Torch: A Novel Part 20

With his lighter Bruce moved from one candle to the next until all eighteen were aflame, and then he turned off the lights. Claire pushed the cake toward Joshua, his face glowing above the candles.

"Are we going to sing?" Bruce asked.

"You don't have to sing," Joshua said.

"Absolutely, we're going to sing," roared Claire from the darkness.

And immediately, she began.

PART IV.

All the conventions conspire To make this fort a.s.sume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

-W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939".

12.

THE GIRL AT THE Calhoun Square Mall ear-piercing shop wore a low-slung ap.r.o.n with three large pockets in the front. In one pocket she kept a purple marker, in another a purple gun, and in the last was her cell phone, which trumpeted like an electronic elephant the moment she pulled the trigger against the fat lobe of Bruce's ear.

"Hey," she said morosely into the phone, holding the gun in the other hand. Her hands were chubby, unlike the rest of her. Bruce waited on his stool, staring, inevitably, at the bony features of the girl's bare abdomen. "Uh-huh," she said into the phone. "Yes. Yes. No," she said in the same monotone each time, with a contempt so entrenched that of all the people in the world the girl could possibly be talking to, Bruce knew it could only be either her mother or her father.

"Did it hurt?" Kathy asked, thumping on his back and then rubbing it, as if to warm him. The earring had been her idea.

"No," he said, though his ear throbbed with a small, focused pain. He examined it in the star-shaped mirror that was framed by tiny light bulbs. It looked like it felt, like it had a fever. He touched the fake diamond stud, but the girl saw this and waved urgently at him to stop.

When she flipped her phone shut, she soaked a cotton ball with a solution and then dabbed his ear roughly with it.

"Maybe I should get one too," said Kathy, though earlier she'd decided against it. She stepped up to the mirror and pulled back her hair so she could look at her ear. She had three earrings on one lobe and four on the other; each one represented something to her, she'd told Bruce, a pa.s.sage in her life. "We're getting married today," she explained to the girl. "This is his wedding ring-instead of a ring ring. He can't have things on his hands. He's a carpenter. They get in the way."

"How romantic," said the girl, her face remaining impa.s.sive. Bruce wondered if he was supposed to tip her. He felt that he should. He reached for his wallet, but then Kathy pushed past him, following the girl through the store, and hoisted her purse up onto the counter near the register to pay the bill.

"Do you like it?" she asked, once they had left the earring store. "I like it," she said, without waiting for him to answer. She grabbed his hand and kissed it, leaving a plum-colored lipstick mark. "I think it's s.e.xy."

He thought he liked it. He caught discreet glimpses of it as they walked around the mall buying clothes they would wear later that afternoon, when they would be married at the Minneapolis City Hall. He caught glimpses of his new ear in the mirrored walls inside the stores and in the gla.s.s of the display windows outside of the stores they pa.s.sed. He had a series of sensations: that his ear was the largest part of his body, that it was not attached to him but was some hot object, balanced on the side of his head, and then he felt the opposite, that it was attached to him entirely, but also to something else that tugged with a small weight as he moved through the mall, like that of a fish caught irrevocably on a line. The girl had said that his ear would no longer be sore in a few days and in six weeks the hole would be healed entirely. In the meanwhile he was to take care of it. He carried a small plastic bag that held a bottle of solution that Kathy had purchased for four ninety-five, with which he was to bathe his ear daily.

Alone, he went to the jewelry store to pick up the ring they'd ordered for Kathy, a thin gold band, while she was off to buy white sandals. Everywhere he looked he saw himself, in the walls and ceilings covered with giant mirrors, and he realized that the earring made him look younger. At thirty-eight the thought of wanting to look younger had not yet occurred to him, but now that he saw that he looked younger, he felt that he'd become old without being aware of it and he liked the idea of at least partially reversing that.

When they were done shopping they had a cup of coffee at the cafe in the mall. They shared a slice of banana bread and watched the people of Minneapolis doing what they did in Minneapolis. Usually they saw the Minneapolis people in Midden: people who came up from the city on weekends to fish or hunt or relax on the lakes. Cabin people. City apes. Now that he was here Bruce felt not so different from them as he normally did, as if he and Kathy blended in, unlike the city people when they came to Midden. The city apes seemed to him more humble here on their own turf, less ignorant and less arrogant. He watched them go by with their shopping bags and children strapped into backpacks and strollers, balancing their lattes in cardboard cups. They didn't seem to Bruce the kind of people who should be called apes, despite everything.

