Fire Sermon

by Jamie Quatro

  This journal’s new, leather-bound, with a thin cord that wraps around the exterior. Kate brought it home from India last year. I put the journal away till now. I imagined I would send it to you with one of my prayer-letters written on the first page. I imagined you would write a letter on the next page, and send the journal back to me, and it would become our habit, back and forth over the years. No telephone or emails or texts. A kind of analog redemption, a quiet return—not the fire this time, but the embers, subdued and tepid. A warmth we could keep, and stir every so often, just enough to expose a subtle but still-pulsing glow.

  The heat is unbearable this summer, the humidity oppressive. All we’re doing is lying around inside, drinking from cans of flavored sparkling water. Today I sat on the back porch to read—do you know Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy? (Why do I ask questions in these letters to him, God? The way I used to ask things of you?)—and when I let the chickens out to roam they just stood there with their beaks open, stunned.

  Kate’s home, we went shopping. She’s about to leave for Paris, where her boyfriend’s starting grad school. I bought an off-the-shoulder shirt for Florida next week. 25 years.

  Something’s happened to my body, some turnover in my genes. A sudden all-over aging. I can’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. Or look down at my hands when I type. The fingertips are puckering, on their undersides, the way they used to in the swimming pool. I catch myself making a point about something to Thomas—extending my hand out onto the table, palm up, my fingers pressed together, as if I’m pleading—and I lose my train of thought, looking at the puckers. My grandmother used this palm-up gesture. I wonder if I’m doing it in remembered imitation, or if it’s something hardwired into my DNA. This is what I mean, this all-over aging has turned me into a younger version of my grandmother, as if I can see her body waiting beneath mine. The upper arms loosening, a ballooning midsection, no matter how many crunches I do; little age spots on my thighs and chest, the backs of my hands. I hate caring about these things, but I do, I understand the impulse to dye and inject, plump certain places and shrink others.

  Look around you, Mags, Thomas says. You’re in better shape than 95 percent of the women your age.

  But I remembered the night at dinner in Chicago—just before we left for the film—when you said you loved two things on a woman, wrinkles and gray hair. How beautiful, you said, a woman who’s earned her face. I assumed you meant to be kind, noticing the silvering at my temples and how my crow’s-feet had deepened since we last saw one another. Thomas means to compliment me. But his version still holds youth as the standard, whereas yours dispenses with the standard entirely.

  She died last month, my grandmother. Increasing vertigo, a walker, oxygen, a wheelchair. Congestive heart failure. We all hoped she’d make it to a century. I wonder if yours is still living? Sometimes I imagine they might have died on the same day, and now, together, they’re commiserating, or celebrating. Maybe talking about us.

  I wish I would have told her about you. Nashville, New York, Chicago. All of it. I got this letter from her, after the funeral, enclosed with a set of handkerchiefs she’d embroidered. She wrote it the day after my wedding and didn’t send it. Twenty-five years just sitting there with my name on it. My parents didn’t even open it when they were going through the house. If we were still talking I would call and read you her letter. She would have understood us. It’s a consolation, to know there was someone I might have told. Grandma, I fell in love with another man. Sometimes when the house is empty (always empty now, such an adjustment for the one who stayed home with the children, Thomas has no idea) I practice saying the words out loud. Different ways of saying it, depending on the listener. I committed adultery, I say to my mother. I fell in love with another man, I say to my best friend. We fucked, it meant nothing, I say to Thomas.

  It was the best thing, I say to you. In all my life, the very best thing.

  I imagine writing all this down and giving the manuscript to my agent.

  This has been done to death, she says. I won’t be able to sell this.

  So you see: There is no one left to whom I can confess. No one who will listen or understand. There is you, and there is God. I’m not sure, anymore, there’s a difference.

  Chicago. April, 2017. A late dinner after the keynote speaker, nearly nine by the time we were seated, a group of us crowded around a long table beside the street-facing windows. Twelve writers and musicians, some with partners and spouses in tow. No one James or I knew. We were squeezed together in the middle of the table, our chairs facing the glass.

