How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  “I’m glad you had a good time,” George said.

  She didn’t mention her recent heartbreak. She wondered whether that was the right word. Sometimes it was the men you felt superior to who did the most damage, the logic being, If this motherfucker won’t have me, I must be doomed.

  George felt as if she were inside an empty swimming pool, even with all the modern distractions at her fingertips. She found no solace in the television or the stereo; the dial-up Internet held no appeal. Even the refrigerator offered no comfort. She opened the doors wide to be greeted by wilted vegetables, sour milk, and ice cream with freezer burn. Whiskey was dinner, which was not usually the sort of thing George did. But it was Anna’s whiskey, and she never saw Anna wallow. At least, not over a man. Anna had the gift of distraction, a catalog of ideas and plans. You had to be still to feel pain, and Anna never stopped moving. George thought all she needed was a plan, but that vague feeling of discomfort returned. None of the words for emotions seemed to apply to what she was feeling, a mixture of heartbreak and self-loathing and some secret ingredient. How could she feel flattened by a guy who called her “dude” and sometimes peed in a jar because he didn’t feel like walking down the hallway in the middle of the night?

  Her attraction to men had always seemed ugly to her. Maybe because when it happened, she was consumed by it. And also because she never wanted men who were decent. She felt lust when she felt off balance. She distinctly remembered hating the first man who gave her an orgasm.

  More whiskey was drunk. She didn’t need what’s his name, who’d once accused her of having an emotional tapeworm. The image of the worm eating out her insides stuck. George refused to explore the need, assumed everyone felt it to a certain extent. Everyone was filled with holes and patched them up in different ways. Tonight, George was trying Anna’s way.

  Before Alexander Graham Bell, drunks were never tempted by the telephone. Sometimes they had to walk miles to satisfy what they would soon learn was only a passing urge. George picked up the phone.

  “Can you come over?” George asked.

  It was a seduction as clumsy as any drunken, undedicated seduction could be. George didn’t try, because she didn’t need to.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked, only to discover that the whiskey bottle was almost empty. When did that happen? She searched the cabinets for hidden booze. Kate didn’t hold with the idea of an official liquor cabinet. Seeing it all in one place, she thought, was too distracting for Anna. Kate made boozing the equivalent of an Easter egg hunt. Anna never complained about the method until after she’d scavenged for hours and come up empty. Then she’d take the car to a liquor store and purchase enough to launch a speakeasy. They were currently in a drying-out phase. A bottle of vodka was hidden in the hall closet behind their winter coats, but George could find only Pernod, that licorice-tasting liqueur that turned cloudy when you added ice. Anna hated the taste of licorice and yet she always purchased Pernod when she was stockpiling. When Anna tried to cut back, she found it helpful to drink booze she didn’t like.

  George poured a glass for Edgar and added ice, because she liked watching the liquid turn opaque. It felt vaguely scientific. She liked being in the rational part of her brain for a brief moment, since she knew the irrational was dominating.

  “Not everybody likes it. But the French sure do,” George said.

  “Are you drunk?” Edgar asked.

  “I probably wouldn’t pass a polygraph,” George said.

  “Polygraph?”

  “No. That’s not the word. Breathalyzer test. That’s it. Those words are nothing alike.”

  “No,” Edgar said. “Is something wrong, George?”

  “Nothing is wrong,” George said, sipping the remaining whiskey and putting her bare feet on Edgar’s lap.

  Edgar had fallen in love with George’s knees first, but he was also a back-of-the-neck man, a breast man, a shoulder man, even a foot man, just not in the fetish-video kind of way. An entire woman was too overwhelming. He preferred admiring them in sections, the way one would study a map.

  Edgar rubbed George’s feet only after she’d kicked him and told him to do so. Their friendship until that point had remained respectful and distant, in the physical sense. George could confide intimate details of her life—whom she was screwing, whom her roommates were screwing, what friend had disappointed her the most at any given time. She would tell him when she had her period so he knew to tread cautiously, but she had always maintained approximately a foot’s distance between them. If Edgar closed the gap, George always opened it. But tonight she was closing all gaps.

