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  He’s rather serious, she told a friend. Of course he has to be a bit serious, because he is studying theology. He speaks Hebrew and some Aramaic and is studying the Psalms . . . but he’s funny, and not too serious, really, and you wouldn’t know from meeting him that he’s going to be a man of the cloth.

  He’s funny, she told another friend. He’s lighthearted, with this nasal twang of a voice that somehow gets to me, you know, and he can turn phrases and do things that get inside me and make me feel alive.

  The shame she felt came from the truth: she had been fucked and was fucking. The carnality of the affair was brutal and the main point. She wore the skirt again, electrified by the dry winter air, and let the static build as she walked along his street.

  When you argue about your own story, she explained, well, that’s the end of things. As soon as we started to argue about our story, things fell apart for us.

  When they tried to get God in, when he mentioned the idea of God nudging them together, the narrative, she would later think, immediately became banal and meek, rooted in the world. It was near the end. On a clear spring day the promenade urged them south. Beneath the wall that ran along Riverside Drive a man lay asleep on an old, splintered bench, his fat belly spilling from green work pants, a newspaper folded over his face. On the next bench sat another man wearing thick headphones, moving his head placidly in small rotations, as if working out an eternal kink in his neck. There was something unsettling about his deep absorption in music that could not be heard and that would never be heard.

  They went down toward the river, cutting off the promenade along a thin dusty path through the weeds. He let her go a few yards ahead so he could watch her hips shifting beneath her skirt, the movement of her rear against the silk fabric, light- and dark-blue daisy-shaped flowers. There was that helplessness in her movement—from her pumps on the unsteady ground—that he enjoyed, a sense that she might tumble at any moment, and she did, twisting sideways to the right with a small grunt, and falling into the weeds.

  The bone was broken—a spiral fracture—just above her ankle. With her arm around his shoulder, and his arm around hers, they hobbled up the path, along the promenade, to Riverside Drive, where they hailed a cab and went all the way up to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

  In his apartment—cool with blue twilight—she lay on his bed while he ran his fingers along the soft cotton gauze, against the fiberglass, that spot where the two met. He’d remember that forever. His finger going up and in against the warmth of her foot, slipping as far as it would go.

  On the way to the car, I was stepping off the curb and twisted it and the bone bore the brunt, she explained to her husband. I got a cab to this hospital and then went back to get my bag from the car. The story felt frail and feeble, like old lace; it had the gaping open spaces you’d expect, although it was made carefully, with consideration of all the angles. He chose to believe it. He let his compassion—his duty as a good husband—slip like mortar between the cracks. Much later he’d examine his foolishness and think: I was as complicit as she was in that story, driving in to pick her up, finding her standing up, leaning against the car.

  A fetid, oily smell emerged from beneath the cast: sweat, dead skin, and dirt. Afternoons, she lay on a divan in the back room and read Tolstoy.

  The way bone heals, calcifying and thickening and becoming stronger. The knob of new bone you can feel against the skin. The elation of the cast being removed, the saw touching the skin but not cutting, the sudden sensation of freedom.

  Summer was deep and warm. Behind them the office building, with its reflective glass, collected and cubed the vista. The great terminus of parting; the deep, elegiac tragedy of it. The upstate reservoirs had been depleted by the heat wave, their dirty skirts powdered with dried algae and muck. Spray caps were attached to the fireplugs, unleashing thin, tight streams, until the kids removed the caps with lug wrenches. The dry silence of a late Friday in early July. Broadway, visible from the corner, was strangely empty.

  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 prev
ent 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

  Full S.H.C. events leave nothing but a very faint trace of ash and a shadow of the deceased, if even that, and in rare cases a lamina of glass coating the object upon which the victim (for lack of a better way to put it) stood, sat, or reclined. Most often the victim is seated with some view or vista at hand: a lakeside or seashore or the broad expanse of some grand river, and in rare cases a wide field, or a savanna, and in even rarer cases no view at all except a television screen, in which instance the device is invariably implicated as the cause—or spark—of the event: blame placed willy-nilly, in the grope for an explanation, squarely on the shoulders of the boob tube (as it was called) and its ability to create flashes of stupid heat, produced out of the dull vagaries of mind-numb sitting when—the theory goes—all deep thoughts are purged to leave a void that is quickly filled with a flux of bodily processes: regiments of cells rebelling against a vegetative state and going haywire as they break into a symbiotic self-eating festival. A somewhat absurd reaction, admittedly, but perhaps justified, depending on the view.

