Burning House

by Ann Beattie

  “Come on,” she had said. “We act like old people. Let’s go to Pennsylvania. It’ll be beautiful in the morning with the sun on the snow.” It was as predictable as her amazed smile: when she took up things he had halfheartedly instigated, he would then go along with them, gradually convincing himself that he was doing her a favor. He found himself standing as she pulled her baggy jeans over the thermal long Johns she slept in and searched through the sweaters in their closet. She took out the blue turtleneck. Then she stood in front of the mirror, parting her hair, sticking in a shiny, star-shaped clip to keep it out of her face. The first time he had brought her to his aunt’s house, ten years before, their last spring vacation from college, she had been such a city slicker that walking through the woods she had asked what the red and aqua tubes were that she saw scattered in the bushes, not knowing they were shotgun shells.

  In the morning they walked through the woods, jeans tucked into their rubber fishing boots. In front of them, heaped in the junkyard they had cut through as a shortcut, were broken pieces of a carrousel: saddles without stirrups and huge horse heads with frosty eyes and broken teeth. As she raised the camera to focus, he noticed her diamond wedding band sparkling. The brim of her hat was pulled low; it was a real John Wesley Hardin hat, a favorite left over from the sixties.

  “Bracket it,” he said.

  She moved the camera away from her eye. “Did I ever tell you about bracketing?” she said.

  “I read it in a book, I suppose.”

  She inched up on the horse heads, as if they might move. She crouched in the snow. It was quiet; the click disturbed the woods like a shot.

  He loved her amazed smile—the way he could announce some unexpected piece of information and arouse her curiosity. She couldn’t believe that he would know a thing like that—retain a term that didn’t even apply to something he did.… When he met her she had been the eager, bright student of literature, whose professor embarrassed her when she gave an interpretation of a book in a class and he asked whether she would also climb a ladder by using the spaces between rungs.

  They had brought water with them from the city, because his aunt had turned off the water before she left for the winter. It had been a long, tiring day. He drank a glass of cold water, savoring it like brandy, and he stood looking out the living-room window, into the back field. It was Saturday night and she was reading old magazines, pacing around the house, sitting close to the Franklin stove. She walked away from him at the window, and he was ten feet or so away from her, but he felt the distance, that something missing he couldn’t put his finger on. He decided it was fatigue: they were both tired from walking so far in the snow. They were listening to one of his aunt’s collection of great old records that his aunt did not realize were great, A scratchy “Pennies From Heaven” was playing, and in his mind he played saxophone in the background, his fingers tapping out the notes on the cold windowpane. When he moved his head nose-close to the window he could see the cement driveway, full of cracks and gullies, the part of the driveway where his mother had run a hose into the car and killed herself with carbon monoxide. The spring before, he had noticed that the driveway was now so overgrown that a wild rosebush had sent up dozens of runners.

  He saw Laura Ann’s reflection in the window, and though he couldn’t see the details of her face, he knew them so well that they were as vivid imagined as seen: those large doe eyes, full of wonder. Now there was nothing to indicate that she didn’t forgive him for his having had an affair with her friend except those eyes, sad even above a smile. He pressed his forehead to the window and looked at the black, star-covered sky. When he was a child, a friend had told him that the stars were sky stones. It probably explained a lot that he had never gotten any misinformation about sex—only about the stars.

  The quilt on top of the blanket was called Sunshine and Shadow. It had been on this bed as long as he could remember, but it was only lately, in the city, when quilts became fashionable, that he had found out the name of the pattern. It was a quilt begun by his grandmother and finished by his mother and his aunt. He had stared at it when he was a child: squares of differing sizes, alternately light and dark—a diamond pattern radiating from the smallest gray square in the center. He had hypnotized himself into dizziness studying the pattern and come to no conclusions, the way he had stared at inanimate objects years ago when he was tripping. Whatever revelations he had were long gone; he couldn’t paraphrase them, so he didn’t know how to talk about them. He could remember things he had thought about, but he couldn’t remember his conclusions. Or, if he could, they no longer seemed to have any context.