  Outside the rain was beginning to taper off. Umbrellas, parkas, taxis hurrying past. Beneath the table I slipped out of my wet suede boots—there’d been no time to get back to the hotel to change.

  Where in L.A.? the man beside James was saying.

  I haven’t found a place yet, James said.

  You should check out Pasadena, I went to high school out there. Twenty years ago. Now there’s train service to downtown, I mean public transportation is making L.A. almost livable.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love my students, but the quality of work just isn’t the same, a woman at the far end of the table said. I recognized her, a writer who’d just come out with a novel reimagining F. Scott Fitzgerald as a sea captain.

  Do you teach? the playwright on the other side of me asked. Beard down to his chest. He’d just ordered his third whiskey sour.

  I’ll have a visiting appointment next fall, I said. A small college between Nashville and Chattanooga.

  Never teach unless starvation looms, he said.

  Poets are lucky, the Fitzgerald woman said. No worries about agents or advances or royalties, I mean the freedom …

  Poets have agents, the woman across from me said. You have one, right, James?

  Well, it isn’t the norm, the Fitzgerald woman said.

  Let’s go do something, I said to James, speaking low so no one else could hear.

  Where?

  There’s got to be a movie theater nearby.

  My flight’s at nine tomorrow.

  Mine’s at eight. Nicholas Sparks, sci-fi. Anything.

  I’ll call a car, James said, putting cash on the table for our drinks.

  We haven’t even ordered yet! the Fitzgerald woman said, as we got up to leave.

  The onset of darkness, in northern climates: get inside, get warm, light fires. And the desert’s great reversal, year-round: twilight signals egress. The waning heat, the hour of going out, of something about to happen—every time she visits home in Phoenix, sunset urging her to drive somewhere fast, to embrace, be embraced—and it’s that twilight excitement she feels in Chicago, in the museum, James looking at her in the mirror, the sweep of his gaze exposing, or creating, the dark truth of her situation: Her passion is dormant and something else altogether. A desire to be on her knees, to beg, then yield to pain. A wide-sky longing—what chance did she stand, when she met its counterpart?

  When she has thrown up in the bathroom and cleaned her face and teeth and returned to the bedroom; when she has told James to fuck her again, when she is bent over the stacked pillows and he’s wedged himself inside, not quite gently, a finger moving in front—when she’s finally there, it’s as if she’s falling into herself and flying out of herself, both things at once, it is as close to the ecstatic as she has ever come, and knows she ever will come.

  What he tells her to say is Please.

  And, when she’s finished: Thank you.

  You’re going to have to probe the domination/submission aspect of this.

  I have.

  And?

  Identification with Christ, who gave himself—voluntarily—unto death. Threw his arms wide and, in radical obedience to the Father, said, I submit. Dominance and submission part of the Divine nature.

  Have you considered the similarity to the position that Thomas—

  Or take Mary. Her submission to the Holy Spirit, brooding over her at the moment of
conception. I am thy servant, may it be done unto me.

  You’re saying that you and James, in that moment, were a metaphor for …

  That’s the idea.

  Yet I feel this absolves you of responsibility for what happened. You seem to want to portray yourself as a victim of your strong feelings, but I don’t get the sense you have any agency about them. Even the way you speak of Thomas, the ways he’s forced you—it’s as if you believe you have no autonomy.

  I admit to using my religious beliefs to manipulate, resisting temptation as a means of feeding my own desire.

  I admit the fact I have had intercourse with only one man gives me a source of power. I admit to using it. In James’s case, making sure he knew how untouched I was.

  I admit to playing up the innocence angle.

