Burning House

by Ann Beattie

  “If she really needs my help,” Todd said, “I could give her some advice on marketing pottery. When our aunt dies, she’ll come into some inheritance money. I’ve been looking into debentures,” he said.

  Before I left for Vermont, I bought an answering machine. My friend Linda goes over to the apartment every four or five days to water the plants and listen to the tape, to see if there are any important messages. Last week she called and said that there was one she ought to play for me. She put the machine on playback and held the telephone to the microphone. It was Jason, the first message in so many months that I’d lost count: “Hello, machine. This is the voice you wanted to hear. It’s calling to ask if you want to meet me for dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. I’m backing up, as you can tell. Doesn’t this thing ever run out of tape? It’s eleven o’clock Sunday morning, and I’m at the Empire Diner.” A pause. Quietly: “I miss you.”

  “The aloe has white flies,” Linda said. “I’ve never known an aloe to get white flies. I sprayed it with the thing from the kitchen sink, and when I go back next week, I’ll zap it with bug spray.”

  On Monday, after Linda called, I walked down the driveway to shovel some of the gravel that had been delivered into the potholes that had deepened over the winter. I got the shovel from where it leaned against the tree, flicked caterpillars off the handle, and started digging into the pile of gravel, thinking that I shouldn’t call Jason back. He didn’t say he was leaving her. If I did something physical, I might not think about it. The mailman came, and I took the pile of letters. And there it was, on top: the letter from Ash, the one we all knew he’d write. Ash, with no phone, in Tennessee Ash without Holly.

  I walked to the high hedge of purple lantana—as impossible that lantana would thrive in Vermont as that an aloe would get white flies—and did one of the most awful things I’ve ever done. I read the letter. I slit the envelope carefully, with the long nail of my index finger, so I could patch it together and feign ignorance when Holly saw that the envelope was ripped. I was thinking of a lie before I even read it. I’d say that there might have been money in it (why would Ash send money?) and someone at the post office held it to the light and … No: I’d just put all the mail in the mailbox and let her get it, and look blank. The same expression I got on my face when Jason talked about himself and his wife doing the things of ordinary life. Jason had gone to get the Sunday paper. Hundreds of miles away, he had eaten French toast—that was what he always ordered at the Empire. I could hear the piano playing, see our reflections in the shiny black tabletops that gave us fun-house-mirror faces. A chic, funny place, no place Holly would ever sit with Ash. What he was asking her to do, in the letter, was to be with him. “They’re probably poisoning you against me,” he wrote, “but they don’t know everything. They’re in the country with you, but they’re city people. They’re the kind who cut before they’re even sure the bite was from a snake. They’ll try to soothe your wounds, but in the end they’ll get you. I know that there isn’t much for you here, but if you could come down for just a little while, the distance from that incestuous world might do you good. I don’t think children are interchangeable, but there’s time in life for more than one thing. I’ve just read a book—here’s something your sophisticated friends would like—I was reading a book and I found out that because of the way space curves, there are stars that everybody thinks of as twin stars, but they’re really the same one. Are you sure that I’m the naïve country boy Jane and your brother want you to think I am? Come down here, just for a week, and stand at the back door with me when the breeze is blowing and my arm is around you and look up at the sky. Then say yes or no.”

  A cardinal was in the road. A brightly colored, male cardinal. It stood there like a vulture—a vulture ready to feed on an animal that had been killed. But nothing was dead. The bird was small for a cardinal. No more a real omen than the little piece of paper you pull out of your fortune cookie that misspells something you should believe.

  “Ash,” I whispered. “How could you?”

  I put all the mail in the mailbox but his letter. I ripped that to pieces as I crossed the road. The cardinal flew away. The bee that had been buzzing around me disappeared. The letter was ripped into pieces as tiny as confetti by the time I dropped them in the mud, by the stream, looking behind me for tiny white pieces I might have dropped, as guilty as a murderer whose knife drips blood. He didn’t deserve her. He really didn’t. That was no illusion; it was a dirty trick that if space curved, you thought that one star was two.