A group of men dressed in bicycle regalia came into the cafe and took over several tables. They pulled over extra chairs all around them and then propped up their feet, their small bright shoes slim as slippers. They laughed and asked each other questions for which Bruce had no context. "Did you see it coming?" one of them asked three times, until finally he got an answer and they all shook their heads. Their legs were hard as stones, sinewy with muscle, and yet also fragile and as brittle looking as crockery, easily smashed.

From the bicycle men, they learned that it had begun to rain.

"And on our wedding day!" Kathy exclaimed so loudly that several people turned quizzically and smiled.

"Here's my something blue," she whispered to Bruce, after the people had returned to their own conversations. She opened a tiny pink bag and showed him a lacy edge of a pair of blue panties and then stuffed them back inside.

He leaned over and kissed her and then kissed her again, longer the second time. She smelled like chemical jasmine from the lotion sample she'd tried in one of the stores.

"Should we go?" he asked. He felt sad, knowing he shouldn't. He wanted to marry her, and yet also his heart ached for Teresa. He understood this was to be expected, another feeling to be gotten through, like all the other feelings he'd had since Teresa died. As they made their way silently through the mall it occurred to him that it was not too late to back out of marrying Kathy. They could continue dating. They could get married in a year. He took her hand, as if to speak.

"What's wrong?" She stopped walking and turned to him, sensing his thoughts.

"I was just thinking, whether we're sure this is the right time to do this."

"I know it is, Bruce," she said, her dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng.

"I know too," he said uncertainly, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

"I know it here," she said, and held his hand against her heart. And she did. She'd consulted her psychic, a man named Gerry whom she called up whenever she wanted what she called "clarification." He claimed to have seen Bruce coming years ago, when he first predicted she'd marry by the age of thirty-five-and now here she was, barely a month shy of her thirty-fifth birthday.

"It's that it happened so fast."

She ran her hand along his arm and they began to walk again. "Sometimes that's how things happen, Bruce. If anything, for me at least, it's more proof that we're meant to be."

They'd decided to marry only the week before. No one knew, aside from Kathy's Minneapolis friends, Naomi and Steve, who would be their witnesses at City Hall. No one even knew they were dating. Claire had asked him about Kathy once, if there was something going on. He'd told her they were just friends, which was true at the time, though it had become untrue within days of him saying it.

In April and May they were friends. And in some ways, Kathy Tyson had been Bruce's only friend. He could not bring himself to socialize with anyone that he and Teresa had been friends with together. He'd become short with them on the phone when they called. He turned down invitations to dinner, nights out drinking, afternoon barbecues. Often he quit work early, by midafternoon, and he would drive to Kathy's house and they would go walking or sit on her tiny porch and drink coffee. By May she'd convinced him to join her softball team, and twice a week they drove together to practice in town and then, afterward, for a drink at Jake's Tavern. Kathy Tyson made him laugh, she made him talk, she made him dinner, she made him a braided-leather bracelet with a single stone in its center, and she made him-without knowing she was making him-play less and less often the tape by Kenny G that he'd become ridiculously attached to. Which is to say that she made him for hours at a time forget Teresa and the fact that he could not live without her.

Her cabin was the stage upon which their friends.h.i.+p played. His house was forbidden territory. They did not mention this, nor did they mention the fact that Kathy knew not to call on the weekends, when Claire was home. During the week if Joshua picked up the phone, she was vague and never left a message. But then something s.h.i.+fted and deepened and s.h.i.+fted again. Kathy Tyson rose in him cold like a flood. He loved her. He wanted her. He could not bear a day without seeing her. When he realized this, they had not yet made love. They kissed, painfully and awkwardly at first. Twice he'd had to sob in her arms, so powerful was the feeling that he was betraying Teresa. But then he recovered and kissing Kathy became his solace, his solitude, the secret lovely room where his wife had never lived.

The first time they made love-or rather attempted to make love-they'd discussed it ahead of time. What they wanted to do, what they would do. But when the time came, Bruce could get only so far as to lie in bed beside her with all of his clothes on and Kathy's s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned before he broke down. She stroked his body kindly, comforting him and refusing his apologies. The second time they made love, they actually made love, though their lovemaking was slow and sorrowful and without l.u.s.t, as if they were enacting a solemn ritual on each other's bodies. The third time they made love, they made love hot and fast and then they did not stop kissing until they made love again, more slowly and tenderly this time, and laughed at the end at how they'd made her bed inch its way from one end of her loft bedroom to the other end, without their having noticed it. They slept there, on the wrong side of the room, until after dark, awakened only by the phone, which rang and stopped, rang and stopped without a message being left, two calls from her mother. The fourth time they made love, he stopped in the middle of it and asked her to marry him.

