Fire Sermon

by Jamie Quatro

  Foogie man, Tommy yells, foogie! Both children fall from their chairs, laughing.

  Maggie hires a sitter so she can get groceries, go to the gym, sit in coffee shops with her notebook. Thomas has finished his MBA and is working for a private equity firm. Sometimes he comes home in the afternoons—an attempt to connect with her during nap time—before going back to work. He knows afternoons are her best time, the most-arousable hours. But it’s startling, the abrupt shift in self-perception required, mommy to wife to lover. At night he wakes her, a hand on her breast or between her legs like a question. Why not? Tommy is long past nursing, we haven’t made love in two weeks, why not?

  The devolution into argument, or—more often—she’ll roll onto her stomach voluntarily, looking at the spines of stacked books glowing in the dim night-light, and press up into him the way she knows he likes. He pulls out just before. Sometimes he cries, after. Sometimes she does too. Why can’t married sex be easier? He’s only satisfied if she reaches orgasm—something she can do only if she distances herself from him, in her mind, picturing another man and woman, imagining she is anywhere but there, in the bed beneath him. If she doesn’t come it’s as if he thinks he’s failed in some way. He will need to try again the next night, and the next, until she can prove something with an orgasm. And then a few days’ respite before the need starts up again.

  He’s a sieve, she thinks. No matter what I do—how I try to enjoy or move—it’s never enough to satiate him, or convince him of … what? That he is adequate? That I won’t leave him the way his mother did? Her climax—his ability to make her climax—is the sign and seal. I am essential to Maggie.

  She wonders if she’s to blame. At thirty-three Thomas is objectively beautiful. His thick hair has begun to silver all over, the rubble of his beard is still dark, the dent in his chin round as a shot. Set against his smooth skin, the silver hair and dark beard make him appear even younger than he is. Tall, athletic build, proportionate, his calves as developed as his chest and upper arms. She notices other women noticing him, wives of his friends. Your husband looks like Patrick Dempsey, one woman whispers to her, shyly, at a company dinner. She has the sense that in his presence women are ducking, lowering eyelids to look at him from beneath, almost subservient. She knows any one of them would love to sleep with him.

  The panic is gone, the need to breathe in the bathroom. In its place is a strange lethargy. It’s as if she’s incapable of moving her limbs.

  Thomas keeps a small towel beneath his side of the bed and is wiping her with it, gently, apologetically. He reaches for her hand; she lets him hold it. Inside her: negative space, apathy, the color gray.

  After he’s asleep—his hand on her upper arm and his foot touching her calf, maintaining connection—she lies awake and forces her brain to recollect. The conscious act of remembering, she’s read, can have a sedative effect. And so she scrolls through the years: childhood, college with Thomas, the move to Princeton, the good years in grad school. Kate’s birth, Tommy’s, the move to Nashville. In her mind she watches them grow on fast-forward: two years old and newborn, three and one, four and two, five and three. Behind them, around them, a ruckus of books and toys and furniture. Physical systems tending toward states of disorder. Entropy, she thinks, is the trajectory of a household as it is the cosmos.

  In August Kate starts kindergarten at a well-respected independent school. Each morning Maggie gathers Kate’s long blond curls into a ponytail. She wears a uniform: navy polo and plaid skirt. The third week of school her new backpack arrives, printed with fall leaves and embroidered with her initials. Take a picture of me wearing it, Daddy! she says. Take one of me and Tommy! Tommy wears a makeshift loincloth, his legs stuck through the armholes of one of Thomas’s T-shirts, excess fabric twisted up and pinned in place. He carries a wrapping-paper tube for a spear. The children pose, arms wrapped around one another, while Thomas snaps with a digital camera. Kate and Thomas leave together—he drops her off on his way in to work each day.

  Maggie’s getting Tommy ready for preschool when the woman who drives his car pool calls.

  You heard it’s canceled today, right? she says.

  Canceled?

  Preschool. Are you watching this?

  Watching what?

  Just turn on your TV.

