Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

He has gone bald.

He didn’t write this in the letter.

They are in the doorway.

The matched intensity of their stares — hers upward and his down, the hanging nearness of his face causing the slackened musculature around his unsmiling mouth to bulge ever so slightly downward, the flicker or play of recognition versus bewilderment in his non-smile, the expressive dark holes of his nostrils, the tiny beady lights of extra liquidity that cause his eye-whites to seem especially luminously clear, the distinctness of eyelashes and their strangeness when looked at closely and how warm he is and how the same old detergent used on his clothes has a different smell from his skin and how well the smells go together, their not knowing what comes next, their happiness, the feeling of being part of a true story again, their unwillingness to look away — adds up to a feeling of at last: us again .

There’s a chance that inside the store Bruce’s wife has not seen what has just taken place, and collecting her wits Ximena says, “Sorry.” Her tone claims they are strangers. Right away she knows it’s odd she lied, but he accepts her having done so.

He is even, she sees, relieved.

He says, “Hey, no problem.”

The new lover may or may not have witnessed their encounter, she might have been talking to the baby, she may have been spooning ice cream toward his gaping hole of a mouth with a plastic spoon. There’s a chance she didn’t notice what happened in the doorway, but even if she had, she might have understood their mutual stare as jolted apologetic curiosity, natural when someone has just bumped into you. Ximena walks away with a quickening sense of guilt: recognized for what it was, that stare could cause problems with the new wife. She walks fast, willing him to get away with it. To be okay with the crazy intensity that overcame them in that doorway and not to let it show. Detachedly she thinks he looked good. Lucky his skull is a nice shape. The pushy cranial roundedness suits his height, his doctorliness, his air of being slightly out of it. This, then, is the other side of the betrayal coin, the way the two of them must have felt about her : she wants not to cause pain.

She turns around to see if she’s the one being called out to.

“It felt so wrong seeing you walk off,” the younger woman says. “And then I thought, dinner. I can buy dinner, to make up for the shirt, because I can tell from your face that — well. Or cook. I can cook. Say yes.”

To be a guest inside one’s own old house: it’s like being a guest inside one’s own body, the way you feel on a doctor’s examination table, outwardly polite, inwardly full of offended resistance and asocial impulses — to insult, to make an escape. Only Robin appears at ease, her hair disciplined into a high ponytail, arms bare, lipstick on. The wine is good—“organic,” Bruce says — and the food, too, salad with grilled figs and goat cheese followed by a risotto that keeps Robin in the kitchen while Bruce and Ximena stare and stare and look away and stare again while disliking this deception, the pretense that it is not extraordinary for them to find themselves across a table from each other again. For the sake of deceiving Robin, Ximena’s style has changed. This new style is more breathless and glancing than her own, funnier, free of sorrow. More likable in general. Strangely, given that she is repressing a number of strong emotions, her English is better. Her faked detachment permits close study of the couple Bruce-and-Robin: their marriage is of the endearing kind, not so good that you feel intimidated, but not so bad that you worry for them.

When Robin had followed Ximena into the street and asked her to dinner, Ximena had said, “Look, you don’t want that,” and Robin had said, “Why?” and Ximena had said, “I’m Ximena, you know, who he was with before,” avoiding the word wife the way she would have avoided driving a knife through the other woman’s heart, as a fatal action whose aftermath would be mess and confusion, but Robin had said only, “You are? Really, you are?” and then “Why did he act like that?” and then, “Okay, this is weird. Me asking you to explain some idiotic thing he did,” and Ximena said, “I’m not great at explaining him,” and they had laughed. And Robin said, “Wrong time to say this, probably, but I love your work. I’ve always sort of wanted to tell you, but I never thought there would be a way. Really love it.”

Which is not something Bruce had included in his letter. But she doesn’t know about the letter.

There in the street, Ximena had said, “You’re kind to ask, but I don’t want you to go to any trouble, and it’s maybe not such a good idea, my coming to dinner,” and the other woman said, “No, it will be lovely. It’s the right thing, you know, for people who’ve mattered to each other like you and he have, it’s important for you to find some way to talk and not just to disappear forever. He was scared that you were gone. I don’t know what it is like for you, and I don’t mean to intrude or seem to pressure you, but if he lost you again now it would hurt him so much. Please come. It will turn out all right — it will, trust me.”

From this whole speech, Ximena fastened onto one assertion. “He was scared?”

“Of never seeing you or talking to you again, yes, really scared. He didn’t think I knew that, but I did.”

“Well, wow, this is very understanding of you,” Ximena had said, and meant something mildly slighting, like Are you some kind of pushover, don’t you get jealous? But this implication was lost on her, and the younger woman’s smile made Ximena repent of her meanness and say, “So okay, I’ll come. Tell me when to be there.”

If, after her second or maybe third glass of wine, Ximena starts to flirt with Robin, it’s partly because they were able to laugh with each other like that in the street. Women flirt: it means nothing, it means you are alive. She feels the elation of playacting, she is being lovely to them, but something is wrong: the conversation is haunted by a triangular stiltedness that drives Ximena a little crazy, which she wants to remedy, because they are trying this new and daring thing of talking with each other, three people who have been in various ways badly hurt by each other, except that Robin has not been hurt, Robin got what she wanted, and Robin has never once granted Ximena a long unguarded gaze, and suddenly, somehow, that is the gaze Ximena needs, and not Bruce’s. By what alchemy has desire changed its object — is this even really happening? Robin has the grace of a person who doesn’t second-guess herself, whose aims are mostly kind, and you would think she is not available for flirtation, and yet here it is, quickening the air, Ximena alert to the other woman’s least gesture or the minute tightening of her lips that suggests she is, sexually, no fool, and has registered what is happening, and is at a loss how to repress it, unused as she is to repressing impulses, honest and aboveboard as her life is. In truth, Ximena thinks, those qualities are rarer than rare in a person she now recognizes is very, very beautiful. This is what Bruce had seen early on and why he wanted her. There is a kind of shelter obtainable from Robin’s attention, a tiny house she can make for you where you can take refuge, and suddenly this is what Ximena wants.

Bruce is not aware anything is happening.

None of this occurs in language. The advance and swift deepening of attraction take place at the older, deeper level of recognition, down where the unsaid lives, and art.

After clearing the dinner plates Robin retreats to the kitchen and returns with a torte that she sets down on the table, and Bruce and Ximena glance away from each other because Ximena loathes birthdays and always has.