How to Start a Fire (10 page)

I wish you could have seen it.

Love,

Kate

Kate,

Thanks for the letter; I grabbed it directly from the mailbox so the gatekeeper would have no chance to tamper with the seal. Although I wouldn’t put it past Lena to “accidentally” open my mail. There used to be a lock on my bedroom door, but when I moved back, it was mysteriously gone. Sometimes I think she’s stuck in the past, still playing a game of cat-and-mouse with her adolescent daughter. She’s upped her game, or I’ve lost mine. I would like to be able to open my bedroom window at night without setting off the alarm. She never talks about what I did. She just calls it “the legal matter.” And occasionally implements a new security measure. I offered to explain it to her as best I could. But she thought we should just put the past behind us. I’m living at home. I can’t fucking escape the past.

My life isn’t as exciting as yours—dead librarians and brilliant sunsets. I did just meet a fallen Supreme Court justice or a man with delusions of grandeur. You decide. I’m not one to judge. I’m adjusting to most of the stuff. Living at home is the hardest part, but right now I don’t know what else to do. I’m broke. The legal fees took the last of the trust fund. My brother keeps asking me why I did what I did. It seems so obvious. Doesn’t everyone want to escape sometimes?

Speaking of escapes, is that what you’re doing? I hope you find more than death and sunsets. Unless that’s all you’re looking for.

Love,

Anna

Old Forge, New York

It was a moonless sky, riddled with stars arranged like holiday decorations hung in haste, the beauty in their chaos. Too many to count, although George often tried. Kate mumbled the constellations. Anna slunk away. She dipped her hand in the icy water of the creek and pulled out a beer from the makeshift cooler that she’d brainstormed earlier in the day by loading a twelve-pack into a fisherman’s net, submerging it in the water, and securing it with a bowline knot to a tent stake. Anna twisted off the cap with her numbed palm and sat down on the tarp, slipping between George and Kate for warmth.

There was a house, the Fury weekend home, just a mile away. But George insisted that they find a place to camp out for the night, that they make use of the acreage Lena ignored. It reminded her of her childhood vacations at her father’s lake cabin in Michigan. Although that was just a cabin, not like Lena’s four-thousand-square-foot refurbished barn. George always felt cut off from nature inside the Fury vacation home—it was too civilized for all that ungroomed land. George made sure they hiked far enough away from the property that you could pretend it wasn’t there. After a year of working as a forest ranger, George couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat under the stars without feeling responsible for the earth beneath her. Tonight she was free.

George built the fire while Kate and Anna pitched the tent. Those roles had been established years ago, after numerous fire-building competitions, which George always won, her fire often ablaze several minutes before Anna or Kate could get the kindling started. George had learned at her father’s cabin—the only heat was from his wood stove. Her system was second nature to her, and she had an eye for those perfect dry sticks that never disappointed. After two seasons of losing the fire battle, Anna and Kate decided to step up their game. Kate read books on fires and learned about soft- and hardwood and gathered her kindling ahead of time, hiding it in her backpack. Anna went to a hardware store and purchased a small paraffin-and-sawdust fire starter that supposedly blazed for fifteen minutes, giving your fire ample time to catch. Both girls lost yet again that year.

George added another piece of wood to the fire and returned her gaze to the endless sky.

“Won’t you miss it?” Kate asked.

“It will always be here,” George said.

“But not every night. You’ll have to go looking for it.”

“People give up all sorts of things for love,” Anna said, having only a theoretical knowledge of that subject.

“You’re changing your whole life for a guy you met on an airplane,” Kate said.

“And one day you might change your whole life for a guy you meet at a bus stop,” George said.

As the story went, George Leoni met Mitch Misenti in first class on a flight from San Francisco to Chicago. George was flying home for the holidays and, as usual, was running late. The airplane doors were about to close as George dashed to her gate, a coat and carry-on bag rising and falling like wings in her wake. The flight attendant gave her a sharp scowl as she pegged George as one of those pretty girls who thought they could get away with anything. George, winded and apologetic, wove an intricate lie about not being able to find her cat before she left. George had no cat. But the flight attendant did, and although she’d been about to give the one remaining first-class seat to some almost-lucky frequent flier in coach, it was simpler to assign it to George.

