The Spot: Stories

Never mutual, the fact that one must suffer more than the other, however preordained, seemed startling. Ginkgo nuts fell early from trees along Claremont Avenue — the drought had urged the season forward — and a man collected them in a cloth sack, working slowly in the heat, plucking them up one at a time.

Her explanation was stilted: First she talked about her marriage and her daughter and the fact that she was not willing to give these things up, to let them go, and then, fumbling for something more specific, she said, I went last night to check my daughter, and she was uncovered and sleeping facedown and I looked at her back, the bones of her back, and they were, well, they reminded me of the bones of a sardine. You could chew and swallow them and not even notice.

I believed it myself when I told him that, she said to a friend.

To go back to Chekhov: the torment of it, the way it was rooted in place — the hot winds of Yalta, the wintry streets of Moscow. In her case it was the long stretch of riverfront at the end of the yard at home: then the gray spans of the bridge, with the city, down to the right, stretched lengthwise into the summer haze.

The potential was there for a long time: He’d show up in her town, unexpectedly, standing with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, or at Lincoln Center, as he had proposed, during intermission, the next tier down, spotted through the glass railing, looking, searching.

Much later, she’d hold specific memories of it: the clandestine ventures out into the night; the way the grid of north-south streets seemed to contain them, walking hand in hand down Columbus in the fall, dressed in sweaters, relishing the itch of the wool. A man had been selling cashmere scarves from a sheet of cardboard near the Plaza Hotel. He’d bought one and lifted it gently around her neck.

Weirdly enough, I lied and told him my daughter was sixteen, and troubled, she admitted to a friend. I added four years to my own daughter’s life and didn’t know why I was doing it at the time.

There was deliberation at the deepest level, even in the falling away, the parting, the bitterness. There was an inelegance. No matter how fanciful and wild, no matter how impulsive, in retrospect it had stood within the fact of the marriage itself. Still, she beheld a certain dignity in the exactitudes: the smell of cut flowers at a bodega, rubber bands bright red around their stems; the dusky light off Broadway on summer afternoons; the heavy wall along Riverside Park, cool against their calves, as they sat holding hands during lunch, turning now and then to glance down through the trees to the river, which was broken up into shards, a deep blue against the green.

Facts Toward Understanding the Spontaneous Human Combustion of Errol McGee

The Fire

A violet rashlike spume of vapors circumnavigated his ankles and then spread over his shins — freckled, smeared with age spots — until, reaching the conflagration point, he burst into a senseless mass of orange flame. Presumably he didn’t writhe or squirm because by the time the fire hit (or perhaps before) he was unconscious. The position of his chair indicates that he probably had his heels up on the windowsill. Staring off at the lake with his feet up, the bottle tucked in his crotch, he was resting in a wicker chair, which of course remained miraculously unscorched. People found the things that weren’t burned astonishing: the chair, the curtains, the porch, the cottage itself. Above his skull, on the ceiling over the chair, a large blister of seared paint had formed. The first fireman on the scene couldn’t help himself. He popped it with the tip of his ax.

The Skull

There’s the undeniable physical reality of the evidence: the skull, cleaned of flesh, resting on the green seat cushion; window curtains — blue swirls of highly flammable Dacron — twisting in the lake breeze, perfectly intact after the conflagration, not even a singe except where, years ago, McGee’s ex-wife had let the iron rest a little too long. Again, the ceiling blister, so obviously the result of aggressive heat, but still only a blister. (Admittedly, the ceiling tiles had some asbestos fibers to retard fire, but not enough to prevent flames from driving through to ignite the furring strips and up into the dry-baked rafters. Presumably, a fire that was hot enough to carbonize bone — with the weird exception of the skull — would be enough to ignite a structure. Too neat, the fireman thought, seeing it. Too damn tidy.)

General Conditions