The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  “It’s not supposed to be something to get angry about,” Clare said without a good deal of conviction. “He says that our bodies are quarreling with themselves and that makes them hard to heal. He’s not the USDA. They don’t wear earrings.”

  Frank smiled, then developed a stricken look so Clare massaged his back and shoulders. Clare had seen one of his seizures the first day of the clinic and had doubted that she could handle one behind the boulder. He had twisted on the floor of the dining area and at one point his entire weight was supported by his heels and the back of his head, his trunk thrusting upward. Now his back softened from iron to clay under her hands and they embraced for a moment but he began weeping after he kissed her. At the time she wished she had the gumption to seduce him despite the consequences, whatever they might be. After that incident Frank was embarrassed when talking to her, as if he had behaved badly, and she didn’t know how to tell him otherwise. At the end of the clinic Frank’s wife picked him up and she looked overplump and spiteful to Clare.

  Back at the fire Clare felt the warm smoking clothes and decided she wasn’t inflexible, at least compared to Donald, but maybe that was one thing wrong with marriage, or smallish social settings, where the comparisons were so limited. Her brother felt he never drank more than his three best friends, but the four of them had all nearly drunk themselves to death, and were at present all leading lights in the AA for the Detroit area. The sheer taffy in self-awareness exhausted her. Saying that you were no more inflexible than your husband was small-minded dogshit, and she laughed out loud. She wanted more life, not Robert’s Rules of Order. Crossing a fence was certainly a start, a flexible one at that. It occurred to Clare that while Zilpha swore occasionally, and Laurel repeatedly, she had never learned how. “Fuck you, Donald, you jerkoff,” she whispered to the gathering dark, but the oath was froth. “Jerk-off” was what the boys who worked at the neighborhood gas station called each other. They always glanced down at her legs while they were doing the windshield. If she was wearing a tennis skirt they did an especially good job at the windshield. Quite suddenly a blush rose to Clare’s face as she thought of Zilpha’s son Michael. It had been an unforgivable mistake, and constituted her only secret from Zilpha.

  “It’s okay, Mother. It was the right thing to do.”

  “No it wasn’t. I was never so ashamed of myself. How did you know?”

  “Michael told me way back when. I think it was four years ago, right after it happened. He called to say he was going to ask you to run away to New York with him. He wondered if I thought it was a good idea.” Laurel and Michael had been close since childhood, an unlikely pair, with Michael as obsessed with art as Laurel was with the life sciences.

  “How absurd. It was stupid of me to let it go that far. I must have been sleepwalking.” Clare put on her warm, smoky clothes in defense. The clothes felt wonderful against her skin.

  “I doubt that. The last thing I ever felt when I was making love was asleep.”

  “You’re simple-minded if you think I’m going to talk to you about it.”

  “Suit yourself. What I’m trying to say is that your night is going to be long enough without feeling guilty about something so innocent. If you get hungry just roll a couple of ears of that field corn in that wet clay and lay them at the edge of the fire. By the time the clay dries and hardens the corn will be ready. Not great, but better than nothing. I love you. Good night.”

  “I love you. You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

  “Of course not. And I doubt Michael will ever write his memoirs.”

  “Thanks. Good night.”

  Clare picked two ears of corn and rolled them in the remains of a mud puddle until they were covered with a thickish layer of clay. It was a messy business and she dried her hands before the fire until she could flake off the clay. Perhaps Laurel was right. She felt guilt because she had pretended she only made love to Michael to get out of an uncomfortable situation, but then Michael was as removed from a rapist as could be imagined. A modest “no” would have pushed him over. Also, it was soon after Donald’s nasty interference in her Russian trip, but she recognized that was only a minuscule part of it. In fact, Donald hadn’t been given a thought.

  “Be honest with yourself,” Laurel chimed in from the dark.

