Fire Sermon

by Jamie Quatro

  Duncan’s cat’s named Wiggins, Tommy says. He’s black too.

  Here, Wiggins, Thomas says. Watch, if you rub butter on your hand he’ll lick it right off.

  In the trunk of his car is a dog crate, still in pieces. Thomas puts it together and Maggie helps him carry it up to Kate’s room. Kate is sitting on her bed, blue comforter gathered into her lap, the puppy asleep in the little nest she’s made inside her crossed legs.

  Why does he have to sleep in a cage? Kate asks.

  It’s so he doesn’t have an accident, Maggie says. When he’s house-trained he can sleep in bed with you.

  Here’s my elephant blankie, Tommy says, running in with his baby blanket.

  Want to sleep in my room tonight, Tommy? Can Tommy sleep in my room?

  They put the puppy in the crate and the children arrange Tommy’s blanket in the corner. Together they sit in front of the crate with their hands inside.

  Go to sleep, Wiggins, Kate says. Tommy, hand me that book. No, the one with the mouse on front.

  Kate reads to the puppy over whines and yips, until he circles and collapses on the blanket.

  It might be just the thing, Maggie says that night, in bed.

  I had a dog at her age, Thomas says. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.

  It’s genius, she says.

  He rolls to face her and puts a hand under her shirt.

  Have you tried it yet? he asks.

  I haven’t wanted to.

  We’ve got to try something.

  Maybe if we just talked.

  God damn it, Maggie, I’m trying.

  Later, after she’s rolled onto her side and made the kinds of noises she knows will help (What harm in pretending? What harm?); after Thomas has pushed into her so hard she cried out with the pain, and he pushed harder, thinking she liked it; after he’s finished on the sheets and told her, shoulders shaking, that he’s sorry, and she has said no, she enjoyed it; after he has begged her not to leave him, and promised, again, that he will wait, he won’t ask her to use anything, he will offer only his own skin, his own flesh and blood (Let’s throw the pebble away, he’d said, let’s wrap it up in a kitchen bag and put it outside in the dumpster)—when all of this is over and Thomas is finally asleep beside her and she’s filled with the gray numbness, only then does she think to pray, a poem she remembers approximately: Dear God, who are my rock my steady Christ, hear me. I lie here lost hidden pushed away from the core. Endanger me, if not in my body then by words hammered into my brain, or death as fire, as slow flaying, as bloody lilies. But not this nothing.

  October 2017

  Dear James,

  It’s been six weeks since I took out this journal. Which also means it’s been six weeks since I’ve prayed.

  The blue author (I wouldn’t bring her up so often if I were actually sending these letters) writes about “nostalgia for samsara.” Longing for the past, our own or someone else’s—in the Buddhist tradition, a source of dukkha, the Sanskrit word in the first of the Four Noble Truths that is most often translated as “suffering,” but is closer in meaning to dissatisfaction. This nostalgia-suffering has a noble purpose: It alerts us to our attachment to the illusion of the birth-death-rebirth cycle. The importance of escaping the burning wheel of samsara. Yet the talons of attachment seem to sharpen, she writes, as soon as we begin to understand the need to escape them.

  When the talons of attachment dig in, I remind myself that the act of remembering changes the thing remembered. That I’ve replayed what happened in Chicago so often, the night has become wholly my own invention. Who was it that said if someone gave her flowers, she would arrange them in a vase with no water, give them a good hard look, then put them in the back of her closet? That she couldn’t wait for them to die so she could enjoy remembering them?

  C. S. Lewis says that if we were able to return to the locus of our nostalgia, the place or person or spot of time in which we experienced joy, we would find only more nostalgia. As far back as we could go—a view from a childhood window, patterned light on a nursery wall—we would find only an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. An indication not of the illusion of our existence, but of its ultimate reality elsewhere. A home we once knew but can’t quite remember, to which we will someday return.

