But that night Emma’s house was actually on fire. We turned the corner onto her street, and half a block up, three ladder trucks were raining hydrant water on the A-frame she’d bought with her husband back when they still believed in one another, the little A-frame where more recently I’d passed out reading Chekhov on the love seat in the sunny nook of the bedroom they’d shared, and she’d arrived home and woken me with a cool palm to my face, and I’d made her come right there on the floor, within sight of no fewer than five photographs from her wedding day, photographs she could not yet bring herself to box and closet. Beautiful prints, expensively framed in museum glass, meant to endure and pass through the houses of children and grandchildren, meant to last so long that the people who ended up possessing them would have little idea who Emma and her husband were. Now in the process of becoming ash.
I had to grab her wrist to keep her from bolting up the street. There was nothing to be done, and even if she’d gotten past the cops standing guard at the end of the block the only thing it would have availed her was a better view of her life going up in flames. She fought me for a minute, but I gathered her in, and eventually she stopped struggling. She leaned against me and cried while I weathered a few moments of distant regret over my unfinished novel, now extremely unfinished. But then I found myself more interested in why Emma was crying: did she cry for the house itself, or for what it represented? And did it represent anything at all, really, except in its sudden absence?
Arson, according to the fire marshal’s office. A window on the ground floor had been pried open, the frame splintered and the lock snapped off. The investigator mentioned something about charring patterns underneath the carpet in the living room which indicated beyond a doubt that the fire had been set. The insurance company was eager to conduct an investigation of its own. Meanwhile, Emma moved into a hotel. She was in the stretch run of a campaign and didn’t have time to look for a new house. Plus there was the insurance company to deal with. Plus her husband was dragging his heels on their divorce even though he’d been the one who left. Plus she hadn’t found time to buy enough clothes to keep herself in clean blouses for a full workweek. Plus she’d maybe started drinking a bit too much at night in the hotel lounge and found it difficult, some days, to get up for doing much of anything besides her job, which was part of the reason she hadn’t yet bought enough clothes. Plus she still averaged two nights a week when she would break down out of nowhere, usually after washing her face and brushing her teeth and applying cream to her elbows and knees and getting in under the covers. She never wanted to talk during these jags, but she would send me text messages, and I would debate whether or not to just call her, try to divine from her words if that was what she wanted but couldn’t ask for, and then I would call, and she wouldn’t answer, and then eventually we’d both go to sleep, alone, in silence.
The police brought her husband in for questioning twice, but quickly lost enthusiasm when they perceived, correctly, that he was equally hapless and harmless, so they turned their attention to Emma. Of course I corroborated her whereabouts at the time of the fire, but the lead investigator, the man who had called me on the island, the short guy with a patient predatory manner like a leopard in repose, remained hungry for Emma—just like all the other men she knew.
The investigator questioned Emma five times. He could not have known at first how straight her spine was, but he found out quickly enough. She was indignant about being suspected, and in her indignation she grew fierce. She could have hired a lawyer to get the guy off her back, but she chose to take him on herself. She sat for, at first, as long as he wanted, and later, as long as he could take before wilting. She cried afterward, every time, but it would have been the second coming before she broke down in front of him. And when he finally was forced to release her the last time, it was with an apology that she waved away as if shooing a particularly persistent fly.
Then he turned his eye on easier prey. Namely, me.
After two weeks of Charlotte’s apathy I decided, over beers at Duffy’s, that it had to end. I drove home, performed a cockeyed parking job on the curb in front of the casita, and took the stairs to find her swinging languidly in the hammock. Her smooth, tanned calf drooped from the side of the netting, hanging by the fulcrum of one lovely knee. Her toes, capped by bright red nails, brushed the concrete floor as she swung back and forth. Her face was turned toward me but utterly blank; for all I could tell she was asleep, eyes closed behind the mirrored lenses of her Jackie O glasses. My novel rested unopened on her belly. In the last few days I’d had a growing sense that she was only pretending to read it; that in fact she only ever pretended to read anything. If I’d cared enough I might have quizzed her to test this hunch.
I gazed down at her, a little unsteady on my feet from an afternoon of Medalla and Don Q. She was the very picture of studied apathy, limbs limply askew and face expressive as a chunk of marble, and that was all I needed to realize the impulse that sent me screaming back to the casita had been the right one.
Okay, I said, listen, you have to go.
No visible reaction. Go where? she asked absently.
It doesn’t matter to me at all, I told her. I’d say you should go home, resume classes, get your life in order. But I’ve got nothing—and I mean nothing—invested in whether or not you actually do that. You just have to leave. At least leave the island. Beyond that, you’re free to do whatever you like, as far as I’m concerned.
Charlotte sat up and swung her legs over the side of the hammock; the equivalent, from her, of an outburst. What if I don’t want to go? she asked, her tone still mild despite this sudden agitation.
