Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

“It’s amazing,” Ximena says. “It must have taken you hours.”

Lighting the candles — one two three, Ximena sees, a token cluster, or one for each decade — Robin explains, “It’s meant to sort of redeem chocolate for you.”

“What?”

“After having it smeared down your shirt. I’m nervous about how this turned out. I’m going to close my eyes while you take your first taste.”

Did that need to sound so sexy?

It’s Bruce who asks, “Why three candles?”

Robin says, “All I could find. Left over from the last cake, I guess.”

From upstairs the baby howls. Robin hesitates. Such hesitation is uncharacteristic of her, surely — the adoring mother. “I’ll go,” Bruce says, having caught on at last, and Robin frowns, upset with herself for letting it show that she is tired of the baby’s demands, shaking her head but letting her husband ascend a flight of stairs whose every creak Ximena knows, as she knows his particular rhythm of stair-climbing, the habitual fraction of an instant’s pause (caused by what?) on the fifth stair, the sturdy tramping tread that finishes the flight, the silencing of his footfalls by the hallway’s carpeting. The baby must be in the small bedroom under the eaves. They used to talk about turning it into a bathroom.

How oppressed she has been by his watchfulness, what a relief that he’s gone, even if only for a few minutes.

Ximena lays down her fork. Robin lays down her fork. They face each other undefended. It’s sex. It’s the laying down of forks. Ruin, chaos, sex, and recklessness, we live and breathe for what you will do with us. The candles burn between them. Robin says, “I don’t believe this,” and Ximena says, “You don’t believe what,” and Robin says, “This. What’s happening. Whatever it is,” and Ximena says, “You can’t believe it?” and when there is no answer she says, “Do you want to believe it?” and she could say I can help you feel how true it is , but who is she to say such a thing to this woman, when did she acquire the power to convince this other of a truth that could ruin or at least fuck up her life, which seems well worth protecting, something someone like Ximena, whose motives if viewed even in the best possible light would have to be described as mixed, should stay completely out of? But that is the last thing she wants to do: to stay out of this woman’s life. She’s not capable of staying out of her life. Worse, stranger, Robin is not capable of keeping her out. They are in it now. How did they do that with eyes and faces and voices, come as far as this, get in such trouble?

They can’t kiss while Robin’s baby is crying upstairs, that can’t be the sound track for their first kiss because it would be too crazy-making for both of them and for Robin too inevitable a source of guilt, and even supposing they could shut their ears to that they can’t kiss across the table. One of them will have to stand and lean across, palms flat on the table, careful not to put a hand in a piece of cake, straining, and the combination of effort and delicacy would amuse both the person leaning forward and the one being leaned toward, and the furtive comedy would undercut what they would otherwise be sure to feel, the full unexpected force of their attraction. Its power to take their breath away, that is what is most deeply longed for, and they can’t get at it by ridiculous leaning across this table even if the baby has stopped crying, and he has, but that means too that they have only a minute or so left to figure this out, whatever it is. Five minutes tops. How will this play out after Bruce comes back down the stairs? He may not have caught on yet but he isn’t blind. He’ll look from one to the other and the truth will gradually become more and more felt among the three of them, and the pretense that everything is all right will collapse.

In Robin’s eyes the decision has been made. She stands. She leans across Ximena’s own old dinner table with all its memories. Bruce didn’t even bother to replace it, he didn’t fear the ghosts of their life together, and if he didn’t fear those, how much can it mean to him, that old life? Nothing. Not if he can sit down at this table, lift his wineglass, smile across at her without fear and trembling. The fear and trembling is done by his new lover as her lips meet Ximena’s. Candle flames warm their forearms, their throats, as Ximena tilts her head to allow room for the other woman’s nose, as she tastes her tongue, as she tries with her tongue to suggest the palace of inventiveness and aggression and complicity that would be sex between them, as the two of them ease apart from each other to allow for looking — for the assessment they need to do of what this means and how things have changed. And that look is enough, more than enough, because it tells Ximena that lives can be ruined beginning right here, right now, and that the worst of the damage won’t be done to her, but to these two — no, three — others, whom she might as well love, because without them she’s alone in the world.

For strangeness, for fucked-upness — no kiss has ever come close. For the power of the unforeseen taking over.

Before Bruce comes down the stairs she has altered the course of the future, standing up, collecting her things, keys, the coat she pulls on though Robin says behind her, “Was that wrong? Ximena? Was it wrong?” With luck she can get out of the house before he can glimpse her expression. He couldn’t hear from upstairs if she tried to explain to Robin why she has to go, and probably it would be a good thing, less memorably hurtful, if Ximena tried to give some explanation for this decisive fleeing-the-scene, but she can’t both explain and mobilize her resistance to the other woman. It would be unwise even to turn and take a last look at that face. She’s given Robin reason to believe that they will get away with this, that the two of them have felt something and even acted on it and now Robin can choose how much, if anything, she wants to confide to Bruce about what just happened, only why would she say a thing? Now she is almost out the door, Ximena who believes there is a way to stop time but she has not found it, Ximena who is about to do, just this once, the right thing. And painting — not the moon, not anymore. Not the moon: a face. To inscribe it more deeply in memory, she looks over her shoulder. From now on, that face.

Her students are the devotees and tenders of machines. Some of the machines are tiny and some of the machines are big. Nobody wrote down the law that students must have a machine with them at all times, yet this law is rarely broken, and when it is, the breaker suffers from deprivation and anxiety. Machines are sometimes lost, sometimes damaged, and this loss, this damage, deranges existence until, mouseclick by mouseclick, chaos can be fended off with a new machine, existence regains harmony, interest, order, connectedness. Sleeping, certain machines display a dreamily pulsing white light meaning this machine is not dead . Images, icons, passages of text: even in a silent room the machines are continually storing these up. The students never advance into a day or even an hour without the certainty of messages awaiting them, without the expectation of signals and signs. Rendered visible, the embrace of hyperconnectivity would float around their heads like gold-leaf halos. During class the machines grow restless and seek students’ attention. Certain machines purr, certain machines tremble; certain machines imitate birdsong. Whoever invented the software that causes the machine to sing like a bird must have foreseen not only bewilderment like the professor’s but also the pleasure her mistake, if visible (it is! Flushed from her lecture notes, her gaze swerves around the room), gives to those in the know — that is, her students. For the fraction of an instant that either makes or breaks her authority (she would say she is not interested in authority ) — the fraction when exhilarated hardwired startlement tips into that laughter-inviting cognitive slough, bewilderment — the professor can’t make the correct attribution. For her and her alone, among the two hundred and forty-three listeners in the lecture hall, that realistic sequence of ascending trills equals “bird.” To observe her puzzlement is to know that a bird flits through the wilderness of her brain, to understand that in the professor’s experience song emanates from a creature. Her students find this endearing: she can’t help letting it show that she belongs to the world that preceded theirs.