The Secrets of a Fire King (12 page)

Before Emmy left, I had not liked Stephen. At twenty-seven he still lived at home, in a fixed-over apartment on the third fl oor of his parents’ house. He slept all morning and spent his nights pacing his small rooms, listening to Beethoven or playing chess with a computer he’d bought. I had seen the dark scars that bisected both his wrists, and they frightened me. He collected a welfare check every month, took Valium every few hours, and lived in a state of precarious calm. Sometimes he was mean, teasing Emmy to the edge of tears. But he could be charming too, with an ease and grace the boys my own age didn’t have. When he was feeling good he made things special, leaning over to whisper something, his fingers a lingering touch on my arm, on my knee. I knew it had to do with the danger, too, the reason he was so attractive at those times.

“Kate understands me,” he said once. Emmy, the only person who was not afraid of him, laughed out loud and asked why I’d
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have any better insight into his warped mind than the rest of the world.

“Can’t you tell?” he said. I wouldn’t look at him so he put his fingers lightly on my arm. He was completely calm, but he must have felt me trembling. It was a week after my father had been taken to the hospital, and it seemed that Stephen knew some truth about me, something invisible that only he could sense.

“What do you mean?” I demanded. But he just laughed and left the porch, telling me to figure it out for myself.

“What did he mean?” I asked. “What did he mean by that?”

“He’s in a crazy mode,” Emmy said. She was methodically polishing her fingernails, and she tossed her long bright hair over her shoulder. “The best thing to do is pretend he doesn’t exist.” But Emmy left and then there was only Stephen, charming, terrifying Stephen, who started to call me every day. He asked me to come over, to go for a ride, to fly kites with him behind a deserted barn he’d found. Finally I gave in, telling myself I was doing him a favor by keeping him company. But it was more than that. I knew that Stephen understood the suspended world between sanity and madness, that he lived his life inside it.

One night, past midnight, when we were sitting in the quiet darkness of his porch, he told me about cutting his wrists, the even pulse of warm running water, the sting of the razor dulled with Valium and whiskey.

“Am I shocking you?” he had asked after a while.

“No. Emmy told me about it.” I paused, unsure how much to reveal. “She thinks you did it to get attention.” He laughed. “Well it worked,” he said, “didn’t it?” I traced my finger around the pattern in the upholstery.

“Maybe,” I said. “But now everyone thinks you’re crazy.” He shrugged, and stretched, pushing his large thick hands up toward the ceiling. “So what?” he said. “If people think you’re crazy, they leave you alone, that’s all.” I thought of all the times I had stood in front of the mirror, of the times I woke at night, my heart a frantic movement, no escape.

“Don’t you ever worry that it’s true?”

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Stephen reached over to the table and held up his blue plastic bottle of Valium. It was a strong prescription. I knew, because I had tried it. I liked the way the blue pills slid down my throat, dissolving anxiety. I liked the way the edges of things grew undefined, so I was able to rise from my own body, calmly and with perfect grace.

Stephen shook a pill into his hand. His skin was pale and damp, his expression intent.

“No,” he said. “I don’t worry. Ever.”

Still, on the day the cake collapsed, I could tell he
was
worried.

When I got to the pool room he was squinting down one cue at a time, discarding each one as he discovered warps and fl aws.

“Hey, Kate,” he said, choosing one at last. “Care for a game?” We ordered beer and plugged our quarters into the machine, waiting for the weighty, rolling thunk of balls. Stephen ran his hand through his red beard. He had green eyes and a long, fi nely shaped nose. I thought he was extremely handsome.

“How goes the tournament?” I asked. He’d been in the play-offs for days, and each time I came in the stakes were higher.

Stephen broke, and dropped two low balls. He stepped back and surveyed the table. “You’ll love this,” he said. “Loser goes skydiving.”

“You know,” I said, remembering the plummeting shapes, the silky streaks against the sky, “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Well,” Stephen said, “keep the loser company, then.” He missed his next shot and we stopped talking. I was good, steady, with some competitions behind me. The bar was fi lling up around us, and soon a row of quarters lined the wooden rim of the pool table. After a while Ted Johnson, one of the artists in the farmhouse, came in and leaned against the wall. Stephen tensed, and his next shot went wild.

