Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Shulweis stared at the fireplace as if it were the surface of the moon: rocky and lifeless, with craters that had no visible bottom, and a vast black space around it that threatened to cast him into eternal, breathless orbit. He had grown up in a house without a fireplace and was convinced he could not get a twig burning without igniting his family. As always, his neck craned forward and his shoulders arched. In front of the hearth, crouching on his knees with a box of long-stick matches in his hands, Shulweis looked like a comma. The ceiling lights cast brightly upon the fireplace. With no wood burning, it looked like a cold mouth chewing its way into his house.
He looked over his shoulder to see if Elise was watching. She was not: Shulweis heard the kitchen faucet and the porcelain clinks of dirty dishes being loaded into a washer. A box frame squeaked in the children’s bedroom. It was accompanied by giggles that ceased with a thud on the floor. Shulweis braced himself for the cry of pain and surprise, but did not think to move. He heard Elise’s bare feet hurry down the hallway, then repair the moment with a mother’s salve: “Oh, my baby. Oh, my baby.”
As Elise settled the commotion, he knew he had to appear busy. She had been pleading with him for months – ever since they had moved into the house – to get a fire started, but he always managed a delay. “The flue is not clean,” he once told her. “We’ll suffocate from carbon monoxide.” Or he would ask her to consider the children: “We don’t have a screen, Elise. They’ll run right into the fire!”
But Elise had hired a chimney sweep, then purchased a screen, and when November returned once more Shulweis was out of excuses. The evening air was cold and dry. From his window he could see, in the black sky, white billows rising from his neighbors’ chimneys. He grabbed the handle of the flue and pushed it open. He rested his chin in his hand and was surprised to find black soot on his fingers. He tried to pat the soot off on his pants, and managed to stain his thighs, but a thin layer of residue remained clinging, like a dusted fingerprint, to the whorls and creases of his hands. The echo of “I love you,” said three times, trailed off in the hallway. He hurried to stack the grate with artificial logs as he heard the light switches flick and his wife’s footsteps approach.
“I see someone’s been hard at work,” Elise said. She entered the living room and dimmed the ceiling lights.
“How can you tell?” Shulweis asked.
“You have soot on your face.”
He looked down at his hands, as if castigating them for besmirching him. He rubbed at his early evening beard, trying to remove the soot, but his soiled hands spread it on his cheeks and jaw. Elise began to laugh.
“You try doing this,” he demanded. His pants and face were grimy, and the image provoked in Elise the idea that her husband had fallen in and arrived through the chimney, like a present that had been stuck there since last Christmas. She pinched her cheeks with a thumb and index finger, but her nose quivered and giggles escaped, and she easily surrendered to the laughter. Shulweis burned.
“This is the thanks I get for trying to build you a fire. Next time you can do it without me.”
Elise watched from the sofa. In one motion Shulweis struck the matches, tossed them at the logs, and scrambled for cover, but his motion was so disjointed that the sticks snapped into unlit and splintered vees. Elise watched them bounce meekly off the logs.
“You’re doing great,” she said.
“Do me a favor: Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not. I swear.”
“I don’t even want a fire.”
“You say that, but you don’t mean it.”
“It’s not my idea to do this – it’s yours.”
“You’ll see – once you get it going, you’ll be even happier than me.”
Shulweis shrugged and turned again to the fireplace. He told himself he would move slowly. He carefully dragged another stick along the black rectangle of the matchbox. One spark at a time he saw a flame gradually accumulate at the end of the stick: first like a sparkler he used to dance around as a child in the summer, eventually a consuming flame. He lit the corner of a log and watched its paper turn brown and curl. Fire spread across it and set the grate ablaze.
He closed the screen, which, illuminated from behind by the burning fire, looked like the lace that clings to a woman’s bodice. Elise had chosen it wisely, Shulweis thought. He seated himself beside her and she leaned back against his chest. The fire, leaping at the air and charring the clay brick of the hearth, climbed up the chimney and cast shadows like warm, quivering blankets on the couple. He looked down at his chest. Elise’s eyes were closed and she smiled contentedly. Her wisps of curly hair were pulled back from her broad forehead. Shulweis felt her take his arms and place them around her belly.
