What Burns Away (3 page)

But after the baby and the move, I couldn't quite imagine showing off my legs, or Miles finding the time to help me rediscover the missing parts of myself. I found my loneliness blooming—missing not only that regular touch, but also our former life, who I was before I became a mother, my job, my brain, my research, my body, and who Miles and I used to be together. I started living my life looking backward, seeking out the past and longing for familiarity because nothing in our new life was recognizable to me. I wondered, of course, if Miles was lonely too, though it scared me how most days that thought left me feeling almost nothing.

• • •

On that morning of my fortieth birthday, I did not reach for Miles when he left. I did not block him at the door and encourage him to pull me from my clothes, nor did we make promises to each other about the day. Instead, I stayed seated at the table with Jonah, to whom Miles blew a kiss, our mutual love for our son the one thing holding us together when he walked out the door.

Once Miles was gone, I announced in as singsong a voice as I could muster, “Library time!”

Jonah smiled at me with all ten of his teeth and ripped the bib reading “Hung like a five-year-old” from his neck, a gift from my mother, who has never known the lines of what's appropriate, and, to my chagrin, a token Miles continued to salvage from the trash and use, no matter how many times I threw it away.

“Bye-bye time!” Jonah shouted, letting me know he was in agreement with the plan. And after stuffing his wide toddler feet into a pair of snow boots, I logged on to Facebook once more to read Dean's message, wondering how my life might've turned out if I had ended up with him, recollecting all he had once protected me from.

The first few emails we exchanged were benign. I told Dean where I lived and explained my research in climatology—not the broadcaster kind, but the atmospheric chemistry kind. I didn't mention that I had quit. Then I brushed over a brief account of my seven-year marriage to Miles, recapping it in one sentence before I shifted gears to rave about my son.

Calling him “the true love of my life,” I detailed the number of Jonah's molars, his creamy luscious skin dusted in freckles, his corn-silk hair, his curious eyes dark as chocolates, going on in that manic way triggered by a mother's love to describe how Jonah, in his raspy little voice, would recite “Twinkle, twinkle, little owl” in lieu of the original verse, boasting that my boy, unlike any other sixteen-month-old child I knew, could name three constellations: the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Orion. I gibbered on at such length about my son that later that afternoon, when Dean told me he'd never had any children, I was embarrassed.

And, because he asked, I spent most of that morning uploading pictures of my life for Dean. The images were of Jonah and me together, pictures I'd taken myself, my arm extended as we squinted into the sun, smiling up at the lens. I chose the shots carefully, posting only those in which I looked less like an exhausted new mother and more like my former adventurous self. But not wanting to present myself as too out of his reach, I omitted pictures that were of the three of us—Jonah, Miles, and me—feeling guilty only in passing about leaving my husband out.

And, if I am remembering this correctly, it was shortly after I posted those pictures that Dean first popped up on chat and we began a real-time correspondence, volleying compliments and the details of our family lives back and forth.

Dean:
Claire, great photos. Motherhood looks good on you.

Claire:
Your wife is stunning! How did you meet?

Dean:
Oh man. Roll of the dice.

Claire:
What do you mean?

Dean:
On the beach, not far from where I first saw you, same time of year, November, freezing-ass cold. There was this lunatic out on the water riding waves with a neon parachute bungeed to a surfboard. It was her, kite sailing through the downpour.

Claire:
I can't imagine it—in New England in the winter!

Dean:
It looked incredibly physical and risky, which I love, so I sat parked at Hawk's Nest Beach between residential showings, waiting, watching her for hours. Eventually, she came to shore, and I walked to the beach where she was peeling off her wet suit and invited her for coffee. Two weeks later we were living together.

Claire:
What a story!

Dean:
There's a lot more to that story, but I'll just say this for now, Heather's the kind of girl who wakes up and decides to jump out of airplanes, total wildcat, which is also how I remember you.

Claire:
Not anymore. These days I'm all tucked in by 9:30 p.m. I've become such a snore.

Dean:
You're still in there, I bet. And, well, truth be told, I'd be terrified to start a family with Heather. She's over the edge. A classic unruly redhead.

When I look back on that exchange now, I see how Dean got me thinking about risk and how little of it was left in my life. And maybe hearing him talk about his wife started me thinking in depth about my own marriage, trying to recall a time when Miles had felt that way about me, when I was utterly daring and fun—before we plummeted into something domestic and uninspired, before I left those best parts of myself back there on the coast.

