Fire Sermon

by Jamie Quatro

  She pictures her life as a time line on a blank page, progressing steadily upward, with three barely perceptible dips below the baseline as it approaches the center axis: MBA friend, minister, Aquinas professor. Minor temptations, really, looking back. Then a deep drop, right at the middle of life, a sharp downward spike pooling in a thick black mark at the bottom of the page. Chicago. From there the line begins to crawl upward, until a point in the future where it breaks the surface of the original baseline, never dropping below it again.

  What is that point? When one of their children gets married? The birth of their first grandchild?

  Mojitos, rum and cokes, pina coladas. The first drink energizes; the second numbs. By the third Maggie is in reverie, watching Thomas out in the water, floating on his back. The sea is waveless, flat to the horizon, the color of a gemstone in her best friend’s ring. What was it called? Peridot. Afternoon Gulf is peridot. Peridot is Gulf afternoon.

  A little girl calls from the water: Grammy, watch us! The grandmother on the next chaise over waves to two young girls with their father. She sits with her knees pulled up, wears a one-piece suit with shorts and a sun visor, her hair in a thin ponytail. In ten years I’ll be her age, Maggie thinks.

  The father is fit, tan, he lifts the girls over his head and throws them up and out, their bodies tucked into cannonballs. Again! they cry. The mother sits in a low chair placed at the water’s edge. It is the grandmother they call to, she is the celebrity of the family.

  The girls charge up the beach, scattering sand.

  Grammy, the water’s your temperature exactly!

  Literally, Grammy!

  Come swim with us!

  Please!

  In a little while, the grandmother says.

  The girls run back to the water. Watch this splash! Watch my dive! The grandmother smiles, waves, it is enough for everyone.

  Let me be the kind of grandmother who gets into the water, Maggie thinks.

  In the opposite direction, toward the jetty, a teenage boy performs gainers for a group of girls in neon-bright bikinis. He runs forward and flings himself up and back, landing on his feet each time. A power move, a ninja move. The girls applaud, arching their backs, adjusting the ties on their swimsuits and tossing their hair. Maggie’s own hair is a copper spill down her back, whiting only at the temples. Two months ago she noticed a few white hairs beneath her bikini bottoms and decided to wax everything away. How strange to see that part of her body hairless again, now, in middle age. Thomas loves the slick surface, the heightened lubrication. Since she’s waxed he wants to kiss there all the time. She didn’t think to wax, or even shave, in Chicago. The fact of their bodies—her own, James’s—had seemed beside the point. As if mouths and tongues and limbs were only in the way, something they had to get through in order to get to something else.

  A steady breeze ruffles the umbrella’s border. From out in the water Thomas calls to her; she rises and walks to the edge, light-headed in the sudden sunlight, her limbs gritty with sand. She wades in, tiny fishes scatter, the water so warm she cannot feel it against her skin. Stepping into the sea it’s as if she’s entering negative space. Thomas stands where the shallows drop off, the line where peridot turns to slate. She wades out and slides into his arms. He holds her weightless, his hands beneath her thighs.

  Hey, he says.

  Hey. You’ve been out here a while.

  I can’t remember the last time I felt this relaxed.

  I know, same.

  You still in the wooden hat book?

  Yeah. What did Kate say?

  She wants to move, of course. She’s talking about getting a work visa until she can apply to grad school.

  And Tommy?

  Everything’s fine. It’s hot, he got chigger bites from mountain biking on an uncleared trail. Listen, let’s go back to the room. I have a present for you. Anyhow, look at the sky.

  January 23, 2017

  Hello?

  Maggie?

  Hey.

  Good to hear your voice. It’s been—what—six months?

  Five I think. Since New York. How were your holidays?

  Fine. Different this year …

  I know, weird to have everyone under one roof again when you’ve gotten used to the quiet.

  How’s your work?

  Good. I mean, slow, but good. What about you?

  Great. Steady.

  I saw the New Yorker poem.

  That one isn’t any good. Maggie—

  You had news—

  Beth and I are separating. Just a trial thing. With the kids gone …

  That’s—my God I’m sorry to …

  … we don’t have much to say to one another. We got married so young. I’m the one who’s moving out.

