Fire & Water Read online

  The next day, my last as an intern, was set aside just to close out charts and tie up loose ends. I got off in the early afternoon. My coat was weak protection against the biting wind. I could not remember ever feeling that cold in San Francisco. Snow fell to a thousand feet and dusted Mt. Tam and Mt. Diablo.

  On the hood of my Bug in the parking garage, blowing on his fingers, sat Jake.

  “You look like a woman who could use an adventure,” he said as I approached. The pleasure in his eyes was like a child’s, full of a wonderful secret.

  My fatigue vanished. “What? You’re taking me to McDonald’s for filet mignon and Baked Alaska?”

  Until that second, I hadn’t noticed his missing eye patch. His eye was still bruised, but his dark brow hid the black stitches I’d sewn. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that gave him a gentle, intellectual look.

  Jake brought his fingers to my chin and tilted my face toward his own. He studied me, searching my brow, my hairline, the curve of my jaw, warming each part with his gaze. His forehead pleated, then smoothed. “Your face is even more fascinating in three dimensions.”

  My lips pulsed, anticipating the kiss I’d hoped for two nights before but only received in my dreams. He winked again, acknowledging he’d seen my kiss-me signal. “How about joining me? I’ve got my own wheels and both of my peepers.”

  I glanced around the lot.

  “Come on. I know this is your last day. No excuses.”

  I climbed into his Valiant. While it was of similar vintage to my Volkswagen, the Valiant was pristine. Its idle was the soft purr of a kitten, whereas my Bug suffered conniptions seismic enough to remove your fillings.

  We drove down Irving Street, toward Ocean Beach, listening to Bach on the radio. Without explanation, Jake pulled his car into a beachfront parking lot. Thick crowds milled around the beach. “I want you to see something,” he said.

  He pulled a down parka from his back seat and offered it to me. Stepping out of the car, I found myself following throngs of people who were gathering into crowds along the beach. My eyes watered from the wind and cold.

  The first group formed a circle. I eased myself in among them, only to see a winding, ten-foot-round gully in the sand. Deep inside was a sculpted, circular river formed of a delicate web of icicles. Icicles—in San Francisco! Onlookers snapped photographs. They murmured and pointed, wearing wonder on their faces. Jake guided me on.

  The next sculpture was a round pit dug deep into the sand. The sand started as pale, dry oatmeal on the surface and darkened to a rich mocha color toward the moist center of the hole. A bed of khaki green seaweed lay in the center, a tower built of icicles reaching ten feet high perched atop it. It appeared that it had somehow evolved naturally where it lay. Nature had complied with the artist. The mushroom-gray sky was a background, matte and unobtrusive. Temperatures and the icy beach wind allowed the frozen foreign elements to linger.

  I moved down the beach, taking in each of five massive structures formed of natural elements unnaturally arranged. Thick slabs of ice rested on beds of pale beach rocks. Icicles adhered together at their bases formed giant, frozen, dandelion-like starbursts. Towers fashioned of driftwood and shards of ice were trimmed in white seabird feathers. I could barely breathe for how each piece moved me. They were at once whimsical and profound. Simple and perplexing.

  At the far end of the beach, away from the observing crowds, sat a gigantic mound of snow. Kids squealed as they rode plastic saucers in crayon colors, thrilled at their unlikely day of sledding by the breaking surf. I’d been on this beach with my dad a thousand times and had never seen or even imagined ice or snow here.

  Soon the sun slid down the sky and cast a ginger glow. Campfires blossomed around the beach, far enough away from the frozen sculptures that their melting wasn’t hastened, but close enough to make the ice sparkle in the firelight.

  We sat next to a small fire away from the crowd. Jake poured green tea from a thermos. In the distance the crack of crumbling icicles pierced the twilight and a moan of disappointment rose from the crowd. Jake smiled. Another crack of ice sounded, followed by another murmur. Inexplicably, an ache formed in my throat and my eyes swelled with warm tears. I seldom cried, and now I’d done it twice in front of Jake. “It’s just so sad to see them fade,” I said.

  Jake wiped my eyes with the soft pad of his thumb. “Oh, but that’s part of the whole thing. Their disappearance is as important as is their creation.”

