Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

The first thing she does, on entering the house, is start to undress. Her husband likes to tease her because she always stands just inside the closed front door and eases one black heel off, then the other, always heels, always black, then tilts her pelvis forward to unzip herself behind. Sometimes she hangs her jacket over a dining room chair on her way through, and her earrings chime down into the delft dish where her husband leaves his car keys and change. Once she’s in their room she gets into the clothes that feel like her, his oldest sweatshirt, her black leggings, her feet bare as she crosses the room, and, without thinking at all, sits on the edge of the bed and dials.

Because it’s not true that she hasn’t thought of her first husband in years. She thinks of him. She forgets thinking of him, she forgets doing this, she forgets all of this, yet it happens. She knows his number. He still lives in the midwestern town where they had lived together. The very first time, she had only to call directory information and say his name. There had been two listings under that name, she was told — which was the strangest part, for her, of what she was doing. An improbable coincidence, another person bearing his unusual name in such a small town; it had seemed to diminish him. Of course she hadn’t known his address, and the first number wasn’t his. He had answered on the second number’s fifth ring. She’s not sure how many rings it takes to be truly importuning, and his voice had in fact sounded impatient, bothered by something happening elsewhere in the house, his attention only nominally with whoever was on the phone. He’d had to ask, “Who is it?” He’d waited. He’d asked again, “Who is it?” She could not say who it was. She couldn’t answer him, and she couldn’t hang up. She hadn’t wanted to trouble him, but she had acted just like someone who wishes to cause that curious kind of trouble, the suspensefulness and uneasiness of not knowing who’s called your house and then refused to say anything.

When he’d hung up, that first time, she’d tapped his number out again, an electromagnetic refrain she already liked the way she’d always liked his name. She meant to say, “It’s me, that was me before, I was just so surprised by your voice that I couldn’t speak,” she’d meant to apologize, to embark on some sort of conversation, to tell him something of her life, to ask about his, but when he answered, she was silent again. Haplessly, helplessly, yet with some sense of this act as — bizarrely — expected by him, she was silent, and then he’d done an odd thing himself: he’d left the receiver off the hook and, it seemed, walked away.

After a minute or two she could hear his children’s voices, muted as if they were running through a hallway, and then his wife had come into the room. A refrigerator door opened and closed. She could hear something — milk? — poured, and then his wife said, with that gaiety peculiar to women talking to themselves, “What’s this doing lying here?” and after two tentative and unanswered “Anyone there?”s hung up the receiver.

Another thing, stranger still: she had called him from the hospital room after the twins were born. She’d let the phone ring longer than ever before, seventeen or eighteen times. During labor her chapped lips had begun to split open in tiny cuts; she’d panted and blown her way through the night, only to end, that morning, gazing into the anesthesiologist’s neutral downward gaze. Her left arm rattled inside the webbing that bound it at a rigid right angle to her body. Her hand quaked and convulsed, and her teeth chattered. She’d asked, “Am I supposed to shake like this?” He’d said, “Some do.” She told him, “My body’s scared,” meaning that she, herself, down in the deepest core of self, was somehow fearlessly calm and lucid, however she appeared to him. He gazed down, masked, feelingly or unfeelingly, it was impossible to tell. Her husband was let into the room, and he too was wearing a mask, and each boy in turn was lifted in the doctor’s hands, squalling. There was a feeling of its having nothing to do with her, of her being pushed aside or neglected during this turn of events, in which the babies were hauled into the newborn world. This feeling had gone away when she nursed the twins, one after the other. Once they were in the nursery, and her husband had gone home to sleep, she had dialed the rare, familiar number. It was another instance of not knowing what she was doing, of dissociating, because again, again , she hadn’t been able to speak. It was his voice, though: she’d needed his voice. And, that time, after his voice left, a dog was barking. She remembers the pain of smiling with cut lips to hear a dog barking like mad in what was surely his backyard.

