These are all my imaginings, understand. Me being the template for the universe, as we all are in our little skull-size fiefdoms, it made a certain kind of sense.
That previous Christmas eve, before attending a cocktail party, Emma brought over champagne and two flutes, and we sat on the love seat and chatted, and she talked about how she hosted parties sometimes with a guy she’d had a brief thing with down in Washington where she worked, and that in turn led to her telling me about yet another guy who was always trying to date every woman in their social circle there, and how this guy had tried to kiss her at one of these parties.
Again, this is the way it was with Emma—men swirling about her even while she was married, men steering ships into the rocks over and over. There was a strange comfort in the knowledge that I was anything but alone in my obsession with her. Still, it was dizzying, and troubling, to know that others danced and preened in the hopes of winning her affection, and especially troubling to hear about it in her calm, matter-of-fact tone, as if she were discussing nothing of more significance than what she’d eaten for breakfast that morning.
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife.
But anyway on Christmas eve I didn’t think much of it, really, and we went to the cocktail party, where I knew everyone and Emma knew no one, and she drank red wine and made friends and sort of lit up the room, quickly and efficiently gathering the attention of the men there, as she always did. Watching her I started to wonder suddenly about the guy who had tried to kiss her in Washington, wondered how complicit she’d been in the whole thing, though she’d characterized it as being completely on him.
After, we went back to my place and stayed up late drinking. We woke after just a few hours’ sleep and exchanged gifts. I gave her a pair of earrings from Tiffany; she gave me a photo, in a beautiful custom frame, of the two of us on a trip to Ireland from a few months before. We made breakfast, drank more champagne. It was nice. But now my mind had fixated on the abortive kiss in Washington—the guy must have believed he had a green light for a reason, I thought. I wondered if she had, at first, returned the kiss, maybe even let him put his hands on her, and then thought better of it.
This thought blossomed and grew great black thorns, loomed over our breakfast like a floral centerpiece out of Lovecraft, and finally I asked Emma if she had, in fact, kissed the guy back.
She gazed at me evenly. For a moment, she said. He kissed me. I’d been drinking. He’s not unattractive. But then the moment passed.
It was her nonchalance, you can understand, that really made my mouth go dry.
After breakfast we fell into bed again—no matter the upset or offense, all it took was one decent look at her in profile, one whiff of her essence underneath the previous evening’s perfume, one look at her from behind as she walked away from me, and even if I found it impossible to forgive there was nothing I could not forget.
And in forgetting I regained myself. Pushed her face-first onto the mattress, flat on her belly. Grabbed her wrists and yanked them up, pressing them against the headboard in a way that made clear they were to stay there even after I let them go and set my hands to other things. She squirmed under my weight in faux protest, her legs coming open a bit. Here, in the bed, was the only place where she gave herself over to me, relinquishing control with a sigh as I checked her with one hand, found her inner thighs slick. With the other hand I grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled hard, and she made muffled noises against the pillow as I pushed into her.
And then, afterward, she said that she loved me.
I couldn’t think of anything that seemed like an appropriate response, so I asked her why she would say that.
She told me: Because it’s true. I love you. I’ve loved you again, ever since I read the book.
When she got really turned on Emma sometimes grew angry. My mouth on her nipple, and she’d flail, growl at me a bit. My hand between her thighs, and her hands would clench into fists. It was an obvious effort for her to keep them pressed to the mattress at her sides instead of raising and wielding them.
It’s not that I really want to hit you, she said once. Not at all.
I think you should.
Think I should what?
Hit me. When the impulse happens. See where it goes.
No.
You’re afraid.
Of course I’m afraid.
Which is precisely why you should hit me. See what’s lurking behind that impulse. You might be surprised at what you find.
Listen, she said, I know what you’re getting at, okay. I just think these are things better investigated with my therapist.
You’re going to punch your therapist?
Smiling: Fuck off.
And besides, I said, who said anything about therapy? I’m thinking if you actually hit me you’d probably find yourself as turned on as you’ve ever been in your life.
But to what end? she asked, her smile melting. To what end, Ron?
So Emma demurred at first, but what I said sank in, intrigued her as much as it frightened her, I think, because after that conversation the sex grew, by turns, more and more violent, and more and more compelling. Her hands used to trace gentle paths along my sides, but now they hooked into claws, raked the corridor between my shoulder blades. She’d close her eyes and let her mouth form a delicate, gorgeous sneer that I wanted more than anything to jam all manner of appendages into, roughly, without regard; I was willing to slough skin against her teeth so long as I could hurt her in kind. She’d grab my cock and squeeze it in her fist, and I’d respond by flipping her off of me and onto her back, putting my hand around her throat and easing my weight down onto it while she snarled defiance.
Our talk turned brutal, too—I’ve said nicer things in bar fights than in bed with her.
We upped the ante every time we took our clothes off, until, on a still frigid night in January just before I left for the island, she straddled me, rubbing my pubis against herself and moaning, and then she reached back from above and punched me on the jaw, a clean, solid shot, her rings on, easily one of the five hardest punches I’ve ever taken.
