Dark Fire

Samantha had made it easy for Ron. After Betty left the hotel room, the younger woman tidied up the place and ordered a white wine from room service. She knew that Ron would be in a troubled state of mind. It surprised her when, after making excuses and going to see his wife once the shock wore off, he appeared again in the door as if nothing had happened. They made love with the ferocious intensity of those who know their time is short. When she got back to her home in Los Angeles, Samantha changed her number and deleted her social media profiles.

Betty fought herself over the urge to investigate, but eventually gave in and began hammering search engines to find any mention of "Ron Henderson" and "Samantha." She found the trollop on a picture page for a conference four years prior, labeled as a "promotional manager" for one of the other firms in the field. Betty could not find an email address, and saw the dead social media profiles, but found a number through the directory at Samantha's workplace. She wrote it down, and stared at the post-it often, knowing that there was no point in calling but driven by a need to know that she could not explain.

"She's too nice," Ron said, talking to his brother Greg on his boat in the lake one weekend. "She would talk about it if I brought it up, but she keeps just being Betty, I guess. She's sweet to me but distant."

Greg, a confirmed bachelor, nodded and swallowed his first impulses. "Guess she wants you back," he said. "I'd take it, to be fair. Betty's blind to a lot, heck she'd have to be with parents like hers, but she loves you."

"She doesn't show it," said Ron, musing that none of them -- Greg, Betty, or Ron -- were really in contact with their parents. His had gone off on a tour of the world years ago, and he stayed in touch by phoning them at their Florida condo on holidays. Betty wrote her parents a card for their birthday, and never got a reply.

"Women do weird stuff," said Greg. "When things go badly, they figure the problem is them, so they back off until you fight for them again, but then they get bossy because you just affirmed their value. I guess that's why I date them and leave them."

On Monday, Ron left work late and parked his Porsche outside Roman Holiday, the local bar his engineers often mentioned as a pick-up place. He got himself a non-alcoholic beer and waited. Soon enough, he had female companionship and conversation. It was only when he came home, the memories of one simmering-hot kiss at the bar, that he realized he'd done it again. He had cheated, if not with all of his body, at least with most of his heart.

When he went back to the house, he did not see Betty. For a moment he wondered if he had finally done it and broken them irretrievably. Then, he heard the sound of a paintbrush being rinsed in a jar of turpentine from above, and the smell of oil paints wafted down the stairs. His empty bedroom, the master that they had once shared, beckoned to him, so he slipped inside quietly, showered, and went to bed. The next day he woke up, expecting a momentous change, but it was just an ordinary day in the divided house.

Over the next few days, each retreated into the mindset of their respective gender. Ron began to question whether he wanted to be married; in fact, he questioned whether he wanted to be in his career path, working for this company, living in a city, or even wearing shoes. He thought about growing a beard and retreating to a mountain cabin. But then, who would he talk to? What would he be? Betty on the other hand began to feel the echoes of time amplifying her flaws, and wondered what was so dead inside of her that she could not be a normal wife.

When he came home late on Wednesday, however, Betty was in the kitchen. She looked at him -- loosened tie, mussed hair, lipstick on his cheek, reeking of beer -- and retreated into the dining room where she had her book.

That's it, I'm broken, she thought. Then he appeared in the doorway.

"What?" he said with the exuberant aggression of the intoxicated. "Running away?"

"No, Ron," she said. "Just wondering if this is a choice... or if you just angry with me."

He guffawed, but said nothing more. Words were just colors that people used to make the inevitable seem acceptable to them, he thought.

"Now that it has made itself the issue of the hour, Ron, what is our future?" Betty looked at him with clear blue eyes and a calm countenance.

"I think I broke it," he said. "There's nothing. You can't trust me again, and I can't trust me again. And I can no longer be what you need me to be, your loving husband in whom you have absolute faith. Because you're not going to have that faith, Betty. I can see it in your eyes. They're empty."

She did not appear taken aback, or even rustled in any way, he thought to his surprise. In fact, she seemed almost to have expected that.

