Chemistry of Fire Read online

  At some point I addressed her as “Mrs. Newman,” which was how she had first introduced herself to me at TriQuarterly.

  “Don’t make me feel old,” she said. “Call me Ibi.”

  Ibi and I drank vodka in front of a snapping fire, listening to Simon and Garfunkel. Her favorite song was “Cecilia,” and she played it over and over, turning it up louder and louder as she drank, while the wind cried in the flue. She had made a peppery Hungarian goulash, and we ate it at the great polished dining table, which was set with candles, silver, and crystal goblets of expensive wine, of which Charlie had a cellar full.

  To say that this was all completely new to me is a vast understatement. I had never eaten at a table set with silver or tasted a good wine. I remember the name Château Margaux on the label. I was not used to drinking vodka, certainly, and was far past drunk before we even got to the wine. But the alcohol had the effect of quieting my anxiety and any gut feelings that might have warned me about the peril I was in. In fact, I felt as if I’d somehow been transported to the palace of a princess in a fairy tale. After dinner, we lay on a silk Sarouk and sipped cognac in front of the fireplace. She rolled over and kissed me on the mouth and put her hand in my hair. I put my arm around her and pulled her to me, but she put her finger to my lips and said, “No. Not yet. I want to show you something.” She stood unsteadily. I watched her weave a bit in place and then launch across the room toward a flame maple secretary. She opened it and drew something out. When she turned back to me, I saw that she held a silver revolver with a white handle. First I wondered if it was real. Then as she began to move toward me, I vaguely wondered if she planned to shoot me with it. But she managed to cross to where I lay propped on my elbow, and she collapsed to a cross-legged position on the floor, knees spread, as they had been that first night in the TriQuarterly office. She lifted the little pistol in her open palm and showed it to me. Charlie had given it to her, she said. She added that she planned to kill herself with it. The concept did not really register. Having come up through my own teenage fantasy world of Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan and Sylvia Plath, such a thing as suicide wasn’t real to me. I’d never known anyone who’d committed suicide. It fell somewhere into the dim and misty space where such pursuits as war and polar exploration existed, far away and misunderstood. I thought perhaps we’d both do it. Wouldn’t that be romantic?

  Late that night I opened the front door to go home and found that the snow was blowing sideways across the lawns, the street a foot deep in it. Ibi pulled me back inside. She said, “You had better to stay.” I learned that she and Charlie no longer slept in the same room. He slept in the big master bedroom with the dog. She slept in an unadorned room down the hall. It looked like a cell in a convent. A single bed took up half the floor space. Nothing hung on the walls.

  I began visiting Ibi at every opportunity. When Charlie was in town, she would come to my apartment. I gave her a framed drawing by a friend of mine who was an artist. In quick and simple strokes, it depicted a man and woman lying together, holding each other. Ibi hung it above the twin bed in her cell. When she drank, she would speak endearments to me in German. She would unleash her ponytail so that her hair cascaded down her shoulders, and she’d rest her face against my chest, and sometimes she would weep. Her hands reminded me of Rodin’s Eve. She called me Adonis. She drove home drunk in her Chevy convertible. It’s a wonder she didn’t get killed.

  Late one night she had me design the urn in which she wanted her ashes to be buried. It was a kind of Chinese dragon carved out of wood with a lid that would allow her ashes to be put into the belly of the beast. I still have the drawing. The urn was never made.

  Charlie’s parents had given him their season tickets to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, but he never went. Ibi took me to Carmen. I had never seen an opera before. We sat in one of the front rows, she in her jewels and fur, I in a cheap suit that my mother had bought me when I was still in high school. We had cocktails afterward at the Bow-’n-Arrow, an old art deco bar with a western theme. When I met her, I was twenty-three and she was thirty-two. But her sophistication and accent and demeanor made her seem far older.

