Tinderbox (13 page)

“Some women might feel flattered to have the man who cheated on them then try to cheat
with them on someone else. But I just feel debased. I’m sorry to sound cruel, but
in my professional opinion, you don’t know what you want. This is pathetic, your being
here, my letting you touch me.”

He had not waited for her to kick him out again. He’d gathered up his shoe and left.

10

Adam comes through the kitchen door with an empty platter. He scampers, barefoot,
like a mole emerging from a burrow. Larry feels the familiar irritation at his son
rising in him, curbs the impulse to tell him to put on his goddamned shoes.

He lifts the first of the salmon steaks from the grill onto the platter.

“Boo!” Startled, Larry turns toward the voice. Omar is climbing out the casement window.
“Boo, Grandpa! Boo!”

“Jesus,” Larry says. Eva climbs out behind Omar. She giggles as she straightens herself
up. “I nearly dropped the fish.”

“I scared you?” Omar asks. He smiles shyly.

“Nearly scared the pants off of me.” It is good to see the kid acting like a kid.
“Your father used to do the same thing—crawl out of the window to come to dinner.
Spook us.”

Adam laughs. “I used to pretend I was one of Mamah Cheney’s kids jumping out of the
dining-room window after the servant set the house on fire.”

Eva stares at Adam.

Larry examines his thirty-two-year-old son, the face that seems still only half-formed.
The almost twenty-five years since Myra kicked him out have passed in a heartbeat.

“Sometimes I’d get Caro to climb out the window,” Adam continues, “and then I’d chase
her, pretending I was the ax murderer.” Adam raises his hand as though there were
an ax in it and bolts toward Omar, who screams with terrified delight as he runs from
his father. Adam chases Omar around the edge of the terrace.

“He-elp!” Omar yells. “Help!”

Larry lifts the last of the fish steaks onto the platter. In his mind’s eye, he can
still see Myra lowering her hands from her face while he nursed his injured ankle.
Even in the dim light of the bungalow, there had been no question about it. Her eyes
were dry.

“Save me from this dangerous man!” Omar cries, now on his second lap around the terrace.

“Got ya, got ya,” Adam yells, swinging his arms. Omar veers toward Larry. He darts
between Larry and the picnic table, his father close behind.

Adam stumbles. “Shit!” he cries, crashing into Larry.

The platter falls to the ground, breaking into two jagged halves as the fish tumbles
onto the flagstones.

Larry looks at the broken platter. There are shards of porcelain on the steaks. “Idiot.
Look what you’ve done.”

Adam leans over to pick up the fish. “I stubbed my toe,” he mumbles. He holds a piece
of fish in each hand, looking helplessly for somewhere to put them.

Betty arrives with a new platter. Caro follows with a broom, her eyes moving from
person to person. “Here,” Betty says, taking the fish from Adam and then picking up
the other pieces from the ground. “Nothing a quick rinsey under the water and two
more minutes on the grill won’t cure. Just don’t cut your feet.”

Omar buries his face in Eva’s side. She puts an arm around him.

Larry touches Adam’s shoulder. He feels like a bully. A monster. “Sorry, son. I didn’t
mean that. Are you okay?”

“It was stupid of me to be running like that.”

The worst part is that Larry knows that Adam thinks he is right. That he is an idiot.
“Is your toe okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

Adam sits on the picnic bench. He clutches his foot. Omar sits next to him. He leans
over to examine the toe. Caro sweeps the plate shards into the dustbin.

Larry turns the grill back on. He takes a gulp of his wine. “Okay, another adventure
at Max’s Folly.” His voice sounds artificial, the cheerfulness disingenuous even to
his own ears.

Betty musses Omar’s hair as she passes behind him with the fish, but he does not respond.
He is watching Eva, who has raised her palms so they form a cup under her chin. She
spits into them. Three times in quick succession.

“Why’d you do that, Eva?” Omar asks. “Spit in your hands?”

“Because of the story of the wicked man who burn down the house and use his ax on
the people.”

“That’s just a story, right, Daddy?” Omar turns to look at his father. “It’s not real.”

“Oh, it happened all right.”

Caro glares at Adam. “It was a long time ago, Omar. A freak event.”