The seat was 2C. An aisle. George rushed down the jet bridge, tossed her bag in the overhead compartment, and slipped into her seat, managing to avoid all the disapproving eyes. As soon as she buckled her seat belt, she was offered a glass of champagne, cementing in her mind a causal relationship between being late and getting pleasant surprises.

The champagne went down easy, and then exhaustion set in. George could sleep anywhere. Within moments of takeoff she was drifting into slumber, her head lolling to the side and eventually resting on the shoulder of the rather attractive stranger in 2D.

This was not the first time a fellow passenger had fallen asleep on Mitch Misenti. He traveled often for work (he was an investment consultant, always on the prowl for businesses that were underperforming) and had sat next to an incongruous variety of humanity. Some slept upright; some dozed on and off; some worked straight through; some chatted politely; some prattled on, baring their souls without invitation; just a few fell into a sound sleep and slouched over onto Mitch, and only one was allowed to stay asleep. Passenger 2C.

George woke with a start as the dinner service began.

“I’m so sorry. How long was I out?”

“About an hour.”

“Was I sleeping on you the whole time?”

“Most of it,” Mitch said pleasantly.

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You looked like you needed the rest.”

“I’d buy you a drink for your trouble, but they’re free here,” George said.

“Since you slept on me and all, it seems like I should know your name.”

“George. George Leoni.”

“Nice to meet you, George. I’m Mitch Misenti.”

During that first encounter, it seemed that Mitch asked all the questions. Later, when the flight was over, George knew very little about the man. Mitch, however, never missed an opportunity to arm himself with information.

“What do you do?” he asked.

“I’m a forest ranger.”

“Are you really?” Mitch said, amused. Most attractive women he met were in sales; a disproportionate number were pharmaceutical reps. There was the occasional model or actress or model/actress. And once he’d met a woman who was an aspiring television host, a mutation of the model/actress that was new to him. But most of the women he encountered on the road and sometimes passed a layover with were under that vague umbrella of the corporate work force with job titles no one had ever thought of in kindergarten when dreaming of what they would be when they grew up. No five-year-old ever said she wanted to become a search strategist for a global technology conglomerate.

George Leoni, forest ranger. It was so preposterous he had to choke back a laugh when she said it. It suited her, though. Something about her seemed meant for the wild. It might have just been the untamed eyebrows. He wasn’t used to the natural look. Most women he knew had been plucked and waxed and sprayed the color of something vaguely resembling a suntan. George had a natural tan that was a mix of geometric shapes and shades layered across her body like papier-mâché.

“What would possess you to become a forest ranger?” There was a slight hint of horror in Mitch’s voice.

“Humans weren’t meant to live their lives indoors in windowless cubicles under fluorescent lights breathing recycled air.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“Anyway, when I discovered there was a job where you could spend all day at a campsite, I knew it was for me.”

“So what does a forest ranger do?”

“There’s a broad spectrum,” George said. “I work for the state forestry service. I haven’t been out of school that long, so I man a campsite in the Russian River Valley. I keep the peace. I’m occasionally charged with pulling soil samples for research, surveying, determining fire risks.”

“Have you ever had a run-in with a bear?”

“I have.”

“What do you do?”

“First, I try to reason with it. If that doesn’t work, I shoot it.”

“Shoot to kill?”

“No, with a tranquilizer gun.”

George would at times attempt to maneuver the conversation back to Mitch, but his replies were abrupt and final, as if he were hiding something. She learned that he lived in New York and was on an extended business trip. San Francisco, then Chicago. He owned a company that invested in Internet startups. When George asked for further details, Mitch asked George yet another question about her life. He wasn’t actually hiding anything, at least not at that point. It was all part of his game plan, finessed over years of careful scrutiny of the opposite sex. Mitch had a particular way with women—a formula of giving and withholding that almost always managed to hook them. Getting them to talk about themselves was the first step; remaining enigmatic was the second. There were other steps, but he used only the first two during that encounter.

