Mendocino Fire

Nobody You Know

Only a divorce but she can barely get out of bed, she needs a cocoon or echoless cave, the phone rings on and on despairing, every clock in the twilit house ticks further into the future.

You’re a survivor.

It disturbs her to be called survivor when she knows she is not — not in the sense that’s intended, of belonging to a superior, blessedly resourceful class of human being. When she lived through the experience, she had been a child, and that is what children do, they live through things if they can. In that sense, survivor is like breather. Breathing is what every child does and keeps doing until some force or other rules out breathing. Which is all that survivor amounts to, too.

I didn’t want to be the one who tells you this. He’s her lawyer. He has to tell her. Bruce is involved with someone.

Disbelief resembles distress, maybe, because he says Hey?

She says Look, it can’t be true. I would have known.

Evidently not.

He said the survivor thing by way of preface to this news. Before this afternoon she has been, not enigmatic exactly, but not particularly readable, and he’d liked the challenge. No tears in her eyes till now. Silently he parts with his idealized version of her: interesting slash almost beautiful, a painter whose work nobody really likes, who is somehow famous anyway, or at least well known.

Who is it?

“Nobody you know.” Each of the three words given its pat of emphasis, either because this is a lie or because it’s a truth, she can’t tell. It’s not so much English-as-a-second-language that is the problem, it’s the inflections and subtleties that would confide truth or its absence if she were a native speaker. In the heat of argument, once, Bruce told her she needed to get a grip, and her bewilderment had magically turned anger to laughter, and the two of them back into lovers.

“Nobody I know?”

“So I’m assured.”

“Nobody I know? He told you that?”

“It was conveyed. Look, X.” Her husband’s nickname for her; the lawyer is trading in overheard intimacies now well out of date. “This is a small town. You should think about that job offer. Get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Dodge?”

“What the sheriff tells the—. Joke. Bad joke. Meaning, basically, elsewhere could have its attractions about now. In terms of not running into them.”

A nameless emotion is born the moment she learns he has slammed the door of an excluding love in her face. It can’t be true that she can’t see in. That she can’t know the story. This is her life she’s been shut out of! Throughout their relationship they have been each other’s great explainers and interpreters, and silence is completely and annihilatingly unlike him. There was nothing they didn’t tell each other, no subject that had been out of bounds. The other side of her need to know the story will be his longing to tell her the story, and what do you do, how can you live, if the one you tell everything to, who tells you everything in return, disappears? What happens to their stories now? And how does this severance feel to him? What does it cost him? Does the new lover announce outright No talking to Ximena, not ever? Or is she the sort who doesn’t explicitly forbid but simply makes her fragility clear? After Ximena, the survivor, might fragility have its charms? What had the new woman told him, who was she, what were her eyes like, her mouth? It would be a huge leap toward understanding what had just happened if Ximena could only see the new lover’s eyes. Those eyes would tell Ximena what Bruce thinks he sees, because they have always come to the same conclusions about other people. They were close that way, and after all Ximena knows what he likes in faces and what he has seemed attracted to in the past, though he wasn’t the inconsiderate kind of husband who often calls other women beautiful, and in fact Ximena believes he did not find very many women beautiful, and when he did it was because of intelligence, or soul, something seen in the eyes. Chief among the deprivations of divorce is this awful, inscrutable facelessness of his new lover. Ximena searches her memory for a face interesting enough to have caught his attention. The lawyer is right, theirs is a small town; Ximena must have waited behind the new lover, who was not yet the new lover, in a checkout line, or scoffed at her stupid marginalia in a book in the secondhand bookstore, or brushed past her on a sidewalk, or sat down at the table where she had left her empty coffee cup, or resented the future lover not taking off her perky beret in a movie theater. Ximena can’t ask Bruce, who is the expert on her life, just as a husband should be; she can’t ask him whether she ever encountered the lover, and no one else can clear up the mystery of whether the lover really is unknown to Ximena or say with authority Actually there was this one time. Not knowing is like a ravenous O right in the middle of her mind, crying for the truth. An O like that could turn a person into a stalker. Ximena is not that far gone. She will not haunt Bruce and the new lover, not in real life, not on the Internet. Only, look who they have caused her to understand: menacers, skulkers, crazy people.

