Beneath the Bonfire Read online

  A bad quiet envelops their marriage. Mason imagines a small-town telephone booth from which he calls her and waits for her voice. She answers, her voice like a very cold wind traveling through thousands of miles of telephone wire. Then she puts him on hold and he imagines her walking away forever, leaving him there, through all time, waiting for either a dial tone or a dead click. Neither of which ever come. He grows older in that telephone booth, so much older, until it becomes his glassy coffin.

  * * *

  “Miracle Whip,” Renée says. “She had two of those. Wouldn’t want to run out of Miracle Whip now, would we.”

  She throws the glass jars into the garbage bag.

  Mason stops working and looks at her on her knees, the edges of her underwear peeking up and over the waist of her blue jeans. He feels something like lust rush over him and considers going over to her, fucking her, surprising her. Maybe that is exactly what they need. Maybe that is what she wants from him. To end their cold war. To collapse onto, against each other, for all their tension and anger to be broken loose.

  But he is afraid. Afraid she’ll scream, afraid she’ll look at him like a madman, a rapist. And maybe that is what it would be. How can he even know anymore.

  She stands up slowly, her hands pressed against the small of her back. He smiles at her. But his face feels stiff, his lips dumb, the muscles there frozen. Smiling, it seems to him, has become like a rainbow in wintertime. Not impossible, but implausible.

  “I need a break,” she says. “I need some fresh air.”

  He touches her shoulder and she starts, as if shocked. Looks at him coldly.

  He could not have cleaned the house without her. His mother lived in this house alone for the last thirty years. She was not a hoarder exactly, but she did accumulate things. The attic was the worst. Mouse turds and choking dust and pink fiberglass insulation and sweltering heat and biting cold. Boxes of magazines, boxes of yarn, of Christmas lights and relics of Mason’s childhood. Box by box they threw it all away. A two-person bucket brigade.

  Renée never complained. He admires that about her. She is tough.

  * * *

  Last year Mason had a heart attack. It happened at the movies. All the telltale symptoms: the sweats, the lightning bolts of pain in his arm and chest. She knew right away.

  “Hold still,” she said evenly, “let me get help.”

  He was glad then for her telephone, which she used to call 9-1-1 while he sat, watching the opening credits of a film they would never finish.

  She followed the ambulance rather than ride with him.

  “Go on,” he said, “I’ll be okay. It just makes sense. Then we don’t need a cab to come get the car.”

  She had stared at him.

  He knows that what he should have said is Please. I need you. Please come with me. I’m scared.

  In the ambulance an EMT said to him, “You’re a lucky man. Your wife caught it quick. Most people aren’t that lucky. A few minutes’ difference and man, I tell you, you’re a goner. And look at her back there. She’s holding it down. Practical too. You guys thought to get your car.”

  Mason wept, his face falling apart. He did not make a sound. The EMT turned to him and said, “Man, you all right? You in pain? Let’s get you some meds. Hold on, man. Stay with me, man. You’re fine. We got you. We got you. Hang in there. I’m right here. Your wife is right there, man. I can see her. I can see your wife, man. She’s following us. We’re almost there.”

  * * *

  He gets to his knees, peers into the refrigerator. Even after all of Renée’s work, it is still full of food. Apples, carrots, cabbage, cheese, milk, pickles, salad dressing, sour cream, whipped cream, yogurt … It looks like she was still feeding a family. Like she was ready for Renée and him to come over for a feast. That she was lonely for visitors, diners, mouths to feed.

  He misses her. She knew he wasn’t happy. Once she actually asked about his marriage. She put her hands on his face as if he were nine years old. Looked into his eyes until he could no longer look at her and aimed his eyes at her kitchen table.

  She said, “Getting a divorce doesn’t mean you failed. It just means you grew apart. Happens every day.”

  “You and Dad never got divorced,” he said, still looking at the table.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said, “your dad and I weren’t happy for years.”

  “But I still love her,” Mason said.

  “I know you do, baby, I know that you do.”

  * * *

  Renée returns to the kitchen. “I’m hungry,” she says. “Let’s go. We can come back tomorrow.”

