How to Start a Fire (25 page)

“I need help,” the voice said.

“I have a gun,” Kate said. She had pepper spray. Neither would be much use in a pitch-black forest.

“Don’t shoot,” the voice said. “I’m just lost. I’m a student here.”

“What college?”

“Oakes. I have my school ID on me. I can show it to you if you turn on the flashlight.”

“Name three of your professors,” Kate said.

“Wallace. Fernandez. Billings.”

“What’s Wallace’s first name?” Kate asked.

“Sherman.”

“Don’t you love him?” Kate asked.

“He’s a prick. Everybody knows that.”

Kate turned on the flashlight. The voice and the crunching leaves moved closer. She flashed the light into the young, harmless-looking man’s eyes. His voice was deeper than you’d expect it to be from looking at him. He was lean in the way that young men who will eventually become less lean are. He was clearly a student; it was obvious, from his battered sneakers to his threadbare and faded school shirt.

“What happened to you?” he said, kneeling down.

“I believe I’m injured.”

Kate continued to shine the light in his eyes.

“Can you please stop that? I feel like the cops just caught me urinating in public.”

“Strange analogy,” Kate said. “Do you do that often?”

“It happened once and I was in an alley.”

“Gross.”

“I had to pee.”

“Hold it. That’s what I do,” Kate said.

“Can you stand?” the voice asked.

“Not when I’m peeing,” Kate snapped.

“I meant, can you stand on your leg.”

“I don’t know.”

The young man cautiously offered his hand. Kate took it, planted her good foot on the ground, and stood upright. She tested the injured leg. Pain radiated from her ankle, causing her to stumble. The stranger steadied her.

Kate held the flashlight in one hand and put her other arm around Arthur’s shoulder. They limped along for a few yards, traveling at the speed of a lethargic turtle. It would take hours to return to the dorm. Kate climbed on Arthur’s back, and he gave her a piggyback ride while she navigated him through the familiar terrain with her flashlight.

“This is your fault,” Kate said.

“Most things are.”

Arthur dropped by the next day to check on Kate’s ankle. He brought a bag of ice and a soda and a slice from Upper Crust Pizza. He asked her if she wanted to do something sometime.

“Maybe,” Kate said. “We’ll see.”

George thought Arthur was cute. Maybe not cute enough for her, but definitely in the attractive category, and he wasn’t peculiar in any way. Even as Kate hastened his departure, she appeared interested.

“What are you doing?” George asked. “Don’t you like him?”

“I’m undecided.”

“What would help you decide?” said George.

Kate had gone on a few dates with her lab partner six months ago, but after that, nothing. George thought an intervention was necessary.

“Do you want me to check him out, get a little history on him?”

Kate thought about it for a moment and then said, “Yeah. But it might not be the kind of history you think.”

When Kate explained, it made perfect sense, but it wasn’t something George would ever have considered on her own.

“If a guy likes
you
,” Kate said to George, “maybe you figure you’re his type. The type is tall, skinny, and gorgeous, and you can’t really fault a man for liking that type. It’s pretty standard. But if a guy is attracted to me because I’m his type, you have to wonder. I look sixteen with makeup on, and I’ve seen eleven-year-old girls with bigger chests. You see what I’m getting at?”

“You’re worried he likes little girls?” George said.

“Remember Mike from freshman year?”

“The astronomy TA you went out with for a week?”

“Yes.”

“What about him?”

“His previous girlfriend was a sophomore in high school. And he had some questionable pictures around his house. Nothing incriminating. But I
knew
.”

“I had no idea.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Just because Arthur likes you doesn’t mean he’s a pervert. It means I need to do a little digging,” said George.

A week later George had amassed a small dossier on Arthur’s brief dating history. She assembled this information by making the acquaintance of one of his roommates, Lukas, who was immediately smitten with George, and then by going through Arthur’s personal effects when Lukas left her alone in their dorm room.

“Good news,” George said when she delivered her evidence. “His last girlfriend was on the softball team in high school. From the picture I saw, she was maybe five seven and a hundred and forty pounds. The one before that was short, but she had a rack on her.”