Eva spits in her hands again. “Four.” She spits again. “Five.”

“Why do you keep doing that?” Omar asks.

“My grandmother teach me. It is how you keep away the evil.”

Omar counts the bodies. “There are five of us out here. You spit five times because
there are five of us.”

“One time for each finger,” Eva says.

“But you have ten fingers. Don’t you have to spit ten times?”

“Five. There are five fingers on a hamsa. You spit five times.”

“What’s a hamsa?” Omar asks.

Eva wipes her palms on the sides of her pants. She lifts the chain that hangs around
her neck so the hand-shaped silver amulet that had been inside her shirt rests momentarily
between her thumb and forefinger. She raises it to her lips, then tucks it back beneath
her shirt.

11

Of them all, only Adam believes in the significance of coincidence. As a child, he
would study lists of notable dates. With great solemnity, he would announce the connections:
Did his parents know that Charlie Chaplin died on the birthday of Houdini? That the
Great Fire in San Francisco occurred on the same day as an eruption of Mount St. Helens?
His father would attempt to debunk the significance with his layman’s statistical
proofs: in a room of twenty-three people, there is a greater chance of two or more
persons having the same birthday than not. But none of it had mattered to Adam. Once
he believed something, not even God, had he believed in a deity, would have been able
to sway him.

Back in the city, Adam is struck with the first coincidence to get under his skin
in a very long time. The quiver of uncanniness he felt so often as a child envelops
him one afternoon as he is reading about the rubber boom in Iquitos. In 1909 in Iquitos,
the rubber trade was approaching its precipitous end, the 70,000 rubber seeds Sir
Henry Wickham smuggled out of Brazil having taken hold in neatly organized rubber
plantations halfway across the world. In 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney
left their respective families in Chicago to sail to Europe together, the prequel
to the disaster to befall them.

Adam gets up from his desk. He stretches his arms overhead. He can hear the front
door opening, Omar and Eva laughing together. Why does Omar rarely laugh when he is
with Rachida or him?

Surely, Adam thinks, one of the rubber traders must have traveled from Manaus to New
York, booking passage to Europe on the same boat on which Frank and Mamah fled together,
all of them with children and spouses left behind.

12

For the first few weeks after Adam, Omar, and Eva return from Willow, Myra maintains
her routine: her morning sessions followed by a brisk walk around the Central Park
reservoir, a shower, then a simple lunch, which she eats, when the weather is nice,
on the deck off the kitchen. She’d initially protested when Eva began making her lunch,
but Eva is so eager to do it, Myra lets her.

In general, the girl seems happier. She chatters about Omar, who loves her, Adam says,
because she plays with him like another kid. Coming up the stairs after seeing her
last patient, Myra will hear the laughter that accompanies Eva and Omar’s ongoing
card tournament, the centerpiece of which is a game called Spit that involves whooping
yells.

At the beginning of September, Eva tells Myra about a mother she met in the park who
has offered to introduce Eva to the rabbi at the nearby West End Avenue synagogue.
Eva asks Myra if she can shift her hours so she can attend the services Friday evenings
and the adult Hebrew classes Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Eva’s first visit to the synagogue is on the Friday before Rosh Hashanah. “I never
was in a synagogue before,” she tells Myra when she returns. “I think it will be something
very strange, maybe like a crypt, but it looks like the cathedral we have at home.
There is a man who sings. He has the most beautiful voice.”

“The cantor.”

“The cantor,” Eva repeats. She begins to hum, a mournful melody that Myra dimly recalls
from the synagogue where her uncle had been the rabbi. Her mother had never liked
going to services, had seemed relieved when Myra announced at eleven that she no longer
wanted to attend. During the few weeks, now nearly a decade ago, Myra tried attending
services again, she visited the same West End Avenue synagogue where Eva now goes:
a grand, crumbling edifice with peeling pink paint and stained-glass windows clouded
with decades of dirt. The rabbi had been interested in radical theology and a messianism
that had made Myra think of men in black coats davenning at the Wailing Wall.

“In Iquitos,” Eva continues, “there is an old Jewish man. People come to his house
Friday nights and on Yom Kippur. Until my mother die, she take me every Yom Kippur
to the man’s house. We drink tea and eat sweet mango cakes. The cakes are to remind
us of God’s sweetness, the old man say.”

