The Fires Read online

  Hanna kept trying to catch my grandfather’s eye, but he went on ignoring her. Whenever she spoke, he turned his head slightly to the wall. While my mother and I collected the dirty plates, he said, “We don’t have meals like this often enough,” and I wished he’d meant it. While my parents asked Hanna about her life in Chicago, he played with crumbs of piecrust. I was furious. Ask her anything, I thought. At least look at her face. I couldn’t think of what on earth she could have done to him to make him act this way.

  “It’s already seven o’clock, goodness,” she finally said, breathlessly checking her watch. In my hand she pressed a ten-dollar bill and one of those rain caps in a pink case that the banks give away, kissed me on the cheek, and left, waving at everyone else as she ran out the door to catch the train.

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  “That sounds familiar,” Cornell said, looking somewhere to the left of me. We each sipped at our drinks and put our glasses down on the table. My parents had often sat like this after dinner with their beers, even after they’d run out of things to say to one another. I didn’t want to leave. Outside, a car door slammed, children were squealing, and an ice-cream truck idled, its miniature music sounding rushed and nervous.

  He told me about his life with Hanna, the dresses she bought at secondhand stores and the Polish restaurant where they ate every night and knew all the waiters, how she’d made friends with the old Chinese woman upstairs and had taken care of a seminary student’s children. It was an ordinary, pleasant life, and I understood why she’d had to leave it—she’d wanted to feel as if she’d chosen it or earned it, not as if she’d been destined to meet Cornell, the first person she happened to befriend when she ran away to Chicago. That was cheap chance, and there had been plenty of that for her in Porter. The breeze through the open window smelled of exhaust. I felt sorry for Cornell, because it seemed he had chosen her.

  “I had a way of bringing her out,” he said. “Let me show you how a cheer-up song went.”

  “All right.” He got up and went to the other room, then rolled in an upright piano. He put a chair in front of it and sat down.

  When he looked hesitantly at his hands and wiggled his fingers, I was embarrassed for him and wanted to laugh until he hit the keys. It was a short and catchy song about Paris, the tune riding up and down a hill, and after he’d finished, it struck me that both my mother and Hanna had fallen in love with musicians, one a church organist, one a piano player, how music seemed the closest thing to a kind of love that came from a lot of discipline and practice.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

  32 / RENÉ STEINKE

  “Me, too,” he said, his finger pounding a key. He showed me what his brother had brought back for him: an ashtray with a street scene from the Champs Élysées painted on it. “He was in the army,” Cornell said. “Hated it.” Later, as he smoked and we drank two more glasses of bourbon, he flicked his ashes like gray snow over striped awnings and women in extravagant hats.

  It began to get dark outside. I felt the liquor wiggling in my arms and chest. “I wonder if it’s true what they say about Frenchwomen.”

  “I don’t know.” He cocked his head. “But I’d like to see for myself.”

  “Maybe we’ll go there someday,” I said. “You look like the stubborn type.”

  He smiled. “Maybe. Hanna and I always said we’d go. But we made a lot of crazy plans.”

  “What happened, anyway?” I said, taking another drink. “Why aren’t you still together?”

  He leaned back and sighed. “Oh, well, she was in love with me, I guess, until she realized we were too much alike, and she said she couldn’t tell anymore what was hers and what was mine—she even got our clothes mixed up in the end, the stories about our childhoods.” It was a shock that he wanted to tell me so much. “She took it personally if I was unhappy for five minutes, because she thought she should be able to save me from that—even five fucking minutes of it.” He swung the leg crossed over his knees as if getting ready to kick something at the ceiling.

  “And she left you then?”

  “Oh, she ran off, with someone else I think, I still don’t know for sure. She left a note that said she felt like she was disappearing—what was it? that the ‘we’ was about to murder the ‘you’

  and ‘me’—didn’t make sense.” He stared at the smoke stringing up from his cigarette. Outside, a car horn blared.

