Sleeping in Flame

The brakes failed on her car. When she took it to be repaired, the mechanic said there was a good possibility they'd been tampered with.

These stories went on and on until I got completely exasperated. "For Christ's sake, Maris, why didn't you go to the police? You were being fucking terrorized!"

"In Germany, all you can do is go to the police and make out an Anzeige, which is the same as lodging a formal complaint. But if no one's around to witness the event, you're out of luck until there've been lots of those Anzeigen made against the same person. Then the cops start looking into things. I did one when he hit me the first time, but you know what the cops said? Even after I'd shown them the bruises he'd left on me? How could they be sure I hadn't hit myself just to get him in trouble! Thank you very much, Munich police. You can't imagine how helpless women are under the law in most countries when it comes to things like this, Walker. That's why they're so hesitant to go to the police after they've been raped or attacked."

"But I thought that whole policy was changing."

"It is, but it isn't changed yet."

In the boxes were a wonderful silver ballpoint pen from the 1940s, a Claude Montana leather jacket the color of a chestnut, a pack of tarot cards wrapped in a piece of black parachute silk.

"Do you read the tarot?"

"Yes, but please don't ask me to do it for you yet. I'm a little afraid of what it would say about you and me."

"Are you good at it?"

"Sometimes. It's always there to hold your hand, but then you grow too dependent on it and don't look for the answers on your own. It helps best when you don't need it so badly."

"What happened when you asked it about Luc and you?"

"The card that always came up was the Tower. Das Turm. Do you know what it means?"

"Bad things?"

"Life crashes down. Ruin, usually. It's a card that scares me whenever I see it."

"You won't read for me?"

"Not yet. Also, please don't take the cards out or touch them, Walker. No offense, but there's a fu

People I'd known had had their cards or palms read, their astrological charts made up. To me, it was a convenient, vaguely questionable and frightening way of finding out about the day after tomorrow or how to handle it. Part of me believed, part didn't. What held me back most was the thought that fate was a much more illusive and teasing creature than we liked to admit. Why should it reveal its next move so readily and easily, in a line across the hand or the figure of a man with a few swords going through his body? Maris later assured me the only thing the tarot did was give suggestions about how to handle our lives and our next moves: the final decisions were certainly up to us. But by then she had read my cards and the Tower showed up in every hand she dealt. By then I believed completely in fortune telling, but it gave no suggestions, only told me again and again who I was. And that there was no way out.

An hour later we were standing in the middle of her apartment surveying a Matterhorn of boxes and things stacked everywhere. The doorbell rang. While she went to answer it, I pulled a large book out of a box on the architect Charles Jencks. I heard a child's voice and assumed it was one of the Schuschitz children. I wasn't thrilled. They'd discovered Maris and her kindness as soon as she took the apartment, and had been coming to visit at all hours of the day, sometimes to our embarrassment.

I didn't like children very much but didn't feel guilty about it. Maris said she couldn't believe that, and attributed the feeling to my own strange begi

"Did you bring your cities, Maris?"

"I did. I brought the cities and all my thousands of LEGO, too. We're going to make a whole universe!"

She came back into the room with the boy and girl, both lovely looking, both bratty as hell. They knew they had Maris wrapped around their little fingers, but with the same perceptive ante

"We have to go to school now, but I said we should come down to welcome you home."

She knew the kids were naughty, but smiled at them with pure delight. Her love was helpless and all-encompassing. "If I had some sweeties I'd give them to you, but I haven't been shopping yet. Walker and I just got in. Come back after school and we'll have a little party."

They accepted this and, after checking out some of the more interesting things she'd already unpacked, went out again.

"You really don't like them, do you?"

"Whenever they come in here they want something from you. No kids should be like that, Maris. They're too used to being given everything and expecting it as their due. No, I don't like that."

"Oh, Walker, haven't you ever read Freud or any of those people? Kids expect things as their due because no one's told them different yet. The worst thing that happens to kids is the shitty day they discover the world doesn't give a damn. It happened to all of us, so why not indulge them a little till then? That's only fair; it's what our parents did with us."

I touched her hand. "I don't love them, but I love your love for them. I know what you're saying. You're right."

She went to the bed and started taking boxes off it. I knew what she was doing. It made me as excited as the first day we'd been to bed. I walked over to help. She grabbed me around the neck in a headlock and pulled me down with her. The sheets were freezing cold when we slid beneath them, naked, minutes later.

In a few days she had everything in place and the apartment was completely her. On the walls were large prints of Tamara de Lempicka women, Michael Graves buildings, a blow-up of a Vogue photograph of Maris dressed as a giant green cactus. The shelves were filled with interesting or fu

The first time we ate a full-fledged meal there, she brought out a photograph and put it in front of me.

"It isn't nice, Walker, but I want you to see a picture of him just in case he ever comes around."

Luc had curly brown hair and a slightly cleft chin. Sad eyes, sweet eyes. He looked a lot older than I'd imagined, but wore the clothes of a fifteen-year-old – scruffy white sneakers, bleached jeans, a "Best Company" yellow sweatshirt. Maris had worn the same shirt often. Seeing it on him sent a small prick through me.

"I know that shirt."

She took the picture and looked at it. "He wore all of my clothes. We're about the same size. It drove me crazy. Did I tell you about the underwear? When things really started going bad between us, he would take my underpants and wear them. He thought it was a very hot thing to do."

"Come on, he wore your panties? What the hell for?"

"Because he knew I hated it. He wanted to get me angry."

"And you let him do it?"