  She took his wrist and led him into the bedroom, although she stumbled a few times and he had to steady her. An observer might not have been able to tell who was guiding whom. She disrobed in front of him, balling up each item and throwing it across the room, as if she were doing a study on the aerodynamics of various garments. Once naked, she slid under the covers. What are you waiting for? she asked. He was waiting for an explanation. There would be none. He disrobed more modestly and folded his jeans and T-shirt, placed them on the dresser. He slid into bed, and George crawled on top of him.

  He asked once: Are you sure?

  She replied: Shut up.

  Edgar would remember every second of their night together, in part because he had a photographic memory. George would remember tangling limbs and too many kisses, like a mosquito buzzing around her head. She knew exactly one second after Edgar came that she had made a mistake. Edgar held her in his arms and wouldn’t let go. Most guys just rolled over and started snoring. George removed herself from his grip. It was like pulling off duct tape. She put on her robe, entered the kitchen, and gulped a couple glasses of water and two aspirin. Afraid to return to her room, she slipped into Anna’s room, put on Anna’s pajamas, and tried to sleep in her bed. After fifteen minutes passed, Edgar grew restless and began searching for her. He checked the basement and Kate’s bedroom before he finally climbed the stairs to the attic. When he cracked the door to Anna’s room, George feigned sleep. Edgar knew she was faking, and she knew that Edgar knew. He wouldn’t let her escape him so easily. She didn’t have to sleep in the same bed with him, but he would be there in the morning.

  When light broke, Edgar got out of bed and made coffee. George was already awake when the smell wafted into her room. She stared at the ceiling, trying not to cry, trying not to feel as if something was terribly wrong with her. She couldn’t hide in the room any longer. She needed Edgar to leave, but, unlike Anna, she had no plan.

  “Coffee?” Edgar asked.

  George sat down at the table and let him serve her.

  “How did you sleep?” Edgar asked.

  “I didn’t,” George said.

  “Can I make you breakfast?” he asked.

  “Not hungry,” she said.

  “Did you drink enough water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Milk?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The sharp, dull responses felt to Edgar like a kick behind the knees.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  “It’s time for you to leave.”

  1999

  St. Louis, Missouri

  “Hello,” Kate said to the man sitting at her kitchen table. He had helped himself to a cup of coffee while she was brushing her teeth. “John, right?”

  “Oren,” he said.

  “Where did I get John?” Kate said, picking up his cup of coffee and pouring it in the sink. When Kate got a good look at him, she realized he looked nothing like the John of last night.

  “I don’t know—um, I was drinking that.”

  “I’d like you to leave. Anna won’t be up for hours and I don’t like strangers in my home.”

  Oren grumbled something and shuffled to the door.

  “Have a nice day,” Kate said pleasantly.

  Anna was out of bed only a few minutes later. After a booze-soaked night, she could pass out for a few hou
rs, but it wasn’t sleep, exactly. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a natural slumber. She’d study or work in the anatomy lab for forty-eight hours, her consciousness amplified by massive amounts of caffeine or Dexedrine, and then she’d take sleeping pills to regiment the time allotted for sleep. She hadn’t had a recognizable circadian rhythm in months.

  Kate poured Anna a cup of coffee.

  “Thank you,” Anna said, taking a seat at the table. “What happened last night?”

  “You made me promise not to tell you,” Kate said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you knew you wouldn’t want to remember.”

  “But now I do.”

  “But I made you a promise,” Kate said.

  “You made that promise to me,” Anna said. “So if I tell you it is okay to break the promise, it’s okay.”

  “I made the promise to your drunk self. I didn’t make it to your sober one,” Kate said. “If your drunk self at any point withdraws the request, I’ll tell you.”

