Tinderbox by Lisa Gornick

dusk, Myra waters the flowering beds and blooming herbs, then locks the terrace
     door, leaving her garden clogs on the deck. Barefoot, she climbs the stairs to the
     music room, where she sits down to play without the sound of footsteps overhead. She
     begins with the major scales, advancing by fifths, first hands separate, triple octaves,
     then hands in tandem, and then one ascending while the other descends, a pattern,
     her teacher showed her, which creates a series of chords while keeping the fingering
     between the hands the same. She proceeds to arpeggios, saving the sevenths for last:
     the progression from the joyful third, celebration of life, to the melancholic seventh,
     mournful reminder of its fading.
    When she first learned the cycle of fifths, it had taken her breath away, the mathematical
     perfection, the way the magic happens no matter the scale. As a child, she’d loved
     mathematics, not for the pyrotechnics of computation, but for the mystical nature
     of an invention that insists on utter independence from its creator, an invisible
     system more discovered than constructed, so that studying trigonometry or doing geometric
     proofs felt like unveiling the laws of the universe—as if those were not also a fiction
     of man. Larry had also loved mathematics. But what he loved was the use to which numbers
     could be put—the prediction of velocities and markets and weather patterns—a kind
     of exploitation, Myra had felt, of mathematics for man’s purposes rather than a reverence
     for its poetry.
    Larry found these thoughts of hers very sweet, very feminine. Her mind literally turned
     him on. He’d listen to her talk and wrap his arms around her or fondle her breasts
     and press his groin against hers. It took her years to realize how degrading she found
     this, how his actions implied that her ideas were soft next to the harder qualities
     of his, and how his amusement at her mind was for him a metaphor of sexual conquest,
     of being able to pin her against a wall or hold her beneath him in bed.
    When she’d discovered Larry’s affair and told him to leave, her father-in-law, Max,
     sixty-six and in his last year of work, seemed more heartbroken than his son, who,
     at first, seemed half-relieved. Not knowing what else to do, Max invited her to lunch.
     Seated across the table from her at La Caravelle, he asked her to consider the implications
     of her decision for the children. Silently, Myra, who in the prior five years had
     miscarried six times and buried both her parents, wept into her leek soup.
    Max offered her his handkerchief, which she blotched with her tears and then accidentally
     dropped in her soup.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s unfair of me to ask you that. Larry is just so goddamned
     weak. Smart but weak. He couldn’t bear your grief over your miscarriages. The girl,
     the secretary, receptionist, whatever the hell she is, he was trying to keep you from
     getting pregnant again.”
    Her head bent, Myra nodded. What Max said was so true, she immediately recognized
     it as something she already knew. And although it did not make her feel she could
     trust Larry again or remain married to him, it had changed everything, because she
     could no longer hate him. To the contrary, with the truth of her father-in-law’s comment
     in mind, she had come to feel toward Larry a mild, neutered affection, a feeling not
     unlike what she might have for a former schoolteacher or neighbor, an affection that
     allowed her to go forward unencumbered by powerful emotions.
    Before Larry’s infidelity, she’d visualized the four of them—Larry, Caro, Adam, and
     herself—as a four-sided form: a square, a rectangle, a parallelogram, a quadrilateral,
     a tetrahedron. Afterward, they became a pentagon: the fifth position occupied first
     by the receptionist and then by each of Larry’s subsequent two wives. When she invited
     Adam, Rachida, and Omar to stay with her this year, she imagined