  Laura Ann was lying next to him in bed, breathing quietly, deep in sleep. The light was coming up. The star-shaped barrette had almost worked its way loose; her long, curly hair was spread around her on the pillow like a Vargas girl’s in Playboy, but instead of being picture-pretty, her face was puffy from sleep. He kissed the tip of a curl and wondered if he loved her. On a trip to Pennsylvania a year ago, they had built a snowman, and while he chipped away, trying to make it anatomically correct below its snow belly, she had worked equally hard to pile on breasts. Somewhere in the woods, behind the junkyard, until it melted, there had been a hermaphroditic snowman.

  He put his cheek against her hair, trying to think about all the strange, funny times he had had with Laura Ann, trying to forget his ex-lover. Awake, Laura Ann was often as quiet about things as she was now, in sleep, but not deliberately secretive. She had begun a course in photography during her lunch hour. He had seen the little gray plastic film container on a table and asked about it. She was going to study photography, she had said simply. Just another thing she had considered, and acted on, without ever mentioning it. His anger had been childish, saying that photography made everything into potential art, that there were easy shots sure to succeed. “You’re not the first one to come up with that,” she had said.

  What she had not said was that knowing odd facts could be an equally cheap trick: why Bill Monroe fired Richard Greene; who made the first chocolate-chip cookie; the way to get dried wax off of candlesticks. He had always remembered odd facts, trying to outshine his brother, Derek, who operated in a fog and always came out in the clear. He rolled over and remembered advice from his shrink: Don’t fall asleep thinking bad thoughts about yourself. He remembered apologizing to Laura Ann for condemning photography by showing an interest in her recent prints, and the irregular black borders around them. “You chisel out the negative holder,” she had said, holding her first finger an inch above the thumb so that he could see the imaginary negative holder. “You print it exactly the way it was shot. Then there’s no way you can cheat.”

  Before he had gone to California the previous spring, he had tried to clear his head about what he wanted. When Derek called from Los Angeles and threw around phrases like “in the money” or “out of the money,” discussing closing transactions and sure ways to beat the system, all he could think of was that silliness in Bonnie and Clyde when Bonnie and Clyde go to the movies and watch Ginger Rogers and the chorus singing “We’re in the Money” in Gold Diggers of 1933. Now his brother was in California with a teenage girlfriend, driving a silver Porsche and practically living on undercooked pasta. He visited him and was amazed at his brother’s life—that Derek and Liz sat on the sofa and bent over a small, square pin with a picture of Elvis Costello on it and snorted coke off of Elvis’s face the way millions of middle-class people sat down for an evening cocktail.

  He came back to New York with huaraches from Olvera Street and ten pints of the best-tasting strawberries he had ever eaten. He remembered standing on the other side of the X-ray machine at the airport, watching the fuzzy stacks of strawberries pass through. Thinking about The Situation, he had drunk too much wine and smoked too much with his brother, and he had fixated on one little aspect of Mary or Laura Ann: Laura Ann’s hair versus Mary’s wide-set eyes. Taking an overview? Laura Ann, naked, long and smooth-skinned; Mary, her sex
y adolescent thinness, her flat breasts. Mary had given him an ultimatum: Decide or forget it. Laura Ann, who didn’t know he was having an affair then, had given him a soft leather traveling bag.

  When he returned that summer, the city looked grim. Few places to see the sky, buildings crowding each other. He looked out the window of the cab and saw a sharp-nosed gargoyle above the door of a building; he saw bums curled with their backs to buildings, sleeping expressionlessly, as if they had just shared some intimacy with the sidewalk. He thought about calling Mary, but didn’t. She had an answering machine, and he didn’t want to risk hearing Mary’s voice that was not Mary’s voice.

  His last thought before he went to sleep now made him smile: as he had passed a man walking his golden retriever, the man had said to the dog, “I don’t believe you, Morty. You pissed on the one sign of life in that treebox.”