  Anna had to go to class. Otherwise she would have poured a shot of whiskey into her coffee and gotten her drunk self to make the request.

  What Anna didn’t know was that no such promise had been made. Kate, having grown weary of the reckless manner in which Anna chose to blow off steam, thought she’d attempt a subtle intervention. Kate rarely accompanied Anna on her late-night tears, but this time, when Anna extended an invitation, Kate promptly agreed and readied herself in an outfit that didn’t appear as if it had previously been worn by five different people. She even applied a layer of mascara and lip gloss.

  Kate was a lousy wingman. In fact, George and Anna had crowned her the worst wingman in the history of wingmen, often quoting and requoting her late-night warnings.

  In the morning you will notice his beady eyes.

  Right now, try to remember your last hangover.

  I have a strong feeling that guy has a sexually transmitted disease.

  If you go home with him, might I suggest breathing through your mouth.

  He’s just going to ask you for a blowjob and fall asleep.

  For Anna, nothing that happened that night, including the two-hour blackout, was out of the ordinary. She and Kate went to a hotel bar downtown; Anna had found it was the best place to avoid constant sporting events on big-screen televisions as well as fellow med students. Kate played her part true to form, and Anna played hers. At some point in the night, Anna had struck up a conversation with a stranger.

  “Does Pet Era mean anything to you?” Anna asked.

  It meant nothing to the stranger and yet Anna continued talking about what it might have been for the next half hour.

  “Maybe it was a band that never made it. Or an art movement that never gained popularity. A bad translation, perhaps,” Anna said.

  Occasionally Anna would try to draw Kate into her conversation, but Kate was busy letting the bartender regale her with riveting tales of his at-home microbrewery and the hours of missteps it had taken for him to make the perfect ale. He’d named it after himself: Aaron’s Ale. He also figured that having two a’s in the first name couldn’t hurt if, for instance, someone shelved the beer in alphabetical order. Kate didn’t mention they didn’t shelve beers like books. She said, “Good thinking.”

  And then Anna turned to her and said, as she had so many times in the past, “Can you get home okay? I think we’re going to leave.”

  “Why him?” Kate whispered.

  “Why not him?” Anna whispered back, which Kate always thought was one of the worst reasons to go home with a man. Anna would argue it was one of the best ones.

  Kate used to believe that Anna’s recreational hookups were somewhat more dignified than George’s, albeit more dangerous. George was perennially lonely, seeking comfort. Anna was bored, seeking an outlet, a temporary reprieve from her brain. But lately, Kate’s opinion was inverting. Anna was twenty-four, in medical school, and she was doing things that the eighteen-year-old Anna wouldn’t have thought of doing.

  Kate watched Anna leave with some guy who said his name was John. Suddenly, Kate felt a frisson of fear. What if he was lying? If Anna didn’t turn up in the morning, Kate wouldn’t know what to say to the cops. My friend left with some guy named John. Just John. He was average-looking, brown hair, brown eyes, average height. Kate rushed out of the bar and saw Anna and John at the end of the block, waiting for the light to change. Kate raced in her wood-soled boots, making a clopping noise like a horse. It echoed through the empty streets.

  “Hold up,” Kate said.

  The pair stopped and waited for Kate.

  “Can I see some ID?” a breathless Kate said to the man.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to need to see some ID before I let you leave with her.”

  John ponied up his Missouri driver’s license. John Porter, five eleven, 160 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. Kate thought he’d lied about his height but didn’t mention it. She jotted down his address and driver’s license number and said, “Remember, I know where to find you.”

  Kate caught a cab and went home.

  That’s all Kate knew. But Anna’s blackouts had grown so frequent she could trust that Anna knew even less. For instance, she had left the bar with a guy named John and the next morning was home with a man named Oren. Those missing frames would remain a mystery to both women, but Kate would pretend she knew.

  “Tell me what happened, Kate. Seriously, you need to tell me.”

  “Your drunk self told me you’d say that.”

