The first thing you saw when you turned off the paved road onto the long dirt track of the driveway—Tom Bruckermann’s driveway, up there in Sonoma County on the California coast—was an old bare oak tree. I remember that tree pretty well although I only saw it once, on a cold evening years ago (years ago) through the thick mist of the marine layer that was hanging low over the cliffs. Stripped of all its leaves, with most its branches lopped off, it was leaning out crookedly over the narrow gulch that ran down to the ocean from the road, and in the bleak fields of foxtail and range grass it was the only real thing to look at. So I looked at it as I drove, and in the passenger seat Rose must have been looking too because she said:
“Jesus, that thing looks ready to come down.” She paused. “Granite. Granite and ashes.”
We hadn’t always been as miserable as we were then. There was a summer morning early on, for example—though this memory reaches back to me from a long way off—when we fell asleep on the beach and woke up with our skin the color of red poppies. That afternoon we spread ourselves with lavender oil and aloe vera and made love very, very gently on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor, and at the end of it Rose said we were like two lobsters making love. That was pure Rose. She was always comparing herself to strange creatures, dreaming of strange places, referring to pigeons as “rock doves”; and I was enthralled by it, ecstatic whenever I caught some new glimpse of the fantastic landscape unfolding within her.
But on this particular evening we were not so happy.
On this particular evening we were headed north, though I can’t for the life of me dredge up our reasons for the trip. Not that they really mattered, of course. Because all that really mattered back then was Rose and me. There was nothing else. And if there sometimes seemed to be something else it was just some new variation on that same old theme: Rose and I trying to leave one another, Rose and I trying to get back together, Rose and I feeling sadness seeping like a drizzle in our bones. We’d been up and down every one of love’s scales by then, both the major ones and the minor ones, hitting every key from adoration to disgust; but that sadness was the worst, let me tell you. It lived in the hollows of our words. It hung around and dripped. It threatened us from all sides and drove us back together, time and again. But when we came together it was waiting. That was what mattered.
Tom Bruckermann was a school friend of Rose’s who we were staying with for the night. He was a writer, had rich folks, had been a lover of Rose’s when she was younger; he had an elegant little house. As the long driveway curved to the right we saw it drifting towards us like an ancient ark, motionless in the tossing sea of the windblown stalks. I remember dark weatherworn siding, cedarwood shingles, a trellised wrap-around; large windows with umber-colored shutters; porch- and yard-lights muted by tasteful baffles. Yes, an elegant little place in the prairie style, blending neatly into the land. I glanced over at Rose but, feeling my eyes on her, she stiffened and kept her gaze fixed straight ahead.
I pulled the car in front of the porch and cut the engine, leaning back against the headrest for a moment and letting the machine click and cool around me. Rose got out of the passenger side and stretched. She was a very attractive girl. No, that’s inaccurate. Not attractive, exactly, but there was something, something that had less to do with the specific parts of her body—those huge green eyes, that long black hair—than it did with their relation. When she stood by the open door of the car like that, arching her long back and grasping her elbows above her head—her girlish chest was thrust out and flattened beneath the loose red sweater—you could see how every joint and ligament in her body was attached. That’s it: no muscle contracted or relaxed without the others loosening or tightening in response. And everything spoke. The slightest twitch or motion of her finger spoke, changing the significance of the whole. Even her foot had a language all its own, absurd as that sounds, which could hollow me out with absence or fill me up with meaning as easily as any word....
Tom came out onto the porch and saw her stretching by the car.
“Hey there, Rosy,” he said.
“Hey, Tom,” she said. “Been a while.”
I let them hug and kiss on both cheeks, like Europeans, before coming around from the driver’s side.
“And you must be Jonathon,” Tom said.
“John,” I said.
“John, then,” he said.
We shook hands, a bit too firmly on my part. I’d been prepared to dislike him, of course, as I’m always prepared to dislike a lover’s ex—not on principle or even out of jealousy but simply because they remind me that I’m just one among so many: so many of the living, so many of the dead. But as I tilted my head down to look at him (he was a short man in his early thirties, handsome with a side part) I felt my instinctive hostility give way to something else, something difficult to define. He had soft, boyish features and round, slightly drooping eyes; and maybe it was just that combination of youth and age which made him seem eager and withdrawn, at once enthusiastic and sad. But I suppose solitude will do that to a man. He reminded me of the kind of fellow you sometimes sit beside at bars or barbershops or diners, who talk so loudly to the bartender or the barber or the waitress that you can tell right off that their lives are mostly filled with silence.