The fire burned and a salty film of sweat shone on her cleavage. She opened the buttons on her sweater, revealing a thin cotton shirt, and fanned herself with her hand. But Elise could not cool down, and she wriggled free of her husband and removed the sweater entirely. The heat from the fireplace hovered over her skin. She seemed to draw from it and smolder within.
“Barry,” she said. “I want a girl.”
Shulweis looked at the window, cracked open for ventilation, and felt a draft on his neck. It entered his collar and got trapped within the blousing of his shirt. His skin goose-pimpled and his downy, barely visible body hairs stood on end.
“What was that?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me, Barry.”
Elise smiled and her left cheek dimpled, but only her left; the right cheek remained flush and unblemished. Her teeth were white and perfectly straight: It made him think of all the nights he lay in bed, waiting for her to join him as she remained dutifully in the bathroom, brushing and flossing her teeth. It sounded interminable to him, the starting and stopping of the faucet, the choreography of gargling and spit landing on the vanity. All the while he would remain in bed and burn and wait and continue burning until, nearly extinguished, she would at last turn off the bathroom light and come to bed, smiling her perfect smile and falling asleep within seconds.
“I think I heard you,” Shulweis said. “But I need to hear it again.”
“I said I want a girl.”
He looked past Elise, toward his creation in the fireplace. Flames climbed toward the flue and reached for air, and he grew preoccupied with the notion that he would be tossed in with the logs and reduced to ash for the good of the fire.
“We should be grateful for what we already have, Elise. Let’s leave well enough alone.”
“You don’t know what it’s like for me,” she said. “You have three boys.”
“We have three boys. And I thought we had agreed: all we wanted was healthy.”
“That’s right,” she said, and her chest expanded like a bellows. “And now I want a healthy girl.”
Through the living room entrance, Shulweis saw light from the kitchen fixture fall on the hallway floor. Sometimes he felt like a janitor who closes a school on the evening shift, trudging against his own apathy from room to room, turning down the light switches that the teachers never bothered with when the final afternoon bell rang. Elise often left the lights on, sometimes illuminating a forgotten room for weeks at a time, and this usually bothered him – but now it gave reason to abandon unwelcome conversation, and the patches of uneven heat he felt on his face.
The kitchen light shone, and the door to almost every cabinet was left open. This was another one of his peeves, and he recalled the many nights when, stumbling through the dark for a glass of water, he smashed his head on a cabinet handle. Moving along the walls he closed each cabinet until he came to the one beside the refrigerator – a lonely home to misunderstood appliances, cold and isolated in the dark, waiting for the day when they would be taken down and loved. He reached for an electric juicer on the shelf.
In the living room, Elise heard the claps of wooden cabinets slamming shut and the dull friction of appliances sliding across contact paper. She moved to the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He smiled confidently and stepped down to the floor.
“I’m making juice.”
He took two navel oranges from the refrigerator and halved them with a large knife. Plugged in, the juicer began to hum and vibrate. For a moment he thought that a blush had spread across Elise’s cheeks, but then he reconsidered: it was probably residual heat from the fireplace. He pressed half an orange down on the juicer, its plastic, contoured cone rotating and eviscerating the fruit like a relentless, armored breast.
Shulweis smiled at his creation. By now he had forgotten the difficulty he had lighting the artificial logs. Elise tasted the juice with apprehension, but he relaxed when she smiled. He opened the sliding door to the freezer and rummaged through it, pushing aside sagging boxes and plastic pouches until, hidden beneath the children’s waffles, he uncovered a long-forgotten bottle of vodka. Now he was certain Elise blushed. They returned to the living room and huddled on the sofa. They felt fire on their faces and vodka from within.
