Burning House

by Ann Beattie

  “Your first idea was the best,” Milo says.

  Louise gives him an exasperated look and puts the glass down on the floor, pulls on her poncho, picks up the glass again and says a sullen goodbye to me, and goes out the front door.

  “Why is this my fault?” Milo says. “Have I done anything terrible? I—”

  “Do something to cheer yourself up,” I say, patting him on the back.

  He looks as exasperated with me as Louise was with him. He nods his head yes, and goes out the door.

  “Was everything all right this weekend?” I ask Louise.

  “Milo was in a bad mood, and Bradley wasn’t even there on Saturday,” Louise says. “He came back today and took us to the Village for breakfast.”

  “What did you have?”

  “I had sausage wrapped in little pancakes and fruit salad and a rum bun.”

  “Where was Bradley on Saturday?”

  She shrugs. “I didn’t ask him.”

  She almost always surprises me by being more grownup than I give her credit for. Does she suspect, as I do, that Bradley has found another lover?

  “Milo was in a bad mood when you two left here Saturday,” I say.

  “I told him if he didn’t want me to come next weekend, just to tell me.” She looks perturbed, and I suddenly realize that she can sound exactly like Milo sometimes.

  “You shouldn’t have said that to him, Louise,” I say. “You know he wants you. He’s just worried about Bradley.”

  “So?” she says. “I’m probably going to flunk math.”

  “No, you’re not, honey. You got a C-plus on the last assignment,”

  “It still doesn’t make my grade average out to a C.”

  “You’ll get a C. It’s all right to get a C.”

  She doesn’t believe me.

  “Don’t be a perfectionist, like Milo,” I tell her. “Even if you got a D, you wouldn’t fail.”

  Louise is brushing her hair—thin, shoulder-length, auburn hair. She is already so pretty and so smart in everything except math that I wonder what will become of her. When I was her age, I was plain and serious and I wanted to be a tree surgeon. I went with my father to the park and held a stethoscope—a real one—to the trunks of trees, listening to their silence. Children seem older now.

  “What do you think’s the matter with Bradley?” Louise says. She sounds worried.

  “Maybe the two of them are unhappy with each other right now.”

  She misses my point. “Bradley’s sad, and Milo’s sad that he’s unhappy.”

  I drop Louise off at Sarah’s house for supper. Sarah’s mother, Martine Cooper, looks like Shelley Winters, and I have never seen her without a glass of Galliano on ice in her hand. She has a strong candy smell. Her husband has left her, and she professes not to care. She has emptied her living room of furniture and put up ballet bars on the walls, and dances in a purple leotard to records by Cher and Mac Davis. I prefer to have Sarah come to our house, but her mother is adamant that everything must be, as she puts it, “fifty-fifty.” When Sarah visited us a week ago and loved the chocolate pie I had made, I sent two pieces home with her. Tonight, when I left Sarah’s house, her mother gave me a bowl of Jell-O fruit salad.

  The phone is ringing when I come in the door. It is Bradley.

  “Bradley,” I say at once, “whatever’s wrong, at least you don’t have a neighbor who just gave you a bowl of maraschino cherries in green Jell-O with a Reddi-Wip flower squirted on top.

  “Jesus,” he says. “You don’t need me to depress you, do you?”

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  He sighs into the phone. “Guess what?” he says.

  “What?”

  “I’ve lost my job.”

  It wasn’t at all what I was expecting to hear. I was ready to hear that he was leaving Milo, and I had even thought that that would serve Milo right. Part of me still wanted him punished for what he did. I was so out of my mind when Milo left me that I used to go over and drink Galliano with Martine Cooper. I even thought seriously about forming a ballet group with her. I would go to her house in the afternoon, and she would hold a tambourine in the air and I would hold my leg rigid and try to kick it.

  “That’s awful,” I say to Bradley. “What happened?”

  “They said it was nothing personal—they were laying off three people. Two other people are going to get the ax at the agency within the next six months. I was the first to go, and it was nothing personal. From twenty thousand bucks a year to nothing, and nothing personal, either.”