  Within minutes she sees the second plane hit. She takes Tommy upstairs to the playroom, puts on a video, and runs back downstairs. Alone and horrified, she watches both towers fall. She keeps calling Thomas but can’t get through. He must know people. They must.

  She buckles Tommy into the backseat and drives to the school, which is on lockdown. They wait in the parking lot, where other parents have gathered. Everyone stays inside cars, listening to radios. She doesn’t turn hers on. She wants to pray but can’t think of a single phrase that sounds right. A beautiful morning, sunny and warm, light and sky mirrored in the school’s arched front window.

  The children emerge. Teachers and aides walk them to waiting cars. Kate climbs into the backseat, her eyes wide.

  The TV was on and I saw black smoke, she says. Miss Gifford turned it off and said sit in the hallway and draw how we feel.

  She hands Maggie her drawing: a girl with pigtails and giant tears falling in straight lines to the bottom of the page.

  Lemme see, Tommy says.

  A airplane flew into a building, Tommy! Kate says.

  Where? Tommy looks out the window.

  It’s far away, it’s the Empire State Building, Kate says.

  Thomas comes home at lunch, hugs them all.

  No one I know yet, he says. Phone lines are down. My God, Maggie.

  The children pull out snow boots and the vacuum hose and carry them into the backyard. From the open kitchen windows she watches them play firemen. They take turns being the rescuer, dragging one another by the wrists through the long grass.

  Pretend you’re stuck, Kate says to Tommy. Pretend you can’t breathe.

  Before nap time, Maggie gets the American flag out of the hall closet. Together, she and Kate and Tommy carry it down the driveway and slide it into the bracket on the dollhouse-shaped mailbox left by the previous owner. She’s been meaning to order a new mailbox, something plain, but the children beg her to keep it. A Lego family lives inside. Maggie finds them in various setups when she gets the mail: sitting around a flat rock like a table, or lying in a row, covered with bits of paper towel.

  In his loincloth Tommy perches on the rock landscape wall, spear in hand, surveying the weedy lawn and shaded street. Kate picks dandelion puffs and blows off the seeds. The sun slants through the twinkling maple leaves. Breeze, birdsong, the stark blue of sky. Impossible.

  See if I like butter, Kate says, holding up a dandelion. Maggie twists the flower on Kate’s chin, tilts her small face left and right to inspect.

  Ah, Maggie says. Neon yellow. You love butter.

  Do butter to me! Tommy says. Maggie bends to press the flower into his uplifted chin.

  Why are you crying? he asks her.

  Because I feel sad, Maggie says.

  About the people on the airplanes? Kate asks, frowning.

  Yes. And their families.

  Those people didn’t die, Kate says. They flew up to heaven.

  Watch this, Tommy says, jumping off the rock ledge.

  I saw them going up, on the TV, Kate says, insistent, almost angry. I saw them floating in the sky. Mommy. Stop crying.

  June 2017

  Dear James:

  Sometimes, when I’m home alone, I listen to myself repeat our dates aloud, like a litany:

  Nashville, July 2014

  New York, September 2016

  Chicago, April 2017

  (Lord, lamp unto my feet and light unto my path—how is it possible?)

  I’m still reading the blue book. It’s painful, the way she writes about loss. I can only take it in small amounts. The ancients, she says, disagreed as to whether we perceived objects, or objects perceived us. Do our eyes th
row out a beam, like a lantern, that illuminates them? Or do the objects send out rays which, reaching our eyes, reveal them to us—as if they’re looking back? Plato, she writes, split the difference: a visual fire burning between the eye and the object it beholds.

  I cannot help applying these ideas to love. Its location in a physical sense. Was it something we carried in ourselves—something I sent out to you, and you sent out to me? Or did it exist independently, a potential fire hovering in the middle space between us, appearing only when we looked at one another? In which case, the second we stopped looking, the fire disappeared. Hence my use of the past tense. (But dear God I want to use the present. I want to keep looking, to gaze at length. I want access, again—hours, days, months—to memorize the side-sweep of his smooth hair, the freckles on his legs, the tiny mole on his nipple. I want to sit on top of him and study the veins in his cock; to imagine, over and over, the particular angle at which he held it the moment he lifted my hips from behind and bent into my torso, me with the stacked pillows beneath my hips, waiting—put his mouth against my ear and said, Hold still, this might hurt.)

