Burning House

by Ann Beattie

  “He should have finished school,” Frank says, sopping up sauce on his bread. “He’ll knock around a while longer, then get tired of it and settle down to something.”

  “You think I died out here?” Freddy calls. “You think I can’t hear you?”

  “I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say to your face,” Frank says.

  “I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t say to your face,” Freddy says. “You’ve got a swell wife and kid and dog, and you’re a snob, and you take it all for granted.”

  Frank puts down his fork, completely exasperated. He looks at me.

  “He came to work once this stoned,” Tucker says. “Comprenez-vous?”

  “You like me because you feel sorry for me,” Freddy says.

  He is sitting on the concrete bench outdoors, in the area that’s a garden in the springtime. It is early April now—not quite spring. It’s very foggy out. It rained while we were eating, and now it has turned mild. I’m leaning against a tree, across from him, glad it’s so dark and misty that I can’t look down and see the damage the mud is doing to my boots.

  “Who’s his girlfriend?” Freddy says.

  “If I told you her name, you’d tell him I told you.”

  “Slow down. What?”

  “I won’t tell you, because you’ll tell him that I know.”

  “He knows you know.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “He talked about her. I kept hearing her name for months, and then we went to a party at Garner’s, and she was there, and when I said something about her later he said, ‘Natalie who?’ It was much too obvious. It gave the whole thing away.”

  He sighs. “I just did something very optimistic,” he says. “I came out here with Mr. Sam and he dug up a rock and I put the avocado seed in the hole and packed dirt on top of it. Don’t say it—I know: can’t grow outside, we’ll still have another snow, even if it grew, the next year’s frost would kill it.”

  “He’s embarrassed,” I say. “When he’s home, he avoids me. But it’s rotten to avoid Mark, too. Six years old, and he calls up his friend Neal to hint that he wants to go over there. He doesn’t do that when we’re here alone.”

  Freddy picks up a stick and pokes around in the mud with it. “I’ll bet Tucker’s after that painter personally, not because he’s the hottest thing since pancakes. That expression of his—it’s always the same. Maybe Nixon really loved his mother, but with that expression who could believe him? It’s a curse to have a face that won’t express what you mean.”

  “Amy!” Tucker calls. “Telephone.”

  Freddy waves goodbye to me with the muddy stick. “ ‘I am not a crook,’ ” Freddy says. “Jesus Christ.”

  Sam bounds halfway toward the house with me, then turns and goes back to Freddy.

  It’s Marilyn, Neal’s mother, on the phone.

  “Hi,” Marilyn says. “He’s afraid to spend the night.”

  “Oh, no,” I say. “He said he wouldn’t be.”

  She lowers her voice. “We can try it out, but I think he’ll start crying.”

  “I’ll come get him.”

  “I can bring him home. You’re having a dinner party, aren’t you?”

  I lower my voice. “Some party. Tucker’s here. J.D. never showed up.”

  “Well,” she says. “I’m sure that what you cooked was good.”

  “It’s so foggy out, Marilyn. I’ll come get Mark.”

  “He can stay. I’ll be a martyr,” she says, and hangs up before I can object.

  Freddy comes into the house, tracking in mud. Sam lies in the kitchen, waiting for his paws to be cleaned. “Come on,” Freddy says, hitting his hand against his thigh, having no idea what Sam is doing. Sam gets up and runs after him. They go into the small downstairs bathroom together. Sam loves to watch people urinate. Sometimes he sings, to harmonize with the sound of the urine going into the water. There are footprints and pawprints everywhere. Tucker is shrieking with laughter in the living room. “… he says, he says to the other one, ‘Then, dearie, have you ever played spin the bottle?’ ” Frank’s and Tucker’s laughter drowns out the sound of Freddy peeing in the bathroom. I turn on the water in the kitchen sink, and it drowns out all the noise. I begin to scrape the dishes. Tucker is telling another story when I turn off the water: “… that it was Onassis in the Anvil, and nothing would talk him out of it. They told him Onassis was dead, and he thought they were trying to make him think he was crazy. There was nothing to do but go along with him, but, God—he was trying to goad this poor old fag into fighting about Stavros Niarchos. You know—Onassis’s enemy. He thought it was Onassis. In the Anvil.” There is a sound of a glass breaking. Frank or Tucker puts John Coltrane Live in Seattle on the stereo and turns the volume down low. The bathroom door opens. Sam runs into the kitchen and begins to lap water from his dish. Freddy takes his little silver case and his rolling papers out of his shirt pocket. He puts a piece of paper on the kitchen table and is about to sprinkle grass on it, but realizes just in time that the paper has absorbed water from a puddle. He balls it up with his thumb, flicks it to the floor, puts a piece of rolling paper where the table’s dry and shakes a line of grass down it. “You smoke this,” he says to me. “I’ll do the dishes.”