Now I allowed my annoyance with her, roiling slowly under the surface for two weeks, to emerge. I want to ask you a very simple question, Charlotte, I said, and I want you to try to answer it honestly.
Finally, finally, she took off those sunglasses, and I was surprised to see that behind them her eyes had gone dark and guarded. She held her mouth in a rictus of anticipated damage. It was the first time I’d seen an expression on her face that did not have a studied intent, and for a moment I almost managed to feel something for her.
Then the moment passed, and I said, Should I take your outward attitude toward me—your utter indifference, I mean, in case it’s not clear—as at all indicative of how you actually feel?
Charlotte looked at her feet. No, she said.
Thank you for being honest, I said. And so a follow-up question: let’s put aside the fact that you barely know me, and so could not care as much about this arrangement as you probably imagine you do. Let’s say for sake of argument that what you think you feel is, in fact, genuine. Why then, for the love of God, would you act as though you didn’t care at all?
I waited a beat, two, and she offered nothing, so I prodded her.
I really want to know, I told her. I am sincere. I am trying to understand what motivates you. What you want. I am trying to understand what you need. God help me I am trying but I am also beginning to wonder if men and women could enjoy every advantage the future has to offer, lifetimes as infinite as the universe itself, the integration of human and artificial intelligence, and still never have even a basic understanding of each other.
At this Charlotte didn’t cry, but she brushed up against it. Her eyes had grown wet, and now her mouth pulled thin and turned down at the corners, one step from devolving into a conduit for sobs, as she tried and failed to answer me.
Or maybe, I said, it’s got nothing to do with cats and dogs. Maybe you’re just really young, is the problem.
She wiped at her eyes, sniffling in a wet, open, crackling way that made clear she really needed to sniffle and wasn’t just putting on a show. I seriously haven’t got any idea what you’re talking about, she said.
I looked down at her, and suddenly I saw her rawness, her sorrow, all on open display no
w, and for the first time in a long time I felt that comfortable, noncommittal tenderness I’d felt for every woman I’d been with since Emma dismantled me all those years before. In her sudden vulnerability, Charlotte somehow had opened that room inside me again.
We stripped the bed down to the fitted sheet and made love, and I was careful, putting one hand on her lower back and lifting her hips gently to meet me. She cried at one point, quietly, like water seeping through rock, and she did not punch me or carve gouges in my skin with her fingernails. For my part, I did not pull her hair, or leave any bruises on her. It was all very nice and calm and safe, and later, when we sat on the porch sipping Medalla and watching the sun set, she asked if it would be alright with me if she read my novel.
I had a feeling, I told her, that you were only pretending to read it before.
That’s true, she said. That’s what I was doing. I would look at the words and daydream and every once in a while when it seemed like I should turn a page, I’d turn a page. I didn’t read any of it.
We were both quiet for a minute.
I don’t even know why I was pretending, she concluded.
It’s no problem, I said, leaning back against the stucco with my fingers laced behind my head. You’re firmly in the majority, not having read it, if that makes you feel any better.
But I’d like to read it now. I mean, really read it.
Of course, I said.
Later, when the nocturnal insects and coqui frogs had set about their nightly call-and-response, Charlotte asked me, So who is the girl?
She’d read the first fifty pages or so of the book at this point.
Which girl? I asked.
The one you wrote about in here.
That’s a character. Fictional. Made-up.
But not entirely, Charlotte said. There’s someone real, for sure. A flesh-and-blood girl walking around out there somewhere. She’s smart, and pretty, and she won’t let you have her.
All three of those things, I said, are true.
And I could never replace her.
Also correct, I said.
That doesn’t make any sense, Charlotte said. I’m right here. I could offer you everything. But you keep yourself for her.
I may be perennially reserved. But you see from this afternoon that I could be very, very nice to you regardless.
Still doesn’t make any sense, she said.
I am inclined to agree with you, I told her.
Eventually the cancer in my father’s lungs moved into his brain. He wasn’t thinking right all the time, and his hands grew weak and he couldn’t feel his feet and so he had to give up driving. He and my mother arranged to trade in his truck, along with the old Mercury Grand Marquis she drove, in exchange for a new SUV that would suit her after he was dead.
My father, present at that moment, was planning quite calmly for when he would, in the near future, no longer be present.
He had always been actual to himself. There had never been a time in his experience when he hadn’t existed, and now he was being forced to consider and act upon the impending fact of his nonexistence. Something about that still strikes me as intensely strange and sad, though it’s the sort of thing that has to be done, obviously, from a practical standpoint.