  Laura Ann knew Mary. Those tearful late-night phone calls she had made months ago weren’t to some mystery lover, as he had at first suspected, but to Mary. And then the phone calls stopped and she began to be nice to him again. “You pretend to be so casual,” she said. “It’s a good cover-up, but I know what’s underneath. I know how you spend hours with your calculator meticulously going over your bank statement. I know that you’ll even read a bad book to the end. I know how you make love.”

  The last time he saw Mary, she was sitting at a table inside the Empire Diner when he was walking by. She didn’t see him. On his way back from his cash machine, he walked into the Empire. They were squirting Windex on the table where Mary and her friends had been. He went to the phone at the end of the counter and said what he’d wanted to say for a long time. “If I love anybody, I love you, Laura Ann. Admit that you’ve never forgiven me. I don’t want to come back and walk into that strain again.”

  “You wouldn’t come back if you didn’t want to,” she said.

  The woman at the piano bobbed her shoulders as she played “Fascinatin’ Rhythm.” A man in a gorilla suit walked in and began talking to one of the waiters, gesturing with his paw. A chauffeur, arms crossed, waited outside by a long white Cadillac.

  “You love me,” she said. Then, in a near whisper: “The way I cheat and chip dried food off the plates when I’m setting the table. The way I rub your shoulders. My perfume.”

  “Your voice,” he said.

  “I’m exhausted.” She sighed. “Don’t take it personally if I’ve gone to sleep when you come home.”

  The counterman was talking in a huddle with a waitress. “I told him that we don’t take reservations. ‘You show up, that’s when we take your name,’ I said to him. ‘You come back with four other people, we’ll give you the back table.’ I was just doing my job.”

  Jake searched through his wallet and took out a business card. He dialed another number.

  “This is Doctor Garfield,” Garfield’s voice said. “I’m not available at this time. Please leave your message at the tone, or call me at my home in an emergency.” Garfield gave his home number, and there was a beep. Listening to the silence that followed, Jake thought: Alexander Graham Bell would never have believed that it would come to this.

  Walking back to the apartment, he thought about what he had always been sure he loved: the fields in Pennsylvania, acres of them, stretching away from his aunt’s farm, so flat and green. And the porch swing, missing the middle board, that he sat on to watch sunsets. The tangled mounds of peas that he tied around thick stakes in the garden, trying to keep them growing upward. The summer his uncle ripped the honeysuckle off the porch and poured poison on the ground—the stub where the vine had begun. The porch, where the honeysuckle used to crisscross the screen, the floor transformed into complicated patterns of lace when the sunlight shone through the leaves. And the time he begged to be dressed in the neighbor’s bee-keeping suit, the big spaceman helmet with netting over the front covering his head and face, and then the unexpected, horrible dread he had felt as bees swarmed around him and crawled on the suit. He had stayed rooted to the spot, paying no attention to the neighbor, who shouted from his tractor in the not-too-far distance that it was all right—there wasn’t any way he could hurt the bees. It was a million times worse than being zipped into the stiff yellow rain slicker and sent off to school. In the field, he had been petrified. Finally, the neighbor’s voice had reached him and he knew he had to move, and he did move, trying hopelessly to shrug away the bees. Then he managed to turn his back on the hives, and eventually, as he walked, they disappeared behind him. He was at that point of life where he realized he wasn’t supposed to cry anymore, but he was on the verge of tears when he sat eating toast in the neighbor’s kitchen, toast soggy with butter and spread with thick, dark honey, hardly able to swallow because his throat was so constricted. Later, watching television, looking at the way astronauts floated toward each other to connect in space, he would think about the way he must have looked. There had been one acid trip, one of the last, when he had felt that same heavy disembodiment—that he was grounded, and he had to move, but it was impossible, and if he had taken off, he would have drifted not far from the ground, at a peculiar tilt, like the old man walking through air in the Chagall painting. This realization—and this present life of confusion—was a long way from his thoughts, when he had rocked in a swing missing a board, on the front porch of a house in Pennsylvania.

