Burning Down the House

by Jane Mendelsohn

  —

  They had spent several months in this state, sharing every feeling that drifted by, stealing tiny moments and burning glances, and suffering through serious conversations about whether they had any future, until one night, in the grip of a new degree of passion, Poppy came across a letter. Rummaging through Ian’s desk while he was in the shower, she had found the bloated white envelope filled with photographs, and for the first time in her life she threw a bottle at a mirror and it broke. It was clumsy and impulsive. She burst into the bathroom and smashed the glass into the medicine cabinet, and Ian, without even stopping the rinsing of his hair, finished his bathing and then calmly explained, with a towel wrapped around his waist, that he had been looking through photos of old girlfriends from the eighties as part of his research for the show.

  —

  The corner of the towel drooping, careless, nonchalant. She wants to pull it, rip it out, like ripping out his tongue.

  —

  Poppy did not succeed in getting a rise out of Ian at that moment, but her jealousy was duly noted, and it changed things. She had never known her father and been orphaned at six, but there wasn’t much for which she had had to fight: she had grown up with marble foyers and private chefs, attentive teachers and other perks of being rich that seemed, from very far away, to make up for a grossly dysfunctional family. Now, for the first time, the instinct that had made her clench her fists while she slept, the impulse that had led her to be fiercely independent and appear aloof and eccentric to her peers, was manifesting itself with a purpose. Possessiveness matured her and gave her definition. It brought out her true nature, her terrible longing and submerged rage. It heightened everything about Poppy: her angled face, her knowing naïveté, her sarcastic smile and adorable wit. Her careless, fearless, superbly plain sense of style and ravishing big eyes. And the womanliness it graced her with caught Ian’s attention and made him, finally, begin to love her.

  —

  Where are we going? she asked.

  To a movie, he said.

  To a movie? In a movie theater? Really?

  What? Is that so crazy?

  Can’t we just watch something at your place?

  No, we’re seeing an old movie. A real film. And it would be sacrilegious not to see it in a theater.

  Okay, if you say so, Grandpa.

  Look, I’m proud that I was formed by the twentieth century. No Internet, no texting, no cyberbullies. We had art. We had live, communal experiences.

  People tweet while they watch TV, you know, Poppy said, knowing this would drive him crazy.

  Oh Jesus, he said, smiling wildly, and took her by the hand.

  They were running across Houston Street. The Saturday after Thanksgiving and the day ending so early it felt like what she imagined it might feel like in Sweden. A blue, crisp holiday air and a vibration of excitement, the intersection of urban consumerist buzz and genuine social well-being, people looking one another in the face if not the eyes along the sidewalks, bustling families and children in parkas that left their arms puffed out at an angle as if they were ginger-cookie people, little happy robots breathing in the brisk New York City climate that changed block to block, but that was on this evening maintaining a steady supply of wintertime cheer, fellow feeling, camaraderie among strangers, something akin to joy.

  He took her to see L’Atalante, by Jean Vigo, at the Film Forum. Ian held Poppy in the darkness and she thought it was the most beautiful movie, the most beautiful day of her life. When the skipper dove underwater and imagined that he saw his wife circling, circling with one arm curved loosely above her head, her white dress shimmering, Poppy felt a wave of pleasure wash over her as if she herself were underwater, circling, circling. It was warm and cool under the water, fast and slow. Temperature and time floated away, melted, disappeared. Only being was left, being and circling in the water.

  —

  The love they share is an attempt to express the inexpressible. There is no word for what they have, who they become when they are together. It is theirs and they belong to it.

  —

  Alix invited Ian, as usual, to the family’s holiday party at Steve and Patrizia’s apartment and of course Poppy was there, bantering with Steve’s business associates, flirting with the bartender, swiping canapés from silver trays with a sophisticated, practiced touch. The tables bulged with arrangements of fruit and ornaments, pale green grapes and pears and orbs made of glass, and burnished, dusky-gold garlands running the lengths of the tablecloths and slipping their thick dark leaves and glinting metallic beads in between plates of smoked salmon, sliced steak, bowls of brioche rolls, sourdough rolls with olives and rosemary, and wheat rolls with raisins and hazelnuts. Who spent time thinking up so many different kinds of rolls?