"Marry you?" She opened her eyes to see if he was serious.

"Yes," he said, almost breathless with urgency. He hadn't been legally married to Teresa all those years, but now, with Kathy, nothing short of marriage would do. We don't need a piece of paper to prove our love, he and Teresa used to say, but he needed it now. He wanted it written that Kathy was his and he was hers, that he would never be alone again. He knew it was childish and misguided to believe a marriage doc.u.ment could do that, but he didn't care. It was something. It was more than he had.

"Okay," she whispered, and touched his face, small tears of joy seeping out of her eyes.

She had one condition.

"I know you love Teresa." She rolled away from him on the bed. "And I know she will always have a place in your heart." He lay next to her, listening. She sat up and turned the lamp on and then he sat up too. "But if we're going to get married, we have to start a new life together and move forward."

"This is moving forward," he said, grabbing onto her bare foot.

"But I think we need to make it more ..." She paused, as if unable to find the right word. "To close one door before we can open another. Ritualistically." Her face brightened. "We need to have a ritual."

He knew her to believe in these things. The stone at the center of the bracelet she'd made for him had a curative power, though what cure specifically he could not recall.

"We could burn a candle," he offered.

She pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them, thinking.

"No. It has to be something bigger. Something more connected to-her." She looked up at him and smiled then, a light spreading over her face. "I have the perfect idea."

The following week they spent an hour at the garden store, shaking this packet of seeds, then that. In the end they decided on a wildflower mix, to cover all their bases.

"It reminds me of her," said Kathy. "Just the way she seemed. Eclectic."

"She was," said Bruce.

"Didn't she do a show on them? The wildflowers of northern Minnesota?"

"Every spring," he answered, smiling at the memory.

It was a Thursday morning. The next day they would drive to Minneapolis and get married-there they would be safe from the prying eyes and ears of all the people they knew in Coltrap County-and then they'd return home to spend their wedding night at Kathy's house. He'd asked Claire and Joshua to be home Sat.u.r.day for dinner and then he'd break the news while Kathy waited at her cabin. He'd planned to tell them about it before he and Kathy married, but when he practiced what he would say to them in his head, the words became muddled and contradictory. At last, a single sentence pierced its way through, one that he could deliver only after the fact: I married Kathy Tyson. It was cruel, but clean, and it didn't hesitate to ask. To ask was precisely what Bruce could not afford to do. He knew it would take them by surprise, that it would be hard for them to hear, but he hoped they would understand, that eventually they would make an effort to get to know Kathy. He believed that in the end they would like her. How could they not? And if they didn't, they would have to adjust. He had his life to live.

Before they planted the wildflowers, he took Kathy on a tour of their land. He started by introducing Beau and Lady Mae, and then they wound their way through the pasture and ducked under the fence and walked deeper into the woods to the blueberry patch, the horses gazing after them into the trees, where he and Kathy disappeared from their sight. He showed her the swamp and the place where their old cabin had been, where they'd all lived while he and Teresa built the house, and then he took her the back way into the clearing and showed her the gravesite they'd made, an oval of dirt set off by stones. They stood solemnly at its base, at a gap in the stones where they would place the headstone when it arrived.

"It's lovely," she said, looking around. "Very peaceful. I bet she likes it here in this spot."

Bruce took the packet of wildflower seeds from his front pocket and held them without opening them up.

"Do you feel her?" Kathy asked. "I mean, her presence here?"

He didn't answer, unable to speak. He bent down and removed a branch that had fallen onto the grave. A few weeks before, he and Claire and Joshua had raked through the dirt and manure with their hands, mixing Teresa's ashes into it. The ashes had not been what any of them expected, not like ashes at all, but rather small jagged pebbles with pocks and pores, which looked disturbingly like shards of burnt bone. Before beginning, they had each put one of these shards into their mouths and, holding hands, swallowed.

"I feel her presence," Kathy said in a hushed voice. "It feels very spiritual to me."

"I don't feel her," he said, though he did. He felt her so much he had to cough so he wouldn't cry. She was everywhere-in the air and the gra.s.s and the trees-but he would not admit this to Kathy. In knowing Bruce, she had come to believe she knew Teresa. In loving him, Kathy had come to love her. He'd felt grateful for this until now, out here in the clearing, in what he could only describe as Teresa's presence, where it suddenly felt that to even so much as mention her name to Kathy would be a betrayal of the person she'd once been.