  I try to hold these two views in balance. Buddhist, Christian. Impossible. One ends in Nirvana, nonbeing; the other in personal, individual resurrection. The Christian idea of an afterlife in which we all still exist as individuals, but together, as a body—our ancestors, children, grandchildren, friends, every soul we’ve touched, and they’ve touched, and every soul those people have touched, and so on, some grand knitting-together of persons, each still him or herself but in a new, completed, interconnected way—I mean, it sounds nice. It sounds like a child telling her mother she’s got friends in heaven.

  But the other idea. Extraction from the talons. What relief there would be in no longer longing to feel, again, your whiskers on my inner thighs.

  She pretends the swimming pool is a grave. Allows her body to sink and lies, faceup, eyes open, on the bottom of the shallow end. Compression in her ears, burning in her lungs, the sky above still visible but changed in the wavering gradations of blue and white. Weight of water a benign scrim between worlds. In bed at night, too, she imagines dying: the sudden drop of her legs down into the mattress, the waking jerk back to horizontal. Dying will be just so, she tells herself. Nothing scary about it. Her legs will drop, her feet will find some new solid ground beneath them, and she will simply stand.

  You consider this—imagining your own death—a positive childhood memory?

  Yes.

  You weren’t frightened by the thought of dying?

  Not when I was a child.

  Do you remember when you first became afraid?

  I’m not sure. Around the time I got pregnant with Kate.

  Do you remember other times, since?

  On the way home from the hospital, after the C-section with Tommy. On an airplane to London. In the hotel room with James.

  What were you afraid of, specifically, in each instance?

  That we would get into a wreck and the seat belt would split my stitches and I would bleed to death before the ambulance arrived. The fall from the sky into the ocean, those final moments of terror, knowing what was about to happen and being powerless to stop it. That if I died that night, in the hotel room in Chicago, my family would find out. That what was happening that night would never happen again.

  Let’s talk about Chicago.

  I can’t. Not yet.

  At some point you’re going to have to.

  To tell you what happened will strip the memory of its power. Bleed some of the color out.

  Isn’t that what you want? Why you keep talking to me? To find some release from the suffering of loss, to continue on in your marriage with perspective?

  Yes. Yes to all of that—

  So: you arrived at the hotel after the aborted film …

  And it was sad. Depressing really. We undressed in front of one another and, naked, could only think about the fact that each of our spouses had seen our younger, more muscular selves. I kept one arm beneath my breasts to lift them, the other hand over the patch of hair; he kept his arms crossed over the paunch of his stomach. A brief kiss and we put our clothes back on and watched Seinfeld reruns until we fell asleep.

  Actually I was the aggressor. I don’t know where it came from, I’ve never been that way with Thomas. I pushed him onto his back and straddled him so hard he winced. Careful, he kept saying, careful, I have a slipped disk.

  Actually he entered me three ways at once. Cock in my mouth, tongue in my front, fingers in my back. Turned me over and pulled my hips up so he could enter another way—I don’t want the part of you Thomas has had, I want what’s untouched—and I cried from the burn, guttural sobs he ignored until he finished and turned me over again and stopped my sobbing with his mo
uth. Afterward I begged him to do it again that way, I mean I welcomed the pain as an appropriate manifestation of the betrayal we were bringing into the world that night, a small-scale version of the brokenness we were creating, in ourselves if we kept the affair a secret, in our spouses if we confessed, and in our children, grandchildren, friends, and coworkers and every fucking person who’d known and admired our long-lasting marriages over the years.

  Actually it was otherworldly, ecstatic in a religious sense, at the deepest point of penetration the room fell away and the sky tore open and we were swept up into electric galaxies, our bodies fused together in the presence of a God who allowed us to reach up and run our fingers through the down of his beard …

  Enough. I can see you’re not ready for this.