  Poppy was sitting now on a long, low oyster velvet-covered couch and Ian watched from a careful distance as she talked to Felix. Felix stood by the couch, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, at peace in his trousers and leather shoes and jacket and the bow tie that he had insisted on wearing in spite of Patrizia and Roman’s objections. Ian could see the way Poppy treated Felix with graceful kindness, a reverence that she reserved for very few people. She looked at him thoughtfully, patiently, recognizing his complex inner life and dignifying what others might have deemed his eccentricities by listening to him, answering his questions, allowing his truthful eyes to rest on her.

  Later, when Felix had gone to sleep and Poppy and Ian were seated on a different couch, this one a chesterfield upholstered in sovereign blue, having been unable to avoid each other for an entire evening, the two of them balanced dessert plates on their laps amid a large group engaged in conversation about sports, politics, technology, and television. At first, Ian had thought of offering his opinion on a recent political scandal but the actual idea dissolved in his brain and he found himself unable to understand why anyone would care about the incident. Similarly, Poppy considered proffering her thoughts on the latest hot movie star and whether he was hotter or less hot than another hot actor but as she was opening her mouth it occurred to her that she was completely uninterested in the subject. In keeping the nature of their relationship a secret, she and Ian were carrying on their own private conversation, not spoken but some internal communication that heightened the energy connecting them and kept them close. Joyful, afraid, joyfully afraid, they sat at either end of the long sofa, smiling at other people, pretending to listen, nibbling at their ganache, falling more and more in love.

  SO IT REALLY WAS a tragedy when the housekeeper told Jonathan about the receipts and souvenirs and Jonathan told Steve about Poppy’s affair with Ian and Steve told Ian that he, Ian, was Poppy’s biological father. Steve was a ferociously intelligent self-made mogul who had scaled the sheer-glass mountainsides of the international real estate community to become a member of the planetary elite. He was sixty-two, and he was wearing a bespoke suit on his large, unmuscular frame. He stood up and took his jacket off, hanging it carefully on the back of his chrome-and-leather chair, and walked around his desk to position himself, as he rolled up his shirtsleeves, to sit, just barely, on the front of the desk, looking down at Ian. After explaining to him how he knew that Ian was Poppy’s father and that he wanted Ian to never tell Poppy of this relationship, because, of course, as Ian would agree, such knowledge would be devastating to her, Steve insisted, effectively, that Ian sign a confidentiality agreement. Therefore, in spite of Ian’s feelings for Poppy, in spite of his stunned recognition that he was facing, for the first time in his life, a moral dilemma—the kind of thing that in his mind only occurred in screenplays and nineteenth-century novels—in spite of his idea of himself as a good and relatively speaking noble person, when Ian broke up with Poppy and hurt her more than she could possibly understand, he was not legally permitted to tell her why.

  18

  IAN HAD FIRST met Steve over twenty years ago, when Ian and Alix were freshmen in college, but he had never in all those years received a pho
ne call from him. Who knows how long Steve had been waiting to make the call, but on that particular day Ian answered his cell, arrived shortly thereafter on a high floor of a building in Rockefeller Center, and, after walking down the gleaming corridor lined with modern art as violently and visibly expensive as if it had been painted in blood brushed on with thousand-dollar bills, learned from Steve that he, Ian, was Poppy’s biological father.

  —

  Ian did not believe it, not even when Steve, sitting behind his gargantuan desk in his spotless office, explained coolly that his sister Diana, Ian’s former writing teacher, had told Steve so, shortly before she died. Ian did not believe it when Steve described how Diana had known from her intimate, perhaps drunken, conversations with Ian that he had been making extra money to pay for his off-campus apartment by donating sperm at the local sperm bank. Ian did not believe it—because he could not bear to believe it—when Steve told him that Diana had been able to get Ian’s sperm because she had known that he had lied on the medical intake form, Ian having told her, laughing over vodka and tonics at the Castle Bar, that he had claimed on the questionnaire that his mother was in perfect health, that he had been captain of his high-school basketball team, and, just for fun, that he knew French, Italian, Swahili, and ancient Greek. It was easy, Diana had told Steve drily from her hospital bed, tubes worming their way from her nose and arms, to look for the basketball captain who spoke Swahili. There were only two.