Our hands fell apart and Rose reached into the back seat of the car, pulling out the bottle of Wild Turkey we’d picked up at the junction. We always presented our hosts with bourbon back then, Rose and I; back then, the best gift was something you could share.
“A little token of our appreciation,” she said, handing the bottle to Tom. She smiled.
“You shouldn’t have,” he said. He smiled too, looking down and turning the bottle in his hands as if remembering. He had decent liquor in the house, I saw it myself, but he smiled and turned the bottle in his hands, remembering. Then he said:
“We’ll be needing glasses.” He looked up at us, still smiling, and again there was that queer mixture of sadness and enthusiasm. “Yes, glasses,” he repeated. “Come on in and make yourselves at home. There’s no one around but me so make yourselves at home.”
Then we all walked into the house.
***
After dinner we gathered deckchairs around the fireplace on the back porch to finish the bourbon. The night had grown clear and dark; I remember how the only light came from the thin slit of the crescent moon cut like a scar on the sky. There was a sharp onshore wind running through the fields that stretched from the house to the cliffs, and whenever a particularly strong gust swept in off the ocean the long stalks rippled all together, silver in the blackness. It smelled of salt and sage and wet rock. Faintly (so faintly that I could barely distinguish it from the sound of the wind) the surf sighed and hissed down on the beach.
It fell to me to start the fire. I was pleased to do it. My father had taught me how to make a fire and I remained childishly proud of my skill, though this one took me a long time to get going on account of my drunkenness and the freshness of the logs. They couldn’t have been more than six months old. I recall that at one point, when I’d used up a few matches, Rose slipped off one of her laceless shoes and, slouching down in her chair, stretched out a long leg and touched me teasingly on the shoulder with her toes.
“John’s drunk,” she said to my back, and I felt her naked toes wriggle along my collarbone and tickle the side of my neck. She was drunk too, and Tom was drunk.
“I’m not drunk,” I said. But I said it with an exaggerated slur so she could tell I was happy.
And, strangely, I was: happy to be starting the fire, to be using strips of the San Francisco Chronicle which shrivelled and burned green when they caught. I remember the date because it was on the top of every page, November 1, though it’s funny that I can’t recall the year. Mom would’ve been at the cemetery, I guess, laying flowers.
Rose and Tom talked in the shadows behind me, their voices loud but somehow distant, coming in waves. I liked listening to them, especially to Rose. When she wasn’t talking to me she could talk so beautifully; and when she spoke about the past, like she was then, she had a way of weaving significance into the smallest things. People and places, objects and events: her voice’s lilt let you know that she was a charmed being, that everything in her life, the evil with the good, always meant something more, was part of a larger, more mysterious system. The simplified version of this system—Rose called it her “phenomenological rainbow”—embraced everything she could experience with her senses, her emotions or her mind, placing each of them on a gradient scale which ranged from pure darkness through a spectrum of colors to pure light. (Hence the “granite and ashes” of the oak.) She never revealed the intricacies of her method to me. But whatever logic she used, it worked to transform the world as she lived and described it into a tapestry of interlacing hues, a work of art. On one hand I could see that this process was purely defensive, a way for her to organize and control all the violent forces that might do her harm. (She had had her share of tragedies.) On the other hand I could see that it was beautiful. Sometimes there was nothing I wanted more than to listen to her, wondering at the strangeness of her mind.... When the bits of kindling finally caught I almost regretted it.
For a long while I stayed kneeling before the fireplace, still listening, watching the thin orange tongue of the flame weave like a living thing along the base of the big log. At first it moved tentatively, slipping from one splintered twig to the next with curious nuzzles and retractions of its tip. Then, lightly, rounding my lips, I blew downward into the middle of the latticed wood and felt the fire’s heat as it blazed up at me and swayed, responding to my breath. I waited until the big log began to crackle and hiss, spitting sap from its ends, before I stood up at last and wiped my hands on the thighs of my jeans. Rose and Tom had grown quiet when they’d seen the first throbs of light invading the corners of the fireplace; and now, as I stepped away from the flame and turned towards them, they both looked up at me, their faces growing brighter and glistening as the fire rose.
