Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  After two years of a dizzying rhythm of jealousy and reconciliation, Stark had arrived at a new stage with her, in which the baring of reasons for their trespasses against each other went on in a kind of calm. His, now, were merely rote flirtation, undertaken more to retaliate than for any interest another woman could have for him; hers had more weight: confessed cravings, late-night phone calls, disappearances. He was outdone in what his ex-wife had called his “ways.” Now he had no ways, only the relics of an old habit.

  “I have good luck,” Katya would say, on a day when she was soothing him. “Women look at him, this doctor.” She had a rare smile, wide, with the mouth closed. He watched, with a dawning hopelessness, the slow elongation of the curved lips. It was a smile he thought of as Russian, the expression of a pleasure half savored, half scorned.

  Gradually she came closer. The chases down the sidewalk—during which he gave thanks for his hours in the gym—the recriminations and avowals, the shouts and even slaps: all these, he told his partner Bernstein, had been leading somewhere.

  “Right,” Bernstein said. “Go for it.”

  Twice she had moved in with him and out again, but this third time her mood as she lugged in her houseplants was sober. She closed the door, leaned on it with her eyes closed, shutting out whatever had been going on with somebody he had not been able to identify, though he knew it was not the Russian or the ex-husband. She threw armloads of clothing onto the couch. “I will stay, now.”

  This final return came at the beginning of the second year, the brimming year when he told his friends, “Seriously, I know what they mean by ‘a new life.’” They walked holding hands, or even with arms around each other. They produced, she said, an energy field of their own. “I won’t even ask what you’re talking about,” he said. If his daughter Lynn had said such a thing in her New Age phase, he would have given an irritated chuckle. Katya said, “It is how we are, in my country. We are not closed to the great world, like you. We have souls. Look at you. And”—her homesickness, her simmering nationalism could surface at any time, out of the schoolbooks of the child she had been when she left—“if we fight a war in Afghanistan, everyone is thinking, talking about war. All the time. We do not let our little sons go to the war while we have a picnic. You don’t know about this. You have only daughters.” He did not remind her that she had no children at all.

  He was not going to pretend to perceive an energy field, but his senses had indeed unsealed themselves. Backing out of the garage, in his own alley he caught the smell of paint, roses, individual Dumpsters, lilac. “Louder!” She turned up the radio. “This doc-tor! He must have quiet, that is what he likes, so he can hear little sounds with his—what-is-it. Loud, forte, he does not know. Music! What is that, to him?”

  He found her a ring with a chunk of emerald set in ruby chips. She said she would marry him at Christmas. Early in the New Year, at the latest. “Right now is early in the new year,” he said, for it was still April.

  “Next year. But it will be a bad year. Another of your wars is coming.”

  He caught himself; he had almost said, “What does that have to do with us?”

  Then, impossibly, absurdly, he was in a cemetery, walking alone to his car. He was at his door, fitting his key in the lock. He was on the stairs, he was in the bedroom opening the double closet she had taken over. He was stepping inside, he was standing draped in silk sleeves.

  Impossibly, he was once more a man with a good car and a gym locker. Messages on his voicemail from women. The packed referral list of which he had once been so proud. Yet he was not that man. It was as if he had gone up the Amazon, or to Borneo, or some unvisited place, where he had landed without the labor of travel, and once there found every tie cut but the one to Katya. He felt as if he had been taken inside a cave, one where an unknown organism lived that had not yet entered civilization, whether poison or cure. Because Katya was gone—one minute she had been with him and the next gone, with her death somehow part of the cave—he found himself alone with what had happened. No one could see the organism in him, the way you could see a tan or a loss of weight when someone went away and came back. Death—of course everyone around him in the hospital and the medical school was familiar with death. Nothing exotic there. Yes, his girlfriend, his fiancée, had died, and they were sorry. No one knew he had not come back.

