How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  Edgar,

  It’s rare to make contact with someone you want to hear from when trawling these sites. Maybe it makes up for the slightly dirty feeling you have when you realize you wasted an hour (okay, two) of your life reading about the banal details of acquaintances’ lives. Most of the time I wonder what draws me to this cheap form of communication. I’m still in touch with Kate and Anna. I’m not sure what to say about either of them. I’m surprised how Kate turned out, and Anna’s story—I’m not sure that it’s mine to tell. Maybe I’ll answer those questions another time. Just so you know, Anna uses a nom de plume to spy on her friends. She goes by the name of Kate Mirnoff as a less-than-subtle mockery of Kate’s blind resistance to all forms of cyber-communication. (Kate still doesn’t know a parody of her is online reporting regularly about the lunch she ate or the lecture series she recently attended or the bad vacuum cleaner she purchased.)

  As you know, I have three boys. All wild animals and I can’t deny that I prefer them that way. I was a forest ranger for all of one year and then I married (more than once). I’m not married now. I no longer work as a ranger. I consult for environmental groups. But it’s not the same. We camp as much as we can. Only one of my husbands shared my love of the great outdoors and even that one didn’t work. Can you believe I have ex-husbands, plural? That’s enough about me.

  Tell me what you’ve been up to. Married? Children? Career? I suppose those are tedious questions. So middle-aged. Is that what we are now? Anna says she will admit to middle age only when she turns fifty. She says she’s going to live to be one hundred. I believe her.

  George

  A few polite but staid e-mails passed over the next few weeks, and then Edgar suggested a phone call. George put the boys to bed, took a bath, threw on a pair of an ex-husband’s sweats, wrapped herself in an old musty family quilt, and poured herself a glass of wine as she waited by the phone. Edgar had said he would call at ten on the dot. The phone rang at 9:59 p.m.

  George’s experience with men was that, after the initial courtship, they showed little interest in what she had to say, and even during the courtship phase, that interest was theatrical. She could spot the well-timed head nod, the radio-delayed canned laughter at something amusing she might have said—often stories about her children or an old forestry anecdote. Like the time she’d found a throng of Deadheads lost on a hiking trail in the Russian River Valley. When they couldn’t find their way out, they saw it as a sign that they were supposed to live off the land. There was enough water and fishing for basic survival (one of the Deadheads had been an Eagle Scout). They thought they’d start their own minicivilization, believing they were miles deep in the Sierras.

  “Dude, we thought we were like the Donner Party. But we made a pact not to eat each other,” a white guy with dreadlocks and a tie-dyed T-shirt said. “Some of us are vegetarians,” he added.

  George pointed the Donner Party Redux onto a trail and explained that a thirty-minute walk would bring them back to civilization. There was only one holdout (the Eagle Scout), and he’d lasted just a few minutes.

  George couldn’t count on her fingers and toes how many times she’d told that story. It was her go-to anecdote. Most men expressed mild to moderate amusement. But Edgar liked the story best.

  Edgar was different. Religiously curious. It was as if he were trying to siphon intelligence, as if it were a scarce resource. He listened intently and interrupted to ask questions only when he felt the information provided was inadequate—and it was always inadequate. She had said so much about herself during that first phone call that, when it was over, she wondered if she had a single biographical detail left to reveal.

  While George spoke, Edgar managed to absorb the information while summoning a vivid image of the beautiful, leggy college girl he’d met at that very strange party he’d been conned into hosting so many years ago. The sharp sting of her rejection was now a soft memory. They spoke until well past midnight, until the battery on George’s phone began to die. Edgar told her that he’d call her next week.

  That night George started to think of Edgar in ways she hadn’t thought of him before. More specifically, she began forcing herself to think of Edgar in those ways, since the feelings didn’t come naturally. George had always been attracted to a certain type of male. The type who didn’t speak much, or listen much, for that matter. The kind of man who didn’t ask if he could kiss you good night but just did it. The men George liked didn’t ask her any questions at all.

  That night Edgar masturbated to a mental picture of a twenty-year-old George.

