Everything Burns

by Vincent Zandri

  “Freelance writer David Bourenhem has written for dozens of newspapers, magazines, journals, and more. He’s also published short stories in some of the leading reviews and was a top-ten finalist in the William Kennedy Screenplay Prize. He’s presently available to assist you and your business with all your public relations writing needs. Don’t just be the best you can be. Be better than the best. Contact David today.”

  I sit back and peer at the page like I’m waiting for something to pop out at me, like a crazy clown head from a jack-in-the-box. There’s a link for journalism and another for public relations campaigns. Another for testimonials. The final one reads, “Screenplay Sample.”

  I click onto the screenplay link. How can I resist?

  When the page pops up, I see words on a page in the familiar format. It’s the title that glares out at me.

  LISA

  by

  David Bourenhem

  There it is again. The dry mouth, the beating heart, the heated adrenaline coursing through the veins and capillaries in my brain. I want to read the sample, but I don’t want to read it, either. But, like driving by a car wreck on the highway, you can’t help but crane your neck to look.

  FADE IN:

  Scene 1: Interior. Bedroom. Night.

  All around the room, candles are burning. All the lights are turned off, and the firelight flickers off the wall. Sexy music can be heard in the background. Grinding kind of music. The atmosphere is most definitely devilish, bacchanalian even. We see two naked figures occupying a bed. The early middle-aged man, RANDY, is on the bottom facing the ceiling while the thirty-something LISA is on top of him, riding him, her long, lush black hair bobbing and swaying with every thrust of her hips. They are both beautiful people and their skin is soaked with a sheen of sweat. Obviously they have been making love for a long time, as if they cannot possibly get enough of one another. As if they need to devour one another in order to survive.

  LISA

  Do you love me?

  RANDY (between breaths)

  I love you . . . with all my heart.

  LISA

  Then make me cum. Make me cum hard. Do it now.

  RANDY

  I’m your slave, Lisa. I’ll do anything for you. Anything.

  LISA

  I know you will.

  LISA lets loose with a climactic scream as the flames on the candles flicker menacingly.

  Scene 2: Interior bedroom. Later.

  The couple is lying on their backs, post coitus. They are staring up at the ceiling as the candle flames make their skin glow.

  LISA

  You meant what you said?

  RANDY

  Meant what, baby?

  LISA

  That you would do anything for me?

  RANDY (giggling)

  What are you, Herod’s wife?

  LISA, turns over onto her left side to face RANDY. She obviously means business.

  LISA

  I mean it, Randy. I’m not fucking around.

  RANDY (face turning serious)

  Okay, I get it. What is it you would like me to do?

  She slowly reaches out, starts running her fingers through his chest hair. We see a close-up of the long, stiletto-like fingernails, which are painted fire-engine red.

  LISA

  Would you be willing to kill for me?

  RANDY (swallowing)

  What the hell do you mean?

  LISA

  If I asked you to kill someone for me, would you do it?

  RANDY

  What a question, Lisa. I guess no one has ever asked me that before.

  LISA

  I’m asking you now.

  RANDY

  Who, exactly? Who would you like me to kill?

  LISA (putting her mouth to his ear, whispering)

  My husband.

  RANDY’s eyes go wide. He swallows again.

  RANDY

  How exactly would I go about killing your husband?

  LISA

  With fire.

  RANDY

  Jesus, you want to burn him?

  LISA

  I want him to suffer.

  Once more the candle flames flicker almost violently, while one or more goes out, as if an evil wind has just passed through the room. And it has.

  I stop reading there.

  I stop reading before my heart spontaneously combusts and burns its way out of my rib cage. Are the Randy and the Lisa in the screenplay the true-life David and Lisa? Naturally, I can only hope that this screenplay is just David’s way of having fun, because in my heart of hearts, I could never imagine Lisa even considering something like homicide, much less talking it over in bed with the new boyfriend.

  Death by fire.

  “Ashes, ashes,” I whisper to myself. “We all fall down and we keep on falling.”

  My eyes still locked on the screenplay, I aim the cursor arrow at the X in the upper right-hand corner and make the words on the page disappear from sight and mind.

  Chapter 15

  My detective work continues.

  Taking a moment to breathe, I then click back to the home page, where I find several links to Bourenhem’s personal social networks. I go to Facebook. The face that appears on his profile picture is the same one that I recognize from his website home page. For his cover or banner photo, he’s got a picture of his laptop and whatever he’s working on. I try to look at the words on the laptop screen, but they are all a blur. Like I said, this isn’t the first time I’ve looked at Lisa’s ex’s Facebook page. This is just the first time I’ve looked at it since Lisa and I have been back together. It’s the first time that I really care to look at it, if that makes any sense.

  My eyes scroll down to his latest post.

  “Lisa is getting her eyes operated on today . . . Good Luck Leese!!!”

  The post is followed by one of those yellow smiley faces and three big Xs.

  XXX

  Located directly below the post is a “Like” option. It’s only been “Liked” one time. I click on it to see who the “Liker” is, but it’s not the least bit necessary, since I know full well who it is. I know it in my gut.

