Flames
by Bonnie ZoBell
Willy teeters back in his chair, stares at the ceiling when I tell him about Jay and lunch. The candle going between us gives the whole room a sepia hue; Willy seems to almost glow. "So he’ll drive down for lunch, some quick sex, and be on his way," he says, running a hand through his hair, his beard.
"Willy." For a minute I’m afraid he’ll lose his balance.
"I thought he lived in Boston. When did he call?"
"Sunday night," I tell him. "He’s visiting his sister in L.A."
"I’ve talked to you four times since Sunday night."
"I didn’t want you to worry."
"Who’s worried? I’ll just have to call Donna or Darlene," Willy says, and an odd smile crosses his face as he says it.
Willy and I have each spent more years alone than we care to admit. Oh, we’ve had exes, plenty of exes. Willy’s most recent are Donna, Darlene, and Anne. Donna’s the one from Flagstaff who makes frequent business trips. Since she and her husband no longer have sex, she and Willy do, or at least did until I came along. Then there’s Darlene, a little kinky in the lovemaking department. She’s the one Willy calls Queen of the Vibrators, who pretends to have only physical needs. She seemed like the perfect diversion three years ago when a woman named Anne broke his heart. Anne hurt. Willy, who is thirty-four, never offers her name in our conversations, ever. And he’s told Darlene all fifteen times she’s called since I moved back from Boston that he’s seeing me. No, he tells her, he doesn’t want to get together, not even for a movie, not even for a cup of coffee, especially not on her birthday.
As for me, there’s Jay, who’s called to say he’s driving down to San Diego from Los Angeles tomorrow and would I like to have lunch. Don’t ask me why. I left Boston with the idea of putting three thousand miles between us. I left Boston thinking maybe alone wasn’t so bad.
Willy may have a few years on me, but my experiences with abandonment started early. In the middle of a brisk fall night, my father, unannounced, left my mother and the rest of us. We never talked about it. You can imagine what the years after this were like. You can imagine what the years before were like if he didn’t think it necessary to mention he was leaving. My mother has never been good at being on her own.
"Donna’s in town," Willy says, pushing himself from the table. The candle between us flickers.
"Oh, come on, Willy."
"She is."
"And I suppose you’re going to have torrid sex with her."
"Of course."
"You and your Donnas and Darlenes."
He stands and smiles. Willy is six feet one with reddish-brown hair, though he won’t admit to the red. Never mild, he sees me as someone he has to tease a little to find out what’s going on inside. Few people in my life have made this effort.
"Donna isn’t here," I say, "and there’s nothing for you to worry about."
"I’m not worried, and she is here."
Jay stepped in from the Idahoan plains and won me over before I ever heard the gravely catch in his voice, most noticeable first thing in the morning. I didn’t know a soul in Boston when I met him. Swarthy, he wore his dark hair back in a ponytail, one earring; he had a large, sexy nose, though he didn’t think it was sexy.
We were graduate art students. We painted. I thought I’d left San Diego and a series of bad romances behind me forever, that Jay would never need to know about the bars I’d passed time in so I wouldn’t have to be alone. It was his very maleness—the big arms and shoulders exuding strength and protection—that was both his appeal and his downfall. He seemed much more than only two years younger than me. Jay thought my being from Southern California made me smart, that I was sophisticated. He wanted to be like me. I knew I was in love the day I spotted him listening so intently to a lecture his mouth was hanging open, so deep was his willingness to trust, to give himself over. Or at least it seemed that way at the time.
The night I seduced him, I ran my finger up the inseam of his jeans, laughed. I don’t think I’d ever seen such a look of shock. We went to my apartment. We’d had so much to drink that when our movements shook the bedside table, knocking the candle over, we didn’t even notice the table had caught fire until smoke filled the room. Within six months he’d moved in. How could I tell this breath of fresh air of the men before him who weren’t so nice, who weren’t as naive as he was, who didn’t think me so smart?