  Edgar sent George an e-mail the following morning. She responded that afternoon. He e-mailed again the next day and they spoke on the phone two days later and then two days after that. The balance of the early conversations, so heavily in favor of George, began to shift after the third phone call, when George noted how often she heard the sound of her own voice. She couldn’t recall Edgar saying more than Yes; That’s true; I see; How unfortunate. She had gathered only a few details of his life after well over two hours of phone conversations. He lived alone in Silicon Valley; he had a cat named Squirrel; he owned a tech company called Axiom Inc. that specialized in creating renewable energy for personal electronic devices. While George was curious about how a cell phone could charge itself, she was far more interested in Edgar’s personal life.

  “You never married?” she asked. It was her first question beyond the passport-application-type inquiries.

  “I came close. Once,” Edgar said. And he told the story of Amy, whom he had met in graduate school in Texas. They moved in together after dating only two weeks—compatible in mind and spirit. They could spend hours discussing renewable energy and the relative merits of biofuel and wind, solar, and nuclear power. Amy was wildly against the last, but Edgar remained open to all possibilities. A year into their relationship, Edgar proposed, and they began preparing for their nuptials. And then a few months before the wedding, Edgar realized he wasn’t in love anymore. What Edgar didn’t tell George was that sometimes he thought of George when he was having sex with his fiancée. As the wedding drew nearer, he decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life fucking one woman while thinking about another.

  Three months after George first made contact, she flew to San Francisco to meet Edgar for the weekend. He sent a limo to pick her up at the airport. He didn’t want their first encounter after almost twenty years to be a quick roadside embrace followed by fumbling with luggage and narrow escapes from minor fender-benders and the stress of traffic. He had been told on more than one occasion that he drove like an old man. Their reunion had to be perfect.

  Edgar was standing on the porch of his three-story Colonial in Palo Alto when Edgar’s driver pulled George’s chariot along the circular driveway. George noticed the house first, not Edgar. The plantation-manor-size structure took her aback. George immediately thought of what Kate might say: Six thousand square feet for one man. That’s environmentally irresponsible. Let’s say he doesn’t even use the heat or air conditioning—the water required for that half acre of lawn is three hundred and twenty-five thousand gallons per year, approximately. That’s the equivalent of over two hundred thousand toilet flushes. Then again, Kate would have been happy living in a closet. And George had researched the common lawn on her own; there were some environmental benefits.

  Edgar waved, which pulled George’s attention away from lawn-care statistics. He looked the same, but fleshier—in a good way—and he still had most of his hair. He wore a flattering, pressed white shirt and designer jeans, which led George to the quick and accurate conclusion that someone else bought his clothes for him. They were too on the nose for Edgar to have chosen them of his own accord. She wished he had looked a little more scruffy and unfettered, like his old self.

  He opened the car door for George. They embraced. The driver grappled with her heavy suitcase while Edgar led George on a twenty-minute tour of his home, which showed no evidence that it was i
nhabited by him. Any rich man could have lived in that house. One room contained a massive flat-screen television, several video-game consoles, and shelves loaded with alphabetized comic-book collections and a few Batman figurines from the 1950s that were worth more than some people’s cars. Everything with color, with memory, with a tie to the owner of the home was trapped in that single room.

  As George was leaving, she saw a large, expensively framed set of mushroom sketches on the wall. Roughly drawn with colored charcoal and labeled in a scrawl that looked as familiar to George as her own hand.

  “‘Amanita muscaria, also known as the fly agaric.’ Why do I know that?” George asked, staring at the picture with an unnerving sense that she’d seen it before, a picture that felt utterly wrong in this house.

  “Kate drew that,” Edgar said.

  “You saved it for all of these years?”

  “I was sorting through stuff when I moved two years ago,” said Edgar. “I always liked that picture. It reminded me of a different time. I think I sent the fake Kate a message telling her about it. I didn’t hear back.”

  “I forgot all about the mushroom phase,” George said wistfully. The memory did not serve to remind George that Kate liked Edgar first. It merely reminded her that time was passing her by. She was thirty-seven years old with three children and no husband, and her forehead carried worry lines that didn’t disappear when she stopped worrying.