  It comes from Lisa.

  It gets worse. Because she’s also typed “XOX” in the “Write a Comment” area. Makes me feel like there’s more than just phone calls going on between them.

  My eyes gravitate toward Bourenhem’s vital stats.

  He describes himself as self-employed at “Fictionalizer, Fibber, Lover.” Witty. He went to Siena College and lives in the historic old city of Troy, just across the Hudson River from the Albany skyline. He also lists his relationship status as “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re fucking single, pal,” I whisper as if he can hear me.

  I click on his photos. There’s a bunch of pictures of him and Lisa together. Even now that they’re supposed to be broken up, I see him arm in arm with my woman. I wonder if I ever looked at the pictures before. If I did, it’s only now registering how much they bother me, causing my body to enter into a slow burn.

  In the first picture they’re drunk and all smiles at some bar, who knows where. In another, David, Lisa, and Anna are standing before a huge pumpkin on a brilliant fall day at a local “pick your own pumpkin” farm. They look like one big happy family.

  Yet another picture shows the threesome at some amusement park, Anna riding a carousel, both her hands gripping the thick metal pole that supports the white horse, her face all smiles.

  One more photo has David dressed in a tuxedo and Lisa in a minidress and black stockings. They’re holding hands at some kind of ritzy function, and judging from the way they’re looking into one another’s eyes, they appear to be absolutely in love.

  The date on the picture is
a curious one. It’s only a little over two months ago. Maybe one or two days prior to our reuniting on the day my father dropped dead of a heart attack.

  I’ve had enough.

  I log off Facebook entirely since I can’t bear to look at David and Lisa’s lives together anymore. Lives together when they’re supposed to be separate. In fact, I come close to tossing the laptop across the room. But that wouldn’t be very good for my new novel or my career in general.

  What the hell is going on here? How can it be that the two of them attended a black-tie function together just days before we got back together? Did they attend only as friends? Anyone looking at the photograph can tell they are more than just friends. That they are in love. In love and lust.

  Being back with Lisa for the past two months has been like a dream come true. I have my wife and daughter back at a time in my life when I can enjoy far more professional successes than train wrecks. At a time when writer’s block isn’t a problem. At a time when my obsession with fire is under control. But suddenly I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff and peering down into a deep pit of fire. And I’m losing my balance.

  From where I’m sitting at the dining room table, I spot the keys to my Escape sitting out on the kitchen counter. They beckon me. I go into the kitchen, snatch them up, and leave the house knowing that what I’m about to do is the wrong thing. But then, it’s the only thing for me to do.

  I’m about to drive to the medical center and demand an explanation from Lisa. Demand nothing less than the naked truth.

  Chapter 16

  What is it that draws us back to the broken places?

  Maybe it’s some kind of human perversity and stubbornness. This desire to rein in something that seems, on the surface anyway, to be forever out of your control. Of wanting to put things right even if it means going back in time and reentering a life that ended up causing so much pain in the first place.

  Love has a lot to do with it, of course. Obsessive love.

  I never stopped loving Lisa, even when things were at their worst and I was approaching bankruptcy and a nervous breakdown (the former didn’t quite happen, but the latter struck like a firestorm). Throughout the years of our separation, I never had a bad thing to say about her, even while romancing Rachael, whose predilections for hard work, good food, red wine, and sex fit mine perfectly. I suppose that’s because I found it impossible to sever the bonds with Lisa entirely, no matter how many times I was required to sign our divorce papers.

  It didn’t help that we shared the greatest emotional attachment two people can share: our daughter. It certainly didn’t help that I could find myself sitting in a park on a beautiful day in another part of the world altogether, like Paris for instance, and upon seeing a young father walking hand in hand with his little girl I would suddenly be reduced to tears.

  The divorce didn’t really work for us in one important aspect: Lisa and I didn’t break off all unnecessary contact. In the modern digital world, you’re never totally disconnected from an ex, no matter how hard you try to unplug. Not that we tried. We e-mailed, texted, talked on the phone, and, on more than one occasion, engaged in phone sex. Did it when we were seeing other people. There it is, the admission of the century.

  I’ll admit something else too: I never once gave up hope that we would one day reunite, no matter how often she’d remind me just how different we’d become as the years of our separation wore on. Love is strange, but obsession is stranger. I’d become consumed with both.

  I did quite a lot of web research on the topic of getting back together with your ex. It’s a touchy subject to say the least. An entire science has been constructed around it and, for the psychoanalysts of the world, it remains both a topic of fascination and a significant boon to the old bottom line.

  I talked the matter over with my psychotherapist, and in the end, he issued me a stern warning: “If you go back to a relationship that didn’t work out the first time, it will not only fail a second time, it will fail harder and more painfully.” What’s the old saying? Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.

  Still, I persisted. Still, I obsessed.

