The Secrets of a Fire King Read online

  “But I’m such an old woman,” she would say. “What do you still see in me?”

  He would not answer, and she would laugh a young girl’s laugh as the towel slipped away to the floor.

  “We are so lucky,” she said to him once. “We are able to live the happiest time of our lives over again.”

  Jade Moon remained slim and agile even as Rob, comfortable now in his retirement, grew a mild belly and felt stiffness settling in his joints. He expected that she would live longer than he would himself, and he took careful, secret precautions to make sure she would not lack for money. There was his life insurance policy, bought years before and now paying healthy premiums. There were blue-chip stocks and bonds locked away in a bank vault. Sometimes he got up early in the morning and drove the old truck into town. He had coffee and doughnuts in the bakery with the other retired men, easy conversations that were like surfacing from beneath the water, and then he went over to the bank to count his modest investments. He liked the rich scent of metal and leather in the safe-deposit room. He liked locking himself into a tiny booth and writing down the figures. Most of all, he liked the feeling he had when he returned the box and the key and left the bank. It was the same feeling as finishing a house and knowing that it was a solid house, that it would last. No matter what, Jade Moon would never go without. He drove along the country roads feeling sad at the thought of his own demise, but nonetheless deeply content with his arrangements.

  He never considered what his life would be if she were the one to die first and thus, when the first signs came that this would be the case, he was able to ignore them. If Jade Moon was pale, well, she had always been fair skinned. When he saw her stop and touch her heart, as if with pain, he thought—well, she is getting old after all, and so am I.

  At last the day came when Jade Moon fainted. She was working in the vegetable garden, but the day was overcast and she was only watering with a hose. He ran to her from where he was repairing the fence, and the expression on her face—something near the pain he had witnessed there during her three labors—compelled him to finally take her to a doctor. They drove to the same hospital, twenty miles away, where their children had been born. There was a new highway in place now, but Rob took the old road, reassured by the familiar curves and hills. Altogether, they made this trip three times over as many months, for tests. He expected something simple and curable: high blood pressure, a heart murmur, kidney stones. On their last visit the doctor escorted them into his office to tell them, quietly and gravely, that Jade Moon had cancer, advanced and inoperable. Rob was struck with such shock that he couldn’t speak. Even after they left the hospital and were driving through the snowy white fields on the country road, he couldn’t talk. He drove slowly, glancing now and then at Jade Moon from the corner of his eyes.

  “So, I am dying,” she said finally. “I thought I was sick, and now I know.”

  “You’ll get better,” he insisted, though the doctor had given them no hope. Then he turned fully toward her, surprised, for a moment, out of his fear. At the hospital he had been too stunned to translate, and yet Jade Moon had understood the terrible thing that had been said. On the far side of the truck she was looking out over the rolling white fields, and he saw a trace of a smile flicker at the edges of her mouth.

  “Do you remember,” she said, “the first winter you appeared in our village? It was snowing then, too, just like now, and we were all shocked at that fur hat you wore. So tall, it looked like something out of a Russian painting. That’s what I thought. You were just as strange, and just as handsome, as a man from a painting. I really thought you were a Russian.”

  He tried to remember his first day in her village, but all he could bring up was a blur of staring faces darting here and there amid the snow.

  “I remember some schoolgirls,” he said. “I remember a whole group of girls watching me walk in. When I got close they all began laughing and ran away. They were wearing their high shoes and running in the snow.”

  “Not all of them ran,” she said. “I was among them and I stayed and watched you. Do you know I decided right at that moment I would marry you? Even as you walked into town, I was planning to learn Russian so I could speak with you.”

  She laughed. Rob understood that she was telling him that she did not regret anything. She had made her choice that snowy day; she had wanted him and everything that had followed was justified by that moment. He felt a thickening in his chest and pulled off the road, into an area beneath a cluster of pine trees. He leaned over and put his arms around her. The old truck smelled of years of cigarettes and, very faintly, of kerosene. Jade Moon was small and frail beneath the bulky coats and scarves. Her cheek was dry against his. After a moment she pulled herself carefully away. She put her left hand on his cheek.