  He lets his head sag. Feels the refrigerator’s fan kick on, warm air hitting his knees, cold air against his face and neck. He is tired, lonely, heartsick.

  “Come on,” she says, “get up.”

  He can’t look at her. “No,” he says. “I’m going to stay here. There’s food enough here.”

  He reaches for an orange Tupperware container in the back corner of the refrigerator. He peels off the top and the container seems to burp. Or sigh. It is cassoulet. He stands, carries the Tupperware to the microwave. Leans against the counter while the food heats. He looks at her.

  “You know I won’t eat that.”

  He nods.

  “So what? So you want me to bring you back something? So you want to walk home? So what?”

  The words are a reservoir; his teeth, his lips are the dam. He shakes his head, bites his lip.

  “Mason?”

  Inside the microwave, the food circles like a carousel. The light in there is strange.

  “Mason?”

  “I’m going to stay here,” he says.

  He owns the house now. Or they do. But already he’s certain that he wants to live there the rest of his days. The microwave beeps three times loudly. He lets it beep; what is the hurry? Reaches for the Tupperware, and it is hot enough to burn his fingers, his palms, but he does not wince, won’t give her that gift. Carries the Tupperware to the kitchen table where he has eaten hundreds, thousands of meals. Walks again across the kitchen. Gathers a fork. Pours himself a glass of whole milk. It is so opaque, so thick, so white.

  “Mason, that food could be a week, two weeks old. Who knows? Are you all right? Mason?”

  Her voice is rising.

  He looks at her, says, “I’m so sorry.” What he thinks is I want a divorce.

  Then he forks a bite of beans, of duck, of sausage. Lifts it to his mouth, chews, swallows. He imagines his mother’s hands preparing this food. His mother’s mouth eating this same food. He imagines tasting her lipstick. Imagines her alone, sitting at the very table where he sits now.

  He chews slowly, washes the food down with a swallow of milk. His throat pumps it all down.

  “Mason,” she says. “Mason, I’m your wife.”

  He shakes his head, says, “I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.”

  BENEATH THE BONFIRE

  Meant, I knew—of course I knew—

  That it would be only a matter of weeks,

  That there was nothing more to do.

  —James Merrill, “Christmas Tree”

  THEY WERE DRAGGING THE TREES across the frozen lake by their stumps, a trail of needles behind them, the crowns of the trees down against the ice, snow, and slush where once the apexes of the little trees had supported a brightly lit star or angel. Most of the trees had long since stopped drinking, the needles beginning to dot carpeting, the trees wrapped in lights and ornaments no longer gleeful, no longer merry, just combustible.

  The tradition was to burn the trees out on the frozen lake on the first night of January. Kat watched as they marched out from shore, the trees making a low steady scratching sound over the ice. Her boyfriend, Pieter, hunched over a chainsaw, checking its fluids, a can of gasoline beside his knee.

  “It’s kind of sad,” she said, rubbing her arms, “to end this way. Every year. Just to be burned. What was the point of it all?”

  They, the
neighbors, were approaching now. The first trees being piled in a place far away from shore and the watching houses. A mile away, the city glimmered on a hill. An isthmus city buttressed by two lakes.

  Pieter primed the chainsaw’s bulb, placed the toe of his boot inside the open handle to steady the saw against the ice, and then jerked the starter cord. The chainsaw rumbled. He raised the saw off the ice and spun its steel teeth; the machine screamed in the night. Kat started. Away from the city even this much, there were no traffic sounds: no buses, no horns, no stereos, no drunk pedestrians. The chainsaw did not seem to belong, and she supposed that thrilled Pieter. There was a wide smile on his face, half hidden beneath his mustache, the corners of which he had waxed into two curls. She did not approve of the mustache and saw the sculpted whiskers there as resembling some kind of ludicrous mantle.

