Burning Down the House

by Jane Mendelsohn

  She’s deeply depressed, said Poppy.

  Who?

  You know who. The saintly nun. Sister Alix.

  Ian looked down the long table at Alix’s judging, critical squint.

  How did you two become such enemies?

  Whatever do you mean? My biggest worry is that something will happen to her. I pray to God every day that she doesn’t injure herself, said Poppy drily, ripping a piece of bread.

  No really, how did it happen?

  I always looked up to her. And she can’t stand that. She prefers to be pitied, or despised.

  Are you always so smart?

  Only sometimes. Mostly I’m a spoiled brat.

  —

  He didn’t think she was. He never would. But he would hear her call herself that again on the floor of his apartment as she cried into his arms and she would use that phrase later to describe him when he found her with her lip bleeding and her cheek bruised yellowish blue.

  —

  After the main course the waiter returned for the millionth time and brushed the crumbs from the table into a silver scoop. Another waiter carried a fan of dessert menus at the ready like giant playing cards, as if there might be some fabled game of high-stakes poker among these groomed and shining outlaws. When the meal was entirely finished they grabbed their satchels and donned their light outerwear and moved back into the night. The waiters stood side by side. They waited in their uniforms, buttons gleaming, watching the party of eight drift effortlessly through the dining room. All glowing in the rosy-amber chandeliered lighting, these wondrous lucky humans, like science-fictional royalty. Replicas of some species that roamed the earth millennia ago, long before anyone could remember.

  —

  Neva saw upscale tourists from around the world and spiffy locals with their children navigating the parks throughout the day. The Blessed. Former nomads and hunter-gatherers celebrating the cultivation of nature into paths and borders, little rivers and charming gardens. They nodded to her, and their children ran up and tried to engage the twins and sometimes balls were tossed or words exchanged.

  She saw young women with clotted mascara so thick it looked like caterpillars were growing from their eyelids. They were smoking cigarettes, walking arm in tattooed arm, eyeing the world suspiciously. She saw the elect themselves rolling prams big as small cars, the future lucky ones snuggled tenderly inside, and she saw herds of consumers carrying glossy shopping bags like weaponry and shields, armed with crests and titles of every description, their logos twisted from humble images of leaves or fruit or clouds into distorted symbols, brightly colored fragments of life as reduced and severed from nature as if they were cutoff human ears or human teeth or human limbs and the carriers themselves at first seemingly benign but on closer inspection crazed looking and wild in their anxious eyes and raw laughter. Neva did not know whether to love all of these people or hate them or forgive them or denounce them or accept them for what they were: a visitation from some alien planet that had entirely taken over this one.

  Back at the hotel, foremost among these visitors, unreal in dimension and disarming with his benevolent gaze, awaited Steve. His office was too crowded and he preferred to do business today in his hotel suite. The enormity of his skeleton especially when he rose from a chair and unfolded himself was disorienting, an optical illusion. He was not muscular or fat or even broad, but of another scale entirely from everybody else. He was alone in the room and when Neva entered with the twins earlier than expected she was surprised to see him in a chair, his legs outstretched, a device in his hands, his reading glasses perched on his nose like a bird on a branch of a gigantic wind-twisted tree.

  It’s fine, he said, without looking up from his reading. The boys can stay in their room. I have some business to do here.

  —

  Neva settled the boys, who were tired from a day at the Tower of London imagining beheadings and the vomit of gore that would spew from lopped heads of naughty kings and upstarts, in front of an even-more-gruesome video game for Roman and the annotated Sherlock Holmes for Felix.

  Then she closed the door behind her and walked through the central living area toward her own small room and saw Steve engaged in conversation with another man. He must have entered quietly. Neva stood in the corner of the vast yellow-fabric wallpapered room and watched them. When Steve’s eyes quickly glanced at her he gave her a silent nod. Or he seemed to nod. She felt that he had indicated that she should stay. Then he continued speaking to the man.

  His name was Grant. He was a young distant cousin of Steve’s but one whom Steve took seriously, perhaps because of a long history with Grant’s parents. He was in his early thirties and he was a chef. He had big plans for a restaurant empire. He needed a permit to build on a genius location in Laos, on the water. But there was a problem getting the permits. The local officials were being difficult.

  Steve had no contacts there.

  Grant knew that. He said he’d find the contacts but he needed help persuading the officials. He said he knew that Steve was brilliant at this sort of negotiation. He said Steve must have people who could help.

  —

  Three weeks later Ian traveled with Jonathan and Grant to Vang Vieng. Steve had suggested that Jonathan bring someone along to babysit and as it turned out Ian had time off from the show while some construction work was being done in the theater. Ian was there to keep Grant out of trouble while Jonathan conducted business. Ian did not have any real idea what the business was but he was happy to take a few days in Laos with the lovely girls who threw flowers from the hillsides and swam slick and topless in the water and the Bob Marley music pouring like tequila into the river and Grant introducing him to new pleasures. One day they went on flying fox swings over the Nam Song while tripping on hallucinogenic cocktails from beachfront bars. A few days later amid the seasonal rushing of the river two Australian men were killed while tubing without life jackets and drifted back downriver bloated and naked, their skin the blue-pink ombré of iridescent fish. Then it was time to go home.