  “Rob,” she said, startling him with perfect, lilting English. “Please. I would like to go home.”

  THE DISEASE, which had made itself known so slowly, now progressed with an astonishing speed. For Rob, ignoring his bad back and chopping cord after cord of wood to release the wild energy that overtook him at the thought of her death, it was like learning a new word. For years the eye skipped over it, but once it became known, it seemed to appear everywhere. Jade Moon’s symptoms were now so clear, so obvious, that he wondered at the time he had passed without seeing them. She lost weight, she tired easily. And then the medicine was less effective as the pain grew. Within two months she was spending her days in bed, watching TV and knitting. He had written the terrible news to the children right away, and they called home now at frequent intervals, encouraged each time by Jade Moon’s bright, chatty tone. April was in California, working as an editor for a testing company. Michael was a lawyer in Seattle. Maria was married to a landscape architect and lived in Chicago. They said they would come when it got serious, and they did not believe him when he tried to tell them that it was serious already. They were all good at denying what they would rather not see; it was how they had survived, after all. It was only Rob who saw it, how she hung up the telephone and slumped back into her pillows, eyes closed against the lapping waves of exhaustion and pain.

  “You must come,” he said to them finally, one after another, and at last he convinced them. They would meet in Chicago, at Maria’s house, and fly home together. Rob nodded at the phone, and told them each to hurry.

  “I’m so worried,” Jade Moon said on the morning the children were to arrive. He had told her they were coming and now her fingers moved in a fretful pattern across the sheets. The medication had made her drowsy and forgetful. “I’m worried, and I can’t remember their names.”

  He smoothed her hair back from her head. “We have three children,” he told her. She knew by now that he had given them other names, legal names, but today he spoke slowly and used the names of their childhood, the ones that she had chosen. “Spring. Mountain. Sea.”

  “Ah,” she said, “yes.” He was relieved to see how she relaxed then, as if each name had diffused through her like a drug.

  “Spring,” she repeated, and closed her eyes. “Mountain. Sea.” Her breathing deepened, and he knew she was asleep.

  He stood up and went to stand in the window. A few years earlier the city had widened the road and approved a stone quarry on the opposite hill. The traffic increased; machines had cut a great gash in the side, and now the huge boulders rested randomly on the hills, white and inert, like sleeping elephants. The noise, the tearing of the earth, had upset Jade Moon, and she had kept the curtains closed day and night against that sight.

  Now he pushed them aside and, despite the thick heat in the house, the chill outside, he opened the window. The air, bright with sun and cold, rushed around his face. At the house of Jade Moon’s parents he had stood just this way on a winter afternoon, leaving the suffocating warmth of the fire for the bitter, refreshing air of the unheated rooms. And it was in the spring, when the air was as fresh and crisp as well water, that he went walking with Jade Moon in the hill
s behind her parents’ house. There was one spot they went to often, just beneath the crest of the mountain, where a shelf of rock thrust itself out over the sea. They used to sit there, the sun-warmed rock balanced by the chill of the air, Jade Moon picking the delicate wildflowers and looking, now and then, out across the expanse of sea to the places he would take her within a year. It was so long ago. They had left as planned, and in all the years of their marriage they had never been back.

  Jade Moon stirred behind him; he wished the children would hurry. Spring, Mountain, Sea, he murmured, like an incantation, as if the words that had the power to soothe his wife could also hurry his children from their lives.

  The image that came to him was incomplete, the way a frame merely suggests the finished house. He said their names again to help it form. Spring, Mountain, Sea. The four syllables were suddenly as powerful as a poem. How many times had he heard her speak them? Yet for him, until this moment, they had always evoked only the individual faces of his children and the weight of his double life. He had never thought of them this way, as Jade Moon must have, three small strokes of language that reconstructed their shared past. Spring, mountain, sea: he was sitting on a rocky cliff, gazing at an ocean as wide and full of promise as his future, and Jade Moon, young and lovely, was collecting flowers at his side.

