Torch

  “So guess what?” Bruce asked lightly as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “I joined the softball team. The Jake’s team.”

  “Jake’s?” Claire asked suspiciously, pausing in her work to look at him.

  “Yeah.”

  “Since when did you like softball?” asked Joshua.

  “I always liked softball,” he answered, unconvincingly, stirring the sugar into his cup. “And Jake’s needed more players, so I thought, well, it’s something to do. I have to keep myself busy or I get depressed.”

  “What’s wrong with being depressed?” asked Claire. “Of course you’re depressed. Something horrible just happened. That’s how we’re supposed to be. Plus, you seem to be coping,” she said. “You’re back at work.”

  “Which is my point. If I stay busy, then I’m fine. Softball gives me something to do when I’m not at work.”

  “What about your knees?” asked Joshua.

  “My knees are fine,” he said defensively. “It’s softball, for Christ’s sake. Why would it hurt my knees?” He looked helplessly at each of them. “It’s something to keep me occupied.”

  “Leonard is going to be pissed,” said Joshua.

  “That’s what I was wondering,” agreed Claire, assessing her cake. “What Leonard and Mardell will think.”

  “Why would they think anything?” he asked them, and then continued without waiting for a reply. “If you mean will he be mad about why I’m not playing on his team, I think you’re being ridiculous.”

  Claire set the cake on the table and forced a smile onto her face.

  “There you go, cowpoke,” Bruce said.

  The cake was covered with yellow frosting and on its round surface there was a giant smiling face, a black stripe for a mouth and two black dots for eyes. “I was going to write happy birthday,” she explained, “but then I thought this would look more cheery.”

  “It does,” said Joshua.

  There was a long silence. Claire regretted now not having written Happy Birthday Joshua on it, the way they always had. She felt the presence of her mother so strongly now, even more strongly than before, as if the box that contained her ashes wasn’t sitting in the curio cabinet but on her chest.

  “With all this cake, it’s too bad David isn’t here to help us,” Bruce said.

  “I’ll bring a piece home for him,” Claire said.

  “Is Lisa coming over?” Bruce asked Joshua. “I mean, later.”

  Joshua shook his head and tilted back in his chair. “She’s gotta work.”

  “We could ask Kathy Tyson if she wanted to come over for cake,” Bruce suggested, obviously straining to sound casual but trying so hard that Joshua and Claire abruptly looked up.

  “Kathy Tyson?” Claire asked. She said the name distinctly, as if she’d never spoken it before, a sick panic filling her. Instantly, she remembered having sat next to Kathy at a wedding reception the year before. How eager Kathy had been to find a man. Claire had egged her on, giving her ideas, laughing and lamenting about men in the intimate way she did with her best women friends, though Kathy was almost as old as her mother. “Why would we invite Kathy?” She took a butcher knife from its block and set it near Joshua on the table.

  “To be neighborly.”

  “What about the other neighbors?” Joshua asked.

  “We could invite them too,” Bruce said falsely. “It’s that we have all this cake.”

  He had never worried about having too much cake before, Claire thought. She felt that Bruce was emitting a sort of heat that rose to a vibration, and it occurred to her for the first time that he was different now, that the Bruce without her mother would not be who the Bruce with her mother had been.

  “Do you two have something going on?” she blurted, feeling tears rise into her eyes. She shook white candles from a tiny box onto the table and began to push them one by one into the cake.

  “We’ve become friends,” he said, too gently. “She’s been very good to me.”

  “How so?” Joshua asked.

  “She’s been a friend, you know. She’s there for me when I need to talk.”

  Claire could feel Bruce watching her, waiting for her to say something, to press the subject harder, so the entire truth would come out. To do what she now realized she always did with him, and with Joshua too, to ask and ask until he said whatever it was he was too afraid to say all by himself. But she wouldn’t, she couldn’t. This was going to be a normal birthday party. This was going to be like it had always been before. She concentrated on arranging the candles in a formation that went all the way around the rim of the cake, her hands trembling. Satisfied with the candles at last, she looked up. “Who has a light?”