  I’m sorry—

  I took a job in L.A. I’m moving out there at the end of the term. What about Princeton?

  It’s a visiting appointment. UC Irvine. The plan is to come back. Beth and I don’t really want to … I mean we hope it’s not permanent. For now, with Dustin at Occidental—it’ll be good to be close to him.

  Right, he’s in L.A. now.

  You’re the first person I’ve told outside of work.

  Why me?

  Because you’re my friend.

  Yes.

  I’m looking forward to meeting Thomas in Chicago.

  I was going to tell you, he’s going to Turks and Caicos that week, for a company retreat. I might go with him.

  Please don’t.

  All the spouses are going. Golf outings. Hors d’oeuvres on yachts. You’d love it.

  I would understand if you went. But don’t.

  I haven’t decided. I’ve heard you get blacklisted from the conference for three years if you cancel so I’m not—

  Maggie. I lied. I haven’t been able to write since we stopped talking.

  …

  Not a single, fucking poem. I feel like poetry is dead in me.

  It’s been the same for me.

  Come to Chicago.

  I’ll think about it.

  I want to say more.

  Don’t.

  The rain comes. As it does every afternoon this time of year. Furious storms that end as abruptly as they begin. The massive buildup of cloud behind the high-rise condos and hotels along the shore, articulation of blue and green fading to gray. Families coalesce, gather belongings, and disappear; young men sweating through collared shirts pile umbrellas and chairs on the backs of four-wheelers. Shutters shut on beachfront bars, wind flaps the palms and grape plants with their exaggerated fruits, the first heavy raindrops pock the sand. An hour later it’s over, the sun descending into the water, an orange-yellow flare at the horizon softening to the lavender of twilight.

  Thomas and Maggie ride the golf cart back to the hotel. The wind is picking up; white birds flap over the mangrove forest; beneath the plank walkway, in the estuary, schools of tiny silver fish scatter across the surface of the water like flung rice. Yesterday, running on the beach, she’d seen a porpoise surfacing and diving, carving a scalloped line parallel to her own path. On the way back, crossing the bridge, she paused with a group of tourists taking pictures of a manatee in the estuary at low tide. Together they watched as it shapelessly rolled itself back to the sea.

  From their room on the eighteenth floor Thomas and Maggie watch the storm, rain seeming to hover in midair like thick static, obscuring as if with smoke the high-rise condo building opposite, painted butter yellow with white-railed balconies stacked one above the other. The condo’s parking lot is always empty, at night the windows are dark. (No one lives here in the summer, a couple they meet tells them. No one is from here either. It’s a town you end up in.)

  They’re both naked, wet swimsuits in a heap on the floor. She lies back on the chaise in front of the mirror, watching herself touch her own breasts. Thomas above her, kissing everywhere. Two mojitos and a rum and coke in her system. She rolls her head to look outside, the sun already beginning to ligh
ten the clouds. A sliding warmth against her skin. Lovely, to feel this again with a husband—

  You taste like salt

  You too

  Your skin I still can’t get over how soft

  Why don’t you—I want you

  She is pulling him against her, arching up into him, lovely

  Hold on, I want to get your present.

  Thomas walks to the closet and comes back with a cloth drawstring bag.

  Tell me that isn’t what I think, she says.

  It isn’t. Not entirely.

  She sits up. Inside the bag is a silver device, long and sleek.

  Silver anniversary? he says.

  Maggie stands, sets the device on the chaise, and begins to dress.

  Come on, Mags, Thomas says. A little fun. And it isn’t my only—

  She pulls on her underwear, shorts, a tunic.

  This is about that poet, isn’t it, he says. The one you used to write to.

  Everything tilting sideways. Where were her shoes?

  This is about me, she says, grabbing a room key and—still barefoot—walking out.

  On a lobby phone she dials James’s cell number. Hangs up.

  Dials again, lets it ring twice. Hangs up again.