  “We’ll both smoke it. I’ll wash and you can wipe.”

  “I forgot to tell them I put ashes in the sauce,” he says.

  “I wouldn’t interrupt.”

  “At least he pays Frank ten times what any other accountant for an art gallery would make,” Freddy says.

  Tucker is beating his hand on the arm of the sofa as he talks, stomping his feet. “… so he’s trying to feel him out, to see if this old guy with the dyed hair knew Maria Callas. Jesus! And he’s so out of it he’s trying to think what opera singers are called, and instead of coming up with ‘diva’ he comes up with ‘duenna.’ At this point, Larry Betwell went up to him and tried to calm him down, and he breaks into song—some aria or something that Maria Callas was famous for. Larry told him he was going to lose his teeth if he didn’t get it together, and …”

  “He spends a lot of time in gay hangouts, for not being gay,” Freddy says.

  I scream and jump back from the sink, hitting the glass I’m rinsing against the faucet, shattering green glass everywhere.

  “What?” Freddy says. “Jesus Christ, what is it?”

  Too late, I realize what it must have been that I saw: J.D. in a goat mask, the puckered pink plastic lips against the window by the kitchen sink.

  “I’m sorry,” J.D. says, coming through the door and nearly colliding with Frank, who has rushed into the kitchen. Tucker is right behind him.

  “Oooh,” Tucker says, feigning disappointment, “I thought Freddy smooched her.”

  “I’m sorry,” J.D. says again. “I thought you’d know it was me.

  The rain must have started again, because J.D. is soaking wet. He has turned the mask around so that the goat’s head stares out from the back of his head. “I got lost,” J.D. says. He has a farmhouse upstate. “I missed the turn. I went miles. I missed the whole dinner, didn’t I?”

  “What did you do wrong?” Frank asks.

  “I didn’t turn left onto 58. I don’t know why I didn’t realize my mistake, but I went miles. It was raining so hard I couldn’t go over twenty-five miles an hour. Your driveway is all mud. You’re going to have to push me out.”

  “There’s some roast left over. And salad, if you want it,” I say.

  “Bring it in the living room,” Frank says to J.D. Freddy is holding out a plate to him. J.D. reaches for the plate. Freddy pulls it back. J.D. reaches again, and Freddy is so stoned that he isn’t quick enough this time—J.D. grabs it.

  “I thought you’d know it was me,” J.D. says. “I apologize.” He dishes salad onto the plate. “You’ll be rid of me for six months, in the morning.”

  “Where does your plane leave from?” Freddy says.


  “Kennedy.”

  “Come in here!” Tucker calls. “I’ve got a story for you about Perry Dwyer down at the Anvil last week, when he thought he saw Aristotle Onassis.”

  “Who’s Perry Dwyer?” J.D. says.

  “That is not the point of the story, dear man. And when you’re in Cassis, I want you to look up an American painter over there. Will you? He doesn’t have a phone. Anyway—I’ve been tracking him, and I know where he is now, and I am very interested, if you would stress that with him, to do a show in June that will be only him. He doesn’t answer my letters.”

  “Your hand is cut,” J.D. says to me.

  “Forget it,” I say. “Go ahead.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Did I make you do that?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Don’t keep your finger under the water. Put pressure on it to stop the bleeding.”

