Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (8 page)

T
he next morning I awoke to my phone ringing. I reached across Charlotte, taking no care to avoid jostling her (not out of meanness, but because the fact of her presence registered so faintly with me that there seemed little need to take any care with it) and lifted the phone from the nightstand. I didn't recognize the number but answered anyway, and was surprised to hear the detective with the curly hair and predatory manner on the other end, the detective Emma had shamed into shelving her case.

We'd like you to come in for a few questions, he said.

I'm out of the country right now, I told him.

I know. This is no big deal, he said.

I was not inclined to believe him, and I'm not sure he intended for me to.

Don't go changing your travel plans or anything, he said. Really we should have brought you in at the beginning, since you were with Ms. Zielinski the night of the fire. Just whenever you get back, give me a call. You have my number on your phone, I presume.

I do now.

That's a direct line. Be in touch, please. And enjoy the sunshine.

T
he night that the detective wanted to question me about had taken place almost a year before, when Emma and I were still blinking hard at finding ourselves sharing a bed again. We managed to keep our clothes on long enough to go out and eat high-end pizza at a busy place on the waterfront. According to the menu the pizza dough was made from organic wheat. The mozzarella was organic, too, and the sausage nitrate-free.

I cracked wise about the eco-earnestness. Emma smiled politely.

Later we went to a pub where an acoustic two-piece alternated between traditional Irish folk songs and John Denver tunes. ‘Whiskey in the Jar,' followed by ‘Rocky Mountain High,' and so on. The place was jammed with a mix of yuppies and backward-ball-capped college types, but we lucked in to two seats at the bar. We talked and laughed and drank. After a while I suggested I was ready to switch from beer to scotch, and Emma decided to join me, somewhat reluctantly, but when she ordered a glass of Macallan I changed tack without really knowing why, and asked for a Guinness.

She punched me on the arm.

Near closing Emma got a text from a friend saying there was a fire in her neighborhood, very near her house, even possibly—the friend hated to say it because she didn't want to freak her out for no reason—
at
her house. The friend couldn't be sure; they had the block cordoned off, but damned if it wasn't awfully close.

We paid our tab and started to walk back. Emma always strode with purpose, but now I had a hard time keeping up with her. It was cold, and she blew into her hands while I assured her, from half a pace behind, that these sorts of anecdotal reports were always overblown. As we got closer we saw a great horizontal column of white smoke drifting westward against the night sky, and she walked yet faster.

I moved to grasp her hand, but she shook me off.

I really wasn't worried at all, even though I'd dropped my overnight bag at her house, and in that bag was my Mac, and on my Mac was every word I'd written for the last three years, including the novel I was six months late in delivering. I wasn't worried, even though I'd always been too lazy to back up my files. I wasn't worried, because I quite simply didn't believe her house was on fire. I still suffered from the common delusion that big bad things didn't happen to me or those I cared about, even though my father's death was recent enough that some nights I woke with the smell of his diseased body in my nostrils.

But that night Emma's house was actually on fire. We turned the corner onto her street, and half a block up, three ladder trucks were raining hydrant water on the A-frame she'd bought with her husband back when they still believed in one another, the little A-frame where more recently I'd passed out reading Chekhov on the love seat in the sunny nook of the bedroom they'd shared, and she'd arrived home and woken me with a cool palm to my face, and I'd made her come right there on the floor, within sight of no fewer than five photographs from her wedding day, photographs she could not yet bring herself to box and closet. Beautiful prints, expensively framed in museum glass, meant to endure and pass through the houses of children and grandchildren, meant to last so long that the people who ended up possessing them would have little idea who Emma and her husband were. Now in the process of becoming ash.

I had to grab her wrist to keep her from bolting up the street. There was nothing to be done, and even if she'd gotten past the cops standing guard at the end of the block the only thing it would have availed her was a better view of her life going up in flames. She fought me for a minute, but I gathered her in, and eventually she stopped struggling. She leaned against me and cried while I weathered a few moments of distant regret over my unfinished novel, now extremely unfinished. But then I found myself more interested in why Emma was crying: did she cry for the house itself, or for what it represented? And did it represent anything at all, really, except in its sudden absence?

A
rson, according to the fire marshal's office. A window on the ground floor had been pried open, the frame splintered and the lock snapped off. The investigator mentioned something about charring patterns underneath the carpet in the living room which indicated beyond a doubt that the fire had been set. The insurance company was eager to conduct an investigation of its own. Meanwhile, Emma moved into a hotel. She was in the stretch run of a campaign and didn't have time to look for a new house. Plus there was the insurance company to deal with. Plus her husband was dragging his heels on their divorce even though he'd been the one who left. Plus she hadn't found time to buy enough clothes to keep herself in clean blouses for a full workweek. Plus she'd maybe started drinking a bit too much at night in the hotel lounge and found it difficult, some days, to get up for doing much of anything besides her job, which was part of the reason she hadn't yet bought enough clothes. Plus she still averaged two nights a week when she would break down out of nowhere, usually after washing her face and brushing her teeth and applying cream to her elbows and knees and getting in under the covers. She never wanted to talk during these jags, but she would send me text messages, and I would debate whether or not to just call her, try to divine from her words if that was what she wanted but couldn't ask for, and then I would call, and she wouldn't answer, and then eventually we'd both go to sleep, alone, in silence.

T
he police brought her husband in for questioning twice, but quickly lost enthusiasm when they perceived, correctly, that he was equally hapless and harmless, so they turned their attention to Emma. Of course I corroborated her whereabouts at the time of the fire, but the lead investigator, the man who had called me on the island, the short guy with a patient predatory manner like a leopard in repose, remained hungry for Emma—just like all the other men she knew.

