Burning House

by Ann Beattie

  “Leave him alone if he doesn’t want to do what you want him to do, Jason,” Elizabeth said. She had just come back into the room.

  “Who was that on the phone?” Ena said. She took a drink of bourbon. Nick noticed that she had put a sprig of mint in the glass.

  “That person named Richard. He read something from a book called An Exaltation of Larks.” Elizabeth shook her head. “He’s the one you call The Poet, isn’t he, Cal? Wasn’t the man who called two days ago and read that long poem by Donne named Richard?”

  “It’s not a practice I’ve ever heard of,” Ena said. “I think it was the same man.”

  “Come on,” Jason whined to Elizabeth. “Aren’t you going to come out and play baseball?”

  “I wasn’t invited.”

  “You’re so touchy,” he said. “You’re invited. Come on.”

  Nick and Elizabeth got their coats and walked out the back door into the cold. Benton had found a chewed-up baseball bat in the back of the garage, and a yellow tennis ball. As they got into position to play, Hanley Paulson’s son passed through the game area, carrying an armful of pumpkins. The back hatch of his car was open, and there were already about a dozen pumpkins inside. He closed the hatch and started the car and bumped down the driveway, raising his fist and shaking it from side to side when Uncle Cal waved goodbye.

  Looking at his watch, Nick wondered if it could be possible that the boy had stacked all the wood and gathered the pumpkins in only half an hour. It was amazing what could be accomplished in half an hour.

  The night before Nick left for L.A., there was a big dinner. Ena cooked it, saying that it was to make up for the Thanksgiving dinner she hadn’t felt like fixing. Everyone said that this dinner was very good and that on Thanksgiving no one had been hungry.

  “I would have made a pumpkin pie, but the pumpkins disappeared,” Ena said, looking across the table at Uncle Cal.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “The kid took two or three pumpkins. There must be a dozen left out there.”

  “He took all the pumpkins,” Ena said.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Uncle Cal said. “Where’s the flashlight? I’ll go out and get you a pumpkin.”

  Uncle Cal and Ena were both drunk. She had not wanted to make a pie, and he did not want to go outside in the cold to shine a flashlight into the pumpkin patch.

  “I was mistaken,” Ena said finally. “I thought you had given him all the pumpkins.”

  “He got them himself,” Uncle Cal said. “I didn’t give him anything. I let him round them up.” He cut into his roast beef. “He was just a kid,” he said.

  “Olivia hasn’t touched her roast beef,” Ena said.

  “You talk about me as though I’m not here,” Olivia said.

  “What does she mean?” Ena said.

  “I mean that you don’t address me directly. You talk about me, as though I’m not here.”

  “I realize that you are here,” Ena said.

  “I’m enjoying this roast beef,” Uncle Cal said. “If Morris could see me now, he’d die. Morris is my decorator. Doesn’t eat meat. Talks about it all the time, though, so that you’d think there were plates of meat all over reminding him about how much meat there was in the world.”

  “Your decorator,” Olivia said.

  “Yes?” Uncle Cal said.

  “Don’t be pissy,” Benton said.

  “I don’t think anybody even remembers why we’re here. It seems to me that this is just another family gathering where everybody lolls around by the fireplace and drinks.” Olivia took a sip of her wine. Nick winced, because he had seen her taking Valium in the kitchen before dinner.

  “That’s uncivilized,” Ena said.

  “This is uncivilized,” Olivia said.

  Nick had expected one of them—probably Olivia—to begin crying. But it was Jason who began to cry, and who ran from the table.

  Elizabeth had left the table to go after Jason, and Benton had followed her upstairs without saying anything else to Olivia.

  “You said what you thought,” Uncle Cal said to Olivia. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  Olivia got up and stalked away from the table.

  “She did what she felt like doing,” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Oh, nothing’s wrong with anything, is it?” Ena said to Cal.

  “My heart,” he said. “You should see that last EKG. Looked like an ant’s-eye view of the Himalayas, where there should have been a pretty straight line. Of course you have a straight line, straight as a piece of string, you’re dead. It should have been bumpy, I mean—but not like it was.”