Recently Willy has bought a house near his apartment in Chula Vista, a suburb of San Diego. We put the candle out, take a walk there now, study the property. Mrs. Beebush will stay until escrow closes, then move to a retirement home. She’s lived by herself for years.
In the dark by the palm tree that will soon be Willy’s, I try to see through the windows while we pretend to be alien strollers in the neighborhood.
"Are you going to move in?" Willy says.
"I don’t want to live with Mrs. Beebush."
Willy groans. "Later, when it’s mine. Don’t you long to live with me?"
"Long?" It’s nice being the one feelings have to be pulled from after three years of a man who didn’t like to admit to even having them.
"Although if you move in, what will I do about Donna and Darlene?"
I sock him in the arm, and we run all the way back to his place.
Jay’s danger is missing, the edge, the longing for things and people you can’t have. Driving home that night, I remember the unexpected color in Jay’s paintings, the mystery, a sudden shift that left you feeling breathless, disoriented. It’s the part that makes you have to try so hard every day or it might all be over. And even then, eventually, you find it’s over anyway.
The next morning it seems like mere coincidence that Chula Vista—where Willy lives and is in charge of the Homeless Task Force—is also where I need to go for graphic art supplies. Willy is busy when I stop by his office, but has become as anxious as I am about my impending luncheon, and so he makes time.
"So you’re going to see your boyfriend pretty soon," Willy says, "but you couldn’t resist stopping and seeing me because you love me so much, right?"
The smiles we play off each other are teasing, complicated smiles.
"He’s not my boyfriend," I tell him.
"He’s a jerk."
"There’s nothing to worry about, Willy." I play with paper clips, a zoning map for the City of Chula Vista.
"I’m not worried," he says.
His phone rings, and I listen to him make important-sounding business. He leans back in his chair, runs a hand through his hair.
I stare at a mural behind him, think of a Friday night not long before Jay and I split up, when we’d been painting together for the first time in ages. Our apartment was always cold, but that night the chill disappeared, maybe because we were working so fast or because occasionally he’d do something really outrageous on the canvas—some enormous swipe of color—and we’d let go of huge buckets of laughter. I was still working on things the color of bruises back then, dark things in corners that didn’t immediately catch the eye.
When the phone rang, it was his buddies from Idaho. "Hell, no, there’s no love here—I’m just shacking up," he managed to gasp into the phone, already giddy from our painting. I watched as he pulled at his ponytail, his earring, as he leaned one of his big, farm-grown shoulders against the wall. I watched as he forgot I was in the room.
I’d packed an overnight bag by the time he was through.
"It was a joke," he said before I left for the weekend. But I’d already been through this with my father. I wasn’t going to be the one left behind this time.
As I wait in Willy’s office, still listening to him on the phone, reiterating and posing evaluative suggestions for the City of Chula Vista, I can’t help smiling. Even though Willy knows his way around town, writes million dollar grants, his socks, peering out from under the desk, match none of the other clothes he is wearing, nor each other, and his shirt has a pink tint to it from the time I threw my jogging shorts in with his wash.
Despite his Irish good looks, Willy has a booming, brawlish laugh that some find unrefined, while others, complete strangers, can’t help laughing with him. I worry that Willy, who knows nothing about art, can never truly understand what’s important to me. But when he plays the piano for you and you see his eyes close, his body sway back and forth over the keyboard; when you hear the way he gets at the heart of a song, holds it and teases it for a while before letting it go and working out the fine points, he’ll win you over forever. Right now, watching him on the phone, sure of himself, of his knowledge about his job, of his feelings, I think he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Willy’s been on the phone a full ten minutes, longer, I suspect, than the call actually warranted. I’ve turned my attention to the blackboard saved for Relocation meetings, where I chalk that he loves me and draw a large heart around this information.
Willy smiles, and when he finally hangs up, I realize that instead of being embarrassed—like Jay would have been—in his rather braggart-like way he might actually be hoping that someone will see my diagram.
"Donuts?" I ask. He loves donut shops. His mother worked in one before she died.
Willy’s secretary arrives with more letters for signing.