  A shame came over him. In her harshness, her casual insults, Katya had been right: to be an American was to be a fool. To hear no warning. To have no idea what was wrong with you. To be overtaken by events you had never foreseen, and to smile. Others in the world did not smile.

  She didn’t mean anything political; she had no politics.

  He saw that the word adore could be used for something unrelated to love. Could it really have been he, Stark, who had tried in his heedless contentment to convert another person to decent, domestic, reliable love? At night he sat up in bed and grasped his head.

  In the daytime he was filled with a dull apprehension, as if something were on its way that he must avoid. He had to hunch his shoulders and wait, the way he had seen so many do after an MI, not filling their lungs.

  He didn’t postpone any appointments; he went in to work every day. His clinic manager Shawna looked away from his eyes.

  At home he would be standing in the light of the giant refrigerator Katya had chosen, in her love of appliances, and it would dawn on him that there was no food in it and the house was pounding with her music—audible no doubt to the neighbors—to which he had forgotten to listen.

  “He does not know Dvorak from Debussy, the foolish man. The jerk. The musical jerk.” She loved American slang. “It is all you have, in your language. I love this word you have, jerk! Of course we have such words! But we have so much more that you do not have because you have no souls. Oh, don’t argue. You are nothing but—jerks! Listen, Doctor, what you call the bug, the ladybug, with your no imagination, we call bozhya korovka, little cow of god.”

  He had opened the case and taken out her violin, and now it lay on the bedroom chair. Something held him there scraping a string vertically with his thumbnail to produce a thin squawk.

  At the funeral he had met her ex-husband, the man she had stayed with in that year, twice that he knew of. His hand was shaken by a man with baggy eyes and a paunch, who had come to the service in an open-necked shirt. He looked like a drinker. What did he do? Stark could not remember, though he could remember tearing at the phone book looking for the man’s number, trembling with hatred. The man seemed to be sizing him up in turn, and finding satisfaction in what he saw.

  After the funeral, Stark called his daughter Lynn. “You were talking to him. What did he say?”

  “What do you care, Dad? He said she would have wanted to die while she was pretty.”

  “Pretty! Jesus Christ she was never pretty.”

  “He said pretty. Dad, I came to the funeral, OK? Katya was not my favorite person but I feel bad for you. But this is not what I want to be talking about. I do not appreciate—”

  “Did he say she thought she was going to die?”

  “No. God, Dad.”

  “What else?”

  “He said she was about to come back to him. The guy’s a mess.”

  “I guess she mowed him down,” Stark said with a kind of pride.

  STARK HAD AN ex-wife, Rosalie, but the years of getting through medical school and a residency and raising two children were far behind them both. Nevertheless, when their younger daughter Kelly was in town, Lynn got them all together. On a Friday three weeks after the funeral, early in the afternoon he called Rosalie and asked her to meet him for a drink. “No, not after work,” he said. “I’m leaving now.” He saw his stiff face glaring at him in the window glass.

  He told his clinic manager, “Shawna, I’m going to have to call it a day.”

  “You should, you’re getting that flu,” Shawna said obligingly. Long ago, before her marriage, he had had a weekend or two with Shawna. She had suf
fered, liking Rosalie. But later he had seen her through her first son’s atrial septal defect, and she was loyal. He tore off his white coat. He had never before left with patients in the waiting room.

  Glimpsing the changes in Rosalie, he always felt a jab of protective dismay. Still, recently she had become involved with a fireman who, it turned out, was hardly any older than Katya. Rosalie had met him when, all alone in the old house, she had a chimney fire. Since taking up with the fireman she was using more makeup and her dark eyes had gone small and sparkling. When she leaned forward the skin at her low neckline formed crisscross lines. There was no way to warn her not to lean across a table when she was with the fireman. “She’s talking about fires,” Lynn said. “She quotes him. She’s a nutcase.”

  Rosalie said, “What are you telling me? Is the family suing you?” From Lynn he had heard that when the fireman was around, Rosalie had a new, careless tone. She knew the pride he took in having had no lawsuits. Where was her soft heart? He felt tears come into his eyes.