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  In my imagination I’d woven a life for her that made sense, and he was tugging at all the loose ends, unraveling it. But with the liquor running in my limbs, it wasn’t an unpleasant unraveling, like the slow breakup of a chord my father sometimes played just before the real beginning of a hymn.

  “I have to tell you,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s the lone-liest person I ever knew.” I thought she just had an independence he couldn’t see. “It’s like she’s walking around with a big hole blown out of her, where most people’s hearts are.”

  “But she never listened to anybody’s stupid rules,” I said.

  His face strained into a longer, hollower shape, and it seemed as if he were looking down at me from a height of several feet.

  “No,” he said hoarsely. “She listens too hard. To everybody.

  That’s her problem. She has to fill up that hole.” He leaned forward, so close I felt his hot breath on my neck. “Otherwise she’d come back to me.”

  The dust particles in the beam of window light between us shimmered. His Hanna had a different face, a different past. I thought if I could part some warm curtain, I could look inside him and find her.

  His eyes crinkled. “Well, you can’t be a universe to each other for very long. Everything starts to seem really small.”

  I knew I’d drunk more than I should have when I looked up at the ceiling and the cracks shivered like black lightning. “You still want her to come back, don’t you?” I smoothed the folds in the lap of my skirt. I was talking too much, but couldn’t help it.

  “Wouldn’t you do almost anything to feel as if she were closer?”

  I felt light. The room looked blurry from under my lowered eyelashes.

  He laughed uncomfortably and rubbed his knees. “I wouldn’t do anything. No, the truth is, most of the time I’ve pretty much forgotten her.”

  34 / RENÉ STEINKE

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. It seemed to drag Hanna closer to us.

  He swung his finger around the lip of his glass, leaned toward me. Outside, children were laughing. “Oh, well, I’d do something to feel closer to her.”

  “To pretend,” I said, resting my hand on his thin arm.

  He edged around the coffee table and moved to sit beside me on the couch, his chest caved in under his narrow shoulders. Our breath was so thick with bourbon, it smelled flammable. “Sometimes when you move your hand that way, under your chin, it reminds me of her,” he said.

  “Really? No one’s ever said that before. Do you think she put her hand there to cover that birthmark?” It was red and could have been mistaken for a love-bite, but she usually kept it hidden with a scarf or thick makeup.

  “Yeah, that’s right. She was always worried about that—especially if she didn’t know people. You have one of those too?” He pulled my hand away from my chin and stroked my neck.

  “Nope.”

  When he kissed me, his tongue was soft and insistent, like a thumb dipped in honey. As I felt him stroke my collarbone, I imagined what it must have been like to be her, with her smooth complexion and dimples. The walls started to spin in a pleasant, carousel way as he inched his hand under my blouse, inclined it so it held the edge of my breast. His other hand went under my skirt, slowly rubbing my leg. “What’s this?” he said, his finger catching at a ridge of scars. I flinched, but he pushed me back on the couch and turned out the light so I relaxed a little. For a while at least it must have been good, to have someone that in love with you, someone who pai
d enough attention to think they knew you. His hand swept up my thigh, pulled down my stockings and underwear. Everything seemed fuzzy, rose-colored and gentle. He

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  kissed the thin skin on the inside of my thigh, and his tongue butterflied upward. It was a moment before I knew what he was doing and thought to myself, Sit up, but didn’t. The room was cool and dark, except for the quivering pink light of his tongue.

  He flipped back my skirt and rubbed the sides of my legs. I was woozy but opened my eyes just slightly, and then a car’s headlights passed through the window and lit the red, withered skin on my thighs. He must have seen it too, felt something feathered, coarser. I drew back and pulled down my skirt.

  “What’s the matter?” I pulled on my stockings and shoes but didn’t bother to find my underwear in the dark. Hanna was far away now, tapping perfume behind her ear or riding in a taxi, having not thought about either of us for some time. I got up, steadied myself on the arm of the couch. “I shouldn’t have stayed so long.”

  He turned on the lamp, looked up at me, surprised, still smiling from one corner of his mouth. “But you did.”

  “I have to leave.” I didn’t look at him again but found my purse and ran down the crooked stairs, grabbing the banister at the two crazy turns. I was glad he didn’t follow me or call out.