“Too bad,” Ted said, stepping forward. “Looks like you’re on a regular losing streak.”

“You could go fuck yourself,” Stephen said, but his voice was even, as though he’d just offered Ted a beer.

“Thanks,” Ted said. “But actually, I’d just as soon ask Kate a
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question, while she’s here. I’d like to know what you think about honor, Kate. Specifically, I want to know if you think an honor-able person must always keep a promise?” I shot again. The cue ball hovered on the edge of a pocket, then steadied itself. There was a tension, a subtext that I couldn’t read. I sent my last ball in and took aim at the eight. It went in smoothly, and I stepped back. There was a moment of silence, and we listened to it roll away into the hidden depths of the table.

“What’s your point, Ted?” I asked, without turning to look at him.

“Stephen is going skydiving,” he said. “That’s my point.”

“Stephen, you lost?” I felt, oddly enough, betrayed.

“It was a technicality,” Stephen said, frowning. “I’m the better player.” He took a long swallow of beer.

“What bullshit,” Ted answered, shaking his head. “You’re absolutely graceless in defeat.”

Stephen was quiet for a long time. Then he put his hand to his mouth, very casually, but I knew he was slipping one of his tiny blue Valiums. He tugged his hands through his thick hair and smiled.

“It’s no big deal, skydiving. I called today and made the arrangements.”

“All the same,” Ted answered, “I can’t wait to see it.” Stephen shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ll go alone.” Ted was surprised. “Forget it, champ. You’ve got to have a witness.”

“Then Kate will go,” Stephen said. “She’ll witness. She’ll even jump, unless she’s afraid.”

I didn’t know what to say. He already knew I wasn’t working the next day. And it was something to think about, too, after a summer of sky gazing, to finally be inside a plane.

“I’ve never even flown before,” I told them.

“That’s no problem,” Ted answered. “That part is a piece of cake.”

I finished off the beer and picked up my purse from where it was lying on a bar stool.

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“Where are you going?” Stephen asked.

“Believe it or not, some of us work for a living,” I said.

He smiled at me, a wide, charming grin, and walked across the room. He took both my hands in his. “Don’t be mad, Kate,” he said. “I really want you to jump with me.”

“Well,” I said, getting flustered. He didn’t work, but his hands were calloused from playing so much pool. He had a classic face, a face you might see on a pale statue in a museum, with hair growing out of his scalp like flames and eyes that seemed to look out on some other, more compelling, world. Recklessness settled over me like a spell, and suddenly I couldn’t imagine saying no.

“Good,” he said, releasing my hands, winking quickly before he turned back to the bar. “That’s great. I’ll pick you up tomorrow, then. At eight.”

When I got home that night my mother was in the kitchen.

Sometimes the house was dark and quiet, with only her even breathing, her murmured response when I said I was home. But usually she was awake, working, the radio tuned to an easy-listening station, a book discarded on the sofa. She said that the concentration, the exactness required to form the fragile arcs of frosting, helped her relax.

“You’re late,” she said. She was stuffi ng frosting into one of the cloth pastry bags. “Were you at Stephen’s?” I shook my head. “I stayed late at work. Someone went home sick.” I started licking one of the spoons. My mother never ate the frosting. She saw too much of it, she said; she hated even the thick sweet smell of it.

“What is it that you do over there?” she asked, perplexed.

“At work?”

My mother looked up. “You know what I mean,” she said.

I pushed off my tennis shoes. “I don’t know. We hang out.

Talk about books and music and art and stuff.”

“But he doesn’t work, Kate. You come home and you have to get up in a few hours. Stephen, on the other hand, can sleep all day.”

“I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”
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My mother sighed. “He’s not stable. Neither are his friends. I don’t like you being involved with them.”

“Well, I’m not unstable,” I said. I spoke too loudly, to counter the fear that seemed to plummet through my flesh whenever I had that thought. “I am not crazy.”

