10. LIGHT MY FIRE

"If," thought Solitaire, "I can just get through today, then the worst will be over and I shall be all right."

It is daybreak on Sunday morning, the twelfth of April.  Wispy grey curtains of rain swing north out of Mexico and blow across the Sonoran desert.  An unseasonably cold wind, more like February than April, is gusting, whipping up dust devils and clusters of acacia pollen.  Everyone in the Old Pueblo is sneezing, wheezing, dabbing at their eyes, and blowing their noses.  

"Aviva is up and brewing a pot of coffee, but not without the faint whiff of condescension common to the coffee cognoscenti of Seattle.  The two women put on windbreakers and take the dogs out.  To the left of the front door a large hole has been dug and Em's tree stands in it uncertainly, teetering slightly, its  fronds quivering nervously in the wind.  The dogs climb down into the pit, christen the tree, and clamber out.

Zach and his two girls, Lily and Marsha, drive up in their SUV, the interior of which looks, with its mashed juice cartons, gummy bears, Kit Kat wrappers, stray socks, hairbands and last week's classroom "art" smeared with turquoise bubblegum ice cream, pink sprinkles and ketchup, like the inside of a dumpster.

Em’s eldest son, Zach, a good looking fellow who will be fifty on his next birthday, has lately taken to wearing khaki cargo shorts and billowy Hawaiian shirts as though he were about to spin a south seas tale for his shipmates on the fo’c’sle, though his silvery mesh running shoes with the orange day-glo laces are somewhat at odds with his Outcast-of-the-Islands image.  The “Aloha” shirts, which he apparently buys by the gross on e-bay have been embellished with patch pockets, (obligingly custom-sewn by his poker pal, Jenny, a former flower child who learned her trade in a sweat shop in the Haight), in which he carries a half-dozen ballpoint pens the better to network potential poker clients.

“You’re not planning to dress like this for the service, are you?” Solitaire asks edgily.

Zach raises his eyebrows.   “Is there a problem?” 

Like many men in the southwest, Zach’s body is trim except for his gut which he carries before him as though it were a balloon spinnaker about to bear him aloft in a high following wind.  At the moment he is standing flat-footed in a quasi-passive-aggressive stance, a huge yellow hibiscus stretched taut across his belly and several coco-shell buttons tugging combatively at the fabric like puppies with a pull-toy.

Solitaire starts to respond in kind, then reconsiders.  “No problem.”  Zach grins.  Round #1 to him.  She gestures toward the girls.  “What about those ragamuffins?”

“You’ll have to discuss it with them.  I don’t get involved in their fashion choices.”  The girls are five and seven.

Well, did you bring some clothes for them to change into?”

“I told you – I have no idea.”  He walks over to the van, extracts what appear to be some items of wearing apparel, and heads toward the house.

 Aviva and the girls, meanwhile, have taken the dogs for a walk and return just as Nestor the landscaper arrives.

Zach, who emerges from the house after Nestor has cut the sacking from the root ball and wrestled the tree more securely into the soil, is now turned out in chinos, a long-sleeved light blue Oxford shirt of Em’s, and loafers.  High fashion for Tucson.  Like his father, he doesn’t know one end of a spade from the other  (unless it’s a playing card, of course) but that doesn’t prevent him from telling Marsha how to wield a shovel.

A cold drizzle begins to fall.  The air is scented with wet dust and wildflowers.

 Each person takes a quick turn at the shovel, tips in a spade full of dirt, then rushes inside, leaving the rest of the job to Nestor.

The girls sit in the kitchen, shivering over a cup of cocoa, then change into their spangled spandex party dresses and sequined sneakers.  Solitaire thinks back, way back, to her own demurely smocked organdy frocks and patent leather maryjanes.

Everyone is busy.  Around noon, Em's younger son, Benjamin, arrives with his longtime Korean girlfriend, Kiki.  The daughter of a prestigious mathematician in Seoul, Kiki fulfills the family potential by playing tournament poker at various casinos "on the rez" and peddling diamond jewelry to other players on the side.  Everyone’s got a culinary specialty and Kiki’s is a colossal lemon meringue graham cracker crust pie from the Village Inn. 

 Friends, about a dozen, come with assorted food and flowers. Solitaire makes a vague attempt to find platters and vases.  Standing in the middle of the dining room, aimlessly opening and closing cabinet doors, she greets her guests in a quizzical manner that suggests they have come on the wrong day, or, alternatively, that she has never seen them before.  

Aviva, who is setting up a buffet table, puts an arm around Solitaire’s shoulder and leads her out onto the terrace.  The sky has cleared, the sun shines; the big pepper tree sparkles with raindrops.

There is a slight hubbub as a shockingly beautiful young woman slips obtrusively between the guests and, dashing for cover under a market umbrella, huddles in its protective shade.

