Torch

  “Such is life,” he said, sipping tentatively from his drink. It meant something to him that they had the same kind of drink. Initially, he’d asked for beer. “Let me ask you this. You got a tattoo?”

  Claire shook her head. Bill rolled his sleeve up and showed her the inside of his forearm: a cougar, ready to pounce.

  “Take my advice and don’t. It’s a bad idea, especially for women.”

  “I’ve thought about it. Maybe a chain of daisies.”

  “Anyhoo,” he said. “After all that with Janet, I took my broken heart to Alaska to work in a salmon cannery. Now that’s good money. But that’s work. That’s not like what passes for work with some of these guys. These white shirt types. That’s where I met Nancy. She worked at the cannery too—women do it too—but that’s not where we got together. Where we got together is about five years later when I moved to Duluth to take a job—I schedule the ships that go in and out of the harbor—and I thought, Who the heck do you know in Duluth? And I had never forgotten about Nancy, you know. I met her and never forgot her and I knew she was from Duluth, so I looked in the phone book and thought, Why the heck not call her up? The rest, as they say, is history.”

  Bill asked Claire where she lived, who her family was, whether she liked the Minnesota winters or not, if she’d ever been to California. He wanted to know what her favorite movie was, if she believed that life existed on other planets, if she ever wanted to have children.

  “We were planning on kids, but then boom—Nancy has cancer.” He looked around the room. There was a row of video games across from them repeating a display of wrecking balls and exploding rockets, automobile crashes and little hooded men wielding axes. “So are we going to have lunch or not?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “Me, neither,” he said. “You want another drink?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. She could feel the one drink running pleasantly through her. She had the sensation that everything was going to be okay, that her mother was not as sick as she seemed, and if she was, Claire could accept that fact with calm and reason. “I could go either way. I’ll have one if you do.”

  “I don’t need one,” Bill said, and they sat in silence together.

  A woman with a rash on her face came into the bar with a bucket of flowers and asked them if they would like to buy some and they said no, but then Bill called her back and bought a bouquet after all. Red carnations with a tassel of leaves and baby’s breath. He set them beside him on the seat.

  “It’s nice to talk to you, Claire.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There aren’t many people you can talk to. People in this situation, so to speak.”

  “No.”

  “Nobody wants to hear it. Oh, sure, they want to know what they can do for you and so forth. That’s nice. But no one really wants to hear about it.”

  “No,” Claire said. She was sitting on her hands. She rocked forward every few moments to sip from her straw. “I know exactly what you mean about all that.” People had carved messages and names into the table. Tammy Z. it said in front of her, cunt.

  Bill coughed into his fist, then asked, “You got a boyfriend in Minneapolis?”

  Claire told him about David, about what he was studying in graduate school—a mix of political science and philosophy, literature and history, but none of those things solely.

  “I know the kind of thing you’re talking about. The humanities,” Bill said, coughing some more. “You go to bars much?”

  “No. Not too much. Actually, I just turned twenty-one a few weeks ago.”

  “No kidding,” he said, and fished an ice cube out of his glass and tossed it in his mouth. “You seem older. I’d’ve guessed twenty-five. You strike me as a sophisticated lady. You’ve got a way that’s very grown-up.”

  He had a small, firm belly and a thick bush of graying hair on his head. Tufts of hair sprang from his eyebrows and nostrils and the backs of his hands. His ears were red and burly and sat like small wings. He reminded Claire, not unkindly, of a baby elephant, in a lordly, farcical way.

  Claire crossed her legs under the table. She rattled her ice. “We should be getting back. My mom is probably waking up now.”

  “Well. It was nice to get away. Everyone’s got a right to that from time to time.” He raked his hands through his hair, as if he were waking from a nap.

  Claire was acutely aware of his body across the table, of her own pressing luxuriously back against the ripped-up vinyl. “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “Not far from here. About a mile.”

  He set his hands on the table and knocked on it with his knuckles. She reached out and set her hands lightly on top of his. He stayed still for a moment, then turned his hands over and laced his fingers into hers.

  “Shall we?” he asked, after a while.

  “Yes,” she said. “We shall.”

  Bill’s house was white, surrounded by a picket fence, and cloistered in a thicket of pines. It sat a few steps below the street, but above everything else—the buildings of downtown Duluth, the lake. Claire could see the roof of the hospital far off and she pointed it out to Bill. It was freezing. Claire was shaking but impervious to the cold.

  “The snow is sparkling like diamonds,” she said, idiotically.

  “Diamonds?” Bill smiled at her curiously.

  “I mean, the ice crystals. They’re sparkling,” she said, and blushed. “I like the word sparkle, don’t you? It’s one of my favorite words. Sometimes I’ll just be attracted to a certain word for no reason at all, but that it sounds nice. Or it looks nice on the page.”

  “I can see what you mean,” he said, guiding her onto the porch. “Sparkle has a ring.”