  “Then what are you doing yoga for?” Ena said. “You’ll kill yourself twisting into all those stupid positions.”

  “Probably going to be dead anyway,” Uncle Cal said, tapping his pocket.

  “Stop being morose,” Ena said.

  “Might stop being anything,” Cal said.

  “Stop worrying about your health,” Ena said. “It’s what’s in the cards. Wesley was a young man, and he drowned.”

  “That was an accident,” Uncle Cal said. “An accident.”

  “It wasn’t any accident,” Olivia hollered from the living room.

  “It was,” Elizabeth said. She had come downstairs again, and she looked like she was about to murder somebody.

  “Elizabeth—” Nick said.

  Elizabeth sat down and smoothed her skirt and smiled to show that she was all right, calm and all right. Then she began to cry.

  Nick got up and put his arm around her, sitting on his heels and crouching by her chair. He said her name again, but it didn’t do any good. It hadn’t done any good the night before, either, in the motel room.

  Upstairs, Jason was pretending to be a baby. Benton had gotten him into his pajamas and had taken the sheet from the bed and was holding Jason, sheet thrown around him like a huge poncho, facing the window. Jason was afraid, and he was trying to pretend that it was animals he was afraid of. He wanted to know if there were bears in the woods. “Not around here,” Benton said. Fox, then? Maybe—“but they don’t attack people. Maybe none around here, anyway.” Jason wanted to know where all the animals came from.

  “You know where they came from. You know about evolution.”

  “I don’t know,” Jason said. “Tell me.”

  “Tell you the whole history of evolution? You think I went to school yesterday?”

  “Tell me something,” Jason said.

  Benton told him this fact of evolution: that one day dinosaurs shook off their scales and sucked in their breath until they became much smaller. This caused the dinosaurs’ brains to pop through their skulls. The brains were called antlers, and the dinosaurs deer. That was why deer had such sad eyes, Benton told Jason—because they were once something else.

  GRAVITY

  My favorite jacket was bought at L. L. Bean. It got from Maine to Atlanta, where an ex-boyfriend of mine found it at a thrift shop and bought it for my birthday. It was a little tight for him, but he was wearing it when he saw me. He said that if I had not complimented him on the jacket he would just have kept it. In the pocket I found an amyl nitrite and a Hershey’s Kiss. The candy was put there deliberately.

  In the eight years I’ve had it, I’ve lost all the buttons but the top one—the one I never button because nobody closes the button under the collar. Four buttons are gone, but I can only remember how the next-to-last one disappeared: I saw it dangling but thought it would hold. Later, crouched on the floor, I said, “It stands to reason that since I haven’t moved off this barstool, it has to be on the floor right here,” drunkenly staring at the floor beneath my barstool at the Café Central.

  Nick, the man I’m walking with now, couldn’t possibly fit into the jacket. He wishes that I didn’t fit into it, either. He hates the jacket. When I told him I was thinking about buying a winter scarf, he suggested that rattails might go with the jacket nicely. He keeps stopping at store windows,
offering to buy me a sweater, a coat. Nothing doing.

  “I’m going crazy,” Nick says to me, “and you’re depressed because you’ve lost your buttons.” We keep walking. He pokes me in the side. “Buttons might as well be marbles,” he says.

  “Did you ever play marbles?”

  “Play marbles?” he says. “Don’t you just look at them?”

  “I don’t think so. I think there’s a game you can play with them.”

  “I had cigar boxes full of marbles when I was a kid. Isn’t that great? I had marbles and stamps and coins and Playboy cutouts.”

  “All at the same time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The stamps didn’t come before the Playboy pictures?”

  “Same time. I used the magnifying glass with the pictures instead of the stamps.”

  The left side of my jacket overlaps the right, and my arms are crossed tightly in front of me, holding it closed. Nick notices and says, “It’s not very cold,” putting an arm around my shoulders.