"Let's talk about it in the morning," she said, but both of them knew this would not happen. Instead, the divided house would come gradually to life and its humans would leave, separately, as they had come to live.

Ron spent an hour at his desk massaging his temples while gulping down copious amounts of iced tea. Slowly the throbbing receded and he felt less of the cottonmouth. He had still slept badly, and so his brain worked poorly, but fortunately he had little of dire consequence on his plate. He met Greg for lunch.

"She makes me feel terrible," he told Greg. "Sitting there, like Mother Mary, immaculate in her suffering, beyond criticism. She is wounded and I wounded her, and she's being nice about it just to make me feel terrible, so I come crawling back. Then, I'm going to have to be a dog. Sit, Ron. Stay, Ron. Stay home tonight, Ron. Beg, Ron. Nah, there's not much I can do to fix this. Even if she takes a lover, we'll still never trust each other, and her vision of me is always going to be fractured, tainted."

"Maybe you could just be friends," said Greg. "You clearly care about her, or you wouldn't even be entertaining these thoughts. You'd just move on, like you did when you had to take the company back. You don't think about those guys any longer."

Across town Erin and Betty were having a quick lunch in the cafeteria of the medical center next door. "And so that's how I ended up being a single mom," Erin said. "When I found out I was pregnant, I had to leave school."

"Was that hard?" Betty asked. "I asked a friend at the university, and she said you were a promising student, with a full-ride scholarship."

"Of course it's hard," Erin said, frowning slightly. "I work all day, go to school at night, and I don't have weekends. I used to think I would do it differently, but if I had to do it all over again, I would do the same damn thing, because I got Tommy out of it. He's eight now, a perfect angel. Well... an angel, if you consider that boy angels should be naughty, you know the old rhyme about snips, snails, and puppy dog tails. As far as I can tell, people act as if every moment is their last, which makes them see it as an eternal state, instead of a step to something else with lots of options along the way. I couldn't imagine living without my boyfriend, so I let him use me, and I ended up pregnant. Was it bad, or good? My child is good, and in another two years, I'll be there too."

She patted Betty on the leg. "No matter what you're going through, it will be fine in the end," she said. "You can't un-do the past, just move forward."

"In the end..." said Betty. "The final moment."

Back at the barbecue restaurant where Greg and Ron were tossing back a midday Shiner, the conversation got similarly esoteric. "There are no sure things. We like to think that love is, and maybe God, but I think they're like gravity and time, relative to velocity and direction. I believe in the Malthus-Eckhart theory, which is basically that humans think linearly and arithmetically but life operates exponentially and three-dimensionally. This means that we recognize only the parts of reality that repeat consistently until the last second of time, and we filter out all of the other possibilities. This gives us something that we can work with, as a group, so it goes really well at first, but then something we never thought of comes in, and the failure is exponential. The fascinating thing is that whatever we did looked like a really good option at first, but then became not just a not so-good-option, but our doom. This is why humans are so self-destructive."

"Yeah," said Ron slowly. "I guess I did filter out everything but what I wanted. I wanted a perfect marriage, and I got a wife who was too busy to be there for me, so instead of working on that, I just moved on to something else. Now I can't get back to what I thought was linear. I thought that I could step out for a few days, then come back to exactly where I was, but it is like how a space ship moving at light speed might take a few decades to reach another world, but when it came back, the relative speed would mean that twenty thousand years had passed on Earth. It's like that with my marriage: I was gone for a few days, but I came back and a thousand years have passed, and now we're unknowns to each other."

Greg drained the last of his beer, the vaguely iodine flavor lingering tingling on his tongue. "Cheer up, brother of mine," he said. "This won't be forever. Either she'll crack because you're still better than anyone else, or you'll leave her and then I can show you around the dating world. Nothing is final. I mean, until death, I guess, and maybe even that is relative, too."

"You mean I might wake up on another planet as a lizard man and still be married to a lizard-woman who is Betty?" Ron asked, laughing.