  That summer, Ibi insisted that I go with her and Charlie to his parents’ country place in Michigan. I felt a thrill of alarm that whispered: Don’t go, don’t go! I asked her where it was. She smiled and ducked her head in that way she had, that vulnerable way that she showed me when she wasn’t being fierce, when she wanted something. She shrugged and answered in German: “Wo sich die Füchse gute Nacht sagen.” Where the foxes say good night. She meant that it was out in the sticks somewhere. She didn’t know where. She didn’t care. Life had been carrying her here and there, willy-nilly, for years, and it was just one more place. When I hesitated about going, she turned fierce again and whispered to me, “I don’t want to be alone with him out there.” I felt the delicious fear sizzle through me once more. And I have to admit: the fear of her attracted me. And through the signals she was sending me in the stream, I knew that she needed to be rescued. Just like my mother. The stream. We are constantly and unconsciously taking information from the environment and from other creatures, a torrent of cues and signals that may not rise to the level of consciousness but that nevertheless register like love at first sight.

  We took the ferry across Lake Michigan on a clear summer night and sat out under the stars drinking vodka out of Charlie’s silver flask as the diesel engines sent a low strumming note through the steel hull of the ship. Matias ran around pestering people and then shat on the deck. Charlie scooped it up with the paper plate from which he’d eaten his dinner and tossed it overboard. We watched as the wind blew it back onto the lower deck. Screams from below.

  3 BALLERINA WITH A GUN

  Two houses nestled in the woods, one where Charlie’s parents lived, down by the shore of Walloon Lake, and an A-frame where we stayed, concealed in the trees up the hill. Charlie made sure I knew that this was the same lake where Ernest Hemingway’s family had owned a house. Windemere, as it was called, had recently been declared a National Historic Landmark. Hemingway had put the cottage in several of his short stories.

  We got settled in the A-frame and then walked down to have cocktails and dinner with Charlie’s parents. As we descended the hill through the forest, Charlie charged ahead, and Ibi pulled me aside. “You must move more slowly around Charlie’s parents,” she said. When I asked her why, she said, “Because rich people move more slowly.” She was trying to tame the savage she had brought into her palace and to calm my Tourettic nervousness. (I had so many tics at that time that one cruel and cackling in-law nicknamed me Blinky.)

  Charlie’s parents, Joan and Charles, Sr., seemed pleasant enough, if somewhat boring. He had been the chief counsel for the Chicago Tribune in its heyday, but by then he was old and feeble. It was clear that the elder Newmans resented Ibi and thought her beneath their son. She was a refugee. Her English was not good. And they thought she lacked sophistication. The opposite of my view.

  The cocktail hour dragged on for nearly two hours as Charlie and his father talked about the ski boat that lay murmuring against its rubber bumpers down at the dock. Charles, Sr., couldn’t drive it any longer. It was for the kids. They spoke of the stock market and of Charlie’s expected novel, The Promisekeeper, and of the Chicago Cubs, who had come in second in the National League East the previous year, 1969. Billy Williams had ninety-five runs batted in and twenty-one home runs for a batting average of .293.

  When Charlie’s mother made an effort at conversation with Ibi and asked about her dance studio, Ibi answered with as few words as possible. Things had not been going well at the ballet school.

  The Newmans served wine with dinner and Armagnac afterward. Although we were already drunk, we stumbled back to the A-frame for a nightcap. It could get cold up there, even in the summer, so Charlie lit a fire. We sat in the living room, drinking by the fireplace. He flipped through an old New Yorker and said nothing, chewing on a dea
d cigar.

  “Where’s Ibi?” I asked.

  “What?” He looked up, the round lenses of his eyeglasses flashing in their wire frames.

  “Ibi. I haven’t seen her in a while.” He shrugged. “I’ll go look,” I said.

  The main room was upstairs. I went downstairs to their bedroom, which had sliding glass doors that opened onto the wooded hillside. It looked as if someone had ransacked the room. The contents of their suitcases spilled out onto the bed and the floor. Ibi was not there. I slid open the door and walked out among the trees and into the cool night. I called Ibi’s name, and the crickets that had been singing stopped all at once. Through the scent of pines, I caught the smell of her perfume, an aroma that I would never forget. L’Air du Temps.

  I moved deeper into the forest and found her leaning against a tree. She didn’t look at me at first. Her hair fell across her face. Then she moved her hand from behind her back, and I saw that she held the same pearl-handled .32-caliber revolver that she had shown me at her house. I snatched it from her. She raised her chin and met my eyes.

