Mendocino Fire

Narrator

Near the end of what the schedule called the welcome get-together, two women — summer dresses, charm — stood at the foot of the solemn Arts and Crafts staircase where he was seated, mostly in shadow, on the fifth or sixth step. Wasn’t it rude, I wondered, to let them keep appealing for some scrap of his attention from below, wouldn’t it be nicer to come down? That could have been me his condescension fell on: I had been scraping together the daring to approach. He was leaning back on his elbows, his long legs crossed at the ankles. This is you in real life? I said to him in my head. The women at the foot of the stairs were sufficiently unembarrassed in their pursuit that one of them even lifted the camera around her neck and aimed. At the prospect of his rebuking her presumption I was stricken, as if being his adoring reader conferred on me the responsibility to protect us all from any wounding or disillusioning outcome. And then the worst thing that could have happened, happened: he stood up and turned his back on them. Inspired to document this irascibility of a famous writer’s, the camera-holding fan clicked off several shots while he remained immobile, and then both women called out, bizarrely, “Thanks!” before walking off. It occurred to me that they might feel the need to maintain appearances if they were going to be his students in the coming week, as I would not be, having been too broke to enroll before the last minute, and too full of doubt about whether I wanted criticism.

Another student came up to me then, and I made my half of small talk: New Mexico, yes as beautiful as that, no never been before — what about you, six hundred pages, that’s amazing. My fellow student’s confidence was so cheerfully aggrandizing that mine flew below his radar. The full moon would be up before long, and if I wanted we could ride across the bridge on his motorcycle, an Indian he’d been restoring for years — parts cost a fortune. There was a ride like that in his novel and it would be good to recheck the details. I couldn’t, I said; I had to read the stories for tomorrow. He said, “Homework, over the wind in your hair?”

Enough students were out, in couples and exuberant gangs, that I didn’t worry, crossing through the campus’s dark groves of eucalyptus, dry cataracts of slim leaves hanging as still as if they’d just been shushed, low enough in places to whisk across the top of my head. The boy I’d been talking to had implied that, lacking boldness, I wasn’t the real deal; listening to him, I had been thinking no real writer could be as imperceptive as he was; who was real, and who wasn’t, had been the question preoccupying us — pitiable, unpublished us. He had been right about the moon: sidewalks and storefronts brightened as I walked back to my hotel, followed, for a couple of bad blocks, by a limping street person who shouted, at intervals, Hallelujah! On the phone my husband told me that a neighbor’s toddler had fallen down an old hand-dug well but apart from a broken leg wasn’t hurt, and he had finished those kitchen cabinets and would drive them to the job site tomorrow, and our dog had been searching all over for me, did I want to talk to him? You big lunkhead, why did you ever let me get on that plane? I asked our dog. When my husband came back on the phone he said Crazy how he loves you and So the first day sucked, hunh? and They’re gonna love the story. Sleep tight baby. Hallelujah. Bed strewn with manuscripts, I sat up embroidering the margins with exegeses and genius alternatives — if someone had pointed out that You should try this can seem condescending, I would have been really shocked. At two A.M., when the city noise was down to faraway sirens, I collected the manuscripts and stacked them on the desk. They were charged with their writers’ reality, the way intimately dirtied belongings are — hairbrushes, used Band-Aids — and I couldn’t have fallen asleep with them on the bed. Where, in Berkeley, was his house, and was he asleep, and in what kind of bed, and who was beside him?

Before leaving the party, I had sat for a while on his step in the stairwell. All I had to go on were the first-person narrators whose stubborn cherishing of difficult women imbued his work with generosity of spirit, but I felt betrayed. Savagely I compared the rudeness I’d witnessed with the radiance I’d hoped for. How could narrators so prodigal in their empathy originate in the brain of that withholder? The women had not trespassed in approaching: the party was meant for such encounters. Two prettier incarnations of eager me had been rebuffed, was that it? No. Or only partly. From his work I had pieced together scraps I believed were really him. At some point I had forsaken impartial immersion and begun reading to construct a writer I could love. Consider those times I’d said not His books are wonderful, but I’m in love with him. But he had never intended to tell me who he was. There was no fall from grace, not one page is diminished, not one scene or sentence, the books are as beautiful as ever, I coached myself. But the sense that something was ruined survived every attempt to reason it away.