Myra’s parents had always fasted on Yom Kippur. When she turned thirteen, they expected
that she would fast too. Afraid to tell them how light-headed the fasting made her,
she had stashed licorice under her mattress to help her get through the long day.

Eva smiles in a way that suggests she is remembering the sweet mango cakes. “Every
year, on Yom Kippur day, my mother take me from the old man’s house to the Catholic
church so we can say confession and receive communion.” She studies Myra’s face. “The
Jewish people, they don’t do that here, do they?”

13

After a few weeks of Friday pickups, Caro and Omar fall into their own routine. Immediately
after school, they walk to an ice-cream store on Columbus Avenue where Omar orders
a scoop of strawberry in a cone and Caro orders whatever nonfat concoction is being
offered from the machine. Ice cream in hand, they head south to the Museum of Natural
History, where they visit first the dinosaurs on the fourth floor and then the African
mammals off the rotunda. Afterward, they catch the bus up Central Park West, getting
off at Ninety-fifth Street as Caro had during all of her high school years.

The salad Eva has made will be on the counter, the table set, the chickens her mother
has cleaned and seasoned earlier in the day already in the oven. Omar plays cards
with Eva until she leaves for evening services. A little before six, Myra climbs the
stairs from her office. She and Caro have a glass of wine before calling the others
for dinner.

After some toing and froing, Myra and Rachida have agreed that meals are not to be
delayed for her since she rarely arrives before eight, and even that hour is unpredictable.
On the first Friday in October, however, Caro notices two extra settings on the table.

“Who’s coming?” Caro asks her mother when she arrives upstairs.

“Rachida. She invited another resident from the hospital. A woman named Layla who’s
also from Morocco.”

A few minutes later, there are footsteps on the brownstone stairs. The front door
opens and Rachida, in blue hospital scrubs, enters with Layla, a slip of a woman in
a short skirt and sling-back pumps.

Layla’s hands flutter as she reaches out to touch first Myra’s and then Caro’s arm.
Adam comes down the stairs, unaware or having forgotten, Caro surmises from his unkempt
appearance, that a guest will be at the table. Layla greets him with her arms pressed
tightly to her sides.

Caro follows Adam to the kitchen while the others settle into the parlor. He opens
a bottle of red wine and she pours a glass of juice for Omar, who has come downstairs,
too. “Tuck your shirt in,” she whispers as she leaves to bring the juice to Omar.
“You look like something the cat dragged in.”

Layla is draped in one of the Barcelona chairs, talking about the four years she spent
at medical school in Iowa. Omar has taken Caro’s seat on the couch, his head resting
on his grandmother’s shoulder.

When Adam extends a glass of wine toward Layla, she holds up a hand like a stop sign.
“No thank you.”

“A teetotaler?”

Rachida shoots Adam a sharp look as she gets up and heads to the kitchen.

“I don’t drink because I’m a Muslim,” Layla says softly.

“Excuse us, dear,” Myra says. “We’re all so parochial here.”

“What’s that mean?” Omar asks.

“You know,” Caro says, “how some children love playing with action figures and you
don’t? Imagine if they couldn’t understand that you don’t.”

“That would be mean.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s meant to be mean, but it can feel like that.”

Rachida returns with a glass of sparkling water that she gives to Layla.

“So, the two of you work together?” Caro asks Layla.

Layla glances at Rachida, who answers for her. “Layla is a second-year primary-care
fellow. My track, the respecialization track, overlaps with the second-years.”

Over dinner, Layla tells them that she was raised in a small village near the edge
of the Sahara, not far from the Algerian border. “My father was the eldest son of
the man who was the chief of the region. His grandfather was a sultan. When I was
a child, my grandfather kept camels that he’d rent at the tent camps used by tourists
headed out to see the Erg Chebbi dunes. He gave that business to my two uncles, and
now they have the cell phone franchise for the area—which is very big because there
are so few landlines.”

“That’s where Bertolucci filmed
The Sheltering Sk y
, isn’t it?” Adam asks.

“That was in Ouarzazate,” Layla says. “In the Draa Valley. Where we live is totally
desert.”