  “Why? Okay, then. At the moment Michael reminded me of a young English instructor I studied with as a freshman. I knew we both wanted to make love but there were rules against it and besides we were too shy. When I came back as a sophomore I found out he had committed suicide that summer in New York City. Every time I got a crush on someone, they moved to New York. I chose badly.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “Not that I know of. Once we had coffee at a cafeteria and he gave me some bad advice. He told me that literature was so rich with possibility that I could safely ignore life itself. I asked him why Pasternak had said that despite all appearances, it took a lot of volume to fill a life. He told me Pasternak’s reputation had been discounted by the higher critics. Two of his colleagues passed our table and one of them winked at him as if I were his bimbo.”

  “Which is what you wanted to be.”

  “You might say that. When I met your father I made sure he didn’t get away.”

  “I know all about that one. It fails to interest. Anyway, Michael said you only had that single event. As they say, don’t sweat it. I made love to him once myself when we were fourteen. We smoked a marijuana cigarette, drank some wine and did it. We decided afterwards that we wouldn’t let it ruin our friendship. Actually we fell asleep and Zilpha caught us. She broke out laughing and closed the door.”

  “So I heard. We didn’t come to any conclusions when we discussed it.”

  “You two never had any secrets, did you?”

  “I never told her I made love to her son. It still bothers me.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mother. The corn should be roasted by now.”

  “Good night, dear.”

  “Keep in touch if you get lonely.”

  “I will.”

  Clare tapped the baked clay with her knuckles to no effect, then used a stone to break it. The green shucks steamed on the night air and she waited for them to cool. What had happened one day was that she and Zilpha were supposed to help Michael pack up to move to New York after a morning tennis game. Zilpha looked terrible, having spent the night arguing with her husband, plus she had a summer cold, so Clare volunteered to go solo on the packing chores. She went straight to his studio apartment from the tennis game and found him untypically organized. Michael had given all of his furniture to friends, and he wandered around the apartment stuffing what he called simply his “art” into portfolios, wearing pajamas which was all he ever wore unless it was absolutely necessary to wear clothes. If the trip was to the grocery store or to his mother’s house he’d slip a raincoat over the pajamas.

  Clare began by disassembling some large unstretched frames. Michael, more than anyone she had ever met, had no abilities outside of his imagination, nor was he interested in any. Michael and his father had given up on each other in his early teens, and he kept his doting mother at an affectionate distance. He developed a few friendships among other burgeoning artists at Cranbrook, and he and Laurel kept close though she went to Country Day, but Michael had been considered pretentious and unlikable in the neighborhood. He had not been at the club since his fourteenth birthday when he took off his clothes and pissed in the fireplace. He was flunked out of Rhode Island School of Design for a total lack of interest, spent a year in Paris and Florence, then came home for a few years in Detroit where his paintings caused a minor rage in the art community. The paintings were a bit of a puzzle to Clare because Michael painted only what he called “the insides of things”: animals, engines, clouds, trees, women. For a year or so on his return from Europe Clare and Michael had become close again, just as they were when he was young. She helped him hang his paintings at several galleries, bought not a few of them
and had lunch with him at least once a week at a restaurant that indulged him his pajamas. Donald didn’t begrudge the time she spent with Michael, never referring to him as anything but “the poor little bugger,” though Michael was of average size. Of course he seemed a bit effeminate, but then Donald and his cronies were sure that all men but themselves betrayed gay tendencies, even professional hockey players. This was a mystery to Clare when she listened to their after-dinner jokes. Sadly to her, Michael sensed charity in her continued purchase of paintings and began to keep her at a distance. Only in the last few weeks before his move to New York had they become quite friendly again.

  That day in the dull, humid heat of a Detroit July Michael surprised her with her favorite wine, a Château d’Yquem, saying that he wished he had swiped it from his father but he had bought it himself. They drank the wine on the floor, her back against the wall, but Michael sprawled in front of her. He told her about a recent adventure with a lovely black girl who had decided he was too crazy and went back to her musician. He was a bit sad about that and said so. The wine was nearly gone and they had lapsed into silence when he looked at her strangely.

