Tinderbox

by Lisa Gornick

  Rachida, who has been staying in the residents’ dormitory, will remain there until the end of June, when her fellowship will be over, after which she and Adam and Omar will return to Detroit. Adam will stay at Caro’s. When Omar is discharged, he will move into Caro’s as well. Larry, who has rescued and had cleaned what of their clothes could be salvaged, will go back to Tucson at the end of the week.

  On her end, she has made decisions with a certitude that has rendered them simple despite their magnitude. Most significantly, she has decided not to return to living in the house. The insurance adjuster, a surprisingly gentle and patient man, visited her on her second day in the hospital. Her policy will cover six months of temporary housing. He has given her the names of two contractors who specialize in fire renovations. Her office suite is luckily undamaged. Once she is ready to resume seeing patients, she will be able to do so there. After the house is presentable again, she will sell it and buy an apartment where she can also keep an office.

  Caro has found her a furnished apartment to which she goes straight from the hospital: the home of a soap-opera star who has been written out of her part so that she is subletting her Trump Tower thirty-sixth-floor one-bedroom to go live uptown herself. “A seesaw,” Myra says to Caro. “One person’s misfortune, another’s opportunity.”

  The apartment is extravagantly comfortable, with towel warmers and a heated floor in the bathroom and a remote control that operates the sunshades, but impersonal and bland, so that Myra feels as though she has been airlifted into an advertisement in a glossy design magazine. On her first day out of the hospital, she lies on the couch looking down at the city so far below it is sanitized of garbage and rat droppings and sound, save for a whooshing that, were she not able to see the horse-drawn carriages lined along Central Park South and the cars, tiny as toys, rounding Columbus Circle, she would have mistaken for wind.

  In the evening, Adam comes to visit. His fingernails are untrimmed and he needs a haircut.

  Myra waits for him to settle into the white leather slipper chair before telling him that she will be selling the house.

  “Are you sure?” Adam blurts, as though she might have jotted down a piece of information incorrectly.

  “I am, darling. The fire was just the kick in the pants. I love the house. It’s where I raised you and Caro. But the two of you have been gone for a long time now. It’s time for me to live a different way.” She doesn’t say what she has thought countless times since the fire: that if she hadn’t delayed for so long selling the house, an avoidance, really, of acknowledging that the era of raising her children is long past, she would not have taken in Adam and Rachida and Omar. Would have left Adam to figure out how to manage here in the city without her. Would not have hired Eva.

  18

  The day after Caro settles her mother into the temporary apartment, she returns to work. It is a relief to find everything the same: Simon, still wearing her old Harvard sweatshirt, still lingering by the bakery stoop, the Christmas lights strewn over the door even though it is late March, the yeasty smell of the soft Spanish rolls ready for the slabs of orange cheese.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” Simon says, “long time no see. You been in Tahiti with your boyfriend?”

  “I wish. My mother had a fire in her house.”

  “Bummer. Real bummer.”

  “It is. How’ve you been?”

  “You can keep a secret, right?”

  Caro raises an eyebrow.

  “This kid in the neighborhood spliced some wires and got me cable in my squat.” Simon grins. “I got HBO now!”

  Caro smiles. It is the first time she has smiled since the fire. For a moment, everything feels okay. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get us something to eat.”

  19

  It is late afternoon, Myra’s first excursion out of the soap-opera star’s apartment since she left the hospital four days ago—a doctor’s appointment and a visit with Omar. Her porcine dressings have been removed and the burn doctors have declared what they describe as good epithelialization on the wound site, but she still feels a deep fatigue, a heaviness in her limbs, a constant awareness of her sapped energy.

  She and Larry are seated on opposite sides of Omar’s hospital bed, watching him sleep. Adam has gone back to Caro’s. Rachida will be arriving soon. Mumbling so that at first she’s not even sure what he’s saying, Larry asks if she will have dinner with him tonight, his last night in New York.

  “Okay.”