"She so longed for me that she had to stop by and see me again this morning," he tells her.
The secretary rolls her eyes. "Right," she says.
At the Winchell’s Donuts counter, he suddenly lunges for me in front of a middle-aged Mexican woman who is patiently awaiting our decision. His long limbs wrap around my short frame in a comical pose. "You’re not still carrying a torch for this jerk from Idaho, are you?" he says. I laugh, try to pull away—this type of affection was never shown in my family—but Willy is all arms and legs. The clerk enjoys his theatrics immensely.
"She’s an artiste," Willy tells her.
"Oh stop, Willy," I say.
I sneak a look at him studying maple bars and banana eclairs. His family used to have day-old donuts every morning for breakfast. Even when there was trouble, his parents were affectionate, and there was trouble. His father drank too much, trusted people he shouldn’t have. Eventually they had to move to a two-bedroom on the other side of town—all five boys in one room, the parents in the other. Since there was only one bathroom, sometimes they had to go outside. The image of five cupid-like fountains standing in a row in the backyard has stayed with me. "It’s fun to pee outside," Willy has told me.
"Why did you leave him?" he asks once we’re back in the car.
"I’ve told you," I say. "I didn’t. He left."
"Oh." He’s maneuvering the car back to his office. "Why?"
"Oh, Willy. Do we have to talk about this again?" Sometimes I worry I’m as unavailable as Jay was, but Willy is the one who has bought the house, and if some Thursday night he decides it’s not working, I’ll be the one who has to move my new fold-out couch into a Motel 6. Maybe I shouldn’t be seeing Willy at all. Maybe I’m not ready and none of this is fair.
"You had no idea he was going to leave? You weren’t arguing?"
"Who doesn’t sometimes? You’re just afraid I’m going to pull an Anne."
"No, I’m not. I’ll just have lunch with Donna."
"Oh, come on."
"Don’t believe me."
"I don’t."
The doorbell rings, and when I answer it, Jay looks exactly the same: masculine, healthy despite a darkness around the eyes. Gruffly handsome. His paint-spattered tennis shoes and jeans cause me to take a deep breath, like other women must when they see a man in a tuxedo or swim trunks. Is he painting again?
He stands in the living room, stares at a painting I’m not sure I’m finished with. Figures and shapes creep out from the edges of amorphous dark shadows, shadows that used to completely dominate my work. Willy proclaimed in all earnestness after seeing the piece that I ought to have my own show at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.
Jay, on the other hand, who better understands the composition, how I got there, what it means, says not one word. Finally he stops looking and sits, but when I suggest a restaurant, he is on his feet and out the door again in an instant. The fresh air is less close, less intimate. He waits on the porch while I grab my things, helps me with my jacket. He is all roiling outlaw passion, looming physicality, maleness kept under the surface and unknowable by any female.
In the car I point out the house I grew up in after my parents’ divorce and subsequent remarriages. "I hope at least some of your parents are proud of you," he says, referring to my career. He finds multiple mothers and fathers humorous; they confirm all his notions about California.
The restaurant is one that tourists of Del Mar like: At the Poseidon customers sit on an unfinished and sea-worn deck at unfinished and sea-worn tables and benches. Cocky sea gulls glare from unfinished and sea-worn banisters while you eat, and the moment you leave they swoop right onto your table, gulp down your half-eaten hamburger bun. Squirrels eat crab meat practically off your fingertips. When Jay and I used to live near Fenway, we fed the squirrels almost every Saturday. There was one we even named, though I can’t remember what. I took this as a sign of great sensitivity, Jay’s feeding the squirrels.
"I may have this Avo-wich," I tell Jay now.
He guffaws. "I swore to the guys I wouldn’t eat anything with avocados while I was out here." I feel both charmed and repelled by Jay’s boyishness, forever repelled by his buddies.
What dismays me the most, though, is that beyond this boyishness and the paint splatters, I can’t seem to remember what made me stay with him for three years. There must have been more or we wouldn’t be so nervous and polite in this restaurant. I want to feel what I used to feel again, just for a second, to believe that when I say I am in love with someone, even if it doesn’t last, it is something so huge I am speaking of that when contacted years later it will still flicker and give off strange sparks.