  “I’m finding you quite exciting,” he said.

  “I’m the same person I’ve always been.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Michael, I don’t believe that. You’re teasing me.” She blushed deeply, unable to look at his eyes. “You shouldn’t tease about such things.”

  “I’m not teasing.”

  He put a hand around her ankle and she let a leg straighten out. His other hand covered the crotch of his pajamas where it was obvious that he wasn’t teasing. She closed her eyes and said, “Oh, well,” with her ears buzzing. He made love to her quickly there on the floor and she was embarrassed at her excitement. Afterwards, they stood in the kitchen apologizing to each other in miserable half sentences, then went back into the main room where she tried to think of a graceful way to pick up her panties on the bare floor. They stood there for a few minutes, then he embraced her strongly and they took off everything and made love for quite a long time, ending with exhaustion, then laughter. He yelped when she put hydrogen peroxide on his raw knees.

  °

  The ear of corn was much better than Clare had reason to expect, lacking sweetness but full-flavored. It was now dark but a three-quarter moon was rising, a cream-colored globe barely above the horizon. A full moon would have been too dramatic, she reflected. One of the grandest times ever with her father had been a long walk one night in the summer during a full moon up near their cottage on Burt Lake. They had taken the long way through a virgin oak forest down to a Chippewa graveyard near the lake, and her father, who was inventive for an accountant, made up new variations on the Robin Hood stories. When they reached the white picket fence of the cemetery she clutched his hand tightly as they looked out over the crosses at the sheen of the moon on the lake. At this juncture her father always tried to spook her by saying in a whisper, “Perhaps there’ll be a message from the spirit world,” but this time when he finished they heard from far out on the lake the tremulous wail of a loon as if it had been arranged. He clutched her hand as hard as she did his, then they laughed at their fright and made unsuccessful loon imitations.

  Clare considered saving the second ear for morning, then thought why bother, since she was surrounded by virtually millions of them. The idea that she probably wouldn’t have married Donald if her father hadn’t died was less interesting at the moment than Robin Hood. Michael had sent her a book of poems called Roots and Branches by Robert Duncan, whom she had never heard of; the poems were splendid though difficult, and now she could remember an entire passage she had copied in her ledger:

  Robin Hood in the greenwood outside

  Christendom faces peril as if it were a friend.

  Foremost we admire the outlaw

  who has the strength of his own

  lawfulness. How we loved him

  in childhood and hoped to abide by his code

  that took life as its law!

  The day after her lovemaking with Michael she and Zilpha had a final lunch with him, then a trip to the airport. It was an unsuccessful event with the only lighter moments provided by the memory of the time the three of them had packed a picnic basket to search for Michael’s car which he had “misplaced” a week before. They had driven all the way to Zug Island near Wyandotte to consult an actual Gypsy fortune teller who, startlingly enough, had pinpointed the lost car within a block of Wayne State University. It seemed terribly funny when they had arrived at the car and found the tires were gone.

  At the restaurant Zilpha went off to the bathroom and Michael suggested, half seriously, that they get rid of her and make love in the airport parking lot. Clare became angry and said, “Never again,” and Michael paled. He was quite hopeless and she didn’t hear from him again for several years until his mother’s funeral, where he looked harsh, thin, hardened, which she supposed was part of living in New York. They were both weeping over Zilpha when they embraced, and Michael pinched her bottom, and whispered, “I’m willing when you are.” She stepped back sensing the kind of humor that arises out of grief, but no, he wasn’t kidding.