Divorce is not linear. One morning there is peace of mind, the next there is wrath. So what if she packed and left, so what if she behaved well and let him keep the house instead of forcing him to sell it and settle up, that doesn’t make her forgiving, it doesn’t mean she feels anything but contempt for the lover and basilisk rage toward him. Good thing they are far away. Just let her see them once more and she will ruin their lives if she can.

Welcome to Iowa, you survivor you. Ximena walks through the emotionless atmosphere found only in new houses. She owns a kitchen sink, electrical outlets, bare walls, a cat brought home from the animal shelter so there will be another heart adapting to this strangeness. Thanks to an oversight by the finish carpenters or whoever, the stairs have not been swept, and the sawdust records her ascent in good peasant footprints, one per tread. See the cunning peas-in-a-pod lineup of her toes, clear as if printed in beach sand. Up comes the cat. Ximena crouches to let the striped cat rub against her knee, her shin, the knuckles of her hands, first the left and then the right. The cat will work methodically, taking small breaks from the project of rubbing its cheek against every new corner and facet of home, and what is Ximena’s project? Should she try rubbing her cheek on facets and corners? Maybe this is a space she can work in, this attic. Skylights permit cloud shadows to roll purposefully across the planks. Bird shadows, too, handfuls of them splashed across her floor, wheel and tilt and vanish. Summer. It’s enough, for now, to be kept track of by a cat, it’s plenty. This is a bare-bones existence, not bare in the sense of poor because she’s not, but bare in the sense of involving minimal contact with other human beings, intelligently bare, Agnes Martin minimal, and the one thing she misses is her studio behind the house in Smoke River. Bruce’s carpentry had proved inadequate to the more fantastic, Russian-dacha elements of the sketch she’d done on a napkin in answer to his question, If you could have the perfect place to paint what would it look like? Because that had been their first cup of coffee, their first conversation, she had not understood he was serious. She had not foreseen his saving the napkin and setting out to translate romance into two-by-fours, and he had not foreseen that romance would not prevail over a lack of competence. Windowpanes cracked for no reason, the roof was always shedding shingles, the door never completely closed, but for her it was the safest place she had ever known, every single nail driven for love of her, and now she will never see it again. Abandoned, its floor pattered over by mice, she supposes, its spire (that was crazy, that he’d built her a spire) waiting for lightning to strike, whimsical little shipwreck rotting in the field behind the house where Bruce lives with, with ( ). The lover’s name is still unknown to her.

The dean who, on first hearing a rumor of her divorce, had sought Ximena out, wooed and reassured and faxed, describes the Indian mounds of a nearby state park, mentions the Art Deco theater featuring indie films, says how pretty spring is in Iowa, how astounding after seemingly endless winter, and Ximena says she looks forward to it, and in fact certain discoveries please her: figs drizzled in honey in the town’s organic restaurant, gingko leaves turning a uniform raincoat yellow, a yoga instructor saying open or softly directly to her knees or knotted shoulders, cajoling Ximena’s body as if that relationship, his with her body, was subject to laws different from those of minds’ polite, slowly accreting acquaintance. Divorce, it turns out, means severance not only from certain cherished versions of oneself but with disliked variants. In particular there is a suffering, slightly famous self that Ximena is glad to forsake. Here are acquaintances who have never heard Bruce narrate the death of Ximena’s father to an entire quieted table of his doctor friends. Now she wonders why he had ever believed he had a right to tell that story. Why keep talking when by staring down at her plate she’d made her resistance plain? Why did he like stories in which harm was done innocence, and why had it taken her so long to wonder why? In his absence, the world’s murderousness continues: the eleven-year-old schoolboy caught abusing five-year-olds; not just one baby found dead in a dumpster, but twins. Bruce believed it was essential to keep abreast of coups, smuggling, assassination. He was one of those catastrophe-literate Americans who knew immediately, from her name, whose daughter she was, and if that had been part of her appeal for him, she had never minded until now, six months into divorce: and now she hears, or rehears, the accusations that had been part and parcel of their intimacy, the failure to engage with her past, the resistance that he stopped short of calling cowardice, her need to paint the same thing over and over again. To break through to the next subject would require courage. She didn’t want to raise her voice with him, not about courage, and not about painting, and not in her studio, because that would have been like screaming in church. There had been one final, bad confrontation. Softly she said that she was already doing what she wanted to and it was the only thing she wanted to do, and under her softness she meant that he should cut it out, this thing of telling her what to paint, but he persisted: “Baby, why not work closer to the bone?” Which, it takes her a moment to understand, means Why not use your own life? Use. He should have said use. “My hown life,” she said — hearing, through anger, the emergence of the accent that will make her seem more perversely authentic to him. “I could hopen a vein and paint with the blood and you’d be pleased, I could paint my father’s shirt with nineteen bullet holes, the shirt left at night on the doorstep for my aunt to find so she could fall to her knees screaming, paint that and you and everyone can say That really happened, and it would make you feel so good, right? because you would have a little piece of this terrible thing, a piece you can handle, which makes you feel more alive, because what you want me to use my father’s death for is to make you and everyone feel more alive, and that makes you a stealer, a leech of emotion, a thief—”