  One of the spines on my nightstand: Letters of John Newton. Earmarked page: Various Uses of Temptation in the Life of the Believer. But who is John Newton? I must familiarize myself with his story, if I’m to glean from him anything worthwhile regarding the nature of temptation. Which I must. Glean from him what is worthwhile regarding what happened at the Hyatt, in order to repent, accept forgiveness, forgive myself. Love my husband and children with integrity.

  Above all, to stop missing you.

  Newton: born in London, 1725. Mother died when he was seven. Became a mariner at the age of eleven, went to sea with his father, lived aboard ships until his stroke at thirty. In the intervening years he became a slave trader. Likely impregnated slave women on the ship in order to sell them at a premium upon arrival in port. Libertine, infidel, injurious, old African blasphemer—words he applied to himself. Then: his Great Awakening. Conversion and settlement in the parish at Olney, where he famously wrote hymns with the depressed Cowper. Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds. A wretch, once lost, who tells me what temptation is useful for:

  1. To show me what is in my heart.

  Burning. Ear is burning sounds are burning nose is burning odors are burning tongue is burning flavors are burning body is burning tangibles are burning. Mind, idea, consciousness, burning. Burning with what? With lust, and delusion.

  2. To make me sensible of my immediate and absolute dependence upon God.

  “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.” Asaph, Psalm 73. This is not my truth anymore. Though I ask you to make it so, God. May Earth have nothing—no one—that I desire. Grant me estrangement. Ear, nose, tongue, body. Outward forms, mind, idea.

  3. To conform me to Christ in his sufferings: “Can you wish to walk in a path strewed with flowers when his was strewed with thorns?”

  But did Christ experience sexual temptation? Adulterous, homoerotic, pedophiliac, bestial? We are told he was tempted in every way but was without sin. Yet according to Christ himself to even imagine a sin is to commit the sin itself. Ergo: How was he tempted without imagining the temptation? Why even use the word temptation? Is this a translation issue?

  4. That I might sympathize with my suffering brethren, and be able to speak a word in season to them that are weary. “If your prayers, your conversation, and the knowledge others have of your trials afford them some relief in a dark hour, this is an honor and privilege which, I am persuaded, you will think you have not purchased too dear, by all you have endured.”

  In a dark hour. Here we are, then, in New York City, looking for a cathedral with a door left open, someplace more private than a coffee shop, a cool interiority where we might sit or kneel or lie prostrate and pray aloud together. Low-burning candles, icons, statues, perhaps an empty confessional into which we could steal and enact the roles of penitent and priest and say to one another, through the grate, with the safety of a wall between us, the things we said in room 1602 at the Hyatt, postcoital and sweaty on the soft beige carpet. The things you told me to say when we did it again on the bed. Perhaps, had we found such a space prior to that night in Chicago—a dark hour in which to confess to one another the nature of our temptation, the dreadful joy of the crush, how we became aroused by, and secretly masturbated to, one another’s written words and images, and the lies we told our spouses (just a friend, a colleague really); had we analyzed, together, the stance of friends (side by side looking ahead to a shared horizon) versus lovers (side by side looking at one another) and admitted that, yes, we had turned, we were no longer looking forward—perhaps then I might have said, Pray for me, I’m tempted by you. You might have said the same to me. And then—what? Would we have allowed ourselves to do, inside a church, what we did in Chicago? What might have happened, had we done those things in a sacred space? I imagine statues beginning to weep, blood curling down the carved marble ankles on the crucifix above the altar, For this moment I died, for this moment I am always dying, every moment for all eternity I am bleeding so they can sit in the pew in this sanctuary and allow their fingertips to touch on the wooden bench, allow themselves to hold hands in an attempt to pray, then turn toward one another, he sliding a hand inside the ripped knee of her jeans to feel the skin of her thigh and musculature of her quadriceps (see the human machinery on which I am eternally pushing myself up to draw a breath), she reaching her hand beneath his jacket, running it over the smooth cotton of his checked shirt (see the sword-pierce just below my own bare chest). Which of us would have noticed the bleeding Christ, the inclined head and glassy forsaken gaze into eternity, the stench of hell? Which of us would have pulled back and said, but the suffering! We cannot forget the suffering! You would say, We have beautiful families, we cannot cause them pain. I would say, We can endure our own pain but we must never consummate this—my hand inside your shirt, index finger tracing a line down your abdomen, the sparse soft hair; your fingers unfastening the buttons on my blouse.