  With his lighter Bruce moved from one candle to the next until all eighteen were aflame, and then he turned off the lights. Claire pushed the cake toward Joshua, his face glowing above the candles.

  “Are we going to sing?” Bruce asked.

  “You don’t have to sing,” Joshua said.

  “Absolutely, we’re going to sing,” roared Claire from the darkness.

  And immediately, she began.

  PART IV

  All the conventions conspire

  To make this fort assume

  The furniture of home;

  Lest we should see where we are,

  Lost in a haunted wood,

  Children afraid of the night

  Who have never been happy or good.

  —W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

  12

  THE GIRL AT THE Calhoun Square Mall ear-piercing shop wore a low-slung apron with three large pockets in the front. In one pocket she kept a purple marker, in another a purple gun, and in the last was her cell phone, which trumpeted like an electronic elephant the moment she pulled the trigger against the fat lobe of Bruce’s ear.

  “Hey,” she said morosely into the phone, holding the gun in the other hand. Her hands were chubby, unlike the rest of her. Bruce waited on his stool, staring, inevitably, at the bony features of the girl’s bare abdomen. “Uh-huh,” she said into the phone. “Yes. Yes. No,” she said in the same monotone each time, with a contempt so entrenched that of all the people in the world the girl could possibly be talking to, Bruce knew it could only be either her mother or her father.

  “Did it hurt?” Kathy asked, thumping on his back and then rubbing it, as if to warm him. The earring had been her idea.

  “No,” he said, though his ear throbbed with a small, focused pain. He examined it in the star-shaped mirror that was framed by tiny light bulbs. It looked like it felt, like it had a fever. He touched the fake diamond stud, but the girl saw this and waved urgently at him to stop.

  When she flipped her phone shut, she soaked a cotton ball with a solution and then dabbed his ear roughly with it.

  “Maybe I should get one too,” said Kathy, though earlier she’d decided against it. She stepped up to the mirror and pulled back her hair so she could look at her ear. She had three earrings on one lobe and four on the other; each one represented something to her, she’d told Bruce, a passage in her life. “We’re getting married today,” she explained to the girl. “This is his wedding ring—instead of a ring ring. He can’t have things on his hands. He’s a carpenter. They get in the way.”

  “How romantic,” said the girl, her face remaining impassive. Bruce wondered if he was supposed to tip her. He felt that he should. He reached for his wallet, but then Kathy pushed past him, following the girl through the store, and hoisted her purse up onto the counter near the register to pay the bill.

  “Do you like it?” she asked, once they had left the earring store. “I like it,” she said, without waiting for him to answer. She grabbed his hand and kissed it, leaving a plum-colored lipstick mark. “I think it’s sexy.”

  He thought he liked it. He caught discreet glimpses of it as they walked around the mall buying clothes they would wear later that afternoon, when they would be married at the Minneapolis City Hall. He caught glimpses
of his new ear in the mirrored walls inside the stores and in the glass of the display windows outside of the stores they passed. He had a series of sensations: that his ear was the largest part of his body, that it was not attached to him but was some hot object, balanced on the side of his head, and then he felt the opposite, that it was attached to him entirely, but also to something else that tugged with a small weight as he moved through the mall, like that of a fish caught irrevocably on a line. The girl had said that his ear would no longer be sore in a few days and in six weeks the hole would be healed entirely. In the meanwhile he was to take care of it. He carried a small plastic bag that held a bottle of solution that Kathy had purchased for four ninety-five, with which he was to bathe his ear daily.

  Alone, he went to the jewelry store to pick up the ring they’d ordered for Kathy, a thin gold band, while she was off to buy white sandals. Everywhere he looked he saw himself, in the walls and ceilings covered with giant mirrors, and he realized that the earring made him look younger. At thirty-eight the thought of wanting to look younger had not yet occurred to him, but now that he saw that he looked younger, he felt that he’d become old without being aware of it and he liked the idea of at least partially reversing that.

