Wake Up Call

    About the time my mother’s house burned to the ground for the third time I was at the California State Fair with Woody Pulaski, trying to talk him out of leaving his wife, and watching his kids fall from the sky in little wire and glass balls attached to a complicated-looking steel structure of arms and runners called The Gravitron.  I’d like to say I felt something about the fire—a special prescience or telepathy connecting me with my mother—but there was nothing.  No image of her standing on the second-floor balcony of her latest pre-fab home in a nightgown and slippers, magazine folded under one arm and smoke running out the door and up the walls behind her, a deranged sardonic look on her face as she waves at people in the street and calls for help.  At the time it happened I was probably sucking fake strawberry syrup from a scoop of ice-shavings in a cone-shaped paper cup and trying not to think about what it had been like sleeping with Woody’s wife, Charmaine, so as to maintain a look of deep and impartial concentration.  Probably at the moment my mother became aware of the smells of burning carpet and paint, I was watching yellow-jackets slam in and out of dropped snow-cones and the mustard-stained heels of wiener-buns littering the ground next to a trash barrel across from where we sat, and remembering (in spite of myself) the cinnamon smell of Charmaine’s hair and skin.
    “She thought I’d be better off knowing about this guy,” Woody said.  “Happier,” he added, his mouth hooking down and pouching at the corners.
    “Nothing physical yet, though,” I asked.
    He shook his head.  “So she says.  It’s all up here,” he tapped his forehead.  For a second I realized how barely he was able to contain himself, all his grief and frustration, and I was really glad for the conventions of normal discourse—the conventions of being two guys in public with kids to look after.  “In spite of it all I think I actually believe her.”
    “Good,” I said, brightly.  “That’s good.  There’s a world of difference between thinking and doing—you still have that little margin of trust.”
    He’d just finished telling me the story of how Charmaine had fallen in love with a man, this time from the swimming pool.  They’d shared lanes since January and by mid-March were exchanging nervous hellos as they came in and out of the pool, tucking flesh back into the seam of a suit or licking the insides of their goggles for a seal before jumping in.  One day she followed him into the parking lot.  She loved the noise of his shot exhaust and the way he cornered hard and accelerated, driving off—even the dirty, flame-red of his Jeep.  The parking lot was wet from rain, puddles everywhere reflecting the sky, and the air smelled sweet like fresh pumpkin, she said; she said she stood there for a long time after he was gone, wondering what in the world had come over her.  “Like a high school crush,” she said.  Then a few days later, after a noon swim, she followed him from the pool to the insurance company where he worked.  A week or so after that she saw him stopped at an intersection downtown and trailed him to a daycare where he picked up two blond children—boy and girl in blue and pink overalls, exactly like him but smaller—and from there, home.  She followed him home exactly five more times and sat in her car across the street from his house, under the palms and eucalyptus trees, weeping.  She said she was weeping because she could never have him and because of the way water ran off his legs when he was swimming and how his eyes flared pink from chlorine, even with the goggles, making him look like a burned, desperate man.
    “Think about it, Wood,” I said.  “What is it she really wants you to know?  I mean—why tell you at all?  Why all the detail?”  I sucked up some acid-tasting chemicals meant to taste like strawberry and swished them together with saliva in and out of my front teeth.  Meanwhile, my mother was waving to pedestrians and calling back over her shoulder for the dog—a cocker spaniel already singed once to the brink of death and blind in one eye from flying embers.
    “Because I asked,” he said.  “Because you know Charmaine—if you ask she has to tell.  Nothing sacred.  No closed doors.”
    “Sure,” I said.  Now I was remembering an afternoon with Charmaine years ago, in my studio.  It had been hot for days and the air stank sweetly of varnish fumes and paint; I was working on an installation of eight-foot-tall wood and plaster figures draped in blue plastic.  My studio is shaped like an L and Charmaine was at the opposite leg of it cooking instant macaroni and cheese for us on the gas camping stove I used back then to perc coffee, while I napped on the couch.  And after a few minutes rattling around—finding pots, I imagined—she came back to me, water dripping from her knuckles and between her clenched fingers.  “What?” I asked.  “Having trouble getting it started?”  She had pale blue eyes and waspy features so perfectly symmetrical you could project onto them nearly any version of sexual fantasy you liked.  Now I could see something was about to happen that hadn’t happened to me before.  She shook her head.  “Eddie, shh,” she said.  She knelt on the floor next to me.  “Oh, I get it,” I said, but I didn’t.  She had an ice-cube in each hand and her lips were gleaming with something—hot pepper-oil it turned out.  What happened next, that mixture of pain and pleasure, I eventually took to be the exact sum of everything I felt for her but could never apprehend.  