If nothing else, I was intrigued by the fact that Dean had married an extreme version of that madcap girl my husband once found in me. So it was then, I remember, that I lost the first of many afternoons scrolling through Dean's images to scrutinize his life and contemplate the adventures he had with his wife in that Connecticut town where I was born, comparing it to what Dean and I had, once upon a time, and what we might've become had we shared a future together.

That afternoon, as Jonah slept, Dean set the stage for what would unfold between us in the weeks to come, revealing very little about himself beyond the daily grind of his real estate tours and the staging of open houses for our former mutual friends, and instead focusing his correspondence almost exclusively on the intimate details of a past we shared together.

Claire,

I don't know if I should say this, but last night I thought about your hair. The way it smelled. How you braided it after a swim, sitting in your yellow bikini and cutoffs in the bed of my truck. It was so thick it never seemed to dry. And I remember teaching you how to drive. It was summer, July of '86. You were tan. And drove all of 35 mph in a 65 mph zone on the freaking interstate.

And what was that sticky stuff you wore on your lips? The berry kind? I remember tasting you for hours.

You were so sweetly shy when I followed you upstairs and sat you on the windowsill to undress you after your dad died. I'll never understand why I started to fade out of your life afterward, or how I allowed myself to kiss you good-bye forever on your birthday that winter. I was a stupid jackass of a kid.

Dean

Reading his emails, I allowed myself to become the girl Dean wrote about, letting everything in Madison fade out—the laundry baskets full of clothes to fold, the toys scattered across the rug, the isolation—and I went back home with him to that long-ago windowsill in my mother's second husband's house on the day of my father's funeral, with the hot sun streaming in, my face wet with tears, Dean unzipping my navy-blue romper, his breath in my ear, his mouth on my neck. And in his reiteration of that afternoon, I unearthed a desire I believed myself no longer capable of and began to sense myself coveting not only him, but also the me that he remembered, yearning for her youth, her spontaneity, her energy, her skin.

Serendipity played its role in how those messages affected me, no doubt, and as the therapist has suggested, I might not have been so vulnerable if Dean hadn't caught me just then, after the move and particularly on my fortieth birthday, that ridiculous marker of middle age, another indication of all that was behind me—my career, my youth, my home, and my marriage, it seemed, following suit.

Although, in his own way, Miles did reach out to me. Perhaps sensing my distraction or the gap grown between us, he made a rare call home from work and told me, “Get ready, babe. We've got to do it up for your birthday!”

“I thought we were going to skip it,” I said.

“Tonight,” he announced, “I'll be home to take you out.” And, for once, he was.

Reluctantly, I shimmied into a black dress, stepped into a pair of heels, and glossed my lips red. I pinned my hair up into a twist and thought about all the ways Miles and I could turn things around. For a long while, I stared into the mirror, turning to the side and sucking in my stomach, examining the lines around my eyes and smoothing them out with my fingertips, fingering my untamable blond curls as I told my reflection, “You're forty years old. Holy shit.”

While I dressed, Miles agreed to put Jonah to bed, and once his little snores purred into the room, the awkward teenager across the street came over with a book weighing more than her frame. “Happy birthday, Mrs. Spruce,” she told me and took the monitor from my hand, curling catlike into a wingback chair.

In the car, my husband played a CD he'd made me for my birthday the previous year. “I didn't really plan anything special,” he said. “I thought we could be spontaneous. I know you like that kind of thing.”

But Miles has never been good at knowing the right kind of spontaneous, and so we walked from place to place, getting turned away at every establishment we entered because it was the first week of the winter term, and the University of Wisconsin's men's basketball team was playing at home, in our new university town. The whole city was booked with students, their parents, and crowds of middle-aged alumni, decked out in the university's colors, cheery red and white. Hoards of alums in Bucky Badger sweatshirts and coats had returned to a place they held dear, a place that reminded them of their youth, a place they loved to revisit because a part of their story began there, while we, in contrast, bumbled down side streets in long black dusters with our iPhones directing us through a city to which we remained strangers.

Block after block we peered into restaurants, finding couples our own age holding up pint glasses and stemware, their eyes glossy with drink, their cheeks rosy with nostalgia. And as we checked with the hostess stations, hoping for a seat in each place we passed, we witnessed roars of laughter as friends leaned across tables to embrace each other. All of it made me homesick for our life back East.