  When they were done shopping they had a cup of coffee at the café in the mall. They shared a slice of banana bread and watched the people of Minneapolis doing what they did in Minneapolis. Usually they saw the Minneapolis people in Midden: people who came up from the city on weekends to fish or hunt or relax on the lakes. Cabin people. City apes. Now that he was here Bruce felt not so different from them as he normally did, as if he and Kathy blended in, unlike the city people when they came to Midden. The city apes seemed to him more humble here on their own turf, less ignorant and less arrogant. He watched them go by with their shopping bags and children strapped into backpacks and strollers, balancing their lattes in cardboard cups. They didn’t seem to Bruce the kind of people who should be called apes, despite everything.

  A group of men dressed in bicycle regalia came into the café and took over several tables. They pulled over extra chairs all around them and then propped up their feet, their small bright shoes slim as slippers. They laughed and asked each other questions for which Bruce had no context. “Did you see it coming?” one of them asked three times, until finally he got an answer and they all shook their heads. Their legs were hard as stones, sinewy with muscle, and yet also fragile and as brittle looking as crockery, easily smashed.

  From the bicycle men, they learned that it had begun to rain.

  “And on our wedding day!” Kathy exclaimed so loudly that several people turned quizzically and smiled.

  “Here’s my something blue,” she whispered to Bruce, after the people had returned to their own conversations. She opened a tiny pink bag and showed him a lacy edge of a pair of blue panties and then stuffed them back inside.

  He leaned over and kissed her and then kissed her again, longer the second time. She smelled like chemical jasmine from the lotion sample she’d tried in one of the stores.

  “Should we go?” he asked. He felt sad, knowing he shouldn’t. He wanted to marry her, and yet also his heart ached for Teresa. He understood this was to be expected, another feeling to be gotten through, like all the other feelings he’d had since Teresa died. As they made their way silently through the mall it occurred to him that it was not too late to back out of marrying Kathy. They could continue dating. They could get married in a year. He took her hand, as if to speak.

  “What’s wrong?” She stopped walking and turned to him, sensing his thoughts.

  “I was just thinking, whether we’re sure this is the right time to do this.”

  “I know it is, Bruce,” she said, her dark eyes flashing.

  “I know too,” he said uncertainly, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

  “I know it here,” she said, and held his hand against her heart. And she did. She’d consulted her psychic, a man named Gerry whom she called up whenever she wanted what she called “clarification.” He claimed to have seen Bruce coming years ago, when he first predicted she’d marry by the age of thirty-five—and now here she was, barely a month shy of her thirty-fifth birthday.

  “It’s that it happened so fast.”

  She ran her hand along his arm and they began to walk again. “Sometimes that’s how things happen, Bruce. If anything, for me at least, it’s more proof that we’re meant to be.”

  They’d decided to marry only the week before. No one knew, aside from Kathy’s Minneapolis friends, Naomi and Steve, who would be their witnesses at City Hall. No one even knew they were dating. Claire had asked him about Kathy once, if there was something going on. He’d told her they were just friends, which was true at the time, though it had become untrue within days of him saying it.

  In April and May they were friends. And in some ways, Kathy Tyson had been Bruce’s only friend. He could not bring himself to socialize with anyone that he and Teresa had been friends with together. He’d become short with them on the phone when they called. He turned down invitations to dinner, nights out drinking, afternoon barbecues. Often he quit work early, by midafternoon, and he would drive to Kathy’s house and they would go walking or sit on her tiny porch and drink coffee. By May she’d convinced him to join her softball team, and twice a week they drove together to practice in town and then, afterward, for a drink at Jake’s Tavern. Kathy Tyson made him laugh, she made him talk, she made him dinner, she made him a braided-leather bracelet with a single stone in its center, and she made him—without knowing she was making him—play less and less often the tape by Kenny G that he’d become ridiculously attached to. Which is to say that she made him for hours at a time forget Teresa and the fact that he could not live without her.