  (But God, God, tall friend of my childhood, you saw everything that night. How I began crying in the elevator, his jacket half-wrapped around me. Kept crying as we undressed. My legs wouldn’t stop shaking, I couldn’t make it to the bed, just sank to the floor in my bra and underwear while he lay beside me and touched my face and, with an almost unbearable tenderness, finished undressing me. Covered me with his body, his weight pressing me into the carpet, then entered and held still until I came, and came again. Talked me through it as if I were a virgin. Breathe now, he kept saying. Darling. You need to take a breath.)

  TWO

  Invisible, relentless, the erosion of human imprint upon the planet. The old enemy Nature gnawing steadily away, wind and water and invasive plant. Wet emergence of frond and fern, moss and lichen, vine and privet; the fierce sprawl of kudzu, sun surfacing over the vine-draped woods with a decorous goodwill (we tell ourselves) so we forget to notice the gradual rise in temperatures. The humid air oppressive, eerily still. Yet every so often, at twilight, a hot breeze, like a belly breath held and pushed suddenly outward, will arrow up the street, shuddering leaves in its path and bending tips of cattails newly sprouted from the ditch. One can almost see this breath from above: a single, fingerlike strand of air making its way toward the two-story house with its globed gas lamp flickering beside the dollhouse mailbox. It agitates the pine needles clogging the gutters of old Mrs. Lawson’s house (Lady, her golden retriever, barking on the front porch—what does she sense this evening, as the wind ruffles her fur and she whimpers, then paws at the door to be let in?), stipples the surface of a swimming pool, and imperceptibly sways a faux hitching-post ring held forth by a statue of a black man in uniform. It cuts a path through the pokeweed and onion grass in the empty lot two doors down and winds through the grove of mulberry trees still dropping ripe fruit. It rushes past the row of crape myrtles next door, causing tiny pink petals to loosen and sink, silently, to the ground.

  See it pause before the house on its swell of land, lower half lit, upstairs dark. (The daughter, wearing a thin white nightshirt, has flung off covers and sleeps on her stomach, the fine bones of her spine articulate in the dim nightlight, while across the hall, beneath a blanket printed with elephants, the son lies faceup, arms flung out, each soft palm curled as if cradling a cookie.) The air climbs up the front lawn and bends around the home’s exterior geometries, shivering against windowpanes. (The husband hears a rattle and looks up, briefly, to see his own pale reflection; he’s working late, a client site in Chattanooga he will visit tomorrow, third-generation family-owned company desperate to hire women and minorities.) The air twists itself around the crabapple tree and crawls over the herb garden’s sprawling mint and basil gone to flower. At the back of the house it presses against a window flickering with a faint blue light. (The wife is propped on pillows, reading light clamped to her book. She hears a gentle tap on the windowpane and reminds herself to cut back the butterfly bush. On the edge of sleep she feels an exhale on the back of her neck. Thomas? she says, reaching over to his vacant side of the bed.)

  I think I’m going to write to him, Maggie says.

  A Saturday morning in August. She and Thomas are sitting on the back porch. The children—teenagers—are both still asleep.

  Who? Thomas says, raising his eyes from his laptop. His feet rest on the tempered glass coffee table between them. Magnolia leaves and pine needles litter the driveway, a storm that blew up overnight. The morning is cool, breezy, the crape myrtles glinting with raindrops. By noon it will be muggy again.

  Maggie holds up a book. Always a book in her hand, in her purse, beside the bed.

  James Abbott, she says. He’s a formalist. Writes in a hyper-regular iambic meter, but with all this, I don’t know … riot inside the lines.

  Thomas nods. He’s always been a good listener.

  On the surface he’s writing about the apocalyptic suffering created by a market economy, she says. He was part of the Occupy movement.

  The Occupiers, Thomas says. Raising their Starbucks in collective protest.

  He reminds me a little of Hopkins, she says, ignoring the slight. Recalibrating the language of faith. Assimilating the old ways of speaking about God and moving beyond them.

  Read me something, Thomas says.

  She knows this is his way when he feels threatened, to engage with her in the dialogue, attempt to understand what she’s saying and entice her to go deeper. And in return for this openness—though she wouldn’t call it that, something in return, it’s just their way, a tacit agreement of sorts—she tells him everything. Usually more than he needs to know. That she would write to this poet, for instance.

