Tinderbox (11 page)

When Adam opens the door, he looks disheveled. The blinds are shut and the bed is
unmade. There’s a musky smell in the room. Her stomach turns.

“Did I wake you?”

“Just a little snooze.”

“That was Rachida. She can’t come this weekend. She’s on call.”

Adam knits his brows. “How can she be on call? She was on call last weekend.”

Caro examines her brother. Everything needs to be trimmed: hair, beard, fingernails.
She hates feeling caught between him and Rachida. “That’s what she said. She said
she’d talk to you about it tonight.”

7

It is past midnight when Myra hears Rachida come in. Unable to fall back asleep, she
sits in her office with a blanket over her knees, looking out at a milky moon hovering
over a treetop. She tries to read, her concentration pierced by memories of the Willow
house, where her children now are, and the early years of her marriage, before
the call
, before everything halted, when she’d spent so much time there herself.

The call
. For years, it had felt as though it had taken up permanent residence in her consciousness,
that she was locked in its confines, in the supra-intensity of those moments. Now,
though, it has been years since she has thought about it at all.

Still, it’s all there
: Caro in the kitchen doing her third-grade homework; Adam in the tub, blowing bubbles
through a wand, just old enough to be left alone in the water, with firm instructions
not to stand up while Myra went to answer the phone in her bedroom.

“Is he home?”

It was a woman’s voice, loud and demanding, so that Myra, with her mind still on Adam
in the tub, jumped to the easiest conclusion: a patient who had somehow gotten hold
of their number, even though Larry kept it unlisted so that patients would have to
go through his service to reach him on evenings and weekends.

“Where is he?”

In fact, Myra could not say. She had stopped trying to keep track of Larry’s schedule.
Sometimes he arrived home in time to kiss the children good night, sometimes not.
There were women she knew from the playground who considered taming the hour of their
husband’s return home as the index of their control in the marriage, but on her end,
aside from wishing the children would get to see more of their father, it didn’t much
matter. Her evening routine with Adam and Caro, in fact, went more smoothly when Larry
came home after they were asleep. On those nights, she would sit with him while he
ate a reheated plate of whatever she’d prepared earlier for the children, her mind
already on the reading or other work she needed to do for her next day’s classes.

The woman on the other end of the line began to cry.

“Is there something I can help you with?” Myra asked.

“You can tell that prick if he doesn’t leave you, he’s going to be sorry. Real sorry.”

“Excuse me,” Myra said. Her voice was small and hollow. “I have to get my son out
of the bath.”

Myra hung up. Her heart was pounding so wildly she had to sit down on the edge of
the bed. The phone rang again. She let it ring and ring. When she finally picked up,
the woman screamed, “Eight months. Eight goddamned months.” She made a sound that
was either a sob or a laugh. “That bastard’s been screwing me for eight goddamned
months, telling me goddamned lies.”

Myra hung up again. She leaned down to unplug the phone. Already, the phone was ringing
again. The jack was behind the bed, and she had to go onto her hands and knees to
reach it. When she stood back up, she held on to the headboard to keep from blacking
out.

In the bathroom, Adam had moved on to playing with his pirate boat. At seven, he was
on the verge of becoming too old for playing in the tub. Too old for bubbles and pirate
boats. Too young to go through a divorce, but in the time she’d walked from her bedroom
back into the bathroom, she’d seen into the months and years ahead to what would happen.

She got Adam out of the tub, dried him, and sent him to get into his pajamas. Then
she knelt next to the toilet, a wave of nausea yielding the dinner she’d had with
the children. The eight months made perfect sense. It coincided precisely with the
last time she and Larry had had sex, with the polite chill that had fallen between
them. With the way that her marriage had come to occupy fewer and fewer of her thoughts,
slipping lower on her list of priorities, behind the children, behind her classes,
behind her work with Dreis on the backlog of grief she felt about the six miscarriages
which had left her afraid to try again but still longing for another child—a longing
Dreis had gently begun to show her had its origins in never having felt longed for
herself, her parents’ deaths having made finite what had never taken place.