  They stepped into the house. Claire felt slightly dizzy, but alert, not at all like she’d had a drink and no lunch in the middle of the day. She took her coat off, and her gloves. She wanted to take everything else off as soon as possible so she’d stop being nervous. She wore jeans and a shirt that exposed a sliver of her lower abdomen, despite the cold, and boots that echoed loudly against the wooden floors as she followed Bill from room to room, on a tour.

  “It’s lovely,” she kept saying, and it was. Every room was painted beautifully, a different color, but none of the colors clashed. She reached for the earring that she usually wore in her nose—often she twisted it when she was nervous—but it wasn’t there. More and more, she’d been forgetting to put it in before leaving for the hospital. She held her little braid instead, pulling on one of the tiny bells as he showed her the cabinets that he’d built, the place where there had once been a wall that he and Nancy had knocked down to let more light into the dining room, the hardwood floors they’d sanded and refinished themselves.

  In the bathroom, where Bill left her alone at last, there was a bowl of stiff rose petals on a narrow shelf and a photograph of Bill and Nancy—both of them completely bald—with their heads tilted toward one another. Claire washed her hands and face with a bar of green soap that smelled like aftershave and then went into the living room.

  “You like Greg Brown?” Bill asked her, holding a record, blowing on it, putting it on the turntable.

  “I love him,” Claire said.

  “This is some of his older stuff,” he said, and the music began.

  “You never see records anymore.”

  “I collect them.” He opened a cabinet with several shelves of albums. “I’ve got all kinds of music—anything you could want. Country, rock, classical, bluegrass, you name it.”

  “Me, too. I mean, that’s what I like. All kinds.” The skin of her face was tight from the soap. She sat down on a blue couch and instantly stood up again. “So … come here,” she said, smiling like a maniac.

  He took her hair by the ends and pressed it to his nose and smelled it. He wound it around his fingers, pulling her toward him, and kissed her. His mouth was cool and shaking and strange, but nice, nicer to her than anything. She shoved her h
ands into the back pockets of his jeans and felt his ass.

  “I’m glad I met you,” he said.

  “Me too. Take this off,” she said impishly, tugging at his shirt. He gathered her wrists in his hands and pulled her into the bedroom. The walls were the same color as the comforter on his bed. Amber, with an edge of smoke.

  “Now,” he said, unbuttoning her shirt. They laughed awkwardly, pawed at each other. He bent to kiss her breasts, biting her nipples tenderly, and then harder. They teetered, finally onto his bed.

  “Do you have a condom?” he asked her.

  “No.”

  But they went ahead anyway. It seemed impossible that she would get pregnant, that anything at all could be transmitted or take root or live in them. She knew it. He knew it. This didn’t make sense, but they were right.

  Claire watched Bill’s face while they fucked. It was haggard and tense, as if he were concentrating on something either very far or very near, as if he were attempting to remove a splinter or thread a needle or telepathically shatter a glass in France. He saw her watching him and then his face became animated again, wide-eyed and carnivorous, until it crumpled as if he were about to sob in agony, and he came.

  “That was nice,” he said after a while, looking up at her, straddled over him. She rolled off of him and lay down beside him. A mobile of fat chefs dangled overhead, and farther, down near their feet, a birdcage without a bird. He turned onto his side and placed his hand delicately on her stomach. He found her birthmark and petted it and outlined it with his finger, as if he’d known her all of her life.

  “Was that weird for you?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What was it like?”

  He stood up, jerked his jeans on. “Like a million bucks.”

  “There’s a lady down the hall who’s a high school teacher,” Claire said to her mother, even though she appeared to be sleeping. She was standing by the window, looking out at the street below, from where she’d just come. There was a long silence, and then her mother’s low voice.

  “What’s her name?”

  Claire turned and went to stand by the bed, near her mother.

  “Nancy Ristow.”

  “Is she a visitor or a resident?” She smiled, a small glorious smile.

  “Resident. She’s a history teacher.”

  It was nearly four. Claire had had a panicked feeling when she and Bill had rushed back to the hospital, but when she’d entered her mother’s room, it was as if she’d never left.

  “Ask her what she thinks happened to Amelia Earhart.”

  “Who?”

  “This teacher. Nancy.”

  “Why?” Claire snapped.

  “You said she teaches history, right? History interests me. I’d be curious to know if she has a theory, since she’s in the know. I always liked Amelia Earhart.” She opened her eyes and tried to push herself up to a sitting position against the pillows, the tubes swaying around her. “I think of her going off like that. Can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine? Having no idea what would happen? Imagine how brave she was. She was one of my personal heroes.”

  “Is.”

  “What?”

  “Is, Mom. She is one of your personal heroes.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Is.”

  She sat looking carefully at Claire. “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere. You were sleeping. I walked around.”

  She continued to look at Claire. Her face pale, drained, regal.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been somewhere.”

  “I told you.”

  “You’re different.”

  That night, back at home, she called David.

  “How are things?” he asked. “How’s your mom?”

  “Hard. It’s … horrible.” She began to cry and he listened to her crying over the phone. She could hear music playing in the background. “She seems to be getting sicker. Every morning when I go in, it’s worse. I can see the difference. And Josh is still being an ass—he came home last night. I saw him this morning, but he squirmed out of coming to the hospital with me.”