  “Oh, it’s all good fun,” Pieter said, setting the saw down, its small engine still idling. “Besides, it’s better than tossing the tree on the curb, isn’t it? Something you were supposed to have loved. Just kicked to the curb or dumped into some random ditch. It’s like disposing of a body. Naw, this is better. We get together, build a bonfire, drink some schnapps, maybe some skinny-dipping.” He looked at her and grinned.

  “You’ve got to be pulling my leg,” she said flatly.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said, coming to her, his long fingers in her hair smelling of gasoline and oil, his mustache close to her lips. They kissed and his whiskers tickled her. He had shaved the rest of his beard the night before. A kind of lark. He’d done it while she was sleeping and she woke in the morning beside him, a strange version of her lover, and not for the better.

  “It’s close to zero,” she said. “Also, I’m not sure I like that thing,” she said, indicating with her finger his mustache. “Just for the record.”

  “We also scuba-dive,” he said seriously.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “There’s not even any open water.”

  “That’s what the chainsaw’s for. We make open water,” he said. “It’s like a dream. A little acid and you’d swear you were on another planet.”

  “You’re not doing that tonight, are you?” she asked, pushing away from him.

  “I do it every year. I even brought a wet suit for you. You have to try. No acid tonight. Maybe a little grass. Or just schnapps. Whatever you want.”

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” she said, suddenly exhausted. It was not late, though the sun was long gone. Perhaps six in the evening, more people streaming out onto the lake now, four dozen in total. The pyre of desiccated trees growing and the tang of marijuana in the air mixing with the metallic spiciness of schnapps. She watched as a man threw a bucket of kerosene on the pile. Then a young woman hooted and flicked her cigarette butt at the mound. It went twirling through the air, orange and yellow, until it kissed the kerosene and there was a strong huff of a fire starting. The flames climbed quickly. Fifteen, twenty, thirty feet in the air. The crowd roared over the sound of glasses touching. There were many coolers out on that broad plane of ice, and also people simply spilling cases of aluminum cans onto the frozen lake.

  “Hey,” Pieter said, “hey. You all right? What’s going on? Look, you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. I’m not forcing you.”

  She looked away from him to the chainsaw, jostling itself on the ice and putting out a steady blue hiss of smoke. They hadn’t been dating long—three months. He was the best lover she’d ever had. Everything that was too much about him in the real world, in the now, was revelatory in her bed. He was wild and uninhibited, strong and creative, stubborn and hypergenerous.

  She’d never come before, not until sleeping with him. Their first date, in the days after they met in the amusement park, she had invited him in, something inside her flaring up and against her better judgment. Her fingertips hooked in his belt loops. He pushed her into her bed. Pulled off her boots and blue jeans. With his teeth, yanked off her panties. Then, his eyes on hers, he said, “I’m not going to stop until you come three times.” And he put his tongue in her, on her, ate at her like a hummingbird.

  He took her face in his hands now and kissed her. “Seriously,” he said, “I have to walk back to the house anyway for my wet suit and tanks. I’ll take you back.”

  She surveyed the party. A woman playing an accordion. Some voices caroling, others howling “Hey Jude.” The bonfire of Christmas trees so hot no one could stand within thirty feet of it.

  “You ever worry about the ice? I mean, does anyone worry about anything?” She wrapped her arms around him. Studied the fire in his eyes.

  “The ice has got to be three feet thick by now. Maybe more. Sometimes it’s been as much as six. Let’s find out. The saw is all warmed up now.”

  He went to the chainsaw and revved it again, the crowd turning to observe him as he put the spinning blades to the ice. The chainsaw went down easily, spitting chips and splinters of ice, then very cold water at Pieter’s calves and thighs. He went slowly, deeply, working the chainsaw in a straight line three feet long. The deeper the blades sunk, the more water surged back at him. His mustache now a frozen shelf over his lip. A minor throng had assembled behind him.

  Having finished cutting the square in the ice, he began to cut that plug into smaller pieces. Men came over, carrying lanterns and pulled away the chunks of ice to reveal a portal into the lake, a door of black water. Everyone stared down into it. It was so odd, to hear water lapping in January, to see little black scalloped waves.