  I admit that I have created, to some degree, a self-feeding monster, using, at first, the emotional connection with James to further retreat from Thomas, creating an overall mien of frustration in our sex life. Sometimes I think I’ve given Thomas no choice but to continue to force himself on me, and I use this fact to subconsciously (“above all the heart is deceitful”) justify both my feelings for James and my continued imaginative replaying of the night in Chicago. (The blue flame, James said at the airport. We’ll extinguish the fire, we’ll never speak again but we must keep the blue flame alive. Both of us. Promise me. I need to hear you say the words.)

  I admit that my self-flagellation is indulgent and coercive. Guilt as fuel, guilt as food, guilt as energy.

  I admit that I am not a victim but know what I want and how to get it by pretending, to myself, that I don’t want it; maybe even lying to myself about my religious beliefs, because if I don’t believe any of them the forbidden aspect of my sexual relationship with James will disappear, taking the pleasure with it.

  I admit that if I do believe what I say—eternal forgiveness from before all time—the word forbidden becomes meaningless, everything becomes permissible. Why feel guilt for something preemptively forgiven? Why not simply acknowledge Chicago as planned, ordained—a cause, even, for celebration? (Grandmothers clink wineglasses in some crystal room dripping with jewels. All is well, they say. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.)

  I admit that unless something is forbidden I cannot want it with any intensity.

  I admit that unless something is forbidden I can’t fucking feel anything.

  I admit that I loathe God for creating the universe in such a helpless situation—knowing it would get itself into this kind of trouble, creating it anyhow.

  I admit that with Thomas I have autonomy. I am an adult. I could leave, for example. The children are grown. The house is empty.

  I could simply leave.

  (But would you leave a husband who, when you wake in the middle of the night, your body slick with sweat—dreaming you had to say goodbye to a man you slept with, once upon a time, but the man doesn’t care, he has better things to do, he doesn’t mind that he’ll never see you again and the pain in your chest is so acute it forces you awake, gasping for air—this husband gets up to bring you a glass of water, then holds your hand across the mattress until you fall asleep? A man who, when your son brings home a girl who dropped out of high school and wants only to get married and have a kid, sits with her for an hour and talks about the benefits of higher education, offers to pay for her to take the GED and apply to colleges? Would you leave such a man? Or would you think: confess, repent, he is the one who should leave?)

  January 9, 2017

  Dear James:

  Since we saw one another in New York I’ve been wondering if I made the right decision, to no longer write, as it’s been

  Dear James:

  Do you remember the moment we got to 24th just as the light changed and I crossed while you waited

  James:

  I keep thinking about the churches, how if only we could have gone inside one of them– if we’d spent time in a place of worship, maybe prayed together—I mean I wonder if I might have changed my mind

  James: I know I insisted on this silence but I keep wanting to discuss some of the poems in the Olds book you gave me, “The Talkers,” for instance, it must be how the angels live, and how Milton felt the highest form of intercourse was sexless, the intellectual interpenetration of angels. My God, they’re not going to touch each other—that line breaks my heart every time

  My friend how I’ve missed your voice since New York

  My dear James

  Dearest James

  From: Margaret Ellmann

  Date: January 10, 2017, 11:16 AM

  To: James K. Abbott

  Subject: Hello

  Dear James:

  Apologies for breaking the silence I so insisted on in New York. Briefly: I wondered if you would be at the conference in Chicago, in April? I’ll be giving a reading. I thought I should let you know. I’m guessing you’ll be there too. Thomas is planning to come with me.

  I hope you’re well, and staying warm up there.

  My Best,

  Maggie

  From: James K. Abbott

  Date: January 10, 2017, 11:23 AM

  To: Margaret Ellmann

  Subject: RE: Hello

  Dear Maggie,

  How wonderful to see your name in my in-box! No worries about breaking the silence. As you know, I always thought maintaining a professional conversation was the better route.

  I’ll be in Chicago, yes. Beth can’t come. But I’ll look forward to meeting Thomas. (Finally!)

  Cold, yes. Bring some of that southern warmth with you?