  “Really?” Larry grins like a fifteen-year-old. “The concierge at the Stanhope is usually able to get early reservations at Daniel.”

  “It would be wasted on me. Especially now. And I don’t feel like dressing up with bandages still covering half my stomach. Let’s just go someplace simple.”

  Myra suggests a small French restaurant on upper Broadway, a place where she’s been with Caro. Seven o’clock, so she can rest first but still not be out too late. When she arrives, Larry is already seated at a table in the window alcove in the front. He stands to kiss her cheek. His skin is smooth, just shaven. In his cashmere sports coat and Cartier watch, he looks overdressed and too prosperous for the place.

  She recommends a few dishes that she’s had before—the fluke, the ocean trout, the vegetable terrine—and leaves Larry to select the wine. They chat for a few moments about how well Omar is doing. Then Larry leans forward in his chair. “Henry called me this afternoon from Willow. The walk-through before the closing was today. He went to check the house first, and it seems that Eva did come back. The note Caro wrote was gone and the mailbox was empty.”

  Myra nods. When Caro told her that Eva had left the scarf Myra had given her at Christmas, Myra had thought she would come back.

  “I haven’t told Caro yet. Do you think I should?”

  “Why not?”

  “She felt terrible about making the police report. I think she imagined Eva in one of those nightmare scenes from the movies when dogs and men with nightsticks surround some poor, vulnerable person. Then, afterward, she said she had the impression that the report would go in a filing cabinet and nothing would be done. She didn’t like that either.”

  “She was filling in for me. Eva was my responsibility.”

  “So you wouldn’t tell her?”

  “I would tell her. She has a right to know. And we don’t need the burden of another secret.”

  Larry looks at her quizzically.

  “Eva had a lot of secrets.”

  The waiter arrives with the bottle of wine. Myra stares out the window while Larry goes through the silly tasting ritual. She waits until they are alone again to continue. “I think there are only two people whom I’ve failed with a capital F. Eva was one of them.”

  “She was crazy long before she came to New York. If anyone is to blame, it’s your cousin. She should have warned you.”

  “Ursula really didn’t know her. She just wanted Eva out of Alicia’s and her hair. Eva’s troubles go way back. But we, I, made her come entirely unglued.”

  It surprises Myra that she does not feel with Larry a sanction against talking about Eva. Perhaps it is because he is a physician, so it seems in some way almost collegial, within the confines allowed by professional ethics. Or has what Eva’s done—or, to be fair, what Myra suspects Eva did—released Myra from any covenants?

  “I only understand a part of it. She wanted me to be the protective mother she lost too early or probably never had. I think seeing so many of us—Rachida, Caro, me—taking care of Omar made that longing overwhelming for her. But there was something more, something that had to do with Adam. After the kids got back from Uri’s funeral, she stopped talking to him. She set the fire in the music room, the room Adam was using as his office.”

  The waiter arrives with their first courses: the terrine for Larry, a green salad for herself. She feels so tired, she hopes she will be able to make a respectable attempt at eating.

  “But why a fire?”

  “Her mother was ki
lled in a fire. Her father set the house where they lived on fire and her mother was burned to death.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me.”

  “And she never told the police?”

  “I suppose not.”

  Larry puts down his fork. He has finished the terrine before Myra has even begun her salad.

  Without thinking, Myra switches their plates, then flushes as she recognizes the gesture from the years they were married, when Larry’s hunger always outstripped hers. “I’m still getting my appetite back,” she murmurs.

  It is true about her appetite, but she switched the plates, she sees now, as distraction—because she feels unnerved by the skeptical way Larry is looking at her. It reminds her of Dreis, of the doubt she, too, seemed to have about Eva’s story.

  “Adam must have gone to town with that,” Larry says between forkfuls of Myra’s salad. “You know his obsession with Frank Lloyd Wright and the fire the servant set to his home.”

  “To the servant’s own home?”

  “No. To Taliesin, Wright’s home. Adam never told you that story?”