She rinsed out her mouth at the sink. She knew women who had gone insane with jealous
rage after discovering their husbands’ affairs. When her neighbor downstairs had learned
in the ninth month of her pregnancy that her vain husband had slept with another woman
on an out-of-town business trip, she put as many of his prized Ferragamo shoes as
she could fit into the oven and roasted them until they turned into something resembling
beef jerky. Another woman from the playground tore her husband’s photographs of his
mother, who’d died when he was eleven, into confetti and then, weeping, flushed the
pieces with her wedding ring down the toilet. Afterward, she begged him to come back.

Myra washed her face. The woman had sounded thirtyish. Myra imagined her having peroxided
blond hair and big breasts. She imagined Larry atop her, thrusting and grunting. She
imagined the woman sucking Larry while he sat upright in his desk chair, swallowing
his cum, the way she could never bring herself to do. She imagined Larry mounting
the woman from behind and holding on to her squishy breasts.

The images had brought with them a sharp pain that started in her throat and moved
into her gut. The pain was not about Larry touching someone else. It was not because
she wanted to be the woman. The images brought pain because, with this breach, she
knew she would never again be able to sleep in the same bed with Larry or let him
touch her in any way. They brought pain because this was the father of her children,
the man with whom she had conceived eight times (with this thought, which came after
the good-night kiss she gave Adam and the chapter of
Little Women
she read to Caro, the sobs came hard and fast), because now there would be no more
children and Adam and Caro would have to be told all the stupid unbelievable things
children of divorce are told about how their parents no longer love each other but
will still always love them.

8

For their last evening in the Willow house, Larry suggests that they grill salmon
steaks. Betty buys corn on the cob and tomatoes from the farmers’ market and Caro
and Omar bake brownies for dessert. Adam, Larry notices, actually changes his shirt.

Eva and Omar ring the terrace with citronella candles, paltry defense against the
mosquitoes, so they can eat outside. The divide in the family about the merits of
the house had been mirrored in the divide between who did and did not get bitten by
mosquitoes. Larry and his mother, Ida, had been eaten alive; Max (always lobbying
to dine on the terrace), Myra, and Adam had never been touched.

Larry sprays his arms and legs with insecticide and, out of homage to his father,
takes his glass of wine outside. He turns on the grill. The last time he can recall
eating on the terrace was with Myra. It must have been her suggestion, to please his
father, who, she argued, had paid his doghouse dues for the house.

His father had loved Myra from the moment Larry introduced them.
A woman with a soul,
his father announced. Myra was twenty-three, an assistant at a publishing house.
Larry was thirty, in the last year of his cardiology residency. He had slept with
thirteen girls, the first few, girls from his set, well versed on the pros and cons
of Bergdorf’s versus Bendel’s, with good tennis serves and strong opinions on the
diamond settings they expected. He had broken off two engagements, one because he’d
developed an aversion to the way the girl smelled, the second because he’d decided
after six months of her endless complaining—how her dresses came back from the cleaners,
the temperature of a consommé, the hours he watched baseball on television—that he
would rather kill himself than spend the rest of his life listening to her.

It had been a fluke that he even met Myra, at a book party, an event he never would
have attended had another resident, a cousin of the author, not brought him along
on the way to a bar they frequented. It was the first time he’d been at a book party
and he’d not known quite what to do. Myra was behind the table where they were selling
copies of the book. She had small breasts, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, and
a thin prominent nose that made it impossible to call her pretty but that he would
later realize made her quite beautiful. She was dressed in a long Indian skirt and
embroidered shoes. He bought a copy of the book so as to be able to talk with her.

She was like no girl he’d ever dated. She read Rilke in French and Marcuse and Virginia
Woolf and grew dozens of plants in her tiny apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone
on Seventy-fourth Street. She spent her meager salary on tickets for nosebleed seats
to hear Glenn Gould play the
Goldberg Variations
at Carnegie Hall. His mother, disapproving of Myra’s clothes, unhinged by her stillness,
the strangeness of a girl who didn’t make chirpy entertaining conversation, pursed
her lips before issuing a damning
She seems very nice.