She had screamed in church, and from then on, whenever he came out to the shed to see a new painting, he was no longer honest. Even now she misses his confrontational stance before a painting, his boxer’s glower, brow creased, chin down. He had held nothing back, and if the painting failed to change his life he blamed it, and he was right, she understood now, in the relentlessness of his extraordinary expectations he had been right, more than right, rare, because once one has ceased to be a child there is not nearly enough visceral loathing of complacency. It’s an aspect of their marriage that has come to seem, in retrospect, a treasure: the dictatorial rightness of his obsessiveness, his crazy conviction that she is a genius, or would be if she would only listen to him.

One night when the full moon and too much wine keep them awake after sex, the yoga instructor asks if he can see her work, and she can think of no real reason to say no. The good part of this is that while following him up the stairs she can admire the high rounded puckish symmetrical ascending cheeks of his ass, the cleft of their clean division curving in to the shadow where the scrotum, like some sad, worn, withered shaman’s bag he must carry everywhere, lolls between long-muscled thighs. Not that women think this way, she thinks, but this man is far more beautiful than Bruce, who was getting soft around the middle when she saw him last, whose wispy hairline exposed his temples, sharpening his air of braininess and worry, and why had she loved those qualities, why was he real to her, more real than anybody else? Down the length of the attic, in and out of shafts of moonlight, the bare-assed yoga instructor named Daniel drifts, and — sure that she is about to be lied to — she stands watching his easygoing unawareness, his innocent shambling failure to feel what he is feeling. He says some nice things and for the first time she grasps that he believes her to be obscure and a failure, that concealed within his attraction is the desire to rescue: to help her out. This boy! Help her! While the cat rubs his left ankle, Daniel asks, “One thing I don’t get.”

She gives him no encouragement. If he wants to say it, let him say it.

He says it. “Why paint the same thing over and over?”

More than a year later Bruce turns up, one hazy midsummer morning, in the form of a letter. Envelope, stamp, handwriting. A letter.

Hey X,

I’m hoping you won’t just rip this into little pieces.

I want to believe you can look back on what we had without pain, but you would say that like always I am imposing my version of how things should be, without asking you. For the pain I caused you, I would like your forgiveness. Please forgive me.

Occasionally somebody says you’re doing well out there and I’m glad. There are developments in my life, too. This is Robin holding Clem, who just said his first word. He had me wrapped around his finger from day one.

Listen X, make them treat you right out there in the Heart of Darkness and if you get back this way give me a call.

p. s. Happy 37th — be well.

She’s no expert at telling babies’ ages, but this one has to have been conceived long before they broke up. For months he had kept this secret. In those months she had kissed him, she had told him what she dreamed last night, she had done his laundry, she had confided her fears. He must not have known what to do; he must have been torn, hearing, under their domestic small talk, the ticking clock of his predicament. The baby wears the kind of ominous knit cap favored by perpetrators of muggings and assaults. She makes a halfhearted attempt to tear the picture in two, but it’s tough and flexible and destroying it would require scissors, and besides it’s as if this picture has infinite depths and she can’t see deeply enough, but that has to be shock. Disbelief, which causes this simple picture to seem strange. The baby’s expression — opaque, lordly, insolent, dire — suggests the laserbeam confidence of the utterly beloved. He has been caught in the middle of a lunge, resisting the arms that hold him.

