Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  I met Juno at Aux Armes Tuesday morning while Stefan was at the gym. When I got there, she was leaning comfortably on the counter, chatting as easily but seriously with Mrs.

  Fennebresque as if they were at a Clinique counter assessing a new beauty regimen. Juno looked gorgeous as ever in a black coat-dress with large leopard-print buttons. Mrs.

  Fennebresque was wearing a pink lace-collared blouse, red skirt, and several necklaces of amber beads. She grinned.

  “Well, hello! I wasn’t sure you’d be back.”

  “Did you think you scared him off?” Juno asked in an

  intimate tone that made it clear she knew me well. If that wasn’t enough, when I walked up to the counter, she slipped an arm in mine, and now Mrs. Fennebresque eyed us both with as much friendliness as if we were neighbors who had brought her a housewarming gift.

  “I like seeing a couple share interests,” she said. “It keeps you together. How long’s it been for you two?”

  Juno laughed and squeezed my arm harder. “Not long

  enough!” If I didn’t blush, I should have, because I enjoyed feeling Juno’s breasts rub against me.

  “That’s the right sentiment.”

  “I’m not letting this one go,” Juno said. “He’s too good a catch.”

  “My husband and I were together for forty-five years

  before he passed. Say—I just made myself some tea, would you like a cup?”

  We said yes, and soon Mrs. Fennebresque was serving

  us tea in ivory-colored cups with tiny shamrocks across them, a pattern that Juno recognized as Beleek, from Northern Ireland. Juno and Mrs. Fennebresque spent a few cozy

  minutes comparing Irish origins.

  “Before you got here, Mrs. F. was telling me she used to teach at SUM,” Juno said, bringing me back into the

  conversation which had seemed bizarre, surrounded as we were by ranks and ranks of weapons and surveillance

  cameras, which I noted for the first time.

  “Really?”

  Mrs. Fennebresque nodded. “In the School of Nursing. I left before they closed it down. I could feel the disaster coming. And my husband had always been a gun aficionado, so this was the natural choice. Speaking of choice, have you thought any more about what you need in a gun?”

  Juno and Mrs. Fennebresque eyed me expectantly, and I tried to concentrate hard. It felt like an oral exam in which I had to draw on a night of cramming.

  “I don’t think I’m ready for anything as heavy-duty as a .357. If I’m just getting started, I think accuracy is more important now than stopping power. I’m thinking I should start with a .22 and perfect my aim in target practice.”

  Juno and Mrs. Fennebresque glanced at each other and

  nodded, eyebrows up.

  “That’s very sensible,” Mrs. Fennebresque said

  approvingly. “Did you have something particular in mind?”

  “Show me what you’ve got.”

  We spent half an hour looking at Rugers, Smith &

  Wessons, and Brownings. I held them as she did while she showed me the safeties, talked about bullets, explained why they were called long rifles, discussed pressure in the barrel and accuracy. Every sentence made the situation more and more normal.

  “You keep going back to the 22A,” Juno noted, and she was right. For some reason I was drawn to that Smith & Wesson. “Does it feel good in your hand?”

  I nodded. But it also looked good, plain and black with not too long a barrel. A basic, solid gun, nothing flashy. It wouldn’t blow someone away across the street, but if

  someone threatened me closer than that, it would be enough.

  And even though the Ruger was supposedly the world’s best .22, it looked too much like a toy gun to me.

  “You know, these guns aren’t concealable,” Mrs.

  Fennebresque said confidingly. Then she pointed to some tiny-looking .22s farther along the counter. “But with these, they say you can take the nipple off a baby’s bottle and use it practically as a silencer. It’s supposed to be an old Mafia trick. They do call this kind of .22 an assassin’s gun. It’s just so easy to hide.”

  I met Juno’s eyes. We were both thinking the same

  thing: that’s what had happened at the reception, and why nobody else seemed to have heard a gun.

  “The price is right for your Smith & Wesson,” Mrs.