The days passed without my glimpsing him again, and besides I was distracted by an acceptance entailing thrilling, perilous phone calls from the editor who was taking the story, whose perfectionism in regard to my prose dwarfed my own. Equally confusingly, my workshop, when my story was up, found the ending unconvincing. The ending had come in a rush so glorious that my role was secretarial, the typewriter chickchickchickchickchick-tsing-ing along, rocking the kitchen table on its uneven legs; now I couldn’t tell how good it was, and I was anxious to get back to New Mexico and realigned with instinct. A story that was going well set the table jolting, my husband said, like a three-legged dog late for supper. Home was a two-hundred-year-old adobe on a dirt road winding along the contour of a canyon wall: What had I thought would be out here, for me? At the farewell party in the twilight of the grand redwood-paneled reception room, hundreds of voices promised to stay in touch. At the room’s far end, past the caterer’s table with its slowly advancing queue, French doors stood ajar, and two butterflies dodged in, teetering over heads that didn’t notice. They weren’t swallowtails or anything glamorous, just drab small airborne slips dabbling in the party air, and my awareness linked with them, every swerve mirrored, or as it felt enacted, by the consciousness I called mine, which for the moment had more to do with them than me. After a while they pattered back out through the doors. Then there he stood, observing their waffling exit. And now it was him I couldn’t look away from. His head turned; when he believed I was going to retreat — when I, too, was aware of the social imperative to break off a stare — and I didn’t, then the nature of whatever it was that was going on between us changed, and was, unmistakably, a declaration. Triumph showered through me, at finding nerve where there had always been inhibition: I was as delighted with this new self of mine as I was with the man I was staring at. But did he want this? Because who was I? He broke the connection with a dubious glance down and away, consulting the proprieties, since non-crazy strangers did not lock each other in a transparently sexual gaze heedless of everybody around them, and he wasn’t, of course he wasn’t, sure what he was getting into. If I had been my old shy self, that hesitation would have killed my stare. At last he looked up to see whether he was still being stared at, as he was, greenly, oh shamelessly, by me, and he wondered whether something was wrong with me, but he could see mine was a sane face and that I, too, acknowledged the exposedness and hazard of not breaking off the stare, and this information flaring back and forth between us guaranteed we were no longer strangers.

We spent the night over coffee in a café on Telegraph Avenue, breaking story-length pieces off from our lives, making a slice of torte disappear in alternating forkfuls. Our waitress’s forgetfulness he explained as distraction; she had a sick child at home. How can you tell? Unicorn stamp on her left hand, he said. How a local pediatrician commemorates non-crying visits. At the next table, two sixtyish gents in identical black berets slaughtered each other’s pawns. See, I told him, the way when one leans over the board, the other leans back the exact, compensatory distance. When I recognized what I was up to, matching him detail for detail to accomplish what my old anthropology professor would have called establishing kinship—We are detail’s native speakers, and there will be no end of detail, no end to what binds us—I understood that rapport, which had always seemed to belong among the less consequential social feats, could in fact be revelatory. The most fantastic determination arose, to stay in his presence. At the same time I understood full well that I would be getting on an airplane in — I looked at my watch — five hours. He, too, looked at his watch. Our plan was simple: not to sleep together, because that would make parting terrible. We would stay talking until the last minute, and then he would drive me to the airport, stopping by my hotel first for my things. I didn’t have money for another ticket and couldn’t miss my early-morning flight.

He left it till late in the conversation to ask, “You’re, what—?”

“Twenty-four.” I stirred my coffee, not sure I should ask the reciprocal question. Forty-two or — three, my guess was, but I was bad at telling ages.

“What’s in New Mexico?”

“Beauty.” I didn’t look up from my coffee to gauge if that was too romantic; the narrators of his books were always in quest of a woman’s unedited self. “The first morning I woke up there — in the desert; we’d driven to our campsite in the dark — I thought This is it, I’m home.”

Another thing he said across the table: “Your cover is blown, my friend. The story that got taken from the slush pile, that was yours.” The workshop instructor, a friend of my editor’s, had gone around repeating the news.

“Someone”—the moonlight-motorcycle-ride guy—“told me, ‘It’s lightning striking, the only magazine that can transform an unknown into a known.’ Not that I’m not grateful, I’m completely grateful to have been dug out of the slush pile, but what if I’m not good at the known part?”

“Comes with the territory,” he said. “Why would it be harder for you than anyone else?”

“Too awkward,” I said.

“Pshaw.”

“Too foot-in-mouth.”

“Be the girl wonder.”

Which shut me up: I took it to mean that, instead of complaining, I should adapt. I would go on to hear similar corrections encoded in other remarks; this was only the first instance. “You’re chipper this morning, kid”—that was a warning whose franker, ruder form would have been Tone it down. “You look like something from the court of Louis Quatorze” meant I should have blow-dried my long hair straight, as usual, instead of letting its manic curliness emerge. When he would announce, of his morning’s work, “Two pages” or “Only one paragraph, but a crucial one,” I heard And what have you done? Since your famous story. What? I could be getting it all wrong, I knew, but I couldn’t not interpret.

