Assorted Fire Events: Stories

COITUS

THIS TAKES place on a Wednesday afternoon on the tenth of July on a cooler than usual day of a long dry hot summer along the Eastern Seaboard during coitus between Bob Sampson and Ellen Davison-Simms, who are lying together in light that seems to billow with the rise and fall of the curtains, which during those first moments (before entry) have risen and fallen several times, giving form to a front of Canadian air, cool and dry, bringing relief to two long weeks of record heat. The house in which our two lovers find themselves — as they say — is full of light, bursting with it, clean and white and not so large or small but grand in a way, attaching itself as it does to the larger estate it was once a part of; it’s the so-called guest house, but it is larger than the houses farther up the hill, away from the river, and now with the hedges grown up, the drooping roses on rotting trellises, it stands on its own. The entry part is over — he’s in her — and the rise and fall of the breeze against his body — he’s on top — makes his buttocks feel chalky, like rock, firm and hard, eternal, holding some coolness the earth requires, yet there is that line of his suntan that gives him the feeling — at least a vague sensation — of being a man of two sides, one warm and the other cold, hidden by Speedos and boxer shorts and tennis gear. But that’s another story because by the second or third thrust (is it a thrust or a wave, a movement confined by certain latitudes?) the curtains lift again, billow, fold, his head turns slightly to see them, eyes almost closed, as white folds of light and space and air; curtains that his wife made for the old house, their first together, laying the long sheets of cotton in the living room to be cut down to size — facing back towards Ellen, chin touching chin a moment, hummmm easing up from her throat, the nip of her throat, he feels, vibrating — from off, off, the soft moaning of a boat horn, a tug, drawing a barge up the river to the limestone quarries in Haverstraw, two warnings of some sort, he hears them …

… brings to mind for no good reason Tom’s death — his brother in upper Michigan spilling a canoe along the Two Hearted; a bad paddling river, lots of deadfall that spring, water ice-cold, the cold black branches holding him under — it was at this great cost that Bob Sampson purchased the depth of his eyes; Ellen saw that, it gave his eyes a great attractive quality. They had met in that traditional bump-together way you see in bad movies, or even some good ones, where fate has actually transpired to physically nudge two souls together — or so you’re supposed to think, at least, knowing damn well it’s mostly luck and nothing else, what else would explain the quality of Bob’s eyes having cost so much? You never get that in movies, the cost of great beauty; Ellen knew it when she saw it, met his eyes, in line; who wouldn’t know it? Bob has great eyes. There is that deep pooling quality; they stay on you just long enough and then move away; he doesn’t stare, but he takes some time with each glance, or at least he had, standing there, turning to order a double cappuccino with extra cinnamon — a man who likes cinnamon, she thought; she was wearing her lime-green skirt, pleated, tight against the sides of her thighs; she owned a clothing store and knew everybody in town but for one reason or another she hadn’t met Bob, who was moving his business into his home, or setting up a home office, whatever they called it; she later recalled his wife; she knew her by first name, Cindy, a tall willowy woman who came in often and preferred long and black and somewhat draping dresses … we’ll leave her out; the arch of himself into Ellen, that boat, the boat horn, her nub, the nub of her chin — pink and white light, cool, but nonetheless a thin moustache of sweat forming just above the line of his upper lip;

there is a reluctant sadness in the way he holds back from the next movement, what would you call it? It wasn’t that he was thinking this but maybe the thought was forming anyhow — that it was a fending off of death, this pausing to keep yourself from coming, to hold off the spillage without letting on that that was what this pause was about, her hand webbing the back of his hair, which was layer-cut black, small specks of gray — maybe he didn’t even know that, wouldn’t allow the pretense of some kind of control into this moment; he wiped the sweat with his tongue.