  11

  ON THE JET from London back to New York there were two pilots, two flight attendants, superb food, cashmere blankets. There were no rules about not using electronics. Poppy surfed fashion sites for a while until Patrizia got up from her generous leather seat next to Steve, and Poppy assumed her place in it. She wrapped her thin self up in a thick blanket. Steve ignored her for some time and then removed his reading glasses and fell into conversing with her. He spoke warmly to her and with a studied expansiveness of spirit. From time to time Roman and Felix looked up from their devices and noticed, expressionless, Steve speaking to Poppy in a way that he rarely spoke to them. It wasn’t merely because of the difference in age that he used an unusual tone with her; it was because she aroused an intensity in everyone.

  Why does she always get what she wants? said Roman under his breath.

  Felix shot him a look. She doesn’t, he said, and kept reading.

  —

  Steve was already leaning in and lowering his voice to Poppy.

  He studied her face with a deep understanding that wetted his eyes. He sketched for her the problematic nature of her desire to work for him instead of going to college, his hands holding his glasses and sculpting in the air with an architectural clarity invisible diagrams of the obstacles before her. He presented for her consideration the complexities of land-use transactions, references to obscure tax codes, the psychological difficulties of people in their twenties who lose their way, certain passages from Shakespeare that related to her ambition and impatience, speculations on what might become of her future if she were to isolate herself from her peers in a way that constituted practically an anthropological experiment. Poppy listened to him with great attention and before he was done she had started crying.

  —

  Patrizia returned from the restroom and her fifteen minutes of moving her legs. She looked down at Steve.

  What did you say to her?
/>   I was just talking to her about her plans.

  Why is she crying?

  Steve’s face was blank. A blinding blankness like an overcast sky on a March day in the Northeast when there is no sun and no birds and a dead stillness that crushes all hope. Poppy was still crying.

  What did you say to her, Steve?

  I don’t know what upset her. I have no idea.

  What did you say to her that is making her cry?

  —

  Steve smiled. It is disappointing, he said, when something you wish for and convince yourself is possible is not possible. These are the lessons of youth. I had assumed Poppy knew that I was in some sense humoring her when I suggested I would think about her coming to work for me directly after high school. But it is consistent with my thinking that that course of action would not make sense. I think she must understand that it is her turn to humor me and to consider going to college. At the very least, she has to accept that she cannot work for my company until she is older. Words are words. Poppy, I’m sorry if you misunderstood what I said the other day.

  —

  She was still crying. Her nose was cherry red and the whites of her eyes were a pale rose against the strong azure of her irises. She had listened to Steve in silence. Roman chuckled softly as he tortured insurgents on the screen. Poppy stood up and walked with her head down to the restroom. Then Steve rose up and spoke quietly to Patrizia, holding his glasses in his hand and listening to her with his head bent forward, exhibiting great concentration and patience. Felix turned in his seat to look at Poppy as she walked back to her seat, her face washed and an impassive look in her eyes. In the car on the way home Steve gave Poppy several thousand dollars in cash and hugged her tightly on the sidewalk before she and the twins and Neva went upstairs.

  —

  Poppy feels hollow taking the money. She feels like the white-and-pink ceramic piggy bank that lived on her dresser when she was little, the coins clinking against the inside when they fell. She knows the money means something but she doesn’t know what, cannot decode those clinks. Does it mean that she works for Steve or that he is taking care of her as he should? Does it mean that she is independent or that she is a slave to these bills? Does it make her different from anyone else or the same or better or worse or does it not mean anything at all? These questions about money are never talked about with her, around her. Is the money something natural like food or sex or is it manufactured, a construct, another thing among this crowded universe of things? Poppy pushes the money into the bottom of her bag and throws her bag on the linen-upholstered chair in the corner of her room. At her desk she watches one of her favorite music videos on YouTube, the one about the couple where he enlists in the war and she gets mad and then they show her sitting alone on some bleachers at the end. Poppy watches it over and over and over.

  —

  After that Steve and Patrizia got back into the car and rode downtown each of them silent in the leathery dark and they met friends in Tribeca for dinner.

  12

  THAT NIGHT Neva unpacked and settled into the room in which she had spent only one day before leaving for England. This new job had been a trial by fire. But she would last. She could handle Roman and was beginning to understand Felix. Patrizia liked her. Poppy was heartbreaking, tragic, difficult to love and impossible not to. Alix and Ian would barely be around, the same for Jonathan and Miranda. Steve. Steve shook her and left her hollowed and awed, as if she had been granted a glimpse into the underworld. Gleaming, ghostly, but every inch alive, he seemed to be rising and falling at every moment, a catastrophic wave. That night she would listen to him berate Patrizia when they thought that no one could hear them, and his voice was like a great godlike hand sifting through the coals of a fire, unafraid to touch the hottest most scalding embers of another person.

