Tinderbox (10 page)

Caro pulls on her black tank suit, covering up her excesses with an oversized T-shirt.
Most of the time, she feels at peace that she is never going to be anyone to look
at, her brief foray with having a sexy figure the year she lived abroad having borne
nothing worthwhile. Given one wish, it would not be to have that body again but, rather,
to eat normally: three meals a day and a snack here and there. Around her father,
though, she is always thrown back into the feeling she has had since her solid child’s
body morphed into something with bulges in the right, but also in too many of the
wrong, places—that she has disappointed him by not being a beauty.

She climbs the flagstone steps to the pool, where Eva and Omar are already in the
water, squealing as they take turns throwing a basketball into a floating hoop left
by the tenants. Eva has on a tomato-red bathing suit with an attached skirt and a
stiff built-in brassiere, absurdly large on her, a hand-me-down, perhaps, from Ursula
or Alicia.

Her father and Betty are seated under an umbrella with drinks in their hands. Adam
is sprawled on a chaise at the edge of the pool with his eyes closed.

“Miss Caro, Miss Caro!” Eva waves.

“You found your suits.”

“Dr. M. tell me to pack them on top of the suitcases so Omar can swim right away.
Omar show me the way Mr. Adam used to go to the pool. Through the window!”

Caro had forgotten this, that Adam would leave the screen propped against the bedroom
wall so he could come and go through the window.

Betty pours Caro a drink that looks like a melted lollipop. “Have a meatball,” she
says, pointing at the platter. “Nice, isn’t it? I like seeing the mountains. And it’s
so cool compared to Arizona. You can’t even be outside in August there.”

Betty flings her legs up so that her bunioned but well-manicured feet rest on Larry’s
thighs. Caro feels her jaw tighten as she recalls her last visit to Tucson, when an
evening had similarly commenced with a pitcher of something too sweet and had then
proceeded to Betty pressing her pelvis against her father and calling him her baby
cucumber.

“I have to admit, for the first time, this visit, I understand why my father loved
it here.”

Adam opens his eyes.

“Where did you say Eva’s from?” Betty asks Adam. “She seems like a sweet girl.”

“Iquitos. That’s a city on the Amazon in northern Peru.”

“I didn’t know the Amazon went through Peru. Geography.” Betty laughs. “Well, school
in general, was never my thing.”

“Eva,” Adam says to Betty, “is what you would call one of us. Her great-great-grandfather
was a Jew from Morocco.”

“She knew Rachida?”

Adam raises the back of the chaise so he is sitting up. He sniffs his drink. “Eva’s
great-great-grandfather was a rubber trader from Rabat who lived in the Amazon at
the turn of the century. The rest of her heritage is Bora Indian.”

“So she’s an Indian Jew?” her father asks. “I never heard of that.”

“Grow up, Dad. There are Chinese Jews. There are Pakistani Jews. Judaism is a religion,
not a blood type.”

Caro stands. “I’m going for a swim.” She shoots her father a look. He nods and rises
to his feet. Caro takes Adam’s drink from his hand while her father yanks Adam’s glasses
from his nose.

“You grow up,” Caro says as she and her father tip Adam into the pool.

5

It is the first evening Myra has been alone in the house in nearly two months. She
sits in the garden with her notebook in hand, pleased but also a bit disoriented by
the solitude.

At the front of the notebook, she keeps her master list, her evolving teleology of
love, which she has titled “A History of One Woman’s Passions.” At first, as for all
mammals, she has written, there is the breast or, in her case, the substitute bottle,
since she was born at a time when breastfeeding was viewed as slightly barbaric. Only
for her, the bottle had been simply that—a disembodied receptacle with no sensual
body attuned to hers. Anything more would have terrified her mother. Where her appetite
should have been, Myra was left with a hole, so that to this day food brings her no
pleasure; she eats to squelch hunger and acquire fuel, having to remind herself in
the same way she has to pay attention to put gas in her car.
But, of course
, Dreis, her former analyst, said,
you were starved for love. No cookie would do.

