The Fires (23 page)

Later, I’d left the gate unlatched and didn’t hear him come back from his round. He tapped my shoulder, and I flinched, holding my chest. He wasn’t laughing the way he usually did when he startled me. His knuckles knocked against the desktop, and he bent down to look into my face as if he were searching for something on my cheek, then kissed me between my ear and my throat.

“I think I’ve seen all the rooms but yours.”

I couldn’t have lifted my arm, and my voice flitted higher. “It’s like all the other ones.”

“No it’s not.”

When we went upstairs, something bright turned in my stomach as I unlocked the door. Inside, I went straight to the bathroom to fix my hair and pour a little bourbon into two plastic cups.

I came back, and we sat on the knobby chenille bedspread. He seemed larger and louder than he had downstairs, trying to repress the smile on his purplish lips, a scent like soap and lemons in his clothes. He glanced at my suitcases. “You haven’t unpacked?”

“I just don’t have anywhere to put them,” I said. My sweaters were strewn on the dresser, and above it, the square mirror hung like an empty television screen waiting for something to happen.

My books lay towered under the painting of the dog standing taut and noble with its ears pricked and mouth parted, listening to some high-pitched whistle. I didn’t know if Paul remembered what I’d told him about my scars and, if he did, whether he imagined them as slighter than they were, the vain exaggeration of a

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girl trying to seem tragic. I hated that idea, and knew I wouldn’t attempt to fool him. I turned off all the lights, except the tidy lamp on the bureau, and made a joke about a sloppy fat man who’d followed Paul on one of his rounds to see for himself that the hotel was safe. “Good thing he checked, right?” We laughed, and his elbow knocked against my book on the nightstand. My bosom and thighs were warmly expanding, and we were kissing again, his hand squeezing my shoulder. I wanted to talk more until I could figure out what to do. I pulled away. “I have to tell you—”

He looked down at my lap and put his hand on my arm and turned it so the blistered spot faced the light. “What happened here?”

It wasn’t me,
I thought,
please, not me.
I shrugged and tried to smile. “Just the iron.”

He put his other hand on my knee. “You have a scar here?”

I nodded. He moved his hand farther up my leg, to where the zipper began on my skirt. He spread his other hand against my stomach. “There, too,” I said. He nodded and murmured something. The light seemed to flutter. He kissed me again, pulled me back into his arms. His voice was hoarse and shaky. “Will you show me?”

The light spun and needled against the wall. I gulped down the last of my bourbon and the rest in his glass, too. I was afraid, but if I didn’t do this now I’d never be able to. I’d let him see them, and then that would be it. It would be over with. If he left, I would still be okay. It wouldn’t kill me.

I stood up, slipped off my stockings, and my hand shook so much it took a while to find the catch to the zipper of my skirt.

It swerved as I pulled it, and when I lost my grip, the skirt fell to the floor. That was enough. I could leave my sweater on. He leaned over and traced his finger along the border of a scar on my thigh, which in the dimness looked almost natural, like a mass THE FIRES / 181

of freckles or the spotted colors on an animal’s fur. He inhaled a breath. “You’re lucky it didn’t—” Then he started to say something else, but swallowed. With his head lowered, his forehead and cheeks looked extremely wide, and I noticed how clear and pale the flesh on his face was, his mouth full and open. He looked up and stared at my sweater, a pale-blue one that I thought made my neck look long and my shoulders regal. I wasn’t going to take it off. He reached up and flipped the ribbed band at my waist.

“Come on,” he said gently, and he seemed vulnerable in his largeness, as if his body were too much for him to carry around and he badly needed my help.

Do it fast,
I told myself, quickly pulling it up over my head, and the scars burst red from my torso. Sitting beside him on the bed, as casually as I could, I unhooked my bra and shrugged it off, his shirt grazing my bare arm. I was breathing so hard my chest hurt.

My body felt monstrously large, and the scars stung and rippled, the horsehead like a bad smear of blood, the pink thorns above it like claws. There were furred orangish flecks under my right breast, the rope looped on the left, but around the nipples the skin was perfect and white, like stone or velvet.