The moment her fist made contact she drew her hands back to her face and said, from behind them, Oh my God I’m sorry!
But I didn’t give her regret time to take hold. Still reeling, operating on instinct, I reached up and grabbed her hair and pulled it, hard enough to take a dozen strands away on my hand.
Charlotte stayed on for a while, and I let her—out of stasis, out of loneliness, out of a desire for someone other than me to make breakfast. Rick and the other two specimenz flew back to the mainland. Charlotte told me that, before they left, one of the specimenz had asked her what on Earth she was doing, what she was thinking.
I wondered the same thing myself, but wasn’t interested enough in the answer to actually ask.
In fact, I wasn’t interested in anything at all, during those first two weeks. My state of mind could best be described as one of pure indifference. I didn’t care if Charlotte was taking up space in my casita, or in my bed, and I didn’t care if she wasn’t. She was there, so I slept with her, but if I’d woken up the next day and found myself alone I wouldn’t have given half a thought to where she’d gone, or why.
For her part Charlotte maintained a calm, detached air, which didn’t seem to mesh with the fact that she’d blown off school, her friends and family—her entire life, really—to shack up with a complete stranger, albeit one who’d written a book and carried himself with the messy, tragic bent that a certain kind of woman seems to find appealing, at least until she approaches thirty or so, after which she recognizes it as self-indulgent nonsense and steers clear with the same zeal with which she used to pursue.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to generalize about Charlotte,
an actual individual person, in this way, but she didn’t give me anything else to go on at first. I passed hours without speaking and she rarely tried to penetrate my silence, opting instead to read (she’d started with The Corrections, but put it aside and began sifting through the copy of my novel that I’d brought, which annoyed me in a distant way), to scribble in a notebook, to deepen her tan in the porch hammock. While I stared through windows at the Caribbean she moved casually around the casita, washing dishes, combing her hair, paying no attention to me at all. For whatever reason she’d decided to behave as if we enjoyed the intimacy of a longtime couple, as though we were a younger version of David and Penny—the sort of domestic arrangement people gradually and inevitably melt into, in which they only truly notice the other person in his or her absence. She saw a space next to me and tried to convince herself that she belonged there by rights. And when I thought about her at all, which was rare, I came to feel as though she deserved my indifference, because if she’d paid any attention to the few words I offered, or had even just given me a good long look, it would have been obvious to her that the space beside me was already occupied, and that if she placed herself next to the rightful occupant of that space, Charlotte herself was the one who disappeared.
From the outside it probably appeared to Charlotte, and maybe others, that I was in a foul mood, but really I’d come to occupy a place of apparent imperviousness—I was as comfortable as I’d been since the day before Emma and I had gotten together again all those months ago.
Or so I’d convinced myself. But of course my longing for her still ran in the background, buzzing like an air conditioner in high summer, easy to ignore and forget but nonetheless powered on.
Even so, I stopped waiting on tenterhooks for contact from Emma, and stopped sending messages and calling her myself. The ironic if predictable result of this was that she started reaching out with more frequency, wondering where I was, what I was doing, if I was alright.
‘I know I’ll always bear the responsibility of having sent you down there,’ one message read, apropos of seemingly nothing. She intuited that I was in trouble, and this made me glad. I didn’t respond.
Emma called one night when Charlotte and I were having dinner at El Quenepo and ignoring one another. While I talked on the phone right there at the dinner table, Charlotte continued to read.
You sound sort of . . . happy, Emma said, perplexed and a little worried at the combination of my sudden distance and concurrent high spirits, and I took some bitter, drunken pleasure in her discomfort, her confusion at being, for once, the person who got the slip, instead of the person who gave it.
I’m embarrassed beyond words to recount this pettiness. She’d gotten the biggest slip of them all, for God’s sake: her husband had left.
Anyway, I probably did sound happy. There was something brittle in me masquerading as good cheer. I was talking through clenched teeth, but smiling at the same time.
So I told Emma as much: I’m smiling this very moment, I said.
Charlotte flipped a page in her book, then used the same hand to tuck a lock of hair slowly behind one ear, feigning absolute absorption, pretending not to care who I was talking to, pretending not to eavesdrop. I wanted, suddenly, to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, force her to stop acting like she didn’t give a shit about anything.
It would turn out that the only way to get her to do that was to tell her she had to leave. But more on that in a minute.
Where are you? Emma asked. I hear music. I hear people laughing.
On the malecón. Having dinner.
By yourself?
No. You just said you heard people, right?
There was a pause. Listen, is there something wrong, Ron? Between us? There’s very little I can’t handle hearing—you know that. So if something’s up you should say so. Because I have to tell you, right now I don’t feel like we’re on the same team.
Everything’s fine, I told her. You just got done saying I sounded happy.
You can also just tell me you don’t want to talk about it right now. I’ll accept that, too. But I don’t like being made to feel like I’m imagining things. You barely get in touch anymore. You’ve stopped calling. And when I call, you tell me you’re smiling, and you talk in monosyllables. And you’re cold as hell. Icy, even.