  “I suppose he did. I must have forgotten.”

  The waiter clears their plates, brings their entrées. Larry ceremoniously tops off her wineglass and refills his own empty one.

  “So,” Larry says, raising his glass, “let’s not waste all our time on Eva. Or Adam’s obsessions. We’re finally having our dinner. Only twenty-five years later than I wanted.”

  Myra clicks her ex-husband’s glass. “We’ve been separated for twenty-six years.”

  “It took me six months to know what I wanted to say to you.”

  “Well, please don’t say it now.” She touches Larry’s arm to soften her words.

  “My intentions were pure in inviting you to dinner. Not that I wouldn’t drop everything if you said you’d take me back.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You just like that fiction. You’d be irritated by me within a week. Besides, you seem to be genuinely happy with Betty. Happier, in fact, than I’ve seen you before.”

  Larry props an elbow on the table, rests his chin in the cup of his hand. He is aging well, Myra thinks, as lean as he was at forty, his hair gray now but thick as ever. “I am happy with Betty. The kids think she’s crude, and she is a little rough around the edges. But she has a big heart.”

  “They know that. Adam told me how nice she was with Omar when they visited you in Willow.”

  “But what about you? Don’t you miss having a man?”

  Myra takes a long drink of water, which makes her feel better. In the habit of therapists who’ve spent too many sessions hearing patients’ observations of them in movie theaters or at the grocery store, she surveys the room to be certain none of her patients is watching her. “At times,” she says. “When there’s a blizzard and everyone’s housebound and I imagine I’m the only one not playing Parcheesi and drinking hot cocoa. Sometimes in August, when I don’t want to travel by myself. But, at heart, no. I feel like I’ve moved beyond romantic love.”

  “You wrote me that after I came to the place you were staying in Tucson. When I made an ass of myself by trying to get you to go to bed with me.”

  “You didn’t make an ass of yourself. You were very sweet and sincere.”

  “You didn’t seem to think so at the time. You said some pretty strong words to a guy who could barely walk. I ended up on crutches for two weeks after that night, with a nasty sprain.”

  Myra takes a forkful of her trout. “Poor Larry. I was using every ounce of self-control not to let things happen between us. It would never have worked. We would have just ended up confusing the children and hurting each other again. People always think they can go back. I can’t tell you how many of my patients spend hours on the Internet looking for their high school crushes.”

  “I’ve read that a lot of those relationships turn into something. People marrying their long-lost sweetheart.”

  “No one writes about what happens three years later.”

  The restaurant is filled now, a low din in the room, the candles lit on all the tables. “I like this place,” Larry says. “A place to eat rather than a destination to be discussed like most of the restaurants where I seem to go when I’m here. It’s genuine—like you.” He pauses, embarrassed, it seems, that she will think he’s saccharine, then plunges ahead. “I still remember what my father said about you—that you had soul. I was so hurt when he said that, because I thought what he meant was that I did not.”

  Myra pushes her plate slightly to the side. She folds her hands on the table. “One person can’t be another’s soul. And you’re wrong, Larry. You have soul. You have your own soul, different than mine, but every bit as good.”

  Myra leans over and kisses her ex-husband, father of her children, grandfather of her grandchild, lightly on the lips.

  20

  During the second week Myra is in the soap-opera star’s apartment, the city has a two-day cold spell. Ice crystals form on the windows. Looking out from the thirty-sixth floor, it’s as though she has traveled to another latitude. Preoccupied with ice, she reads about Ultima Thule, the mythic last stop of civilizations, about the king penguins who march hundreds of miles each year back and forth from their glacial breeding grounds. She imagines ships gliding through water bound by glaciers, the fractured ice-splintered light. She recalls her beloved childhood stories. The Snow Queen who abducted children to her crystal palace. Guinevere wrapped in furs as she was carried off to Arthur’s castle.