  “What the hell is that thing doing here?” I asked.

  Her hair was down. Her eyes were red and wild. “Charlie gave it to me. I brought it.” She was slurring her words.

  I unloaded it, putting the cartridges in my pocket and snapping the cylinder shut.

  She laughed wickedly. “I can get more. You can’t stop me.”

  I took her hand and led her through the woods and back into the bedroom. “Go to bed,” I ordered. She smiled at me, a surly, knowing smile. I picked her up in my arms like a baby. She seemed much smaller when she was drunk. I carried her to the bed and covered her with a blanket. She didn’t resist. It was cold in the room without a fire. I closed and locked the sliding doors and tried not to think of Charlie coming down there drunk and sleeping with her.

  I climbed the stairs and laid the gun and cartridges on the table in front of him. “You gave that to her?” I asked. He just looked at me with a hangdog expression. “Hide it, will you?” And then I went to bed in the loft above. There we were, three lost souls in a cabin in the woods, helpless to understand what we were moving toward with our inexorable momentum. No one there to rescue us.

  4 KINDRED SPIRITS

  I was badly shaken by the incident with the pistol, and the voice of alarm had grown louder, even as the distorted inspiration of my unconscious tried to pull me back into her orbit. I kept hearing: She’s just like you. But I had seen too much in the woods of Michigan. At home, I began pulling away from Ibi.

  As summer turned to fall, Ibi had been calling me repeatedly, wanting to come to my apartment, and a tone of desperation had crept into her voice. I had no idea what to do. I was by then writing for a real magazine, and I felt relief when several assignments took me out of town. I didn’t have to make excuses to Ibi about why I couldn’t see her. Anyway, I had grown closer to Carolyn by that time. We had met in the English department the year before. She was arguably the prettiest girl on campus, but she was also not married, my age, and working on her PhD in English, so we were able to spend hours talking about literature. Moreover, she seemed wonderfully stable compared to Ibi. There were no guns, no sneaking around, no dramatic rescues.

  I saw Ibi for the last time on an icy winter’s day. I was walking along one of the main streets in town, crossing an intersection, as she came barreling down the road in her ivory and sky-blue two-tone 1965 Chevrolet Impala convertible. She had the top down, and the wind blew her hair around. She wore big sunglasses, and a yellow scarf flew out behind her as she lifted her right hand high in ceremonial greeting. She did not slow as she made the corner, and I stepped back and caught her wake as she roared down the lane. L’Air du Temps.

  I drove Carolyn around in Eileen’s sports car. Eileen had been my girlfriend for a couple of years but had warned me that we couldn’t get serious, because I wasn’t Jewish. Then when I met Carolyn, Eileen lent me her red Volvo P1800 roadster and urged me to pursue the tall, thin twenty-two-year-old with the straight and gleaming reddish-brown hair—long hair, long waist, long legs—and green eyes that fixed me in my finitude. She was writing her dissertation on food in Dickens. We talked about literature and food and politics late into the night. I wrote poems for her, and—better still—she saw them published in literary magazines. We were dazzled by life. We were beautiful. We were immortal. We were the perfect match of abused children recognizing each other in the stream.

  I had rented a large apartment in a bad neighborhood not far from the lake. The living room was the size of a squash court and had ill-fitting casement windows, nearly floor to ceiling, that opened onto a view of a courtyard lawn and the sunset. But the landlord was stingy with the heat, and in the winter the wind screamed down from Canada over nearly four hundred miles of open pancake ice on Lake Michigan and right into my bedroom.

  It was six o’clock in the morning, sometime in January of 1971. I would normally have been up already writing, but Carolyn and I were deep in sleep under a pile of Indian blankets. The phone was ringing. It was an old-fashioned Bell telephone with a rotary dial and a Western Electric double brass bell that sounded as if it belonged in a firehouse. I turned over and tried to ignore it. In those days, we had no answering machines, no voice mail. I may have gone back to sleep, but the phone kept ringing. At length, I gave up and bolted from the bed.