  —

  She saw him sometimes very early in the morning, before he left for work. She never got used to how big he was, how raw looking, and the way his eyelids sagged as if the tiny muscles in them had been cut with a blade. He wore tailored expensive clothes but he was often unwashed, staying up late working in the toxic firelight of his computers, stewing in the rancid overripeness of unquenchable ambition.

  —

  You’re getting along okay? he asked her.

  Yes, thank you.

  You find the boys manageable?

  I enjoy them.

  Steve smiled. I’ve watched you with them. You’re a good worker. Smart. I have my eye on you, he said, very directly, into her eyes.

  —

  Neva was afraid that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. It was not a sexual tension, or a romantic tension, but something she experienced as profound and frightening. She realized instinctively that this momentary interaction had brought them fearfully close, as if they were soldiers together in combat, or had witnessed a crime. She felt exhilarated and at the same time uncertain whether she was interpreting the moment correctly. She felt a disintegration of her senses, a delirium that she tried to prevent. There was a siren wailing out on the street that seemed to be coming from a vase of pink flowers on a hall table and a smell of smoke that appeared to be wafting from the bronze chevron-patterned wallpaper.

  Neva’s glance moved quickly up from the vase of flowers to Steve’s slightly sagging, philosophical face, his sculpted nose, his head an ancient marble bust. He smiled and began to tie his tie, which he had been holding in one hand and was now wrapping around his neck. Before he buttoned the top button of his shirt she could see the slightest fur of gray hair on his chest. It was the only place he had gray hair: his chest. He did not often swim or go shirtless so she rarely saw his chest although she would see it sometime later on the floor of the apartment when the medics unbuttoned his shirt and again when she would be the only one to notice the malfunctioning machinery in his hospital room as his torso lay panting and shuddering beneath the pale green gown which fell open as he suffered.

  I am impressed by you, he said.

  She stood silent. She felt an exquisite conflict, a confusion as to whether or not to believe or accept these words, which she realized her soul or something like her soul had been longing to hear.

  Who are you? he said. What is your secret?

  She thought for a moment about how to answer him.

  My secret is that I don’t have any secrets, she said.

  His tie was tied by now and he laughed silently. He bent down the better to see her.

  I admire your dishonesty, he said.

  —

  At that moment one of his phones rang. He took it from his pocket. Like a great ponderous mastodon he lumbered down the hallway toward the vast kitchen and took the call. He wrapped his big hand around the phone. He seemed to step into the conversation as if he were casually walking into a bonfire, entering a native element, himself a piece with the licking flames of talk and trades and complex transactions. Someone had misunderstood his instructions and his voice roared low like a thing alive and Neva watched and heard how his power fled out from him like fire catching and racing in chains along a wooden fence, propelled by the wind. She was aware that he was at the center of some tented military encampment, a demented circus lit up by torches in the middle of the howling desert, and beyond him stretched maelstroms, a vortex, a void which he controlled.

  —

  Three hours later when she and the boys left with Patrizia for the beach it was a hot morning with the sun shattering against the East River into a million glinting shards. The helicopter rose high above the water and flew away from the FDR Drive, the gray buildings, the jagged city. For once the boys looked out the window, and they flew through the sky like little gods, and the shards of glass on the water melted into puddles of white and the boys rode on together and for a few minutes their faces were lit up and warm and newly open to the natural world.

  13

  A LONG WIDE ROAD that cut through the city like an absence of city, cars swerving all over t
he dirt, no lanes, small buildings, almost too small for people, stretching out from either side of the road. This was Laos and Ian felt uncharacteristically free as he and Jonathan and Grant sped out of Vientiane toward the riverside town in which Grant wanted to build a restaurant.

  They rode in the direction of green misty mountains that huddled behind one another like children’s heads forming a crowd around something of interest. In this case it was just wide brown road, fewer cars now, some bicyclists, backpackers here and there walking in twos and threes. The air felt light and floral and as if there were nothing separating Ian from his vacation. He was one with the easy sweetness and lazy freedom. That he was here on some mission, to be useful in some way, escaped him and lifted like a kite into the sky. Eventually, gone.

  At the tourist town twenty-somethings had overtaken the local culture: tubing, zip-lining, mushroom shakes, everyone half naked, the village children dealing drugs, the bars open all night, the idea of civilization floating down the river like a used condom. Grant and Ian headed to get a drink while Jonathan met with two officials in a back room. They sat at a wooden table, discussing.

  Jonathan listened to their reasons for declining a permit. The town was overrun. These tourists had no respect for the Laotians. It was time to crack down on the partying, not encourage it. Music was blowing into the dim room from riverside beaches. Jonathan sipped a Coke and sniffed as he listened to the two men make their case.

  Thing is, he said when they finished, my cousin really believes in this restaurant. He thinks it will be good for the town. He’ll keep it clean.

  That’s what they all say, the men said.

  Jonathan looked down at the table and smiled with his jaw. Well, this time it’s true.

  The officials sat silently.

  He looked back up at the men.

  You know, it could all disappear in a minute. You might think that would be good but all the money coming in: poof, gone, that wouldn’t be so good. You’re lucky all these kids like coming here.