  Until that instant, I’d assumed Jake had simply brought me to see this incredible exhibit. He had told me he was an artist, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this was his installment. I’d pictured paints and canvases in a sloppy studio. Late rent checks and defaulted student loans. “You did these. All of this?”

  “Well, it only seemed fair.” Jake fingered the stitches on his brow. “I’ve seen your art. Now you’ve seen mine.”

  “Please tell me that you photographed them,” I pleaded. “So that they’re preserved.”

  “Oh they were photographed. That’s what my buddy Burt does. He’s a great photographer, and he’ll publish them in a coffee table book or calendar or something. He’s the entrepreneur who helps me to pay the bills. But photographs are only headstones for pieces that will be dead for me long before the film is developed.”

  “I’ll never forget them.”

  “Ah, then the day was a success. They’ll live forever because they’ve been witnessed and experienced.” He paused. “Like your Jane Doe. That’s the only permanence there is. People die. Stones crumble. Canvases decay. Photographs fade. But experience reverberates indefinitely.”

  After the sun went down, the crowd thinned to a few dog-walking couples. Jake and I sat by the last of the campfires while the sea crept in and stole the last remnants of his sculptures. The air became brittle around us, inviting us to sit dangerously close to the fire. He jumped up and retrieved a basket filled with bread, wine, and cheese from his car. “How did you do all of this?”

  Jake could barely contain his energy as he explained that his work was about manipulating natural elements without intruding on their beauty. He talked of his nature sculptures in stone and leaves, sand and slate, ice and twigs. He’d spent years walking in remote parts of the world, from Tibet to Afghanistan, from Brazil to The Congo. His voice was pure energy, with not a hint of bragging; he was simply revealing himself. “Usually when I work with ice or snow, I do it where it stays cold. But I’ve wanted to do something in San Francisco for a while. I moved here to wait for the opportunity. I couldn’t get the image of icicles near the Golden Gate out of my head. I like unlikely pairings. I’ve been waiting for a day cold enough that I thought it might work, so Burt loaded a crew into a helicopter and we went up to Yosemite to gather the elements. Hauled the ice and snow in a freezer truck. Cost a mint, but it was worth it.”

  He must’ve left for Yosemite straight from The Front Room. “When did you sleep?” He didn’t look a bit tired.

  “Sleep is highly overrated.” He smiled and sipped his wine.

  The silence between us was filled only with the pops from the fire. “I need to tell you something, Kat.”

  The nickname felt as if it had always been mine. I braced myself. I could no longer pretend he was just some guy. I suddenly had more to lose—now that I’d seen the genius of him.

  “Everything changed because I met you.” He read the questions forming on my face. “I’ve never had anyone else’s eyes in mind when I constructed pieces before. Never. Ideas just come to me in dreams or when I see shapes or patterns.” He pulled me close enough that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my skin. “But with these, I couldn’t stop wondering what they’d look like to you. I can’t imagine making another piece that you won’t see.”

  We lingered there and I breathed in the salt of the sea, watching the amber light on his face. Knowing him had changed my work, too. It was impossibly fast, what he felt. But then, I felt it, too. From that moment forward I would wa
nt to tell him about every patient, every stitch I sewed, every life and death I witnessed.

  I must’ve nodded, though I can’t say I remember it, because his lips found mine. It was nothing like a first kiss. It was more like the inevitable meeting of sea and shore.

  “Please say you’ll stay with me tonight,” he whispered. His eyes were the color of river stones under crystal water; speckled gray and green, with flecks of gold. Sometimes the most luminous stones, when taken from their cool waters, turn out to be just gray rocks. Others glitter with a light of their own. You never know about river stones until you take them home.

  We walked to the car, the fading firelight behind us.

  * * *

  Jake’s home, a warehouse in San Francisco on Brennan Street, was as unlikely as icicles on Ocean Beach. The graffiti-covered cinderblock exterior and corrugated metal doors disguised the enchantment to be found inside. The industrial elements of a warehouse—concrete floors, exposed pipes, metal catwalks, and cavernous spaces—still remained. The enormous single room was warmed by soft, golden light, though the source of this light was a mystery as I could see no actual fixtures.