  As I drove down the highway in the dark, each set of passing headlights was a pair of eyes widening, lingering on my face, the stare momentarily blinding me until they passed. For a while I’d believed it was Hanna drawing me to him, but now I knew it was just the bourbon. I was ashamed of myself for using it that way again. It never worked unless the person was a stranger, a total stranger.

  When I stopped on the side of the road near Gary, the air smelled like synthetic manure, and a few red dots of water-tower lights were stacked beneath the stars. I took a blanket from the backseat, flung it out the window, and lit a match to the pink satin edging. The flame extinguished, so I got out, went to the 36 / RENÉ STEINKE

  trunk, and found the gasoline. A semi trundled by. I hurried back into the car and, sitting in the front seat with the door open, soaked one ragged corner in gasoline, lit it up again, and threw it on the gravel beneath me. The pale blanket jumped up like the back of a horse, then crumpled and slithered under the flames. I drove away with the fire seething behind me.

  Watching it shrink in my rearview mirror, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. I was speeding past the cornfields, worrying what Cornell must have thought of me: A few drinks and she’d let you do anything. She pretended to be looking for Hanna, but really she was desperate for something else.

  I stopped again on a dirt road between two fields, the breeze in the corn leaves like a faraway tide. I got out and doused some old newspapers with gasoline before I lit them on the ground, but there weren’t enough to keep a fire going for very long. Under the cover of the corn, I didn’t worry anymore about being seen.

  I searched my trunk for more flammables and found some cans of spray paint I’d used to touch up the paint job on the car doors.

  I walked a little way down the road, ignited the tip of each one, and threw it up over the corn tassels, which lit up like tiny crowns, until the cans exploded and the dark sucked in the flare.

  The third time I stopped near the Porter exit sign, I didn’t even get out of the car. The darkness squeezed at my shoulders. I lit a match to the delicate leg of the wooden deer from Hanna’s box.

  “Damn it, Hanna,” I said. “Where are you?” I lay the deer on the seat beside me, looking at its pathetic wide-eyed face and puckered lips like a surprised girl’s. I was coughing from the smoke as the seat’s white vinyl melted, but it calmed me down to watch the little deer burn out until I snapped on the light to see what was left among the feathery ashes: the blue beads that had been its eyes.

  III

  T hen I was back in Porter. The town lay on shifting, stolen ground, somehow dragged to Indiana during the Ice Age, and even if they didn’t know why, people were afraid the land their houses stood on would one day be taken back. The streets named after presidents and species of trees marched in a grid around the courthouse until they got as far as the surrounding cornfields, where they could safely forget themselves in dirt.

  When I dropped out of the local college, my mother was afraid I’d move away, but it was a difficult place to leave. I daydreamed about traveling, but plans to actually go anywhere always faded away like the streets once they reached the edge of town.

  The hotel was square, three floors of brick the color of yellowed paper, with four curtained windows on each floor facing Lincoln, the main street. A red-brick path led from the sidewalk to the front door, which was topped by a short, black awning that said LINDEN in sturdy block letters.

  Each night at the front desk I counted the change into a small green metal box and put the rest in a zippered bag for the bank.

  The bills were limp and soft as felt, the coins clammy, and when I finished, my hands felt the pleasant grime of travel and strangers’ fingers.

  37

  38 / RENÉ STEINKE

  I’d sit with a book, or sometimes just watch the heavy wooden door, anticipating the turn of the knob. Living in Porter had made me good at waiting. I waited for shoes to creak on the wooden floor, then pad onto the flat gold carpet. I waited for the harried voices of people who’d spent too long in a car or a bus, for the smell of cigarettes and soda, for flesh to be reflected in the cheap crystal of the miniature chandelier that had hung there in the lobby since the hotel had opened a hundred years before.

  My grandfather had been worried about the germs. “When someone sneezes or scratches or coughs—I don’t care who they are—” he said, “take two steps back and look away. No sense exposing yourself.” He and my grandmother had stayed at the Linden the night of their wedding. There would have been no cheap paintings or trophy cases in the lobby back then, just the clean white walls and the chandelier’s teardropped pieces of glass.