Maybe Elise was right, he thought; perhaps he was even more thrilled by a burning hearth than she was. With a drink in hand, he drew in the fire like it was his own private performance, a hypnotic dance of saw-tooth flames that hid behind their own shadows and lulled him with brief pulses of orange and yellow ribbon. He sipped his juice, and felt the hot alcohol in his chest, and with his arm kept Elise close beside him. He rested his hand on her waist, and his thumb stroked the skin above her hips. Neither one spoke – they slowly changed their positions, as if trying to find a fit in the other one’s contour, and it felt like each deliberate movement was orchestrated by the fire.
The fireplace, the juicer, a vodka bottle stashed at the bottom of an icebox – it all came as an affirmation to Shulweis that they lived among a buried history covered by dirt and rubble. When at last his arm went numb under the weight of Elise’s torso, Shulweis got up from the sofa and took a Scrabble board down from the top of their coat closet. The game had been a favorite of theirs when they lived together as an unmarried couple – when they would lay down lettered tiles on the game board with the same diligence they would one day summon in setting ceramic squares in the renovated powder room, or marble backsplash in the new kitchen.
But with the arrival of the children, Scrabble had been tucked away in the coat closet with everything else: the backgammon case, their snowshoes, Elise’s needlepoint kit, Shulweis’ copy of The Satanic Verses. But in the evening’s spirit of distraction, of digging up discarded relics and feigning to embrace them with the passion of first discovery, the Scrabble board, too, was revived by the heat of the fireplace.
They opened the board on the living room floor, in front of the fire, and began to play with the delight and competition of the past. They were both skilled, but Shulweis was better and unaccustomed to losing. There was a reason the backgammon case remained in the closet: Scrabble was perhaps the only forum in which he felt unchallenged by Elise. So when he found himself clinging to a slim lead as the tile bag emptied and the game neared its conclusion, he erupted in protest when Elise put down “M-A-X.”
“You can’t do that,” he said. “‘Max’ is a proper noun.”
“When it’s a man’s name, it is,” she said. “Not when it’s the accepted slang for ‘maximum.’”
“But it’s not accepted slang.”
“Of course it is!”
It was a crucial point: Her “X” rested on a triple word score; the thirty-six points could have secured her the game. And he had been eyeing the same spot for his next turn (“M-A-S-K,” worth thirty). Feeling the game and the generous spirit of the evening slipping away, he went to the bookcase and marched out the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, always the arbiter of such disputes.
Elise looked over his shoulder as he turned the dictionary pages. The thin onion skins stuck together, and this frustrated both of them. The typeset was small and Shulweis needed more light. He turned the book toward the fireplace and there, illumined by the fire, was “max” – considered an abbreviation by the Oxford lexicographers, and thus ineligible.
Elise lost her turn. Shulweis put down “mask” and she fell hopelessly behind. This gave him just the confidence he needed, but the triumph was not shared.
His wife’s perfect smile was thin and pouting now, though her cheeks remained pink and her wide, brown eyes looked up to him beseechingly. (He would one day wonder if this pose were part of a larger seduction.) He leaned close to her, conciliatory in his victory, the alcohol on their breath a volatile vapor before the fire.
“Don’t pout,” he said. “How about I clean up the pieces?”
Elise ran her hand over his and, looking away from him, like a damsel on a hilltop, turned the corners of her mouth down.
“You promise to clean up all the pieces?”
“Yes,” he said, running his other hand inside her shirt and pressing against her. “I’ll pick up every one.”
He closed his eyes and kissed her, and he felt her mouth open slightly. She leaned back against the carpeted floor, her hands clasping behind his head, and she pulled him down against her. Her skin was soft, and he inhaled its powder as he kissed her neck. And this, Shulweis thought, is also something beneath our roof that had gotten lost somewhere.
They made love in front of the fireplace, and the children remained asleep. As the fire flickered out, the shadows grew darker on their bodies, moving together. Shulweis rolled over and stroked Elise’s head against his chest, and it was all as wonderful as he had recalled.
Nine months later, the argument was rekindled. But this time it was Shulweis, cradling in a warm cotton blanket the wet infant that Elise had just delivered, who wanted to name the boy Max.
Douglas Krohn is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College and a primary care physician practicing outside of New York City. His fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Intima, Blood and Thunder, The Westchester Review, South 85 Journal and other publications.