“How big?”

“C, maybe D cup.”

The next time Arthur asked Kate to do something sometime, she said yes.

“I think we should see other people,” Jason said to George.

“You mean you want to break up,” George said.

“No. I want to see other people.”

“You want to have sex with me and have the option of having sex with other women as well,” George asked, clarifying for him what seemed clear to her.

“It sounds seedy when you say it.”

“It sounds indirect and cowardly when you say it.”

“We’re young.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure I believe in monogamy.”

“That’s what people say when they find someone new they want to fuck. Who is she?”

“I could give you a name, but it might change in a week.”

George admired women who seemed to store their emotions inside a box, pulling out only the ones required at the moment. Anna seemed an expert at this. She would meet men at parties, go home with them, and then not care if they never crossed paths again except by accident. It seemed to George that Anna was master of her emotions. That was, of course, bullshit. These men had no effect on Anna because Anna had been pining for one man for almost ten years. Anyone else was merely a diversion.

George might have felt some envy toward Kate’s practical approach to men if it weren’t for the men she attracted. They were always too soft for George. There was no edge to them, nothing to fear.

George returned to the High Street house and drank Anna’s whiskey. She blasted the radio to extinguish the suffocating quiet. She wanted the kind of overt distraction that only Anna could offer. She wanted a game, the threat of excitement, the idea that something good or uncomfortable could happen at any moment. She had never needed Anna so badly. And Anna was out.

George had always assumed that when they all moved into a home with room to breathe, her roommates would stick around more. But Kate still preferred studying in the library, and Anna continued to vanish without speaking of where she was going. She left brief Post-it notes on their refrigerator.
I’ll be back
was all she’d write. The statement seemed so obvious that it made Kate and George wonder if one day, they wouldn’t find the note, and Anna wouldn’t return. Still, her unexplained absences always upset the balance in the home. While George and Kate could resent Anna on various grounds, they needed her there to resent.

On this night, George waited patiently for Kate to come home, ignoring her loneliness in anticipation of its end. At midnight Kate was still gone; her note said she was going to the library and then to Arthur’s. George called Arthur’s house. No answer. She drank more whiskey and cycled through the five channels on their twenty-two-inch rabbit-eared television. She phoned her mother, who chatted aimlessly for an hour about her solo holiday in Greece. She had returned just a week ago.

“I have to say this,” said Vivien. “It’s
so
much easier traveling without your father. Not only does he expect me to plan the entire vacation, but I’m supposed to pack his suitcase because he’s incapable of that simple task—although he certainly manages for a business trip. Plus, it’s nice to keep my own hours. I can get an early start on the day. It is ridiculous being in Europe and wasting most of the morning in a hotel room.”

“I’m glad you had a good time,” George said.

She didn’t mention her recent heartbreak. She wondered whether that was the right word. Sometimes it was the men you felt superior to who did the most damage, the logic being,
If this motherfucker won’t have me, I must be doomed.

George felt as if she were inside an empty swimming pool, even with all the modern distractions at her fingertips. She found no solace in the television or the stereo; the dial-up Internet held no appeal. Even the refrigerator offered no comfort. She opened the doors wide to be greeted by wilted vegetables, sour milk, and ice cream with freezer burn. Whiskey was dinner, which was not usually the sort of thing George did. But it was Anna’s whiskey, and she never saw Anna wallow. At least, not over a man. Anna had the gift of distraction, a catalog of ideas and plans. You had to be still to feel pain, and Anna never stopped moving. George thought all she needed was a plan, but that vague feeling of discomfort returned. None of the words for emotions seemed to apply to what she was feeling, a mixture of heartbreak and self-loathing and some secret ingredient. How could she feel flattened by a guy who called her “dude” and sometimes peed in a jar because he didn’t feel like walking down the hallway in the middle of the night?

Her attraction to men had always seemed ugly to her. Maybe because when it happened, she was consumed by it. And also because she never wanted men who were decent. She felt lust when she felt off balance. She distinctly remembered hating the first man who gave her an orgasm.