  He puts the plate on the table. Freddy is leaning against the counter, staring at the blood swirling in the sink, and smoking the joint all by himself. I can feel the little curls on my forehead that Freddy was talking about. They feel heavy on my skin. I hate to see my own blood. I’m sweating. I let J.D. do what he does; he turns off the water and wraps his hand around my second finger, squeezing. Water runs down our wrists.

  Freddy jumps to answer the phone when it rings, as though a siren just went off behind him. He calls me to the phone, but J.D. steps in front of me, shakes his head no, and takes the dish towel and wraps it around my hand before he lets me go.

  “Well,” Marilyn says. “I had the best of intentions, but my battery’s dead.”

  J.D. is standing behind me, with his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’ll be right over,” I say. “He’s not upset now, is he?”

  “No, but he’s dropped enough hints that he doesn’t think he can make it through the night.”

  “O.K.,” I say. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

  “Six years old,” Marilyn says. “Wait till he grows up and gets that feeling.”

  I hang up.

  “Let me see your hand,” J.D. says.

  “I don’t want to look at it. Just go get me a Band-Aid, please.”

  He turns and goes upstairs. I unwrap the towel and look at it. It’s pretty deep, but no glass is in my finger. I feel funny; the outlines of things are turning yellow. I sit in the chair by the phone. Sam comes and lies beside me, and I stare at his black-and-yellow tail, beating. I reach down with my good hand and pat him, breathing deeply in time with every second pat.

  “Rothko?” Tucker says bitterly, in the living room. “Nothing is great that can appear on greeting cards. Wyeth is that way. Would ‘Christina’s World’ look bad on a cocktail napkin? You know it wouldn’t.”

  I jump as the phone rings again. “Hello?” I say, wedging the phone against my shoulder with my ear, wrapping the dish towel tighter around my hand.

  “Tell them it’s a crank call. Tell them anything,” Johnny says. “I miss you. How’s Saturday night at your house?”

  “All right,” I say. I catch my breath.

  “Everything’s all right here, too. Yes indeed. Roast rack of lamb. Friend of Nicole’s who’s going to Key West tomorrow had too much to drink and got depressed because he thought it was raining in Key West, and I said I’d go in my study and call the National Weather Service. Hello, Weather Service. How are you?”

  J.D. comes down from upstairs with two Band-Aids and stands beside me, unwrapping one. I want to say to Johnny, “I’m cut. I’m bleeding. It’s no joke.”

  It’s all right to talk in front of J.D., but I don’t know who else might overhear me.

  “I’d say they made the delivery about four this afternoon,” I say.

  “This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the door, and see all the people,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself. I’ll hang up and find out if it’s raining in Key West.”

  “Late in the afternoon,” I say. “Everything is fine.”

  “Nothing is fine,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself.”

  He hangs up. I put the phone down, and realize that I’m still having trouble focusing, the sight of my cut finger made me so light-headed. I don’t look at the finger again as J.D. undoes the towel and wraps the Band-Aids around my finger.

  “What’s going on in here?” Frank says, coming into the dining room.

  “I cut my finger,” I say. “It’s O.K.”

  “You did?” he says. He looks woozy—a little drunk. “Who keeps calling?”

  “Marilyn. Mark changed his mind about staying all night. She was going to bring him home, but her battery’s dead. You’ll have to get him. Or I will.”

  “Who called the second time?” he says.

  “The oil company. They wanted to know if we got our delivery today.”

  He nods. “I’ll go get him, if you want,” he says. He lowers his voice. “Tucker’s probably going to whirl himself into a tornado for an encore,” he says, nodding toward the living room. “I’ll take him with me.”

  “Do you want me to go get him?” J.D. says.

  “I don’t mind getting some air,” Frank says. “Thanks, though. Why don’t you go in the living room and eat your dinner?”

  “You forgive me?” J.D. says.

  “Sure,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault. Where did you get that mask?”

  “I found it on top of a Goodwill box in Manchester. There was also a beautiful old birdcage—solid brass.”