  It was Wednesday. The night before at the Paradise Lounge, I’d gotten so drunk with two seed salesmen that I ended up in the ladies’ room throwing up pink, sweet, whiskey-sour vomit, and that afternoon I had a bad headache.

  Jo came in and sat behind the desk beside me. She pulled out the writing board and said, “You look a little peaked,” in that half-British voice of hers that she’d gleaned from old movies.

  “I’m fine,” I said, putting away the change box in the drawer.

  “Sure?” She fixed her eyes on me. “I have some saltines and aspirin in my purse.” She took out the adding machine and quickly punched out a tape of the week’s profits, her gaze snapping between the ledger and her dancing fingers. Her feet were aligned on the floor, her back straight, her face serious. She took an exacting pleasure in tasks like this. It must have come from so many years playing the viola, practicing scales and counting to the metronome. She sometimes had to bail her drunk father out of jail, after his arrests for disorderly conduct, and when I pictured THE FIRES / 39

  her talking to the judge, it was this practical face I saw, as if she had to practice and count to make sure her eyes and mouth would work properly for her.

  She was unusually quiet today, and I wondered if she’d had a fight with her fiancé, David. I watched the tape snake out from the machine, her fingers tapping, and the mechanical swallow each time she hit the plus sign.

  I used to be practical, too. I’d wanted to be a teacher and had finished two semesters and begun the training before I knew I’d made a mistake. Mostly what I ended up teaching the children was how to wait. They were so well behaved. They looked up at me with wide, trusting eyes, crossed their legs and folded their hands prettily, listening for me to tell them what to do. I saw their lives stretched out in those moments of waiting—their little ears tingling, tipped forward—and I thought I’d never be able to teach them anything else, and knew that I had to quit.

  Jo punched at the adding machine, pursed her lips, and
let the paper ribbon out and curl. She turned to me and slapped her hand down on the blotter. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d lost your mind? When did it happen?” I supposed she must have heard through the grapevine about my last night at the Paradise.

  I broke open a roll of quarters for the change box. “So I got drunk,” I said. “Big deal.”

  “Stinking drunk.” Her eyes flashed furiously. “You know well and good,” she said, “that it was stupid to go there by yourself.

  Why didn’t you call me?” She blinked quickly several times as if she couldn’t see. “I know you’re upset, but you can’t…”

  I stared at the painting of the clown, and the red ball of his nose hurt my eyes.

  “And what were you doing with those two men? You know, you’re lucky Mark saw you there. He would have taken care of you if you hadn’t left.” Mark was David’s best friend. I barely 40 / RENÉ STEINKE

  remembered seeing him now, with his grasshopper eyes and green drippy tie. “How’d you get home anyway?”

  “I walked.”

  “You walked?”

  I knew how my drinking like that disgusted her. “Look,” I told her, “I was just in a funny mood.”

  She bit her bottom lip. “You know, if I had your looks, I’d—I wouldn’t go wasting them. Why won’t you go out with Mark?

  He’s the best thing to hit your pavement in a long time.” Jo still thought one of the local boys could rescue me. I pictured the ruddy skin above Mark’s collar, his barrel chest and too-broad shoulders.

  “I’m not interested,” I said. “As soon as things calm down, I’m going to leave anyway. I just have to decide where I want to go.”

  She gave me a wan smile and sighed. “Not before David and I buy our house, I hope.” The color rose in her cheeks.

  “You’re sure now?” I said. She had been wavering lately about whether or not to marry him.

  “I think so,” she said, walking over to the glass trophy case on the wall, where little gold men held balls the size of buttons and there were photographs of Mr. Linden as a teenaged basketball player, his impossibly long skinny legs sticking out from his loose shorts like long clappers hanging from bells. “You’d never know this was him,” she said. “Hard to believe that penny-pincher was ever this good-looking.” She reached down to tuck her heel back into her flat shoe.