  Fennebresque said. “To start out. I’m sure you’ll move up, though.” And she eyed Juno fondly. “You’re certainly big enough to handle more gun.”

  Juno did not say anything raunchy. I was buzzing with the information about the other .22s, and filled with a sense of calm wonder that I was moving closer to purchasing a gun.

  “Tell me about the safety quiz,” I said, setting the Smith & Wesson down on the counter carefully.

  “You’re already exercising safety! Treat every gun as if it’s loaded. That’s first and foremost.” She handed me a pamphlet about firearms safety and explained in detail the process of applying for a permit. It was more complicated than I thought.

  “Why does it take three to five days for the background check?”

  “They tell you that, but if your name isn’t something ordinary like John Smith, it can be instant. They just check with FBI records. I suppose they want to give people a cooling-off period.” She shrugged. “Where do you live?”

  “North of campus.”

  “Then you’ll have to go to the North Precinct to start the process, and I’m sure they may try to slow things down.”

  She explained that Michiganapolis was divided into four police precincts, north, south, east, and west, and the northern one included SUM.

  “But it’s not a high-crime neighborhood.”

  “True. There are a lot of professors, though, and they can be bad tempered.”

  Juno and I nodded. I reached across the counter to shake Mrs. Fennebresque’s hand and thanked her.

  “No,” she said. “Thank you. You’re exactly the kind of people I like to see shopping here, and it’s lovely to think of the two of you buying your first gun together. Who knows where it’ll lead!”

  10

  OUT in the sunny parking lot, I confronted Juno.

  “What was all that couple stuff?”

  “Wasn’t it fun?”

  “She’s a nice woman, and now she thinks we’re a

  couple—that’s dishonest.”

  “Give it a rest, Nick. It’s not deception, it’s

  entertainment. She thinks we’re sweet. To her, we’re at the beginning of our lives.”

  “You make it sound like we were picking out a silver

  pattern, not a gun.”

  “And you make it sound like we’re grifters. Nick, we gave her a little gift. It made her happy. She’s a widow, she undoubtedly misses her husband, we made her smile. What’s so fucking terrible about that? We’re not cheating her out of anything.”

  I had never thought of Juno as a psychological Lady

  Bountiful before, but I felt somewhat mollified, even as I knew I wasn’t addressing the real question—how disturbing it was to be taken for a straight man. Disturbing because it was so profoundly pleasing.

  Juno was right—it had been fun pretending to be

  something I wasn’t. Easy fun. And there was a strange relief to momentarily being one of the pack. Did that mean my self-esteem tank was running low? It was flattering to be thought of as Juno’s boyfriend or husband, since she was the kind of woman who would make a man “feel—mighty real,” if quoting Sylvester wasn’t completely inappropriate in this circumstance.

  “You enjoyed it, too,” Juno asserted, head cocked to the left, studying me as if she were reading my mind. She was doing a good job. “You didn’t pull away. You didn’t correct me.”

  “That would have been rude.”

  “Oh, really?” She leaned forward and stage-whispered, “It’s not that big a deal, Nick.” Then she strode to her Lexus and waved as she got in. �
��See you at Parker,” she called, peeling out of the lot like a spoiled teenager who’d already totaled a BMW and a Mercedes and was about to rack up a third disaster.

  When she had merged with the light traffic, I realized we hadn’t even touched on what we’d learned from Mrs.

  Fennebresque about the possibility of silencing a .22 with a nipple. It seemed vaguely ludicrous, but no more so than anything else that had been transpiring in EAR.

  As I drove home, I calmed down more. I thought that

  Juno might be right about our brief imposture. It wasn’t a big deal. We hadn’t cheated Mrs. Fennebresque out of anything, just played to her fantasy about us. And so what if for forty-five minutes of my life I had been less than totally authentic?

  Did somebody behind the counter at a gun shop need to know my whole life story? And what if she didn’t even believe it herself—what if she were playing a game with us? Anything was possible when a retired nurse sold firearms.