  Yours, JA

  Dear James,

  Thank you for this reply. I admit I was worried about breaking my own rule. You’re right: better to simply leave the door open for professional communication.

  Till Chicago, then. Looking forward.

  Best, ME

  Maggie:

  Actually, might we speak on the phone? I have some news I wanted to share before Chicago. Email too impersonal.

  Yrs JA

  James,

  Sure. Tommy and Kate are home until the end of next week. Can we talk the following week, say Monday, Jan 23?

  Yours, ME

  June 12, 2018. Twenty-five years. Her parents send them a cast aluminum sign, white, with embossed letters painted hunter green: ELLMANN, Est. 1993.

  Kate’s gone to Paris to visit her boyfriend. (Maman, she says, when she calls, Mummy, you and Dad have got to get over here, we want to take you to the d’Orsay, you’ll love it, and Père Lachaise, you can see Chopin’s grave!) Tommy home for the summer, working at a local organic farm. They leave him in charge of the house and go to Florida for a week, Naples, a high-rise hotel facing the sea. In between the hotel and beach is an estuary and a forest of mangroves. Golf carts shuttle guests back and forth along a wooden plank walkway. Maggie and Thomas prefer to walk. They have a suite on the eighteenth floor, where, in the living room, a double-wide chaise faces a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Assumption built into the arrangement of furniture.

  You will enjoy it, Maggie tells herself. You will give.

  His desire, and her fear, have become tempered, now. Blunt-edged, eroded. It’s as if they’ve worn down together, and what’s left is understanding and kindness. The quiet-spread-of-light kind of love, the placid excellence of long accomplishment. The flagstone patio, in the big house, the wearing away of sharp edges so only the central parts of the pavers remain; in the spaces between, dark soil sprouting the exploding weeds the children used to call firecrackers. And this is my husband, Maggie thinks. Softened around the edges, the essential part of him solid, the largest part of him only good. Better than I am. Maybe marriage is for this, she thinks. The shearing away of the rough, leaving the parts that will last into eternity.

  Thomas unpacks and showers while she stands naked in front of the mirror. Her waist and hips are still defined, the skin just starting to loosen at the inner thighs and upper arms. Her
calves and ankles will stay slim until she is ancient. Her grandmother’s swollen ankles: what she remembers, remembering the last time she saw her. The hike of her pant legs when she sat, the quashy-thick skin inside nude compression stockings. She wonders about James’s grandmother, in Santa Fe—if she’s still living—and her belief in the Native ways, the continued presence of ancestors, how they would appear and speak to her. My grandmother would love to talk about those visions you’ve been having, James would write, if they were still writing.

  Of every excuse to contact him, this seems the most natural. Dear James, my grandmother died. No one else she knows would understand what it meant to lose a grandparent at her age. To have watched one’s children grow into adulthood with three generations behind them.

  Long days on the beach, cushioned chairs set out for them each morning, striped towels, an oversized umbrella positioned to block the morning sun from behind. Young men in collared blue shirts come around to reposition the canopy, as the sun moves, seesawing the spiked post deep into the sand. Beside her Thomas is reading a galley of a book she’s been asked to blurb. (Blurb? Thomas says. Like whatever happens to dribble out of your mouth?) They haven’t fought in over a year. How ironic, she thinks, how inexcusable, that we’ve reached this peace now. She wonders if his patience with her began with what happened in Chicago—if somehow, in committing the act with James, she finally relaxed enough to free Thomas, and herself.

  Only now I’m a slave to guilt, she thinks. To protecting a secret. She envisions the unconfessed truth growing like a malignant bead just beneath her skin, somewhere unnoticeable—armpit, inner ear. She’s constantly scanning her body for strange moles, running soapy palms over her breasts in the shower. How many years must they live through before the fact of the affair no longer matters to him, or matters less? How long before she is safe? If she could say, “Five years ago, in Chicago, I did such and such”? Ten years? Fifteen?