Those first charmed early-summer days he put on his record of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, which I had never heard before, and taught me to listen for the snatches of Gould’s jubilant humming. When I was moved to tears by Pachelbel’s Canon in D, he didn’t say Where have you been? He sang Joni Mitchell’s “California” in his bathrobe while making coffee to bring to me in the downstairs bedroom. One morning, sitting up to take the cup, I asked, “Do you remember at the welcoming party, you were in the stairwell and two women came up to you? And you wouldn’t say anything?”

He had to think back. “Garance and Lizzie.”

“You know them?”

“I was surprised to run into them there, but Lizzie’s doing a book, portraits of writers taken from behind. And they just found out Garance is pregnant. Try getting a word in edgewise.”

My expression must have amused him. He said, “You have lesbians in New Mexico, right?”

I hadn’t caught my flight. Instead we made love in the hotel room I hadn’t wanted him to see, since I had left it a mess. “Was this all you?” he asked, of the clothes strewn everywhere, and it was partly from embarrassment that I lifted his shirt and slid a hand inside. When we woke it was early afternoon and the implications of my having not gone home became real to me. My husband had a daylong meeting that prevented his picking me up at the airport; at least he had been spared the ordeal of standing there scrutinizing the disembarking crowd, wondering what could possibly have kept me from making my flight. In five years of marriage we had barely been apart. I imagined him at a conference table among his colleagues in their suits and ties, drawing airplanes in the margins of his legal pad. At our small Ohio college he had majored in art, and when a friend of his father’s offered him a position in a Santa Fe firm, he had surprised us both by accepting. I had been selfishly relieved that one of us was able to pay the rent on our Upper Canyon Road adobe. He didn’t really have it, he said, and I said he couldn’t know that, not now at the very beginning of trying. In an unfinished painting I reclined in our claw-foot tub, paperback book held nearsightedly close, bathwater strewn with lopped-off wildflower heads.

I had feared finding all of California alienatingly new, but where he lived was a comradely neighborhood of mostly neglected Victorians, none very fanciful, shaded by trees as old as they were. His place was the guest cottage—“So it’s small,” he cautioned, on the drive over — belonging to a Victorian that had decayed past any hope of renovation. The old house had eventually been replaced by a single-story studio-apartment building, and once he bought the place, these rentals became the most reliable part of his income. Whenever he could, he avoided teaching, he said. His minding about precariousness (if it was) was embarrassing. It was proof that he was older. Even if they could have, no one I knew in New Mexico would have wanted to use the phrase reliable income in a sentence about themselves: jobs were quit nonchalantly, security was to be scorned. With the help of an architect friend — a former lover, he clarified as if pressed; and never do that, never renovate a house with someone you’re sleeping with — all that was stodgy and cramped had been replaced with clarity and openness, as much, at least, as the basically modest structure permitted. This preface sounded like something recited fairly often. The attic had been torn out to allow for the loft bedroom, its pitched ceiling inset with a large skylight, its wide-planked floor bare, the bed done in white linen. The white bed was like his saying reliable income—it was the opposite of daring. No man I had ever known, if it had even occurred to him to buy pillowcases and sheets instead of sleeping on a bare mattress, would ever have chosen all white. Sleeplessness and guilt were catching up with me, and there was the nagging feeling any house tour gives, of coercing praise. I was irritated that in these circumstances, to me costly and extraordinary, the usual compliments were expected. “Beautiful light,” I said. The narrow stairs to the loft were flanked by cleverly fitted bookshelves, and more bookshelves ran around the large downstairs living room, onto which the galley kitchen and bathroom opened, and on another wall were doors leading to his study and the guest bedroom that would be mine, because, he said apologetically, he couldn’t sleep through the night with anyone in bed with him — it wasn’t me; he’d never been able to. Would that be all right? Of course, I said. I sat down on the edge of the twin bed. I can get the money somehow, I can fly home tomorrow. Even as I decided that, he sat down beside me. “When I think you could have gotten on that plane. I would be wondering what just hit me and how I could ever see you again.” In that room there was a telephone, and he left me alone with it.

He had his coffee shop, and when he was done working, that’s where he liked to go — at least, before me that’s where he’d gone. Time spent with me, in bed or talking, interfered with the coffee shop, and with research in the university library and his circuit of bookstores and Saturday games of pickup basketball, but for several weeks I was unaware that he had altered his routines for my sake. From the congratulatory hostility of his friends, I gathered that women came and went. “Your free throw’s gone to shit,” said Billy, owner of the shabby, stately Victorian next door whose honeysuckle-overrun backyard was a storehouse of costly toys — motorcycles, a sailboat. “How I know you have a girlfriend.” I would have liked to talk to someone who knew him — even Billy, flagrantly indiscreet — about how I was faring in my anxious adaptation to his preferences, whether I was getting anything wrong. Other women had lived with him: What had they done while he was writing in the morning? How had they kept quiet enough? One was a cellist — how had that worked? His writing hours, eight to noon, were nonnegotiable. If he missed a day, his black mood saturated our world. But this was rare.