It is degrading to have lost him to so white a face, pale to its barely-there lashes and with the pointy rat nose sometimes seen on the monochromatically fair. But the mouth! The mouth is done in lipstick of a carnal, crude, trashy red, a third-world mouth, a Cuban mouth, and Ximena can’t help wondering if the lover feels the need to mitigate her whiteness, if the ethnification of her mouth is owed to competitiveness with Ximena, about whom he must tell stories, feeling as he always has about Ximena’s life, that its tragedy rubbed off on him and persists even now as an aura, the tingling persistent glamour of violent death. Ximena packs, biting her lower lip as she shoves notebooks and BlackBerry and reading glasses into her messenger bag, needing at last to confront him, to tell him that his theft of her life, his lover’s theft of her mouth, has to stop, fifty miles of highway vanishing before she pulls over to dig out her cell, cancel her birthday dinner with Daniel, and ask can he feed Bad Cat while she’s gone? Sunk deep between walls of corn, the yellow line sucks toward an irresistible vanishing point.

Ximena paints moonscapes across which the lunar wind blows esoteric litter, a tumbling bowler hat, a black dress, glowing rubber balls, flying scraps of paper bearing scribbled handwriting. They don’t work for everyone, far from it, but her paintings are sought after, collected, given the minor awards that foretell greater awards in the future, deemed sufficiently interesting to justify lucrative visiting-artist stints and, out of the blue, the associate professorship at Iowa. No doubt her story plays a part, and the famous photograph. LIFE had caught her father, three days before his death, resting his bearded cheek against Ximena’s hair while she toyed with his watch. She remembers this photograph from inside. That is: the feelings whose outward expression makes this photo memorable — the feelings that cause anyone seeing it for the first time to pause — were her feelings. Or: half of them were hers, the other half her father’s. Usually undemonstrative, he had laid his cheek against her hair, his contentment in his child’s presence, contentment of the kind almost anyone can feel, combined with weariness almost beyond comprehension. The tiny deliberate steps that undid his wristwatch were the most intimate actions Ximena had then ever performed on or with another body, and she loved him for letting her do them. Without the watch his forearm was a rakishly black-haired length of wild creature, tendony, bony, full of authority and life force, capable of great quickness, of (she had sensed it even then) violence. A man’s arm, which she had set free. Ximena made the watch glide snakelike up her own thin arm, concentrating with a child’s rapture in sensation — which can appear in a photograph as mere reverie — on bringing time to a halt.

Her aunt, the older of two, a black-browed, haggard, natural-born martyr, led Ximena through a strange world of tin roofs and dusty alleys to the site of her father’s death. Across a wall of adobe bricks tottered gigantic letters in fresh paint, reds and blues and blacks unmediated, as yet, by dust. Wasps clambered in and out of the holes in the wall. Each emergent wasp, posing on the rim of a bullet hole, took an instant to compose itself. Witless witnesses to her father’s death, had they cowered inside their holes, or flown out enraged? Her father’s name reeled across the wall in letters whose haste suggested peril, but someone had run the risk. Once written, the name had been embellished, paid homage, annotated with signs and slogans. It was only a question of time before it would be found by obscurers and erasers of history; it was bound to be a brief-lived salute, but while it lasted it was as brave as paint could be, as loving and outraged as hands could contrive. Here was a language Ximena spoke. She needed to press against that paint, to wet her fingertips and leave an imprint of her own, but her hard aunt, seizing the thick tail of the girl’s hair, yanked her back.

The girl was handed over to the younger aunt, the smarter aunt, who managed to get them both to the country across which Ximena drives, high on the sense of destiny that attends certain self-destructive decisions. Caffeine sweeps every mote of delusion from the white room of consciousness. Now she understands. Bruce was still sleeping with her when that baby was conceived with the lover, when he came inside that albino with her little smile who probably told him she was going to keep it, she was going to have this baby with or without you, and Bruce would have looked from one to the other of the two women in his life and seen one whose sorrow was unrelenting and one whose need had a beginning and an end. A kind of end. As Ximena’s grief never will.

The town has gone ahead without her: a new traffic light on Highway 1, a McDonald’s painted a shade of blue sanctioned by the Coastal Commission, a hotel at cliff’s edge where once a grove of towering shaggy eucalyptus had sifted the wind. In a dim room smelling of latex paint she opens the window for the evening breeze and leans out: yes, tatters and coils of beige-green bark litter the margin of bare ground between cliff and raw hotel. Ximena slides between newish sheets, and after a time realizes that she has been awake far too long. After such a long drive sleep is rightfully hers, but this paint-stinking room withholds it, the rustle of clean sheets repels it, impersonal pillows offend it. She tosses and moans and scratches fleeting itches, waking in wan eleven A.M. light with a headache and a weird chemical taste in her mouth.

Which could be guilt, or the premonition of guilt.

