every time.

She imagines he’ll take her farther away from the town on dates, their relationship burgeoning out in concentric circles, like the damage zones of a ground zero atomic blast. They’ll go for rides with Gary on weekends, and Rudy and Stan, his boys, will come over and play, Stan perhaps acting the part of big brother. They’ll drive up to West Point in the spring to watch the cadets parade. Then one night — almost a year later — early fall, they’ll go over the Bear Mountain bridge alone and take the winding road north along the river. She’ll kick off her pumps and wade her stocking toes through the hot wash of air from the heater — her hand resting plaintively on his knee, twitching along his wide-wale cords, zipping the fabric, brushing the knotty tightness of his crotch. A year has passed. The pain has faded. What she can recall of her life with Ron has become burnished, ideal, a beautiful relic (or the inverse; the whole marriage pure boredom, the man a dullard, the end inevitable one way or another). She’ll look out the window at the wintry dark — barely listening to Hugh as he talks about a castle up on the hillside, built by a robber baron, and how he had once hiked up along a path to see the ruins of house, the stone foundation loaded with charred timbers. They’ll get to the town, park along the streets. A light snow will be falling. The restaurant at the end of the street, along a pier, will have long, wide windows allowing a view of the river — and across it — past the narrow bend of wafer — the tall looming dark squat rock of Storm King Mountain; he’ll explain something about how these rocks were not carved out by glacial backwash. She only half listens. She has grown accustomed to his voice, the resonate tones, and his soliloquies about geological formation; his world is striated and broken and governed by forces webbing back into some primordial center; he has a firm grip on this world, on life, and he has lifted her up, has her in his arms, in the parking lot, after the meal, and she smells a faint hint of his spice cologne rising from damp wool. The engagement ring is a bit loose on her finger. She keeps it bent slightly during the ride home. Grief has lost a toehold. It has become only a faint residue.

When the thought occurred she was in the kitchen, mixing clots of chocolate powder into a glass of milk. This must not transpire. I can’t let this happen. Wednesday, December 12th. Out the window the river was flat, quivering like molten silver. In the other room Gary and Billy were playing. A potted fern sent FTD sat in the center of the table next to a pile of papers she had to go through — insurance reports, tax papers, bills, things that needed to be sorted. She’d foist the fern on Meg; it was a late arrival, a last-ditch effort at consolation. In a basket beneath the table she put the card with the rest; there were hundreds — people she’d never heard of from LA; movie people who poured their condolences dishonestly the same way they poured their praise thoughtlessly (if something you did was connected to the production of cash). She sensed a ruthless, grotesque quality in the arrival of this fern: it was from Ron’s old agent, a husky loudmouthed cog in a mega-agency who had been a part of Ron’s life during those few intense years he was trying his hand at screenplays.

It did snow that night — Wednesday, December 12, 1999. And they did sit across from each other at the Hudson House and converse. His skin was weathered, and he talked about Iceland most of the time until rising naturally out of his talk was the suggestion that perhaps she might want to see the country someday; nothing about dancing on the lip of volcanoes, or throwing themselves into one sacrificially, but a hint of it. He had wide wrists and a habit of clasping his hands in a prayerlike manner. His voice had a languid, serene quality — maybe a bit too comfortable — as he talked over his divorce and the subsequent years of single-fatherhood (four years in all, but sounding like a lifetime).

“I can’t say I’m a particularly lonely man,” he said near the end. It was late. The waiters stood bored in the back of the restaurant. One was poking information into a computer window screen. From the windows came a brittle hiss of snow against glass. The air smelled of singed beef; of cigarette smoke drifting up from the bar downstairs.

“That’s a funny way to put it. I mean the ‘particularly.’ You don’t sound too sure.”

“I know. I find myself, well, I guess it’s the scientist in me. I can’t help it. I look at my life objectively. I like to stand back. I think lonely people are the other way. They close in on themselves and never get the overall picture.”

“I guess I’m one of those lonely people. I’m not much of a scientist. I flunked biology. All I remember is not being able to do that …”

“Do what?” he fingered his glass, held it high, looking through the fluted stem at her.