  What he’d created was so simple. The room was huge but divided into intimate spaces by the placement of sculptures: screens constructed of twigs, woven together so that they appeared constructed by Nature herself; a six-foot sphere formed of shards of gray slate; bougainvillea petals, fuchsia splashes on ebony black wood tabletops.

  I trembled both from the cold of the day and from my tingling senses. Jake rolled up paper to light a fire; his breath brought the flame to life. We stood beside the hearth still bundled in our parkas, still wearing the sea. The copper warmth of the flames spilled over us. His kisses tasted of wine. His skin smelled of the salty beach. I lost myself in the textures of him: the stubble of his beard, his calloused hands, and his eyelashes against my cheek. As the room warmed, Jake removed my jacket, then my sweater. One by one we removed our garments, revealing ourselves to one another.

  This wasn’t like me. I hadn’t showered since early morning, and I still wore my scrubs. I didn’t have on my date underwear, only everyday cotton panties. I worried about my knobby knees, my appendectomy scar, and my ears that stuck out too far. Jake’s beach sculptures and every article in his unimaginable home were things of exquisite beauty. My awkward, imperfect form didn’t fit in with his exquisite objects of art.

  “Don’t hide,” he whispered as he peeled the last of my clothes away. He cradled me and leaned me back onto a massive chocolate suede sofa. He unfolded my arms like they were the petals of a flower and laid me back, letting his gaze drift over me. “Just look at you.”

  I’d had moments in my life when I felt attractive, even pretty on rare occasions. But with Jake, I was beautiful. He lay on his side next to me. His fingers moved in long strokes, studying the contours of my body. I let my gaze follow down the line of his throat, further over the soft mounds of his chest and down to the dark nest of hair between his legs.

  He lifted his head, startled by an idea. “Here. Close your eyes.”

  “What for?”

  “Relax. Just close your eyes.” His fingers moved over my eyelids. “Keep them closed.” I kept my eyes closed as I listened to him move. Next to my breast, where his warm cheek had just been, I felt a weighty, radiating spot of coolness. “Relax. Just go with it,” he urged. As the icy intensity waned, another formed just below it. Then another, down my ribcage on the opposite side of my body. As each cold spot warmed, another one occurred, creating a curved line from my heart, across my torso, down my right thigh, and to my knee. I tried to imagine what Jake was doing. There were no ice cubes around us. No drips of moisture made trails on my body.

  I was curious about what he was doing, but my body simply wanted to let go and enjoy the sensations. His sudden intake of breath cued me to open my eyes.

  From the suede pillow where my head rested, I viewed the landscape of my own body, now adorned with a curved trail of smooth, black stones that Jake had taken from an earthen bowl. The stones followed the mounds and hollows of me in a winding path, drawing the eye from my heart down to my thighs. I held my breath, trying not to ruin what he’d created. Ebony stones against the white of my skin formed a river-like trail. Arranged from large to small, the stones descended my body. My skin warmed the stones, making them more a part of me. I’d never felt so feminine or so lovely.

  “You see, Kat. There’s no photograph. No permanent exhibit in a museum. But here you are… a work of art that will last forever.”

  I couldn’t move for fear of ruining what he’d made. One by one, starting from my knee, Jake removed each stone. The warmth of his lips on my skin replaced each stone’s weight until I no longer felt the loss of it. He set each one on the floor beside me, creating a perfect spiral. After he lifted the last and largest stone from above my beating heart, he entered me smoothly, silently. His body was not foreign to mine, but a missing part now found.

  Immovable Object, Unstoppable Force

  Jake and I were together every minute of the next four days. It was as if we’d discovered a new food and couldn’t get enough of it. Our lovemaking was ravenous. Our meals took hours. We were insatiable in consuming everything about one another. He savored the details of my growing up in Murphy’s Pub and reveled in the descriptions of my family there. When I told him about how I’d just learned about my mother’s suicide, the pain of it registered instantly on Jake’s face. For the first time, my anger gave way to grief. I wept for my mother’s death. I wept for her sad life.

