When Ted opened the door to find Mariana there, his first thought was “I don’t know what I’m wearing.” And he didn’t look down; he had a bad feeling and didn’t want to face it, kept his eyes on the girl, who said, “Hello, Theodore.” Ted thought he remembered a lengthy negotiation that had ended in an agreement to call him “Ted.” Maybe not.
“Hello, the death nurse.”
“Grief counselor.”
“Hello, the death counselor.”
She smiled patiently and would not be baited or charmed.
“Very nice of you to stay with your dad.”
“Very nice of you to … bring … death, you know, to the home, make housecalls, uh.”
“How long will you stay?”
Ted became aware of an overwhelming urge to impress this woman, like enter a hot-dog-eating contest for her, and he shook his head because he knew that thought had no business here at this time. Instead he said, “You know what, as long as it takes. That’s the kind of who I am. I’m a giver. That’s what I do. I give.”
“You’re a giver.”
“Uh-huh.” He stared into her dark brown eyes and saw they were speckled with amber and hazel, like veins of precious stone hinting at what riches lay beneath. He still wanted to say he’d eat hot dogs for her till he could eat no more, but had the good sense to hold his tongue.
She said, “Hey, look at that. You have your dad’s eyes.” Ted sensed that she liked Marty a lot, and that to be like him was perhaps a good thing, for once.
“Well, I am fifty percent him, I guess, you know, genitally speaking.”
Ted felt a shift in the air. Like he’d said something strange, but he didn’t know what. He tried to replay what he’d just said in his mind, but couldn’t hear it clearly.
“You mean, ‘genetically.’”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“You said ‘genitally.’”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“You did.”
God, that was stupid. What was he, four? Maybe. He caught a glimpse of the two of them in a hallway mirror. He saw her first and was taken that this opposite profile showed another person, still a beauty, but another dimension, a depth that concealed as much as it revealed. But then he saw himself. He was wearing his old New York Yankee pj’s, the cuffs of which came to mid-calf, like culottes. Good look. His belly … he couldn’t even deal with his belly at the moment, so he went to his hair, fuck. He gathered up handfuls and twisted and turned them into some kind of ponytail/chignon. Sweat announced itself at his hairline.
“You said you were ‘fifty percent’ of your dad ‘genitally speaking.’ I guess you’re giving new meaning to ‘chip off the old block.’”
“That’s horrible. No. No way. Anyway. If that’s what we’re … I’m sure I’m well over fifty percent. That’s not … let’s say I am the opposite of fifty percent, okay, whatever that is, probably, would be, like … Jesus. According to the abacus in my head.”
“Must be the new math you got working there.”
“Can I shut the door and you knock and I answer and we can start this all over again?”
Ted was aware this might be funny; he was also aware it might not be funny at all, that it might be a rock balanced on a precipice and could roll either way, into the promised land or back onto his head.
“Perhaps I misspoke.”
“Freud says there are no accidents.”
“Oh, the Freud card, okay, cool. You’re gonna make me play the Jung card? Or perhaps pull Otto Rank?”
He might’ve quit at that one, which wasn’t a half-bad play, but he thought he had a coup de grâce: “Freud schmoid.”
There. He was wrong. He did not have a coup de grâce.
“Nice comeback. What’s that smell?”
“My embarrassment?”
“Your embarrassment smells like marshmallows.”
Mariana, concerned about the burning smell, pushed past Ted and into the house. She hustled after the center of the smoke, up to the fourth floor, Ted climbing the stairs behind her, his head inches from her ascending ass. He could’ve climbed those stairs all day. What the hell is that? Oh. Oh. He felt the stirrings of a hard-on and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one. Spring of ’76? Something about the tall ships and a drunken woman/perhaps transvestite in Queens. Whatever. His cock rolled over like a man troubled in his sleep, awakened by a noise outside but not sure if he should bother to rise fully to go check it out. This is interesting, he thought, and heard again his father say in his head, “She’s out of your league.” Ted agreed.
He followed the death nurse and his thoughts of her into the study, where Marty was now roasting marshmallows impaled on the end of a Boston Red Sox promotional umbrella. Mariana took in the scene, stopped, and nodded. She saw the magazines, the life burning, and intuited the rest. She had seen this before. In her job, dying people often asked to have things obliterated, like the burning ships of Nordic funeral pyres, especially intimate things, creative things—as if they didn’t want to be vulnerable when dead, their defenseless ashes picked over by the vultures of posterity. It was a common concern.
She had read that unfortunate mountain climbers, who fell or wandered off lost and perished in the cold of the Himalayas, were sometimes found with their clothes off. That they had stripped as an unreasonable response to freezing to death. It was called “paradoxical undressing.” It seems that when the body is finally shutting down in the cold, the blood moves from the extremities inward, the last bit of heat retreating to the vital organs, in a doomed attempt to stay alive. But by the time this happens, it is already too late. The freezing person experiences this final stage of freezing death as overheating, and may take off his clothes in the subzero temperatures, searching for comfort: freezing and burning simultaneously. Fire and ice. Frozen in time, burned at the stake. She understood that all too well. Marty’s bonfire was something like this, she reasoned. A cold heat, a paradoxical striptease by a man who does not want to be seen.
She went to Marty and slipped a hand around his waist. Together they looked at a life go up in smoke. “Is that all there is to a fire?” Marty asked.
Mariana’s response to his attempt at ironic distance was to pull him in even closer. From behind, to Ted, they looked like they could be lovers. A May/December thing. Or more like a July/February thing. Marty rested his head on Mariana’s shoulder and pulled the umbrella out of the fire, making an offering, “Marshmallow? Breakfast of champions. Maybe I wrote that.”
She took of it and ate.