  But me passing? I had lived so many years of my life on the outside, as the son of immigrants, as a Jew, and as a gay man. If that wasn’t enough, having been born and bred a New Yorker left me open to suspicion and preemptive hostility, since everyone outside the city seemed to expect New

  Yorkers to feel like exiled royalty longing for home and trapped in some provincial backwater, ready to lash out at their inferiors. New Yorkers I’d met in Michigan tended to reinforce that stereotype by complaining about the lack of culture, the lack of sophistication, the lack of anything and everything they associated with civilized life. Of course, these same people would have been miserable anywhere, but

  Michiganders tend to be more sensitive to this criticism than Californians or Chicagoans might be.

  I drove more slowly the closer I got to home, thinking now about EAR, about who might want to shoot at Juno and was savvy enough to have ingeniously silenced a .22. Did the baby’s-bottle nipple point to someone with kids?

  Stefan was waiting for me in the kitchen when I walked in, his gym bag over by the laundry room door, and coffee smelling like it had just been brewed; I thought it might be our strongest blend, Vienna Roast. He looked flushed and pumped up from his workout, and he was finishing a bottle of Evian.

  “Sharon called,” he said, stretching his shoulders and neck inside his SUM sweatshirt.

  “On your line? How is she?”

  “No, on yours. She’s tired. I heard her leaving a

  message, and I went into your study to say hi. She hasn’t been calling, so I wanted to hear her voice. She asked you not to call her back.” He didn’t add anything more, but I’d known him long enough to hear the wingbeat of things he wasn’t saying. He broke his silence with, “I thought you were going to do the grocery shopping this morning.”

  “Oh, shit, you’re right. I forgot. How was your

  workout?”

  Stefan nodded as if my nervous, deflecting question had confirmed him in some resolution. “After I hung up your phone, I saw some catalogs on the file cabinet.”

  Too hurriedly, I said, “That’s research for my mystery class.”

  “You need that many gun catalogs for research? What,

  four, five?” He went to the coffee maker and poured himself a mug of coffee, as if he were giving me time to get my act together and tell the truth. But I resisted.

  “Why shouldn’t I be informed about firearms? It’s part of reading mysteries and thrillers. I have to know the reality.”

  It was lame, but all I could come up with.

  Stefan turned, leaning back against the sink with such a casual air I knew he was furious. “You were reading that Writer’s Digest book called Armed and Dangerous. Wasn’t that enough?”

  “It didn’t have pictures.”

  “Have you bought a gun?”

  “No!”

  “But you want to.” He crossed his arms combatively.

  “After you had dinner with Juno, you said you thought there was nothing wrong with having a gun, and your face— You didn’t look surprised, or grossed out. You were into it. You were fascinated.”

  “Okay. So. What if I am into it? I’ve been beaten up, I’ve been threatened, I’ve seen people killed!” I sat at the granite island, facing him squarely, thinking it was a very civilized room for what threatened to be a very uncivilized confrontation, looking after its remodeling like the kind of glowing large kitchen you see in advertisements, and envy. I had an almost Proustian sense of the summer’s maddening chaos, and the dust from drywall rising around us, and the confusion that preceded it as we’d made endless small decisions about countertop edging and cupboard handles and the like. “Stefan, what’s wrong with getting a gun after all that? Look at the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto—the Poles refused to sell them guns. If they’d had guns—”

  “Nick! Those Jews could have had a hundred times more guns in the Warsaw ghetto, and the Nazis still would have wiped them out—they had tanks and planes. And the whole German army. That’s a bullshit argument, it’s beneath you.”

  I flushed because he was right, but I wouldn’t back

  down. “If your parents had had guns—”

  “My parents? If they’d been armed, they wouldn’t have survived a minute. They would have been killed right away, even if they’d been able to take some Nazis with them. They were civilians! How can you even bring them into your craziness? That’s sick.”

  “It’s not sick.”

