Burning House

by Ann Beattie

  Somebody is playing a record downstairs. It’s the Velvet Underground—Lou Reed, in a dream or swoon, singing “Sunday Morning.” I can barely hear the whispering and tinkling of the record. I can only follow it because I’ve heard it a hundred times.

  I am lying in bed, waiting for Frank to get out of the bathroom. My cut finger throbs. Things are going on in the house even though I have gone to bed; water runs, the record plays. Sam is still downstairs, so there must be some action.

  I have known everybody in the house for years, and as time goes by I know them all less and less. J.D. was Frank’s adviser in college. Frank was his best student, and they started to see each other outside of class. They played handball. J.D. and his family came to dinner. We went there. That summer—the summer Frank decided to go to graduate school in business instead of English—J.D.’s wife and son deserted him in a more horrible way, in that car crash. J.D. has quit his job. He has been to Las Vegas, to Colorado, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Paris twice; he tapes post cards to the walls of his living room. A lot of the time, on the weekends, he shows up at our house with his sleeping bag. Sometimes he brings a girl. Lately, not. Years ago, Tucker was in Frank’s therapy group in New York, and ended up hiring Frank to work as the accountant for his gallery. Tucker was in therapy at the time because he was obsessed with foreigners. Now he is also obsessed with homosexuals. He gives fashionable parties to which he invites many foreigners and homosexuals. Before the parties he does TM and yoga, and during the parties he does Seconals and isometrics. When I first met him, he was living for the summer in his sister’s house in Vermont while she was in Europe, and he called us one night, in New York, in a real panic because there were wasps all over. They were “hatching,” he said—big, sleepy wasps that were everywhere. We said we’d come; we drove all through the night to get to Brattleboro. It was true: there were wasps on the undersides of plates, in the plants, in the folds of curtains. Tucker was so upset that he was out behind the house, in the cold Vermont morning, wrapped like an Indian in a blanket, with only his pajamas on underneath. He was sitting in a lawn chair, hiding behind a bush, waiting for us to come.

  And Freddy—“Reddy Fox,” when Frank is feeling affectionate toward him. When we first met, I taught him to ice-skate and he taught me to waltz; in the summer, at Atlantic City, he’d go with me on a roller coaster that curved high over the waves. I was the one—not Frank—who would get out of bed in the middle of the night and meet him at an all-night deli and put my arm around his shoulders, the way he put his arm around my shoulders on the roller coaster, and talk quietly to him until he got over his latest anxiety attack. Now he tests me, and I retreat: this man he picked up, this man who picked him up, how it feels to have forgotten somebody’s name when your hand is in the back pocket of his jeans and you’re not even halfway to your apartment. Reddy Fox—admiring my new red silk blouse, stroking his fingertips down the front, and my eyes wide, because I could feel his fingers on my chest, even though I was holding the blouse in front of me on a hanger to be admired. All those moments, and all they meant was that I was fooled into thinking I knew these people because I knew the small things, the personal things.

  Freddy will always be more stoned than I am, because he feels comfortable getting stoned with me, and I’ll always be reminded that he’s more lost. Tucker knows he can come to the house and be the center of attention; he can tell all the stories he knows, and we’ll never tell the story we know about him hiding in the bushes like a frightened dog. J.D. comes back from his trips with boxes full of post cards, and I look at all of them as though they’re photographs taken by him, and I know, and he knows, that what he likes about them is their flatness—the unreality of them, the unreality of what he does.

  Last summer, I read The Metamorphosis and said to J.D., “Why did Gregor Samsa wake up a cockroach?” His answer (which he would have toyed over with his students forever) was “Because that’s what people expected of him.”

  They make the illogical logical. I don’t do anything, because I’m waiting, I’m on hold (J.D.); I stay stoned because I know it’s better to be out of it (Freddy); I love art because I myself am a work of art (Tucker).

  Frank is harder to understand. One night a week or so ago, I thought we were really attuned to each other, communicating by telepathic waves, and as I lay in bed about to speak I realized that the vibrations really existed: they were him, snoring.

  Now he’s coming into the bedroom, and I’m trying again to think what to say. Or ask. Or do.

  “Be glad you’re not in Key West,” he says. He climbs into bed.

  I raise myself up on one elbow and stare at him.

  “There’s a hurricane about to hit,” he says.

  “What?” I say. “Where did you hear that?”

  “When Reddy Fox and I were putting the dishes away. We had the radio on.” He doubles up his pillow, pushes it under his neck. “Boom goes everything,” he says. “Bam. Crash. Poof.” He looks at me. “You look shocked.” He closes his eyes. Then, after a minute or two, he murmurs, “Hurricanes upset you? I’ll try to think of something nice.”

  He is quiet for so long that I think he has fallen asleep. Then he says, “Cars that run on water. A field of flowers, none alike. A shooting star that goes slow enough for you to watch. Your life to do over again.” He has been whispering in my ear, and when he takes his mouth away I shiver. He slides lower in the bed for sleep. “I’ll tell you something really amazing,” he says. “Tucker told me he went into a travel agency on Park Avenue last week and asked the travel agent where he should go to pan for gold, and she told him.”

  “Where did she tell him to go?”

  “I think somewhere in Peru. The banks of some river in Peru.”

  “Did you decide what you’re going to do after Mark’s birthday?” I say.

  He doesn’t answer me. I touch him on the side, finally.

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning. Let’s talk about it another time.

  “You picked the house, Frank. They’re your friends downstairs. I used to be what you wanted me to be.”

  “They’re your friends, too,” he says. “Don’t be paranoid.”

  “I want to know if you’re staying or going.”

  He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and continues to lie very still.

  “Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake—you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of the May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

  He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”