As in: doing something that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Or planning to.

Having driven halfway across the country in order to.

If she packs now and heads back to Iowa no one will get hurt. Breakfast — no, lunch — and she’ll gas the car up for the long drive back across the flat states. Finally she grasps the essential rightness of signing over Smoke River to Bruce and his lover: to have stayed would have inscribed her obsession with the two of them in the marrow of her bones. As it is, she has been free — more or less free. Out over the ocean, a horizon-wide brushstroke of fog bides its time, but until it advances on the town every edge and outline has the chill clarity of coastal light, every little shingle on every little roof diamond-exact. Even the McDonald’s is pretty. Where Highway 1 is, briefly, Main Street, logging trucks roar through, leaving a wake of diesel fumes and dancing evergreen twigs. Ximena turns pages in a bookstore, the rustle of suffering, herself older than the last time she turned pages in this corner, wiser, tucks of disappointment around her smile. Even if she did want to call Bruce, she no longer has his cell number. That smallest, most ordinary token of acquaintance, and she doesn’t have it. Fuck someone for ten years. She’s not even thinking about love. Not love. Just all that fucking. Think how much fucking was involved. How many times and how nakedly, fucking till he tells you you’re an angel. She buys a couple of paperbacks and after paying for them can’t remember their titles or what they’re about. On the sidewalk she contemplates the new streetlights the town has paid for, black cast-iron columns ascending to frosted globes meant to evoke the gaslights of an earlier, more genteel thoroughfare. Who are they kidding: Smoke River had always been the surly, xenophobic logging town. Its streets had never been lit. Yet among the improvements is a storefront advertising handmade local ice cream.

She’s sitting at a table when, on the other side of fogged plate glass, a woman pauses to stare, the baby on her hip. Bruce’s new wife, from the photograph. Staring at Ximena? No. Of course not. At the menu. Wondering if the ice cream’s organic, if it’s safe for baby, or for her given the allergies that must come with that pallor. See her private half-smile, because the baby’s tugging on a lock of her hair and that’s cute — it feels cute, Ximena can almost feel how it feels. Tug, tug. If this is hate it is small-scale, tight in its focus, and not fun, not energizing: it simply means you see clearly. You concentrate. Because here she is. Her eyebrows have been replaced with the single moronic band of her backward baseball cap, her hipster jeans try too hard, her Converse sneakers say she’s already afraid of getting older, but in this war, which this girl has no idea is a war, it’s Ximena who’s the loser. This girl has a greater claim on the world than she has. First there’s the baby. That is a claim. Then there’s Bruce. This girl can be awkward and foolish and inept, and still when he wakes and yawns and rolls over this is the face Bruce sees, those are the eyes looking back at him and not Ximena’s, and as long as he wants her eyes looking back at him she has a hold on this world, and Ximena, who has lost his gaze forever, has no hold at all.

It’s true what her lawyer said. Ximena has never met this person before. This person squats. The baby dismounts. Across black-and-white checkerboard tiles the toddler advances with the lordly shamble of a drunk who finds himself charming. Advances toward Ximena, his surreal little monkey hand with its actual greedy fingers seizing the cup on her table just as she jerks it away, their grabs clashing, the chocolate orb slobbering down her shirt to her lap, cradled there till she jerks her legs apart and lets it plop to the floor, his slow mother dragging the toddler back, vehemently apologizing, but it’s clear she hopes for interruption, forgiveness, kindness, because he’s a baby after all and maybe what happened was even kind of funny. But Ximena wipes theatrically at the chocolate Rorschach blot. She can’t help thinking this person is a bad mother, letting this kid walk right up to strangers, steal food from them, and then expecting to hear Don’t worry about it even as the kid picks up the orb from the floor and dabbles it at his mouth, which causes his mother to say Don’t sweetie that’s nasty. At her sharpness the baby throws the lumpen chocolate, which skids along the winding smear of its own melting. They all watch. Suddenly the mother thumps down on her ass with her legs stuck out on either side of the baby, letting her exhaustion show, and Ximena, who has had no intention of pitying her, feels the swift unfolding of empathy, this woman or girl close to tears from embarrassment and not knowing what to do. No lipstick today, her lips barely a shade darker than her skin, fair except for the grainy redness flaming up her throat, an odd way to blush but interesting to watch. “Look, I am sorry, it’s his age, there’s a lot going on at one year old, all day he’s been crazy to get away from me, I’d like to buy you another ice cream, please let me buy you another ice cream, what were you having?”