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “So these are them,” he said, stroking the marks whipping up the small of my back. He drew in closer, but I couldn’t read his face.
Not pity,
I said to myself.
Curiosity is better than pity.

His kiss was tense. I was sure he was going to leave, and I pulled back.

“You’re not used to it,” he said, coaxing me down to the bed so we were facing one another. His eyes were huge and dark, the lashes long and curved. “Don’t be afraid.”

He kissed my ear, and the stubble of his beard rubbed against my cheek, his hands puttered around my waist, then up to the first curve of my breasts. I kept thinking he would leave.

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When he took off his shirt, his white skin sloped above me, his chest flecked with a few black hairs. I watched the arch of his neck, the pulse and swallow there in the paleness. The lamp on the bureau glittered. He stared down at me as if he were memorizing, going over a formula in his head that he would later recite.

I kept waiting for the numbness, for that creeping sense of dislocation, like losing your hand in the dark, but it never came. The gold-white light behind his shoulder flickered, dangerous and lush.

Afterward, lying back beside him, I noticed the walls tilted at the sloped ceiling, and I felt lightheaded and dizzy. When I glanced back at his face, he grimaced and turned on his stomach.

“Look,” he said, moving the lamp closer.

Between his shoulder blades clung thin streaks of red. The scars briared down to the small of his back, not raised, but dark and definite, almost purple, from a belt or a stick. “It’s where my uncle hit me.” His hands pressed flat into the mattress, the tops of his fingers whitened. I sat up and ran the side of my thumb along one of the scars, then up over the curve of his shoulder. “He was a bastard, but I didn’t tell anyone. He was paying for my school.”

He turned over and sat up. “We’re the same enough, aren’t we?”

That night I didn’t sleep much, an unsteady shimmering every time I opened my eyes. Very early in the morning, when the light was still tentative and faint, I woke up, startled to see his face. I reached to smooth my hair, wipe the crust from my eyes. He cupped his hand next to my ear and combed his fingers down the length of my hair.

I
became strangely confident. A couple of times I wore shorter sleeves or shorter skirts to work. When I’d notice a guest stare THE FIRES / 183

a second too long at a scar, I’d look into their eyes and straighten my shoulders, and they’d gaze back at my face as if they hadn’t seen anything much. It was easier than I thought.

“You should come back with me to Poland sometime,” Paul said one night, in his basement room. He lived in his cousin’s house, and there were maps pinned to all the walls, a little shaky card table desk where he worked, and a mattress on the floor.

“I’d like that,” I said.
Only if you throw out all the matches,
I told myself.
Give that up or you’ll ruin it.
I sat down cross-legged on his mattress and opened up the physics book he was reading to a bright diagram of circles and arrows. “Where would we stay?”

“With my mother in Kruszwica. I’ll take you to see Lake Goplo and the Mouse Tower—a part of this old castle that I like, where this evil king lived with his syphilis. And there’s the salt-springs spa.”

He was good-natured in that way of people who appreciate absurdity and don’t let it upset them much. He made me laugh with his impressions of the whiny woman who never had enough towels and the stiff, lantern-jawed man who kept insisting we were late with his wake-up calls. But when he was really angry, his humor had an edge. After the person left, he would pull out his mock sword and pretend to chop off their head or plunge it into their heart and say sarcastically, “There!”

As Jo put it, we became a couple, and a few weeks after this we were at the Big Wheel after midnight, drinking coffee. I thought the waitresses looked prettier than the last time I remembered, their eyes more luminous, their reluctant smiles less crooked. He was eating almost-burnt hash browns. I’d already asked him about his parents, and he’d told me that his mother worked in a textile factory and his father, who had been an engineer, had died. We had that in common, too, though Paul hardly remembered his father.

He was telling me that night about the uncle who had beaten 184 / RENÉ STEINKE

him, his mother’s older brother, a foreman at the textile factory where she worked. “What’s the phrase you have? The chewing image?”

I started to laugh. “The spitting image.”

“That, I’m told I’m that for my father, and I think my uncle was jealous of his success, so he tried to beat it out of me.”