  A standoff ensued, which Kate eventually won. It’s easy to refrain from divulging information you don’t have. The method, preposterous, had a certain salubrious effect. Kate noted a marked decrease in apartment traffic over the next several weeks.

  “Buckle up,” James said.

  “I was just about to do that,” Kate said.

  She was. She was also just about to do each of the things he told her to do after that. Like put the key in the ignition, move the seat forward, adjust the rear-and side-view mirrors, start the car, put it in Drive, not Drive 2 or Drive 3 (higher rpms for hills or snow), and press the gas pedal … lightly. James had been offering Kate driving lessons ever since he learned that she didn’t know how to drive, but recently he’d become more insistent. He provided a series of relatable doomsday scenarios to persuade her that one day she might forestall a disaster with this ordinary skill.

  He started with relatively realistic situations. “What if you’re on a road trip with a friend and your friend becomes incapacitated?”

  “Incapacitated like how?” Kate asked.

  “Do I really want to list all the ways a person could become incapacitated?”

  “It would be impossible for you to list all the ways.”

  “Drunk,” James said. “You’re on a road trip with Anna and she gets tanked.”

  “She usually waits until the driving is done to start drinking.”

  “What happened to your parents was tragic, but you’re not doomed to the same fate.”

  Kate’s parents had died in a car accident, her father at the wheel. Toxicology reports came back negative, but he’d driven straight into a tree and there were no skid marks to indicate he’d tried to stop. Kate wasn’t worried about driving into trees, although the extreme avoidance of trees could cause someone to drive into something equally immovable, like a concrete barrier. The thing was, because her father was driving, he was ultimately responsible for his wife’s death. He could never have lived with that fact. Kate, too, could never have lived with that fact. Or what if she wasn’t paying attention and accidentally hit a pedestrian? Or what if a pedestrian wasn’t paying attention and Kate ran into him? Technically, it would be the pedestrian’s fault, but Kate would still be the means of execution. And so, for years, Kate had remained a passenger, which was metaphorically a little too apt.

  It was a Sunday morning and they were in an empty mall parking lot. The stores did
n’t open for two hours. Kate started the engine, put the car in Drive per James’s instructions, and began circling the lot with increasing speed.

  It was nice controlling something so powerful. She remembered how much she’d liked bumper cars at the county fair that one time she went. Although she hadn’t particularly enjoyed the bumping, which Anna did relentlessly. But she liked the idea that she could turn a wheel, and the car would turn. Not many things in life were quite as trustworthy.

  “What exactly is the nature of your relationship?” Anna impatiently asked after patiently listening to a play-by-play of Kate’s driving lesson.

  “We’re friends and neighbors,” Kate said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  That was it. Now. Before, it was something else. Kate had felt that heady flush of attraction that very first day she met James in the hallway, when he’d gallantly dispatched Anna’s lingering houseguest. It was Kate’s habit, when emotions overtook her, to vanquish them by focusing on intellectual matters. That was why she never went anywhere without a book in hand.

  She was currently reading about salt, a subject James once made the mistake of asking her about before she started the car. She was more than glad to put the driving lesson on hold and provide some highlights: Did you know that salt was used as currency up to the twentieth century? The Afar tribe in Ethiopia traded it in one-pound bars called amoleh. It’s possible to kill yourself by eating too much salt. Forget years of hypertension: one gram per pound of body weight will do the trick. Suicide by salt was apparently common among Chinese nobility, since salt was so expensive. Sodium chloride is the only form of rock that humans regularly consume.

  The day Kate met James she was reading a book about Pythagoras, which created an enduring connection in her mind between James and the Greek philosopher and mathematician. This association eventually extended to any philosopher or mathematician or Greek person. Finally, she came to realize that she was thinking of James all on her own without any prompts. She could be reading about the invasion of Normandy, and James would come to mind for no reason at all, and she’d feel a blast of heat on the back of her neck and wonder how quickly James could undo her buttons with just one working hand.