  Edgar did everything right. Or at least, he did everything he could think of to make the evening perfect. He had hired a chef to teach him how to make pasta puttanesca and a flourless chocolate cake. He made the meal for George that night, attempting to radiate smooth culinary certainty. A few hiccups with sauces bubbling over and an obvious lack of familiarity with how the oven worked gave him away, but George didn’t let on. She offered her assistance, but he refused, ordering her to sit and drink, which she did prodigiously. By the time dinner was served, she’d killed almost an entire bottle of red wine on her own.

  Edgar was easy to talk to, but it’s always easy to talk to someone who is captivated by your every word. In the three hours it took Edgar to prep the meal and serve it, the subtext for George remained the same: I should feel something. But Edgar had enough feelings for the two of them. He tried to wait until dessert was on the table to kiss her, but he slammed her against the refrigerator when she got up to refill a glass of water. George returned the kiss because it was the polite thing to do and she wanted to feel something. The cake burned. Edgar turned off the oven and opened the window.

  “I’ll make you another cake,” he said.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” George said. She still wasn’t feeling anything but thought that she might feel something if they had sex.

  The middle-aged couple disrobed with adolescent speed, as if racing to copulate before someone’s parents returned home. Edgar tried to do all the right things. Things he had learned from the five women he had been with; things he had read in men’s magazines; things he had seen in porn. George seemed to respond. Her moans and breathing quickened, but George was skilled in the art of sexual performance. She had gotten almost too good. After George fake-came and Edgar really did, she still thought, I should feel something. She comforted herself with the knowledge that Edgar did feel something, and, for now, that was enough.

  On Monday, when Edgar returned to work, his colleagues required a full report on his weekend. Edgar provided the gentleman’s version and was about to send George a bouquet of flowers when Rufus, his CFO, intervened.

  “Dude, you’ve got to play it cool. Chicks don’t like it if you seem too needy.”

  “Rufus, grown women aren’t interested in men who play games,” said Edgar.

  Cathy, a grown woman, said, “But we also don’t like men who seem desperate. You have to figure out how to strike a balance.”

  “How do I do that?” said Edgar.

  “Wait five days, then you can call her,” Rufus said.

  Edgar waited three days until he sent flowers. The first day after George returned home, she felt ambivalent toward Edgar. The second day, when the phone didn’t ring and there was no message in her inbox, she began to feel a stew of emotions that she interpreted as longing. By the third day, she was so desperate to hear from Edgar that when the bouquet of red roses arrived, she convinced herself she was in love.

  Edgar would eventually notice the consistent and reliable push and pull in their relationship. If he withheld emotion or attention, George came alive. When he showered her with affection, she would first accept it hungrily, and then withdraw. Edgar often felt like he was tending an extremely temperamental garden.

  2009

  Boston, Massachusetts

  “She’s barking like a dog,” Colin said. He was referring to his three-year-old daughter, Zooey.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Kate said.

  Kate had been working at the West End Branch of the Boston Public Library going on three years. She took the job when she finally returned from Operation Bankruptcy, as Colin called it. As Kate saw it, she’d merely come home from her travels with much less money and a little less guilt. It was that simple. Kate never regretted that first swing of the bottle on the intruder, but she’d always wondered if the death blow had been necessary.

  It had taken Colin all morning to track Kate down. He knew she worked part-time at a library, but she had never mentioned which library. So he had his secretary call every single one in Boston proper.

  At that very moment, while Colin was speaking in hushed tones to Kate behind the stacks of biographies (Dewey 900–999: history, geography, biography), Zooey was barking and crawling on all fours in his office while his secretary chased her around, shushing her.

  “The problem is that my nanny quit because my daughter has been barking like a dog for a week straight. Mrs. Kline says that she doesn’t have a dog of her own for good reason.”

  “Allergies?” Kate asked.

  “I’ve been through three nannies in the past year. If my ex-wife hears that I took my daughter to work again and left her in the hands of my secretary, she will use this against me in court and file for full custody. Don’t you have any vacation days coming?”