  “But your work is so good. Won’t you be able to find something again?”

  “Could I ask you a favor?” he says. “I’m calling from a phone booth. I’m not in the city. Could I come talk to you?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  It seems perfectly logical that he should come alone to talk—perfectly logical until I actually see him coming up the walk. I can’t entirely believe it. A year after my husband has left me, I am sitting with his lover—a man, a person I like quite well—and trying to cheer him up because he is out of work. (“Honey,” my father would say, “listen to Daddy’s heart with the stethoscope, or you can turn it toward you and listen to your own heart. You won’t hear anything listening to a tree.” Was my persistence willfulness, or belief in magic? Is it possible that I hugged Bradley at the door because I’m secretly glad he’s down and out, the way I used to be? Or do I really want to make things better for him?)

  He comes into the kitchen and thanks me for the coffee I am making, drapes his coat over the chair he always sits in.

  “What am I going to do?” he asks.

  “You shouldn’t get so upset, Bradley,” I say. “You know you’re good. You won’t have trouble finding another job.”

  “That’s only half of it,” he says. “Milo thinks I did this deliberately. He told me I was quitting on him. He’s very angry at me. He fights with me, and then he gets mad that I don’t enjoy eating dinner. My stomach’s upset, and I can’t eat anything.”

  “Maybe some juice would be better than coffee.”

  “If I didn’t drink coffee, I’d collapse,” he says.

  I pour coffee into a mug for him, coffee into a mug for me.

  “This is probably very awkward for you,” he says. “That I come here and say all this about Milo.”

  “What does he mean about your quitting on him?”

  “He said … he actually accused me of doing badly deliberately, so they’d fire me. I was so afraid to tell him the truth when I was fired that I pretended to be sick. Then I really was sick. He’s never been angry at me this way. Is this always the way he acts? Does he get a notion in his head for no reason and then pick at a person because of it?”

  I try to remember. “We didn’t argue much,” I say. “When he didn’t want to live here, he made me look ridiculous for complaining when I knew something was wrong. He expects perfection, but what that means is that you do things his way.”

  “I was. I never wanted to sit around the apartment, the way he says I did. I even brought work home with me. He made me feel so bad all week that I went to a friend’s apartment for the day on Saturday. Then he said I had walked out on the problem. He’s a little paranoid. I was listening to the radio, and Carole King was singing ‘It’s Too Late,’ and he came into the study and looked very upset, as though I had planned for the song to come on. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Whew,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t envy you. You have to stand up to him. I didn’t do that. I pretended the problem would go away.”

  “And now the problem sits across from you drinking coffee, and you’re being nice to him.”

  “I know it. I was just thinking we look like two characters in some soap opera my friend Martine Cooper would watch.”

  He pushes his coffee cup away from him with a grimace.

  “But anyway, I like you now,” I say. “And you’re exceptionally nice to Louise.”

  “I too
k her father,” he says.

  “Bradley—I hope you don’t take offense, but it makes me nervous to talk about that.”

  “I don’t take offense. But how can you be having coffee with me?”

  “You invited yourself over so you could ask that?”

  “Please,” he says, holding up both hands. Then he runs his hands through his hair. “Don’t make me feel illogical. He does that to me, you know. He doesn’t understand it when everything doesn’t fall right into line. If I like fixing up the place, keeping some flowers around, therefore I can’t like being a working person, too, therefore I deliberately sabotage myself in my job.” Bradley sips his coffee.

  “I wish I could do something for him,” he says in a different voice.

  This is not what I expected, either. We have sounded like two wise adults, and then suddenly he has changed and sounds very tender. I realize the situation is still the same. It is two of them on one side and me on the other, even though Bradley is in my kitchen.

  “Come and pick up Louise with me, Bradley,” I say. “When you see Martine Cooper, you’ll cheer up about your situation.”

  He looks up from his coffee. “You’re forgetting what I’d look like to Martine Cooper,” he says.