The check came, for the story. Forwarded by my husband, whom I called sometimes when I was alone in the cottage, and blue. “You can always come home, you know,” my husband said, and I bit down on the question Why don’t you hate me? He knew me well. “Look,” he said. “People get into trouble. We get in over our heads. It’s not only you.”

The renovated cottage was close enough to the university that, days when he was teaching, he could ride his bicycle. Covertly, I began to hold it against him that he was honoring his responsibilities, meeting his classes, having conversations about weather and politics. My syllogism ran: what love does is shatter life as you’ve known it; his life isn’t shattered; therefore he is not in love. Of the two of us, I consoled myself with the idea that I was the real lover. But, really, why did it matter so much? The question of who was more exposed emotionally would have struck him as crazy, my guess is. But either my willingness to tear my life apart had this redeeming authenticity, or the pain I was causing my husband was callously — even violently — pointless.

By now I had learned something about the women before me, including the Chinese lover whose loss he still wasn’t reconciled to, though it had been years. I stole her picture and tucked it into Middlemarch, the only book in this house full of his books that belonged to me, and when he admitted to not liking Eliot much I was relieved to have a book which, by not mattering to him, could talk confidentially to what was left of me as a writer, the little that was left after I was, as I believed I wanted to be, stripped down to skin and heartbeat and sex, never enough sex, impatient sex, adoring sex, fear-of-boredom sex.

The immense sanity of Middlemarch made it a safe haven for the stolen photograph. Whenever I went back to Eliot’s novel, I imagined the magnanimous moral acuity with which the narrator would have illumined a theft like mine, bringing it into the embrace of the humanly forgivable while, at the same time — and how did Eliot manage this? — indicting its betrayal of the more honorable self that, in her narrator’s eyes, I would possess. But I didn’t go back often; sex and aimless daydreaming ate up the hours I would usually have spent reading, and when I went up to the loft, I left the book behind — I didn’t want him noticing it. He had a habit of picking up my things and studying them quizzically, as if wondering how they had come to be in his house, and if he picked up Middlemarch there was a chance the photo would slip out. If I fell asleep in his bed after sex he would wake me after an hour or two, saying Kid, you need to go downstairs. On the way down I ran my fingers over the spines of the books lining the stairwell. If you opened one it would appear untouched; he recorded observations and memorable passages in a series of reading notebooks.

My scribbled-in Middlemarch stayed on the nightstand by the twin bed, and I had hung my clothes in the closet, but that didn’t mean I felt at home in the room, with its dresser whose bottom drawer was jammed with photos. What did it mean that this drawer, alone in all the house, had not been systematically sorted? Near the bottom of the slag heap was an envelope of tintypes: from a background of stippled tarnish gazed a poetic boy, doleful eyes and stiff upright collar, and I wanted to take it to him and say Look, you in 1843, but that would prove I’d been rifling through the drawer, and even if he hadn’t said not to, I wasn’t sure it was all right. His childhood was there, his youth, the face of his first author photo. Houses and cities before this one. His women, too, and I dealt them out across the floor, a solitaire of disparate faces: I wanted to know their stories. No doubt I did know pieces, from his work, but here they were, real, and I would have listened to them all if I could, would have asked each one How did it end? When he was writing he would sometimes knock and come in and rummage through the pictures, whose haphazardness replicated memory’s chanciness. As with memory there was the sense that everything was there, in the drawer — just not readily findable. Disorder is hospitable to serendipity; was that the point? When he found the photo he wanted he didn’t take it back to his desk but stayed and studied it, and when he was done he dropped it casually back into the hodgepodge. If I opened the drawer after he’d gone, there was no way to guess which photo he’d been holding.

There were things that happened during sex that felt like they could never be forgotten. Recognitions, flights of soul-baring mutual exposure, a pitch of ravishment that seemed bound to transform our lives. But, sharing the setting of so many hours of tumult — the bed — and tumult’s instruments — our two bodies — these passages lacked the distinctness of event and turned out to be, as far as memory was concerned, elusive. And there was sadness in that, in coming back to our same selves. By midsummer, something — maybe the infuriating inescapability of those selves, maybe an intimation of the monotonousness sex could devolve into, if we kept this up — caused us to start turning sex into stories. Sex with me as a boy, the one and only boy who ever caught his eye, a lovely apparition of a boy he wanted to keep from all harm, but who one day was simply gone; sex as if he was a pornographer and I was a schoolgirl who began, more and more, to conjure long-absent emotions, tenderness, possessiveness, even as the schoolgirl became more and more corrupt, telling sly little lies; the sex we would have if, after ten years’ separation, we saw each other across a crowded room; sex as if I had just learned he’d been unfaithful to me with one of his exes; sex as if I’d been unfaithful; the sex we would have if we broke up and after ten years ended up in the same Paris hotel for some kind of writers’ event, a book signing maybe, and sometimes it was his book and sometimes it was mine; sex with me in the stockings and heels of a prostitute, with him as a cop, me as a runaway desperate for shelter, with him as a woman, with the two of us as strangers seated near each other on a nightlong flight.

