Mendocino Fire

Mystery Caller

Ten years later, this can happen to her: someone can set his coffee cup down on the counter instead of in its saucer, and she can, for that, love him. Who is he? No one, a colleague she likes but who isn’t important or especially close to her — no one she has ever imagined herself with. Office politics tend to sweep them, if not into collusion, at least into a nicely practical kind of empathy. There is relief for each of them in understanding the other, when they understand so few people around them, and he has supported her at key moments, strategically, in a manner that prevents his seeming too much her friend. That would be resented, as friendships are in offices — someone would set out to sabotage it. So they meet in amiable secret: it means nothing. He would say — it’s one of his phrases — it’s not hugely significant. She likes and admires him, but would be careful about saying she knows him, careful about asserting any kind of claim to his attention.

He rarely drinks coffee. He’s doing so now, he’s explained, because of insomnia the night before. Until this morning she hasn’t known that he resists setting the cup in the saucer just as, ten years ago, her first husband did. She relied on it: really, she waited for him to set his cup down on counters or tables rather than in saucers, and this sense of waiting for this or for some other gesture or inflection unique to him was her sense of what it was to love. It was a thing she loved, his resisting the convention by which the presence of the saucer compels the placement of the cup, a thing he did that no one else did, and she hadn’t expected to encounter that habit again, or, encountering it ten years later, to feel love. To have a fraction of an instant’s love exacted from her for someone she does not love: What does it prove about love, about this love (she means not love for the man sitting next to her, but love for her ex-husband), about what you can know about what you feel? You think you are aware. You perceive that you are drawn to the angle of your father’s cheekbone in an otherwise unknown face, you understand that the presumptuous way your wrist is taken hold of and a thumb is run across your palm (she is thinking of meeting her second husband) works on you because in your family intimacy had had so much distance to cross it had needed the power of presumption, there had had to be something intractable about it, really, or it couldn’t have existed at all. You believe, in short, that you are informed about what you feel. An intelligent consumer, a diligent recycler, a woman who, the second time, married wisely and well. You allow for contradictions and gaps because it is wise to. You have never before hit a wall like this — never run into some way in which you are truly, blindingly wrong about yourself. Because a man sets his coffee cup down alongside his saucer, you can conceivably love him. It would be no less love than what you feel for your husband, yet this can’t, in any reasonable, enlightened view of things, be true. She wants to gape in her companion’s face, or to shout, to offend or alienate him so that he, dismayed, will assume responsibility for maintaining distance.

He gets it. Something’s gone awry, and his voice is unsure, fractured by hesitation, when he says, “Okay, what?”

“Nothing.”

He says with a plain kind of gentleness, no wiles, no manipulation, only a rightful affection for her in his voice, “Come on.”

“You could be my first husband.”

“Oh? Would I want to be?”

“I just realized.” Aware he needs more to go on, she withholds; she lets him wait, she wants him to; it is the first consciously unequal moment they’ve experienced, her inflicting this brief interval of suspense upon him. This is the answer to the rightful affection in his voice: for her part, no affection, none, and the absence of reciprocal affection lets in sex. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”

He says, with the satisfaction of someone too intelligent to be flattered (who is nonetheless pleased), “We look alike?”

She’s not going to tell him what it is. She wants no self-consciousness to intrude in his way of setting his coffee cup down or she’ll never get to see it again. She says, “There’s something.”

“Is that good?’

“I’m surprised.”

“Good surprised?”

“I can’t tell.” She considers. “Good, I think. I haven’t thought about him for a long time. Can you go years without thinking of someone you once loved? It makes a life seem very long.”

“What?”

“That you could love someone for years. Then forget them for years.”

“Then remember them? I’ve felt that. There was this girl — my first wife.” He’d like her not to have caught girl, a word potentially problematic: his status in the office has much to do with his being deemed progressive. “We were married three weeks.”

“That long?”

“No one takes this story seriously when I say three. It was a mistake, but at the same time, we were serious, we were in deep. And I guess I haven’t done that that many times.”

In his voice, the sudden amplitude of truth telling, the sense of language widening out, of constraints loosening. This, the shift to self-delighting spontaneity, is what she’s always hoping for in her dealings with others: she sees that now, even as she recognizes her inward wish to end this conversation before the rapport between them twists toward franker, sexier seriousness. When she prods her empty torte plate across the counter, it’s so that the scrape of china across Formica will stand in for her voice, so that he will be interrupted by something other than her protest, and also so that, theatrically, she can read her watch. “God! I’ve got to run.”

He says ruefully, “You stopped it.”

She’s shrugging into her coat. There’s a cottonwood leaf on the coat’s shoulder, and he picks it off. He rubs his palms together, the stem between them, and the leaf twirls. Says, “Okay. Something happened. I understand something happened, but not what. You’re not going to tell me what, are you?”

