Tinderbox (17 page)

25

When Adam asks Eva if he can interview her as part of the research for his screenplay,
she looks at him strangely.

“Would you mind?”

“No, I no mind.”

After dinner, they sit side by side at the farm table while Adam attempts to construct
Eva’s family tree, beginning with Eva’s great-great-grandfather, whose name and date
of death Eva knows from the gravestone her grandmother showed her: Isaac Selgado,
b. Rabat 1861, d. Iquitos 1895.

“Rabat, that’s in Morocco,” Adam says.

“Where is Morocco?”

“Northern Africa—where Rachida is from.”

“I never know that. My mother never tell me that.”

Slowly, Adam gathers what Eva knows. Isaac Selgado had a son, who seems to have been
born around 1890 and was the father of Eva’s maternal grandmother, Ana. It was Ana
who showed Eva the Jewish cemetery, who took Eva and her mother to the Friday-night
gatherings where Eva heard Hebrew read, watched candles being lit. Eva’s mother, the
great-granddaughter of Selgado, was born in 1945. She attended the convent school
and slept beneath a crucifix. “We are Jews,” she whispered to Eva, “but you must never
tell anyone, not even your father.”

Adam fills in the chart as best he can. Upstairs, his mother is playing the piano.
Eva draws a finger along the lines. She glances overhead.

After his mother finishes her piano practice, Adam takes the chart up to the music
room and settles into the wing chair to study it further. He can hear Rachida, who
has managed to make it home in time to give Omar his bath, say a last good-night.

Eva knocks on the doorjamb. She steps toward him, thrusting out her closed hand.

“Here. I bring this to show you.” She unfurls her fingers. In her palm is the piece
of silver, the size and shape of a baby’s hand, she showed Omar that night on the
terrace after Adam had crashed into his father. There is a hole at the wrist where
a chain could be threaded through. “My mother tell me this was my great-great-grandfather’s.
The writing on back, she say, is Hebrew.”

Adam takes the amulet. He holds it under the reading lamp. Each of the five digits
is engraved with a filigree design. On the back of the hand are Hebrew letters.

“I can’t read Hebrew, but Rachida does. Can I keep it to show her?”

Eva nods. She bites her lip as the amulet disappears into Adam’s pocket.

26

When Adam comes into the bedroom, Rachida, still in her hospital scrubs, is lying
propped on pillows atop the bed.

“I’m so beat, I barely made it through one story with Omar. My eyes were closing as
I read. I must have seen thirty patients today, half of them with no medical history
on file and a presenting problem of I don’t feel right, Doctor.”

Adam sits on the edge of the bed. He lifts Rachida’s foot, still in the heavy sock
she wears with her hospital clogs, onto his lap. On the rare occasions when the hostility
is not too thick between them, Rachida permits her feet to be massaged. He makes circles
with his thumbs around her ankle.

She moans. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

Adam removes his wife’s socks and deeply massages one foot.

“Eva gave me something she says belonged to her great-great-grandfather who came from
Rabat. When she showed it to Omar, she said it’s called a hamsa.” Adam reaches into
his pocket and takes out the silver hand. He gives it to Rachida and then goes back
to work on her foot.

Rachida examines it. “My father makes these. The Muslim women have their version that
they call the Hand of Fatima. Both Jewish women and Muslim women wear them to ward
off evil.”

“Can you read the Hebrew on the back?”

Rachida turns over the hamsa. In Essaouira, women wear hamsas inscribed to Lilith,
the demon who menaces the pregnant and newborn, so as to protect them from her nefarious
deeds.

She reaches for her glasses on the bedside stand. “I think it says, I have set the
Lord always before me.”

Rachida studies the amulet while Adam moves on to her other foot. In the afternoon,
he’d taken the subway to the Village to visit an Adults Only bookstore. The store
had been empty except for a Gypsy woman at the counter eating a smelly sandwich and
staring at a portable television. She looked at him with no more interest than if
he’d come to search for shampoo. Perhaps because of her indifference (on past visits,
there had been a skinny man with bad skin who watched his every move), he went for
the first time to the Men and Men section.