  She was sleeping now. Her hair, still dark, had slipped across her face. The stubborn beauty of her gesture clutched at him, and he thought of his many betrayals through the years. He shut the window. Crossing the room, he had again the fleeting impression of her youthfulness, but when he brushed the hair from her face he saw how tightly the skin was drawn now across her skull. He lay down next to her as he used to do on the nights before Spring was born, when she was so cold and he had talked her to sleep in his arms.

  He did not know if she could hear him, or if she was past the power of words to soothe or build or comfort. Yet he spoke softly and steadily, both in his language and in hers, telling her what he had just now understood. When the children arrived that was how they found him, whispering their old, discarded names again and again—as if, by the sheer force of repetition, he could make her understand.

  A Gleaming in the Darkness

  Sometimes we returned in the evening after dinner for another survey of our domain. Our precious products, for which we had no shelter, were arranged on tables and boards; from all sides we could see their slightly luminous silhouettes, and these gleamings, which seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment.

  —MARIE CURIE

  IAM AN OLD WOMAN NOW, AND DYING, SO SURELY THE THINGS OF this world should no longer have the power to compel me. Yet in my final hours I am indeed distracted, and it is nothing from my own hard life that haunts me, but rather a woman I barely knew, a person on the edge of all my living. It seems improper, it is not right. If I am to be in this world a little longer, then I should wish to dwell on my husband, Thierry, or the son who looked just like him and fell beneath the German rifles, or my only daughter, who disappeared so many years ago into the countryside of France. I should wish to think of them, yet I do not. Even my granddaughter cannot hold my attention, though she comes to see me daily. For half an hour every morning she visits, speaking brightly and fluffing up my pillows, rubbing the cool balm into my hands, which are the color of a pig’s liver, the texture of bark, swollen now as thick as sausages. Merci grandmère, she whispers when she leaves. Merci.

  She is good to me. She is grateful. I raised her after her mother fled with the Resistance, and she has not forgotten. In her gratitude she has brought me to this hospital, the best in Europe, to die in a room that is not my own. I watch her depart, delicate in a dark blue dress that rustles lightly against her calves. She, of course, does not remember Madame, who died when she was still a little girl. She does not remember the years of hard work or the blue jars glowing. It is only I who remember, but I do this with such clarity that I sometimes imagine myself back in the small glass building on the rue Lhomond, Madame in her black cotton, Monsieur scribbling on the board, the scent of cooking earth thick around us. As if my life had not yet happened. As if time, after all, were of no lasting consequence.

  It is strange, it is most disturbing, yet it is so. I run their images through my mind like beads through my fingers, working something out. Madame was a small woman whose hands were often cracked and bleeding from her work. She had a habit of running her thumb across the tips of her fingers, again and again, lightly. They were numb, she said once, absently, when I asked her. That was all, a small thing. She would not remember it, and out of so many things that have happened in my own life, why I dwell on this is a great mystery. Still, I would like to call her here, to this room with its walls of green tile, its single window masked by a thin yellow curtain, a pale sea light washing through the air. I would like to ask her what happened to her hands before she died.

  LONG BEFORE she was famous in the world for her mind, Madame was famous in the market for her shopping. That is how I first knew of her, as the woman who stood baffled before the butcher, uncertain how many people she could feed with a joint, as the woman who bought fruit blindly, without pausing to test if it was too young yet, or too ripe. The things any ordinary housewife knew she did not understand. In the market they said she was unnatural, working side by side with men, leaving her small daughter in the hands of others. At first, I must admit, I was no different in my opinions. When the fruit sellers gossiped, I nodded in agreement. When she walked by on the street, in such deep conversation with her husband that the world around them might not have existed, I stared boldly, along with all the others. She did not go to church at all, a scandalous thing, and in the evenings, when I knelt on the hard pine boards of my little room and prayed, I wondered how she lived without that ritual, that comfort.