This evening she crosses her legs, upright on the edge of the bed, listening to his phone ring. Today, today, she will say, “It was me, all those times,” and he will say, “I was sure it was; but why?” She won’t answer directly, but instead will tell him, “Someone reminded me of you today. God, so much .”

He answers. This is probably more than luck: maybe, unconsciously, she structures it a little, calling at times when he’s likely to be at home. Well, assuming he’s continued freelancing journalism, his job during their marriage, he works at home, and probably most calls are for him. Not counting that time his wife picked up after he’d abandoned the receiver, and however much the odds are against it, she’s never gotten his wife or one of his kids, only him. Now he says “Hello” twice to be sure of what’s happening. He’s never said, “I know who you are.” He’s never said, “Don’t call here again.” He’s never, out of curiosity or the need to assert his authority over events, hit star sixty-nine, which would cause his phone to dial her number, and if some digital readout on his phone informs him of her number and its area code, if he’s fairly sure his caller is her, he’s never tested this conclusion by saying her name, he’s never sought to resolve the mystery. Though weeks separate the calls, it takes him only few seconds to understand something like “This is this again.” He never hangs up, just lays the receiver on the counter. When he does so now, she thinks Good. Today, if he had demanded to know who it was, she really would have told him. His laying the receiver down on the counter means they get to go on like this a while longer. The room he’s in is the kitchen, of course. She listens. Water runs from a tap.

A pot or kettle clicks down on a stove burner. Do you still make terrible coffee? she thinks. Or has she taught you how to get it right? Probably barefoot, he crosses and recrosses the kitchen. But how long can this last? What is in it for him? Distantly, his wife calls for one of the kids — that particular rising, questioning inflection is maternal, and the voice is irked in a way that’s also maternal. She knows this intonation well. She knows it’s tenderness in yet another disguise. If the voice calls for him, she knows, or if his wife approaches the kitchen, if there’s any chance of her spotting the receiver left lying on the counter, he will hang up the phone before he can be caught. This is, somehow, their agreement. As long as it hurts nothing, she can listen all she wants. Whoever she is, he lets her have this piece of his life.

Q: Examine the proposition that for each of us, however despairing over past erotic experience, there exists a soul mate.

A: Soul? In some fluorescent lab an egg’s embryonic smear cradles a lozenge of silicon, the vampiric chip electromagnetically quickened by a heartbeat, faux-alive, while in a Bauhaus bunker on the far side of campus, a researcher coaxes Chopin from a virtual violin, concluding with a bow to her audience of venture capitalists, but for true despair, please turn to Prof. Clio Mitsak, at a dinner party in her honor, lasting late this rainy winter night, nine other women at the table, women only, for the evening’s covert (and mistaken: you’ll see) premise is that the newly hired Woolf scholar will, from her angelic professional height and as homage to VW, scheme to advance all female futures, and the prevailing mood has been one of preemptive gratitude, gratitude as yet unencumbered by actual debt and therefore flirtatious, unirksome even to Clio, its object. Clio who, hours ago, hit the button for auto-charm, absenting her soul ( there ) from the ordeal of civility. Gone, virtually, until dessert. Set down before her, the wedge of cake, black as creek-bed mud parting under the tines of the fork, brings her to her senses, but then she’s sorry, because the whipped cream is an airy petrochemical quotation of real cream, and the licked-tire-tread aftertaste provokes an abrupt tumble into depression. It is an attribute of the profoundest despair not to realize it is despair. Kierkegaard. Mitsak. She’s vanished down that rabbit hole known as California, and her cell never cries Text me. Her past has gone dead quiet; her exes have adopted Chinese infants abandoned in train stations. This candlelit table, strewn with cigarettes ashed in saucers and wineglasses kissed in retro red, makes her want to cry out a warning. Nine hopefuls embarked on the long romance with academia’s rejections: she has everything they long for, and look at her! Old! Old! Old! Old! Old! Alone! Alone! Alone! Alone!