"No, but at some point, the two of you might converge, and find out that you share a destiny," said Greg. He felt the statement jar him then, as if stirring up a memory of some thought he wanted to express, but it vanished evanescently and he simply said, "Come on, let's get back to your office."

Thursday was a slow day since the political news was unsettled, the economy was in turmoil, and as a result, people were in a frenzy. It struck Ron as wrong somehow that instead of living individual lives, people had to react to these things that happened so far away. Someone made a decision somewhere, and so a city turns to ash, the world economy crashes, or humans go to the moon or Mars. He wanted it all to go away so he could be in silence with his inner life, where he began to suspect he had lost the ability to trust himself, and therefore could never take Betty back.

After a post-lunch session with a patient whose entire family had died when their plane went down over Zimbabwe, Betty received phone messages canceling her last two sessions. She drove home, wondering if survivor's guilt happened to all of them for even more mundane things. For example, she was not the one caught cheating, but she still felt guilty for -- for things she did not understand. Was it wrong to consider a husband her property, for her exclusive sexual use? Or was it the only way to get out of treating each other like property, through the mystical transformation of love?

Uncharacteristically, Betty helped herself to a beer from the fridge. If Ron wanted her to pay him back, she would, she rationalized. She could justify the beer by claiming that it helped put her in the mood to talk, and she sensed a big four-word ("we have to talk") event coming in their future with dread in her gut and genitals. Everything seemed ruined, and she reflected that her parents had always known it would end this way for her, since she was not a solid through-and-through winner like her siblings. She could see their scornful faces now in her mind.

Without knowing why, she stripped off her pantsuit and shoes, then stood in her bra and panties before her latest painting. Squeezing paint onto a palette, she readied her brush. Art was like reading tarot, scrying, or conjuring, she reflected. You look into the future to see the past. You take things to their ends, and see what their essence was, then paint that. A good painting was like the daily planner of the gods, telling you how everything would turn out and what it meant. She saw so much in her future: the marriages of her children, publishing an article about survivor's guilt, maybe finally getting Ron to buy that cabin in the woods, bungalow near the beach, or boat in which they could travel the world. But that picture was no longer clear for her, and she felt it slipping away, like a destination in the rearview mirror as she roared on toward places unknown in a fast car.

A few hours later Ron slipped through the back door to take a quick shower and change into something less nerdly than his grey sere suit. His personal email contained a message from his insurance agency, confirming that both he and his wife had increased their life insurance to a ridiculous number. That's Betty, he figured, looking out for the kids. Curious, he stopped by her workroom. Two easels took up all of the space. On one was a bizarre painting; the other held what looked like one of books they had given to their children, decades ago. It was open to a dog-eared page. He read:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

He heard Greg's voice echoing in his head: "Women, can't live with 'em, can't figure them out either." Then he turned his attention to the painting. It was classic Betty, with a white castle shining the clouds, lush in the blues, golds, and spring greens she liked to use. She had painted that before, he chuckled.

But then he looked down, tracing a root that seemed to grow from the tree next to the castle into the foreground, then snake zig-zagged to a castle below in a dark world of violets, reds, and silver. There was a moon below it, and it was surrounded by psychedelic paisley plants. Then his eye caught how from the sides of the root, a vine in dark forest green stretched across the blazing orange background toward castles on the right and left.

As he studied the painting, he thought about the character of his wife. Being male, Ron oriented himself toward objectives, but if he lost sight of the big picture, this momentum slipped to noticing flaws.

For too long, he thought, he had seen mostly what he did not like in his wife, instead of the whole picture. He had seen only the dark fire of someone he would never be sure loved him, not the bright and light she brought, her actions speaking louder than words.

She, when she gave up her painting for a career, she lost sight of the picture entirely, figuring that the issue was her or in her, and not about her relationship to the world around her. Life is not a picture, thought Ron, but this was a pretty good painting.

The castle on the right had a high window in which he could see a man, looking like a statue of the ancient god Apollo that had been at their museum, and the castle on the left featured a sunroom in which a virtuous maiden of some kind with long flowing golden hair held a sword. "Nutty female psychological intrigues," thought Ron, and after taking his shower, got dressed to go to the Roman Holiday. As he opened the back door again, but then had a feeling of being watched.