  Todd’s MG bumped slowly into the driveway. He held up something round and shiny. “Got this at a lawn sale,” he said. “Can you believe it? Paella for a hundred, or we could take a bath in it. You know that Degas painting? The woman in the tub?”

  I went in and poured some vodka over ice. I sat on the porch, shaking the glass. On the lawn, Todd was cleaning the gigantic pan with steel wool, washing away the dirt with a strong spray from the hose. I remembered making love to Jason at the end of the dock. Diving into the water. The long white hose that stretched from the back of the house to where the boat bobbed in the water—the East Hampton equivalent of the snake in the garden.

  Simple, fortune-cookie fact: someone loved Holly more than anyone had ever loved me. Linda called again, four days later, and there was no second message from Jason. I hadn’t really expected one.

  Linda had sprayed the plant. The plant was sure to recover. She said she took it out of the sun for a few days, because the combination of light and chemicals might be too much.

  Holly and I were mistaken for sisters, but she was more beautiful. Our long blond hair. Slender bodies. The way, in the city, people would smile at us with the same lack of embarrassment people have when they smile at twins. Oddities. Beautiful exceptions.

  When I found out that I was pregnant, I had thought first about amniocentesis, because a first cousin had had a baby with a slight birth defect. My first impulse was to protect that baby in any way I could. At the end, I had just thought about what it would feel like to have my cervix pricked, the baby sucked out. That crazy romantic lunch—pink petals all over our laps, on the table—and I couldn’t tell him. I had on a wrap-around skirt, and he slid his chair close to mine and was teasing, putting his hand underneath it, and I said to him, “I am eating, Jason,” and “I love you—I can’t eat.” He wanted to go to my apartment. “I have an appointment,” I said. “Tonight,” he said. “I can’t tonight,” I said. “Another night. Some other night.” He thought I was kidding. When he called, hours later, expecting to come over, I was lying in my bed, after the abortion, Linda sitting in a chair reading, watching, and I was trying not to sound woozy, in spite of the fact that they’d given me so many pills Linda almost had to carry me from the building to the cab. I had done it because I didn’t have the nerve to test him—to find out if he loved me more than he loved his wife. Ash loved Holly, and that went a long way toward explaining why we looked so much alike, yet she was more beautiful. She walked like somebody who was loved. She didn’t avoid looking into people’s eyes for the same reason I did when she walked through the city. I thought how lucky she was—even though sometimes she could be frighteningly unhappy—the night I held her and rocked her in my lap. I knew for sure that I was right about her good luck a week later, when I stood at the window, about to pull the shades in my room to take a nap, and I looked out and saw Ash’s old car, parked at the end of the treacherous driveway, and Ash, running toward the house, a huge torch of red gladiolas raised above his head.

  WINTER: 1978

  The canvases were packed individually, in shipping cartons. Benton put them in the car and slammed the trunk shut.

  “They’ll be all right?” the man asked.

  “They survived the baggage compartment of the 747, they’ll do O.K. in the trunk,” Benton said.

  “I love his work,” the man said to Nick.

  “He’s great,” Nick said, and felt like an idiot.

  Bent
on and Olivia had just arrived in L.A. Nick had gone to the airport to meet them. Olivia said she wasn’t feeling well and insisted on getting a cab to the hotel, even though Nick offered to drive her and meet Benton at Allen Tompkins’s house later.

  The man who had also come to the airport to meet Benton was Tompkins’s driver. Nick could never remember the man’s name. Benton was in L.A. to show his paintings to Tompkins. Tompkins would buy everything he had brought. Benton was wary of Tompkins, and of his driver, so he had asked Nick to meet him at the airport and to go with him.

  “How was your flight?” Nick said to Benton. All three of them were in the front seat of the Cadillac.

  “It was O.K. We were half an hour late taking off, but I guess they made up the time in the air. The plane was only a few minutes late, wasn’t it?”

  “Allen and I are flying to Spain for Christmas,” the driver said.