  She goes outside. Marble staircases, thatched-roof bar, pools, waterfalls. A children’s waterslide obscured by palms and jungle flowers in violent bloom. The storm has let up, birds are raucous, steam rises from the wet pool deck. In the shallow end a little boy stares up at her. His arms, encased in blown-up rings, float on the water’s surface. The father looks to see what’s caught the boy’s attention.

  What do they see, she wonders. What does anyone see. Not what they used to. James was the last.

  She is every cliché in every book. She will confess to Thomas.

  What do you think will happen if you confess?

  I will lose Thomas and the children. All that history, wiped out.

  Do you feel you have Thomas?

  A version of him. The version that doesn’t know what I’ve done. The version that doesn’t know I think about getting on a plane to California every day.

  You could say the same thing about losing Thomas, even if you stay. Eventually, everything you know—home, family, church, livelihood, your own body—will betray you. Death of loved ones, abandonment of children, grandchildren; the gradual apathy of friendships, the fall from moral rectitude of clergy and political leaders. Failures of medical professionals. You will be left with nothing but your own mind, and that if you’re lucky.

  Lucky? My mind is a hell. It replays, on endless loop, a single night in Chicago, then punishes itself for doing so.

  The practice of meditation is crucial. Eastern religions understand the importance of training the mind. In your case, you might think of it as being your own minister. You must, in a sense, preach to yourself.

  I thought the point of meditation was to empty the mind. To observe thoughts as they pass through the brain as one observes clouds drifting across the sky.

  But doesn’t emptying imply—indeed, require—the removal, first, of what fills the vessel? It is the articulation of thoughts which in fact renders them observable as separate from the self.

  Were I to articulate them it would sound like blasphemy. I would say possibly heretical things about the nature of erotic desire. I might not believe the things I say. I would say them anyhow. To see what I say, in order to know what I think, in order to observe. Maybe even detach.

  So say them.

  I’m afraid I’ll leave a giant ink stain on the history of Christendom if I do.

  How do you know unless you try?

  Fire Sermon

  Brothers and Sisters: a litany, a confession, a proposal.

  Where desire began: in third grade, my dark-haired friend Anika with the genius older brother whose parents let him turn his bedroom into a chemistry lab, his tree house into the place he slept at night. We weren’t allowed in the tree house, Anika and I, but we went up anyhow, lifted his air mattress to find the magazines that showed us our future selves: how our breasts might someday drape along our ribs, what a man might do to us, or two men, or a woman with the men. So many openings! Anika’s fingers quivered when she flipped pages, and something in their shape—nails bitten so short the angry underskin showed—loosened a space behind my navel. I liked the feeling. Like a downhill drop riding in the backseat. Other days I watched her fingers do other things—move checkers, divvy saltines, dress Barbies—but when I said, Your hands make my stomach feel shaky, she dropped the paper she was folding into a flapped pick-a-color fortune-teller and balled up her fingers. That’s weird, she said. Don’t look at them anymore. Fifth grade, Karen, greasy blond hair and a legato way of doing things—running, walking, speaking, she even blinked in slow motion. Her breasts were the first in our class to form triangular peaks beneath her T-shirts, until one day the triangles were half-spheres. In the girls’ bathroom she lifted her shirt: white, white, and in between, three tiny flowers with colored centers, petal pink, sky blue, mint green. The thrill of finding Easter eggs tucked in a tree root. At a sleepover I asked if I could try on the bra. Only if you let me try your retainer, she said. We made the exchange, me imagining her breasts attached to my chest and my saliva in her mouth, though she washed the retainer with soap and hot water before pressing it into her palate. Laura, whom everyone called The Queen, five-foot-eleven at sixteen years old, so shy she would crawl under the covers to change at bedtime, until the night she didn’t, she stood beside her bed, me sitting on its twin, already in my nightshirt—rows of plastic horses with lifted forelegs and tiny leather reins our audience—stood there in bra and underwear, looking at me, and unclasped. It was as if she were a time-lapse film of ripening fruit on a branch. How could such a thin body contain that—that much? What happened inside me, then, made me dive beneath my comforter. I couldn’t breathe. When I came out she was in her robe, sitting on the bed, brushing her hair. Shall we? she asked, meaning brush one another’s hair, something we’d been doing at sleepovers for years. Not tonight, I said, and there would never be another night, I stopped sleeping over that summer, and the following year, when I had a boyfriend and she sent me a letter, handwritten on notebook paper, saying that sometimes she missed me so much she thought about ending her life, I had pulled so far away that I’d forgotten what seeing her—what looking at her—had done to me.