what’s the matter

nothing

you’re sure

yeah

just resting

yeah

the horn again farther up the river more near Haverstraw, or just a train-coming-in-across-the-river sound playing those desperate tricks — what was it, a mile over there, two maybe? — the water glassy cool and slicked with silver; eyes open; Ellen, six years younger, still taut around the jaw but not clear-skinned, her own eyes hickory brown and small and close to his, maybe too close because he began the waves again to get her away, to move her back to get her to shut those eyes white and pink, that white-pink behind-the-eyelid thing; again the wind, going to the sides now, a nudge of his knee against her inner leg, the whole thing tipping … this groaning inward sound both made once, twice, the white lifting and the house, trying to remove, to rid, to get rid of something. (There was this time last winter when, on the way back from the city, in heavy snow, going up the Saw Mill, he saw deer grazing along the roadside — no it wasn’t what he saw that mattered, it was the monotony of the trip that did it; he was driving so slowly with the great windswept walls of snow blurring the headlights that he had to pull over to get his bearings, and then, for the first time in years, for no reason, in the boxed-in silence of the car he thought of Tom, his going down, the canoe tipping, the hard coldness of the water forcing his own breaths short.) What had he seen? His brother going down? No. Nothing of the sort. Just the red canoe wedged up against the tree, the hard black branches over the water and shadowed and down, too, you could see them; he dove down under after a moment to find — nothing — it was just hard darkness; the water current took him down, below it was much harder — then breaking the surface calling Tom Tom Tom, wondering if, maybe, his brother was playing a joke because he did play jokes. (He’d fallen though the ice once, ice fishing, goofing off, chopping the edges of the hole — but that’s another story, just another story.) He couldn’t remember a thing about Tom’s face anyway, really, not any more than he could about Ellen’s face really when he had his eyes closed and was swelling up into her. (The eyes, the lips, they come undone.) They’d stopped a few times to ford and move around the larger branches — too many times, really — and there were blackflies already that early in the day, already swarming; they’d brought face nets just for that, but they left them back at the camp; that was what he did remember, the smell of the fire, the cool hardness of the night, shaving in Lake Superior in the morning where the water was stupid-cold, dead-cold, it blued your ankles before you got in it. The way Tom threw himself headlong into it.

The logistics of the affair were simple, too simple, he sometimes thought, but not often; both were free, really, all day; to confirm her absence and her distance, to make sure she was really in the city, he talked to Cindy maybe midmorning, her voice tinny and removed on her speaker phone. (Between words, during the pauses, the machine replaced her voice with static; it was either her voice or static and nothing between, which made her all the more inhuman.) It wasn’t that these calls didn’t fill him with a guilt — the guilt was there, it manifested itself strangely enough in prayer. He attended the First Congregational Church, down the river towards the city, in New Jersey — a drive up 9W that hip-hugged the river — alone because Cindy found it boring and because he did not — as they say — feel like losing his soul, which he did pray for; he did, he prayed for the filth he was in, the deep bloodsucking void that he knew he had fallen into, if that’s what you’ll believe in this day and age — as they say — but it was true; he did pray for his own soul, and he did so carefully and with a dedication to making each confession true, frank, open to whatever forces were welling up and deciding the fates of souls at the butt end of the twentieth century — pink behind eyelids and the wetness and that hollowed-out space at the end of his cock, a cave opening up beneath him for a second then closing up; it had taken a while to get to the point of undressing before each other, months really, of talking and meeting for coffee; she wore her hair back, exposing the smoothness of her forehead and the thin pruned eyebrows; there was — he prayed — a meeting of souls involved that couldn’t be avoided and that had led to their eventual disrobing, but that’s another story, the actual meeting of souls — the wind lifts again and there is over his back the cool hand and the smell of fresh-mown grass, of bindweeds, of wild bamboo down near the boatyard, some faint hint of exhaust fumes, and she’s saying softly into his ear, her lips right there, against the lobe, saying some faint phrase her own version of speaking in tongues, the cryptography of her own secret songs oh, oh, hooo,

certainly he did take advantage of her, he saw it right away — the potential for sex, for a liaison of some sort, for a meeting physically; part of it was the way she dressed on their second meeting, out of the lime-green skirt and now raggish; that day, late spring, jeans with holes in the knees and Ked’s sneakers; when they ended up seated together and she bent her legs he caught sight of the dimple in her knees and from just seeing that smoothness extrapolated the rest of her body. It is certainly possible to do so, and he did it.

