Tinderbox (27 page)

“You mean cuckoo?”

“Yes.”

Her cousin, the psychologist, wants to send the cuckoo girl back to her? “You can’t
take her to get some help?”

“I have tried. Several times. She is not willing. I think the best course is to return
her to a more familiar environment where she might do better.”

Ursula looks at her watch. Her husband will be gone for another hour. Twice last month,
she screwed the ugly gardener in the garden shed. Dirt under his fingernails, but
an enormous prick. And he likes her tits. She is feeling fat this morning, which makes
her less in the mood, but she might feel less like eating if she took him in there
again.

“Sweetheart,” Ursula says, “you can’t keep her just until May? What is there for her
here? None of the synagogues here will welcome her. Alicia is going to Tel Aviv in
April. She can look for something for the girl there. It is only three months. What
can happen in three months?”

36

On the first day of March, a snowstorm blankets the city. Rachida wakes to see snow
piled like meringue on her windowsill. She has, of course, seen snow before, here
in New York and lots in Detroit, but it still leaves her filled with wonder that everything
can be covered with something so clean and white. Then she remembers Layla and everything
feels gray and sooty again.

She goes down to the kitchen. Myra is on the phone, measuring coffee as she talks.
After she hangs up, she turns to Rachida. “Schools everywhere are closed. Caro wants
to take Omar sledding in the park. She thinks there are some old sleds in the basement.”

The garden is entirely white. Snow is swirling in eddies. Nearly three weeks have
passed since she and Caro had the talk about Layla. Although Caro had not set a deadline,
Rachida can feel the clock ticking. Now, though, the deadline does not feel as much
about telling Adam as about deciding what will come next, after the end of her fellowship
in late June, when they return to Detroit in July.

The problem is not Layla. Being in love with Layla has never blinded her to the awareness
that a life with Layla would be more maddening than a life with Adam. Without the
built-in limit of the fellowship, she probably would not have allowed things to go
as far as they have. And if Layla were honest with herself, Rachida feels certain,
she would admit the same. Layla has no intention of spending her life with a woman—especially
someone as plebeian as Rachida. She’ll marry an Arab banker or a sheik. She’ll live
somewhere with servants and a driver and round-the-clock nannies to bathe the children
and entertain them during the long, hot afternoons.

As has happened too frequently since her father’s death, Rachida feels herself on
the verge of tears. No, the problem is not Layla.

37

Caro arrives as the snowfall is ending. As a kid, she and her friends had sledded
all the hills in Riverside Park and Central Park—their favorite, the steep one at
116th Street, the Hudson River on the horizon, bales of hay arranged to prevent sledders
from crashing into the trees.

It has been years since she’s been in the basement of her mother’s house. Behind the
stacked air conditioners and the bike she always intended to take, she and Omar find
two wooden sleds, hers well-worn, Adam’s hardly used.

“Would it be okay if I ask Eva to come along?” Caro whispers to her mother after she
has carried the sleds onto the front stoop. “She’s probably never been sledding.”

Myra glances at Eva, leaning over the ironing board. Caro imagines her mother debating
the pros and cons. Would inviting Eva to join them send a wrong message about Eva’s
position in the family? It would be cruel, though, to deprive the girl of the fun.

“Sure. Go right ahead.”

Eva claps her hands when Caro asks her. “I saw that once in a movie. Children going
down a hill on their sleds, with a dog running behind them.” She unplugs the iron
and follows Omar and Caro up the stairs to change into warm clothes.

On the third floor, Omar knocks on the closed door of the music room while Eva continues
up to her room. “Daddy, Daddy, open up.”

“Give me a minute,” Adam calls out.

“Auntie Caro’s going to take Eva and me sledding. Please, can’t you come?”

Eva stops midway up the stairs. She twists around to look at the music room door.

“Okay, I’ll be right out.”

Caro helps Omar find his snow pants and a heavy sweater. She adjusts the suspender
straps, then heads downstairs to gather hats and gloves while Omar goes to tell Eva
he is ready.

When Omar comes back down, Caro and Adam are in the front hall pulling on their boots.
“Eva’s not coming,” Omar says. “She’s feeling sick.”