“Stand back from it all. I think it was a cat we did in biology.”

“Ah, a cat. A dissection.”

“Yes.”

“Scientists are rarely lonely.”

“Well,” and then, before she could continue her response, the waiter came with the coffee and the conversation lulled in his presence and never returned to the subject. From that point on it was casual small talk, and then downstairs, in the street, the surprise of another fresh inch of snow; the walk home; paying Jenny, the short conversation with her in the mudroom—“How’s it going?” “Fine, fine.” “We had a good time.” “Thank you for sitting.” “Be safe, the sidewalks are slick.” And then they were alone with the soft culling voice of Gary’s breath through the monitor.

There are legends — the White River Sioux believe in Takuskanskan, the power of motion, a spirit behind all movement — and then there’s our own bland myth of sexual intercourse, that somehow souls can become transfigured in the act; that all that motion, shifting, shoving, and grunting, can remake us.

Alone on Sunday morning in his colonial up the hill, Hugh sat at a wide, oval table, facing the window, cradling coffee in a big mug he’d bought in Germany during a rock conference; in the other room the boys were watching television — a soft dribble of sound effects, of high-pitched voices. His life had changed. Of that much he was sure. There was confusion, a slight, spongy befuddlement in the center of his head. In his chest — beneath his ribs — a vacuum had formed and he was certain that it was the first stages of a mild depression settling in. To combat it he’d take a pill and drive the boys to Bear Mountain and rent skates and do laps, work on his backwards crossover. The feel of the blades as he walked along the rubber matting, just before he stepped on the ice, would set him straight. Afterwards he’d take them to the lodge for hot chocolate and then, with the dull blue, pre-Christmas twilight settling in, he’d drive home, following the ribbon of red taillights down the Hudson Valley. He’d feel better alongside a thousand other souls — all draining themselves back into a Sunday evening. Maybe when he got back to the house he’d call Grace. Maybe not. It was doubtful. She was a strange case. Too much dead weight. This morning he didn’t feel like the life-saving type. Anyway, there was a single woman named Ann he was thinking about. She worked at the reference desk at Columbia’s Butler Library. In the course of research for his book, a geological history of Iceland, he’d flirted with her enough to know she’d probably accept his offer of dinner in the country — a ride up the Saw Mill; she could spend the night (he’d take the couch and send the boys to friends’ houses), or he’d even drive her back in.

But his life had changed. It would never be exactly the same. The strangeness of that night would be hard to shake.

She had it set up, the VCR tape already inside. (When she inserted it, she felt the longing desire of the machine for the tape. It was the smaller camera cassette nestled within a larger shell mechanism that yawned the tape outward against the kiss of the playback head, all clamps and rollers and pins stretching taut.) She pushed play. Beside her on the couch, Hugh watched with a placid gaze — an expectant and politely curious look on his face as he crossed his legs and put his heel softly on top of the coffee table. His shoes were off. There were gold toes on the end of his socks and the copy of Dubliners, bound in dark green, on his lap. She hadn’t said much, just a murmur about wanting to watch something, and that was it, and the truth was, and she’d think about this later, he didn’t ask what she was going to show him. He didn’t care to find out ahead of time what in particular she was going to put on the screen. There wasn’t a need in him to know. It didn’t matter. What she’d decided to put in front of him by the way of entertainment was beside the point; the point was elsewhere. So the machine did the little windup sound — all that tension; there was a blip, a blue screen, then a black screen with some whites sinews of static along the bottom — and then, appearing out of the darkness, fading long and opening like a cornucopia of light and body parts, the scene of her and Ron making love on their honeymoon; first a blur, then dissolving (as she imagined Hugh saw it) through the darkness, a puzzle of light, the crack of Ron’s ass and her legs parted wide, in and out of focus at the same time, all accompanied by the sound of their soft moans and the camera motor — the hiss of the air conditioner, and behind that, the motorbikes buzzing down the calle.

“What’s this?” Hugh said, with a slight start, landing flat on each word.

“It’s me and Ron,” she answered; she was on the floor with her legs tucked beneath her, to the side, sitting halfway between the TV set and the couch.