  Milo is going to California. He has been offered a job with a new San Francisco architectural firm. I am not the first to know. His sister, Deanna, knows before I do, and mentions it when we’re talking on the phone. “It’s middle-age crisis,” Deanna says sniffily. “Not that I need to tell you.” Deanna would drop dead if she knew the way things are. She is scandalized every time a new display is put up in Blooming dale’s window. (“Those mannequins had eyes like an Egyptian princess, and rags. I swear to you, they had mops and brooms and ragged gauze dresses on, with whores’ shoes—stiletto heels that prostitutes wear.”)

  I hang up from Deanna’s call and tell Louise I’m going to drive to the gas station for cigarettes. I go there to call New York on their pay phone.

  “Well, I only just knew,” Milo says. “I found out for sure yesterday, and last night Deanna called and so I told her. It’s not like I’m leaving tonight.”

  He sounds elated, in spite of being upset that I called. He’s happy in the way he used to be on Christmas morning. I remember him once running into the living room in his underwear and tearing open the gifts we’d been sent by relatives. He was looking for the eight-slice toaster he was sure we’d get. We’d been given two-slice, four-slice, and six-slice toasters, but then we got no more. “Come out, my eight-slice beauty!” Milo crooned, and out came an electric clock, a blender, and an expensive electric pan.

  “When are you leaving?” I ask him.

  “I’m going out to look for a place to live next week.”

  “Are you going to tell Louise yourself this weekend?”

  “Of course,” he says.

  “And what are you going to do about seeing Louise?”

  “Why do you act as if I don’t like Louise?” he says. “I will occasionally come back East, and I will arrange for her to fly to San Francisco on her vacations.”

  “It’s going to break her heart.”

  “No it isn’t. Why do you want to make me feel bad?”

  “She’s had so many things to adjust to. You don’t have to go to San Francisco right now, Milo.”

  “It happens, if you care, that my own job here is in jeopardy. This is a real chance for me, with a young firm. They really want me. But anyway, all we need in this happy group is to have you bringing in a couple of hundred dollars a month with your graphic work and me destitute and Bradley so devastated by being fired that of course he can’t even look for work.”

  “I’ll bet he is looking for a job,” I say.

  “Yes. He read the want ads today and then fixed a crab quiche.”

  “Maybe that’s the way you like things, Milo, and people respond to you. You forbade me to work when we had a baby. Do you say anything encouraging to him about finding a job, or do you just take it out on him that he was fired?”

  There is a pause, and then he almost seems to lose his mind with impatience.

  “I can hardly believe, when I am trying to find a logical solution to all our problems, that I am being subjected, by telephone, to an unflattering psychological analysis by my ex-wife.” He says this all in a rush.

  “All right, Milo. But don’t you think that if you’re leaving so soon you ought to call her, instead of waiting until Saturday?”

  Milo sighs very deeply. “I have more sense than to have important conversations on the telephone,” he says.

  Milo calls on Friday and asks Louise whether it wouldn’t be nice if both of us came in and spent the night Saturday and if we all went to brunch together Sunday. Louise is excited. I never go into town with her.

  Louise and I pack a suitcase and put it in the car Saturday morning. A cutting of ivy for Bradley has taken root, and she has put it in a little green plastic pot for him. It’s heartbreaking, and I hope that Milo notices and has a tough time dealing with it. I am relieved I’m going to be there when he tells her, and sad that I have to hear it at all.

  In the city, I give the car to the garage attendant, who does not remember me. Milo and I lived in the apartment when we were first married, and moved when Louise was two years old. When we moved, Milo kept the apartment and sublet it—a sign that things were not going well, if I had been one to heed such a warning. What he said was that if we were ever rich enough we could have the house in Connecticut and the apartment in New York. When Milo moved out of the house, he went right back to the apartment. This will be the first time I have visited there in years.

  Louise strides in in front of me, throwing her coat over the brass coatrack in the entranceway—almost too casual about being there. She’s the hostess at Milo’s, the way I am at our house.

