How to Start a Fire (37 page)

Edgar Dalton had been busy in the intervening years. He had apparently made quite a name for himself in Silicon Valley. Photos of him, in tuxedos, no less, were littered over the Internet. He looked different these days, impeccably groomed, at ease, sure of himself. George drank another glass of wine and composed a message.

Dear Edgar,

George Leoni here from Santa Cruz. Do you remember me? It’s been almost twenty years. I’m not sure why I’m writing. I saw your picture online and it brought back memories and I wanted to see how you were doing. Although it’s clear you’re doing well. I had a feeling great things would happen for you.

I just thought I’d say hi. Write back if you have the chance.

Best,

George

George turned off her computer after she sent the message and went straight to bed. By morning she had received a reply.

Dear George,

Of course I remember you. How have you been? A brief survey of your online profile informs me that you live in Chicago and have three boys. That must keep you and your husband very busy. Are you still working in the forestry service?

I hope your life has turned out well. Are you still in touch with Anna and Kate?

I’ve thought about you now and again over the years. Tell me what you’re up to these days.

Warmest regards,

Edgar

George, elated to receive such a prompt response, immediately replied.

Edgar,

It’s rare to make contact with someone you want to hear from when trawling these sites. Maybe it makes up for the slightly dirty feeling you have when you realize you wasted an hour (okay, two) of your life reading about the banal details of acquaintances’ lives. Most of the time I wonder what draws me to this cheap form of communication. I’m still in touch with Kate and Anna. I’m not sure what to say about either of them. I’m surprised how Kate turned out, and Anna’s story—I’m not sure that it’s mine to tell. Maybe I’ll answer those questions another time. Just so you know, Anna uses a nom de plume to spy on her friends. She goes by the name of Kate Mirnoff as a less-than-subtle mockery of Kate’s blind resistance to all forms of cyber-communication. (Kate still doesn’t know a parody of her is online reporting regularly about the lunch she ate or the lecture series she recently attended or the bad vacuum cleaner she purchased.)

As you know, I have three boys. All wild animals and I can’t deny that I prefer them that way. I was a forest ranger for all of one year and then I married (more than once). I’m not married now. I no longer work as a ranger. I consult for environmental groups. But it’s not the same. We camp as much as we can. Only one of my husbands shared my love of the great outdoors and even that one didn’t work. Can you believe I have ex-husbands, plural? That’s enough about me.

Tell me what you’ve been up to. Married? Children? Career? I suppose those are tedious questions. So middle-aged. Is that what we are now? Anna says she will admit to middle age only when she turns fifty. She says she’s going to live to be one hundred. I believe her.

George

A few polite but staid e-mails passed over the next few weeks, and then Edgar suggested a phone call. George put the boys to bed, took a bath, threw on a pair of an ex-husband’s sweats, wrapped herself in an old musty family quilt, and poured herself a glass of wine as she waited by the phone. Edgar had said he would call at ten on the dot. The phone rang at 9:59 p.m.

George’s experience with men was that, after the initial courtship, they showed little interest in what she had to say, and even during the courtship phase, that interest was theatrical. She could spot the well-timed head nod, the radio-delayed canned laughter at something amusing she might have said—often stories about her children or an old forestry anecdote. Like the time she’d found a throng of Deadheads lost on a hiking trail in the Russian River Valley. When they couldn’t find their way out, they saw it as a sign that they were supposed to live off the land. There was enough water and fishing for basic survival (one of the Deadheads had been an Eagle Scout). They thought they’d start their own minicivilization, believing they were miles deep in the Sierras.

“Dude, we thought we were like the Donner Party. But we made a pact not to eat each other,” a white guy with dreadlocks and a tie-dyed T-shirt said. “Some of us are vegetarians,” he added.

George pointed the Donner Party Redux onto a trail and explained that a thirty-minute walk would bring them back to civilization. There was only one holdout (the Eagle Scout), and he’d lasted just a few minutes.

George couldn’t count on her fingers and toes how many times she’d told that story. It was her go-to anecdote. Most men expressed mild to moderate amusement. But Edgar liked the story best.

Edgar was different. Religiously curious. It was as if he were trying to siphon intelligence, as if it were a scarce resource. He listened intently and interrupted to ask questions only when he felt the information provided was inadequate—and it was always inadequate. She had said so much about herself during that first phone call that, when it was over, she wondered if she had a single biographical detail left to reveal.

While George spoke, Edgar managed to absorb the information while summoning a vivid image of the beautiful, leggy college girl he’d met at that very strange party he’d been conned into hosting so many years ago. The sharp sting of her rejection was now a soft memory. They spoke until well past midnight, until the battery on George’s phone began to die. Edgar told her that he’d call her next week.

That night George started to think of Edgar in ways she hadn’t thought of him before. More specifically, she began forcing herself to think of Edgar in those ways, since the feelings didn’t come naturally. George had always been attracted to a certain type of male. The type who didn’t speak much, or listen much, for that matter. The kind of man who didn’t ask if he could kiss you good night but just did it. The men George liked didn’t ask her any questions at all.

That night Edgar masturbated to a mental picture of a twenty-year-old George.

Edgar sent George an e-mail the following morning. She responded that afternoon. He e-mailed again the next day and they spoke on the phone two days later and then two days after that. The balance of the early conversations, so heavily in favor of George, began to shift after the third phone call, when George noted how often she heard the sound of her own voice. She couldn’t recall Edgar saying more than
Yes; That’s true; I see; How unfortunate.
She had gathered only a few details of his life after well over two hours of phone conversations. He lived alone in Silicon Valley; he had a cat named Squirrel; he owned a tech company called Axiom Inc. that specialized in creating renewable energy for personal electronic devices. While George was curious about how a cell phone could charge itself, she was far more interested in Edgar’s personal life.

