With an Extreme Burning (14 page)

Little bricks …

On Friday morning he finished the sideboard.

Most of Thursday evening he had devoted to the last fine-sanding of the top and sides, paying particular attention to the inlaid design he had built into the top, and then hand-wiped on three coats of Watco Danish oil finish. When he came out on Friday to look at it, the piece had a rich, warm luster that was close to being just right. One more coat of satin? Or a coat of Varathane? He decided on the Varathane; it would give the wood a smoother, shinier gloss. He applied it without the latex gloves he'd used for the oil stain, taking his time because this was the final step and because he had a desire to feel the grain of the wood against his fingers.

When he was done he washed in the laundry sink, then ran the garage doors up to get a look at his handiwork in natural light. He stood looking at the sideboard for a long time with the sun warm on his back. There was satisfaction in him, the craftsman's kind for a job well done; even the critical creator's eye could find no real flaws in the workmanship. Yet he felt no pleasure or pride in what he saw, nor any in the accomplishment itself. The sideboard had been and still was a symbol to bridge a gap, built for therapeutic reasons. Not a piece of furniture to be used and enjoyed, but an object meant to kick-start a new phase in a life that had been suddenly and violently reshaped.

But it was not the closure he had intended it to be. It had helped him come to terms with the loss of Katy, a life without her.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as the grave?
Swinburne. Truth in that, and irony, too: Swinburne had been one of Katy's favorite poets, but not his. The Englishman's work was too melancholy, too full of Victorian excesses for his taste. But he had more to deal with than the fact of no more Katy. There could not be a full closure, any real peace, until he came to terms with two other vital issues.

One was Katy's affair, and whatever dark reasons lay behind her death.

The other was Dixon Mallory.

*     *     *

After lunch, a restlessness drove him out of the house and into the Buick. He had no idea where he was going—or at least no conscious idea—until he got there: Oak Grove Cemetery.

In his forty-one years he had visited Oak Grove just four times, and on each occasion it had been to watch a loved one being buried. First, when he was very young, his grandfather; then, two days before his seventeenth birthday, his mother; then, nine years ago, his father; and finally, Katy. The idea of visiting graves on holidays or birthdays, the so-called paying of respects, was repugnant to him. The idea of
graves
was repugnant to him. Repositories of bones were all they were, with labels to mark each pile as if it were an archaeological exhibit. Funerals were barbaric and so was the concept of placing a bloodless cadaver in a box and burying the box so flesh and wood could rot together in the cold dark.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
… It was far more civilized, after you were dead, to have your remains reduced to ashes and the ashes scattered. It troubled him, vaguely, that no one in his family felt the same way, that not even Katy had felt the same way.

So why had he come to Oak Grove today? Not to have a little morbid chat with Katy, that was for sure. People who went to cemeteries to talk to the dear departed were self-delusional, and self-delusion was not one of his problems. If anything, the opposite was true—now. Why, then, so soon after he had been here to see her buried?

The cemetery was on the north edge of town, in what had once been open farmland; now it was hemmed in on all four sides by “country living” tract homes and condos. There were two halves to it, one nondenominational and the other Catholic. The older sections of both ran up hillsides thickly grown with heritage oaks, cypress, and eucalyptus. The newer sections were on flats and in hollows that contained fewer trees. Those sections reminded him of the Civil War burial grounds he and Katy had visited in the early eighties, when he was researching his novel. Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia; Antietam, South Mountain, Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg, Manassas Junction, Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Appomattox. The rolling green meadows and rows of white-markered graves at Gettysburg had impressed him the most, but he had found all the burial sites as fascinating as the actual battlefields. Katy had considered the paradox amusing. So had he, mildly, although he'd argued that his interest was scholarly and had nothing to do with the gravesites as gravesites.

He walked uphill into the Catholic half, to where tombstones and monuments jutted among shadows cast by the old trees. There the sites were larger, laid out in big squarish plots with raised cement borders, some family and some communal. Narrow roadways and paths, all unpaved, made an irregular grid pattern over the grounds. It had been so long since he'd seen his family's plot that he couldn't remember precisely where it was; it took him ten minutes to locate the stone border with the word
Mallory
etched into it.

All of his immediate family was here, except for Claudia. And Katy. Since it was his intention to be cremated, she'd seen no reason to be interred with his family. He had respected her wishes to be put into the ground with her family, the Duncans.

The black granite headstone that bore his father's name had a slight backward tilt. Otherwise the plot was in good order and mostly weed-free. Another paradox that Katy found amusing: He hated the concept of ground burial, he never visited his family's plot, and yet every year he plunked down a hundred dollars to the City Burial Commission for its care and maintenance. He supposed it was because the plot had meant something to his father. He was maintaining a tradition, then, and tradition was something he did believe in. It wouldn't have mattered to him, otherwise, if the plot nurtured a teeming jungle of weeds and grass. That was what he'd told Katy, anyway. Yet in an odd way it did matter. If he had come here today and found a jungle, it would have made him angry. And not because of the hundred-dollar annual fee.

He stood for a time looking down at the markers. He could barely remember his grandparents; they were vague recollections of dry, chapped hands and lilac perfume. His mother had died of cancer, a slow, eight-month deterioration that had left him with indelible visual, aural, and olfactory memories of hospital rooms, nurses, cries of pain, and half-heard whispers, the smells of medicine and body fluids and get-well flowers too-sweet and withering. But at least he had had time to prepare for her death, to say good-bye to her. His father had died of a heart attack, suddenly, two weeks after his doctor pronounced him the fittest sixty-four-year-old ex-construction worker and ex-tobacco abuser he'd ever examined. Out fishing for salmon one morning with a friend who owned a Bodega Bay charter boat, hooked onto a big King, laughed about it as he strained to pull the fish in—and in the next second he was gone. Dix had been at the university when notification came. It had been the same kind of numbing shock as the news of Katy's death. And the same long period of adjustment afterward. And the same lingering regret that he had not been able to say good-bye.