  On the tape deck, Orson Welles was broadcasting The War of the Worlds. Cars seldom passed them; the man drove sixty-five, with the car on cruise control, nervously brushing hair out of his eyes. The last time Nick rode in this car, a Jack Benny show, complete with canned laughter, had been playing on the tape deck.

  “An Arab bought the house next door, and he’s having a new pool put in. It’s in the shape of different flowers: one part of it’s tulip-shaped, and the other part is a rose. I asked, and the pool man told me it was supposed to be a rose.” The driver kneaded his left shoulder with his right hand. He was wearing a leather strap around his wrist with squares of hammered silver through the middle.

  “Have you been to Marbella?” the driver said. “Beverly Hills is the pits. Only he would want to live in Beverly Hills.”

  They were on Allen Tompkins’s street. “Hold it,” the driver said to Benton and Nick, taking the car off cruise control but slowing only slightly as he pulled into the steep driveway. He hopped out and opened the door on their side of the car.

  Benton hesitated a moment before reaching into the trunk. Glued to the underside of the trunk was a picture of Raquel Welch in a sequined gown. With her white teeth and tightly clothed, sequined body she looked like a mermaid in a nightmare.

  Benton was in California because Allen Tompkins paid him triple what he could get for his paintings in New York. Benton had met Tompkins years ago, when he had been framing one of his paintings, staying on after his shift at the frame shop in New Haven where he worked was over. Tompkins had asked Benton how much the picture he was working on would cost when it was framed. “It’s my painting, not for sale,” Benton had told him. Very politely, Tompkins had asked if he had others. That night, Benton called Nick, drunk, raving that a man he had just met had given him a thousand dollars cash. He had gone out with Benton the next night, Benton laughing and running from store to store, to prove to himself that the money really bought things. Benton had bought a brown tweed coat and a pipe. That joke had only turned sour when Benton’s wife, Elizabeth, commended him for selecting such nice things.

  Now, seven years later, Benton was wearing jeans and a black velvet jacket, and they were sitting in Tompkins’s library. It was cluttered with antique Spanish furniture, the curtains closed, the room illuminated by lamps with bases in the shape of upright fish that supported huge Plexiglas conch shell globes in their mouths. The lamps cast a lavender-pink light. Three Turkish prayer rugs were lined up across the center of the room—the only floor covering on the white-painted floorboards.

  “Krypto and Baby Kal-El,” Tompkins said, coming toward them with both hands outstretched. Benton smiled and shook both of Tompkins’s hands. Then Nick shook his hand too, certain that any feeling of warmth came from Tompkins’s just having shaken hands with Benton.

  “I’m so excited,” Tompkins said. He went to the long window behind where Benton and Nick sat on the sofa and pulled the string that drew the drapes apart. “Dusk falls on Gotham City,” Tompkins said. He sat in the heavily carved chair beside the sofa. “All for me?” he said, raising his eyebrows at the crates. “If you like them,” Benton said. The driver came into the library with a bottle of ouzo and a pitcher of orange juice on a tray. He put it on the small table midway between Benton and Tompkins.

  “Sit down. Sit down and have a look,” Tompkins said excitedly. The man sat on the floor by the crates, leaning against the sofa. Benton took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and began undoing the first crate.

  “I’m using my special X-ray vision,” Tompkins said, “and I love it already.”

  Tompkins got up and crouched by the open crate, fingers on the top of the frame, obviously enjoying every second of the suspense, before he pulled the picture out.

  “Money and taste,” the driver said to Nick.

  “You could not remember the simplest song lyric,” Tompkins said to his driver, slowly drawing out the painting. “Money and time,” he sighed, pulling the canvas out of the crate. “Money and time,” he said again, but this time it was halfhearted; he was interested in nothing but the picture he held in front of him. Benton was always amazed by that expression on Tompkins’s face. It made Benton as happy as he had been years before when he and Elizabeth were still married, and it had been his morning routine to go into Jason’s bedroom, gently shake him awake, and see his son’s soft blue eyes slowly focus on his own.