He turned around. She was there in her light robe, a nearly-transparent garment that he had always found appealing, and under it he could see the lace of her bra and panties. "You could stay," she whispered. "You could -- I could -- forget about the past. We could just be us again. Stop thinking so much, look toward what we have left."

Ron fixed her with an eye and she saw the dark fire in it. "I'll just screw it up again," he said. "There's nothing left for me. If you give me love, I'll ruin it. I need a life without things that I can lose because I have no discipline. We can't undo the past. There's just nothing left."

He bowed his head slightly, and ducked out the door, then forgot all about the situation as he zoomed on to the Roman Holliday and parked behind the one-story brick bar pulsing with dance music. As he stepped in the door, Marcia called out to him. Five foot nothing without heels, she was covered in exotic tattoos in Enochian and Mayan writing, had long dark hair, and worked as a security auditor at Google. Even more than that, she believed in no-strings dating, where when they saw each other they had wall-banging sex, but otherwise made no claim to a future, any future.

At two in the morning, Betty felt her phone buzz next to her. She had fallen asleep on the sofa with the light on, facing the front of the house. Her gut crawled with uncertainty.

"Hey, it's Greg," said Greg. "I'm here at the, uh, Roman Holliday, and it's about Ron."

"Won't his date be taking care of him?" Betty asked, too close to spitting for her taste. "I'm sorry, I mean, doesn't he have someone there?"

"No, she... uh.... bolted with one of the personal trainers from next door. He's had a few, needs someone to make sure he doesn't get sick. And I've... uh... I've met someone, and we're going our way in just a few. Can you take Ron home." It was not a question, more like a dismissal.

Betty hung up and picked up her car keys and purse. She looked like anyone else going out to that club; the revealing nightgown-slash-robe would probably count as conservative. When she went into the garage however, her car refused to start. She remembered battery warnings on the dashboard for the past few mornings, so it was not entirely surprising. She called up some apps and soon had a paid ride to take her to the club.

Stepping out on the sidewalk, she was taken not by how lewd the place was, but by how cheap it seemed. The bar was a box building with office-style glass windows. There were cheap geegaws like disco balls, streamers, and silly string there to keep the "adults" occupied. The music sounded to her like a record she would have bought for her children, just with a pulsing techno beat. And the girls? They were pretty, just like the men were rugged, but there was no handsomeness there. This was a mating booth, and it struck her as tawdry and empty. She thought more of Ron than this..

Paying the ridiculous cover fee, she found her husband curled up at the bar. He looked ashen grey and there was vomit on the floor, not that anyone here would notice. A wave of perfume hit her in the face, and she realized that they pumped it into this place to cover the stench of sweaty bodies, alcohol, cigarettes, and flatulence. "Come on, Ron," she said, shouldering him and leading him out to his car. She fished his keys out of his pocket.

"Hey, pretty lady, looks like your date is hors de combat," said a six-footer with bulging muscles, a firm jaw, and bold dark eyes. "Drop him off and let's have a good time."

"No, thank you," said Betty with her best smile. "Some other time, maybe."

"Maybe," said the guy, and shot finger pistols at her. Betty sighed and got the Porsche open, then slid Ron into the passenger side, where he slumped against the door as she took the driver's seat and belted on his seatbelt. She pressed the little button to lower the top, mainly to get the alcohol fumes out, but also because it was a beautiful night, with a black infinity over them studded with stars, each one a world of promise to be explored. Wrenching the wheel of the powerful car, Betty peeled out of the lot and got them up on the freeway.

The cold night air rushing past brought Ron back after a few minutes driving. "Where are we?" he mumbled.

"I'm taking you to a safe place," said Betty.

That woke him up more. "Betty? Why are you..."

"Ssh," she said, petting his hair. "Rest now. I'm going to make sure that everything will turn out all right. It will be just like it was before things went wrong."