“No.”

“At least you don’t lie. At least you don’t say, ‘Nothing happened.’” He shakes his head. “I’m lost.”

She smiles. “You know when to leave things alone.”

“But I don’t know. It’s you who’s decided to leave. There’s only one of us who understands what just happened. But okay. I guess you know what you need to do.”

She smiles again, not as pleased with him as she was a moment before, not as pleased as she was with herself. “I’m still learning.”

But it’s not true — or, rather, it’s so newly true that she can’t accept it. Sitting down with him, fifteen minutes ago, she would have said with perfect conviction that she knew all she needed to know about herself. It’s odd to think that her sense of herself has ruptured, that she must now conceive of herself as still learning, as unfinished and anxious, necessarily vulnerable to surprises and intrusions, because it’s only by the narrowest of margins that her decision to get out the café door triumphed over her desire to lean nearer, to prolong her smile until its very duration transformed it into proof of willingness.

Outside, the high-altitude October radiance causes a darker blue to melt across the photosensitive lenses of her sunglasses. Her reflection skates across a plate glass window. One mannequin appears to have thrust a hand through the glass. That is, on her side of the glass, her wrist meets the pane; on the exterior, positioned to match her wrist, her upturned hand is fastened in place. Someone, probably a child, has dropped five bright blue gumballs in that hand. The other mannequins sport garter belts and laddered silk stockings, and seem to have just roused themselves from a tumultuous, sexy group sleep, like a gang of puppies. A horse wanders down the street: it takes her a moment to understand that there is a rider, and the rider is a police officer. The parking garage smells of oil-stained cement and deep shade; the way shade smells in the desert, even in an industrial setting, is one of the pleasures of her western state.

The cruising cars are tourists, but it’s late enough in the year that traffic across town is light. She feels as if she’s been waiting all day to drive. Sometimes driving is like this, a kind of consolation that’s taken your measure and suits you exquisitely. She realizes also that she likes being alone. She has no idea how long she has wanted to be alone, because it’s not a desire that can easily be teased apart from the mix of calculation and confusion, misgiving and worry and relief, that makes up her workday, yet now it’s an available luxury: when she gets home neither her husband nor the boys will be there. Her husband has taken the twins to soccer practice. She wants them gone, and they will be — rarely does domestic life offer such a happy intersection of desire and circumstance. There is an early-evening vacancy to the suburbs, a kind of careful otherworldliness, and she’s aware she is about to laugh as she bends to retrieve one of the twins’ baseball gloves from the lawn. She holds the glove to her face and breathes in grass, leather, sun, little boy. She thinks if any neighbor came up and she turned her brilliant eyes on him he’d be frightened, he’d have to think it was something bad. Facing this imaginary neighbor, the glove still tipped against her face, she does laugh. She laughs into the leather palm hollowed so that the flying ball can lodge there, perfectly clasped. That rush, the exhilarated momentum of attraction, the assurance of sexy fit between two bodies, could have become the decisive factor. It had wanted to dominate, it had wanted to divert and disrupt, and it had felt wonderful. She could have done anything. It’s a realization she has to hate if she is not to hate her life. In her husband she loves calm, wit, sanity, even a certain resistance to her. If she said of the marriage, “We understand each other,” she would mean something far more like “We have a deal” than “We know everything about each other,” but “We have a deal” is cold and can be dismissed, and her marriage is neither cold nor dismissible. A child in a yellow slicker passes by on the sidewalk, kicking leaves, and for a moment everything seems set right, all dangers safely behind her.

The first thing she does, on entering the house, is start to undress. Her husband likes to tease her because she always stands just inside the closed front door and eases one black heel off, then the other, always heels, always black, then tilts her pelvis forward to unzip herself behind. Sometimes she hangs her jacket over a dining room chair on her way through, and her earrings chime down into the delft dish where her husband leaves his car keys and change. Once she’s in their room she gets into the clothes that feel like her, his oldest sweatshirt, her black leggings, her feet bare as she crosses the room, and, without thinking at all, sits on the edge of the bed and dials.

Because it’s not true that she hasn’t thought of her first husband in years. She thinks of him. She forgets thinking of him, she forgets doing this, she forgets all of this, yet it happens. She knows his number. He still lives in the midwestern town where they had lived together. The very first time, she had only to call directory information and say his name. There had been two listings under that name, she was told — which was the strangest part, for her, of what she was doing. An improbable coincidence, another person bearing his unusual name in such a small town; it had seemed to diminish him. Of course she hadn’t known his address, and the first number wasn’t his. He had answered on the second number’s fifth ring. She’s not sure how many rings it takes to be truly importuning, and his voice had in fact sounded impatient, bothered by something happening elsewhere in the house, his attention only nominally with whoever was on the phone. He’d had to ask, “Who is it?” He’d waited. He’d asked again, “Who is it?” She could not say who it was. She couldn’t answer him, and she couldn’t hang up. She hadn’t wanted to trouble him, but she had acted just like someone who wishes to cause that curious kind of trouble, the suspensefulness and uneasiness of not knowing who’s called your house and then refused to say anything.