Adam catches Caro’s eye. He clears his throat, then turns back to his boots.

Outside, there are children trooping toward the park, plastic saucers and red sleds
and trash-can lids in tow. Caro looks up at the top-floor window of the room that
is now Eva’s. The curtain is cracked.

38

Slowly, Winston Churchill at La Mamounia has crept into the screenplay. A rich man
after his Iquitos ventures, Moishe, now middle-aged, has become a regular at the hotel
for lunch. On several occasions, he has seen Churchill walking in the gardens. Then,
in the winter of 1937, they meet on the terrace. Moishe invites Churchill for a drink,
over which he tells him about the years he spent in the Amazon, while Churchill talks
about his fear for the Jews of Germany and Austria, who are already escaping to England.
The main story is now, in essence, a flashback that occurs during this conversation.

Although Rachida does not roll her eyes when Adam tells her about Churchill, she might
as well have. “I thought Frank Lloyd Wright was in the movie—that he and your Moishe
guy were on the same boat.”

“That was 1909. This is nearly thirty years later.”

“So they’re both in it?”

Adam can feel his teeth grinding. Whenever he talks about his screenplays, Rachida
finds a hole in the narrative logic. Exasperated and embarrassed too, he has on occasion
seized the bait, backing himself into ridiculous corners in which he is defending
pompous and vague notions of fictive truth. The truth is, he had forgotten about the
idea of having Frank Lloyd Wright in the story. Besides, it has never been Wright
who interests him. It’s the gruesome scene at Taliesin: the fire set by the deranged
Barbadian servant who then ax-murdered Wright’s lover, Mamah Cheney, and her children.

“I still have to work that out.”

In the afternoon, when Adam leaves to get Omar, Eva is in the kitchen. She is emptying
the dishwasher. He debates saying goodbye, but there is no point. Eva would not respond.
“Lucky you,” Rachida said when he raised again the subject of Eva’s refusal to speak
to him. “I wish half the people in the world who chatter at me would just shut up.”

Outside, it is warmer than he expected. He leaves his coat unzipped. The streets are
slushy with clumps of wet, black-flecked snow. Over the weekend, his mother told him
that she had called Ursula to discuss having Eva return now to Peru and that Ursula
had urged her to let Eva stay until May. His mother sighed. “In that case, I might
as well let her stay until the beginning of July, our original plan, when you go back
to Detroit. No matter how tactfully I put it, she would take it very badly to have
to leave early.”

He had been about to say Jesus Christ, I can’t imagine another season of this, when
he heard the front door opening, Eva coming in with grocery bags, and he felt that
he should exit the room.

He stands outside the school, the only father in the group of waiting adults. What
he really cannot imagine is July, returning to Detroit, living alone again with his
wife and son.

39

After Omar finishes the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and glass of milk Eva has
left for him, Adam follows him upstairs to his room. They play chess. They build a
model apatosaurus with a long snaky neck and tiny head and a protoceratops with elephantine
legs and a stubby tail. They look through an old set of the World Book Encyclopedia.
For a while, Adam’s mind stays on their play, but then his thoughts drift to the pool
at La Mamounia, to the view of the medina walls from their room. He imagines Moishe
and Winston Churchill strolling through the lavish gardens at dusk, the red embers
at the tip of Churchill’s burning cigar. Moishe walking in leather slippers back to
his home, past the Koutoubia, beyond the Djemaa el-Fna.

“What exactly is a fossil, Daddy?” Omar asks. They are thumbing through the F volume.

Adam doesn’t really know. Is it the animal bone turned to stone or the imprint of
the animal? Once, his father told him that in a mirror the images are reversed so
we never see ourselves as we are seen. His mother told him that dreams do the same
with desires. We dream we are giving a ruby ring to the brother we want to rob.

Omar abandons the F volume and turns onto his belly. He holds the apatosaurus in one
hand and the protoceratops in the other, softly speaking to himself. Not long ago,
Adam asked his mother about Omar’s still talking to himself, the way he spins out
loud the stories his toys stimulate in his head.

