Baker Nicholson: A Box of Matches

When we had burned through most of the scraps, I called up a wood man and ordered a cord. A cord is a unit of measure that means “a goodly amount.” The wood man used a large pincering hook to snag the quartered logs off his truck. He drove off with a pale blue check in his hand, leaving us with a heap of logs. This heap Claire and I, over the next week, built into a long, neat edifice against the barn. You crisscross the logs: three one way, and then three over those going the other way, and you put each crisscrossing pile next to the other, and you have to choose the logs so that the pile will remain stable and not topple; and you surmount the whole architecture with a roof made of stray pieces of bark. It takes on an air of permanency, like a stone wall — so finished seeming that you hesitate before pulling from it the first few logs for burning.

The woodpile quickly became an object of fascination for the duck. She roots in between the logs and bangs at the bark with her beak until some breaks off, to see if there are bugs underneath. Now that everything is frozen, there is much less for her to eat there, but once in the fall I lifted a bottom log for her and she found an ant colony and several worms which she consumed with much lusty beak smacking. She is a dirty eater. She snuffles in mud and grass and then goes over to the plastic wading pool that we set up for her and drinks from it, and streams of dirt flow from her beak as she scoops up the water. When she has found a patch of wet earth or weeds that particularly pleases, she makes a whimpering sound of happiness, as a piglet would at the udder. I had no idea that ducks were capable of such noises. In coloration she resembles a tabby cat.

The other day I pried up a log from the stiff ground and turned it over so that Greta (that’s the duck’s name) could have a once-over on it before I brought it inside. It’s not just that I want to give her a treat; it’s also that I don’t want to be bringing termites or strange larvae into the house. She rooted all over the exposed underside, as if she were Teletyping a wire-service story on it. Finally she located, hidden in a crevice, a brown thing that excited her. She was able to pry it out: it was a frozen slug. Its slime had grown ice crystals, giving it a kind of fur. I couldn’t tell if it was hibernating or dead. The duck tumbled it around in her beak and tossed it into the water (whose icy edges she’d broken earlier), and eventually much of it went down her gullet. She bobs her head to work things down into the lower part of her neck, and I suppose her gizzard goes to work on them there.

Good morning, it’s 6:08 a.m. — late. When I got up and stood on the landing at the top of the stairs I could see three light effects. One was the white spreadsheet of the moonlight on the floor, and one was more moonlight barred with long banister shadows on the floor downstairs, and one was the hint of pale yellow and blue of dawn arriving beyond the trees. Or maybe it was the glow of the convenience store in the next town. I got up late because I stayed up late working on that thief of time, a website. Nothing so completely sucks an evening away as fiddling with the layout of a website. By the time I was in bed reading “The Men That Don’t Fit In” by Robert Service, Claire was asleep in her blue fleece bathrobe and it was eleven o’clock.

But now I’m up and little flames are growing like sedums from the cracks in today’s log wall, and I still have a little while before I have to drive Phoebe to school. Every morning the coffee makes me blow my nose, and then I toss the nose-wad into the fire, and it’s gone. The fire is like a cheerful dog that waits by the table as you feed it life-scraps.

Our bedroom was still quite dark when I got up. I felt for my glasses on the bedside table in that tender way one uses for glasses, as if one’s fingers are antennae, so as not to get smears on them. The smear of a fingerprint makes it impossible to concentrate on anything; it’s much worse than the round blur in your vision made by a speck of dust. The glasses made a little clacking sound as I sat up and put them on — oh yeah, baby. The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.

My hand seemed to know just where my glasses would be, and this reminded me of something that I noticed about five years ago in a hotel bathroom. I wish I’d taken photographs of all the hotel rooms I’ve been in. Some of them stay in my head for a while, and some disappear immediately — those many shades of pinky beige. I remember well two of the hotel rooms that Claire and I stayed in on our honeymoon — one a fancy one, and one in an unprosperous little town. There was a bathroom behind an accordion wall in that one.

Claire has just come in to say good-morning. She said that she could tell that I hadn’t been up for too long today because of the newer smell of the coffee. She has a good sense of smell. In college there were coed bathrooms; one time she knew that it was I who had surreptitiously peed in the shower stall. Right now she’s unhappy that the last American manufacturer of a certain kind of wooden spoon has gone out of business. She saw a woman on the news saying, “This was my life. My grandmother made spoons, my mother made spoons, and now it’s finished.” Claire likes old people — not just relations, but old people in general. She’s become friends with the catty woman down the street, and she is used to the smell of oxygen from oxygen tanks. I’m glad she likes old people because it means that when I get old she will be less likely to be disgusted with me.

I’ve known Claire for — let me figure it out — twenty-three of my forty-four years. More than half my life I’ve loved her. Think of that. We met on the stairs of a dormitory; I was carrying my bicycle down and she and her roommate were walking upstairs carrying bags of new textbooks. We lived on Third North, the third floor on the north side, a hall of extremely young boys and girls (so they seem to me now) who, because we all shared a large bathroom, quickly became chummy. Claire and her roommate gave cocktail parties every Tuesday at 4:30, using the floor’s ironing board as a bar. I walked out in the snow with them to buy the liquor: I was twenty-one, and Pennsylvania had one of those tiresome laws.

When Claire was a little drunk, she would rock slowly to reggae and her lips would get cold. Her mouth, however, was warm and her teeth sharp. I cultivated a rakishly nutty air: I discovered a fine prewar toilet on the curb and carried it into my room, propping the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary inside. But Claire had a thing for a very handsome sandy-haired boy named William. Many had crushes on William because he was gentle and aloof and had an appealing way of clearing his throat before he spoke. Rumor had it that his penis was unusually attractive, but I never saw it. William’s father was a famous surgeon, and one day William borrowed some thread and showed us how to tie the knots that famous surgeons use on wounds. He never drank. When, maliciously, I tried to slip a little gin in his tonic, he sipped and handed the glass back to me with a reproachful look. I still feel guilty.

Claire had a thing for gentle William, as I say — and then one evening, after one of the ironing-board cocktail parties, she asked me out on a date with her to walk to the cash machine. I said that a walk to the cash machine would be very nice. In those days she wore a thrift-store cashmere coat and soft Italian sweaters and, though her mother pleaded with her, no bra. And her lips were soft, too — much softer and somehow more intelligent than others I’d kissed, and though I hadn’t kissed that many lips I’d kissed some.