These games always began the same way. Ceremonious, the invitation, proper and respectful in inverse proportion to the derangement solicited. What if you are. What if I am. We never talked about this, and though either could have said Let’s not go there, neither of us ever declined a game described by the other. The inventing of roles was spontaneous, their unforeseeableness part of the game’s attraction, but a special mood, an upswell of lurid remorse, alerted me whenever I was about to say And then after forever we see each other again. In these scenarios where we had spent years apart, the lovely stroke was our immediate recognition of each other — not, like other emotions we played at, a shock, not a wounding excitement, but an entrancing correction to loss. All wrongs set right. And we look at each other. And it’s like—

While he wouldn’t drink any coffee that wasn’t made from freshly ground Italian dark roast and he had a taste for expensive chocolate, he seemed mostly indifferent to food and never cooked. What had he done when he was alone? Was it just like this, cereal, soup from cans, microwaved enchiladas? Should I try to make something — would that feel, to him, to me, stickily wife-y? He liked bicycling to the farmer’s market and would come back with the ripest, freshest tomatoes. He taught me to slather mayonnaise across bakery bread, grinding black pepper into the exposed slices before covering them with another slice, taking fast bites before the bread turned sodden, licking juice from wrists and fingertips, the tomatoes still warm from basking in their crates at the market, their taste leaking acid-bright through the oily mayonnaise blandness, the bread coarse in texture, sweet in fragrance. There was at least a chance he’d never told any other lover about tomato sandwiches. After weeks of not caring what I ate, I had found something I couldn’t get enough of, and as soon as I finished one sandwich I would make another, waiting until he was out to indulge, and it didn’t matter how carefully I cleared away the traces of my feast, he could tell, he was quick with numbers and probably counted the tomatoes.

Really the entire cottage was saturated with his vigilance; his keen eye for detail was now directed at me. When I went elsewhere, tried working in a café (not his) for example, it was as if the house were still with me, its atmosphere extending to the unrocking table where I sat with my books and my legal pad and my cup of coffee with cream and two teaspoons of brown sugar stirred in. At that table I could not do a dirt road in New Mexico. I could not do a wife steeping in cold bathwater while her husband scissored the heads from poppies and black-eyed Susans. Neither could I do my new existence. He would not walk into a story of mine. He could not have sat down in an armchair of my imagining, or awakened in a bed beside a narrator in some way me. The world we were in was replete with narration, and it was his. After a couple of hours, I gave up trying.

He was sitting with Billy on Billy’s front steps and greeted me by saying, “Everest redux.” Billy said, “Can I have a kiss for luck? Leaving for Kathmandu early in the A.M. Oh, and forgot to tell you”—turning to him—“Delia’s going to house-sit. I don’t want to be distracted on the Icefall by visions of Fats wasting away in some kennel.” Fats was his skinny, hyper border collie. “Only good vibes. Last year, when I got up into the death zone, I hallucinated my grandmother.” Exaggerating his Texas drawl: “‘Time you git back home.’ Actually one of the Sherpas looked a whole lot like her. Brightest black eyes. See right through bullshit, which you want in a Sherpa or grandma. I lied a lot when I was little, like practice for being in the closet. So, Delia. Fats loves her. So, she’ll be staying here.” He said, “Always smart not to leave a house empty,” but I knew Billy was curious if I would show that I minded, because Delia was his most recent ex, the lover before me, and thinking Only good vibes, right, I said, “Fats will be happy” and kissed Billy on his sunburned forehead.