    Not long after this I introduced them—Woody and Charmaine—Woody was married at the time and barely set up in a new job.  Nothing could have been further from my mind than inducing them to become lovers.  We spent an afternoon skiing at Lake Tahoe and hot-tubbing at Woody’s parents’ ranch on the Nevada border.  In hindsight, I suppose, it’s easy enough to say I was probably always acting in my own best interests.  I’m a self-preserving man, if anything, and Charmaine was always too much for me—too much to have, too much to long for.  I’d never known what to do about that.  Soon she wasn’t returning my phone calls; neither was he.  I had no idea of anything happening, though, until the day his wife showed up on my doorstep wounded and distraught, burning with accusations.  
    Now here I was again, and still at a loss to know how I was supposed to help these people.
    “Openness can be a kind of deceit, too,” I said.  “You know?”
    He shook his head.  His eyebrows went up into his forehead a second and his mop of hair caught the wind, then blew forward over his eyes—the same wind that was right then threatening to lift sparks from my mother’s windows and carry them across manicured lawns to the flame-ripe roofs of her neighbors.  “No,” he said, pushing his hair back, wiping away sweat.  “What are you getting at?”
    “The oldest thing in the world, Woody.  She’s hurting you to send some kind of message.  Give you both a wake up call.”
    “Aw, fuck,” he said.  “I mean, really...”  He looked defenselessly at me, then away, his mouth bunching to one side.  At first I thought he was trying to tongue away some food stuck in his rear molars, then I realized he was really going to lose it.  For a second, in the contortion before he began to bawl, his features came loose for me and it was like seeing underneath his skin to everything that had always been in his heart.
    “Woody,” I said.  I looked away.  I put a hand on his shoulder and shook it lightly and squeezed.  “Hey.”
    “Yeah, I’m all right.  I’m just so sick and tired of thinking about her, and what she said or didn’t say and what she thinks, and what she really means, and Goddamn, it’s so exhausting....”
    “Kids,” I cut in.
    “Huh?”
    “Kids,” I repeated, pointing with my chin.  They were disembarking the Gravitron, a boy and a girl.  
    Woody leaned forward, elbows on his knees a second, rubbing his fingers into his eyes.  “OK,” he said, and sat up straight.  “I’m all right.”  
    These were not kids he’d had with Charmaine.  Right now they were queasy-looking and enthralled by terror still, tottering toward us, the boy’s hair (Woody’s, but finer) sticking up over his head.  “Awesome, Dad,” he said and slid into Woody’s lap.  “You should try.”  The girl stood between us kicking the toe of her sneaker into the ground and looking as if she might be on the verge of speech, though I knew from past experience with her that she wasn’t; it was her usual expression and she had nothing special to say to us.
    “Look.  You’ll live it down,” I told him.  I tipped my head for a last dribble of ice-melt and berry flavoring, and crumpled the wrapper to a sticky lump in my hand, conscious that his children were eyeing me with envy and a precocious kind of worry verging upon disgust:  Grown ups don’t eat snow cones! “What other choice do you have?”  
    “There’s always another choice.”
    “Was that one raspberry?”
    “No, strawberry.  But only one thing to do that’s right.”
    “I want blueberry!”
    “You’re right.  You’re always right,” he said.
    “Not necessarily.”
    We were not at the end of this.  He’d probably make up his mind a dozen more times, only to unmake it again a dozen different ways, each decision a kind of turning until the thing had gone out of him, taken its final form, or he actually ran out of choices.   
    “Can we see the diving donkeys, Dad?”
    “I wanna do the walk in space.”
    By now, the flames had progressed to the walls and eaten through beams and rafters, securing themselves in years old nests of wiring and insulation.  Firemen cloaked in those fire-retardant mushroom-colored coats and the yellow hats and big boots children dream of, were tromping up the ladder to save my mother—tromping back down again with her wrapped in blankets; begging her to lie still, please, and remain behind the fire-line.  There was nothing left to save or do for her house, or any of her stuff inside it.  Nothing left but to stand by and watch it burn itself out.  Soak the surrounding areas.  Moments later my phone would start buzzing in my shirt pocket, making me think, for a confused second, of the yellow jackets in the trash, and causing me to swat at myself before remembering to answer.  “Excuse me a moment,” I’d tell them and duck away, halfway back toward the beer tent and displays of hot-tubs, examining the numbers in the display screen before pressing the button to talk.  Well, and then the rush across town—the interminable heat and freeway congestion, the heartbeats throbbing in my temples, causing me to sweat, blurring the edges of my sight.  Jesus. Mom.  Again?  All nerves and anxiety.  Only I’d never make it to her house.  Instead I’d take the turn I hadn’t taken all those years since introducing them; loop back up over the freeway and head north again to Charmaine’s work.  Thinking, Wake up call!  Who’s the one without a clue here?  There was no guy at the pool; no Woody, no kids, nothing in the world but her and me.  Time to face that.  
    She’d be waiting, I knew, wondering why I’d taken so long.