“Dixitque deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux,” Tom said, holding out his arms.
“Let there be light,” Rose said softly. She wasn’t looking at me anymore, but I recognized that she was translating for my sake; and I recognized that she was doing it without giving away my incomprehension. In my heart, for that instant, I forgave her everything, everything. A small trembling started in my chest, then gently subsided. I took a Pall Mall from my jacket pocket, lit it in the rising flame and handed it to Rose. Then I picked up my glass and, pulling my chair closer to hers, took my seat beside her. Tom was across from me, on the other side.
We all sat for a minute in silence, Tom and I drinking, Rose smoking, all three of us looking at the fire and thinking, as people in front of a fire do.
Tom was the first to break the silence. Draining his glass he shuddered slightly and shook his head at something, perhaps the burn of the bourbon.
“Damn, Johnny,” he said. (He did, he had a small man’s penchant for diminutives.) “That’s a damn good fire you’ve got going. How’d you get it going like that?”
I looked at the fire and drank from my glass, absently checking for poison in his praise.
“You’ve got a good draft is all,” I said. “This fireplace has a real good draft.”
“Sure, fine,” he said, pouring himself another tall shot. We were drinking the stuff straight. “But draft or no draft, I never got a fire going like that. Did you, Rosy? How do you make a fire like that?”
What was going on in his mind? Tom Bruckermann. I heard somewhere that he eventually made quite a name for himself as a writer.
“Well a fire’s pretty simple, basically,” I said. I took another deliberate drink of the bourbon. “Basically it’s just three things, just oxygen and heat and fuel. You see the way I set up the kindling underneath, all cross-hatched like that?”
Tom looked. “I see it, yeah,” he said. Rose took a long drag from her cigarette.
“That’s called a log cabin base.”
“A log cabin base,” Tom said.
“That’s right.”
Rose let a ribbon of smoke unfurl slowly from between her lips, and I suddenly felt the need to tell her something terribly, terribly important. But instead I said, “That’s how you start a fire in a fireplace. Pyramid base for campfires, log cabin for a fireplace. You balance the ratios of the air and the heat and fuel.”
“Log cabin,” Tom repeated. “Classic,” he said. Still looking at the fire, Rose smiled at something in her mind.
There was another moment of silence and then Tom said loudly:
“Damn it’s good to have you guys here.” He raised his glass to me and said, “Johnny,” and then to Rose and said, “Rosy.” Rose flicked her cigarette into the fire and said, “It’s good to be here, Tom.” We raised our glasses to him, keeping our faces as serious as his was, and we all drank.
For a long time after that the two of them moved away from me again, back into the events and characters and stories of their past. I remember it became suddenly, painfully clear to me that this was the reason Rose had wanted to come. It made me sad, realizing that—the way a lost child crying in a public place makes me sad; I thought how empty her life must have grown. But, with my silence, I tried to tell her that I approved. I knew what it was like, after all. Sometimes you needed to wrap yourself up in it, warm yourself by it, simulate the feelings. All those phrases beginning “I remember,” “Do you remember...?,” “There used to be.” I understood it pretty well, actually, and I approved.
Me, I sipped my bourbon and kept looking into the fire, listening to it hiss and crackle and spit. It was really going now. The bits of kindling were beginning to break up and glow. Sheets of orange flame flowed up from underneath, like waterfalls. Everything was moving. I could see hairline fissures opening on the logs, sap bubbling out from the ends. The chimney sucked up the smoke, the thin tongue licked the creosote.
I finished my glass and, accepting the bottle from Tom, poured myself another one. The bourbon was heating me up from the inside and the fire was like a hot breath on the surface of my skin. It felt good, as if the universe were dividing itself in two, one part touched by the warmth and light of the flame, the other relegated to darkness and outer cold. We were in the warmth and the light. At one point, Rose slipped her fingers between mine on the arm of my chair. I looked over at her. She was looking across at Tom, and the glow of the fire made the dusting of hair on her cheek stand out like a halo on her skin.