The noon whistle breaks open and you can hear it spreading over the shimmer of the Hudson, the tide drawing in from the sea, the deep-cut river licking the Atlantic, the Atlantic licking up beneath the bridge now, the sound haunting along the other side, cresting over the hills that you see when you’re at the window of their room, French doors thrown open to a small tarred roof. The sound comes back and he feels the weight of the hill — still flexing, making work with his hands down there to feel himself and her around him, the slick, well-oiled mechanics of it — with that sound opening and widening; down in the depth of that river — it was a dark woody river — they’d slept at the campsite and gotten up with the sun, and after the shave driven twenty miles upstream to portage; in this he found a place to put the blame years later, in the inane act of putting the canoe on the roof of Mom and Dad’s station wagon to drive back upstream just so they could paddle down it (it was the only state-park campground in that part of the U.P. — a shitty little dust-packed patch of ground, creosoted hibachis ringed with faded Bud bottles, a pit toilet to shit in), when they were already at the river’s mouth. The river ended at Lake Superior with a sharp finality; it didn’t fan out, or widen to a delta, but sliced cleanly and neatly into the coldness of the lake. The plan had been to canoe down and then fish late in the afternoon when the fly hatch was good.

What does

this have to do

with the pink lifting white of her hips, the flat of her stomach

against his for a moment eyes opening up to each other

narrative thrust

drive towards

some resolution;

on the hill no one cared

for resolution, but down here near the river the music was

classical and folks cared

and even prayed for it,

alone

on the roadside

in heavy snowfall

praying.

Bob remembers hearing it, the shot that had killed a utility worker who committed suicide up the hill in June; they’d both heard it, lying naked—the sound of a gunshot bouncing off the palisades, off the hills of the cemetery up past the hospital; gravestone later marked, HE DIED VIOLENTLY BUT RESTS IN PEACE—in a state of coitus in his marriage bed; maybe that was it, the reason he thought of it in that technical term, because he was lying there in his marriage bed hearing some guy kill himself, just catching that faint drift of sound while on that day the sun was bringing up those fresh scents of mint weed (it had rained the night before) from down near the boatyard. Now, in July, he’s consciously working the pace, thinking how before, shedding their underwear, drawing each other’s down with their fingers, her voice had sounded particularly lonely; he was starting to see now that she was, truly, a lonely person in need of him; a customer had come in to make an exchange, returning a dark green-and-white print dress she’d recommended personally, and, well, I don’t know, she said, I mean, Bob, it was like I took it personally or something, her coming in, marching in like that, and saying it wasn’t right — I mean it wasn’t right, that’s all she said, and maybe I’m making too much out of this, I’m sure I am, but, still, am I wrong to feel this way? she said. Am I wrong, Bob? As if he’d know; as if any of us know; and there is that working feeling now he should have been lost in it, to it, just taking her for all she was worth, but he’s suddenly acutely aware of the wrinkles in the sheets — which he’ll smooth out, tuck tight, sniff and test, maybe have the cleaning lady replace (this is Wednesday, isn’t it?); there was a moment in Barcelona with Cindy when he’d felt this exact sensation — that the sheets had been slept on before — and when he went down to speak to the man at the desk he found it was true. They were in the wrong room. A used bed, perhaps made up out of some habitual neatness. His fingers are back around her, working there at the small flat of her back searching for something …