I gave up on the coffee shop, but when I tried writing in the afternoons in the guest bedroom, sitting up in the twin bed with a legal pad on my knees, he would wander in and start picking up various objects — my traveling alarm clock, my hairbrush — and I would drop the legal pad and hold out my arms. Maybe because he was becoming restless, or was troubled by what looked, in me, like the immobilizing onset of depression, he talked me into going running, and that was how we spent our evenings now, on an oval track whose cinders were the old-school kind, sooty black, gritting under running shoes. On days after a weekend meet, the chalk lines marking the lanes were still visible. The infield was grass, evenly mown, and after running he liked to throw a football there, liked it even more than he ordinarily would have because football figured in the novel he was writing, about two brothers whose only way of connecting with each other was throwing a football back and forth, and he needed the sense impressions of long shadows across summer grass and the grain of the leather to prompt the next morning’s writing. When he held a football, his tall, brainy self came together, justified. Pleasantly dangerous with the love of competition, though at the moment all he had to compete with was me. When he cocked his arm back and took a step, tiny grasshoppers showered up. The spiral floated higher, as if the air were tenderly prolonging its suspension, and took its time descending. The thump of flight dead-ending against my chest as I ran pleased me. He had trouble accepting that I could throw a spiral, though he might have known my body learned fast. I couldn’t throw as far, and he walked backward, taunting for more distance. Taunting I took as a guy-guy thing; my prowess, modest as it was, made me an honorary boy, and was sexy.

One bright evening, as I cocked my arm back, he cried Throw it, piggy! Shocked into grace, I sent a real beauty his way, and with long-legged strides he covered the grass and leaped, a show-offy catch tendered as apology before I could call down the field, What?, but I was standing there understanding: piggy was a thing he called me to himself, that had slipped out. In my need and aimlessness and insatiability I was a pale sow. How deluded I had been, believing I was a genius lover no excess could turn repulsive. The next morning I woke up sick, ashamed that wherever he was in the house he could hear me vomiting, and when I said I wanted a hotel room he told me a tenant had moved out from one of his units and I could have the key.

These studio units, five of them, occupied the shabby one-story stucco box that stood between his house and the street. Flat-roofed cinderblock painted a sullen ocher, this building was a problem factory. Termites, leaks, cavalier electrical wiring. With his tenants he was on amiable terms, an unexpectedly easygoing landlord. The little box I let myself into had a floor of sky blue linoleum; sick as I was, that blue made me glad. The space was bare except for a bed frame and mattress, where I dropped the sheets and towels he’d given me. The hours I spent in the small bathroom were both wretched and luxurious in their privacy; whenever there was a lull in the vomiting, I would lock and unlock the door just to do so. Now he is locked the fuck out. Now I let him back in. Now out forever. After dark, I leaned over the toy kitchen sink and drank from the faucet. It was miraculous to be alone. There was a telephone on the kitchen’s cinderblock wall, and as I looked at it, it rang. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I slept in the bare bed and woke scared that my fever sweat had stained the mattress; it was light; that day lasted forever, the thing sickness does to time.

His knocking woke me. He came in all tall and fresh from his shower, having already worked his habitual four hours. First he made the bed; with the heel of his hand he pushed sweaty hair from my face; I was unashamed, I could have killed him if he didn’t make love to me. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow,” he said. I barely kept myself from saying Do you love me. Do you love me. Nausea helped keep me from blurting that out; the strenuousness of repressing nausea carried over into this other, useful repression. “I’m so hungry,” I said instead. “Can you bring me a bowl of rice?” In saying it I discovered that the one thing I could bear to think of eating was the bowl of rice he would carry over from his house. I needed something he made for me.

When I woke it was night. Cool air and traffic sounds came through the picture window, and seemed to mean I would be able to live without him. Now and then the phone began to ring and I let it ring on and on. Sometime during that night I went through the cupboards. I sat cross-legged on the floor with a cup of tea and ate stale arrowroot biscuits from the pack the tenant had forgotten, feeling sick again as I ate. He wasn’t a man who cooked, or who made things of any kind, really, except books. It didn’t matter that I knew this very well, and even understood it; the bowl of rice was now an obsession. It seemed like the only thing I had ever wanted from him, though in another sense all I had done since staring at him that first time was want things from him. In the morning, while it was still dark, he let himself in — I should have guessed there was a master key — with nothing in his hands, and when we were through making love he said, “You’re going to bathe, right?” Then I was alone, without a bowl of rice, cross-legged on the kitchen floor with the cup of tea I’d made and the last five arrowroot biscuits, locked deep in hunger, realizing that — because the hunger felt clear and exhilarating, with no undertow of nausea — I was either well, or about to be. I called and made a reservation on a flight to New Mexico that had one seat left. My husband let me cry through that first night back in his arms. You have to want to write, but love you can do without wanting: which makes it sound as if it’s the simpler thing. He never needed to hear the story.