“You never married?” she asked. It was her first question beyond the passport-application-type inquiries.

“I came close. Once,” Edgar said. And he told the story of Amy, whom he had met in graduate school in Texas. They moved in together after dating only two weeks—compatible in mind and spirit. They could spend hours discussing renewable energy and the relative merits of biofuel and wind, solar, and nuclear power. Amy was wildly against the last, but Edgar remained open to all possibilities. A year into their relationship, Edgar proposed, and they began preparing for their nuptials. And then a few months before the wedding, Edgar realized he wasn’t in love anymore. What Edgar didn’t tell George was that sometimes he thought of George when he was having sex with his fiancée. As the wedding drew nearer, he decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life fucking one woman while thinking about another.

Three months after George first made contact, she flew to San Francisco to meet Edgar for the weekend. He sent a limo to pick her up at the airport. He didn’t want their first encounter after almost twenty years to be a quick roadside embrace followed by fumbling with luggage and narrow escapes from minor fender-benders and the stress of traffic. He had been told on more than one occasion that he drove like an old man. Their reunion had to be perfect.

Edgar was standing on the porch of his three-story Colonial in Palo Alto when Edgar’s driver pulled George’s chariot along the circular driveway. George noticed the house first, not Edgar. The plantation-manor-size structure took her aback. George immediately thought of what Kate might say:
Six thousand square feet for one man. That’s environmentally irresponsible. Let’s say he doesn’t even use the heat or air conditioning—the water required for that half acre of lawn is three hundred and twenty-five thousand gallons per year, approximately. That’s the equivalent of over two hundred thousand toilet flushes.
Then again, Kate would have been happy living in a closet. And George had researched the common lawn on her own; there were some environmental benefits.

Edgar waved, which pulled George’s attention away from lawn-care statistics. He looked the same, but fleshier—in a good way—and he still had most of his hair. He wore a flattering, pressed white shirt and designer jeans, which led George to the quick and accurate conclusion that someone else bought his clothes for him. They were too on the nose for Edgar to have chosen them of his own accord. She wished he had looked a little more scruffy and unfettered, like his old self.

He opened the car door for George. They embraced. The driver grappled with her heavy suitcase while Edgar led George on a twenty-minute tour of his home, which showed no evidence that it was inhabited by him. Any rich man could have lived in that house. One room contained a massive flat-screen television, several video-game consoles, and shelves loaded with alphabetized comic-book collections and a few Batman figurines from the 1950s that were worth more than some people’s cars. Everything with color, with memory, with a tie to the owner of the home was trapped in that single room.

As George was leaving, she saw a large, expensively framed set of mushroom sketches on the wall. Roughly drawn with colored charcoal and labeled in a scrawl that looked as familiar to George as her own hand.

“‘
Amanita muscaria
, also known as the fly agaric.’ Why do I know that?” George asked, staring at the picture with an unnerving sense that she’d seen it before, a picture that felt utterly wrong in this house.

“Kate drew that,” Edgar said.

“You saved it for all of these years?”

“I was sorting through stuff when I moved two years ago,” said Edgar. “I always liked that picture. It reminded me of a different time. I think I sent the fake Kate a message telling her about it. I didn’t hear back.”

“I forgot all about the mushroom phase,” George said wistfully. The memory did not serve to remind George that Kate liked Edgar first. It merely reminded her that time was passing her by. She was thirty-seven years old with three children and no husband, and her forehead carried worry lines that didn’t disappear when she stopped worrying.

Edgar did everything right. Or at least, he did everything he could think of to make the evening perfect. He had hired a chef to teach him how to make pasta puttanesca and a flourless chocolate cake. He made the meal for George that night, attempting to radiate smooth culinary certainty. A few hiccups with sauces bubbling over and an obvious lack of familiarity with how the oven worked gave him away, but George didn’t let on. She offered her assistance, but he refused, ordering her to sit and drink, which she did prodigiously. By the time dinner was served, she’d killed almost an entire bottle of red wine on her own.

Edgar was easy to talk to, but it’s always easy to talk to someone who is captivated by your every word. In the three hours it took Edgar to prep the meal and serve it, the subtext for George remained the same:
I should feel something.
But Edgar had enough feelings for the two of them. He tried to wait until dessert was on the table to kiss her, but he slammed her against the refrigerator when she got up to refill a glass of water. George returned the kiss because it was the polite thing to do and she wanted to feel something. The cake burned. Edgar turned off the oven and opened the window.

“I’ll make you another cake,” he said.

“Let’s go upstairs,” George said. She still wasn’t feeling anything but thought that she might feel something if they had sex.

The middle-aged couple disrobed with adolescent speed, as if racing to copulate before someone’s parents returned home. Edgar tried to do all the right things. Things he had learned from the five women he had been with; things he had read in men’s magazines; things he had seen in porn. George seemed to respond. Her moans and breathing quickened, but George was skilled in the art of sexual performance. She had gotten almost too good. After George fake-came and Edgar really did, she still thought,
I should feel something.
She comforted herself with the knowledge that Edgar did feel something, and, for now, that was enough.

On Monday, when Edgar returned to work, his colleagues required a full report on his weekend. Edgar provided the gentleman’s version and was about to send George a bouquet of flowers when Rufus, his CFO, intervened.

“Dude, you’ve got to play it cool. Chicks don’t like it if you seem too needy.”

“Rufus, grown women aren’t interested in men who play games,” said Edgar.

Cathy, a grown woman, said, “But we also don’t like men who seem desperate. You have to figure out how to strike a balance.”

“How do I do that?” said Edgar.

“Wait five days, then you can call her,” Rufus said.