They were bringing the past up to the present and Tom was saying:
“...in D.C., politics. Doing well for himself, it seems. He sends me updates.” He drank deeply from his glass, the fire dancing in its round surfaces. When he lowered it he shuddered slightly and shook his head, as he had before.
“But you’ll have heard about Will Bronson, I guess?” he said more quietly.
“Will Bronson?” said Rose. She seemed pleased to be salvaging so much. “I haven’t thought about Will Bronson in years.”
“Damn,” said Tom. “I wish I could say the same,” he said. He looked at the fire for a moment longer in silence. Rose tickled my palm with her finger and again my heart trembled with a terrible joy: again I wanted to press my whole soul against hers, to speak weighty, nonsensical words. But instead I said:
“A friend of yours?”
“Not a friend, exactly,” said Rose. Was something similar happening in her? “He was just someone we knew.”
She looked at Tom for confirmation.
“He was around, that’s right,” said Tom. He put his hands on the arms of his chair and made as if to stand; but then, as if prevented by an invisible force—an invisible palm pressed calmly to his chest—he relaxed back again and sipped his drink. This time there was something more to the shudder than the liquor’s burn. His sad drooping eyes seemed tired, but there was a tautness in his voice, a kind of forced composure.
“Yes, he was around,” Tom repeated, looking back at the fire. “And when we all took off for one place or another after school he moved up here. You heard that, no? Real near here, just a few miles further on Route One.”
“Will Bronson,” said Rose again. “I haven’t thought about him in years,” she said.
“Back home,” Tom went on, seemingly for my sake, “he used to do little jobs for folks around town. Car stuff, house stuff, electrical stuff. He was good with his hands, as they say. You needed your battery changed, a skylight installed, a room re-wired, Willy was your man. A big guy, right Rosy?”
“Compared to you?” she said. Then she giggled. I hadn’t heard Rose giggle like that in a long time. She tickled my palm again and I tickled hers back, and life coursed with the liquor through my veins.
“Touché,” said Tom. He smiled, but there was something behind it. “Big compared to me, and not the best-looking guy in the world. High neanderthal forehead, hook nose, a receding hairline by age fifteen.... For years he had a crush on Rosy and she wouldn’t even give him the time of day. Don’t deny it. But he was a good kid, you know? Gentle, sweet. I made sure he got invited to all the parties and he showed up at every one. Just stood in a corner sipping his Coors, grinning at everyone who passed him like some big benevolent bear.”
“The Brawn,” said Rose.
Tom stared at her for a moment blankly, not comprehending. Then surprise broke briefly across his features, followed by the same tiredness.
“That’s right,” he said. He shook his head. “I’d forgotten we called him that. Willy the Brawn Bronson... Jesus, Rosy.” He stopped for a moment, remembering. “He really was big, though, wasn’t he? Oversized and awkward, no idea what to do with all that body. But gentle, like I said; a gentle giant. Sometimes I liked to go out into the school lot and smoke an unfiltered and just watch him look over some rich kid’s car, checking the brakes, checking the suspension. We owned that stuff but Willy knew how it worked, you know? In some sense it was more his stuff than ours.”
There was a pause while Tom drank. I softly squeezed Rose’s hand, then stood up and tapped the andirons with one of the tongs. Sparks the same color as the fire jumped behind the flame; the metallic ringing faded into the sound of the wind. I added two more big logs from the pile underneath the tarpaulin and, pouring myself another glass of bourbon, sat back down. Tom waited until I got settled.
“Do you guys even want to hear this?” he asked carefully.
“Come on, Tom,” said Rose. “You started the thing, so finish it off.” She brought her legs up to her chest and, pulling the loose sweater over her knees, hugged them with both arms. Then she leaned towards me so that our shoulders touched. “It’ll be a bedtime story,” she said.
“Not quite,” said Tom. He looked at me. “Johnny?”
“Shoot,” I said. I would have listened to anything to keep Rose touching me like that, to keep us all wavering like that on time’s edge in the warm glow of the fire.