  It was an easy transfer, female to male: the boy who sucked blood to the surface of my neck till I told him to stop, and who, when he stopped, I begged to keep going; the boy with acne who told everyone he’d had sex with me when in fact we’d never kissed; the boy who broke up with me because—he said—if I kept dating him I wouldn’t be a virgin anymore; the boy with epilepsy who touched my breast through clothing, and who cried when he didn’t get into Yale, having felt sure his disability would have given him an edge; the boy who showed me how to kiss his ear, how to suckle the lobe and hold—hold—and let my tongue quiver the skin against the roof of my mouth, how he was teaching me to do something else, though I didn’t realize it; and the boy who told me the Bible was a crock, I should ignore everything it and my parents and my church taught me and have sex with him, something I refused to do with any of them until college, when I stopped refusing and did it with Thomas, then married him. One and done. Shut the door on the possibility of another love, or another kind of love.

  But what I want to tell you now, Brothers and Sisters—what I realize twenty-five years later: the Indian friend in graduate school, a poet, who came back from a trip to Delhi and told me about her massage, The masseuse didn’t stop short at my breasts—they never do in India—and I let her touch, I couldn’t help it, it felt, so, fucking, good. Men didn’t make her feel that way, she was a disappointment to men, didn’t know how to orgasm with them; also a disappointment to her family because of her inability to enjoy men, and perhaps I might help her, married as I was? I think you’d be good for me, you could show me things, how
to enjoy myself with a man. She pulled me into her lap, in her dorm room, reached up inside my shirt and traced her fingers over the cup of my bra; and though earlier that day when we’d been out walking I’d noticed, with a soft pulse in my groin, the heavy side-sway of her breasts beneath her tunic, when she pulled me into her lap and reached inside my shirt, I felt no arousal, only fear. Disgust, even. We’re having an affair, she told our friends later that night, in a flirtatious tone I’d never heard her use. No we’re not, I said. She left me alone then. A week later, as I sat beside her in the library, we were friends again. She taught me to write my name in Hindi. She was reading a poem by the sixth Dalai Lama—It’s called Wings of the … Crane, she said, or it could be Pelican—and she read a few lines aloud, first in Hindi, then in English, translating slowly: At the tip of a certain mountain, the moon rises from the east like the sun. When it rises in this way, when what is meant for night comes from morning’s—actually, daytime is better—from daytime’s direction, I remember the face of the one close to my heart. I watched her hand moving backward across the page, thought of the mind beneath her body and when she looked at me I noticed the way her lips curled up and out, and the dark stains beneath her eyes, and I thought of how her poetry readings were religious incantations, all sound and rhythm, and how she’d cut off her hair because she said men found her beautiful and she couldn’t give them what they wanted.

  I could kiss you now, I said.

  We already had our moment, she said.

  More: the documentary filmmaker with the buzz cut and nose ring who, I thought, would be classically beautiful if she allowed her hair to grow; the barista with a tattoo addiction and tongue piercing; the yoga teacher whose assists in half-pigeon involved rubbing my inner thighs and pulling them in opposite directions, as if he could split me in two. And M., my Aquinas professor, who suggested, after a long run together, that we strip down and swim in a secluded pond. I’ve never done that, I said, and he said, Done what, and I said, Skinny-dipped. He took off his clothes and went in. I followed. The water was freezing but we didn’t mind. He got out and I watched him climb the bank, grab the rope swing, and drop in. We took turns, swinging out farther each time, climb bank, grab rope, jump on, wrap legs, swing out, let go. Before getting dressed, we lay on our backs in a sunny spot on the prickly grass and I told him, without turning my head to look, that he was beautiful. I felt perhaps something of the sort should be said and as the older of us by a year felt perhaps I should be the one to say it. I think the same about you, he said.