Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

“It’s ours now, sweetie.”

Sweetie is fatal, registered in jolting silence. Jolting because the next thirty miles are so bad, the road seeming as lost as a road can get, running aimlessly along and then madly swerving, barely managing to avoid outcrops of rock or steep drop-offs.

“You mean you can just take anything out of the garbage, whoever left it there, and if they want it back you can say no, it’s yours?” Shane, bent, at eleven, on discovering the moral workings of the world.

A hard curve, and as he slows the car, David tries his mostly successful good-father voice. “Look, I don’t want you going through any garbage ever . You never find anything good.”

“ You did.”

“ You did.”

Jade says, “It must be worth a fortune. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars, even, depending on how old it is. Really, somebody’s going to want it back. Because how could it have been left in a garbage can? I’ve never seen anything like this except in a museum. And why didn’t I know that you go for these drives? Was this a thing you did before?” Before her. “Were you just having a really bad day? Is something going on?” Do we have secrets now? “The rug is a problem, David. There’s been some kind of mistake, because this is not the sort of thing that gets thrown away, not ever. You took it? What made you think you could just walk off with it?”

“Which question do you want me to answer? It clearly had been thrown away. At the end of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was coming back for it. It was getting dark.”

“I just think you were a little hasty,” she says, “impetuous,” and he shouldn’t be flattered, but he is. “Draw me a map of how you get there?”

Her love of proof, documents, evidence, is very like his, and on the back of an envelope he sketches a map, the journey’s last leg a squiggle meant to indicate arduousness, culminating in a cartoon oil drum.

“This is your secret guy place? There’s nothing there.”

“That’s what’s good about it.”

He wants to explain further, to point out the sadness of there not being many unowned places left, but she’s already asking, “How do you know nobody was coming back? Maybe the real owner is there now, looking, and it’s gone.”

Cross-legged on their bed, husband and wife consider the rug unfurled across the tiles of their bedroom floor, and he watches, under the lowered lids of her downward gaze, the REM-like movements of her eyes as she follows, or tries to, the rug’s branching and turning and dead-ending intricacy, its profusion of leaves and petals or the geometric figures that might be leaves and petals, which the gaze barely discerns before relinquishing them back into abstraction. Jade, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, frowning, her right breast indented by her right arm, her shadow thrown across him because her reading light’s on, her backlit profile showing the radiant lint of her upper lip, the angle of her jaw, the length of her throat, and below that the contour of the heavy breast, the nipple’s surprising drab brown color, the unaroused, modest softness of its stem, its wreath of kinked hairs. Best of all, in love, in what he’s experienced of love, are those moments when you can watch the other’s self-forgetful delight.

She says, “I have to tell you something.”

In his work, he’s a good listener. More than that, he solicits the truth, asks the unasked, waits out the heartsick or intimidated silences every significant environmental lawsuit must transcend. Someone has to ask what has gone wrong, and if the thing that’s gone wrong has destroyed the marrow of a five-year-old’s bones, someone has to need that truth or it will never emerge from the haze of obfuscation. Of lying. But this isn’t work. This is his wife.

“I’m a little afraid,” she says. “I know that’s not like me. This is hard.”

“Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

“Whatever it is?”

“You can tell me.”

“Whatever?”

“You can tell me.”

“I’m a Republican.”

He’s been blind to the syllogism chalked on the board: X is a corporate lawyer. All corporate lawyers are Republicans. X is a Republican. The outrage that blazes through him makes the leap to her. When she says, “I knew you couldn’t handle it,” her tone is prosecutorial.

“You waited until we were married.”

“Until I thought you could deal.”

Dismay is cranked so high his pulse ticks in his temples. “I’m having trouble believing this.”

“Calm down, calm down a little, try seeing it’s love, my telling you, it’s wanting no secrets between us.”

“The deception,” he says. “The hiding who you really are. When you know how I feel about lying.”

“I hated it too, every minute of it, but I couldn’t lose you.”

“This makes us like everyone else. Lying. Being lied to.”

“It doesn’t. We aren’t.” She catches hold of his wrist. “Are you all right?”

He waits until she lets go before saying, “Blind, wasn’t I. You must have thought He’s incredibly easy to fool .”

She changes tactics. “David. Let’s deal with the other issue first. Say the rug was in the office of some Los Alamos scientist, and one day somebody ran a Geiger counter over it, a random check, a sweep, cause they’re human, accidents happen, and despite the most thorough precautions—”

“They’re not thorough enough,” he says, and he knows.

“—traces of uranium stick to the soles of somebody’s shoes and get tracked across the rug, and out of fear for their jobs they decide to dispose of the rug in this furtive undocumented way, the sort of thing you’re always telling me about. You, the expert on how contaminants get into the air and the water and into people’s houses, you bring it home , into our house , with no clue why it was left in a trash can. This just isn’t wise.”

“I love you as the expert on wise decisions.”

“My politics are my own, and I could’ve gone on keeping them to myself. Ultimately I chose not to, because you and I tell each other everything.”

“One of us does.”

“So okay, right, you’re the honesty prince, but this is new territory for me. You’re the first person I’ve ever even wanted to tell everything to. I needed to work up to it. Is that a crime, to have needed time?”

“There’s nothing wrong with this rug,” he says. “You’re being paranoid.”

“There is something,” she says. “I can feel it.”

“For the first time,” he says, “how you feel doesn’t interest me at all.”

He’s let down when, without another word, Jade clicks off the light. If they were both wolves they’d be lying just like this, their senses on alert, their fur on end. How about a little red-in-tooth-and-claw sex? He wants her. But who is she? She may intend to amend the constitution to rule out gay marriage, or drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How can he fuck someone who wants to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? All the same, he’s hard. Postcoitally, he can convince her that caribou have rights to their ancient migratory routes. He’s not sure where she is in her progress toward sleep, and when he bends over her, the intense repose of her body on the bed tells him she’s wide awake. This treachery — another in her string of deceptions — exhausts him, and he gives up. He’s asleep.

Before dawn he’s startled by her cry. He can’t make sense of her naked, placatory stance in front of his computer, or his own accusation: “What did you do?” His voice is rough, his body recollecting their fight before his brain does.