"Should we get started?" Kathy asked reverently.

Bruce shook the packet of seeds. They made a rattling sound against their paper container. He hesitated, realizing he should ask Claire and Joshua first about planting the flowers here, but then Kathy put her hand on his back, and he ripped the packet open.

"Wait," she said. "Before we plant I want to sanctify the s.p.a.ce." She pulled a bundle of sage tied in string from her coat pocket, lit both ends with a lighter, and blew on them until they burned. He watched as she walked in a large circle around the clearing, holding the sage above her head, the smoke trailing white behind her. She made smaller and smaller concentric circles, until the last one encompa.s.sed the plot where Teresa's ashes lay, as well as Bruce, who stood at its edge. She knelt and crushed the burning ends of the sage out in the dirt where Teresa's stone would go.

They were silent together for several moments and then Kathy cupped her hands and Bruce shook the seeds of wildflowers into them.

Joshua and Claire were sitting on the front porch when Bruce pulled up to the house that Sat.u.r.day afternoon, waiting for him, as he expected.

"We just saw a hot air balloon fly over," Joshua called to him when he got out of his truck.

Bruce looked up at the cloudless June sky. "They're having some kind of festival out of Brainerd. It's in the paper this week." He continued to gaze at the sky in order to delay having to look at either one of them.

"So we were thinking we should go up to the Lookout for dinner," said Claire from the rocking chair. "There's nothing in the fridge."

"It'll be crowded, but who cares," said Joshua. He was bouncing a tiny rubber ball and then chasing after it when it bounced away. "We can sit at the bar if we want."

Bruce continued to look at the sky, as if searching for more hot air balloons. His hands trembled and he pushed them into his pockets to still them.

"Kathy Tyson and I got married," he said without turning to either of them. He said it quietly, almost privately, as if he hadn't spoken at all.

"What?" Claire asked, standing so quickly from her chair that it rocked wildly behind her.

"Kathy Tyson and I got married," he said more slowly and kindly this time. "Yesterday. I know this is hard but-"

"Hard?" shrieked Claire. "What are you talking about? I don't even understand what you're saying." She turned to Joshua, as if he would explain.

"I'm saying that I loved your mother very much-I still love your mother-I will always love your-"

"Bulls.h.i.+t," said Claire savagely, and then burst into tears. "You married Kathy Tyson? You got married? Mom has been dead for two months and you're already married?"

"Almost three. It will be three on Monday," he said quietly. He was looking at the ground now, at a tiny beige row of anthills. He obliterated one with his foot.

"Almost three!" Claire howled, as if he'd physically wounded her. "Forgive me if I lost track. Forgive me if I wasn't counting the days until I could dump my mother-"

"I'm not dumping your mother."

Claire sat down on the step and put her face into her hands and cried without caring what she sounded like. Joshua sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

"This is what she would have wanted," Bruce said, appealing to Joshua. He felt that perhaps Joshua would have more sympathy for him, man to man. "She would have wanted for me to move on, you know? To live my life ..."

"What about our life?" he asked, his face, his entire self, like a stone.

"Yeah," said Claire from behind her hands. She stopped crying and abruptly looked up at him with her red eyes and demanded an answer. "What about our lives?"

"Your lives?" he stammered. "She wanted you to have a good life too."

"I thought you didn't believe in marriage," said Joshua.

"Look, you two are not some G.o.dd.a.m.ned committee that gets to approve or disapprove of what I do with my life. Let's just get that straight right this minute." f.u.c.k the kids, he thought. He reached for the pack of cigarettes in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. When he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, he could see his hands were shaking harder than before, which made him think f.u.c.k the kids even more.

"Okay, so let me understand this," Claire said after several moments, her voice even and hard. "You believe in marriage. You just didn't believe in it with our mom."

"No. I believed in it. Your mom did too. Listen, we had a marriage. Just because it wasn't legal it doesn't mean that it meant anything less to either one of us."

At this Claire began to sob hysterically again. Bruce knelt down in front of her and rubbed her arm. Joshua walked to the end of the porch so he wouldn't have to be near Bruce.

"Don't touch me," Claire begged weakly, after taking several heaving breaths, and when he continued to stroke her arm she cried out "Please don't" so piteously that he stopped.

"Do you love her?" asked Joshua.

"Who?"

Joshua just stared at him.

"Kathy?" Bruce asked.

Joshua made no response.