Back at the house, he locked the music room door and looked at the magazine he’d bought.
Most of the pictures were of men sucking other men’s monstrous penises, images that
held no interest for him. One picture, though, had mesmerized him: a tall, very erect,
muscular man lifting another slighter, younger man high in the air, his mouth twisted
into a lewd gesture that exposed his red tongue. Viewed in profile, the slighter figure,
his penis hidden against the larger man’s abdomen, might have been a woman. Not until
Adam brought himself to a climactic gasp imagining himself held aloft, his genitals
pressed against the hard belly of the tall figure, did he recognize the image as the
one from
The Searchers
where Ethan lifts his niece Debbie high over his head.

During the months after his father had left, the apartment thick with the sadness
Adam felt inside, he would lie in bed at night imagining that at any moment, soon,
very soon, his father would bound through the door. He’d lift Adam high, out of his
bed, and tell him he was back, it was all over, he was home. Instead, there had been
Sheri with her cartoonish boobs and her cats who would jump on him as he and Caro
slept on her pull-out couch. Then, later, after his father had moved to Arizona and
transformed himself into a cowboy cardiologist, there was his father’s relentless
disappointment in him.
Jesus Christ
, he’d yell,
kids around here start riding while they’re still in diapers, taking care of the animals
not much later than that. Get on the goddamn horse.

Adam presses his thumbs into his wife’s arch. She lets out a guttural sound. He presses
harder. In the dim light, with her broad torso and short hair, she could be mistaken
for a man. He moves his fingers up to her calves.

Rachida lays the amulet next to her. Hidden beneath her scrubs, Layla wears a hamsa
too. Rachida discovered this the first night she and Layla were on overnight call
together. They exchanged back massages, something the residents often did for one
another. Because it had been only the two of them that night in the residents’ dorm,
Layla had taken off her top. Hanging between her child-sized breasts, hardly filling
her teacup-sized bra, was the hamsa. Rachida could feel each of Layla’s ribs descending
down to her waist, her back no wider than a twelve-year-old child’s. When it was Rachida’s
turn to be massaged, Layla had teased that now Rachida had to take off her top too.
She laughed at the size of the straps on Rachida’s granny-style bra.

Now Rachida imagines unsnapping Layla’s teacup bra, touching the tawny nipples. Pushing
her tongue into Layla’s cardamom mouth.

In the photo, it is unclear if the figure held aloft is aroused. Adam wants that to
be the case. He wants the larger man’s mouth against his ear, murmuring to him, pressing
against him, Ethan, who wanted his brother’s wife, Debbie’s mother, now taking the
grown girl instead. Adam moves up Rachida’s body, massaging her thighs. She turns
off the light and he pushes her onto her side and curls around her, his hands kneading
her ample breasts until she directs them to the places where she imagines Layla’s
sweet fingers.

27

“It start before my mother die,” Eva tells Myra. She runs her hand down the upholstered
arm of the patient chair.

“What started?”

“My father, he pull me out of the bed after he kill the chickens. He drag me by the
hair with his hands all bloody into the chicken coop. He pull down his pants and push
my mouth over him. He push himself into me until his stuff squirt all over me.”

Eva is softly crying. She takes a tissue from the box next to the chair and tears
it into pieces. “I scream when he come into my room, but my sister put the pillow
over her head and my mother is scared that he shoot her again.”

The tissue falls in shreds onto the floor. Myra feels a sharp pain in the pit of her
stomach. She knew this was coming.

“He is a dirty, dirty man. He keep magazines with dirty pictures under a floorboard
in the bathroom. My sister tell me that if we spit on them, it destroys the evil.
We spit so many times, the pages stick together.”

When the buzzer rings, Eva immediately gets to her feet. Seeing the pieces of tissue
on the floor, she bends over to pick them up.

Myra waits to call Dreis until her last patient has left. Two years after Myra had
reached what both she and Dreis had considered the end of her analysis, she sheepishly
went back to discuss her distress at a new permutation of Adam’s phobias that had
arisen at the time of his college applications. It had taken only a few sessions for
Myra to see what was being set off in her by Adam. A few years later, Dreis, having
finally decided to retire, called Myra to tell her.