  “Good Lord, Stark. I know you didn’t miss anything. I know you took care of her. I’m sorry, honey. Oh, dear.” Rosalie had always cried when someone else did, even the children at times. She wiped her eyes; she had one of those manicures with white at the tips. “OK, look. Here’s what you do. Go to the cabin. Go, and take it easy for a few days. Just lie around. There’s a TV now. I got a satellite dish.” The cabin was hers now; he hadn’t been there since the divorce.

  She said he didn’t look good; he looked as if he had just crawled out of a cave. “Here.” She dug in her purse. “Here’s the key. Make sure you get it back to me because it’s the only one I have now.” In the old days they would have had three or four keys to the cabin, on hooks and stashed in drawers. But he couldn’t inquire. Her tears had made him worse—and hadn’t those eyes once seemed to fill her whole face when they shimmered with tears? He got up abruptly and went to the men’s room. What was he doing leaning on a bathroom door with his eyes fixed on a hand dryer? With a diffuse spasm in his chest, a need to bear down after catching a breath, as if to keep something where it belonged. The dryer had a stiff logo of joined hands. From the wall the urinals gaped with their stains. How easily people ignored the real acts of the body, even people like himself, doctors who saw into the interior clenching, the explosions and expulsions. To how many people had he said the word spasm over the years, in reassurance?

  When he opened his fist the key fell onto the floor. He picked it up and washed it. He dried his hands under the gasp of the blower.

  “We haven’t been over there in a month,” Rosalie said when he came back and sank into his chair. “Somebody needs to check on the place. We were going to go this weekend but I can’t, I’m off to lose weight.”

  We were going to go. She liked to hint at that part of her life. “You don’t need to lose weight,” he said. Her hips had squared a bit but she was small and still compact.

  “Oh, now I do. Now I do. Lynn’s taking me away to a spa. We’re going to eat spinach leaves and do yoga and meditate. We’ll have four days. So promise me you’ll go. I mean it, Stark.”

  He thanked her in the parking lot. “Just go over there and take it easy,” she said again, as if she were one of their daughters, looking out for him. He didn’t go home; he drove straight out of town and into the mountains. He hadn’t packed anything; he would have to wear what he had put on that morning. His feet hurt, in his good shoes. At Washington Pass he pulled in and changed into the running shoes he kept in the trunk. He left them untied. Because he’s a bum, he said to himself, in Katya’s voice. He walked on old snow that still, in May, covered the short path to the overlook, and gazed down at the dizzying switchbacks. If you climbed over the fence and dropped, you would go straight down hundreds of feet before there was a thing to stop you.

  On the way back he made new footprints, in the grip of a childish, sentimental urge to point himself out to somebody.

  At the cabin—which was not a cabin at all but a log and timber house built with the first real money he had made, with five bedrooms and a river-rock fireplace, quilts Rosalie had found in country stores, scattered floor cushions still in their buttoned denim—he realized he had brought no food. He found a potato to slice and fried it in olive oil in a familiar pan. He was not one who advised his patients not to fry. How would anyone who lived alone not fry? And Katya—who liked to present herself as a peasant and believed, or said she believed, that a fried potato was a meal if you had a glass of vodka to drink with it—Katya could have fried everything she ate. What use would any curbs have been? Should he have said more than he did, when he sent her to Bernstein? This was a young woman. A woman with nothing, seemingly, the matter with her. Before the day she seized his hands she had come to his office twice with the complaint of having lost or almost lost consciousness. Something about the lazy way she related this history made him doubt it. Nevertheless he proceeded, because persistence and care were what he was known for. He uncovered a common thing.

  He must have suspected, by the time she made the third appointment, that she came only to see him. Over the years he had accumulated a few patients who did that. And had that affected his judgment, made him less careful? Exactly what had she said, that first time? And what about afterwards, with Bernstein?

