Free Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent Page A

know what comes next on earth. No one knows. But there are footsteps coming toward him, and if there is any chance of saving a life through the sheer force of one’s love for it, he is already saved.

Mystery Caller
    Ten years later, this can happen to her: someone can set his coffee cup down on the counter instead of in its saucer, and she can, for that, love him. Who is he? No one, a colleague she likes but who isn’t important or especially close to her—no one she has ever imagined herself with . Office politics tend to sweep them, if not into collusion, at least into a nicely practical kind of empathy. There is relief for each of them in understanding the other, when they understand so few people around them, and he has supported her at key moments, strategically, in a manner that prevents his seeming too much her friend . That would be resented, as friendships are in offices—someone would set out to sabotage it. So they meet in amiable secret: it means nothing. He would say—it’s one of his phrases—it’s not hugely significant . She likes and admires him, but would becareful about saying she knows him, careful about asserting any kind of claim to his attention.
    He rarely drinks coffee. He’s doing so now, he’s explained, because of insomnia the night before. Until this morning she hasn’t known that he resists setting the cup in the saucer just as, ten years ago, her first husband did. She relied on it: really, she waited for him to set his cup down on counters or tables rather than in saucers, and this sense of waiting for this or for some other gesture or inflection unique to him was her sense of what it was to love. It was a thing she loved, his resisting the convention by which the presence of the saucer compels the placement of the cup, a thing he did that no one else did, and she hadn’t expected to encounter that habit again, or, encountering it ten years later, to feel love. To have a fraction of an instant’s love exacted from her for someone she does not love: What does it prove about love, about this love (she means not love for the man sitting next to her, but love for her ex-husband), about what you can know about what you feel? You think you are aware. You perceive that you are drawn to the angle of your father’s cheekbone in an otherwise unknown face, you understand that the presumptuous way your wrist is taken hold of and a thumb is run across your palm (she is thinking of meeting her second husband) works on you because in your family intimacy had had so much distance to cross it had needed the power of presumption, there had had to be something intractable about it, really, or it couldn’t have existed at all. You believe, in short, that you are informed about what you feel. An intelligent consumer, a diligent recycler, a woman who, the second time, married wisely and well. You allow for contradictions and gaps because it is wise to. You have never before hit a wall like this—never run into some way in which you are truly, blindingly wrong about yourself. Because aman sets his coffee cup down alongside his saucer, you can conceivably love him. It would be no less love than what you feel for your husband, yet this can’t, in any reasonable, enlightened view of things, be true. She wants to gape in her companion’s face, or to shout, to offend or alienate him so that he, dismayed, will assume responsibility for maintaining distance.
    He gets it. Something’s gone awry, and his voice is unsure, fractured by hesitation, when he says, “Okay, what?”
    â€œNothing.”
    He says with a plain kind of gentleness, no wiles, no manipulation, only a rightful affection for her in his voice, “Come on.”
    â€œYou could be my first husband.”
    â€œOh? Would I want to be?”
    â€œI just realized.” Aware he needs more to go on, she withholds; she lets him wait, she wants him to; it is the first