“Oh no, no, really, no need for that, it’s all right.” She didn’t intend to say anything so nice and is surprised.

“I’d like to. Chocolate, right? Please. It would make me feel better.”

Ximena doesn’t say Look, the ice cream cost a dollar seventy-nine, the shirt was three hundred bucks and is maybe my favorite piece of clothing in the world.

An aproned girl has emerged from behind the counter to crouch with a wet rag and dustpan, muttering No problem, no problem, you guys, no problem. In the relief from tension afforded by her mopping, the two strangers look right at each other. When their eyes meet there’s the kind of click you get when your gaze meets a gaze of equal, kindred but not rivalrous, intelligence. Likeness like this — likeness of minds? in the slant taken on the world? — is rare, the affinity arising from it unmistakable, yet in this case it is worse than useless. Nothing can come of it. The baby sucks his fist, and his mother says to Ximena, “Let me make this up to you.” Ximena shakes her head. “But your shirt is ruined.” Fine, it’s fine, really, she’s got to get on with her day, seriously don’t worry about it, Ximena self-conscious as she stands, dismayed that her blotched shirt has engendered this fresh round of apologies, saying it’s nothing, deciding to get out of there but wanting a last glance at this person she meant to dislike — to hate — and looking over her shoulder she walks right into an entering customer who says, “Oops,” and then, “Hey,” and then, “Wow,” and she is staring up into the eyes that are Bruce.

He has gone bald.

He didn’t write this in the letter.

They are in the doorway.

The matched intensity of their stares — hers upward and his down, the hanging nearness of his face causing the slackened musculature around his unsmiling mouth to bulge ever so slightly downward, the flicker or play of recognition versus bewilderment in his non-smile, the expressive dark holes of his nostrils, the tiny beady lights of extra liquidity that cause his eye-whites to seem especially luminously clear, the distinctness of eyelashes and their strangeness when looked at closely and how warm he is and how the same old detergent used on his clothes has a different smell from his skin and how well the smells go together, their not knowing what comes next, their happiness, the feeling of being part of a true story again, their unwillingness to look away — adds up to a feeling of at last: us again.

There’s a chance that inside the store Bruce’s wife has not seen what has just taken place, and collecting her wits Ximena says, “Sorry.” Her tone claims they are strangers. Right away she knows it’s odd she lied, but he accepts her having done so.

He is even, she sees, relieved.

He says, “Hey, no problem.”

The new lover may or may not have witnessed their encounter, she might have been talking to the baby, she may have been spooning ice cream toward his gaping hole of a mouth with a plastic spoon. There’s a chance she didn’t notice what happened in the doorway, but even if she had, she might have understood their mutual stare as jolted apologetic curiosity, natural when someone has just bumped into you. Ximena walks away with a quickening sense of guilt: recognized for what it was, that stare could cause problems with the new wife. She walks fast, willing him to get away with it. To be okay with the crazy intensity that overcame them in that doorway and not to let it show. Detachedly she thinks he looked good. Lucky his skull is a nice shape. The pushy cranial roundedness suits his height, his doctorliness, his air of being slightly out of it. This, then, is the other side of the betrayal coin, the way the two of them must have felt about her: she wants not to cause pain.

She turns around to see if she’s the one being called out to.

“It felt so wrong seeing you walk off,” the younger woman says. “And then I thought, dinner. I can buy dinner, to make up for the shirt, because I can tell from your face that — well. Or cook. I can cook. Say yes.”

To be a guest inside one’s own old house: it’s like being a guest inside one’s own body, the way you feel on a doctor’s examination table, outwardly polite, inwardly full of offended resistance and asocial impulses — to insult, to make an escape. Only Robin appears at ease, her hair disciplined into a high ponytail, arms bare, lipstick on. The wine is good—“organic,” Bruce says — and the food, too, salad with grilled figs and goat cheese followed by a risotto that keeps Robin in the kitchen while Bruce and Ximena stare and stare and look away and stare again while disliking this deception, the pretense that it is not extraordinary for them to find themselves across a table from each other again. For the sake of deceiving Robin, Ximena’s style has changed. This new style is more breathless and glancing than her own, funnier, free of sorrow. More likable in general. Strangely, given that she is repressing a number of strong emotions, her English is better. Her faked detachment permits close study of the couple Bruce-and-Robin: their marriage is of the endearing kind, not so good that you feel intimidated, but not so bad that you worry for them.