  Her cabin was the stage upon which their friendship played. His house was forbidden territory. They did not mention this, nor did they mention the fact that Kathy knew not to call on the weekends, when Claire was home. During the week if Joshua picked up the phone, she was vague and never left a message. But then something shifted and deepened and shifted again. Kathy Tyson rose in him cold like a flood. He loved her. He wanted her. He could not bear a day without seeing her. When he realized this, they had not yet made love. They kissed, painfully and awkwardly at first. Twice he’d had to sob in her arms, so powerful was the feeling that he was betraying Teresa. But then he recovered and kissing Kathy became his solace, his solitude, the secret lovely room where his wife had never lived.

  The first time they made love—or rather attempted to make love—they’d discussed it ahead of time. What they wanted to do, what they would do. But when the time came, Bruce could get only so far as to lie in bed beside her with all of his clothes on and Kathy’s shirt unbuttoned before he broke down. She stroked his body kindly, comforting him and refusing his apologies. The second time they made love, they actually made love, though their lovemaking was slow and sorrowful and without lust, as if they were enacting a solemn ritual on each other’s bodies. The third time they made love, they made love hot and fast and then they did not stop kissing until they made love again, more slowly and tenderly this time, and laughed at the end at how they’d made her bed inch its way from one end of her loft bedroom to the other end, without their having noticed it. They slept there, on the wrong side of the room, until after dark, awakened only by the phone, which rang and stopped, rang and stopped without a message being left, two calls from her mother. The fourth time they made love, he stopped in the middle of it and asked her to marry him.

  “Marry you?” She opened her eyes to see if he was serious.

  “Yes,” he said, almost breathless with urgency. He hadn’t been legally married to Teresa all those years, but now, with Kathy, nothing short of marriage would do. We don’t need a piece of paper to prove our love, he and Teresa used to say, but he needed it now. He wanted it written that Kathy was his and he was hers, that he would never be alone again. He knew it was childish and misguided to
believe a marriage document could do that, but he didn’t care. It was something. It was more than he had.

  “Okay,” she whispered, and touched his face, small tears of joy seeping out of her eyes.

  She had one condition.

  “I know you love Teresa.” She rolled away from him on the bed. “And I know she will always have a place in your heart.” He lay next to her, listening. She sat up and turned the lamp on and then he sat up too. “But if we’re going to get married, we have to start a new life together and move forward.”

  “This is moving forward,” he said, grabbing onto her bare foot.

  “But I think we need to make it more …” She paused, as if unable to find the right word. “To close one door before we can open another. Ritualistically.” Her face brightened. “We need to have a ritual.”

  He knew her to believe in these things. The stone at the center of the bracelet she’d made for him had a curative power, though what cure specifically he could not recall.

  “We could burn a candle,” he offered.

  She pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them, thinking.

  “No. It has to be something bigger. Something more connected to—her.” She looked up at him and smiled then, a light spreading over her face. “I have the perfect idea.”

  The following week they spent an hour at the garden store, shaking this packet of seeds, then that. In the end they decided on a wildflower mix, to cover all their bases.

  “It reminds me of her,” said Kathy. “Just the way she seemed. Eclectic.”

  “She was,” said Bruce.

  “Didn’t she do a show on them? The wildflowers of northern Minnesota?”

  “Every spring,” he answered, smiling at the memory.

  It was a Thursday morning. The next day they would drive to Minneapolis and get married—there they would be safe from the prying eyes and ears of all the people they knew in Coltrap County—and then they’d return home to spend their wedding night at Kathy’s house. He’d asked Claire and Joshua to be home Saturday for dinner and then he’d break the news while Kathy waited at her cabin. He’d planned to tell them about it before he and Kathy married, but when he practiced what he would say to them in his head, the words became muddled and contradictory. At last, a single sentence pierced its way through, one that he could deliver only after the fact: I married Kathy Tyson. It was cruel, but clean, and it didn’t hesitate to ask. To ask was precisely what Bruce could not afford to do. He knew it would take them by surprise, that it would be hard for them to hear, but he hoped they would understand, that eventually they would make an effort to get to know Kathy. He believed that in the end they would like her. How could they not? And if they didn’t, they would have to adjust. He had his life to live.