“Well,” he said. He considered the small portion of bourbon in his glass and swirled it a few times with his wrist. I understood then that his voice’s tautness, its forced composure, was actually something else: a kind of concealed eagerness. He had been waiting to tell this story for a while. “Well anyway,” he said. “When we all left for wherever we were going Willy moved up here. This must’ve been ten, twelve years back I guess, because by the time I showed up myself three years ago he’d got himself a hardware/maintenance place on the strip. Minor construction work, some landscaping, leaks; a little bit of everything, you know? A profitable business, he told me. Folks from SF come out and stay in the summertime but the rest of the year their places need regular upkeep. So he’d lay tiles, bleed radiators, mow lawns; clean out a swimming pool from time to time or replace a toilet seat. Small things like that, but people paid him well for it. It was a professional operation: he had this navy blue uniform with his name on it, William Bronson embossed in red across the left breast like a gas station employee.”
Tom drained his glass and then he looked at me. I raised my eyebrows with the bottle of Wild Turkey. He said, “Please,” and held out his glass. I passed the bottle to Rose and she reached over, pouring.
I remember this perfectly. Rose reached across the face of the fire and poured. As the glass hung there in front of the flame some trick of light or perspective dissolved it. For an instant the bourbon glowed, uncontained, between Tom’s fingers. Jesus, I remember it like it was yesterday, that cylinder of bourbon glowing between his fingers, touching nothing.... It was as if the fire had reached out its hand and loosened us from gravity. Me and Tom and Rose and the liquor, floating there for a heartbeat—for the silence between two heartbeats—outside of time.
Then Tom sat back and took a drink.
“After a while Willy and I got to seeing one another fairly regularly,” he went on. “After all, a man on his own in the country can’t be too picky about his friends. Don’t get me wrong, I always liked the guy, and I liked him even more when I met him up here. By that point he’d sort of grown into his size, you see. He was never the type of big fellow who slouched in order to minimize his physical presence: he knew he was no threat to anybody and he acted accordingly. But still, there used to be something uneasy about the way he occupied space, as though he were in an airplane or a theater or something and was always nervous about taking up his neighbor’s elbow room. It was his upbringing that caused it as much as anything else, I suppose. Fifth of nine kids, mechanic’s son, no mom.... He told me he shared a bed with his brother all the way through high school. Can you imagine? But by the time I met him up here there wasn’t a trace of nervousness left. He was calm, happy, completely at peace. And I guess most people would’ve been the same with a wife like that.”
“A wife?” said Rose. She yawned as she spoke and leaned into my arm again, putting her head on my shoulder. I was tired too, and a little bored. I smelled Rose’s hair. It smelled of chestnuts in the fire’s heat. For a moment I let myself imagine how beautiful she’d be when she grew old, the streaks of silver running through her black locks like shooting stars through a black sky. I kissed her lightly on her forehead. Some kindling collapsed with a burst of sparks in the fireplace.
“Yes, a wife,” said Tom. “Can you imagine? A shy little local girl named Lara with the prettiest goddamn smile I’ve ever seen, her teeth just crooked enough that they suggested perfection better than perfection itself. Not that I got to see her smile often, of course. But when I had them over once I told joke after joke just to keep it on her face. It was that kind of thing, you know? You’d say anything. And meanwhile Willy just sat there the whole time beaming, looking at her and drinking his Coors even though I’d offered him good wine, liquor, champagne. It was a celebratory dinner, see. Willy had just received a contract for some big private community up north and Lara was in her last trimester. She kept one hand on her swollen belly the whole time, and sometimes Willy would reach across and lay his hand on it, too. He was the contented man I thought had ceased to exist; the happy man who by luck or instinct or some small divine miscalculation had found his way back into the garden and wanted nothing more than what he had. Perfectly ignorant, perfectly at peace. Willy the Brawn Bronson, the second Adam.”
Tom put his hands on the arms of his chair and this time he managed to stand up. Swaying slightly he stepped towards the fire and paused in front of it, looking, and for a moment his body blocked the flame’s glow. His shadow was thrown across us. The cold rushed in from all sides. But then he picked up two logs from underneath the tarpaulin and, laying them across the andirons, turned and sat back heavily in his chair. Rose made a small satisfied noise at my side.