  But Jake was not the only glutton. I gobbled the details of his adventurous life. The world travel, the art, the encounters with the cultured and the famous. The loneliness in his childhood—of being shuffled between nannies and shipped off to boarding schools where he went months at a time without family contact—became my loneliness.

  I called my dad to let him know he wouldn’t be able to reach me at home. When I called Mary K to check in and find out about her health, she told me to stop being her mother hen and asked nothing of my whereabouts—typical Mary K. But for these brief encounters, Jake and I might as well have been on our own planet. In four days, I didn’t go home for a change of clothes, though most of our time was spent wearing nothing anyway.

  “It’s official, I have got to go home for underwear,” I said one morning in the clean white light of Jake’s bathroom. I pulled my only pair of panties off of the shower rod. “They didn’t dry overnight. I can’t wear damp underwear.”

  Jake wrapped himself around me and looked over my shoulder at our shared reflection in the steamy mirror. “I like you without underwear.”

  “That’s a fine arrangement for when we’re here, but—”

  “Then let’s never leave here. I can hold you hostage by keeping possession of your panties.” He snatched my underwear from my hand.

  “That’s sounding a little kinky,” I said, laughing. “Is there something about you I should know?” I looked into his reflection, expecting a continuation of our repartee. Jake’s playful expression wilted. He pulled away from the mirror and went into the bedroom. When I followed him, he was tucking his wallet into his pocket and gathering his keys.

  His crushed look frightened me a little. “Jake, did I insult you?”

  But when he looked up, I could see that the boyish mischief had returned to his face. “You just wait right here. I’ve got some shopping to do.”

  “But—”

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he scolded. “I’ll hear no objections from a woman wearing no underwear.”

  He was out the door before I could say another word.

  * * *

  “Well, look what the storm blew in,” Mary K said as she eased into our kitchen. “Just about filed a missing persons report.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “You can stop with the health inquiry already,” Mary K grumbled. “Is that actual cooking I see you doing?”

  “I felt inspired.” />
  Mary K swung a slow circle around me, her eyes fixed on me. “What’s with the fashionable duds? Do my eyes deceive me, or is that an actual label I see on those jeans? And let’s see, that fitted shirt is not from the Katherine A. Murphy Rainbow of T-shirts Collection. And are those actual boots? What? No tennies? No clogs?”

  I looked into the skillet, suppressing my smile. “I felt like a change.”

  “’Bout time. Man, you look great.”

  The truth was that when Jake came back to his loft, he’d brought a dozen string-handled bags from stores I’d seen only from the outside: Saks, Neiman Marcus, and boutiques I’d never even heard of. The bags were filled with finely made slacks, tasteful, feminine lingerie, shoes, even dresses, none of which I’d have ever bought, but I loved each item. Everything he’d chosen fit perfectly, though he’d left with no information about my sizes. Now, standing in my own kitchen and wearing new clothes, I felt stylish, but still comfortable and natural—wholly myself.

  Ben Casey sniffed the air, full of the aroma of mushrooms and onions. Mary K hadn’t been apart from him in weeks, even sneaking him into the hospital doctor’s lounge with her during her shifts. It required a complex conspiracy to keep a dog of that size hidden, but Ben engendered that kind of loyalty. He greeted me with a cold nose on the soft skin near my elbow.

  Wind slapped branches and threw rain against the windows of the old Victorian. Though it was late in the afternoon, the room was darkened by the storm outside. A flash of lightning lit the room, followed by a rumble of thunder. Ben whimpered.

  I stirred the vegetables, which replied with a hiss, then cracked eggs into a bowl. I was pleased with the perfect semi-circle when I folded the omelet over. “You got my messages, right?” I tried to suppress my giddy grin.

  “Let’s see,” she said, pulling a carton of milk from the fridge. She tipped her head back, taking noisy gulps. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she hummed a mocking little tune. “I got some rather dopey, giggling messages from someone whose voice sounded just a little like yours.” She licked her thumb and forefinger, then snatched a sizzling mushroom from the pan. She huffed as she chewed. “Couldn’t possibly have been you, though. I distinctly heard a man’s naughty, sexy voice in the background. I’m guessing Nigel Abbot’s never made those kinds of noises. Nor has he ever put a look like that one on your mug.”