"What about one of these quesadillas?" he says, the accent in the wrong place.
How could this man have been capable of breaking my heart?
I was sitting next to him on our couch in Boston the night it happened. He’d just opened a letter announcing he’d won an award for one of his paintings. "Why aren’t you glad?" I said. "Smile. Say something happy." I put my finger on the crook of his mouth, tried to stretch it into the shape of a smile.
"Stop it," he said.
On good nights we opened the gates to the kitchen window, ate quietly, stared out on the alley and windows nearby. Afterwards, he’d put on music, and we’d take opposite corners of the apartment and work. That night he wasn’t interested in dinner, though.
"Can’t we talk about it?" I said after he told me he was leaving.
I stood up. I sat down. I didn’t know where to be. All I could think of was losing his sweetness, his vulnerability, of the bars I’d been able to give up. All I could think of was sitting home by myself night after night like my mother had all those years ago.
I went into the bedroom, dialed my sister. "I go to work every morning," I told her. "I’m nice to him even when he gets on my nerves. Now this. Screw the rules."
My sister laughed. "You sure are taking it well."
Jay walked into the room. "Are you okay?" he said.
"No."
He turned and left. I called my other sister.
From the bedroom I could hear him folding out the hide-a-bed, an act reserved for our worst fights. I crept down the hall and peered at him, finally sat down, the old springs creaking. He was crying, too, but his hand covered my eyes so I wouldn’t see. "Come here," he said.
We lay down. "I keep having this feeling that some horrible thing has happened," I told him, our arms around each other. "Then I think it will be okay because I have you. But then I remember that you’re what the thing is."
"I need to be on my own," he said, turning to the other corner.
Was it my fault he quit painting?
There were the echoey closets leering at me when I went home that Saturday night, vacant spots in the medicine cabinet, blue and green paint flecks on his walls. There were the friends I stayed with whose pets I despised but who were still better than no one, the roommate service that put me in touch with two girls I lived with but couldn’t stand, the therapy, the explanations to friends about why I was coming to the party alone, to relatives about what happened to the nice young man. There were even false reconciliations, nights I should never have made love with Jay, phone calls at one o’clock in the morning. And then finally I could stand to be alone. Finally I had weekends to myself that seemed like peaceful desert islands.
A squirrel nearby steps on my feet underneath our unfinished and sea-worn table, and I think it is not unlike a rat that people have mistakenly decided to think of as cute.
As Jay and I finish our sandwich over airy chat, the waitress leaves our check. "Well, you’ve probably met Mr. Right by now," he says, trying to keep the tone jovial. He glances at me, down at the check, back at me.
Should I be seeing Willy at all if there’s any question about how to respond to this one silly comment? I shrug. "Maybe I have."
Between us is an undefinable black and blue mass: monstrous and frightening, full of contradictions. Finally it’s so overwhelming there’s nothing to be done about it but to turn away.
"Who is it?" Jay asks, hands on the back of his head, elbows jutted out.
"Someone who’s mainly a friend. He’s a good friend."
"Not me, boy," Jay says, now working to keep it light. "I can’t seem to make any kind of a commitment. You know me."
"We’ve been seeing each other about a year," I tell him. "We’re mostly friends."
And then, seeing his eyes lurking on the table, what I loved does come back to me: his muddled sweetness and bravado, his easily hurt feelings, the sincerity that let him be so engrossed in his work he wouldn’t even know I was there. Part of me wants to reach for and comfort him.
His hand on the check, Jay says, "I’ll take care of it."
"We can split it."
But then he waves money at the waitress, dismissing me and, I can’t help thinking, this lunch in San Diego. I imagine standing up and yelling: Take me home right now! He has no right to still be so attractive, so perplexing, so dismissive.
"I never realized you lived in such a rural area," he says on the scenic route I take back to my apartment.