  —

  Ian’s equanimity, whatever was left of it, slid to the floor as if he were shedding a skin. He felt naked, cold, exposed. Being told his own secret was a new kind of humiliation, and one he quickly rejected. That he had possessed a mystery previously unknown to him could have stirred his lively sense of drama, but it did not. Instead, he struggled to regain his self-control in the face of knowledge about himself which was too painful to comprehend. In an instinctive gasp of emotion, his love for Poppy rushed through him, a sudden warmth, a radiating orange glow, and then dissipated, like the fading blink of a firefly’s pulsing brightness. Now he felt naked and dark. This was shock. He had never really experienced shock.

  —

  Ian would have been more prepared to respond to the news that it was Steve who was his, Ian’s, biological father, and that he was leaving Ian his vast real estate empire, its tentacles extending and gripping tightly around the globe, to inherit and oversee, effective immediately. But that could not have been further from Steve’s intent.

  —

  Steve walked around his desk to position himself, as he rolled up his shirtsleeves, to sit, just barely, on the front of the desk, looking down at Ian.

  —

  Ian hoped that the glow from a moment before would return to warm him, but it had been extinguished. Or, rather, he had extinguished it in an act of self-protection. But he waited, waited for it to return.

  —

  Ian was saying: I don’t know what to say. I’m stunned. I need some time to process this information.

  —

  To Steve, the word “information” meant many things. Information was the currency that greased the wheels of commerce, and which you hoarded and then revealed with care—let it slip from your grasp too easily and you would never succeed. Information was knowledge, the means by which people learned about one another, obtained access to their inner machinery, and then manipulated them. Sometimes, information was fatal, something that chased you until it caught up with you and struck you down in the thriving prime of consciousness. But as Steve watched Ian, who had gone pale except for a bright redness around his eyes, it became evident to him that information was not, not in any universe that he was master of at least, something that you needed to “process.”

  —

  Steve had wondered for years when Ian would become aware of his relationship to Poppy and step forward to make some claim. To begin with, everyone always suspected that Poppy’s father must be someone whom Diana knew—she wasn’t the type to just let anyone share her child’s DNA. She was an intellectual, an artist, and very, very picky. All three traits had combined to keep her unmarried, according to her mother and brother. Was she too intimidating—slender Diana with the ferocious blue eyes and patrician nose? People surmised for years that the father must be Diana’s first boyfriend from graduate school, the genius one who went on to found an Internet company in the nineties and then killed himself in the dot-com bust. Others guessed that it was Diana’s editor, the one who convinced her to write lush, political, historical fiction and who made her semifamous, the one with the fluffy hair and the decisive cheekbones. But no one, not even Alix, had ever made the connection that Ian was the father, in spite of the fact that Diana obviously adored him—he was her favorite student—and he had remained close with the family for all this time. Perhaps it was because he was several years younger than Diana and seemed so eternally boyish, even well into his thirties. Or perhaps it was because no one wanted to see, thought Steve, because from his point of view the physical resemblance between Ian and Poppy was clear, if not uncanny. It had seemed strange and tragic to everyone when Diana died that there was no one to come forward and claim paternity. Who was this hidden man, this secret father, who would let his own child be orphaned? Who was this Arthur Dimmesdale character who would not accept his responsibility and shoulder his moral obligation? The tragedy was mitigated somewhat by the Victorian-novel good fortune of Steve’s being a billionaire and raising his niece in plutocratic splendor. But the questions and guesses and rumors persisted. Now Steve had finally, for Ian only, cleared up the confusion.

  —

  Don’t you want to know why I’m telling you now? Steve asked, somewhat like a villain in a thriller.