  The third day. That is what we’d be thinking. The resurrection that follows suffering, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (lips, mouths, tongues, hands, burning) why not go on sinning so that grace may increase?

  The doors were locked. Every church we tried.

  They’re never left open, he said outside St. John the Baptist, because of the homeless.

  Neither of us insensible of the irony: we were shut out because of the very people who should be let in.

  On her thirty-second birthday Thomas brings home an unmarked cardboard box.

  Keep an open mind, he says.

  Inside the box, in Bubble Wrap, is a flesh-colored vibrator. Realistic-looking, veined and arched, a switch at its base. Bigger than Thomas.

  It’s supposed to be the one that’s closest to real, he says.

  But why? Maggie says.

  I’m the only man you’ve ever been with, he says. This is a safe way for you to experience something different.

  She leaves it in the box and puts it inside a suitcase beneath her side of the bed, where the children won’t find it. And when he asks—Can we try, here, you run it under hot water—the first time she holds it against her skin, it’s as if she’s withdrawing into herself, away from Thomas and reality.

  Can you, he breathes. I mean, will you—if it feels okay—

  She’s lying on her back, he’s kneeling beside her on the bed, watching from above. She inserts just the tip. Pushes a bit farther, arching to get the angle right. Thomas makes a choked sound, falls onto her, shudders. The tentative wiping-off with a towel. She grabs it from him and does it herself.

  You didn’t like it, he says.

  It’s an object, she says. I don’t have an emotional connection to an object.

  I know, he says. But for me to watch, I mean it’s so—

  Don’t ask me to do that again.

  I’ll get rid of it right now
, he says, stuffing it into the box.

  At night they hear Kate’s voice hours after they’ve put the children to bed. Maggie goes upstairs and finds her sitting cross-legged in the dark.

  Everything okay up here? Maggie asks.

  I’m talking to my friends in heaven, Kate says.

  What friends?

  Just some girls. Actually one’s a boy.

  Maggie sits on the edge of the bed.

  What are their names?

  They won’t tell me.

  What do you and your friends talk about?

  They ask me questions. Only now they stopped because you’re here.

  Can you remember what you were talking about, just now?

  Something about a cat, she says.

  Kate begins to cry every night at bedtime, saying she’s scared to go to sleep. One night, when Thomas switches off her lamp, she throws up on her quilt. She starts to throw up after dinner, as soon as she starts thinking about bedtime. Thomas and Maggie take turns lying on the floor beside her until she’s asleep. She wakes up in the middle of the night and comes downstairs to get into bed with them.

  My friends won’t talk to me, she says, her thin body quivering.

  Let’s let her sleep in our room until she’s out of this phase, Maggie says the next morning.

  I don’t know. Won’t it feed things, to cater to her fear?

  The following week Maggie takes Kate in for a haircut. The stylist comes to the waiting area a few minutes after she’s shampooed Kate’s hair.

  I’d like to show you something, the stylist says.

  Kate’s curls are wet and combed flat. From the back of her head sprouts what looks like the tip of a tiny saguaro cactus.

  We have a little breakage back here, the stylist says, chipper.

  Where? Kate says, a hand flying to the back of her head.