  It was not until the day she came for the key that I began to see her differently. Up close she was more human, and more frail. We were similar in size and looks, she and I, two slight women with gray eyes and ash blond hair, and I felt an immediate affinity with her, despite the vast differences in our ages and our lives. I took her to the room full of windows, a rude and dusty space, abandoned for decades, which would become her first laboratory. Because it was a room the university did not require me to clean, I used to go there often, slipping unseen through the cloudy glass door, locking it behind me. Inside the air was still, moist and warm when the sun shone. I had cleared a little table of its dust and rubble so I could have a place to drink my morning coffee and to eat my lunch in peace. People said it had been a greenhouse once, and in that room of windows I could close my eyes and imagine the air around me growing thick with shiny leaves, spilling over with blooming flowers. I could pretend I was a rich girl, dressed in deep blue satin, wandering through the foliage like a bright pampered bird. When I told this to Thierry, who was then my most serious suitor, he laughed out loud, but two days later he brought me a little turquoise bird in a brass cage. For this I married him, for the extravagance of that little bird, for his deep laugh. I let him kiss me sometimes, in that deserted room, and I remember even now his lips, pressing mine like two pliant leaves, cool and alive. A shaft of sunlight fell across his arm, and all around us the air was full of dust, thick with the memory of growing things.

  On the day they came to see this room, Madame and her thin, absentminded husband, I was newly in love, and thus sensitive to love in others, and so I noticed how he paused and took her arm, and the look she gave him in return—warm, full of an unspoken affection that softened the severity of her features. They said in all the shops that she was cold, like a machine, but that morning I saw she had a tender heart. As they toured the room I watched with curiosity. They were not romantic, yet they suited one another exactly, just as a shell would fit perfectly within its fossil. In part it was the way they spoke, for they did not talk of ordinary things, the closeness of the air or the dampness of the floor beneath their feet, but rather of formulas and
research. Each spoke, each listened, and as I stood quietly in the corner, watching their inspection, I thought that they spoke as two men might, as equals. She was intent, beautiful I thought, but wearing no adornment. She did not flirt or hesitate to contradict her husband. This was odd to me, for Thierry viewed his word as law, and I had learned not to oppose him even when I knew that I was right.

  They took that room and soon moved in, though it was not possible to believe anyone could work there for an hour, much less for the decade they finally stayed, freezing when the winter came, plugging loose panes against whistling drafts, worrying about leaks or the roof caving in beneath the heavy snows. And in the summer it was worse, hot as an inferno with the sun flowing in and the great fires kept going for their experiments. Yet they would not vent the roof. Dust enough, they complained, came in already. No matter how carefully I cleaned, dust drifted into test tubes, coated instruments, tampered with their experiments like an evil force. Still, despite the bad conditions, they worked with such concentration that they forgot about meals and cold and heat, and everything in the world except the experiments before their eyes. I knew it was a rare thing, what they did, the way they did it. I have never seen the like of it, the twin heads bent over the glass and flames and measuring tools, the long silences broken by the bursts of talk, the shared excitement running like another flame, invisible, between them.

  Now I myself have become an experiment, and people study my hands with the same intentness that Madame once turned, day after day, upon her jars. They examine me closely, but no one has any answers. Not the doctors, coming once each morning to make their tests; not the nurses, stepping through the doorway with their trays of bandages. I watch their smiles change, grow fixed, as they attend to me. Your fingers look better, they tell me, lying gently, and then, because they cannot say that soon I will recover, they talk about the war. Soon the fighting will end for good. France is free again, Marie Bonvin, soon the whole world will be free and the soldiers will come home. I murmur small words, smile my happiness. Of course I do. Who could disappoint the young nurses with their clear skin and hope-shining eyes? They save the news up, dwelling on the past, which for me, in their eyes, is a much greater place than my future. Pity glimmers on their faces, and compassion, yet their words are insulated with the smug knowledge of their youth. They do not believe that their unlined skin, their smooth and agile limbs, will ever fall into such a state of disrepair as mine have done. They are sorry for my disabilities, my old age, my dying, and they pity me. They do not see I have no pity for myself. These young girls do not know it, and I cannot tell them, but I have discovered that past and present blur together, become one and the same, so that time means very little at the end.