“No,” said my mother. She had a tray full of sugary roses in front of her, in a bright spectrum of color. I watched her fi ngers, thin and strong and graceful, as she shaped the swirls of frosting into vibrant, perfect roses.

“Whatever happened to simple white?” she asked, pausing to stretch her fi ngers. This bride’s colors were green and lavender, and my mother had dyed the frosting to match swatches from the dresses. Her own wedding pictures were in black and white, but I knew it had been simple, small and elegant, the bridesmaids wearing the palest shade of peach.

“I saw your father today,” she said while I was rummaging in the refrigerator.

“How is he?” I asked.

“The same. Better. I don’t know.” She slid the tray of fi nished roses into the freezer. “Maybe a little better, today. The doctors seem quite hopeful.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“I thought we could go see him tomorrow.”

“Not tomorrow,” I said. “Stephen and I have plans already.”

“Katie, he’d like to see you.”

“Oh really?” I said sarcastically. “Did he tell you that?” My mother looked up from the sink. Her hands were wet, a pale shade of purple that shimmered in the harsh overhead light.

I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go see him next week, okay?” I started down the hall to my room.

“Kate,” she called to me. I paused and turned around.

“Sometimes,” she said, “you have no common sense at all.” Secretly I hoped for rain, but the next day was clear and blue.

Stephen was even early for a change, the top of his convertible down when he glided up in front of the house. We drove through
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the clean white scent of clover and the first shimmers of heat.

Along the way we stopped to gather dandelions, soft as moss, and waxy black-eyed Susans. Ted had given me his camera, with instructions to document the event, and I spent half the fi lm on the countryside, on Stephen wearing flowers in his beard.

The hangar was a small concrete building sitting fl atly amid acres of corn. The first thing we saw when we entered was a pile of stretchers stacked neatly against the wall. It was hardly reassuring, and neither was the hand-lettered sign that warned cash only. Stephen and I wandered in the dim open room, looking at the pictures of skydivers in various formations, until two other women showed up, followed by a tall gruff man who collected forty dollars from each of us, and sent us out to the fi eld.

The man, who had gray hair and a compact body, turned out to be Howard, our instructor. He lined us up beneath the hot sun and made us practice. For the first jump we would all be on a static line, but we had to practice as if we were going to pull our own ripcords. It was a matter of timing, Howard said, and he taught us a chant to measure our actions. Arch 1000, Look 1000, Reach 1000, Pull 1000, Arch 1000, Check 1000. We practiced endlessly, until sweat lifted from our skin and Howard, in his white clothes, seemed to shimmer. It was important, he said, that we start counting the minute we jumped. Otherwise, we’d lose track of time. Some people panicked and pulled their reserve chute even as the first one opened, tangling them both and falling to their deaths. Others were motionless in their fear and fell like stones, their reserves untouched. So we chanted, moving our arms and heads in rhythm, arching our backs until they ached. Finally, Howard decided we were ready and took us into the hangar to learn emergency maneuvers.

We practiced these from a rigging suspended from the ceiling.

With luck, Howard said, everything should work automatically.

But in case anything went wrong, we had to know how to get rid of the first parachute and open our reserve. We took turns in the rigging, yanking the release straps and falling a few feet before the canvas harness caught us. When I tried it, the straps cut painfully into my thighs.

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“In the air,” Howard said, “it won’t feel this bad.” I got down, my palms sweaty and shaky, and Stephen climbed into the harness.

“Streamer!” Howard shouted, describing a parachute that opened but didn’t inflate. Stephen’s motions were fl uid—he fl ipped open the metal buckles, slipped his thumbs through the protrud-ing rings, and fell the few feet through the air.

Howard nodded vigorously. “Yes,” he said. “Perfect. You do exactly the same for a Mae West—a parachute with a cord that’s caught, bisecting it through the middle.” The other two women had jumped before but their training had expired, and it took them a few tries to relearn the movements. After we had each gone through the procedure three times without hesitation, Howard let us break for lunch. Stephen and I bought Cokes and sat in the shade of the building, looking at the row of planes shining in the sun.