Desire transforms you. David believed this.
Leg crooked on his lower back, white, dimples, soap, the soap scent of her thighs. He felt male and small. Hardness overcome by sheer presence, and age, too. Gwen was forty-four. David was thirty. She wasn’t at all like the women he had desired his whole life. His whole life.
It wasn’t a transformation. It was a conversion.
They whispered affection for parts. I love your hair (curly, silky brown). I love your hands (oddly delicate fingers, unpolished nails). I love your lips (his were not quite full, but evenly balanced, a pout-threatening shapely upper lip). Why, Gwen, do we say I love this and I love that, but we never say I love Gwen, I love David? When do the parts equal the person? But he didn’t say this because she didn’t want talk, she wanted murmurs and sighs. He didn’t ask anything of her because what ifshe said no? What he feared was a question and an answer that might unhinge their desire. The alchemy of what they were, he wanted desperately to not decompose it, not unravel it, because it felt like random fortune, shakable by temperature and seasons and hormones. He said nothing, held his curiosity back. How odd that it seemed necessary to command such restraint in the execution of a passion. Strange, you fall into an affair because you long to give in to pleasure, to surrender, and then you have to fight yourself to limit the character of your desires. The resistance mixes with the desire, and it becomes something else, some other new thing. It becomes part of the pleasure.
“Mina?”
“Hi, Jack.”
“How are you, kiddo?”
“I’m a little late for work.”
“Okay.”
“How are you?”
“Great. Melissa and I are going to a sweat lodge retreat in Montana for a few weeks. I thought maybe you would want to come.”
“Jack, I have responsibilities. A job. I can’t just leave. Besides, I don’t want to go to a sweat lodge.”
“How are things with David?
“Fine. I’ll fill you in when I have more time. I’m very late.”
“Okay. Mina?”
“What?”
“Michael got released from the hospital. I mean he checked out.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. He might contact you. I tried to call him at the hospital, and they said it’s been a couple of weeks. He’ll try and contact you. If he does, maybe you could go see him. You know, he’s—”
“Yeah, I know. He hasn’t contacted me. I can’t worry about this now. My life is very chaotic. I can’t be worried about Michael.”
“What’s wrong? Is there something you want to talk about?”
“No, it’s just the usual sort of insanity. Look, I have to go. I’m sorry.”
“I understand. Well, if you hear something, let me know.”
“How can I do that if you’re on an Indian reservation? Would that be smoke signals?”
“I’ll have my mobile phone. I’ll be checking my voice mail.”
“I haven’t heard from him.”
Mina had not seen Michael in years. Michael’s first episode, leading to his first hospital stay, seemed to come out of nowhere, or to be completely inevitable, depending on how she chose to look at it. Her father had looked to her — you know Michael, tell me what happened. You were always so close. Mina and Michael. Mina had adored Michael.
Then, before all the hospitals, there was the warmth of unbroken companionship. A person so close you hardly needed to speak. The combustible energies and combat closeness of children growing up together, moved around, variously parented. Interior logics developed. Secret reference points. An unquestioned and uncontrived siege bonding.
At seven and ten they spent most of their summertimes apart and with different parents. Michael on location with their father, Mina in L.A. with their mother. But during the schoolyear they were always together. Mina and Michael became a two-person investigative cadre. They experimented, they were on a reconnaissance mission between themselves and the world. She mostly remembered them always lighting things in the fireplace. They would load the kindling and the newspapers and then the Duraflame log and then the real logs in the slate-manteled Beverly Hills fireplace. They would beg to be the one who lit the paper in three or four spaced-out places. The flare-up as it ignited, and then the flare-down as it worked on the wood and the “durable” flame. She liked the initial burning flash, and they were bored with the quietly crackling logs, the stoic heat-giving red glow. If the paper and the twigs burned so brightly, why not do the whole fire with paper and twigs? She had a fantasy of throwing endless paper and twigs as the flames flared and hungrily consumed. The drama of it.
“It doesn’t last, doesn’t give off heat, it makes too much ash,” their father would say. But Michael and Mina would sit as close to the fire as possible, until their faces were red from it, until they couldn’t stand it. And when their father wasn’t looking, they’d chuck in newspapers, rolled and tied in a knot, so the flames could unknot it, flaring and then waning and sending little flaming pieces up the flue. They would float upward and glow as if in slow motion. And it would look for a moment how they imagined real fires would look, burning houses and cities, when the sky would be filled with pretty glowing bits of slow-rising ash.
Michael took to drawing, on construction paper, skylines and houses. First cityscapes in silhouette, a skyline seen only in movies and nightlife commercials. Mina would cut the edges out, leaving the varied points, the profile of a grand city with six Empire State Buildings, “skyscrapers,” jagged, manic-edgedbuildings built with such upward optimism and hubris they scraped the sky. They’d put it there behind the Duraflame, prop it up before the fire was lit. Then when it started to burn, they would narrate it. They’d become broadcasters. Even break down on the air—“My God, the flames are consuming the city. I’ve never seen anything like this, my God”—and then they would bawl and scream and cry, finally mimicking the imagined screams of a burning city, even the rats in the boiling sewers.
Their father told them the great Chicago fire started when a cow knocked over a lamp. Mina wondered later why a cow was in the city. And how a fallen lamp could start a fire. Michael figured the smallest mistake could burn the whole world down. One careless moment. They discussed fire drills. Escape plans. Window jumps that could be survived. Mina said, “Well, our house won’t burn because it’s brick,” but he reminded her that whole steel-girdered buildings burn, and brick was even worse. All the fire got locked inside with the people.
“What’s a pizza oven made out of, like the one at Mario’s?” Mina knew what he was getting at. She nodded sagely.
“Our house is a brick oven.”
Then there was the garage. The metal-plated heat toy in the garage. It melted rubber pellets into creatures. It was called Creature Features. Then they discovered Shrinky Dinks, which were plastic, maybe Plexiglas, ornaments that you colored with a special marker and then put in the toaster oven until they shrank and their colors were sealed in, emitting an odd, burning-plastic smell that her brother and she fell in love with. They watched them shrink through the oven window. The melting preset pellets soon inspired their own heat “experiments. a” They both seemed to realize simultaneously that anything plastic could melt, and that the fun of it, the mystery contained within the plastic, was watching how it would melt. Objects lost their form and revealed something elemental and basic. The truth of things was revealed in their destruction.