  It was three days after Benton had sold all his paintings to Tompkins, and Nick had gone to the hotel where Olivia and Benton were staying to try to persuade them to go to lunch.

  The light came into the hotel room in a strange way. The curtains were hung from brass rings, and between the rings, because the curtains did not quite come to the top of the window, light leaked in. Benton and Olivia kept the curtains closed all day—what they saw of the daylight was a pale band across the paint.

  Olivia was lounging on the bed in Benton’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt imprinted with a picture of the hotel, and when Nick laughed at her she pointed to his own clothing: white cowboy boots with gold-painted eagles on the toes, white jeans, a T-shirt with what looked like a TV test pattern on it. Nick had almost forgotten that he had brought Olivia a present. He took his hand out of his pocket and brought out a toy pistol in the shape of a bulldog. He pulled the trigger and the dog’s mouth opened and the bulldog squeaked.

  “Don’t thank me,” Nick said, putting it on the bedside table with the other clutter. “A blinking red light means that you have a message,” he said. He picked up the phone and dialed the hotel operator. “Nothing to it,” Nick said, patting Olivia’s leg. “Red light blinks, you just pick up the phone and get your message. If Uncle Nickie can do it, anybody can.”

  He tickled Olivia’s lips with an uneaten croissant from the bedside table. He was holding it so she could bite the end. She did. Nick dipped it in the butter, which had become very soft, and held it to her mouth again. She puffed on her joint and ignored him. He took a bite himself and put it back on the plate. He went to the window and pulled back the drapes, looking at the steep hill that rose in back of the hotel.

  “I wish I lived in a hotel,” he said. “Nice soft sheets, bathroom scrubbed every day, pick up the phone and get a croissant.”

  “You can get all those things at home,” Benton said, wrapping a towel around him as he came out of the bathroom. The towel was too small. He gave up after several tugs and threw it over the chair.

  “The sheets I slept on last night illustrated the hunt of the Unicorn. Poor bastard is not only fenced in, but I settled my ass on him. Manuela does nothing in the bathroom but run water in the tub and smoke Tiparillos. Maybe on the way home I’ll stop and pick up some croissants.” Nick closed the window. “Christmas decorations are already going up,” he said. He took a bottle of pills out of his pocket and put them on the table. The label said: “Francis Blanco: 2 daily, as directed.”

  “Any point in asking who Francis Blanco is?” Benton said.

  “You’re hovering like a mother over her chicks,” Nick said. “Someday that bottle will grow wings and fly away,
and then you’ll wonder why you cared so much.” Nick clasped his hands behind him. “Francis Blanco just overhauled my carburetor,” he said. “You don’t have to look far for anything.”

  In spite of the joke about being Uncle Nickie, Nick was Benton’s age and four years younger than Olivia. Nick was twenty-nine, from a rich New England family, and he had come to California four years before and made a lot of money in the record industry. His introduction to the record industry had come from a former philosophy professor’s daughter’s supplier. In exchange for the unlisted numbers of two Sag Harbor dope dealers, Dex Whitmore had marched Nick into the office of a man in L.A. who hired him on the spot. Nick sent a post card of the moon rising over the freeways to the professor, thanking him for the introduction to his daughter, who had, in turn, introduced him to her yoga teacher, who was responsible for his gainful employment. Dex Whitmore would have liked the continuation of that little joke; back East, he had gone to the professor’s house once a week to lead the professor’s daughter in “yoga exercises.” That is, they had gone to the attic and smoked dope and turned somersaults. Dex had been dead for nearly a year now, killed in a freak accident that had nothing to do with the fact that he sold drugs. He had been waiting at a dry cleaner’s to drop off a jacket when a man butted in front of him. Dex objected. The man took out a pistol and put a bullet in his side, shooting through a bottle of champagne Dex had clasped under his arm. Later Dex’s ex-wife filed a suit for more money from his estate, claiming that he had been carrying the bottle of champagne because he was on his way to reconcile with her.