T
he investigator questioned Emma five times. He could not have known at first how straight her spine was, but he found out quickly enough. She was indignant about being suspected, and in her indignation she grew fierce. She could have hired a lawyer to get the guy off her back, but she chose to take him on herself. She sat for, at first, as long as he wanted, and later, as long as he could take before wilting. She cried afterward, every time, but it would have been the second coming before she broke down in front of him. And when he finally was forced to release her the last time, it was with an apology that she waved away as if shooing a particularly persistent fly.

Then he turned his eye on easier prey. Namely, me.

A
fter two weeks of Charlotte's apathy I decided, over beers at Duffy's, that it had to end. I drove home, performed a cockeyed parking job on the curb in front of the casita, and took the stairs to find her swinging languidly in the hammock. Her smooth, tanned calf drooped from the side of the netting, hanging by the fulcrum of one lovely knee. Her toes, capped by bright red nails, brushed the concrete floor as she swung back and forth. Her face was turned toward me but utterly blank; for all I could tell she was asleep, eyes closed behind the mirrored lenses of her Jackie O glasses. My novel
rested unopened on her belly. In the last few days I'd had a growing sense that she was only pretending to read it; that in fact she only ever pretended to read anything. If I'd cared enough I might have quizzed her to test this hunch.

I gazed down at her, a little unsteady on my feet from an afternoon of Medalla and Don Q. She was the very picture of studied apathy, limbs limply askew and face expressive as a chunk of marble, and that was all I needed to realize the impulse that sent me screaming back to the casita had been the right one.

Okay, I said, listen, you have to go.

No visible reaction. Go where? she asked absently.

It doesn't matter to me at all, I told her. I'd say you should go home, resume classes, get your life in order. But I've got nothing—and I mean nothing—invested in whether or not you actually do that. You just have to leave. At least leave the island. Beyond that, you're free to do whatever you like, as far as I'm concerned.

Charlotte sat up and swung her legs over the side of the hammock; the equivalent, from her, of an outburst. What if I don't want to go? she asked, her tone still mild despite this sudden agitation.

Now I allowed my annoyance with her, roiling slowly under the surface for two weeks, to emerge. I want to ask you a very simple question, Charlotte, I said, and I want you to try to answer it honestly.

Finally, finally, she took off those sunglasses, and I was surprised to see that behind them her eyes had gone dark and guarded. She held her mouth in a rictus of anticipated damage. It was the first time I'd seen an expression on her face that did not have a studied intent, and for a moment I almost managed to feel something for her.

Then the moment passed, and I said, Should I take your outward attitude toward me—your utter indifference, I mean, in case it's not clear—as at all indicative of how you actually feel?

Charlotte looked at her feet. No, she said.

Thank you for being honest, I said. And so a follow-up question: let's put aside the fact that you barely know me, and so could not care as much about this arrangement as you probably imagine you do. Let's say for sake of argument that what you think you feel is, in fact, genuine. Why then, for the love of God, would you act as though you didn't care at all?

I waited a beat, two, and she offered nothing, so I prodded her.

I really want to know, I told her. I am sincere. I am trying to understand what motivates you. What you want. I am trying to understand what you
need.
God help me I am trying but I am also beginning to wonder if men and women could enjoy every advantage the future has to offer, lifetimes as infinite as the universe itself, the integration of human and artificial intelligence, and still never have even a basic understanding of each other.

At this Charlotte didn't cry, but she brushed up against it. Her eyes had grown wet, and now her mouth pulled thin and turned down at the corners, one step from devolving into a conduit for sobs, as she tried and failed to answer me.

Or maybe, I said, it's got nothing to do with cats and dogs. Maybe you're just really young, is the problem.

She wiped at her eyes, sniffling in a wet, open, crackling way that made clear she really needed to sniffle and wasn't just putting on a show. I seriously haven't got any idea what you're talking about, she said.

I looked down at her, and suddenly I saw her rawness, her sorrow, all on open display now, and for the first time in a long time I felt that comfortable, noncommittal tenderness I'd felt for every woman I'd been with since Emma dismantled me all those years before. In her sudden vulnerability, Charlotte somehow had opened that room inside me again.

We stripped the bed down to the fitted sheet and made love, and I was careful, putting one hand on her lower back and lifting her hips gently to meet me. She cried at one point, quietly, like water seeping through rock, and she did not punch me or carve gouges in my skin with her fingernails. For my part, I did not pull her hair, or leave any bruises on her. It was all very nice and calm and safe, and later, when we sat on the porch sipping Medalla and watching the sun set, she asked if it would be alright with me if she read my novel.

I had a feeling, I told her, that you were only pretending to read it before.

That's true, she said. That's what I was doing. I would look at the words and daydream and every once in a while when it seemed like I should turn a page, I'd turn a page. I didn't read any of it.

We were both quiet for a minute.

I don't even know why I was pretending, she concluded.

It's no problem, I said, leaning back against the stucco with my fingers laced behind my head. You're firmly in the majority, not having read it, if that makes you feel any better.

But I'd like to read it now. I mean, really read it.

Of course, I said.

Later, when the nocturnal insects and coqui frogs had set about their nightly call-and-response, Charlotte asked me, So who is the girl?

She'd read the first fifty pages or so of the book at this point.

Which girl? I asked.

The one you wrote about in here.

That's a character. Fictional. Made-up.

But not entirely, Charlotte said. There's someone real, for sure. A flesh-and-blood girl walking around out there somewhere. She's smart, and pretty, and she won't let you have her.

All three of those things, I said, are true.

And I could never replace her.

Also correct, I said.

That doesn't make any sense, Charlotte said. I'm right here. I could offer you everything. But you keep yourself for her.

I may be perennially reserved. But you see from this afternoon that I could be very, very nice to you regardless.

Still doesn't make any sense, she said.

I am inclined to agree with you, I told her.