In the novel he wrote about that time, I wasn’t his only lover. House-sitting next door, the narrator’s sensible, affectionate ex affords him sexual refuge from the neediness of the younger woman he’d believed he was in love with, whose obsession with him has begun to alarm him. Impulsively, after the first time they slept together, she left her husband for him. How responsible did that make him, for her? He understands, as she doesn’t seem to, that there’s nothing unerring about desire. At its most compelling, it can lead to a dead end, as has happened in their case. This younger, dark-haired lover keeps Middlemarch on her nightstand, and riffling through the book one night while she’s sleeping the narrator finds the photograph of the Chinese woman. She lives not very far away, he thinks, and I would have heard if she got married — people can’t wait to tell you that kind of thing, about an ex. But, really, how could I have left her? Here the novel takes a comic turn, because now he needs to break up with two women: his house-sitting ex, likely to go okay, and, a more troubling prospect, this young woman inexplicably damaged by their affair. He needs to rouse her from her depression, to talk to her directly, encouragingly, until of her own accord she decides to leave. Tricky to carry off, the passage where, as he holds the picture, the old, sane love revives — the novel’s crisis, also the single event I was sure had never happened. I don’t mean the novel was true, only that the things in it had happened. The likelier explanation was he’d gone into the guest bedroom while I was out. Far-fetched, his coming into the room while I slept — why would he? — though I could understand why he wanted, thematically, the juxtaposition of sleep and epiphany, and how the scene was tighter for the suspense about whether the dark-haired lover would wake up.

Twelve years later, heading home with two friends from the funeral of our well-loved colleague Howard, who had lived in Berkeley, we stopped in a bookstore. Between the memorial service and the trip out to the cemetery, the funeral had taken most of the day. Afterward we had gone to dinner, and except for the driver we were all a little drunk and, in the wake of grieving funeral stiltedness and the tears we had shed, trying to cheer each other up. Death seemed like another of Howard’s contradictions: his rumbling, comedic fatness concealed an exquisite sensibility, gracious, capable of conveying the most delicate epiphanies to his students or soft-shoeing around the lectern, reciting “In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.” If Howard’s massiveness was bearish, that of his famous feminist-scholar wife was majestic, accoutered with scarves, shawls, trifocals on beaded chains, a cane she was rumored to have aimed at an unprepared grad student in her Dickinson seminar—“My Soul had stood — a Loaded Gun,” David quoted; Alan corrected, “My Life,” with the amiable condescension that David’s grin said he’d been hoping for, since it made Alan look not so Zen after all. Alan was lanky, mild, exceedingly tall, with an air of baffled inquiry and goodwill I attributed to endless zazen; David sturdy, impatient, his scorn exuberant, his professional vendettas merciless. It was David I told my love affairs to, and when I had the flu it was David who came over, fed Leo his supper, and read aloud. Through the wall I could hear David’s merry “showed their terrible claws till Max said ‘BE STILL!’” echoed by Leo’s “Be still!” That evening after the funeral one of us suggested waiting out rush hour in the bookstore and we wandered through in our black clothes, David to philosophy, Alan to poetry, me to a long table of tumbled sale books on whose other side — I stared—he stood with an open book in his hand, looking up before I could turn away, the brilliant dark eyes that had held mine as I came over and over meeting mine now without recognition, just as neutrally looking away, the book in his hand the real object of desire, something falsely enchanted in his downward gaze that convinced me he had been attracted to me not as a familiar person but as a new one, red-haired now, in high heels, in head-to-toe black, a writer with three books to my name, teaching at a university a couple of hours away, single mother to a watchful, emphatic toddler who spoke in complete sentences — though he wasn’t going to get to hear about my son, wasn’t going to get a word of my story. And in the hiatus of not being recognized there was time for a decision, which was: before he can figure out who he’s just seen, before, as some fractional lift of his jaw told me he was about to, he can look up and meet my eyes again and know who I am, before before before before before before before before he can say my name followed by I don’t believe it, followed by I always thought I’d see you again, look away. Get out. Go. And I did, and although behind me where I stood on the street corner the bookstore door opened now and then and let people out, none of them was him. Person after person failed to be him. He hadn’t known me, and while it wasn’t rational to blame him for this blow to my sense of myself as memorable, as having burned very bright, if not for very long, in his life, I minded that he had somehow retained such power to move me, even if that power was used only, inadvertently, to inflict sadness; and his having this power, while I had none — not the least means of moving him — seemed the newest incarnation of our old inequality as lovers, and this configuration, him dominant, me self-absconding, bypassed my mind and spoke to my body, and made me remember what he had been like, in bed, and just as desire took on a dangerous shine, I saw: how guilelessly I had erased my writing, as if relinquishment was what he had ever asked. If there are two people in bed they are both narrating, but it had seemed otherwise to me: having him, I could not believe another story was needed. How astounded he must have been by my willing losses. My friends came out carrying their bags, and David told me, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you leave a bookstore empty-handed, ever,” and we pulled our gloves on, telling each other that taking a break had been a good idea, and our heads were clear now, and we could make the drive home. Of course, that was when he came out the door, long-legged, striding fast. Pausing, fingers touched to his lips, then the upright palm flashed at me — a gesture I didn’t recognize, for a second, as a blown kiss — before he turned the corner.