  Udall’s Natural Hair Ointment

  McGee had steely gray hair combed neatly back and held to his scalp with a lacquer of Udall’s Natural Hair Ointment, vintage 1945, of which there were large quantities found in the cottage medicine cabinet and under the bathroom sink, sixty bottles in all, which led to one early theory that some of this tonic had saturated his skin and, in turn, his cell walls, and somehow, when he lit a cigarette (another key bit of evidence: a soft pack of Winstons, half gone, and a box of kitchen matches on the windowsill), sparked a violent combustion.

  Before he fell into the bottle in a big way, McGee had been obsessive about his bodily care, although he had shunned modern products such as deodorant sticks for his own methods: that is, sprinkling his armpits with bay rum. In general, he was a man of outmoded customs: toothpicks for tooth cleaning; links to secure the cuffs; bandanas, and later fine linen handkerchiefs, folded neatly into the front pocket and occasionally taken out for a good, loud nose blow. McGee was a virtuosic nose blower, and his colleagues from his early days at the mill, those still alive, say he blew loud enough to be heard over the roar of the press drums and even the final rollers. One dubious theory has it that intense pressure in the nasal cavities can somehow induce spontaneous combustion.

  The American Dream

  Back when he was the head of Mear Paper, a firm that produced more wire-bound notebooks, check pads, carbon backing sheets, lined and unlined twenty-pound bond than any mill west of Maine, he used to say: It ain’t nothing to making goddamn paper. Find a few trees, chop ’em down, mash ’em up, add water. In just a few years he went from general mill hand to welder, to electrician, to manager, to owner and president.

  Eventually, the large pond that settled to the west of the main plant and the plume of dioxins that leached into the aquifer were blamed for the cancer cluster that stretched in a tongue shape from Drake Street—old row housing originally built when the wax paper facility was erected in the early forties—to the end of Crane Avenue, where it ended abruptly at the location of McGee’s elegant Queen Anne–style home. His fall seemed mythic to those who saw him in his later years, dressed in his old mill overalls, stained black along the hip where his tool belt had worn a greasy spot, staggering outside of Hawks near the railroad station. Hawks, your bottom-end drunk bar and hobo hangout set as close to the double set of tracks—Chicago–Detroit, Detroit–Chicago—as it could get; Hawks, not much more than a tar paper shack with the obligatory single neon sign in the window, a pale pink outline of a cocktail glass sputtering epileptically.

  The War in Vietnam

  As one theory goes: McGee was fascinated by the protest immolation of monks in Vietnam, and had once been overheard saying he could understand the notions that get behind a man when he douses himself with gas to make a point. Inside his mill locker—kept as a gesture of solidarity with his employees—he had taped a magazine photo of Thich Quang Duc being consumed by flames. He studied it occasionally and marveled at the discipline of the monk in relation to the hungry disorder of the fire itself.

  He talked sometimes of napalm: In retrospect it seems fit, to those who speculate on the cause of his S.H.C., to note that his son, Haze, was killed by the arrant use of this weapon/product in that war, a fact laying a bit of credence to the theory that McGee’s combustion was a sympathetic reaction, albeit delayed a few decades, to the news delivered by a soldier one May morning to the Queen Anne house on Crane Avenue. It is not inconceivable—to those who have endured the same kind of grief—that a man, on a hot summer night, reminiscing about his son, would draw up the deep pain of that loss much the way the wick (see “Wick Theory,” below) supposedly draws the melted fat, and in doing so might himself become overheated with the fires of melancholy and explode into sorrow-fueled flames.

