The Burning House. Paul Lisicky
timing,” I said. “What if you hadn’t come by? Shit.”
We watched Red moving down the street, his walk deliberate and henny. Buck, buck, buck, buck, buck, said the walk.
“You’re not naked,” Craig said, rubbing his shaved chin.
I pictured the corners of my smile held up with pushpins. I asked him what he was talking about.
“You,” he said, “you always have your shirt off. Every time I run into you. I’m surprised you even have any clothes in your closet. Do you have clothes in your closet?”
“Is that right?” I felt my expression changing, though I tried to remember the old trick: keep it stony, keep it plain.
“And you’re not singing something. Aren’t you always singing a little tune?”
“I don’t sing.”
“As if you don’t sing.”
“What do I sing?”
“What are you usually singing? ‘Born to Run.’ Yeah,” he said, pleased with his ability to make connections. “That’s it.”
I tried to reach for something witty, but I came up short. I’d never sung “Born to Run” in my life. At once, I felt that rude, rash desire to get away fast and quick. The deadly effect of standing in the presence of an authority figure whom I was expected to suck up to but couldn’t without seeming false, or looking like some totally extinct bird.
We started talking—Laura, Joan, my truck accident, everything you’d imagine. But my mind kept going back to his assessments of me. He hadn’t been making fun—I’d have been taking myself too seriously if I’d thought he’d been making fun. But I felt a little crazed. Who wanted to be told that he’d lost the ability to surprise and change, that he’d finally become himself: a man whose two coordinates were his body and his singing? Even as he’d been standing up for me, I knew he saw me as someone who’d never lived up to his potential, an aimless joeboy who’d leave the world without a mark or a stain. Maybe it was all about the effects of that face on me, a face with such magnetizing power that it could pulverize steel, draw water from stone. It said: I’m embedded in the world, while you’re only halfway here. A woman would take me over you any day, and isn’t it a sign of the brute injustice of this world that you were born yourself and not me? In another situation I might have laughed aloud at the absurdity of it, but what if he was right? What if I was already dead and was the last to find out? What if I wasn’t fully present enough in my life to give myself memories? No connections made, no ability to sustain a conversation: a phantom, a walking ghost, a Frankenstein monster.
And what about the women I’d loved? What had I given them?
I looked up. I imagined a trash fire inside the corners of an unfinished room until the house was charred.
“I need a job.” And it came out with such desperation that I turned my face away. Hot tears roiled in the base of my throat.
Then Craig put his arm around my shoulder and smiled with characteristic concern, as if our rightful places in the grand scheme of things had been assumed.
“I was waiting for you to ask.”
But I hadn’t always been a member of the walking wounded. Once the world had been brighter and alive, rich with incident:
1982. I’m making my way to my high school algebra classroom. A crowd gathers outside the doors of the auditorium. Mrs. Muscufo tries to break it up. Voices are raised, but only a few do as they’re told. I’m fourteen. I should keep going—isn’t it about time for a pop quiz? Instead, I stand on my toes, flex my calves until they’re stopped up with blood. Everyone is tall: eager and greedy and ruthless. There’s a sour smell of hot woolens. Why am I here? I can’t tell you that. Instinctively, I hate crowds and anything that draws crowds: sports, tournaments. Send me to the outfield, and watch me drop the ball from my mitt, screwing it up for my team. And yet I can’t tear myself away. I’m losing precious minutes as my algebra teacher is most likely handing out the pop quiz.
In seconds, I work my way to the front of the crowd so that I’m standing inside the dark vault of the auditorium. The stage itself is drenched with red-gold light. I’m still small; this is years before my arms thickened. There’s a piano player hunched over the baby grand. And on the stage, a voice so large that it destroys the girl who’s singing. Her body doesn’t so much matter anymore: the voice is somehow greater than the body. If the room had been any smaller, I wouldn’t have been able to stand it. Too private, too intimate. But she might as well be handing me a chain, pulling me up the side of the highest mountain, link by gorgeous link.
Uptown, going down, old lifeline ...
The song punishes as much as it feeds. It comes apart in pieces just as soon as I can pick out a pattern. I’m not sure I even like the song, but that’s not exactly the point. It’s as if I haven’t even known my skin before; it feels stranger, yet more beautiful. I’d always thought my body was mine alone: small and wholly mine and expendable: who would have known that it was a part of something else? I glance back at those who stand behind me. There’s Tom Pomeroy, there’s Jose O’Neill. Though they’re concentrating, they’re not as radically changed as I. On a pure animal level, they only know the voice is something they have a duty to hear. God wants it from them, though they wouldn’t call it God.
She finishes. I want to get away before she starts the next number, because I know she’ll never sound like that again, and I need to preserve it, like something I’d keep in a jar. But I’m wedged in between two people; I can’t move without stepping on feet. Someone turns, and then I see her between two heads. She isn’t radiant or extraordinary anymore, but she’s one of us, a senior. Someone I’ve seen walking up and down these halls. There’s nothing remarkable about her, nothing to write home about her rounded shoulders, her deep-black bank of hair, her height. But her singing tells me something different: she’s an old soul, older than anyone I’ve ever known, including my grandfather.
Walking down faster, walking with the master of time ...
Life could still change: that’s what her singing told me. She came at a moment when she was exactly what I needed. It wasn’t like those were the worst of times. My father hadn’t died yet; nor Uncle Moishe or my cousin Danny. Or none of the friends that were to come later. But listening to that bright big sound, I could tell that my life wasn’t going to be the neat, predictable shape I’d already pictured. There was no way out of it. The years ahead were going to be hard, harder than I had it in me to imagine. And yet the news didn’t make me want to run or curl into myself. Though it took me a year and a half to speak to her, I already knew that we’d share the same house and bed one day. I saw us sitting across from each other in our kitchen, a warm, yellow sun streaming through a part in the curtains, lighting up the table.
The fact of that gave me comfort, and I walked on to algebra, where the teacher, Mrs. Voorhees, didn’t seem to care that I was late, and flashed, somewhere beneath the sternness, a look of approval.
CHAPTER 3
I have a job.
I said it to the pitch pines, the violets, and the gravel, though no one was there to hear it. I jogged past the shopping center, the marina, the boats with their pulleys and eyelets. I was telling Laura, Joan—anybody, in my head—that Craig Luckland would see to it that Ferris would take me on as a property manager: one of those guys who checked up on houses while their owners were away. Of course Joan would say, “You’re going to work for Ferris? You can’t stand Ferris.” And she’d be right. Not that I couldn’t stand him, but one minute you were his best pal, and the next he’d walk right past you as if he couldn’t be bothered. At least a hello, buddy. And is it my fault that you walk through the world like an old man, or at least an old man before his time? But things would