What did he ever really know about me when we lived in Boston? What did I know about him?
He uses the bathroom in my apartment, then says he has to leave. Is that what love is, somebody constantly preparing to leave, like my father did, somebody who keeps his passion in check, just out of your grasp, who keeps reminding you how much you care, even though you don’t want to?
We hug each other, if you want to call it that: our bodies and cheeks hardly touch. He has driven six hours for an hour and a half lunch. Like with his painting, Jay seems to have gotten stuck somewhere. Even though he came up with those wild colors, those outrageous strokes, he himself never understood that that was what was interesting. And I have finally started exploring those murky shapes emerging from the dark corners in my work, bringing them to the center, working them out until they mean something.
* * *
When I see Willy, his face is flushed and excited, making his hair seem even redder than usual. We’re in an old divey bar, Ralph and Eddie’s, which has a card-playing room attached. We just wanted a drink, nothing fancy. "How was your date?" he asks.
"I’m moving to Idaho tomorrow." I try to tease, but the whole thing falls flat.
He shrugs. "Donna canceled."
"And I suppose Darlene’s in your bedroom now?"
"Nope."
I stare at him across the table, and suddenly it dawns on me that this isn’t a game. "You mean Donna really was in town?"
Now he teeters back on his chair legs, smiles a bit. "She called and said she was coming over last night."
"She’s very direct."
"I told her we’d only talk, but she thought it fitting that I sneak around on you like she has on her husband all these years."
"A sense of humor."
"Then she called and canceled."
He wants to beam at me from across the table, to glow with the fact that other women are still hot after him, but it’s not working.
"What was it you really talked about?" Willy says.
"Nothing," I tell him.
He perceives this as mysterious, would like me to babble on, but I can’t come up with a way to better outline the nothing that Jay and I spoke.
I realize, as I sit in the dingy bar at a stool beside Willy and listen to Danny and the Dogs, a raucous but not-so-bad band, how like this bar those others were I used to sit in, how like these men those others were I used to call boyfriends, how I used to believe I could find one who would love me so much it would erase the pain of my family falling apart, my father leaving, our not somehow miraculously coming back together and caring about each other again.
"What’s the matter?" Willy shouts over the music. And then he smiles. Willy’s heart is like a fire on a cold winter night: it flames and encompasses you at its peak, calls you to its side when it needs attention. It is a heart unlike Jay’s, which cannot be depended on for warmth but that smolders and has to be prodded to understand if it is even going. What I worry about when comparing the two is whether this means Jay’s heart is deeper, whether it means that what Willy and I feel for each other is somehow not as profound. I like to think that just because Jay could make me feel awful doesn’t mean he could make me feel more.
"Don’t all the exes bother you?" I ask Willy. And then I’m annoyed to realize that I’m going to cry right in the middle of Ralph and Eddie’s.
"Come here," Willy says. He’s not annoyed though. That’s the thing about Willy.
"I’m not really crying about Jay."
"Yes, you are."
Fortunately this kind of episode is not unusual in Ralph and Eddie’s. Willy holds me because he doesn’t like it when I’m unhappy, but I can see he’s not exactly crazy that this is about another man.
"I just don’t get it," I tell him, wiping my face with a cocktail napkin that has riddles on one side, the answers on the other, "how you can be with someone for three years and then have a lunch that’s like an appointment."
"The guy’s a jerk," Willy says, stroking my hair.
"I’d like to live with you, but what if it happens all over again?"
He leans toward me, kisses me below the ear, says he’s not going to leave me.
But I’ve heard that one before. "I think we should stop seeing each other for a while," I tell him. I cry silently into my hands while he drives me home.
My life takes on a quiet routine: I’ve asked Willy not to call or contact me in any way, so now in the morning I get up and do graphic art, and in the afternoon I paint. Impressions emerging from under the darkness begin to take on human qualities, though I’m more interested in capturing the essence of each figure—what we don’t let others see—than I am in literal detail. In the evening I pay bills and watch the news. It’s a nice routine, calm, peaceful.