When Robin had followed Ximena into the street and asked her to dinner, Ximena had said, “Look, you don’t want that,” and Robin had said, “Why?” and Ximena had said, “I’m Ximena, you know, who he was with before,” avoiding the word wife the way she would have avoided driving a knife through the other woman’s heart, as a fatal action whose aftermath would be mess and confusion, but Robin had said only, “You are? Really, you are?” and then “Why did he act like that?” and then, “Okay, this is weird. Me asking you to explain some idiotic thing he did,” and Ximena said, “I’m not great at explaining him,” and they had laughed. And Robin said, “Wrong time to say this, probably, but I love your work. I’ve always sort of wanted to tell you, but I never thought there would be a way. Really love it.”

Which is not something Bruce had included in his letter. But she doesn’t know about the letter.

There in the street, Ximena had said, “You’re kind to ask, but I don’t want you to go to any trouble, and it’s maybe not such a good idea, my coming to dinner,” and the other woman said, “No, it will be lovely. It’s the right thing, you know, for people who’ve mattered to each other like you and he have, it’s important for you to find some way to talk and not just to disappear forever. He was scared that you were gone. I don’t know what it is like for you, and I don’t mean to intrude or seem to pressure you, but if he lost you again now it would hurt him so much. Please come. It will turn out all right — it will, trust me.”

From this whole speech, Ximena fastened onto one assertion. “He was scared?”

“Of never seeing you or talking to you again, yes, really scared. He didn’t think I knew that, but I did.”

“Well, wow, this is very understanding of you,” Ximena had said, and meant something mildly slighting, like Are you some kind of pushover, don’t you get jealous? But this implication was lost on her, and the younger woman’s smile made Ximena repent of her meanness and say, “So okay, I’ll come. Tell me when to be there.”

If, after her second or maybe third glass of wine, Ximena starts to flirt with Robin, it’s partly because they were able to laugh with each other like that in the street. Women flirt: it means nothing, it means you are alive. She feels the elation of playacting, she is being lovely to them, but something is wrong: the conversation is haunted by a triangular stiltedness that drives Ximena a little crazy, which she wants to remedy, because they are trying this new and daring thing of talking with each other, three people who have been in various ways badly hurt by each other, except that Robin has not been hurt, Robin got what she wanted, and Robin has never once granted Ximena a long unguarded gaze, and suddenly, somehow, that is the gaze Ximena needs, and not Bruce’s. By what alchemy has desire changed its object — is this even really happening? Robin has the grace of a person who doesn’t second-guess herself, whose aims are mostly kind, and you would think she is not available for flirtation, and yet here it is, quickening the air, Ximena alert to the other woman’s least gesture or the minute tightening of her lips that suggests she is, sexually, no fool, and has registered what is happening, and is at a loss how to repress it, unused as she is to repressing impulses, honest and aboveboard as her life is. In truth, Ximena thinks, those qualities are rarer than rare in a person she now recognizes is very, very beautiful. This is what Bruce had seen early on and why he wanted her. There is a kind of shelter obtainable from Robin’s attention, a tiny house she can make for you where you can take refuge, and suddenly this is what Ximena wants.

Bruce is not aware anything is happening.

None of this occurs in language. The advance and swift deepening of attraction take place at the older, deeper level of recognition, down where the unsaid lives, and art.

After clearing the dinner plates Robin retreats to the kitchen and returns with a torte that she sets down on the table, and Bruce and Ximena glance away from each other because Ximena loathes birthdays and always has.

“It’s amazing,” Ximena says. “It must have taken you hours.”

Lighting the candles — one two three, Ximena sees, a token cluster, or one for each decade — Robin explains, “It’s meant to sort of redeem chocolate for you.”

“What?”

“After having it smeared down your shirt. I’m nervous about how this turned out. I’m going to close my eyes while you take your first taste.”

Did that need to sound so sexy?

It’s Bruce who asks, “Why three candles?”

Robin says, “All I could find. Left over from the last cake, I guess.”

From upstairs the baby howls. Robin hesitates. Such hesitation is uncharacteristic of her, surely — the adoring mother. “I’ll go,” Bruce says, having caught on at last, and Robin frowns, upset with herself for letting it show that she is tired of the baby’s demands, shaking her head but letting her husband ascend a flight of stairs whose every creak Ximena knows, as she knows his particular rhythm of stair-climbing, the habitual fraction of an instant’s pause (caused by what?) on the fifth stair, the sturdy tramping tread that finishes the flight, the silencing of his footfalls by the hallway’s carpeting. The baby must be in the small bedroom under the eaves. They used to talk about turning it into a bathroom.

