Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

One bright evening, as I cocked my arm back, he cried Throw it, piggy! Shocked into grace, I sent a real beauty his way, and with long-legged strides he covered the grass and leaped, a show-offy catch tendered as apology before I could call down the field, What? , but I was standing there understanding: piggy was a thing he called me to himself, that had slipped out. In my need and aimlessness and insatiability I was a pale sow. How deluded I had been, believing I was a genius lover no excess could turn repulsive. The next morning I woke up sick, ashamed that wherever he was in the house he could hear me vomiting, and when I said I wanted a hotel room he told me a tenant had moved out from one of his units and I could have the key.

These studio units, five of them, occupied the shabby one-story stucco box that stood between his house and the street. Flat-roofed cinderblock painted a sullen ocher, this building was a problem factory. Termites, leaks, cavalier electrical wiring. With his tenants he was on amiable terms, an unexpectedly easygoing landlord. The little box I let myself into had a floor of sky blue linoleum; sick as I was, that blue made me glad. The space was bare except for a bed frame and mattress, where I dropped the sheets and towels he’d given me. The hours I spent in the small bathroom were both wretched and luxurious in their privacy; whenever there was a lull in the vomiting, I would lock and unlock the door just to do so. Now he is locked the fuck out. Now I let him back in. Now out forever. After dark, I leaned over the toy kitchen sink and drank from the faucet. It was miraculous to be alone. There was a telephone on the kitchen’s cinderblock wall, and as I looked at it, it rang. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I slept in the bare bed and woke scared that my fever sweat had stained the mattress; it was light; that day lasted forever, the thing sickness does to time.

His knocking woke me. He came in all tall and fresh from his shower, having already worked his habitual four hours. First he made the bed; with the heel of his hand he pushed sweaty hair from my face; I was unashamed, I could have killed him if he didn’t make love to me. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow,” he said. I barely kept myself from saying Do you love me. Do you love me. Nausea helped keep me from blurting that out; the strenuousness of repressing nausea carried over into this other, useful repression. “I’m so hungry,” I said instead. “Can you bring me a bowl of rice?” In saying it I discovered that the one thing I could bear to think of eating was the bowl of rice he would carry over from his house. I needed something he made for me.

When I woke it was night. Cool air and traffic sounds came through the picture window, and seemed to mean I would be able to live without him. Now and then the phone began to ring and I let it ring on and on. Sometime during that night I went through the cupboards. I sat cross-legged on the floor with a cup of tea and ate stale arrowroot biscuits from the pack the tenant had forgotten, feeling sick again as I ate. He wasn’t a man who cooked, or who made things of any kind, really, except books. It didn’t matter that I knew this very well, and even understood it; the bowl of rice was now an obsession. It seemed like the only thing I had ever wanted from him, though in another sense all I had done since staring at him that first time was want things from him. In the morning, while it was still dark, he let himself in — I should have guessed there was a master key — with nothing in his hands, and when we were through making love he said, “You’re going to bathe, right?” Then I was alone, without a bowl of rice, cross-legged on the kitchen floor with the cup of tea I’d made and the last five arrowroot biscuits, locked deep in hunger, realizing that — because the hunger felt clear and exhilarating, with no undertow of nausea — I was either well, or about to be. I called and made a reservation on a flight to New Mexico that had one seat left. My husband let me cry through that first night back in his arms. You have to want to write, but love you can do without wanting: which makes it sound as if it’s the simpler thing. He never needed to hear the story.

In the novel he wrote about that time, I wasn’t his only lover. House-sitting next door, the narrator’s sensible, affectionate ex affords him sexual refuge from the neediness of the younger woman he’d believed he was in love with, whose obsession with him has begun to alarm him. Impulsively, after the first time they slept together, she left her husband for him. How responsible did that make him, for her? He understands, as she doesn’t seem to, that there’s nothing unerring about desire. At its most compelling, it can lead to a dead end, as has happened in their case. This younger, dark-haired lover keeps Middlemarch on her nightstand, and riffling through the book one night while she’s sleeping the narrator finds the photograph of the Chinese woman. She lives not very far away, he thinks, and I would have heard if she got married — people can’t wait to tell you that kind of thing, about an ex. But, really, how could I have left her? Here the novel takes a comic turn, because now he needs to break up with two women: his house-sitting ex, likely to go okay, and, a more troubling prospect, this young woman inexplicably damaged by their affair. He needs to rouse her from her depression, to talk to her directly, encouragingly, until of her own accord she decides to leave. Tricky to carry off, the passage where, as he holds the picture, the old, sane love revives — the novel’s crisis, also the single event I was sure had never happened. I don’t mean the novel was true, only that the things in it had happened. The likelier explanation was he’d gone into the guest bedroom while I was out. Far-fetched, his coming into the room while I slept — why would he? — though I could understand why he wanted, thematically, the juxtaposition of sleep and epiphany, and how the scene was tighter for the suspense about whether the dark-haired lover would wake up.