What if I hadn’t really loved Willy? What if he’d woken up one morning and realized he’d never meant to get in this deep? I’ll be glad I made him stop and think before it was too late.
I visit my sister in L.A., go to movies alone, have lunch with a guy from my building whom I’ve bumped into at the mailbox bank. Our conversation is so easy that it seems right—we talk about how busy the freeways are getting, the new mayor, why whales have been dying off the coast of Baja. Only I don’t think about him later, I don’t wonder about him, I don’t care.
I receive a postcard from Boston. Jay says he was happy, sad, jealous, relieved, sentimental, etc. to see me. I want to cut these adjectives out of the postcard, put them in an envelope, send them back to him. How easy to throw them at me now on a piece of cardboard from a thousand miles away. How cowardly not to say anything when we had lunch, not to mention when we lived together. But when I think about it now I have to admit that I didn't say anything either. I didn’t question what we didn’t talk about when we were together. I didn’t tell him over lunch how I missed him for so long afterward, ask whether he was happy now.
It’s here, curled up on the sofa in my studio apartment at 10:00 p.m. that night—mulling over the postcard in my hand and staring blankly at the television newscaster’s perfect hair, her perfect blue suit, ten perfect nails a half an inch long each—when it strikes me that maybe I should be thanking Jay for forcing me to know I’m okay alone, for teaching me not make the same mistake he did.
I pick up the phone and dial. I don’t hang up when I hear Willy’s voice but tell him, "I long to see you."
"Long?" Willy seems as surprised as I that I’m calling this late but makes a quick recovery. "Well, then come over. She’s out!"
We've learned that Mrs. Beebush has a lot of friends in the neighborhood, that unlike my mother she seems to have been just fine on her own all these years.
I unravel myself from my solitary cocoon, pack clothes for work, head out to my car even though the highway scares me at this time of night—the endless black ribbon looming out ahead, disappearing into a blurry haze, too far away to see.
When Willy and I step inside the new house, it is as though we are breaking and entering a world we haven’t known before. A fiery glow of hope radiates from Willy as he paces around the house. There’s an alcove by the dining area, perfect for a piano. The alcove, the dining area—all this is Willy’s. The warm apricot carpet running through the empty rooms is Willy’s too. We have no idea about the lives that were lived here before, the tragedies and moments of triumph, whether the widow Beebush, in her younger days, may have made love before the hearth on an otherwise chilly night. But there is a doorbell, a rusty hummingbird feeder that you could gaze at in moments of reflection, a den just perfect for painting—where you could sleep if you were mad at the person in the bedroom.
"You could take this clothesline down now if you wanted to," I call outside to Willy, even though it’s eleven-thirty at night and he’s busy across the yard, peeing in his new hibiscus. "The clothesline’s all yours," I call.
"Ours," he says.
We can’t really stand to look at each other after he says this, so I lock the back door. "You need a dishwasher," I tell him when he finally gets in through the front door.
"I have one," he says. "She’s five foot four."
"That’s disgusting," I say, but then he pins me on the floor in a schoolboy press, howls with laughter. I can’t help laughing a little too, even though this, too, is disgusting, and then I threaten, as I have often since we’ve known each other, to go home.
"Stop hitting yourself, sweetheart," he says. My hand, manipulated by his, beats against my chest.
I watch from the bedroom as Willy rustles through the house, the long inseams of his Levis brushing his strides, his mismatched socks padding the floor. He leans in to see whether I’m okay in the blankets we’ve arranged for the two of us, then returns to the other room and touches the curtains for the first time, tries window locks, jiggles the front door knob. He pads back and forth around the house, touching this, closing that, and when he finally settles in beside me, a pocket of heat develops between us making it warm enough to sleep the whole night through.
Bonnie ZoBell won a 1995 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and another
of her stories won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and was later read on National Public
Radio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review,
The Bellingham Review, and Gulf Stream Magazine. She has attended
the graduate writing workshop at Columbia University on fellowship, and teaches at Mesa
College in San Diego, CA, and is finishing her first novel.
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