“What if,” Myra timidly asked, “there is something I need to talk with you about?”

“You’ll telephone me. I’m not disappearing. I just won’t be keeping regular hours
or teaching any longer.”

Since then, Myra has seen Dreis only once, perhaps three years ago, after she’d developed
an inexplicable anxiety about one of her patients. She’d gone to Dreis’s Park Avenue
apartment. A housekeeper greeted Myra at the door, led her into the library, where
her former analyst was seated with a blanket over her legs. It was a shock to see
how old Dreis had become. But her mind remained as sharp as ever, and in one conversation,
Myra felt back on track—not just with her patient, but with herself too.

“Would you like to come tomorrow? I know you wouldn’t call me until it felt pressing.”

“Would noon be okay?”

“Of course, dear.”

28

After her last morning patient, Myra goes directly upstairs. Eva is at the sink washing
lettuce. With the water running, she doesn’t hear Myra open the stairway door.

She is singing to herself, and for a moment, Myra pauses to listen: “When the dog
bites / When the bee stings…”

She has a beautiful voice. Sweet and pure.

“When I’m feeling sad…”

Myra clears her throat. Eva twists around. She looks shyly at Myra. “You are not going
to the park today?”

“No. I have a doctor’s appointment. I’ll be back before my next patient.”

“I make you a tuna sandwich for when you get back?”

“Don’t bother. I’ll have something while I’m out.”

Eva turns back to the lettuce. Her shoulders pulse slightly. “I think you eat outside
because you do not want me to talk to you today.”

29

“She was right,” Myra tells Dreis when she has reached the end of her description
of Eva. “I don’t want her to tell me any more, not today, not any day.”

Dreis sips her tea and nibbles on one of the shortbread cookies the housekeeper has
brought into the library.

“Of course you don’t. We can’t have our maids or our sisters or our neighbors as patients.
It is too exhausting for us. There is no time off. If we can’t attend to our own fantasies
for some hours of the day, we burn out. Besides, it is dangerous.”

“How so?”

“The transference is out of control. The girl wants you to really be her mother. There
is no play in the work, no
as if
.”

“I haven’t thought of it as a treatment. I’ve thought of it as a lonely, troubled
girl unburdening herself to an older person.”

“Myra, you know better. She sits in your patient chair. She tells you the things that
people only tell their therapists.”

“She sits eight, nine minutes at a time.”

“My dear. All a patient needs sometimes is three minutes. Think of everything that
is done in the last minutes of a session. For some patients, the entire treatment
occurs in those few minutes. But here, you don’t have a patient. You have a girl who
sees you all day long. She wants to be at your feet, to suckle your breast without
end. She wants you to be the mother she lost too young.”

Myra sighs. She sinks back into Dreis’s armchair.

“There is something you didn’t tell me,” Dreis adds.

“What is that?”

“How her mother died.”

“She hasn’t told me.”

“And you haven’t asked?”

Myra stares out the window. She can hear the Park Avenue traffic below. In her mind’s
eye, she can see Eva’s father with blood dripping from his hands and his fly unzipped.

“So what do I do now?” Myra asks as she turns back to Dreis. “Now that I’ve allowed
things to go this far.”

“You explain to her what we’ve talked about and then give her the phone number of
a clinic. You take her the first time if need be.”

30

In the afternoon, when Adam comes downstairs, Eva is putting on her jacket, getting
ready to pick up Omar at school. From the way she keeps glancing up at him as she
does the buttons, he feels as if there is something he has forgotten to do or say
or …

“Mr. Adam, did you show Mrs. Rachida what I give you?”

That’s it. To give the amulet back to Eva. He was so thrown off balance by having
sex with Rachida, he forgot to take the amulet back from Rachida. But where the hell
is it? He remembers Rachida examining it, but what happened to it after that?

“I did. She said she’s seen lots of them before. I’ll get it for you while you’re
out.”

Eva bends down to tie her shoes. She leaves without saying goodbye.

Adam climbs the two flights of stairs to his and Rachida’s room. Rachida must have
put the amulet on the bedside stand when she took off her glasses, he decides. He
searches the drawers. He searches under the bed. He searches on top of the dresser.