  Obviously I have a lot of questions, Ian replied.

  Disappointingly, Steve thought.

  I’m telling you because it has come to my attention that you have been spending a lot of time with Poppy, now that she is working on your—and here he hesitated as if having a hard time saying the silly word—musical. And I am uncomfortable with the idea that you might misinterpret any, shall I say, unconscious forces that might draw her to you. I had hoped not to have to share this with you, not only because it was not something my sister wanted me to divulge to anyone, even yourself, but also because you do not impress me as a person who would be a good father…figure. Here Steve paused to see if his insult had fully registered, but he received no indication if it had. He continued: I have given great consideration to telling you, and I am only doing so to keep my Poppy safe. I also want to keep her happy, which means I fully expect and insist that you never say anything to her about this. Obviously, and here he smiled, in a menacing impersonation of empathy, it would be traumatic and possibly devastating information to encounter, particularly for an adolescent.

  —

  Just so that they were both completely clear about their understanding, Steve went on, he’d had some papers written up. Due to the sensitive nature of the information therein, he said he’d appreciate it if Ian could look them over now—he could sit down on the couch on the other side of the room if he’d like and make himself more comfortable—and then sign them. It was very straightforward, basically a nondisclosure agreement, which he was sure Ian must have seen before, his line of work being the entertainment business. Then he said he was very pleased that they had had this talk.

  —

  Steve held out the forms to the shaking figure in the chair. Ian took one cursory look over them and, his hands trembling, asked for a pen and signed. And that was how he found out that he was Poppy’s father.

  —

  If Ian had been another kind of person, someone less interested in professional success and others’ approval and more curious about the whorls and depths of human psychology, he probably would have spent more time having wondered about Poppy’s parentage. As it was, he had given the question very little thought, and had assuaged whatever guilt and soothed whatever sadness he had felt about his beloved lat
e mentor’s young child by thinking of himself as an “important grown-up” in her life, someone who appeared from time to time with interesting stories from the world of adults and with excellent wide-eyed listening skills. He had shown enthusiasm for her interests over the years, the play kitchen and sparkly tutus, the books and movies and byzantine social world of girls, and just as he was becoming interested in Poppy as a female he was excited when Alix had suggested to him that he hire her, smart, sophisticated, well-educated Poppy, to be an intern on his show. But the musical—a rollicking exploration of 1980s America seen through the eyes of a group of friends and based on his own drug-addled yet somehow indelible experiences of college, deconstructionism, the Reagan years, and New York nightlife—sent him so far back into the cataracts of his own myopia that he was less inclined than ever to consider from whose sperm his new girlfriend had sprung, divided, evolved, and been spawned.

  —

  Every day, he paced back and forth in front of the stage, reliving his debauched, intellectual, and weirdly innocent early adulthood, bewildered by the feeling that his life had changed so much and not at all. A banal revelation, he knew, but it led him to the less-ordinary understanding that in the middle of his life he was becoming aware that there was no such thing as the middle. Either everything was the middle, in which case there was nothing on either side to make it, by definition, the middle, or everything was the beginning, or, of course, everything, and he did not like to think about this, was the end. He had not forgotten his time in college. On the contrary, he remembered it vividly and in detail, but his memory was changed by all that had happened since: his first play, which had been an unexpected hit, his ambivalence about its success, his descent into despair about the politics and pretensions of the artist’s life, his subsequent escape into directing, his realization that no world was better than any other, people were people. By now, everything was new again, and this equal parts giddy and depressing sense of the eternal newness of life contributed to his leading himself and Poppy astray. The relationship made him on the surface feel closer to his college days, and underneath reminded him annoyingly of his distance from that time, his hunger for an irretrievable excitement, his disappointment with either praise or criticism of his work, and the many slender, well-read, and hyperarticulate women with whom he had blundered through much of his life. The scent and seduction of Poppy had been very familiar to him, and he felt certain that his scent would become familiar to her, as no doubt she would meet other men like him when she left, in a year, for college, or real life, or whatever.