  She opens to her favorite poem, reads a few stanzas, looks up.

  My God, Thomas says. You’re gorgeous when you read, you know that?

  From: Margaret Ellmann

  Date: August 12, 2013, 11:48 AM

  To: James K. Abbott
  Subject: hello & thanks

  Dear Mr. Abbott:

  I’m writing to tell you how much I admire your new collection. I read it on a long flight. It was as if I took off in one universe and landed in another. The poetry unlocked something for me. Cleansed my perception, somehow. Not sure how to describe the experience. A renewed sense of holiness about the world. It bolstered me in some crucial ways regarding my own articulation of faith. On a panel in Boston, with two male writers—both of whom declared their own disdain for organized religion—the moderator asked me, point blank, if I was a believer. I’m not sure I would have answered in the way I did, had I not been reading your book.

  I’m now making my way through the essays in your HABIT OF PERFECTION.

  I’ve never written to an author I don’t know personally. But to quote C. S. Lewis, “A book sometimes crosses one’s path which is so like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country, it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer.”

  I do hope I’ll have the chance to meet you at some point. For now, my deepest thanks for your beautiful work.

  Yours,

  Maggie Ellmann

  From: James K. Abbott

  Date: August 17, 2013, 9:12 AM

  To: Margaret Ellmann

  Subject: RE: hello & thanks

  Dear Maggie,

  Thank you for taking the time to say these things, and for being a soul of solidarity in this scary time of cheery nihilism. Nietzsche and Camus and Beckett—all of that meaningful madness—seem positively companionable compared to the bland insanity of today. Once writers staked their beliefs to church doors or screamed them out of the flames. Now we whisper into microphones at panels. Why can’t we have one Grand Panel (and maybe one Grand Inquisitor?) and be done with it?

  I wish I knew what you said to that moderator!

  And there’s some stupid stuff in HABIT. Try not to hold it against me. I want to write a new Foreword to the book but I can’t keep up with the work I already have in front of me. I can’t keep up with anything these days. I’m quite sure that’s the way your life is as well, as I believe you have the same number of children as I do. I googled; am eager to read your book. Linked stories about Southerners prep
aring for an immanent second coming sounds delightfully, subversively weird.

  I’m surprised you have time to go to the bathroom much less write me an email. But I want you to know how grateful I am to you for waving this flag. I hope to find a way to get you up to Princeton, at some point, so we can sit and talk.

  Yours, James

  P.S. (Mister Abbott?)

  Dear James (James!):

  Yes, yes, the collective whisper from the dais. And I plead guilty. I was writing a piece freelance, called “The Christian Writer in Post-Christian America,” a la Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South. I’d written an entire section on my sense of isolation; my grief, the longing for return to a viable literature of faith. I pulled it just before the deadline. I chickened out. I think it was the right thing to do. The essay was soapboxy, and included a manifesto against the “Christian publishing industry,” which—I’ll say it to you—has all but decimated real theological understanding and continues to further the demise of intellectual thought and discussion re: religion in our country. I mean, what T. S. Eliot feared might happen, in 1935, has happened. I’m sure you know this quote but I’ll paste it anyhow: “The last thing I would wish for would be the existence of two literatures, one for Christian consumption and the other for the pagan world … The greater part of our reading matter is coming to be written by people who not only have no such belief, but are even ignorant of the fact that there are still people in the world so ‘backward’ or ‘eccentric’ as to continue to believe.”

  As a matter of fact, my husband and I lived in Princeton for several years. I was getting my doctorate in comparative literature. Thank God I didn’t finish, I’m much happier on the creative side. Pregnancy and a move to Nashville, where we still live. I started another doctoral program, at Vanderbilt this time, the intersection of poetry and theology. And of course got sidetracked by eschatology, and wrote the strange little collection instead of finishing the dissertation. It seems a PhD is not part of the plan.