  I ignored my shrink, shrugged him off as an academic who had no idea about real life and real love. I consulted with my dad, with Blood, and my agent in New York. Christ, I even looked up at heaven and asked Tommy and Patrick what they would do if they were in my shoes. No one, dead or alive, would tell me what I wanted to hear. Without fail they all said, “Don’t go back!” Or, as my agent—a rather hardened, broad-chested man of Sicilian descent—put it: “We have a saying in Italy. Once a toy is broken, you can’t fix it. You must toss it into the furnace and find a new one.”

  Knowing my, let’s call it, “complicated” relationship with fire, you’d think he might’ve chosen another metaphor. Fire burns and destroys. I know that better than anybody. But fire is more than that. Fire can also transform, purify, redeem. Words like his could only make me more determined to become the exception to the rule. To raise the broken toy from the ashes, as it were.

  I suspect Lisa felt much the same way.

  Case in point: Once, about six months ago, not long before Rachael and I broke up for good, Lisa called out of the blue and asked if I wouldn’t mind interrupting my writing schedule to take her to the automotive repair shop so that she could pick up her Land Rover, which was being fixed. The vehicle had been a gift from her parents, who’d elected not to pay the routine maintenance bills on the gas-guzzling foreign 4x4 for the simple reason that Lisa’s character might benefit from bearing at least some financial responsibility, which is precisely how Lisa put it . . . with a smile.

  I picked her up and naturally I asked her where David might be, that I should be elected to do the taxiing honors. She informed me that he was busy with an interview for a local pop culture newspaper. But then, turning away from me, she admitted that they had not been getting along so well as of late. A confession that sent a sudden wave of heated optimism coursing up and down my blue veins. David, she said, for as sweet and gentle as he was, lacked direction and ambition. He could never properly take care of her or Anna.

  “He’ll never be the writer you are,” she said. “He just doesn’t have what it takes.”

  “I thought he was writing a book,” I said.

  “He did write a book,” she said, eyeing me. “Years ago, before we were a couple. Remember? He came to the house to get your opinion on it.” Again with this insistent story of hers. “But it was impossible for him to get it published and he hasn’t been able to write one since.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Years before, our relationship deteriorated over my obsession with my work and, at the time, a dreadful writer’s block that just happened to coexist with the precise duration of our marriage. At least, that’s the way I remember it, not that I remember a whole lot about that time . . . that horrid, dreadful time when Lisa and I lived in a state of siege while she began rekindling her friendship with a man named David Bourenhem. Now she was telling me that David was able to write a book prior to their getting together, but in all the years they had been a couple, he hadn’t written a thing, other than cheesy public relations copy.

  Was there a pattern developing here? Was Lisa, as lovely as she was, some sort of anti-muse?

  I could only shake my head and smile. I was making too much out of nothing. But as we got onto the highway in what was then my pride and joy, an open-topped Jeep CJ, I told her that I had enough ambition for both David and me combined. She shook her head sadly and looked out the window, no doubt sorely reminded of her bad choices in men.

  Then, turning back to me, she turned her frown upside down.

  “Rachael doesn’t mind you doing me a favor like this?” she said. “From what I’m told, she has a temper.”

  “The girlfriend and I aren’t getting on so well as of late either.”

 
The smile never left her smooth face. “You doing okay?” she said, gently placing her hand on my thigh.

  “Sure,” I said, feeling the electricity of her touch. “We had what’s known in the publishing business as a very good run.”

  But what I wasn’t letting on about was the entire truth of the matter. Rachael loved me very much. Too much, maybe. She wanted to spend her life with me, perhaps even have a child with me. But more than once she’d caught me texting or e-mailing Lisa. More than once she’d heard me utter Lisa’s name in my sleep. More than once she’d snagged me staring at Lisa’s Facebook page. We were still together, but Rachael had made it very clear she could not, would not go on with my still being in love with my ex-wife. I was either going to commit to “us” entirely, or she was going to have no choice but to douse the flame that was “us.” As Lisa and I bounced around on a bright, sunny, cool day in my Jeep on the way to the auto repair shop, that flame was officially in the process of being doused.

  Later on, as we exited the highway and began driving through a scenic stretch of country road, Lisa asked me what I had seen in Rachael in the first place. My answer might not have been one she liked, but I told her the truth. That Rachael was beautiful, gifted, funny, intelligent, ambitious, and what’s more, independent. She was currently taking the New York City art community by storm, and I found something entirely sexy and stimulating in that. Maybe it wasn’t exactly what Lisa wanted to hear, considering her role as a full-time mom, but I saw no reason at that point not to reveal the absolute truth. After all, we were divorced.

  “So how is she in bed?” she posed after a weighted pause.

  I shot her a look, but didn’t answer.

  She turned away and faced the open road. “That good, huh?”

  We fell back into a silence that was neither uncomfortable nor comfortable as we drove further on into the country, flanked by the thick trees that were filled with the rustic golden colors of early autumn. The wind filled the Jeep and made Lisa’s long dark brown hair blow back beautifully away from her face. Soon we came upon an old, abandoned farmhouse that was set inside a patch of overgrown second-growth woods. Lisa suddenly perked up and demanded that I slow down and pull into the driveway.