  Clare stirred the fire and wondered if her diminished pile of sticks would last, but then even the slightest of fires would suffice to leaven the balmy night. She feared the dissociation of waking up in the middle of the night to total blackness, though the moon should be a modest compensation. She rearranged the wood where she could reach it from her green cave, and firmed some dirt around her can of water so she wouldn’t inadvertently tip it over. She wished she felt a little stronger when she curled up for sleep and thought again of the notion of prayer, but she lacked the solace of a religion that does not depend on ignoring the human condition. When she prayed as a child God’s face in her mind was similar to her father’s—the graying hair, the furrowed brow, the essentially kind look that was still not interested in trivialities. Her childhood prayer from Sunday school was simple enough: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Curled there on her bed of leaves and grass, Clare thought this prayer lacked a great deal in terms of reassurance. She didn’t want the Lord to take her soul in the night; she wanted to go to Europe without having to listen to Donald’s incessant business prattle. In the nave of Notre-Dame he had whispered, “Remind me to make a call,” as if he ever forgot. In the Uffizi he couldn’t stop saying, “I wonder what this would bring at Parke-Bernet.”

  The world itself was a marketing possibility. Before he had played his Tracking the Blues tape today in the car he had interrupted a favorite Stravinsky passage by saying that local acreage was recovering from the 1985 downturn, though Donald Jr. had said pork bellies had the flutters but would really firm up by Labor Day. A signal announcement had been that the black walnut tree in their backyard was worth seven thousand bucks as furniture veneer, and that walnut tree thieves were circulating the Midwest waiting for the innocent to go on vacation. Curiously enough, Donald didn’t mind when she asked him to write a large check for the American Indian College Fund or the NAACP, two of her favorite charities, saying something to the effect that “those folks got the wrong end of the stick,” as if all American history had been a business deal. Maybe it was. Donald had tried to hedge at her support of the Nature Conservancy and Greenpeace because he felt the bird watchers and “little old ladies in tennis shoes” were cramping certain resort complexes in northern Michigan that were otherwise good investment potentials. Clare reminded him that if she wasn’t already a little old lady in tennis shoes, it could clearly be seen on the horizon.

  But how could you blame Donald for so fulsomely taking on the colors of the workaday world? Perhaps the lines were drawn more clearly than she had ever thought, and that was why she lay curled in a thicket staring at the weak light of a cottonwood fire. One autumn afternoon when she was helping her father comb burrs
out of the long hair of their English setters she had asked him why the Bible said it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. He treated the question gravely and said that if all your mind is full of is money you become crazy, and that insane people live in a private hell without even knowing it, and that insane rich people created a hell for a lot of other people without knowing or caring about it. As simplistic as this seemed Clare still essentially believed it. Her father said it and he looked like God, though he had done a lot of bad things to her without knowing it. He couldn’t have done them on purpose.

  Clare sat up as a lump had begun to form beneath her breastbone at the first indication of certain childhood memories. She put a fresh stick on the fire and watched its brief, feverish blaze. She always read herself to sleep and the absence of this routine was haunting. She would have read the footnotes in the Tao if there had been enough light. She studied a book of matches from a truck-stop restaurant in Illinois called R Place where they had stopped for lunch on the way out. The restaurant gave a special award and inscribed the name on a plaque of anyone who could eat a four-pound hamburger. The waitress had told Clare that the meat patty was only a little over three pounds but the bun and all the fixings brought the weight up to an even four. For some reason this disgusted Donald who thought the idea “lowlife.” The waitress pointed out a burly trucker on the other side of the room who was on his way to victory. Clare excused herself to wash her hands and passed by the trucker on the way to the bathroom, though the trucker was well out of the way. She paused at the table.

  “I hope you manage. It looks wonderful,” she said.

  “You look pretty damn good yourself. I’d give you a bite but I’d be disqualified.”

  She waved and passed on, wondering if the man had a wife and what she looked like.

  Now she reached out and put her beret on tight for extra comfort. She took off her watch and stowed it in the bag thinking if she kept looking at it time itself would swallow her. It was extraordinary that at one moment she could be thinking of making love to Michael on the floor and at the next she was trying to devise a prayer appropriate to the situation. Back to the basics, she joked: religion, fucking and Dad at the cemetery.