Looking out from her crib, she saw the shadows of the venetian blinds on the walls,
the shift as the sun rose in the sky and the room lightened. Then later, the love
of
I can do it
: walk, talk, ride, draw, and then read, which led to books, her first passion, the
world opening from the pages. Books remained preeminent through her discovery of her
own late-blooming body, not dwarfed until she found men: a boy in high school who
read poetry and kissed her on a damp summer lawn, a boy in college who played the
cello and had long lean legs and thick dirty blond hair. She slept naked with him,
let him make her come with his fingers. It had been he, not she, who was too scared
to have intercourse. With Larry, there had been her first and only deep romantic love,
but it paled, or perhaps simply faded, with the onslaught of the love of her children,
when she knew that she could survive the loss of him but not of them.

There had been the twisted attachment, a sort of love, really, Dreis proclaimed, that
she developed for pain: the miscarriages, over and over; her parents’ deaths, which
left her not with a feeling of loss but with a sense of utter aloneness as she recognized
that she had never been able to love either of them because neither had loved her.
They had taken care of her the way a turtle does her young: providing until the season
when the offspring can manage on its own. Foods with adequate nutrients, given without
pleasure, so they were stripped of taste, shelter scrubbed so it felt more like an
institution than a home, protection that forbade joy but left her limbs intact. Her
parents died so quickly, there was no opportunity for her to take care of them (even
that, it seemed, they had deprived her of), to transform what they’d not given her
into something she would do for them.

With Dreis, she felt for the first time what it was like to be seen and understood
by another; with her patients, she learned that the experience was equally profound
when she was the one with the mirror to show them who they were, the vision of what
they could be. After the divorce, there was love of nature, which she found in her
garden and terra-cotta pots, in her daily walks in the park—the world transformed
from the ammonia scent of her mother’s house into a thing of beauty. And then, with
her fiftieth birthday, there was the piano, the awe she felt when the patterns in
the Bach Inventions began to reveal themselves to her, when she could glimpse the
logic of a Chopin mazurka.

Briefly, she’d thought she might discover a love of God, but a month of Saturdays
in a synagogue left her embarrassed, sadly aware that it was too late for her not
to experience the rituals as false or, worse, silly. When she discovered that, for
her, God is grace, the pieces fell into place. That she could do. She would aspire
to live with grace, even more, to embody grace, her home infused with as much beauty
and generosity as she could muster. It was with this idea, this latest stage of her
teleology, that she had opened her home to Adam and Rachida and Omar, with the hope
that Adam would finish a screenplay he could sell for some respectable money and Rachida
would do her fellowship and Omar would march his little self through first grade.
Opened her home, she’d not recognized at the time but had to now, to Eva as well.
Eva with her dreams of next year in Jerusalem.

At dusk, Myra waters the flowering beds and blooming herbs, then locks the terrace
door, leaving her garden clogs on the deck. Barefoot, she climbs the stairs to the
music room, where she sits down to play without the sound of footsteps overhead. She
begins with the major scales, advancing by fifths, first hands separate, triple octaves,
then hands in tandem, and then one ascending while the other descends, a pattern,
her teacher showed her, which creates a series of chords while keeping the fingering
between the hands the same. She proceeds to arpeggios, saving the sevenths for last:
the progression from the joyful third, celebration of life, to the melancholic seventh,
mournful reminder of its fading.

When she first learned the cycle of fifths, it had taken her breath away, the mathematical
perfection, the way the magic happens no matter the scale. As a child, she’d loved
mathematics, not for the pyrotechnics of computation, but for the mystical nature
of an invention that insists on utter independence from its creator, an invisible
system more discovered than constructed, so that studying trigonometry or doing geometric
proofs felt like unveiling the laws of the universe—as if those were not also a fiction
of man. Larry had also loved mathematics. But what he loved was the use to which numbers
could be put—the prediction of velocities and markets and weather patterns—a kind
of exploitation, Myra had felt, of mathematics for man’s purposes rather than a reverence
for its poetry.

