Tinderbox (14 page)

“Layla was telling us about her family,” Myra says, looking pointedly at Adam. “What
is the village like where you live?”

“We live in an ancient town called Rissani. It was the home of the first of the Alaouites,
Hassan the Alaouite. There is an old palace there that belonged to the royal family.
Now, though, the area is very poor. Most people live off the meager incomes they receive
from the government with a little extra money when they can get it harvesting dates
in some nearby oases. My family has had electricity since 1990, but many families
only got it in the last few years. Now everyone spends the hot afternoons squeezed
into the houses of the people in the village who have televisions.”

“Watching,” Rachida adds, “dubbed sitcoms from the States. Layla intends to go back
to southern Algeria and open a clinic. The electricity is too spotty to be counted
on for refrigeration, so it makes antibiotic and vaccination use hard to manage. She’s
writing a grant proposal for the World Health Organization to fund solar generators
for medical refrigerators.”

“Blindness is the main problem,” Layla says. “One out of eight children suffers from
eye infections that place them at risk of losing their vision.”

“You put us to shame,” Adam says, pouring himself a second glass of wine. “Our father’s
a cardiologist, but he won’t even take private health insurance anymore.”

“How does your family feel about your being here?” Caro asks.

“When you call his office,” Adam continues, “they ask for credit card information
before they even ask what the problem is.”

Rachida stands to clear the plates.

“Let me help you,” Layla says.

14

After dinner, Adam heads upstairs to give Omar his bath while Eva does the dishes.
Layla thanks Myra for having her, apologizing for leaving so early. “I haven’t had
more than ten hours’ sleep all week,” she says.

“Of course, you must be exhausted.”

“I’ll walk you to the cross-town bus,” Rachida says.

“I can walk her there,” Caro says. “I’m headed that way.” Having assumed Rachida would
prefer to have time with Omar before he goes to bed than to walk Layla to the bus,
she is surprised by Rachida’s expression, which suggests otherwise.

“Come back anytime,” Myra says. “We’d love to have you.”

Outside, the autumn air is damp and chill. Layla’s heels make a clicking beat on the
sidewalk. They turn south on Columbus Avenue, Caro folding her arms across her chest,
Layla’s gaze fixed on the sidewalk in front of her.

When they reach Eighty-sixth Street, Caro points across the street where the bus will
stop, then extends a hand to say good night. Layla grasps Caro’s arm.

“I didn’t want to say it in front of the child,” she says.

“Say what?”

Layla examines Caro’s face. “You asked how my family feels about my being here.”

Caro nods.

“My father and my brothers stoned me after they heard I’d been accepted to medical
school in New York.” Layla pushes up her jacket sleeve to reveal a long scar on her
arm. “They broke my arm and my nose and three ribs, then dumped me as far out into
the desert as their truck could go.”

Caro gasps.

“They left me on the sand to be eaten by the vultures. My boyfriend heard about it.
It took him until the next morning to find me, because I’d been half-covered by sand.
He wrapped me in gunny sacks to hold my bones together and took me to a hotel where
some French tourists had me flown to a hospital.”

The bus pulls into the stop and Layla dashes across the street. When she reaches the
curb, she turns to wave. Caro exhales, her breath held since she saw Layla’s long
scar.

15

Myra began her analysis with Dr. Klara Dreis after her parents’ deaths, when she felt
backlogged with grief from the miscarriages and achingly alone. At the time, she had
not understood how unusual the analysis was. There was no chipping away at resistances,
no gradual construction of unconscious thoughts. Rather, once she lay on Dreis’s couch,
everything poured out: the chill in her bones that had lasted her entire childhood;
the fear of making a mess—of her puke, shit, toys, clothes impinging upon her mother’s
vigorously sanitized rooms, for that’s what they had felt like, not a home, certainly
not Myra’s home.

Then, behind that torrent to Dreis, came the words
They didn’t love me
, words sputtered with humiliating tears that backed into her nose and chafed her
cheeks, followed then by something worse—the apprehension that the words were true.

For months, her only comfort was Dreis’s reassurance that it would eventually become
a relief to have it said, that her parents had not loved her, and then to look at
this idea from a distance, as something of curiosity, how it had happened that two
people had borne a child whom they then had not loved.

“When?” Myra demanded, her tears still abundant. “When will this relief come?”

“When you stop believing as you did as a child that it was because of you, who you
are.”

Not at five, not at eleven, at twenty, at thirty, had she been able to conceive of
this possibility: that the sorry state of affairs had nothing to do with her, a reality
which had its own quality of pain—the utter impersonality of it, the utter obliviousness
to her, so that it would have made no difference if she were a saint or a psychopath.
That these people whose offspring she was simply had nothing in them that allowed
love: not for themselves, not for each other, not for her. The actual ease of their
circumstances had never touched their belief that they were on the precipice of disaster,
that living was a brutal grind that required unflagging vigilance.

“Had you been more difficult, had you enacted your sorrow,” Dreis said, “they would
have hated you for the interference. That might have been easier for you, since at
least you would have had their attention.”

For Dreis, the insight was just the skin of the beast. Myra still needed to face the
ugly fact that she was like them—her own insistence on order and cleanliness, her
stubborn, cruel belief that the state of pristineness was possible, be it in her thoughts,
where she expected of herself to have only clean and generous responses, or her home,
where she never allowed the paint to remain chipped, or with her body, where her torso
by eight weeks after both of her children’s births had been free of bulges.

“If your insistence on perfection was simply your identification with your mother,”
Dreis declared, “you would have given it up by now. No, it is more insidious. It is
the expression of your grandiose defenses against the rage and despair you felt, as
though you can conquer the natural order of disintegration and decay. You believe
that you alone can keep a flower in bloom, that in your home, on your body, the petals
will not wilt and the leaves not turn brown.”