“Exactly,” he said.

He might have said Shut it off, out of some kind of disgust, or shame; or he might have been turned on by the sad ordeal of watching her dead husband doing it to her; she might have stood up tearfully and shouted Look at what the world took from me, but instead there was the soft clatter of the storm widows catching a hard burst of wind from the north; there was the background hum of the camera motor’s resonating off the Spanish dressing table; the soft clutch of two people reaching an early orgasm against their wills; her legs clamping tight around the back of his thighs; nothing funny at all this time; it seemed a vastly different tape than the one she’d viewed with Ron on the small television in their apartment in the city. (The current television was twice as big.) Hugh sat back watching and didn’t say anything. He did so partly out of a politeness for her feelings; to stand and walk away — considering the sanctity of the situation — wouldn’t be kind; he had to at least see a conclusion to the night, so he watched for four minutes until the awkward disengagement after the orgasm, the parting of flesh from flesh, and saw the pixels of light add up to what seemed to be a template for the home-brewed porn tape. (He’d never rented one of those amateur porn tapes from the video store before, but this was exactly what he’d expected.) He watched the end and sat still while she shut it off, drew both hands through her hair, and told him he’d better go as she led him down the stairs to the mudroom door where he left his boots, and thanked him for the wonderful night while he tied his laces. Then, as she held his coat for him, he urged his arms through the sleeves; and she spoke the whole time about the breaded pork she’d had for dinner, and how nice the Hudson House atmosphere was, until he turned and said, “Hang in there,” and gave her a little hug, making out through his down coat the softness of her shoulders. He then trudged his way up the hill to the main street, turned left, and walked through town. His hood was up and the asthmatic seethe of his breath kept him company. He was a scientist, used to looking at facts, but he wasn’t hard-hearted. He knew what was up. The game was clear. She wanted to nix it, to throw it at him, her life before Ron’s death. She wasn’t ready to love again. It was too early. Her heart was still with Ron, as it should be. She was perfectly normal. Nothing was wrong with what she did, showing him the tape like that, acting out a commendable faithfulness to her past; it was the kind of impulsive, perhaps deranged action you’d expect from a widow. Strangely, he thought, it was (he was now hiking up the hill in jerky, quick strides) what you want from a widow. You want that soft sadness. You want the strange behavior — wild, passionate moodiness. You want pain manifested in deviant acts. There was a fine snow falling, melting as it hit his face. Grief seemed to crunch beneath his feet. The whole planet was a matrix of movements, he knew, causing irremediable change. He thought of Iceland, of the wild surges of gradient heat buried beneath the sea — of the long fissures of magma basting into the immense pressure of the depths, just twelve feet of water equaling the pressure of miles of air, and deeper still into a fantastic weight. In a week, back in Iceland for the conference on plate tectonics, he’d relax and think things over. He’d think only about geothermal system problems, precise yet still earthly and ultimately ungraspable. He’d take the boat out to the site of their study and dive with his colleagues. He’d gone down before in the Alvin — the only thing between his life and those tremendous pressures, a rubber gasket on the door. Pure titanium walls, five thick feet of it, but all that came between life and death was that gasket. He loved Iceland. There was no end to the amount of warmth they could tap from the earth — absolutely free. It was never cold inside a home in Iceland. The price: fantastic volcanic instability, the insecurity of knowing that at any moment, any day, the whole place might go up in a blast. He was at his door. His hand was on the knob. He had so much to do. He had to think it all over and come to some conclusion.

The boys were asleep. Upstairs he undressed in the dark and left his clothes on the floor. He didn’t brush his teeth. The cognac buzz was wearing off, and there was an aftertaste of dinner in his mouth. He lay and watched the dark shadow branches on the ceiling. There was a steady, hard wind. He kept his eyes open for as long as he could. When he closed them, he saw floating behind his eyelids the shadows from the videotape, half formed, Grace’s knees and the back of Ron’s thighs, blended through the light and the lens of that afternoon in Madrid; although he couldn’t precisely identify the sound, he could hear the buzz of the motorbikes winding through the narrow, ancient streets.