After looping Madison's capital square three times, unable to find seating elsewhere, we settled for a Nepalese restaurant on State Street that served mostly takeout but offered a few wobbly tables near the window. We were ridiculously overdressed, and both of us were trying to make the best of things, feeling the pressure of the occasion and the expectations of the first date we'd had in ages.

In an attempt to sound encouraging, I said, “This is cozy,” while we huddled over a greasy menu and I pushed my disappointment with the venue into the empty pit of my stomach. Outside, groups of coeds dressed in support of the home team, wearing Badger-red snow hats and red-and-white-striped overalls, huddled against the cold and cheered for what must have been a victory over at the basketball stadium.

While I waited for Miles to place our order, I checked my cell phone to see if there was word from our sitter. Finding none, I scrolled to my Facebook account, where there was a photo from Dean, no note this time—just a scanned snapshot from an old Polaroid camera, a picture of me blowing out the candles on a giant sheet cake with a
Happy 15th Birthday
he had iced in pink across the center of it, before he kissed me that final good-bye.

Considering the flurry of flames cast over the cake, I recalled my high school chemistry lab, my ninth-grade science teacher that year, Mr. Barnet, and how one day after class, when I was supposed to be on my way to second period study hall, I simply couldn't tear myself away from the tornadic flames we had made. Set on a lazy Susan, the conflagrations rose and spun into motion as currents moved through a protective mesh screen, replicating the role of trees in a wildfire and whirling the flames into a vortex. Beholding the beauty of that illuminated twister, I stayed in my seat long after the bell, charmed by its animated whirl.

Mr. Barnet dragged a wobbly metal stool over to sit beside me and said, “Pretty cool stuff, right?”

Almost in a trance, I whispered, “I love it,” while the fire cyclone gained momentum.

“Then stay a minute,” he told me.

Opening his cabinet and pulling down a plastic container that looked like an egg crate, each compartment holding what appeared to be salt, Mr. Barnet wiped a platinum wire with hydrochloric acid and dipped the looped end of it into the first sample on the tray. He then waved the wand through the fire, the flame changing from orange to sky blue—the fire gone magic.

I laughed with pure pleasure and asked, “How did you do
that
?”

“Arsenic,” he said, sliding a heavy volume across the space between us.

The book,
The
Chemical
History
of
a
Candle
, featured the image of a taper whose single flame seemed to blow across the cover, as if someone were making a wish.

“You should read this,” he said. “It was written by the English scientist Michael Faraday in 1860, who once gave a series of Christmas lectures for young people at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Each of his experiments deduces the chemical and physical properties of fire.”

All those years later, sitting at a wobbly table in a Nepalese restaurant on my fortieth birthday, I could still recite the title of the first lecture in the book's series: “A Candle: The Flame—Its Sources, Structure, Mobility, Brightness.”

And when I spotted Miles returning to our table with a tray full of steaming food, I slipped my phone and the image of my fifteenth birthday cake back into the side pocket of my winter coat.

Miles took his seat and apologized. “Babe, this isn't what I expected. I had no idea the town would be so crowded on a weeknight. I hope this is okay.”

I forged a smile for him, not wanting to dishearten him by revealing my own disappointment with the night, with our marriage, or with this new life he had chosen for us.

“It's great,” I encouraged and lied the way you do for someone you love, willing myself to feel some simple gratitude for the food he set before me.

At the only other table in the restaurant, a trio of undergraduate boys rated the girls walking past the window on an academic scale of “hotness.” The thin boy with reptilian eyes and a fedora was the ringleader. “Okay, so a hot chick would be like a 4.0. An average cute one would be like 3.0 or 3.5, and a chick who is a 2.0 would be what we call fuckable only when drunk.”

I wondered where a forty-year-old woman would rank, knowing that in our previous life, Miles and I would have made jest of their conversation, adopting it as our own, one of us winking at the other and proclaiming something like, “I think you're more a 3.5, babe, but for the rest of your curry dish and a quickie, I'll grant you a 4.0 for the night.”

Instead, we stared blankly into our entrees, eating salty vermicelli while swatting away a fly that had somehow survived the winter and joined us for my milestone birthday celebration.

I wanted to go home and take off my heels, and while I was speculating about where our laughter had gone, Miles stood up. Regal in his suit and tie, as if we were at a large party in a room full of people, he cleared his throat. “I'd like to make a toast to my beautiful wife.”