  “Let’s get the equipment and come back,” he said. Pieter shut the chainsaw off and reached for Kat’s hand. Then he practically ran to the house, dragging her behind, the fire throwing weak shadows in front of them.

  Pieter rented the middle floor of a turn-of-the-century Victorian right on the shore. A dump, really. Mice in the drawers and scurrying up and down the pipes, ancient registers pumping out hot steam, the windowpanes coated in complex matrices of frost.

  “I think I’ll need a drink,” she said at last as they entered his apartment. “Or a little weed, maybe? Something to calm me down.”

  “So you’re coming?” he asked, smiling, clearly surprised.

  “Sure,” she said, feeling some kind of yoke drop away from her shoulders. “What the hell.”

  “You’ve scuba-dived before?” he asked, unscrewing a half-empty bottle of red wine and pouring her a full coffee mug.

  “Once,” she said, “in Mexico. Not like this.”

  He nodded. “Well, we’re going to stay close to one another. It’s a lake, not an ocean. So you can’t get into too much trouble. And there will also be a cord between us. That’s crucial. Don’t forget the cord. But inside the suits we’ll be plenty warm.”

  He stared at her as she sipped her wine.

  “What?” she asked finally.

  “I think we should probably fuck first,” he said, pulling off his clothes.

  She finished the wine in a gulp, kicked off her mukluks. It was hot enough in the kitchen to break a sweat, a little linoleum-floored sauna. On her knees, she felt granules of salt and sugar bite into her skin, felt her nipples graze the floor before he placed his hands under them. He made her feel unfastened, her body weightless and unencumbered. She was another person while they were intertwined. When they were done, she stood, and outside, the bonfire looked like a raft of angry light.

  They held hands as they went back out into the cold in their wet suits, their bodies tightly clad in black, the booties on their feet crunching the snow beneath them. He carried both tanks on his back, the other gear in a bag on his shoulder. Back out on the ice, they had the look of two people with a new secret. Some of Pieter’s friends and neighbors hooted at them. He raised a hand in mock triumph; Kat felt herself blush. It was humiliating, this. And thrilling.

  Pieter equipped her: tanks, belt, weights, flippers, gloves, a hood. For all the lunacy of this nighttime ice dive, he was scrupulous, his hand flittering all around her, cinc
hing things, scrutinizing gauges and dials, facing her, saying, “How does that feel? You still with me?”

  She nodded, thumbs up, watched as he suited himself up, came back to her and said, “We’ll go for a half hour. Not long. I’ve got a rope. I’ll tie us together. Keep your hand on the cord if you want to. You can keep us as close together or as far apart as you want. Sometimes it’s better to drift a bit. You touch someone in the dark down there, it can give you a little scare. And remember the fire. If something happens, find the fire. The fire is close to our hole. Okay?”

  He went first, waddling toward the hole as the crowd applauded, his hands in the air, riling them up, brandishing a huge underwater flashlight in one hand. He fixed his face mask, his snorkel, and then let his body drop through the hole. He was gone.

  Suddenly she was unsure. She moved toward the hole. And then his gloved hand appeared out of the water, a few fingers motioning her down. The crowd once again roared. She mimicked his checklist, tightened her face mask and inserted her regulator, took a step and plunged down.

  All around her now: darkness; and above, a ceiling of white-blue light, diffused. Just the hole there, the blurry light of a few lanterns and murky movement. She began to hyperventilate, unable to find Pieter, no bottom beneath her, suspended but dropping slowly. She kicked up frantically, only to bump her head on the ice, her hands on it now, searching for an edge that did not exist. She scratched at the ice with her gloved hands. Black creeping in at the sides of her vision. Then: a hand. Pieter.

  He was in front of her now, both hands on her shoulders, the flashlight on a cord around his neck. His eyes wide but soft, happy. He took one of her hands and pressed it to his chest. She felt him breathing and it steadied her. Slow. She could feel his ribs and musculature beneath the wet suit. She knew the topography of his body. His heart beating slowly. There had been a shock at first, the water on her cheeks and into the wet suit, but now the shock was gone. It was warmer in the water than outside, above.