Mitch got George on the subject of forest fires, and their conversation didn’t end until the plane landed. That summer in California, fires had raged for months; just when one was quenched, another blazed. The newscasters called it a phenomenon of the drought, but every summer was the same. George took those fires personally, as if they were set by someone seeking revenge against her. She could pontificate for hours on the subject but had abbreviated her speech over the years.

“In nature, lightning strikes occasionally cause small, localized fires that burn away the underbrush. The policy has been to put out those fires. So now there’s plenty of underbrush, which is the perfect fuel for massive destruction. Hundreds and thousands of acres have been destroyed, lives lost, because we didn’t trust nature to do its job.”

Actually, the policy began with nature lover Teddy Roosevelt. George used to single him out in her impromptu lectures on the subject, but she’d quit when it seemed that Anna had extrapolated only that one bit of information: “All these forest fires. You know whose fault it is?” Anna once asked some drunk student she had cornered at a party. “Fucking Teddy Roosevelt’s fault.”

As George and Mitch deplaned, the intimacy of their in-flight exchange faded into the polite surface conversation of virtual strangers.

“It was nice meeting you, George,” Mitch said.

“Yes, really nice talking to you too,” George said after a brief pause. She was expecting their parting to be accompanied by an invitation.

They walked down the terminal together in silence. Almost as an afterthought, Mitch handed George his business card.

“I come to San Francisco at least once a month. If you’d like to have dinner sometime, give me a call.”

George phoned Mitch a week later, after she’d returned to San Francisco. Mitch called her back two weeks after that, just as he was about to board the aircraft on his way to San Francisco. He invited her to dinner that night. George said yes and scrambled to finish her paperwork, find an appropriate dress, and drive to the city. She was half an hour late. Mitch waited impatiently at the restaurant. By the time George got there, he had already put away half a bottle of wine.

George was, once again, winded and apologetic when she arrived. Mitch slowly put his napkin on the table, got to his feet, and kissed her on the cheek. He leaned in and whispered in her ear.

“I think I’m going to buy you a watch.”

They began a long-distance relationship that was long distance mostly for George, who had to endure the brief weekend trips to New York City, red-eye flights in coach that left her spent and jet-lagged at least half the month but were, generously, bankrolled by Mitch. By then, George’s lack of timeliness had landed several rungs down on their ladder of arguments. Sex and housekeeping were at the top, although only the housekeeping arguments were voiced. Mitch would find a glass of water on the nightstand in the bedroom, an old coffee cup on the kitchen counter—a flagrant disregard for the use of coasters. He’d take George by the shoulders and march her over to the spot, as if she were a child being taught a lesson. At first, the message was patiently delivered.

“Have you finished drinking that?” Mitch would ask, and George would sweep up the mug and promptly stow it away in the dishwasher. Later, when she’d hear the key in the door, she’d scramble through the house looking for anything amiss. And a few times, she’d drink stale tea or coffee as if it had just been brewed. Every man had his quirks, and this was Mitch’s. She told herself that this was certainly superior to living with a slob. Although there were moments when she questioned that. When Mitch ceased voicing his reprimands, he would pick up her beverage and angrily clank around the kitchen, tidying up the invisible mess. She caught him once in the bathroom collecting her bleached-blond hairs off the floor. George tried to explain that you could lose up to a hundred hairs a day. How was she supposed to keep track of them all? Mitch kissed her on the forehead and suggested she brush her hair more often.

The sex arguments were silent. If Mitch returned home to a mess (a few crumbs on the counter), he’d refuse to touch George that night. Her only recourse for affection would be a blowjob, an unspoken apology. Otherwise, sex was always according to Mitch’s desires; if George initiated, Mitch would roll her onto her side, kiss her on the cheek, and say a firm good night. There was never a reciprocal refusal from her. Anytime Mitch wanted her, he could have her. There was something sick about her desire, George knew. Once, just thinking about him being inside of her, she felt nauseated and saw spots in the air. No one had ever had that effect on her.