  Kate agreed to nothing at that first meeting. She dropped by Colin’s office after work and picked up Zooey.

  “Zooey, do you remember Kate, Aunt Anna’s good friend?”

  “Arf!”

  “Good doggy,” Kate said, patting Zooey on the head.

  “Don’t encourage her,” Colin said.

  “Why not?” Kate asked. “She’s three years old. When else will she have a chance to be a dog?”

  Colin didn’t have time to argue, at least not with Kate. He had a brief to write. Kate drove Zooey straight from Colin’s office to the dog park, where Zooey raced around with the medium-breed canines, having quickly abandoned the dedicated but cumbersome four-legged approach. Most people assumed that Kate had an animal in the mix of ecstatic hounds. But a few dog owners were suspicious. A woman approached Kate, who was standing leashless by the sidelines, and said, “Which one is yours?” Kate pointed to Zooey and said, “That one.”

  The woman clarified: “Which dog?”

  Kate pointed to Zooey again. “That one.”

  The woman did not make any further attempts at conversation.

  After the dog park, Kate took Zooey to the pet-supply store and let her pick out a dog bowl and a few balls, which Kate made sure could bounce and therefore would be useful when the Fido phase ended.

  “This was a mistake,” Colin said when he returned home and caught sight of his daughter eating oatmeal out of a dog bowl on the floor. He sat down at the table and rubbed his temples. “My mother would have a heart attack if she saw this.”

  “And your mother is the gold standard for good parenting?”

  “Point taken.”

  When Zooey lifted her head from the dog bowl, Colin took a napkin and wiped the oatmeal from her face.

  “Arf.”<
br />
  “Good dog,” Kate said.

  Colin winced. “I’m not sure this is the approach I would take,” he said in hushed tones.

  “I want ice cream,” Zooey said, her first human words in forty-eight hours.

  Colin was about to remind Zooey that they had sweets only on the weekend, a rule instituted by Madeline, whose fear of her daughter becoming fat had started when Zooey was an underweight baby.

  “Dogs don’t eat ice cream,” Kate said plainly.

  Zooey regarded Kate for a long stretch, the child’s giant brown eyes boring into the eyes of this tiny woman in her home.

  “I don’t want to be a dog anymore,” Zooey eventually said.

  “What do you want to be?”

  “A girl.”

  “Girls eat ice cream,” Kate said.

  There was no ice cream in the house, but the trio walked hand in hand to a shop around the corner. Zooey got a scoop of rocky road on a sugar cone and devoured it under the fluorescent lights of the pastel-colored parlor. When she was finished, she said “Arf” for the last time.

  The next phase she stuck to a bit longer. Zooey ransacked her costume trunk one afternoon (dress-up was an activity Kate wildly encouraged) and donned a white tennis skirt, a black cape, and sweatbands and called herself Swinger Girl, an unfortunate moniker that referenced her high-flying acts on a swing set. Swinger Girl’s primary objective was to have the cape afloat in her wake. When she wasn’t on a swing, she was racing through the house shouting, “Swinger Girl is on the loose!”

  “Zooey, please sit down for dinner,” Colin said three nights into the Swinger Girl era.

  “How long is this phase going to last?” he asked.

  “A long time, I hope,” Kate said. “Swinger Girl eats her vegetables.”

  Colin was working seventy-hour weeks and had little time to vet potential nannies. He delegated the responsibility to Kate, who interviewed five women and one man but found no acceptable candidates. Candidate number one kept referring to Zooey as a young lady, emphasizing lady and loading the word with old-fashioned notions of gender roles—or at least, that was how Kate interpreted it. Candidate number two spent five minutes talking about how children needed routines and consistency; Kate didn’t have a problem with the concept, only with the degree to which it was underscored. Candidate number three was clearly anorexic. Candidate number four appeared unduly concerned when Zooey scratched her head, and she inquired repeatedly about lice. Candidate number five mentioned her fondness for porcelain figurines. Candidate number six, the one male, arrived forty-five minutes late for the interview.