He turned away—not as easy a leavetaking as it should have been—and walked farther uphill. Cool under the trees; the intense heat of the past week had begun to ease, and there was a light breeze today. Quiet too. Nobody else in sight, just him alone among the acres of bones.

Stranger in a strange land, he thought. But not a stranger to myself, not anymore.

Most people never found out the truth about themselves. Didn't want to, took pains to keep it hidden. They were the lucky ones. He'd held his own self-knowledge at bay with Katy, his work, his daily routine, his friends and social activities, his half-formed and half-assed plans for the future. But Katy's death had shattered the thin wall of his defenses, and he had found himself standing naked among the rubble. You can't hide from yourself at a time like that. And never again afterward.

Last night he'd gone into his study to finish reading through Lawrence Hampton's History 453 syllabus. And after a while, distracted, he had noticed his shelf copy of
A Darkness at Antietam
and taken it down, the first he'd looked at it in a long time. In his hands it had felt strangely like a secondhand book, the pages no longer crisp, the binding just a little loose, the dust jacket curled at the edges, and its colors the slightest bit faded. And when he'd opened it and read passages and scenes at random, it had been painfully obvious to him why the novel had sold less than four thousand copies, why so many critics had given it unenthusiastic notices. He had set out to tell an intensely personal story of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War, the single most calamitous day of fighting in American history—September 17, 1862, on which the combined casualties of McClellan's Army of the Potomac and Lee's Army of Northern Virginia numbered 22,719 killed or wounded during twelve hours of what one Union soldier described as “a savage continual thunder.” His research had been extensive, detailed; he had chosen and developed his primary characters—four Yankee and four Reb officers and enlisted men—with care and precision; he had taken pains to create those dozen hours faithfully in all their terrible drama. Four years he had spent on the novel, more than two in the actual writing. And when he was done he'd known, of course, that his book didn't approach the genius of
The Red Badge of Courage
or the epic caliber of
Andersonville
or
The Killer Angels
—he simply wasn't in a class with Kantor or Shaara, much less Crane—but he had nonetheless been convinced that he had written a major novel of the Civil War. He continued to believe that even after it failed both critically and commercially, or at least he'd pretended to himself that he believed it. Last night he had admitted the truth: What he'd actually written was a minor historical adventure, technically competent but without any real depth or insight or literary merit, publishable but forgettable.

He'd known then, too, that
A Darkness at Antietam
was an accurate measure of its author. Once he had considered himself an above-average teacher who remained on the faculty of a small, obscure state university because he could accomplish more in a relaxed and less competitive atmosphere. Once he had considered himself ambitious, a seedbank that would eventually produce more and better historical novels. Once he had considered himself a good husband and lover, who had given Katy the best of himself in all respects. Once he had considered Dixon Mallory a successful man, a happy and secure man. But the truth was—

Mediocre writer. Mediocre teacher at a mediocre school. Mediocre husband, mediocre lover. Mediocre accomplishments in a mediocre life.

Mediocre man.

Abruptly he stopped walking. He hadn't intended to seek out the Duncan family plot, but there it was at his feet. In fact he was standing in the same place he'd stood less than one month ago; he could almost hear the droning intonations of the priest, the sounds of weeping. He stared down at Katy's grave. You could still tell that it was a new grave, but now the clods of earth were dry and cracked from the heat, and the flowers that had been placed there were decaying corpses themselves.

I'm alone, he thought.

Goddamm it, I'm all alone.

Friends, sure, more than most men had. Claudia just an hour away in Healdsburg, the two of them closer than most siblings, talk to her any time about whatever was bothering him. People at the university, Elliot … there for him, too, if he needed them.

But you can't go to your friends, your sister, your colleagues, and say to them, “Listen, I've just realized some pretty basic things about myself. I'm mediocre, I've always been mediocre, and I can't stand the thought of being mediocre for the rest of my life. Can you help me out here? Can you tell me what to do?”

Alone.

Maybe that was why he'd been drawn here today. A need to touch the part of his past that represented stability and strength: his mother, his father, Katy. Find his courage through them. Pretty pathetic, if that was it. The answers weren't in the past or with the past. And sure as hell not among the bones of his dear departed. If he found them at all, it would be inside himself—and all by himself.

ELEVEN

He asked, “Have you read this, Amy?”

“Oh, the Gay Talese book.”

“It looks interesting.”

“It's okay, I guess.”

“You prefer the political type of investigative reporting? Woodward and Bernstein?”

“Not really. No.”

“But you didn't like
Thy Neighbor's Wife
?”

“It's not that I didn't like it, exactly.”

“What then, exactly?”

“Well, you know, the subject matter.”

“Sure, I understand. It's difficult to relate to a subject that you've had no experience with.”

“I've had experience with it,” Amy said bitterly.

“You have?”

“You know, my parents' divorce.”

“Oh, right. I'm sorry, Amy.”

“Well, I've learned how to deal with it.”

“Of course you have.”

“Anyhow, he's a good writer. Gay Talese.”

“I think so, too. Should I buy the book?”

“Well, it's worth reading.”

“A book about sex is always worth reading.”

“If it's not just sleaze.”