  “It is—it’s hysteria.” The word sounded more damning

  given that Stefan’s voice was so calm. “If everybody who was in your shoes went out to buy a gun, this country would turn into the Sudan. You got beaten up? Take a kick-boxing class, take tae kwan do—”

  “That’s the typical over-intellectual response. Is

  something wrong? Read a book, write a letter, take a class.

  Do therapy!”

  “And buying a gun is better than any of those? That’s a solution? It’s a whole new problem.”

  “Stefan, I don’t feel safe anymore.”

  “This is Juno’s fault. She’s got you hypnotized with her Annie Oakley, funky Amazon routine.”

  It stung to hear him come that close to how I felt about Juno—hypnotized—but I was relieved that he was wrong

  about the direction. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Juno has a 9-millimeter, I’m only looking at a .22.

  People use those for target shooting.” I rushed into my study, grabbed the Smith & Wesson brochure, and stormed back into the kitchen, shoved it at him, opened to the page with the gun I was interested in. He took it from me with contempt in every movement.

  “See?” I pointed. “Look at the symbols. It’s not a police gun, it’s not for home defense, it’s for target shooting— plinking—small game.”

  “That’s great. You’ll be fine if you’re attacked by tin cans or rabbits.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “How is this gun going to make you feel safer?”

  “I feel safer already just looking at it, touching it, reading about it.”

  His mouth twisted with disgust.

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting a gun. Millions of people in America own guns. Tens of millions!”

  “That’s very convincing. What’s next, a pickup with a gun rack and a Confederate flag decal?”

  Now I felt disgusted at his stereotyping.

  “Listen, Nick, am I supposed to like having a gun in the house? It’s my house, too.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

  “How would you feel if I started doing drugs and keeping them here?”

  “Now it’s my turn to say that’s a crappy argument. It’s a phony analogy. You’re not making sense.”

  “And you are? Nick, you’re not acting like the person I’ve lived with for fifteen years. This is an aberration. You’ve never wanted a gun, never wanted to talk about guns. You won’t watch a John Wayne movie, even that stupid Genghis Khan movie with Susan Hayward when it’
s on AMC.”

  “And people don’t change? I’m not allowed to change

  my opinions—I have to stay stuck where I’ve always been?”

  Now he frowned. “You feel stuck?” And then he made a leap that really scared me. “With me? Is this all part of some midlife crisis? Are you going to dye your hair, buy a little red sports car, and start running around with some hustler?”

  “Hey! I’ve never looked at another guy like that, and you know it. You’re the one who invited Perry Cross to SUM, got him a fucking job in your own department because you

  weren’t sure if you still loved him or not.” We had not mentioned the terrible episode involving Stefan’s ex-lover in more than a year, and I felt flushed with a sense of reckless bravado.

  “You said you were over that.” His face was getting red, and he set down the coffee mug so sharply I was surprised it didn’t crack. I felt on the edge of a conflagration without even knowing how hot it might burn, and I quickly tried to mollify Stefan.

  “I am over it,” I said reassuringly. “It’s just that—”

  “You wouldn’t bring it up if you were over it. You said you forgave me.”

  “I did. That doesn’t mean I don’t think about it

  sometimes, still.”

  He whirled away from me and stared out the window.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s just wonderful. I’m going to have to put up with your complaining about Perry Cross for the rest of my life.”

  I don’t know why, but instead of trying to contradict him, I switched gears entirely, as if all my defensiveness were suddenly water draining into sand. “If his name had been Mark Cross, people overhearing us would think we were arguing about luggage.”

  “What?” He turned around, hands on his thighs,

  scowling.

  “That was a joke.”

  “A joke,” he repeated flatly.

  “You know, a remark made to induce jocularity. Sound

  familiar?”

  I could see the corners of his mouth starting to rise and his eyes softening, but he fought it. “Am I supposed to laugh now?”

  “Well, it is customary.”

  I watched him silently debate whether to stay hostile or melt. “Come here.” He held his arms open to me, and after a brief hesitation, I stood and walked over, fell into them. We hugged and stayed quiet for a few minutes. “It scares me to think of you having a gun,” he said after a while.