  The renovation of her house begins, the fire department having caused as much damage as the fire: windows smashed to release the pressure from the hot air, floors flooded with the water from the hoses so that blowers and dehumidifiers have to be installed to dry out the soaked woodwork and plaster.

  She cannot tolerate warm sheets, hot beverages, woolen sweaters. She turns off the heat, drinks her coffee iced, flings off her covers. She cannot stop thinking about the little girl she saw the first day she visited Omar whose leg was kept submerged in a bath of cold water. Otherwise, she would scream in pain.

  Prone on the soap-opera star’s sofa, she pieces together a story line, each action illustrated as in a picture book. A child setting fire to a house laced with gasoline-soaked rags. The drunken father racing out. The child crouching behind the chicken coop. The mother she’d thought was next door playing a tile game, trapped inside.

  An e-mail arrives from larrymendelsohn@desertdocs.com. She cracks the window. A cold wind blows across the table where she has set up her computer.

  It’s eighty degrees here today. The bougainvillea on the trellis by the pool are in bloom. Betty’s boys are both swimming.

  When you kissed me in the restaurant, I had the most vivid memory of the first time I ever kissed you—a girl I’d met seated behind a table of books who read highbrow novels and spent her meager salary on nosebleed seats at Carnegie Hall. It’s so strange to say this, but I saw for the first time that you were my love but that you will not be my only love. For the first time since I threw our lives together away with that stupid Sheri, I felt truly released.

  You didn’t say who the second person was you failed. Not that I agree with your assessment of the first.

  Myra hits Reply.

  You. I failed you.

  21

  On the day that a piece of skin 1⁄100th of an inch thick is removed from Omar’s left buttocks and sewn onto his scalp, Adam tells Caro that he and Rachida are separating.

  “She told me about Layla,” Adam says. “She said you knew and had told her she had to tell me.”

  It is six o’clock. They are eating in the hospital cafeteria. If all goes well, Omar will be discharged at the end of the week.

  “She says she’s in love with Layla. That she would never have made it through this without her.”

  Caro tastes a piece of the baked fish, dried out from too many hours under the warming lights. If she were alone, she would spit it into
a napkin.

  “Layla’s going to move to Detroit with Rachida in July. They’re both going to look for jobs as primary care doctors there.”

  It is hard to imagine Layla in Detroit. “I’m sorry.”

  Adam takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “Yeah. I am sad. But I’m kind of relieved too. The main thing is Omar. I told Rachida I want him to live with me.”

  “You think she’ll go for that?”

  “I don’t think she’s going to fight me on it. At least not for the first six months while she’s getting settled into a new job. Only, I want to stay here with him. She doesn’t know that part. I’m going to put the screenwriting on the back burner and try to get a teaching job. I’m almost looking forward to it: being part of the mainstream, so that days like Memorial Day and Presidents’ Day mean something to me. I’m going to see if there are any openings at Omar’s school, since I could get half tuition for Omar that way.”

  There are so many holes in Adam’s plan, Caro doesn’t know where to start. And even if Rachida were to agree to let Adam keep Omar in New York, how would he afford an apartment large enough for the two of them?

  By bedtime, against her will, a solution comes to her. Once she has the idea, she wishes she could send it back to the recess of her mind from which it has escaped. But it is so logical, so right, as she tells her mother the following Sunday, it grows legs on its own.

  They are sitting in the soap-opera star’s living room, a room at odds with the green tea and bran muffins they are sharing.

  “Right?” her mother asks. “Do you mean morally right or the best-fit solution?”

  “Both. Doesn’t it seem that the two usually coincide?”

  Myra tucks her legs under her. In the past week, the pain from the burn has finally abated and, with this, the compulsion for cold. She doesn’t want to know what it is that Caro has dreamed up. Already she can feel that it entails a sacrifice. Another sacrifice for Adam.

  “Adam and I will buy your house.”

  Myra laughs. She cannot help herself. Then she feels tears come to her eyes. “Darling, you don’t have to do that.”