His mother looked surprised at the question, surprised, he realized, that he’d asked
her opinion about Omar at all—something he has refrained from over the years out of
fear of Rachida’s anger.

“You were the same. You talked out loud to yourself for a very long time. But no,
there’s nothing to worry about. That’s just his inner stream of thought.”

“It sounds like the inside of my head when I’m working.”

“Exactly. It’s the child’s creative work.”

“Or maybe it goes the other way. Maybe my work is just child’s play.”

His mother smiled. “That was essentially Freud’s position. He thought imaginative
writing is the mark of an immature personality, an escape into florid fantasy—that
there is only a thin line between the creative writer and the psychotic. I think he
was just envious because he was probably a novelist at heart himself.”

Omar pokes a finger into Adam’s side. “Come on, Daddy. Let’s play.”

Adam did not want to say so, but he understands entirely Freud’s point. Who wouldn’t
prefer to live in his mind, moving around creatures who do what they are told and
never snap back?

He lowers himself onto his stomach and tries to pay attention to Omar’s story about
the dinosaurs and the cave and the meteorite that is coming. For two weeks now, he
has not looked at the photographs. Not since the morning of the big snowstorm when
he’d been interrupted by Omar knocking on the door, by his plea that Adam join the
sledding. It had gotten to him, his son’s little voice on the other side of the locked
door, the glaring white of the snow outside, and then, himself, with his pants unzipped
and a dirty picture in front of him.

Lying in bed this morning, he had a reverie. He’d known it was not a dream because
he was sufficiently awake to be aware that he was creating it in his head, but the
images had the same hazy, effortless quality of a dream. He was the younger, slighter
man—the one being lifted high. The older, heavier man was lying on a bed. He beckoned
to him with one finger. “Come on over here,” he said. His voice was gravelly. Adam
lay down. He curled his body into the older man, resting his head on the broad chest.
The older man hooked an arm around Adam’s shoulders and then looked off, away from
him. Adam began to kiss the man’s chest, his neck. Slowly, with a look of amusement,
the man turned to him and covered Adam’s mouth with his own.

“I have some work calls to make. You play by yourself for a while. I’ll come back
as soon as I’m done.”

Like a criminal, he creeps across the landing in his stocking feet, locking the music-room
door, lowering the shades, dragging the file box out into the middle of the room.

He finds the file and takes out the envelope with the photos inside. He has never
counted them. At least twenty. There are at least twenty. But why are they sticking
together? It is as though the folder got wet. Adam examines the file box. He can see
no evidence of water. He will have to get a flashlight, check the closet ceiling,
the floor.

The photo he wants is near the rear of the clump. It is stuck to the photo in front
of it. Carefully, he peels it apart. Splotches of white spread over the image, part
of the photo imprinted on the back of the prior picture.

Adam stares at the photo. The men’s faces and their shoulders are covered with white.
Erased.

He feels like crying. He feels as though the older man has jerked away his mouth and
stood up from the bed. He gathers up the photos and puts them back in the envelope.
He puts the envelope back in the folder and the folder back in the file box.

He leaves the box in the middle of the room and returns to his son’s room. During
the time he has been gone, Omar has taken out a set of iron knights one of the children
gave him for his birthday. Adam lies on the floor next to Omar, staring at the ceiling.
Omar leans against his arm.

He tries to conjure again the kiss from the reverie, but all he can see are the white
splotches on the ruined photograph. He sits up. He feels sick, disgusted with himself,
to be thinking about the photographs with his son next to him. He pinches his cheeks
hard enough to make himself wince, to wipe out the splotched photograph, but the moment
he releases his fingers, a new thought arrives: he needs another magazine.

“The knights are coming to save the good vegan dinos from the meteorite.” Omar hands
him the model apatosaurus. “You be the dino.”

Adam takes the apatosaurus.

“When the meteorite comes, the carnivorous dinos are going to get burned up.”

There is the bodega five blocks away. The bodega doesn’t have much, but the place
in Times Square is too far.

He looks at his watch. Four twenty-five. His mother is still with her patients. Rachida
will not be home until after nine. Eva is in the kitchen. He could be back in twenty
minutes.