The taste of his salt moustache, the sound of another boat — the second in a chain of three barges coming up past Hook Mountain, rounding the turn up to the quarries — a boat horn might again bring him around to that moment, after they pulled his brother Tom from the water and he saw right off in the dim refusal of light his eyes that he was gone, lost. But pink/white light, the sound of his heart beating, again another breeze, this one slightly tinged with tar — sweet tar from a roofing operation several blocks away, men with heavy buckets sealing up the top of a pizzeria — his rapid forward thrust, her raising up of the hips, the give and take, and that pink/white state; the cool air; the hollow at the end, her soft cooing not even cooing but that little chortle sound you might hear from a bird resting, sleeping maybe, and they’re going to give it all up for this moment, both of them, the dress shop and his business, opening up and the last ticking the smooth white, white stop, the pink opening, the lifting form of the air in the curtains and the tarred heat — as they say — the heat of the whole thing coming together; he’ll be released; he’ll lift the soul of his dead brother into his arms; the wet mat of his hair down over his forehead hours later when the state troopers, using long poles, took him out, caught him by a single arm was all it took, just hooked it under the armpit and yanked him out because you could see him right there bent and twisted and moving gently in the undercurrents.

Atonement has little to do with this story, that sound of the boat horn having edged its way into the waves of movement and touch that made up one afternoon’s lovemaking. For a minute he had staggered along the bank helplessly, of course not knowing exactly where he was except that he was along the Two Hearted someplace (later, listening to Mozart, he knew the feeling: it was of two themes going simultaneously together, playing off each other with both a ruthlessness and a grace purified of all fault, the notes just taking, taking and giving, that was how it was there in the bland light, dark-branched, not knowing where, where he was); stumbling; crying; the wet mulch stench of the forest floor and the vast emptiness that the Upper Peninsula offers, that stony wilderness scratching the back of the greatest freshwater body in the world, a lake deep enough to swallow whole freighters, boats so long the crew ride bikes to get from one end to another. He was in that not-knowing of fucking and being lost in it, of the white waves of cold — about to come, going and lost — and he was just remembering the cost; she was, too, maybe, her eyes shut tight but his open — he’d opened them, he was wide awake, he was shutting them to the cool wet whiteness and pink of his own flesh; there was the tar smell, too, but that’s not enough to make a story of, or about how he went a mile down the road, still-frozen mud, and flagged a pickup, a bilge color, driven by an old man with a hearing aid who had to be shouted into going to the store, where there was a phone; the wild assuaging of flesh against flesh of dishonor and guilt and a vestige of hope; for there was hope in coming for him, after holding back, and her pelvic thrust, too, and the dim prayer he had made that night along the Saw Mill; it’s al short, the long and the short of it, and afterwards in the cool-sweat light, eyes wide open, she’d see the cost of it in his eyes, he assumed — the death of his brother that spring day, the state trooper’s daunting eyes, testing, looking for some flaw in the story, the weight of the story already heavy, already breaking apart in his own mouth looking for the right words; and he sat alone on the bank while the men in hip waders pried Tom loose; that stony hand waving forever, burned permanently on the eyelids, the last moment as much as the first pink/white light and white and some darker purple as he clamps his eyes shut, coming, and she’s saying I’m coming, softly, hardly air through the lips that memory has made, the mess that is, it has made of us twisted and torn trying to find these moments, the dark red flanks of a canoe on the bank, the pure wind from the north hissing through the conifers, the stupidity of going from one place to another just for the sake of doing it when you didn’t have to—

it’s later, afterwards, and still naked they speak softly to each other. She’s asking for details, wants to know where it comes from, that faraway look, the long silences that aren’t haunting but just there, a part of him, and he’s trying to explain, on his elbow, trying to look out, remembering the time that guy killed himself up on the hill; he’d heard the shot, too, as did others, for it had come out of the ground and swung over the water, a report — the paper called it — bouncing off the inconspicuous ridges across the river and back — and it took work to pry that memory away, to start peeling back the edges, to find some way to let it go.