With this, Myra wept. What issued from her body was something more than tears, something
closer to her own soul. She saw her insistence on having a third child as part of
her demand for perfection: a tyrannical expression not only of her mother still alive
and scrubbing inside her, but the invulnerability she had cultivated. With this, she
was able to say out loud, “Well, I didn’t love my mother and father either”—and then
to weep at the great loss of this, not to have loved her own parents.

16

After Myra returned to New York from Tucson, the trip during which Larry had managed
to delude himself for a scant few minutes that she might go to bed with him, he received
a letter from her, her precise handwriting filling a single sheet of pale gray stationery.

Dear Larry,

I hope your ankle is okay.

I think you should know that I was tempted to sleep with you. Unlike you, I have been
with no one else since you left. (I know you like to say that I kicked you out, but
surely you can see that it was you who left me…) I am grateful that whatever small
quantity of wisdom I have gained over the years was able to take the reins, because
it would be a terrible mistake for us to become entangled again above and beyond what
we will always have, which is to be the parents together of our children.

Once you severed the covenant between us (I am sorry to sound so Catholic here), it
altered forever the path of my life. I had assumed that we would go hand in hand to
old age, that our growth would come through learning about ourselves, through learning
to love each other more deeply. I was very sad to give that up. I would have liked
to take that path with you. Now, though, we will each take different routes. On my
end, I do not believe that romantic love will be a central part of my life from this
point on. Not that I don’t think that I will have another lover—I imagine I will once
the children are older, perhaps after they’ve left the house. Rather, I feel that
I now have the children and my patients, and I suppose myself to nourish first. When
I fell in love with you, I gave you all my heart. I will never be able to do that
again, not because you broke my heart, but rather because I have moved on to a place
where I can no longer give away that much of myself.

So, my dear Larry, you will remain always my ex-husband (my only ex-husband, I am
quite certain) and the father of my children. If you take up with the women you take
up with because you truly desire love, I hope that you will find it and be at peace,
and that we will continue to work kindly together to parent our children. I think
we’ve been doing a pretty decent job at putting aside our quarrels with each other
in the service of their well-being. Sometimes, I even think that we’re doing a better
job as divorced parents than we might have had we remained together.

Yours in friendship,

Myra

For three nights after receiving Myra’s letter, Larry made excuses to Linda for not
seeing her, spending his evenings drinking brandy and watching television with his
dogs on the couch beside him. On the fourth night, Linda came over unannounced with
two filets mignons and a chocolate sour-cream bundt cake. She was three inches taller
than he, six in her spike-heel sandals. He could discern the outline of her nipples
beneath her white T-shirt. Pushing the dogs aside, he fucked her on the living-room
couch and then, unable to control himself, cried in front of her.

In the morning, with Linda still asleep in his bed, he wrote Myra:

Dear Myra,

Now it’s my turn to be honest with you. I wanted to touch you two weeks ago not because
I lusted after you but because I still love you. That must sound like a strange thing
to say after what I did to you. There is no defense to my argument other than to say,
which, of course, you must know, being in your line of work, that a person is the
final arbiter of the truth or falseness of his own feelings and this is how I feel.
I believe that we could have a strong marriage. I have half my life left. I would
like to sit with you when our children graduate from high school and college, to visit
our baby grandchildren together. I would like to be grandparents together, doing all
the corny things that grandparents do with their grandchildren.

Maybe you’re being a little selfish to hold on to your grievances with me?

Yours always,

Larry

A week later, he received another letter from Myra:

Dear Larry,

Thank you for your letter. I am very warmed that you still love me. In a certain way,
I love you too. I do need, however, to point out that your fantasies about us are
only an extension of our being parents together, which we can, to some extent, continue
to do. You can sit with me when the kids graduate from high school and then from college.
We can both attend our grandbabies’ birthday parties.

You must, however, recognize that these images do not constitute a marriage, or at
least not the marriage I would want (and will probably now never have). Very few people
actually have a marriage that I think is worth having. My parents shared little more
than a roof together. Your parents are locked in constant battle, which protects them
from the harsher reality that your father long ago outgrew your mother. My cousins,
Ursula and Alicia, carry on with their husbands as in tawdry romantic comedies. Only
my friend from graduate school, Charlotte, who you never met, has a marriage that
looks good to me. She and her husband are truly friends. They discuss everything.
They go to one another first when they are in pain. They nourish one another’s most
delicate hopes, the wishes most of us don’t dare to even say to another person. They
treat each other with a most gentle kindness, aware that they hold each other’s inner
life in their hands. And they manage to do all of this without sentimentality or banality,
their lives together leavened always with humor. Perhaps we might have learned to
treat one another similarly, but during the years we lived together, we never achieved
anything even approaching this.

I think it best that we not correspond further.

Again, yours in friendship,

Myra

17

Before she has the key in the door, Caro knows that she is going to eat. There is
no hunger, her stomach still filled with her mother’s food. Rather, after hearing
Layla’s story, seeing the long scar on her arm, there is a craving for the oblivion
of salt, sugar, chewing, all the while knowing, even before she has touched the refrigerator
door, that what will enter her mouth will not be a comfort but rather a gorging—a
debasement of what her mother would call the human spirit, that tiny flame it remains
every person’s mission to keep alive.

She starts with a leftover deli container of tuna and continues through a bag of pretzels
and the remains of a box of cocoa she eats dry with a spoon. Hopelessness descends
over her, accompanied by revulsion, not only at her behavior, but at the immorality
of creating misery, of wasting her own life with this cycle of destruction. She subtracts
dates in her head: fifteen years since her return from Morocco when she stumbled upon
food as a drug—the disgust about her gluttony preferable to the disgust she felt that
fall about herself.