Larry found these thoughts of hers very sweet, very feminine. Her mind literally turned
him on. He’d listen to her talk and wrap his arms around her or fondle her breasts
and press his groin against hers. It took her years to realize how degrading she found
this, how his actions implied that her ideas were soft next to the harder qualities
of his, and how his amusement at her mind was for him a metaphor of sexual conquest,
of being able to pin her against a wall or hold her beneath him in bed.

When she’d discovered Larry’s affair and told him to leave, her father-in-law, Max,
sixty-six and in his last year of work, seemed more heartbroken than his son, who,
at first, seemed half-relieved. Not knowing what else to do, Max invited her to lunch.
Seated across the table from her at La Caravelle, he asked her to consider the implications
of her decision for the children. Silently, Myra, who in the prior five years had
miscarried six times and buried both her parents, wept into her leek soup.

Max offered her his handkerchief, which she blotched with her tears and then accidentally
dropped in her soup.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s unfair of me to ask you that. Larry is just so goddamned
weak. Smart but weak. He couldn’t bear your grief over your miscarriages. The girl,
the secretary, receptionist, whatever the hell she is, he was trying to keep you from
getting pregnant again.”

Her head bent, Myra nodded. What Max said was so true, she immediately recognized
it as something she already knew. And although it did not make her feel she could
trust Larry again or remain married to him, it had changed everything, because she
could no longer hate him. To the contrary, with the truth of her father-in-law’s comment
in mind, she had come to feel toward Larry a mild, neutered affection, a feeling not
unlike what she might have for a former schoolteacher or neighbor, an affection that
allowed her to go forward unencumbered by powerful emotions.

Before Larry’s infidelity, she’d visualized the four of them—Larry, Caro, Adam, and
herself—as a four-sided form: a square, a rectangle, a parallelogram, a quadrilateral,
a tetrahedron. Afterward, they became a pentagon: the fifth position occupied first
by the receptionist and then by each of Larry’s subsequent two wives. When she invited
Adam, Rachida, and Omar to stay with her this year, she imagined again a four-sided
form. Now, though, there is Eva. Again, a fifth.

6

The week that Caro, Adam, Omar, and Eva spend with Larry and Betty proceeds with surprising
ease. Larry has purchased a month’s membership to the local country club. Each morning,
he leaves with Eva and Omar to spend the day teaching them the rudiments of golf and
tennis, buying them lunch at the clubhouse, goofing around with them on the shuffleboard
court. Around noon, Adam disappears into his room with the door closed, at work on
his rewrite of
The Searchers
, and Betty heads out to go shopping for what she calls antiques—napkin rings, a ceramic
spoon rest, a wooden duck—leaving the pool area deliciously free for Caro to read
and swim.

Every day, over breakfast, Larry and Adam debate the merits of various Westerns in
preparation for the choice of the evening’s viewing. Caro had forgotten that Adam’s
love of these movies came from her father, who now sees them as a ratification of
his decision to move to Arizona. For Adam, it is as though his expertise about Westerns
compensates for his being unable to do any of the things the men in these stories
routinely do: ride a horse, shoot a gun, woo a woman, punch a man. With Eva’s reaction
to
The Searchers
, Caro at first worries about her watching the other movies Adam and her father choose,
but whatever bothered Eva in
The Searchers
does not seem to do so with
The Magnificent Seven
,
The Naked Spur
,
Stagecoach
,
Shane.

On Wednesday afternoon, the phone rings while Caro is at the pool. When Adam fails
to pick up, Caro races down the steps.

“Hey,” Rachida says.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Only I have to cancel coming up. I’m on call.”

Caro can hear the tension in Rachida’s voice. “I’ll find Adam.”

“Just tell him, okay? I’ll talk to him when Omar calls before bed. I’ve got to get
to rounds.”

“Sure.” Caro looks at her watch. It is two o’clock. From what she remembers with her
father, rounds are usually first thing in the morning and then at the end of the day.

Annoyed that Adam didn’t answer the phone, she knocks on his door. She knocks again
and then, in the way of family members, turns the knob.

The door is locked. “One minute,” Adam calls out. She waits, wondering what the hell
she is waiting for.