How oppressed she has been by his watchfulness, what a relief that he’s gone, even if only for a few minutes.

Ximena lays down her fork. Robin lays down her fork. They face each other undefended. It’s sex. It’s the laying down of forks. Ruin, chaos, sex, and recklessness, we live and breathe for what you will do with us. The candles burn between them. Robin says, “I don’t believe this,” and Ximena says, “You don’t believe what,” and Robin says, “This. What’s happening. Whatever it is,” and Ximena says, “You can’t believe it?” and when there is no answer she says, “Do you want to believe it?” and she could say I can help you feel how true it is, but who is she to say such a thing to this woman, when did she acquire the power to convince this other of a truth that could ruin or at least fuck up her life, which seems well worth protecting, something someone like Ximena, whose motives if viewed even in the best possible light would have to be described as mixed, should stay completely out of? But that is the last thing she wants to do: to stay out of this woman’s life. She’s not capable of staying out of her life. Worse, stranger, Robin is not capable of keeping her out. They are in it now. How did they do that with eyes and faces and voices, come as far as this, get in such trouble?

They can’t kiss while Robin’s baby is crying upstairs, that can’t be the sound track for their first kiss because it would be too crazy-making for both of them and for Robin too inevitable a source of guilt, and even supposing they could shut their ears to that they can’t kiss across the table. One of them will have to stand and lean across, palms flat on the table, careful not to put a hand in a piece of cake, straining, and the combination of effort and delicacy would amuse both the person leaning forward and the one being leaned toward, and the furtive comedy would undercut what they would otherwise be sure to feel, the full unexpected force of their attraction. Its power to take their breath away, that is what is most deeply longed for, and they can’t get at it by ridiculous leaning across this table even if the baby has stopped crying, and he has, but that means too that they have only a minute or so left to figure this out, whatever it is. Five minutes tops. How will this play out after Bruce comes back down the stairs? He may not have caught on yet but he isn’t blind. He’ll look from one to the other and the truth will gradually become more and more felt among the three of them, and the pretense that everything is all right will collapse.

In Robin’s eyes the decision has been made. She stands. She leans across Ximena’s own old dinner table with all its memories. Bruce didn’t even bother to replace it, he didn’t fear the ghosts of their life together, and if he didn’t fear those, how much can it mean to him, that old life? Nothing. Not if he can sit down at this table, lift his wineglass, smile across at her without fear and trembling. The fear and trembling is done by his new lover as her lips meet Ximena’s. Candle flames warm their forearms, their throats, as Ximena tilts her head to allow room for the other woman’s nose, as she tastes her tongue, as she tries with her tongue to suggest the palace of inventiveness and aggression and complicity that would be sex between them, as the two of them ease apart from each other to allow for looking — for the assessment they need to do of what this means and how things have changed. And that look is enough, more than enough, because it tells Ximena that lives can be ruined beginning right here, right now, and that the worst of the damage won’t be done to her, but to these two — no, three — others, whom she might as well love, because without them she’s alone in the world.

For strangeness, for fucked-upness — no kiss has ever come close. For the power of the unforeseen taking over.

Before Bruce comes down the stairs she has altered the course of the future, standing up, collecting her things, keys, the coat she pulls on though Robin says behind her, “Was that wrong? Ximena? Was it wrong?” With luck she can get out of the house before he can glimpse her expression. He couldn’t hear from upstairs if she tried to explain to Robin why she has to go, and probably it would be a good thing, less memorably hurtful, if Ximena tried to give some explanation for this decisive fleeing-the-scene, but she can’t both explain and mobilize her resistance to the other woman. It would be unwise even to turn and take a last look at that face. She’s given Robin reason to believe that they will get away with this, that the two of them have felt something and even acted on it and now Robin can choose how much, if anything, she wants to confide to Bruce about what just happened, only why would she say a thing? Now she is almost out the door, Ximena who believes there is a way to stop time but she has not found it, Ximena who is about to do, just this once, the right thing. And painting — not the moon, not anymore. Not the moon: a face. To inscribe it more deeply in memory, she looks over her shoulder. From now on, that face.