  The phone rings again. I pick it up. “Wouldn’t I love to be in Key West with you,” Johnny says. He makes a sound as though he’s kissing me and hangs up.

  “Wrong number,” I say.

  Frank feels in his pants pocket for the car keys.

  J.D. knows about Johnny. He introduced me, in the faculty lounge, where J.D. and I had gone to get a cup of coffee after I registered for classes. After being gone for nearly two years, J.D. still gets mail at the department—he said he had to stop by for the mail anyway, so he’d drive me to campus and point me toward the registrar’s. J.D. taught English; now he does nothing. J.D. is glad that I’ve gone back to college to study art again, now that Mark is in school. I’m six credits away from an M.A. in art history. He wants me to think about myself, instead of thinking about Mark all the time. He talks as though I could roll Mark out on a string and let him fly off, high above me. J.D.’s wife and son died in a car crash. His son was Mark’s age. “I wasn’t prepared,” J.D. said when we were driving over that day. He always says this when he talks about it. “How could you be prepared for such a thing?” I asked him. “I am now,” he said. Then, realizing he was acting very hardboiled, made fun of himself. “Go on,” he said, “punch me in the stomach. Hit me as hard as you can.” We both knew he wasn’t prepared for anything. When he couldn’t find a parking place that day, his hands were wrapped around the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

  Johnny came in as we were drinking coffee. J.D. was looking at his junk mail—publishers wanting him to order anthologies, ways to get free dictionaries.

  “You are so lucky to be out of it,” Johnny said, by way of greeting. “What do you do when you’ve spent two weeks on Hamlet and the student writes about Hamlet’s good friend Horchow?”

  He threw a blue book into J.D.’s lap. J.D. sailed it back.

  “Johnny,” he said, “this is Amy.”

  “Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.

  “You remember when Frank Wayne was in graduate school here? Amy’s Frank’s wife.”

  “Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.

  J.D. told me he knew it the instant Johnny walked into the room—he knew that second that he should introduce me as somebody’s wife. He could have predicted it all from the way Johnny looked at me.

  For a long time J.D. gloated that he had been prepared for what happened next—that Johnny and I were going to get together. It took me to disturb his pleasure in himself—me, crying hysterically on the phone last month, not knowing what to do, what move
to make next.

  “Don’t do anything for a while. I guess that’s my advice,” J.D. said. “But you probably shouldn’t listen to me. All I can do myself is run away, hide out. I’m not the learned professor. You know what I believe. I believe all that wicked fairy-tale crap: your heart will break, your house will burn.”

  Tonight, because he doesn’t have a garage at his farm, J.D. has come to leave his car in the empty half of our two-car garage while he’s in France. I look out the window and see his old Saab, glowing in the moonlight. J.D. has brought his favorite book, A Vision, to read on the plane. He says his suitcase contains only a spare pair of jeans, cigarettes, and underwear. He is going to buy a leather jacket in France, at a store where he almost bought a leather jacket two years ago.

  In our bedroom there are about twenty small glass prisms hung with fishing line from one of the exposed beams; they catch the morning light, and we stare at them like a cat eyeing catnip held above its head. Just now, it is 2 A.M. At six-thirty, they will be filled with dazzling color. At four or five, Mark will come into the bedroom and get in bed with us. Sam will wake up, stretch, and shake, and the tags on his collar will clink, and he will yawn and shake again and go downstairs, where J.D. is asleep in his sleeping bag and Tucker is asleep on the sofa, and get a drink of water from his dish. Mark has been coming into our bedroom for about a year. He gets onto the bed by climbing up on a footstool that horrified me when I first saw it—a gift from Frank’s mother: a footstool that says “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life” in needlepoint. I kept it in a closet for years, but it occurred to me that it would help Mark get up onto the bed, so he would not have to make a little leap and possibly skin his shin again. Now Mark does not disturb us when he comes into the bedroom, except that it bothers me that he has reverted to sucking his thumb. Sometimes he lies in bed with his cold feet against my leg. Sometimes, small as he is, he snores.