More whiskey was drunk. She didn’t need what’s his name, who’d once accused her of having an emotional tapeworm. The image of the worm eating out her insides stuck. George refused to explore the need, assumed everyone felt it to a certain extent. Everyone was filled with holes and patched them up in different ways. Tonight, George was trying Anna’s way.

Before Alexander Graham Bell, drunks were never tempted by the telephone. Sometimes they had to walk miles to satisfy what they would soon learn was only a passing urge. George picked up the phone.

“Can you come over?” George asked.

It was a seduction as clumsy as any drunken, undedicated seduction could be. George didn’t try, because she didn’t need to.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked, only to discover that the whiskey bottle was almost empty.
When did that happen?
She searched the cabinets for hidden booze. Kate didn’t hold with the idea of an official liquor cabinet. Seeing it all in one place, she thought, was too distracting for Anna. Kate made boozing the equivalent of an Easter egg hunt. Anna never complained about the method until after she’d scavenged for hours and come up empty. Then she’d take the car to a liquor store and purchase enough to launch a speakeasy. They were currently in a drying-out phase. A bottle of vodka was hidden in the hall closet behind their winter coats, but George could find only Pernod, that licorice-tasting liqueur that turned cloudy when you added ice. Anna hated the taste of licorice and yet she always purchased Pernod when she was stockpiling. When Anna tried to cut back, she found it helpful to drink booze she didn’t like.

George poured a glass for Edgar and added ice, because she liked watching the liquid turn opaque. It felt vaguely scientific. She liked being in the rational part of her brain for a brief moment, since she knew the irrational was dominating.

“Not everybody likes it. But the French sure do,” George said.

“Are you drunk?” Edgar asked.

“I probably wouldn’t pass a polygraph,” George said.

“Polygraph?”

“No. That’s not the word. Breathalyzer test. That’s it. Those words are nothing alike.”

“No,” Edgar said. “Is something wrong, George?”

“Nothing is wrong,” George said, sipping the remaining whiskey and putting her bare feet on Edgar’s lap.

Edgar had fallen in love with George’s knees first, but he was also a back-of-the-neck man, a breast man, a shoulder man, even a foot man, just not in the fetish-video kind of way. An entire woman was too overwhelming. He preferred admiring them in sections, the way one would study a map.

Edgar rubbed George’s feet only after she’d kicked him and told him to do so. Their friendship until that point had remained respectful and distant, in the physical sense. George could confide intimate details of her life—whom she was screwing, whom her roommates were screwing, what friend had disappointed her the most at any given time. She would tell him when she had her period so he knew to tread cautiously, but she had always maintained approximately a foot’s distance between them. If Edgar closed the gap, George always opened it. But tonight she was closing all gaps.

She took his wrist and led him into the bedroom, although she stumbled a few times and he had to steady her. An observer might not have been able to tell who was guiding whom. She disrobed in front of him, balling up each item and throwing it across the room, as if she were doing a study on the aerodynamics of various garments. Once naked, she slid under the covers.
What are you waiting for?
she asked. He was waiting for an explanation. There would be none. He disrobed more modestly and folded his jeans and T-shirt, placed them on the dresser. He slid into bed, and George crawled on top of him.

He asked once:
Are you sure?

She replied:
Shut up.

Edgar would remember every second of their night together, in part because he had a photographic memory. George would remember tangling limbs and too many kisses, like a mosquito buzzing around her head. She knew exactly one second after Edgar came that she had made a mistake. Edgar held her in his arms and wouldn’t let go. Most guys just rolled over and started snoring. George removed herself from his grip. It was like pulling off duct tape. She put on her robe, entered the kitchen, and gulped a couple glasses of water and two aspirin. Afraid to return to her room, she slipped into Anna’s room, put on Anna’s pajamas, and tried to sleep in her bed. After fifteen minutes passed, Edgar grew restless and began searching for her. He checked the basement and Kate’s bedroom before he finally climbed the stairs to the attic. When he cracked the door to Anna’s room, George feigned sleep. Edgar knew she was faking, and she knew that Edgar knew. He wouldn’t let her escape him so easily. She didn’t have to sleep in the same bed with him, but he would be there in the morning.