“Wasn’t that—?” David said.

“Yes.”

“Did he just—?”

“When we’re in the car, you two,” Alan said. “I’ve got to be at the Zen Center at five.”

“The day before the surgery, he told me his biggest fear wasn’t that they wouldn’t get all the cancer. His biggest fear wasn’t of dying, even, though he said that was how his father died when he was only nine, under the anesthetic for an operation that was supposed to be simple, with nobody believing they needed to say goodbye beforehand, and now that he was facing a simple operation himself, one nobody dies of, he couldn’t help thinking of his father. A premonition. His biggest fear was that he’d be left impotent. Of all the things that can conceivably go wrong with prostate cancer surgery, that was the most terrifying.”

“What did you say?” Alan asked from the backseat.

“‘Most terrifying’? I’m wondering why it’s me, the gay boy, Howard chooses to confide in, about impotence. Because my existence revolves around penises? I’m kind of freaked out, because, you know Howard, his usual decorum, where’s that gone? But I want to be staunch for him. I love this man. And he says, ‘Not for me. If it came down to living without it, I would mourn, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. For me. Whereas for Martha—’”

“‘Most terrifying,’” Alan said. “I’m very sorry he had to make those calculations.”

“‘—Martha can’t live without it.’”

“You were right there,” Alan said. “You reassured him?”

“Of course I reassured him.” David checked Alan’s expression in the rearview mirror. “But it’s not something I imagined, that the two of them ever — or still—”

“Or, hmmm, that she could be said—”

“You idiots, he adored her,” I said. “That’s what he was telling David. Not ‘She needs sex more than I do.’ But ‘This phenomenal woman, light of my life, it’s unimaginable that I might never make love to her again.’”

Alan took off his tie, rolled it up, tucked it in his jacket pocket, and then passed his glasses forward to me, saying, “Can you take custody?” I cradled them as cautiously as if they were his eyes. Once he was asleep David said, “That was him, wasn’t it?”

We had stood across from each other, not five feet apart, I told David, and he had not recognized me. “After I’d gone he must have stood there thinking But I know her, I know her from somewhere. Then he gets it — who I am, and that I’d walked away without a word. Which must have hurt.”

“It’s generally that way when you save your own skin — somebody gets hurt.”

“Even hurt, he blows me a kiss. That makes him seem—”

“Kind of great,” David said.

“Wasn’t I right? Walking away?”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” David said. “There’s no problem with a little mystery, in the context of a larger, immensely hard-won clarity.” He yawned. “I’m not the idiot.” He tipped his curly head to indicate the backseat. “He’s the idiot. Did I reassure him? Fuck me. When am I ever not reassuring.”

Oncoming traffic made an irregular stream of white light, its brilliance intensifying, fusing, then sliding by. I held up Alan’s glasses and the lights dilated gorgeously. I said, “You know why we’ll never give up cars? Because riding in cars at night is so beautiful, it’s telling stories in a cave with the darkness kept out, the dash lights for the embers of the fire.”

“You don’t have to tell me any stories,” David said. “I’m absolutely wide awake.”

I didn’t sleep long, but when I woke he was in a different mood.

“You know, his novel,” David said, “the one about you — is that a good book?”

“If you like his voice it’s good.”

“On its own, though, is it?”

Mine wasn’t exactly a disinterested reading, I said. The style is his style, and like all his work it takes hold of the reader, but unlike his previous books this novel seems rigged in the narrator’s favor, and it would have been more compelling if he had made the dark-haired lover—

“You,” David said.

— okay, me, but I really am talking about the character now, who is all shattered vulnerability and clinging, the embodiment of squishy need, no more, no less than that. But suppose he had granted her an aliveness the narrator could not entirely assimilate, if she had voiced interpretations conflicting with and even undermining his, if it began to be clear that she was in possession of a rival reality, then the margin of her being that is beyond his ken would imbue the whole with greater emotional veracity, would test the narrator’s ownership of the story, and cast doubt on the narrator’s decision to leave her. If she never gets more than one dimension, then it doesn’t matter to the reader that he ditches her. It’s not really moving. Whereas if she’s alive and the reader is privy to how much about her eludes him, then there is the problem of assessing the loss, and everything gets more interesting, right?

“For her to get more real,” David said, “she has to act, right? Give the narrator something to go on?”

“Give him something to go on, yes. But that could come right at the last minute.”

“That’s a sadder ending,” David said. “The way that you tell it.”

“I wasn’t thinking it was sad,” I said. “I was thinking it was — better.”