But so the day came to trade in their vehicles, and before driving to the dealership my mother and I cleaned the bed of the truck out in the driveway. My father, who was by then too weak to help, sat on a lawn chair in his checked hunting coat, buffeted by an autumn wind that swirled leaves at his feet. It felt like he was watching us clean him out of our lives. Which was in fact what we were doing—kindly, perhaps, regretfully, perhaps, but nevertheless. When we finished, he wanted to take the truck for one last drive. My mother didn’t like that idea at all, and frankly neither did I, but the whole affair was sad enough without punctuating that sadness by telling him no, so I helped him into the driver’s seat and got in on the other side, belted myself in.
An inauspicious start: he took out the mailbox with the passenger-side mirror before we even got out of the driveway. I would have laughed if he hadn’t been dying. We got on the road and he settled down, even stopped for a phalanx of turkeys crossing 201, but all the same it was a lot like being sober in a car driven by a drunk—he weaved and drifted, crossed the center line several times, couldn’t maintain speed. For about twenty minutes I tried to make myself tell him to pull over. Problem was, I’d never told my father anything. No one did. But I was starting to worry he would kill us, or someone else.
Finally I said it. He looked across the cabin at me, but didn’t respond for a minute. He kept driving. Then he said, She treats me like a child now, you know. Your mother.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded.
He hit the steering wheel weakly with the heel of one hand. I’m not a goddamn child, he said, breathless in his sudden frustration.
I nodded some more.
And then, after another minute or so, he pulled over to the shoulder and put the truck in park. He was no longer angry, just resigned and pensive. I helped him get into the passenger side and arranged his oxygen bottle for him and drove back home, then to the dealership. And while my father admitted to the salesman, by way of signing paperwork, that he was not much longer for this world, I walked laps around a brand-new Mustang in the showroom, and thought of when my father had told me about the Mustang he’d dreamed of buying during the two years he spent getting shot at in Vietnam, the Mustang he’d not, after all, ever been able to afford, and now here he sat at the salesman’s sad little desk with his back to this beauty, a Shelby GT, supercharged V8, and even if he’d had all the money in the world he couldn’t have driven it even once.
One day while my father was sick, toward the end, I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him at the house while my mother ran errands, and there had been a gap of maybe an hour between when my sister had dropped him off from lunch and when I showed up to take over, an hour during which my father was alone, a casual and honest and heartbreaking mistake on my sister’s and my part. When I arrived I looked down the hallway into the bedroom and saw my father asleep on top of the covers. I didn’t want to disturb him because sleep came hard or not at all at that point, so I set up my laptop at the dining room table, in a spot where I had a line of sight to the bedroom. I noticed him stir a few times, but he never moved to get up, so I let him be and worked on my first novel. I was there for an hour before my mother arrived home and went to him and discovered what had happened. An hour. That was what I kept thinking about then, and what I think about now. A full hour I let him lie there. An hour, was what I thought, all I thought, as I used an old toothbrush and a bowl of warm soapy water to scrub the shit out of his toenails, shit that had run down his pant legs and settled into his socks when he couldn’t get to the bathroom by himself after my sister dropped him off. And then when I arrived I left him like that. For an hour. An hour, an hour, an hour, was what I kept thinking about.
The week before my father died he tried to write me a note. I didn’t find out about this until after he was gone and my mother showed the paper to me. A single page. Scrawled at the top of the page were the first five letters of my family nickname. That’s how we knew he meant it for me. He didn’t have enough energy to write the last letter, and gave up in what I imagine was a fit of frustration. He was frustrated by just about everything at that point. His handwriting had always been a bit messy, but now it looked like a kindergartener’s first efforts. The lines on the ‘R’ didn’t quite connect, and the ‘o’ was a big bumpy loop, outsized when compared with the rest of the script. That was it: five letters, followed by the silence of blank ruled lines. And so it goes without saying, probably, that whatever he wanted to communicate died with him. All he left behind was five-sixths of my name.
On the island, the day a
fter I found it in myself to be tender with Charlotte, I discovered a note of a different kind from Emma in my email. A catalog of data from what had been a very happy trip to Ireland:
I have been meaning to send this to you for a while . . . You may recall that I was making notes on the plane ride home. For me, details like this are better than a narrative for capturing and aiding memories (my poor memory . . .), though I certainly wouldn’t call it comprehensive.
9/5
2 matching bruises
1 minor car accident
3 very expensive meals
3 (?) bottles of whiskey
1 bottle of Bailey’s
4 (?) nights of hot-tubbing
5 days of driving (or was it 6?)
2 pairs of shoes
2 bus rides, 4 flights, 2 boat rides
very little email
2 dreams about Matty; 1 dream about Mr. Harvey [from The Lovely Bones]
no naps; 2 very good nights of sleep
2 nights of difficult conversation
crepes for breakfast
carton+ of cigarettes
3 showers together
1 extra day
lots of laughter
So needless to say, both the timing and the content of this . . . what do you say about any of it, really? Comings and goings, the way we all drift into and out of each other. There are times when I feel I can’t take these inevitabilities, though I always manage it, with the emotional equivalent of bubble gum and chicken wire.