“OMG!” she gasps.  “What’s with this sun?”  This is Belinda, Benjamin’s 23-year-old daughter.   Like her peers, she texts, twitters, tweets and Twilights.  Although not unintelligent, she does not speak in complete compound sentences.  (So what?  Neither did George Bush.)  On the other hand, she is, as they say, so jaw-droppingly gorgeous that if she spoke not a word in any language no one would notice.  In fact, they might prefer it.  In Belinda’s mouth, words seem superfluous, a distracting irritant like spitballs.

Solitaire remembers Belinda as a sweet, sun-tanned little jock who loved to swim all day and throw frisbees for the dogs at her parents’ ranch.  What happened to that little girl?  The sun, great ball of life-sustaining fire, became her enemy.  An apostle for cosmetology, Belinda believes that if her alabaster calves and marmoreal décolletage were to be grazed by a ray of wrinkle-inducing sun she would implode in flames, collapsing in on herself like a White Dwarf;

her velvety brown eyes would grow dim, the luscious scarlet lips blister, her lustrous mane of black hair turn to dandruff and dust.  But here’s the sad rub about Belinda:  this wondrous gift, this miraculous marriage of nature and artifice, is a gift that seems to cause more pain than pleasure; it’s called “Lost Youth” and no one quite knows what to do with it.

Only Solitaire’s mother, Lavinia, once a great beauty herself, seems immune to the numbing aura of unease that Belinda’s beauty engenders.  Now 98, permanently imprisoned in her wheelchair, she lives, as though pre-embalmed, in a realm of eternal hauteur located in a film star stratosphere somewhere between the late Ethel Barrymore and Dame Maggie Smith.

Em, who occasionally grew weary of being press-ganged into his role as reluctant courtier to his very own Queen Mum-in-law, swore that he had actually seen Lavinia languidly raise her forearm, slowly revolve her hand, and give him the Windsor Wave.  Of course, she has also been seen to flip him the Bird, which shows a certain nonagenarian versatility on her part.

Needless to say, Lavinia regards Em’s male progeny as “common” and they in turn  regard her as “bitchy.”  (And that’s putting it nicely.)  So much for familial solace and harmony.

Aviva and Solitaire have prepared a kind of altar-of-remembrance in the library, a selected retrospective of Em memorabilia that includes family snapshots , clippings, photos with heads-of-state and presidents past, published poetry, articles, books, and now, his obituary.   Guests mosey through, gazing and schmoozing, and after making the requisite number of respectful noises they troop into the sitting room, perching on sofas and chairs around the black maw of the fireplace, and Solitaire can’t escape the obvious comparison between this ancient symbol of “hearth and home” and the image of that other fireplace (a recent model of crematorium is actually called a “Hot Hearth”) in Wally’s charnel house across town.

Aviva leads the service (hardly kosher, but who cares?  Not so very long ago she wouldn’t even have been allowed to attend the service, let alone lead it.)  It is sweet, eclectic, somewhat awkward.  A pinch of this, a dash of that.  A little Eliot, a bit of Bach.  A sonnet, a Psalm, a cantata, an elegy, Kaddish, a candle.  The End. 

Much of it is stiffly read, as though they were standing up at a highschool recitation.  Em , who loved the theatre and had done some Shakespeare with Paul Mazursky at Brooklyn College, (his first role, in “Othello,” was as Lodovico, a Venetian nobleman, who, at the very end of the play, utters the immortal line, “Oh bloody period!” thereby cracking up legions of undergraduates) was given to the rueful observation that our parents’ generation was the last American generation to read aloud or to routinely memorize and recite poetry.  What schoolgirl had not read from Willa Cather or recited Amy Lowell’s “Renaissance;” what youth had not known  “Gunga Din” or “The Highwayman?” or some stanzas of “Hiawatha?”  

“By the shores of Gitche Gumee,” runs idly through Solitaire’s mind, “by the shining Big-Sea-Water… dwelt a miner and his daughter, sandals were for –“  Oh for pete’s sake, that’s not it, she’s really losing it…    

And who is she to be critical, anyway?  While others gamely stand up and give it a go, she sits like a stone, not daring to open her mouth to so much as whisper lest her face shatter like a dropped teapot.  Instead, she sits on the sofa, stunned, calcified, bat-ears straining to hear – is it from the netherworld or from just across town? – Em’s well-remembered voice.  If only he were here!  How splendidly he would recite these selections!  With what depth of understanding, with what resonance and elegance of expression!   

            Adonai ro-i, lo ehsar

            Binot deshe yarbitseini,

            Al mei minuhot

            Ynahhateini …

               The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

              He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he

             Leadeth me beside the still waters…

But Em is not there.  He is not there, where he ought to be, because he is in a queue of two or three corpses waiting in plastic-lined particle-board boxes (called “chippies” in the trade) to be “charged” (inserted) on a motorized trolley into a “retort” (a propane-fired industrial furnace lined with heat-resistant refractory bricks) where, at temperatures ranging from 1600-1800° F and in a time span of  less than two hours, her husband’s limbs, flesh, organs – heart, genitals, brain – will be, no, not burned but dissolved, oxidized … vaporized into the atmosphere.