  Gloria

  Some say McGee had a lover, a Chicago showgirl/call girl named Gloria who with his help came up on the New York Central and settled into the Delvic Hotel downtown. His old friend Marlin Duke recalls hearing him mumble something about his love flame, or having to attend to his love flame.

  Perhaps in the white heat of memory, conjuring up the smooth skin of her forearms, the glossy smooth plain of flesh at the base of her spine, the husky elocutions of her smoky voice, or more specifically the way she had stood amid the long, slanting sun shafts in Union Station one fall afternoon, clutching her bag, reaching to adjust the pin that secured her pillbox hat, McGee had simply drawn too deeply from the well of memory that evening at the lake, sucked it all eagerly back, so that it stood in a stasis between his body and mind, in that delicate tissue, where it had congealed and fermented into a single spark bright and hot enough to ignite that final, albeit limited, inferno.

  The Great Depression

  Temperance workers attributed S.H.C. to drink and found a neat way to attach their moral/political agenda to the phenomenon by saying: That’s where the drunk burned, lost to the sins of corn whiskey, hard cider, boot brandy, bourbon, and ripple, until his body—mercy be to the Lord our host—absorbed too much of the distillate and burst forth in a fire of Judgment. Up and down the Dust Bowl countryside, at the bottoms of hopper cars, in the corners of empty reefers you’d find them, bleached white, skulls and feet, the relics of the Lord’s Judgment left to remind the living of the necessity for Temperance.

  Wick Theory

  In one controlled experiment a sedated pig was wound in cotton gauze—wrapped tight, swaddled like a newborn—and then set ablaze to prove the “wick effect.” The theory: The fire, fed by the bubbling fat as flames wicked through the cotton, would sustain itself in a concentrated form until the fat and bones were carbonized and the cotton itself burned away and only the head, falling from the flames, would be left with the proverbial pile of ash and some smoke stains on the laboratory ventilation bib. Throughout the experiment, the subject’s snout moved up and down, softly nodding.

  Early Flame Experience

  Through the smoked goggles the flame looked tight and made small, lip-smacking twists as it touched the metal and then blew out the spark bloom. At an early age, McGee proved himself a brilliant welder and could draw a clean, neat line that tapered out to a beadless end. His relationship with fires in general and flames in particular was a good one, his coworkers said; and after he went to electricians’ school in Detroit, he returned to the mill with a deep understanding of spark formation and an assured intuition that allowed him to tinker in high-voltage boxes without shutting the power. It was said he could grab one of the giant fuses barehanded and yank it without a flinch. How these facts connect with the overall mystery of his end remains unclear, although it is often said that beneath
any mystery lies another, even deeper one, and some speculate that his abilities around electrical forces and, in turn, the fires they could or might create were connected to the fact that on that summer night, alone in his cottage, he found some neat and tidy final arrangement with the demise he had avoided so easily at a time when his life was moving with such vigor and ease into an ascendancy. So it seems natural to some that all of the avoided fires—the curse of any electrician—would finally come back to haunt him in one singular burst, and in so doing provide his decline with a terminal end.

  Family

  First the divorce from his wife, Angel, after she discovered he was hiding his lover at the Delvic; then the death of his son in the war; and then a few years later, the automobile accident that took his daughter, Grace, on a road north of Gary, Indiana.

  The Lake & Cottage

  On the evening of his death the water was serene and flat and unusually glossy as dusk hung over the lake. The failing daylight lent it an unusual copper color, so that from his vantage, on the porch, he watched while all that remained of the day poured itself out into the water and then was sucked into an obsidian form surrounded by the silhouettes of trees and, above those, a blue-black sky with stars peeking through—all this on an evening when the first hints of fall entered the air. (No one can say exactly why, but it seems important that it was a mild evening, not too hot, not too cold, and that the fire that consumed him could not be attributed, say, to one of the long hot spells that plagued the state with blazes that summer.) His cottage had degenerated from pristine, freshly painted each year, to shabby and run-down, with scales of lead flakes coming off the clapboards and a rank odor emerging from beneath the porch. The pavestones on the steps down to the beach had crumbled like blue cheese, and the dock, left out to freeze in the ice over the years, lurched vulgarly to one side.