David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

Meg, can you fuck your way out of grief? She’ll say it suddenly in the kitchen, another day, weeks later. The same setup: having coffee in the kitchen while the kids play in the other room. Except it’s February. Almost two months have passed. For the first time in years the river is frozen. Hunks of ice clog the sides, pounded up into piles. Last night, on her fourth date with Hugh, she went to a movie at the new multiplex; a late dinner at a bad Italian restaurant; then upstairs to her bedroom where he made love to her for the first time from above and behind, nothing but air and his sliding; the simplicity of the position, the way he loomed over her but didn’t touch her except for the plunging, got her thinking about empty space. It was too easy. That position, her face in the pillow. How good it was. Meg pauses a moment, looks into her eyes, and then abruptly squeals and says her name — Grrraace Smith — elongating it like she’s announcing a talk show host, and then stands and moves over to her, giving her a girlish hug, small, quick clasps. What’s on your mind? Guiding Grace to the table and making her sit down. And right then she’ll tell her about doing it with Hugh, confess how good it was from the start that very first night when she just went ahead and slept with him, and how she feels guilty about it but knows that there isn’t anything wrong with getting pleasure out of her body. He has good hands, she’ll say. He goes just the right speed. I’m so ashamed. I mean it hasn’t been that long since Ron died and the truth is, I mean it’s so horrible to say but I feel like, well, I feel I have to say it. He’s better than Ron was, maybe, I mean maybe I’m fooling myself, maybe I don’t remember or it doesn’t matter — after all, he’s gone physically, at least, and all that, and I shouldn’t be comparing, right, shouldn’t even put them side by side, but that’s only natural, isn’t it? And, yeah, well I have to admit that even when Ron was fine, before he got sick, you know, things weren’t so great in that department even then, at least I didn’t know they weren’t great but now I do; I have to compare, can’t help it, and I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that even though he’s kind of awkward at times, he’s a hundred times better than Ron ever was because, well, because of something, his rhythm, I guess — he’ very musical. He’s fantastic, a virtuoso performance every time.

She imagines he’ll take her farther away from the town on dates, their relationship burgeoning out in concentric circles, like the damage zones of a ground zero atomic blast. They’ll go for rides with Gary on weekends, and Rudy and Stan, his boys, will come over and play, Stan perhaps acting the part of big brother. They’ll drive up to West Point in the spring to watch the cadets parade. Then one night — almost a year later — early fall, they’ll go over the Bear Mountain bridge alone and take the winding road north along the river. She’ll kick off her pumps and wade her stocking toes through the hot wash of air from the heater — her hand resting plaintively on his knee, twitching along his wide-wale cords, zipping the fabric, brushing the knotty tightness of his crotch. A year has passed. The pain has faded. What she can recall of her life with Ron has become burnished, ideal, a beautiful relic (or the inverse; the whole marriage pure boredom, the man a dullard, the end inevitable one way or another). She’ll look out the window at the wintry dark — barely listening to Hugh as he talks about a castle up on the hillside, built by a robber baron, and how he had once hiked up along a path to see the ruins of house, the stone foundation loaded with charred timbers. They’ll get to the town, park along the streets. A light snow will be falling. The restaurant at the end of the street, along a pier, will have long, wide windows allowing a view of the river — and across it — past the narrow bend of wafer — the tall looming dark squat rock of Storm King Mountain; he’ll explain something about how these rocks were not carved out by glacial backwash. She only half listens. She has grown accustomed to his voice, the resonate tones, and his soliloquies about geological formation; his world is striated and broken and governed by forces webbing back into some primordial center; he has a firm grip on this world, on life, and he has lifted her up, has her in his arms, in the parking lot, after the meal, and she smells a faint hint of his spice cologne rising from damp wool. The engagement ring is a bit loose on her finger. She keeps it bent slightly during the ride home. Grief has lost a toehold. It has become only a faint residue.

When the thought occurred she was in the kitchen, mixing clots of chocolate powder into a glass of milk. This must not transpire. I can’t let this happen . Wednesday, December 12th. Out the window the river was flat, quivering like molten silver. In the other room Gary and Billy were playing. A potted fern sent FTD sat in the center of the table next to a pile of papers she had to go through — insurance reports, tax papers, bills, things that needed to be sorted. She’d foist the fern on Meg; it was a late arrival, a last-ditch effort at consolation. In a basket beneath the table she put the card with the rest; there were hundreds — people she’d never heard of from LA; movie people who poured their condolences dishonestly the same way they poured their praise thoughtlessly (if something you did was connected to the production of cash). She sensed a ruthless, grotesque quality in the arrival of this fern: it was from Ron’s old agent, a husky loudmouthed cog in a mega-agency who had been a part of Ron’s life during those few intense years he was trying his hand at screenplays.

It did snow that night — Wednesday, December 12, 1999. And they did sit across from each other at the Hudson House and converse. His skin was weathered, and he talked about Iceland most of the time until rising naturally out of his talk was the suggestion that perhaps she might want to see the country someday; nothing about dancing on the lip of volcanoes, or throwing themselves into one sacrificially, but a hint of it. He had wide wrists and a habit of clasping his hands in a prayerlike manner. His voice had a languid, serene quality — maybe a bit too comfortable — as he talked over his divorce and the subsequent years of single-fatherhood (four years in all, but sounding like a lifetime).

“I can’t say I’m a particularly lonely man,” he said near the end. It was late. The waiters stood bored in the back of the restaurant. One was poking information into a computer window screen. From the windows came a brittle hiss of snow against glass. The air smelled of singed beef; of cigarette smoke drifting up from the bar downstairs.

“That’s a funny way to put it. I mean the ‘particularly.’ You don’t sound too sure.”

“I know. I find myself, well, I guess it’s the scientist in me. I can’t help it. I look at my life objectively. I like to stand back. I think lonely people are the other way. They close in on themselves and never get the overall picture.”

“I guess I’m one of those lonely people. I’m not much of a scientist. I flunked biology. All I remember is not being able to do that …”

“Do what?” he fingered his glass, held it high, looking through the fluted stem at her.

“Stand back from it all. I think it was a cat we did in biology.”

“Ah, a cat. A dissection.”

“Yes.”

“Scientists are rarely lonely.”

“Well,” and then, before she could continue her response, the waiter came with the coffee and the conversation lulled in his presence and never returned to the subject. From that point on it was casual small talk, and then downstairs, in the street, the surprise of another fresh inch of snow; the walk home; paying Jenny, the short conversation with her in the mudroom—“How’s it going?” “Fine, fine.” “We had a good time.” “Thank you for sitting.” “Be safe, the sidewalks are slick.” And then they were alone with the soft culling voice of Gary’s breath through the monitor.