The waitress brought us more coffee, and Paul poured cream into his cup. “Didn’t your aunt try to stop him?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Couldn’t.” He wasn’t secretive, but remarkably terse and straightforward when he talked about them—he didn’t like to linger or tell any long stories. It was as if he’d drawn precise lines around them—a diagram like the ones in his books—and he had a formula for each person. I knew they had to be more complicated than he made them out to be, but still admired the confidence behind what he said. “She didn’t do anything without his say in it,” he said.

“I’m surprised you didn’t run away.”

He looked at me fiercely, and his hand clenched the end of his fork. “I loved school. He was paying, and I wasn’t going to let him take that away.”

I nodded and looked over at the pie under the glass dome on the counter. He took a large bite of hash browns, obviously eager to change the subject. “When are you going to take me to see these dunes?” The sand dunes on this side of Lake Michigan were the closest thing to a tourist attraction in our part of Indiana, but his cousin hadn’t taken him there yet.

“As soon as it’s warm enough,” I said. “You’ll see how tall they are. Mountains of sand. It takes an hour to climb one.”

He grinned and pointed at a framed picture against the paneling. “Look at that.” It was a painting of the dunes, the pine trees like spiked, twisted fingers, and a giant gull glided in a grape-colored sky, almost colliding with the sparkled sandy point. “It THE FIRES / 185

looks like Mars,” he said. I was bringing the coffee to my mouth and laughed so hard I spilled it all over the table.

O
ne day he took me to a barn that belonged to someone his cousin knew. There were milk cows in the stalls and a pony tied to a post munched on grass. Hay on the floor, a grassy smell like pond water kept too long in a bucket. He was sure the owners would be gone for the next two days. “That’s why they’ve got all the animals in here,” he said. “You have to trust me.”

We climbed a rickety wooden ladder up to the hayloft, where a fat cat sneered and slinked back against the wall. “Careful,” he said, holding out his hand to help me up. There was a round window the size of a cake plate, nothing in it but green. We’d had to walk through the fields to get there, and our clothes were stained as if we’d been rolling in green paint.

He was making jokes and teasing me. He tied my hands to the window and blindfolded me with his shirt. I could see the red material pressed up against my eyelids and felt him unbutton my blouse, pull off my jeans. I could have kicked, but didn’t, the silky-sharp hay pricking against my bare skin. “Now you’re the only one in the dark,” he said. “Next time it will be me.” There was a recklessness in letting him see, letting him touch. My blood rolled fast as I waited for his hands, guessed wrong, and guessed again. The cow grunted, spilled something in its stall.

I heard a zipper, the wadding of material, and the plod of it hitting the floor. I felt his soft skin, then his breath and tongue just under my arm.

D
espite the chilly weather, we had a picnic late one night on the grounds behind the hotel. We spread a blanket on the 186 / RENÉ STEINKE

grass between the two trees and sat in our coats facing the rows of windows in the back.

He poured some wine into curvy juice glasses from the cafeteria. “If I were to break in right now,” he said, “I’d climb up that back fire escape and pull myself over that railing.” He pointed to the third floor, “And I’d pry open that window. It’s cracked a little.”

“What would you steal?” I warmed my hands under my arms, pressed them against the wool of my coat.

He shrugged. “That would be the harder part. You’d have to be good enough to sneak into the rooms, find the purses and wallets, and leave before anyone noticed.” He glanced over at me. “I’m probably too big and clumsy to make a good thief. You’d be better at it.” Hanna was a thief, my mother had told me once, a shoplifter.
She took what she wanted, whether she needed it or not,
my mother said. Once she’d stolen a handsaw from the hardware store, just because she knew she could. She brought it home, hid it under the bed, showed my mother, and then forgot about it until Christmas, when she gave it to my grandfather as a present.

A light went off in one of the rooms. “There goes another one,”

I said, toasting it with my glass of wine. “Good night.” I pointed to the two corner rooms, whose lights were still on. “Those are the insomniacs,” I said. “I could tell. When they checked in, there was something weird in their eyes.”

“Maybe they were sties,” he said, smiling slyly.

“I can spot a person who can’t sleep, you know,” I said. “You’re definitely not one of them.”

His bottom lip pouted as he considered this, and he shook his head. “I can sleep on trains, buses, all the way through thunder-storms.” For some reason this annoyed me.