“The second Adam,” Tom repeated. “That same evening I stepped outside with him to watch the sunset. Lara was someplace else, and so we just stood there together in the last of the daylight, drinking and looking out over the fields and the ocean and the sky. I remember that nothing was moving except, very, very slowly, the sun. Even the water was perfectly still, and as the sun got low the fiery band of the horizon started to form a brilliant Tau cross with the smeared light on the ocean’s surface.
“We stood there in the stillness for a while, drinking and looking. Then Willy pointed at something and said, Hey, that thing’s gotta come down. He was talking about the old oak you see when you turn onto the driveway. I looked at it and told him I didn’t think it was worth the trouble. It was ugly even then, see, but I’d developed a sort of affection for it; it sort of gave proportion to the vastness of the ocean. Besides, in the summertime the kids used to tie a rope to one of the lower branches and swing out over the gulch, out and back with their feet on a wooden plank. I remember thinking how I’d miss watching them from the porch as they made those wide arcs outward against the sky.... But Willy convinced me to let him handle it.
“It’s dangerous,” he said, practically. “It’ll make a helluva lot of firewood.”
He wanted to do me a favor.”
Tom drank from his glass and, taking care not to disturb Rose, I drank from mine. For a moment I was afraid she was going to move all the same; but with a sigh she just shifted and settled back against my shoulder. “Fire,” I thought I heard her whisper. The two new logs were beginning to hiss and crackle and spit sap with the others, singing out fervidly into the darkness and the sound of the wind.
“We set a date in the middle of the next week,” said Tom, “which just happened to be the week of the late spring wildflower bloom. You can barely imagine now how gorgeous the whole coast gets, everything scattered with larkspur and lupines and these little white violas they call the heart’s-ease. Well, I heard Willy’s truck pull up in the afternoon and I pushed open the shutters of the office window upstairs. There he is in the cab, dressed in his uniform, the sun glinting off his bald head; and in the bed I can see the folding orchard ladder he’s going to use and the pruning saw. I called down to him and waved and he grinned up at me and yelled, Should I...? gesturing towards the gulch with his hand. I yelled, Yes, just take it right down! and he gave me a thumbs up sign and started the engine. The tires left a weaving double parabola in the dirt.
“For the next few hours I heard the regular far-off shriek and whine of the saw. At first it annoyed the hell out of me, that sound, though the noise was distant and small. I was working on a story at the time, an important one, I thought, and in the silences between each revving I couldn’t do anything but anticipate the next one. It was like having a fly in the room, a fly or a bee that keeps dashing itself against the windowpane. But you know how people are...soon enough I got used to it, used to the faint alternation between silence, buzz and drone. I got so used to it, in fact, that it took me a long time to realize that it had stopped. It was early evening by that point, still sunny and warm, and for a few minutes I just sat there doing nothing, looking out at the poppies and the Indian pinks glowing like little flames in the grass. For a few minutes I just sat there doing nothing, listening with pleasure to the silence.
“I found him sprawled in the middle of the logs he’d cut, not dead quite yet but not breathing much, either, his neck twisted pretty bad. The orchard ladder had fallen too, and it lay there next to him like a gawky aluminum giraffe. That comparison isn’t retrospective, it struck me immediately. Well here they are, I said to myself, William Bronson in his uniform and his aluminum giraffe, sprawled among the flowers and the logs. Damn. He died a few minutes before the ambulance arrived, a month and a few days before his little boy was born.”
Tom stopped talking. Out of the corner of my eye I could see he was looking at the fire. I was looking at the fire too, and gently, on my shoulder, I could feel Rose’s jaw tensing and releasing in her sleep. She had begun to grind her teeth at night. The air was filled with the voice and motion of the flames.
I felt a huge sadness and a wild joy struggling within me. I waited, attentive, to see which would prevail. Gradually, I felt the joy begin to master me. I tried to fight it down, tried to hold it in my chest, but it was no use. The joy mastered me. A slow expanding throb was pushing outward from my soul, pushing uncontrollably outward to the surface of my skin and then beyond that into the vibrating air before the flames. I was looking into the fire and as I looked at it I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, beyond all shadows of all doubts, that it was the essence of my joy. I looked deeply into the flames and saw that we in the present were being warmed by the swelling fire of the past, that nothing was ever lost, and that, soon enough, we too would be the fuel on which that fire fed.