Had she learned how?
The beauty: that was what was so remarkable. Seeing the furniture standing about on the street, that had been beautiful enough. But when it burned!
The flowered armchair, which had only been smoldering till now, took hold all at once, and all its meaning was expressed in a tall column of orange flames. Glorious!
Could she?
At the very least she could try to approach it.
She fiddled open the locks of the suitcase. Already she’d lost so many of the things she’d brought with her, all the little bones and bijoux from her past that hadn’t for all her worrying at them yielded her one dribble of the feelings they were supposed to hold. Postcards she’d never sent. Baby clothes. The book of autographs (including three celebrities) she’d started keeping in eighth grade. But what junk she had left she’d gladly give.
At the top of the suitcase, a white dress. She threw it into the lap of the burning chair. As it touched the flames years of whiteness condensed into a moment’s fierce flare.
Shoes, a sweater. They shriveled inside lurid haloes of green flame.
Prints. Stripes.
Most of these things didn’t even fit her! She lost patience and dumped the rest in all in a heap, everything except the photographs and the bundle of letters. These she fed to the fire one by one. The pictures winked into flame like the popping of so many flashbulbs, leaving the world as they’d entered it. The letters, on lighter paper, went even more quickly: a single whoosh! and then they rose in the updraft, black weightless birds, poem after poem, lie upon lie—all of Juan’s love.
Now she was free?
The clothes she wore were of no importance. As little time as a week ago she might have thought at this moment that she’d have to take her clothes off, too.
She herself was the clothing she must remove.
She went to where her own bed had been prepared atop the teevee. All else was in flames now, only the mattress still smoldered. She lay down. It was no more uncomfortable than entering a very hot bathtub, and as the water might have, the heat melted away the soreness and tension of the last sad days and weeks. This was so much more simple.
Relaxing, she became aware of the sound of the flames, a roaring all around her, as though she had finally come to the head of the falls she had been listening to so long. As her little boat had drifted towards this moment. But these waters were flames and fell upwards. With her head thrown back she could watch the sparks from the separate fires join, in the updraft, into a single ceaseless flow of light that mocked the static pallid squares of light gouged in the face of the brick. People stood within those squares of light, watching the fire, waiting, with Lottie, for the mattress to go.
The first flames curled around the edge, and through these flames she saw the ring of onlookers. Each face, in its separateness, in the avidity of its gaze, seemed to insist that Lottie’s action was directed in some special way at him. There was no way to tell them that this was not for their sake but for the sake, purely, of the flames.
At the very moment that she knew she couldn’t go on, that her strength would fail, their faces disappeared. She pushed herself up, the teevee collapsed, and she fell, in her little boat, through the white spray of her fear, towards the magnificence below.
But then, before she could see quite through the curtain of the spray, there was another face. A man. He aimed the nozzle of the fire-hose at her. A stream of white plastic foam shot out, blanketing Lottie and the bed, and all the while she was compelled to watch, in his eyes, on his lips, everywhere, an expression of insupportable loss.
42. Lottie, at Bellevue, continued
“And anyhow the world doesn’t end. Even though it may try to, even though you wish to hell it would—it can’t. There’s always some poor jerk who thinks he needs something he hasn’t got, and there goes five years, ten years, getting it. And then it’ll be something else. It’s another day and you’re still waiting for the world to end.
“Oh, sometimes, you know, I have to laugh. When I think—Like the first time you’re really in love and you say to yourself, Hey! I’m really in love! Now I know what it’s about. And then he leaves you and you can’t believe it. Or worse than that you gradually lose sight of it. Just gradually. You’re in love, only it isn’t as wonderful as it used to be. Maybe you’re not even in love, maybe you just want to be. And maybe you don’t even want to be. You stop bothering about songs on the radio and there’s nothing you want to do but sleep. Do you know? But you can only sleep for so long and then it’s tomorrow. The icebox is empty and you have to think who haven’t you borrowed any money from and the room smells and you get up just in time to see the most terrific sunset. So it wasn’t the end of the world after all, it’s just another day.
“You know, when I came here, there was a part of me that was so happy. Like the first day of school, though maybe that was terrifying, I can’t remember. Anyhow. I was so happy because I thought, here I am, this is the bottom. At last! The end of the world, right? And then, it was only the next day, I was up on the veranda and there it was again, this perfectly gorgeous sunset, with Brooklyn all big and mysterious, and the river. And then it was as though I could take a step back from myself, like when you’re sitting across from someone in the subway and they don’t know you’re watching them, I could see myself like that. And I thought, Why you dope! You’ve only been here one day, and here you are enjoying a goddamned sunset.
“Of course it’s also true, what we were saying before, about people. People are shits. In here just as much as out there. Their faces. And the way they grab things. It’s like, I don’t know if you’ve ever had children, but it’s like that, eating at the same table with children. At first you can enjoy it. Like watching a mouse—nibble, nibble, nibble. But then there’s another meal, and another, and if you don’t see them other times there doesn’t seem to be anything to them but an endless appetite. Well, and that’s what I think can be so frightening, when you look at somebody and you can’t see anything but their hungry face. Looking at you.
“Do you feel that way ever? When you feel something very strongly, you always suppose other people must have felt the same way, but do you know what? I’m thirty-eight years old, tomorrow I’ll be thirty-nine, and I still wonder if that’s so. Whether anyone ever feels the same way.
“Oh! Oh, the funniest thing, I have to tell you. This morning when I was on the can, Miss What’s-It comes in, the nice one, and very matter-of-fact as though it were my office or something she asks did I want a chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake? For my birthday! A chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake? Because, you see, they had to order it today. God, I laughed. I thought I’d fall off the stool I laughed so hard. ‘A chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake. Which will it be, Lottie?’
“Chocolate, I told her, and I was very serious about it too, believe me. It had to be chocolate. Nothing else would do.”
43. Mrs. Hanson, in Room 7
“I’ve thought about it. For years. I don’t talk about it because I don’t think it’s something you can discuss. Once. Once I met a lady in the park, that was a long time ago. We talked about it but I don’t think that either of us … Not then. Once you’re serious, it isn’t something you care to talk about.
“Here it’s a different situation. I know. I don’t mind discussing it with you. It’s your job and you have to do it. But with my family, you see, that’s a different matter. They’d try to argue against it but only because they felt they ought to. And I understand that. I was the same myself. I can remember visiting my father when he was in the hospital—that would be Twenty-twenty or twenty-one, in there, and talking away at him a mile a minute. Lord. But could I look him in the eye? Not for a moment! I kept showing him photographs, as though … But even then I knew what he must have been thinking. What I didn’t know was that it can all seem so possible.