Listen, nothing’s wrong. I just sort of figured it out. How to be apart from you and be okay with it. I thought you’d be happy.
You’ve got a strange idea, she said, of what makes me happy.
I sighed, then hated myself for sighing, such an impotent and ultimately dishonest thing to do, the refuge of those lacking the courage to articulate their displeasure. I glanced at Charlotte though I had no real interest in her; she was merely an object in front of me, something to fix my gaze on. She busied herself feigning interest in an open-air salsa place across the street, and I fought the urge to scoop a few cubes of ice out of my drink and toss them at her.
So listen, I said to Emma, gathering myself, what’s going on up there? Anything you want to talk about?
She didn’t respond right away, and then she said, with almost no inflection at all, The police have shelved the investigation.
I wasn’t expecting this. Shelved? What does that mean?
Apparently it means it’s not closed, but they’re not wasting any time or resources on it, either. I guess because no one’s tried to burn me alive for a while they’ve decided that no one tried to burn me alive in the first place. The detective says he’s convinced whoever it was has moved on. Or that it was totally random in the first place and had nothing to do with me. Not that one of his hunches has ever been correct.
For the first time in days I felt something: concern, just the slightest needle point piercing my apathy. I didn’t like this, didn’t like how vulnerable it left Emma, especially in my absence. Because she was right—not one of the detective’s hunches or suppositions had been correct. And further, he didn’t understand what I knew intuitively, which was that it had obviously been a man who’d set fire to Emma’s house, and men did not just move on from her.
I think he just doesn’t want to deal with me anymore, Emma said of the detective. I think he wants to forget that I exist. Because as long as he’s forced to acknowledge my existence, he has to remember how wrong he was to drag me in there over and over, to treat me like I’d burned my own house down. He’s tired of feeling ashamed, is what’s going on.
Maybe, I said. Could be.
When I hung up I asked Charlotte, Don’t you want to know who that was?
She was reading again. Who who was? she asked, still not looking up from the book.
The next morning I awoke to my phone ringing. I reached across Charlotte, taking no care to avoid jostling her (not out of meanness, but because the fact of her presence registered so faintly with me that there seemed little need to take any care with it) and lifted the phone from the nightstand. I didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway, and was surprised to hear the detective with the curly hair and predatory manner on the other end, the detective Emma had shamed into shelving her case.
We’d like you to come in for a few questions, he said.
I’m out of the country right now, I told him.
I know. This is no big deal, he said.
I was not inclined to believe him, and I’m not sure he intended for me to.
Don’t go changing your travel plans or anything, he said. Really we should have brought you in at the beginning, since you were with Ms. Zielinski the night of the fire. Just whenever you get back, give me a call. You have my number on your phone, I presume.
I do now.
That’s a direct line. Be in touch, please. And enjoy the sunshine.
The night that the detective wanted to question me about had taken place almost a year before, w
hen Emma and I were still blinking hard at finding ourselves sharing a bed again. We managed to keep our clothes on long enough to go out and eat high-end pizza at a busy place on the waterfront. According to the menu the pizza dough was made from organic wheat. The mozzarella was organic, too, and the sausage nitrate-free.
I cracked wise about the eco-earnestness. Emma smiled politely.
Later we went to a pub where an acoustic two-piece alternated between traditional Irish folk songs and John Denver tunes. ‘Whiskey in the Jar,’ followed by ‘Rocky Mountain High,’ and so on. The place was jammed with a mix of yuppies and backward-ball-capped college types, but we lucked in to two seats at the bar. We talked and laughed and drank. After a while I suggested I was ready to switch from beer to scotch, and Emma decided to join me, somewhat reluctantly, but when she ordered a glass of Macallan I changed tack without really knowing why, and asked for a Guinness.
She punched me on the arm.
Near closing Emma got a text from a friend saying there was a fire in her neighborhood, very near her house, even possibly—the friend hated to say it because she didn’t want to freak her out for no reason—at her house. The friend couldn’t be sure; they had the block cordoned off, but damned if it wasn’t awfully close.
We paid our tab and started to walk back. Emma always strode with purpose, but now I had a hard time keeping up with her. It was cold, and she blew into her hands while I assured her, from half a pace behind, that these sorts of anecdotal reports were always overblown. As we got closer we saw a great horizontal column of white smoke drifting westward against the night sky, and she walked yet faster.
I moved to grasp her hand, but she shook me off.
I really wasn’t worried at all, even though I’d dropped my overnight bag at her house, and in that bag was my Mac, and on my Mac was every word I’d written for the last three years, including the novel I was six months late in delivering. I wasn’t worried, even though I’d always been too lazy to back up my files. I wasn’t worried, because I quite simply didn’t believe her house was on fire. I still suffered from the common delusion that big bad things didn’t happen to me or those I cared about, even though my father’s death was recent enough that some nights I woke with the smell of his diseased body in my nostrils.