  “Nothing. Nothing but what we saw,” Bernstein said. “The thing might have showed up the next time, it might not. Could have forced it in the lab? You didn’t do that; I didn’t do that. A year she was my patient. Don’t beat yourself up.”

  He should never have put his weight on her, with that heart inside her that was going to stop. He should never have raised his voice. What had he been thinking of? She had slapped him. He had thrown her down on the bed.

  But he had not killed her by throwing her on the bed. She had stood up to slap him again and lived another year. Standing in the kitchen eating his potato from the pan, he groaned.

  He made his way along the downhill path, overgrown now, to the river, which was running so high it had carved out a new branch. He couldn’t see in the semidark whether the branch veered back to the river where the woods began, or tore on into the trees. In the middle of the two courses was an island, with a big cottonwood at either end. Loud, tumbling water had claimed so much ground that he could not be sure exactly where he was. It blocked his way to the sand between the two trees where he wanted to sit. Once he and the girls had dragged a picnic table all the way out to the river’s edge. The table was long gone—stolen, Rosalie said. Bikers. They snooped around the empty vacation places now. A picnic table taken away on a motorcycle? “They scout stuff out and they come back for it,” she said defensively. He had to consider the question of whether he had encouraged this kind of thinking in Rosalie, who had been so ready to take his word. How conventional he had been, despite his “ways.”

  “Thiefs should keep what they get.” So Katya said, haughtily. “Or how can we have balance? Not like those guys in the movie.” They had seen a movie about a heist. “Real thiefs, I mean.”

  “So should they get this ring? If they don’t hurt this hand?”

  Why had he said this? She had hidden the hand with the emerald on it behind her.

  The branch was running fast, too deep to wade across. Deep enough to be black. You could see tall grass being rushed and flattened. There was no real bank. He put his foot in. Instead of dragging at it, the current lifted it like a leaf and pushed him onto the other leg, making him totter. Had the river ever come this far? He shook his wet foot, his body creeping with goose pimples.

  His ears were full of the loudness of water, and for a moment on the path he had the sensation the river was moving up behind him. Lifting his head he saw, standing in the kitchen, a woman. Tall. God, God . . .

  Of course it was not her. This woman was heavy. The woman was just standing in the kitchen without a sound, even though she must have seen him coming up the steps. She must have seen him at some distance, a figure approaching the hous
e. She had his spatula in her hand, and she was holding the other hand out as if to soothe him. “Hi there,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

  A man stepped into the kitchen. “I’m Ray Rollins.”

  “I said somebody was here.” The woman held up the spatula with a surprising calm. “We were out there admiring your car.”

  “Whoa!” the man said. “I don’t know, man, this is—here I thought we—thought we had the place. This weekend.” So they weren’t burglars. Or probably not. But then the man said uneasily, “What’s the date, anyway?”

  “Well now,” said Stark, “it’s the twenty-first, and I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be here.” He wasn’t going to say “God damn it, I built this house,” or anything like that. He wasn’t going to say Rosalie had given him the key because that would give away her name, if they were burglars.

  “Whoa,” the man said again. Ray. Ray something. He had a crew cut. He looked like a football coach. “So now, did you . . . you must know the owner?”

  Stark said, “I do.”

  The man came forward with his hand out. “Ray Rollins,” he said for the second time. He gripped like a blood pressure cuff.

  “Phil Bernstein,” said Stark. He wasn’t going to get into any explanations.

  “This is Beverly,” Rollins said after a second.

  The woman said, “Beverly Lanier,” and held out her hand. She smiled as if the situation struck her as nothing out of the ordinary. She turned to the man, and because she was big herself, Stark saw for the first time how large and muscular were the arms, now folded, of the man standing beside her, how thick his neck. Not somebody he could tackle, if the two were there after all to steal from an empty house. But wasn’t the guy too clean-cut to be a thief? The girl, surely, too simple. “Well,” she said cheerfully to Stark, “you were here first.”