When he’d hung up, that first time, she’d tapped his number out again, an electromagnetic refrain she already liked the way she’d always liked his name. She meant to say, “It’s me, that was me before, I was just so surprised by your voice that I couldn’t speak,” she’d meant to apologize, to embark on some sort of conversation, to tell him something of her life, to ask about his, but when he answered, she was silent again. Haplessly, helplessly, yet with some sense of this act as — bizarrely — expected by him, she was silent, and then he’d done an odd thing himself: he’d left the receiver off the hook and, it seemed, walked away.

After a minute or two she could hear his children’s voices, muted as if they were running through a hallway, and then his wife had come into the room. A refrigerator door opened and closed. She could hear something — milk? — poured, and then his wife said, with that gaiety peculiar to women talking to themselves, “What’s this doing lying here?” and after two tentative and unanswered “Anyone there?”s hung up the receiver.

Another thing, stranger still: she had called him from the hospital room after the twins were born. She’d let the phone ring longer than ever before, seventeen or eighteen times. During labor her chapped lips had begun to split open in tiny cuts; she’d panted and blown her way through the night, only to end, that morning, gazing into the anesthesiologist’s neutral downward gaze. Her left arm rattled inside the webbing that bound it at a rigid right angle to her body. Her hand quaked and convulsed, and her teeth chattered. She’d asked, “Am I supposed to shake like this?” He’d said, “Some do.” She told him, “My body’s scared,” meaning that she, herself, down in the deepest core of self, was somehow fearlessly calm and lucid, however she appeared to him. He gazed down, masked, feelingly or unfeelingly, it was impossible to tell. Her husband was let into the room, and he too was wearing a mask, and each boy in turn was lifted in the doctor’s hands, squalling. There was a feeling of its having nothing to do with her, of her being pushed aside or neglected during this turn of events, in which the babies were hauled into the newborn world. This feeling had gone away when she nursed the twins, one after the other. Once they were in the nursery, and her husband had gone home to sleep, she had dialed the rare, familiar number. It was another instance of not knowing what she was doing, of dissociating, because again, again, she hadn’t been able to speak. It was his voice, though: she’d needed his voice. And, that time, after his voice left, a dog was barking. She remembers the pain of smiling with cut lips to hear a dog barking like mad in what was surely his backyard.

This evening she crosses her legs, upright on the edge of the bed, listening to his phone ring. Today, today, she will say, “It was me, all those times,” and he will say, “I was sure it was; but why?” She won’t answer directly, but instead will tell him, “Someone reminded me of you today. God, so much.”

He answers. This is probably more than luck: maybe, unconsciously, she structures it a little, calling at times when he’s likely to be at home. Well, assuming he’s continued freelancing journalism, his job during their marriage, he works at home, and probably most calls are for him. Not counting that time his wife picked up after he’d abandoned the receiver, and however much the odds are against it, she’s never gotten his wife or one of his kids, only him. Now he says “Hello” twice to be sure of what’s happening. He’s never said, “I know who you are.” He’s never said, “Don’t call here again.” He’s never, out of curiosity or the need to assert his authority over events, hit star sixty-nine, which would cause his phone to dial her number, and if some digital readout on his phone informs him of her number and its area code, if he’s fairly sure his caller is her, he’s never tested this conclusion by saying her name, he’s never sought to resolve the mystery. Though weeks separate the calls, it takes him only few seconds to understand something like “This is this again.” He never hangs up, just lays the receiver on the counter. When he does so now, she thinks Good. Today, if he had demanded to know who it was, she really would have told him. His laying the receiver down on the counter means they get to go on like this a while longer. The room he’s in is the kitchen, of course. She listens. Water runs from a tap.

A pot or kettle clicks down on a stove burner. Do you still make terrible coffee? she thinks. Or has she taught you how to get it right? Probably barefoot, he crosses and recrosses the kitchen. But how long can this last? What is in it for him? Distantly, his wife calls for one of the kids — that particular rising, questioning inflection is maternal, and the voice is irked in a way that’s also maternal. She knows this intonation well. She knows it’s tenderness in yet another disguise. If the voice calls for him, she knows, or if his wife approaches the kitchen, if there’s any chance of her spotting the receiver left lying on the counter, he will hang up the phone before he can be caught. This is, somehow, their agreement. As long as it hurts nothing, she can listen all she wants. Whoever she is, he lets her have this piece of his life.