  He’s right. It isn’t. Last Friday afternoon, the doctor told me I was going to have to go to the hospital on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, to have a test to find out if some blockage in a Fallopian tube has been causing the pain in my left side, and I’m a coward. I have never believed anything in The Bell Jar except Esther Greenwood’s paranoid idea that when you’re unconscious you feel pain and later you forget that you felt it.

  He’s taken his arm away. I keep tight hold on my jacket with one hand and put my other hand around his wrist so he’ll take his hand out of his pocket.

  “Give me the hand,” I say. We walk along like that.

  The other buttons fell off without seeming to be loose. They came off last winter. That was when I first fell in love with Nick, and other things seemed very unimportant. I thought then that during the summer I’d sew on new buttons. It’s October now, and cold. We’re walking up Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks away from the hospital where I’ll have the test. When he realizes it, he’ll turn down a side street.

  “You’re not going to die,” he says.

  “I know,” I say, “and it would be silly to be worried about anything short of dying, wouldn’t it?”

  “Don’t take it out on me,” he says, and steers me onto Ninety-sixth Street.

  There are no stars this evening, so Nick is talking about the stars. He asks if I’ve ever imagined the thoughts of the first astronomer turning the powerful telescope on Saturn and seeing not only the planet but rings—smoky loops. He stops to light a cigarette.

  The chrysanthemums planted down the middle of Park Avenue are just a blur in the dark. I think of de Heem’s flowers: move close to one of his paintings and you see a snail curled on the wood, and tiny insects coating the leaves. It happens sometimes when you bring flowers in from the garden—a snail that looks and feels like pus, climbing a stem.

  Last Friday, Nick said, “You’re not going to die.” He got out of bed and moved me away from the vase of flowers. It was the day I had gone to the doctor, and then we went away to visit Justin for the weekend. (Ten years ago, when Nick started living with Barbara, Justin was their next-door neighbor on West Sixteenth Street.) Everything was lovely, the way it always is at Justin’s house in the country. There was a vase of phlox and daisies in the bedroom, and when I went to smell the flowers I saw the snail and said that it looked like pus. I wasn’t even repelled by it—just sorry it was there, curious enough to finger it.

  “Justin’s not going to know what you’re crying about. Justin doesn’t deserve this,” Nick whispered.

  When touched, the snail did not contract. Neither did it keep moving.

  Fact: her name is Barbara. She is the Boulder Dam. She is small and beautiful, and she has a hold on him even though they never married, because she was there first. She is the Boulder Dam.

  Last year we had Christmas at Justin’s. Justin wants to think of us as a family—Nick and Justin and me. His real family is one aunt, in New Zealand. When he was a child she made thick cookies for him that never baked through. Justin’s ideas are more romantic than mine. He thinks that Nick should forget Barbara and move, with me, into the house that is for sale next door. Justin, in his thermal slippers and knee-high striped socks under his white pajamas, in the kitchen brewing Sleepytime tea, saying to me, “Name me one thing more pathetic than a fag with a cold.”

  Barbara called, and we tried to ignore it. Justin and I ate cold oranges after the Christmas dinner. Justin poured champagne. Nick talked to Barbara on the phone. Justin blew out the candles, and the two of us were sitting in the dark, with Nick standing at the phone and looking over his shoulder into the suddenly darkened corner, frowning in confusion.

  Standing in the kitchen later that night, Nick had said, “Justin, tell her the truth. Tell her you get depressed on Christmas and that’s why you get drunk. Tell her it’s not because of one short phone call from a woman you never liked.”

  Justin was making tea again, to sober up. His hand was over the burner, going an inch lower, half an inch more …

  “Play chicken with him,” he whispered to me. “Don’t you be the one who gets burned.”

  A lady walks past us, wearing a blue hat with feathers that look as if they might be arrows shot into the brim by crazy Indians. She smiles sweetly. “The snakes are crawling out of Hell,” she says.

  In a bar, on Lexington, Nick says, “Tell me why you love me so much.” Without a pause, he says, “Don’t make analogies.”