Twelve years later, heading home with two friends from the funeral of our well-loved colleague Howard, who had lived in Berkeley, we stopped in a bookstore. Between the memorial service and the trip out to the cemetery, the funeral had taken most of the day. Afterward we had gone to dinner, and except for the driver we were all a little drunk and, in the wake of grieving funeral stiltedness and the tears we had shed, trying to cheer each other up. Death seemed like another of Howard’s contradictions: his rumbling, comedic fatness concealed an exquisite sensibility, gracious, capable of conveying the most delicate epiphanies to his students or soft-shoeing around the lectern, reciting “In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.” If Howard’s massiveness was bearish, that of his famous feminist-scholar wife was majestic, accoutered with scarves, shawls, trifocals on beaded chains, a cane she was rumored to have aimed at an unprepared grad student in her Dickinson seminar—“My Soul had stood — a Loaded Gun,” David quoted; Alan corrected, “My Life,” with the amiable condescension that David’s grin said he’d been hoping for, since it made Alan look not so Zen after all. Alan was lanky, mild, exceedingly tall, with an air of baffled inquiry and goodwill I attributed to endless zazen; David sturdy, impatient, his scorn exuberant, his professional vendettas merciless. It was David I told my love affairs to, and when I had the flu it was David who came over, fed Leo his supper, and read aloud. Through the wall I could hear David’s merry “showed their terrible claws till Max said ‘BE STILL!’” echoed by Leo’s “Be still!” That evening after the funeral one of us suggested waiting out rush hour in the bookstore and we wandered through in our black clothes, David to philosophy, Alan to poetry, me to a long table of tumbled sale books on whose other side — I stared— he stood with an open book in his hand, looking up before I could turn away, the brilliant dark eyes that had held mine as I came over and over meeting mine now without recognition, just as neutrally looking away, the book in his hand the real object of desire, something falsely enchanted in his downward gaze that convinced me he had been attracted to me not as a familiar person but as a new one, red-haired now, in high heels, in head-to-toe black, a writer with three books to my name, teaching at a university a couple of hours away, single mother to a watchful, emphatic toddler who spoke in complete sentences — though he wasn’t going to get to hear about my son, wasn’t going to get a word of my story. And in the hiatus of not being recognized there was time for a decision, which was: before he can figure out who he’s just seen, before, as some fractional lift of his jaw told me he was about to, he can look up and meet my eyes again and know who I am, before before before before before before before before he can say my name followed by I don’t believe it , followed by I always thought I’d see you again , look away. Get out. Go. And I did, and although behind me where I stood on the street corner the bookstore door opened now and then and let people out, none of them was him. Person after person failed to be him. He hadn’t known me, and while it wasn’t rational to blame him for this blow to my sense of myself as memorable, as having burned very bright, if not for very long, in his life, I minded that he had somehow retained such power to move me, even if that power was used only, inadvertently, to inflict sadness; and his having this power, while I had none — not the least means of moving him — seemed the newest incarnation of our old inequality as lovers, and this configuration, him dominant, me self-absconding, bypassed my mind and spoke to my body, and made me remember what he had been like, in bed, and just as desire took on a dangerous shine, I saw: how guilelessly I had erased my writing, as if relinquishment was what he had ever asked. If there are two people in bed they are both narrating, but it had seemed otherwise to me: having him, I could not believe another story was needed. How astounded he must have been by my willing losses. My friends came out carrying their bags, and David told me, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you leave a bookstore empty-handed, ever,” and we pulled our gloves on, telling each other that taking a break had been a good idea, and our heads were clear now, and we could make the drive home. Of course, that was when he came out the door, long-legged, striding fast. Pausing, fingers touched to his lips, then the upright palm flashed at me — a gesture I didn’t recognize, for a second, as a blown kiss — before he turned the corner.