  The office manager from TriQuarterly, Sue Kurman, was on the line. Her husband was an old-time radio journalist at WGN, and Sue had single-handedly kept the literary magazine running for years. She was practical, businesslike, and efficient, and I depended on her in more ways than one. In her spare time, she typed my novels.

  As I picked up the phone, I was sputtering, shivering, croaking in that first attempt to speak after deep sleep, and it took me a while to get my mind around the fact that Sue was calling me at all. What sort of business could be so important that she had to call at six in the morning? Her voice sounded as bad as mine, and I thought I heard her say that she was at Charlie’s house. His house? What was she doing at his house at this hour? Then, sensing my confusion, she simply blurted it out.

  Ibi had waited in bed in her nunnery cell until she heard Charlie’s key hit the lock upon his return from his girlfriend’s apartment. Then she had shot herself in the right side of her chest with the pearl-handled .32-caliber revolver. At the sound of the shot, Charlie had begun running up the stairs. On his way up, he heard the second shot. Ibi had shot herself a second time for good measure. Charlie found her in a welter of blood. He fell upon her, trying to stanch the wounds with his hands. The air that he blew into Ibolya’s mouth came bubbling out of the holes in her side. She was dead before the ambulance arrived.

  I hung up the phone. I was sitting on the floor in shock when Carolyn came in, hugging herself, wrapped in a colorful blanket, asking, “What? What’s wrong? What happened?” I was still numb a week later when Charlie came into the office and told me that he was leaving me in charge of the magazine. He was going out east for a while. The girlfriend, Tula, was going with him. Before Charlie left, we shared a tense scene at his house. I came to retrieve the framed drawing I had given Ibi. Charlie knew. Of course he knew. He sat stiffly in the living room by the fireplace before the silk Sarouk, where Ibi and I had drunk his vodka and listened to wild music and the whistling wind. He said, “You go get it. I don’t want to go up there.” And I did. Ibi’s room was bare but for the framed drawing on the wall. The bed had been removed. The room gave no sign that she had ever existed. Not that she had lived. Not that she had died.

  Charlie had been a lifelong drinker and existed in a self-soothing confusion of sexual frenzy. He eventually married five times. He couldn’t get it right. He soon had his parents’ money and ricocheted around the world, traveling to Hungary so many times that some of his friends began to think that he might be a spy. But he was researching his final novel, which seemed to contain both Ibi and the dog Matias and which Charlie in any event never
finished. He hadn’t published a book in more than twenty years when he dropped dead of a heart attack with the manuscript scattered all over his apartment in New York. The obituary in the New York Times said, “Mr. Newman’s novels explore soullessness and atomization amid the ruined temple of postmodern life.”

  Charlie’s nephew, his sister’s son Ben Ryder Howe, found his uncle’s final novel in boxes after his death and managed to piece together a publishable book. But even Howe, devoted as he was to his uncle, said of the book, “It’s not a particularly nice vision—it’s humanistic but in a perverse, misanthropic, and grotesque way, not to mention hostile to the type of educated reader who is likely to pick his novel up.” He called Charlie “a great hater.” And as someone who worked directly under him, I can testify that he was not a fun guy. Yet I felt for him. He seemed unreachably alone and desperate. And like me, he wrote obsessively. I believe in a way completely different from me and Ibi, Charlie and I were kindred spirits.

  I continued to work at TriQuarterly for a time, going through the motions, but my heart wasn’t in it. Some days I found myself just staring at the red leather sofa where Ibi had sat that first evening in her fur, looking so regal and fierce and unassailable. I saw her laughing in the flower garden at the Baha’i temple by the lake. I heard her voice reading Faulkner in German by candlelight: “Lena sitzt am Straßenrand. Sie sieht, wie das Fuhrwerk über die Wegsteigung langsam näherrückt, und denkt: Ich komme aus Alabama: ein schönes Stück. . . .” I saw her hair exploding as she freed it from her comb and remembered the perfect power of her ballerina legs. Sometimes, quickened and still quivering, when she was about to put her clothes on to go home, she would stand in my room and go up on the big toe of one foot and point the other straight up at the ceiling, her feet tortured from point shoes. Caught like that, her Rodin fingers outstretched, her sex on display, she made a catastrophic portrait of beauty and waste.