Larry had understood his father’s comment that Myra had a soul to mean that he himself
lacked depth. It hurt him because he had chosen cardiology precisely because of the
metaphors, which he believed, about the heart. It hurt him because he knew it was
true. He was loud. He drank a lot. He loved to play tennis, ski, watch sports on television.
He’d been fucking regularly since he was fifteen. He and Myra, he believed, were yin
and yang. With her, he believed, he would gain access to a river of meaning that ran
beneath the surface of things, a river he’d been aware of on rare occasions, sometimes
after sitting with his mother in synagogue for most of the Yom Kippur day, once when
his father had taken his brother, Henry, and him on a mule trip into the Grand Canyon
and they’d slept outside so they could watch the shooting stars.

And indeed, at first he and Myra had felt like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together.
He’d taught her to ski, lifted her high in the air, skis and all, when she’d made
it down the bunny slope the first time, her cheeks red, her eyes glistening with pride.
He’d taken her on her first airplane ride, to a hotel in Puerto Rico where he’d ordered
rum drinks for them both from the swim-up bar in the pool and chartered a sailing
boat for the afternoon. And although she had been shy and inexperienced in bed, she’d
let him teach her about her body and then his.

Caro pokes her head out the door. “Are you ready for the fish?”

“Sure.”

Larry watches his daughter carry the platter, an oven mitt and a long spatula squeezed
under an arm. Adam had inherited Myra’s graceful form, hidden now under his middle-aged
tire and schlumpy gait. In Caro, it is his mother’s body reincarnate—the heavy breasts,
the short legs—and his own narrow, deeply set brown eyes. He watches his daughter
the way he might watch a patient or even a stranger, with an odd distance between
them that he would not say distresses him but leaves him feeling disconnected from
himself, his love for her absolutely there but out of sight, like the shed on the
distant edge of his land.

She smiles at him as she sets the platter next to the grill. A wave of gratitude passes
over him that she has always been sweet to him, that, unlike Adam, she has not held
the divorce against him. Not that she isn’t tough. She had driven a hard bargain when
she wanted to buy her apartment, but he had admired her shrewdness and not resented
her for it. Like her mother, who has always been meticulously fair with him about
money, something he knows from his divorced friends is virtually unheard of, his daughter
holds firm to a standard of reasonableness and equity.

Larry puts the salmon on the grill and hands the platter to Caro to take back inside.
He sits on the stone wall of the terrace waiting for the steaks to cook on the first
side. When the children were little, he’d been besotted with them. He’d prided himself
on being a hands-on father: changing diapers, giving baths, taking the children on
Saturdays to the park so Myra could have some time for herself. Saturday nights, there
had been a standing babysitter, and he and Myra would go out to dinner, laughing that
they seemed mostly to talk about the kids, on occasion leaving before dessert, unable
to stay away any longer from their sleeping babes, and then, after paying the babysitter,
having sex, sometimes on the living-room floor, while Myra chastised him about Caro
and Adam being able to hear them if they awoke, but mostly in their bed, where Larry
would marvel that he lusted even more for his wife since they’d had children together.

Then came the miscarriages, each at ten to eleven weeks. Myra had braved the first
and second with a stiff upper lip. Her gynecologist reassured her that one out of
four conceptions miscarry. Larry can no longer remember the exact order of things
after that: the progesterone suppositories, which left her so sluggish she could barely
stay awake; her parents dying within ten months of one another; her decision to use
the money she’d inherited to go to graduate school. Another miscarriage, this time
with so much bleeding he had to rush her to the emergency room. The night he called
her a selfish bitch,
Jesus fucking Christ
, he yelled,
we have two beautiful children who you’re fucking neglecting now, either sleeping
all the time or off at your useless classes
. He still remembers the devastated look on her face as she took her pillow so she
could sleep on the couch, and then, in the middle of the night, hearing her throwing
up in the bathroom and realizing she was pregnant again.