  When he is at a loss—when he is lost—he is partly lost in her. It’s as though he were walking deeper and deeper into a forest, and I risked his stopping to smell some enchanted flower or his finding a pond and being drawn to it like Narcissus. From what he has told me about Barbara, I know that she is deep and cool.

  Lying on the cold white paper on the doctor’s examining table, I tried to concentrate not on what he was doing but on a screw holding one of the four corners of the flat, white ceiling light.

  As a child, I got lost in the woods once. I had a dandelion with me, and I used it, hopelessly, like a flashlight, the yellow center my imaginary beam. My parents, who might have saved me, were drunk at a back-yard party as I kept walking the wrong way, away from the houses I might have seen. I walked slower and slower, being afraid.

  Nick makes a lot of that. He thinks I am lost in my life. “All right,” I say as he nudges me to walk faster. “Everything’s symbolic.”

  “How can you put me down when you make similes about everything?”

  “I do not,” I say. “The way you talk makes me want to put out my knuckles to be beaten. You’re as critical as a teacher.” The walk is over. He’s even done what I wanted: walked the thirty blocks to her apartment, instead of taking a cab, and if she’s anxious and looking out the window, he’s walked right up to the door with me, and she’ll see it all—even the kiss.

  It amazes him that at the same time variations of what happens to Barbara happen to me. She had her hair cut the same day I got mine trimmed. When I went to the dentist and he told me my gums were receding slightly, I hoped she’d outdo me by growing fangs. Instead, when my side started to hurt she got much worse pains. Now she’s slowly getting better, back at the apartment after a spinal-fusion operation, and he’s staying with her again.

  Autumn, 1979. On the walk we saw one couple kissing, three people walking dogs, one couple arguing, and a cab-driver parked in front of a drugstore, changing from a denim jacket to black leather. He pulled on a leather cap, threw the jacket into the back seat, and drove away, making a U-turn on Park Avenue, headed downtown. One man looked at me as if he’d just found me standing behind the counter of a kissing booth, and one woman gave Nick such a come-on look that it made him laugh before she was even out of earshot.

  “I can’t stand it,” Nick says.

  He doesn’t mean the craziness of New York.

  He opens the outside door with his key, after the kiss, and for a minute we’re squeezed
together in the space between locked doors. I’ve called it jail. A coffin. Two astronauts, strapped in on their way to the moon. I’ve stood there and felt, more than once, the lightness of a person who isn’t being kept in place by gravity, but my weightlessness has been from sadness and fear.

  Barbara is upstairs, waiting, and Nick doesn’t know what to say. I don’t. Finally, to break the silence, he pulls me to him. He tells me that when I asked for his hand earlier, I called it “the hand.”

  His right hand is extended, fingers on the bone between my breasts. I look down for a second, the way a surgeon must have a moment of doubt, or even a moment of confidence, looking at the translucent, skin-tight rubber glove: his hand and not his hand, about to do something important or not important at all.

  “Anybody else would have said ‘your hand,’” Nick says. “When you said it that way, it made it sound as if my hand was disembodied.” He strokes my jacket. “You’ve got your security blanket. Let me keep all the parts together. On the outside, at least.”

  Disembodied, that hand would be a symbol from Magritte: a castle on a rock, floating over the ocean; a green apple without a tree.

  Alone, I’d know it anywhere.

  SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

  The woods Jake and Laura Ann were walking in were a few miles from his aunt’s house, in a remote corner of Pennsylvania. His aunt was in Key Biscayne for the winter. The night before, they had trained the car headlights on the stump where she kept a jar with the house key hidden inside. Leaving New York had been a sudden whim; all day he had been thinking about the farm, and when he had mentioned it late at night to Laura Ann she had sprung out of bed and begun dressing, half seriously, half mocking. This was a just punishment for so much fretfulness. He had already complained that he wanted a garage that didn’t cheat him. That he wished the damned cleaner would smile less and lose his clothes less often. And snow falling on a Friday night—what was the point, when alternate-side-of-the-street parking couldn’t be suspended?