  He has painted the walls white. There are floor-length white curtains in the living room, where my silly flowered curtains used to hang. The walls are bare, the floor has been sanded, a stereo as huge as a computer stands against one wall of the living room, and there are four speakers.

  “Look around,” Milo says. “Show your mother around, Louise.”

  I am trying to remember if I have ever told Louise that I used to live in this apartment. I must have told her, at some point, but I can’t remember it.

  “Hello,” Bradley says, coming out of the bedroom.

  “Hi, Bradley,” I say. “Have you got a drink?”

  Bradley looks sad. “He’s got champagne,” he says, and looks nervously at Milo.

  “No one has to drink champagne,” Milo says. “There’s the usual assortment of liquor.”

  “Yes,” Bradley says. “What would you like?”

  “Some bourbon, please.”

  “Bourbon.” Bradley turns to go into the kitchen. He looks different; his hair is different—more wavy—and he is dressed as though it were summer, in straight-legged white pants and black leather thongs.

  “I want Perrier water with strawberry juice,” Louise says, tagging along after Bradley. I have never heard her ask for such a thing before. At home, she drinks too many Cokes. I am always trying to get her to drink fruit juice.

  Bradley comes back with two drinks and hands me one. “Did you want anything?” he says to Milo.

  “I’m going to open the champagne in a moment,” Milo says. “How have you been this week, sweetheart?”

  “O.K.,” Louise says. She is holding a pale-pink, bubbly drink. She sips it like a cocktail.

  Bradley looks very bad. He has circles under his eyes, and he is ill at ease. A red light begins to blink on the phone-answering device next to where Bradley sits on the sofa, and Milo gets out of his chair to pick up the phone.

  “Do you really want to talk on the phone right now?” Bradley asks Milo quietly.

  Milo looks at him. “No, not particularly,” he says, sitting down again. After a moment, the red light goes out.

  “I’m going to mist your bowl g
arden,” Louise says to Bradley, and slides off the sofa and goes to the bedroom. “Hey, a little toadstool is growing in here!” she calls back. “Did you put it there, Bradley?”

  “It grew from the soil mixture, I guess,” Bradley calls back. “I don’t know how it got there.”

  “Have you heard anything about a job?” I ask Bradley.

  “I haven’t been looking, really,” he says. “You know.”

  Milo frowns at him. “Your choice, Bradley,” he says. “I didn’t ask you to follow me to California. You can stay here.”

  “No,” Bradley says. “You’ve hardly made me feel welcome.”

  “Should we have some champagne—all four of us—and you can get back to your bourbons later?” Milo says cheerfully.

  We don’t answer him, but he gets up anyway and goes to the kitchen. “Where have you hidden the tulip-shaped glasses, Bradley?” he calls out after a while.

  “They should be in the cabinet on the far left,” Bradley says.

  “You’re going with him?” I say to Bradley. “To San Francisco?”

  He shrugs, and won’t look at me. “I’m not quite sure I’m wanted,” he says quietly.

  The cork pops in the kitchen. I look at Bradley, but he won’t look up. His new hairdo makes him look older. I remember that when Milo left me I went to the hairdresser the same week and had bangs cut. The next week, I went to a therapist who told me it was no good trying to hide from myself. The week after that, I did dance exercises with Martine Cooper, and the week after that the therapist told me not to dance if I wasn’t interested in dancing.

  “I’m not going to act like this is a funeral,” Milo says, coming in with the glasses. “Louise, come in here and have champagne! We have something to have a toast about.”

  Louise comes into the living room suspiciously. She is so used to being refused even a sip of wine from my glass or her father’s that she no longer even asks. “How come I’m in on this?” she asks.

  “We’re going to drink a toast to me,” Milo says.

  Three of the four glasses are clustered on the table in front of the sofa. Milo’s glass is raised. Louise looks at me, to see what I’m going to say. Milo raises his glass even higher, Bradley reaches for a glass. Louise picks up a glass. I lean forward and take the last one.