  “That sucks,” David said.

  Claire sat at the kitchen table, pulling the phone to reach from the wall. She drew arrows and triangles and spiraling lines on the back of an envelope that had been sitting there. She hadn’t talked to David for two days, yet now she couldn’t think of what to say to him.

  “You seem far away,” she said.

  “I am,” he said, and laughed.

  “No, I mean, actually far. Like Russia or something. I don’t even feel like I’m on the same planet with you.”

  “We’re on the same planet,” he said irritably.

  “Not just you and me, but me and everyone else. Like I’m on this other planet. Or in a dream, a nightmare. That’s what everyone always says, ‘It was like being in a nightmare,’ and that’s totally how it is. Like I’m going to wake up.”

  “I’m here for you,” David said. The music had stopped and now she could hear a remote crackling on the line, a mysterious, celestial sound that made her feel even lonelier.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “The phone. It’s making a sound. It’s creeping me out. Say something. Talk to me.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  She thought that she loved him too, but she didn’t have it in her to say it anymore, the way they’d always said it, every day, back and forth, a Ping-Pong of words. I love you. I love you too. Sometimes, she couldn’t help it, she wished that one of his parents were sick or dead or long gone from his life. It didn’t seem fair to her that he should have two loving parents, still married and madly in love with each other, perfectly alive and well, even though they were fifteen years older than her mother.

  “I could read to you,” he said. That was something they did at night, one book at a time.

  “Okay,” she said glumly. And he began. She found herself listening to his words in a way that she’d never listened to anything before: with all of her attention, and yet also forgetting each detail the moment it registered—who was married to whom, for how long, and why the characters were where they were. It didn’t matter. The story lulled her into something like a trance.

  After they hung up, she walked into her mother and Bruce’s room and turned on all the lamps and lay down on the bed sideways, her feet hanging off. She wished her brother were here. She thought maybe he would come home in the middle of the night and then in the morning she could talk to him, convince him to come to the hospital with her. The phone rang and she waited for the answering machine and listened to her mother’s voice saying hello, please leave a message, and then the somber voice of their neighbor, Kathy Tyson, offering to look after the animals if they needed it. On impulse, Claire lunged for the phone, but by then Kathy had hung up. She’d had the idea that maybe Kathy could come over and have a cup of tea with her and distract her from her sorrow. They could talk about men and how few eligible ones there were in Midden, the way they had the year before, at Gail Nystrom’s wedding reception, when they’d been assigned to sit next to each other at the singles table because there were too few men to go boy-girl. Kathy had confided that she’d posted a listing on a Web site for singles who liked country living, that the very next day she was driving to Norway to meet a man who’d answered her ad.

  Claire didn’t know her number and to look for it seemed too much of an effort, so she hung up the phone and stood. She realized that she was still wearing her mother’s wool coat, not having taken it off for the nearly two hours she’d been home. She pushed her hands into the pockets and instantly found the cassette tape she had put there earlier. She pulled it out and looked at it for the first time. Kenny G, it said. She’d taken it that day, from Bill’s house. She didn’t know why. It sat next to the tune box in his bedroom among a scattering of other cassettes that Bill and perhaps Nancy had been presumably listening to recently. Instinctually
she’d reached for a cassette and shoved it into her pocket. She sat up now and opened the drawer of the small table beside the bed and tossed the cassette in and then shut the drawer.

  She met Bill twice the next day. Once just after ten, and then again in the late afternoon. Both times they went to his house and had sex in almost precisely the manner they had the day before. They already had a ritual: afterward they would dress and sit in the kitchen, drinking warm apple cider and eating toast with peanut butter. They told each other stories about the lovers they’d had. Claire’s list was short, only four men long, Bill being the most interesting, the one least like her. Bill’s list was long and complicated, grouped mostly into categories, rather than individuals. He told her about losing his virginity with Janet in a closet where his mother stored cleaning supplies; about prostitutes he had slept with in various ports during his Navy years; a series of alcoholics in Alaska; and then Nancy. He told her about how they’d gone to Puerto Rico for their tenth wedding anniversary. They’d lolled in bed and made love and ate a bag of plums they’d bought on the street. In jest, Bill put one of these plums into Nancy’s vagina and it sucked itself up inside of her and they couldn’t get it out.

  “Well, it came out eventually,” he said, laughing, rubbing his face, laughing again, laughing so hard that his eyes filled with tears.

  Claire sat with him and smiled. She nibbled her toast.

  “Now there’s something,” he said, finally getting ahold of himself, wiping his tears away. “There’s something you don’t do twice.”

  She didn’t see him the next day at all. Her mother had become so ill that Claire hardly left the room.

  “You’re interrupting me,” she’d said as soon as she saw Claire that morning, a new edge to her voice.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you do. You interrupt.” Teresa swung her head in Claire’s direction. Her eyes blue, beloved, uncomprehending as a buzzard.

  “Mom.”

  Bruce was still there, asleep in the cot, and he sat up, startled and confused.