 But wait – not so fast!  Two-thirds of the way through the process, whatever remains of the incinerated corpse is turned, “repositioned,” as Wally puts it, which makes Em sound either like a cruise ship, or an evenly-roasted side of beef.  Solitaire is assiduous in her questioning and Wally forthcoming in his answers, sketching rudimentary graphs and graphics, diagrams of out-take valves, burner placement, and percentages of gaseous compounds.  He points out, thoughtfully, that having two gas burners in the main chamber and an entry burner prevent your body from smoking like a wet log and, moreover, that such terrific heat is guaranteed to re-ignite you if your fire goes out.  But when he gets to the part about the repositioning, he pauses uncomfortably.

“So,” Solitaire insists, “what is it that’s left at that point?”

“Well… the skeleton, mostly.  But sometimes there’s a bit of … other stuff."

"Stuff?"

"You know, this and that.”

This and that.  “Oh God!” Solitaire groans, thinking of this fiery prison, this hermetic chamber of horrors.  “Couldn’t it be done outside?  Don’t you have some sort of crematory garden?”

“Certainly not.”

“We could take him down to the ranch,” Solitaire says.  “We’ve got an old sunken –“ she is about to say “barbeque “ but thinks better of it and substitutes “fire pit” instead.  “The new owners wouldn’t mind and no one else would know.”

“Are you kidding?  It’s totally illegal.  I’d lose my license.”

“I can’t bear it!  It’s all so hideously claustrophobic.”

 “Oh no,” Wally protests.  “There’s a nice little peephole in the retort.  You can even watch the burning if you’d like.  And now we have dual exterior and interior shut-off heat switches, so you can turn the heat off from --"

"You mean ... in case he changes his mind?"

"... plus you can open the door from inside the cremator… 

“In case he’s not dead?”

“Of course he’ll be dead.  He is dead.  And frankly, if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think claustrophobia’s going to be an issue with your husband at that point.”

 

By the time they reach the Kaddish, Solitaire is on the verge of somnolence, a state induced partly by the sing-song sound of the ancient Aramaic chant:

           

            Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash shmay ra’bbo, bolmo dee’vro           

            chir’usay v’yamlich malchu’say, b’chayayhon…

               

            May the great Name of God be exalted and sanctified,

            Throughout the world, which he has created according to his will...

Her mind strays back to the death of Em’s father, Ezra.  A gentle man who loved music, (“Never underestimate Mozart!” he exhorted Em), he had a powerful torso, strong features and a great leonine head of iron grey hair.  An emigre from Minsk and a sewing machine operator in the Garment District for most of his working life, Ezra walked to his job each morning with his sewing machine slung over his shoulder. 

Em’s mother, who was bi-polar, and his father had long been divorced and it was Ezra’s second wife, Edith, who arranged the service at a temple in the Bronx.  Em and Solitaire, who were in Washington between assignments, drove up in a rental car on a sweltering mid-summer day and the moment they entered the temple Solitaire felt as though she had been transported to another country and that, moreover, her husband had become a complete stranger.   Normally so cool and controlled, he gave vent to a wild dithyrhambic display of grief, wringing his hands and sobbing, chest heaving and tears coursing down his cheeks.   So accustomed was she to the funereal Wasp stiff upper lip that she was astounded, even embarrassed.  She looked around apprehensively at the other mourners and was surprised to see that not a few of them were weeping copiously as well.  They drove to the grave site in a cortege from the funeral home and Em and Solitaire found themselves riding in the same limo with Norma, Em’s former wife.  It was the first encounter between the two women and Solitaire could hardly blame the divorced wife (aka “Victim”) for a certain display of overt hostility towards the new wife (aka “Home-wrecker”). 

To this day, Solitaire can feel the atmosphere crackling inside the limo.  Edith and Em were in the back seat, Norma in the passenger’s seat, and Solitaire on the jump seat, her face a few scant inches from Norma’s nose whenever Norma turned around, which was often because she and Em were having a horrific, ear-singeing argument about their son Zach.  Then a sophomore at a highschool in the Bronx, he had, it transpired, just been accused of selling pot to his classmates.  Em’s reaction was one of disbelief, anger and outrage, all vividly expressed, while at the same time still spasmodically sobbing and groaning and venting his grief for his father.  Solitaire, meanwhile, had her own priorities, which did not include being dissed.  No one, least of all Em, had bothered to introduce Solitaire and Norma to each other and Solitaire finally found this incivility intolerable.

“Excuse me,” she said the next time Norma’s nose swiveled in her direction, “I’d like to introduce myself –“ But that was as far as she got because Norma bored two holes in Solitaire’s head and looking through them, spoke directly to Em.

“I’m sending Zach to live with you in Moscow,” she announced.  Fortunately, the Fates had other plans, but it was a long time before the hackles lay back down on Solitaire’s neck.

Em said Kaddish for Ezra for eleven months and as far as Solitaire knows, he prayed for his father’s soul every day up unto the day of his own death.