  She was, as she had said she would be, in bed. She didn’t open her eyes, although he thought that she had heard him walk in. If she had, this particular night, those steady green eyes might have had the power Kryptonite had on Superman. He was always struggling to think that he didn’t need her. That love didn’t mean need. That crazy conflict acid produced, of having your senses touched sharply, yet knowing you were powerless to respond. Even before acid, that sudden, strength-sucking anxiety—the fear, standing in front of the big white boxes of bees swarming in and out.

  What strength it took just to lie there, eyelids lightly closed, nothing to suggest that the way she looked, curled on the bed, was a position difficult to maintain. He knew that if he asked her in the morning, she would look at him with exasperation and say that she had been asleep.

  He sat at the foot of the bed. She had not pulled the shade. The streetlight, streaming light through the curtains, blotched her body—luminous shapes that were almost a triangle, almost a circle. If she had opened her eyes and seen him sitting there, smiling fondly, whatever he told her about being unsure of whether they should stay together would be discounted. Her version of it would be that he thought about her so much and stared so often because he was in love. It would be like the story the neighbor told his aunt and uncle all summer: how he had loved those bees, how he had been mesmerized by them. And how, being a gentle boy, he had not wanted to make a move if it might possibly hurt them.

  DESIRE

  Bryce was sitting at the kitchen table in his father’s house, cutting out a picture of Times Square. It was a picture from a coloring book, but Bryce wasn’t interested in coloring; he just wanted to cut out pictures so he could see what they looked like outside the book. This drawing was of people crossing the street between the Sheraton-Astor and F. W. Woolworth. There were also other buildings, but these were the ones the people seemed to be moving between. The picture was round; it was supposed to look as if it had been drawn on a bottle cap. Bryce had a hard time getting the scissors around the edge of the cap, because they were blunt-tipped. At home, at his mother’s house in Vermont, he had real scissors and he was allowed to taste anything, including alcohol, and his half sister Maddy was a lot more fun than Bill Monteforte, who lived next door to his father here in Pennsylvania and who never had time to play. But he had missed his father, and he had been the one who called to invite himself to this house for his spring vacation.

  His father, B.B., was standing in the doorway now, complaining because Bryce was so quiet and so glum. “It took quite a few polite letters to your mother to get her to let loose of you for a week,” B.B. said. “You g
et here and you go into a slump. It would be a real problem if you had to do anything important, like go up to bat with the bases loaded and two outs.

  “Mom’s new neighbor is the father of a guy that plays for the Redskins,” Bryce said.

  The scissors slipped. Since he’d ruined it, Bryce now cut on the diagonal, severing half the people in Times Square from the other half. He looked out the window and saw a squirrel stealing seed from the bird feeder. The gray birds were so tiny anyway, it didn’t look as if they needed anything to eat.

  “Are we going to that auction tonight, or what?” Bryce said.

  “Maybe. It depends on whether Rona gets over her headache.”

  B.B. sprinkled little blue and white crystals of dishwasher soap into the machine and closed it. He pushed two buttons and listened carefully.

  “Remember now,” he said, “I don’t want you getting excited at the auction if you see something you want. You put your hand up, and that’s a bid. You have to really, really want something and then ask me before you put your hand up. You can’t shoot your hand up. Imagine that you’re a soldier down in the trenches and there’s a war going on.”

  “I don’t even care about the dumb auction,” Bryce said.

  “What if there was a Turkish prayer rug you wanted and it had the most beautiful muted colors you’d ever seen in your life?” B.B. sat down in the chair across from Bryce. The back of the chair was in the shape of an upside-down triangle. The seat was a right-side-up triangle. The triangles were covered with aqua plastic. B.B. shifted on the chair. Bryce could see that he wanted an answer.

  “Or we’ll play Let’s Pretend,” B.B. said. “Let’s pretend a lion is coming at you and there’s a tree with a cheetah in it and up ahead of you it’s just low dry grass. Would you climb the tree, or start running?”