Burning House (10 page)

Olivia was lounging on the bed in Benton’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt imprinted with a picture of the hotel, and when Nick laughed at her she pointed to his own clothing: white cowboy boots with gold-painted eagles on the toes, white
jeans, a T-shirt with what looked like a TV test pattern on it. Nick had almost forgotten that he had brought Olivia a present. He took his hand out of his pocket and brought out a toy pistol in the shape of a bulldog. He pulled the trigger and the dog’s mouth opened and the bulldog squeaked.

“Don’t thank me,” Nick said, putting it on the bedside table with the other clutter. “A blinking red light means that you have a message,” he said. He picked up the phone and dialed the hotel operator. “Nothing to it,” Nick said, patting Olivia’s leg. “Red light blinks, you just pick up the phone and get your message. If Uncle Nickie can do it, anybody can.”

He tickled Olivia’s lips with an uneaten croissant from the bedside table. He was holding it so she could bite the end. She did. Nick dipped it in the butter, which had become very soft, and held it to her mouth again. She puffed on her joint and ignored him. He took a bite himself and put it back on the plate. He went to the window and pulled back the drapes, looking at the steep hill that rose in back of the hotel.

“I wish I lived in a hotel,” he said. “Nice soft sheets, bathroom scrubbed every day, pick up the phone and get a croissant.”

“You can get all those things at home,” Benton said, wrapping a towel around him as he came out of the bathroom. The towel was too small. He gave up after several tugs and threw it over the chair.

“The sheets I slept on last night illustrated the hunt of the Unicorn. Poor bastard is not only fenced in, but I settled my ass on him. Manuela does nothing in the bathroom but run water in the tub and smoke Tiparillos. Maybe on the way home I’ll stop and pick up some croissants.” Nick closed the window. “Christmas decorations are already going up,” he said. He took a bottle of pills out of his pocket and put them on the table. The label said: “Francis Blanco: 2 daily, as directed.”

“Any point in asking who Francis Blanco
is?
” Benton said.

“You’re hovering like a mother over her chicks,” Nick said. “Someday that bottle will grow wings and fly away, and then you’ll wonder why you cared so much.” Nick clasped his hands behind him. “Francis Blanco just overhauled my carburetor,” he said. “You don’t have to look far for anything.”

In spite of the joke about being Uncle Nickie, Nick was Benton’s age and four years younger than Olivia. Nick was twenty-nine, from a rich New England family, and he had come to California four years before and made a lot of money in the record industry. His introduction to the record industry had come from a former philosophy professor’s daughter’s supplier. In exchange for the unlisted numbers of two Sag Harbor dope dealers, Dex Whitmore had marched Nick into the office of a man in L.A. who hired him on the spot. Nick sent a post card of the moon rising over the freeways to the professor, thanking him for the introduction to his daughter, who had, in turn, introduced him to her yoga teacher, who was responsible for his gainful employment. Dex Whitmore would have liked the continuation of that little joke; back East, he had gone to the professor’s house once a week to lead the professor’s daughter in “yoga exercises.” That is, they had gone to the attic and smoked dope and turned somersaults. Dex had been dead for nearly a year now, killed in a freak accident that had nothing to do with the fact that he sold drugs. He had been waiting at a dry cleaner’s to drop off a jacket when a man butted in front of him. Dex objected. The man took out a pistol and put a bullet in his side, shooting through a bottle of champagne Dex had clasped under his arm. Later Dex’s ex-wife filed a suit for more money from his estate, claiming that he had been carrying the bottle of champagne because he was on his way to reconcile with her.

Nick hadn’t succeeded in getting Benton and Olivia to leave the hotel. He was hungry, so he parked his car and went
into a bakery. The cupcakes looked better than the croissants, so he bought two of them and ate them sitting at the counter. It embarrassed him that Benton and Olivia couldn’t stay at his house, but the year before, when they were in L.A., his dog had tried to bite Olivia. Ilena, the woman he lived with, also disliked Olivia, and he half thought that somehow she had communicated to the dog that he should lunge and growl.

He peeled the paper off of the second cupcake. One of the cupcakes had a little squirt of orange and red icing on top, piped out to look like maize. The other one had a crooked glob of pale brown, an attempt at a drumstick.

Nick was a friend of long standing, and used to most of Benton’s eccentricities—including the fact that his idea of travel was to go somewhere and never leave the hotel. He and Benton had grown up in the same neighborhood. Benton had once supplied Nick with a fake I.D. for Christmas; Nick had turned Benton on to getting high with nutmeg. Each had talked Dorothy Birdley (“most studious”) into sleeping with the other. Benton presented Nick as brilliant and sensitive; Nick told her, sitting underneath an early-flowering tree on the New Haven green, that Benton’s parents beat him. In retrospect, she had probably slept with them because she was grateful anyone was interested in her: she had bottle-thick glasses and a long pointed nose, and she was very self-conscious about her appearance and defensive about being the smartest person in the high school.

It had been a real surprise for Nick when Benton began to think differently from him—when, home from college at Christmas, Benton had called to ask him if he wanted to go to the funeral parlor to pay his respects to Dorothy Birdley’s father. He had never thought about facing Dorothy Birdley again, and Benton had made him feel ashamed for being reluctant. He drove and stayed in the car. Benton went in alone. Then they went to a bar in New Haven and talked about college. Benton liked it, and was going to transfer to
the Fine Arts department; Nick hated the endless reading, didn’t know what he wanted to study, and would never have had Benton’s nerve to buck his father and change from studying business anyway. In other ways, though, Benton had become almost more prudent: “You go ahead,” Benton said when the waitress came to see if they wanted another round. “I’ll just have coffee.” So Nick had sat there and gotten sloshed, and Benton had stayed sober enough to get them home. Then, when they graduated, Benton had surprised him again. He had gotten engaged to Elizabeth. In his letters to him that year, Benton had expressed amusement at how up-tight Elizabeth was, and Nick had been under the impression that Benton was loosening up, that Elizabeth was just a pretty girl Benton saw from time to time. When Benton married her, things started to turn around. Nick, that year, stumbled into a high-paying job in New York; his relationship with his father was better, after they had a falling-out and his father called to apologize. Benton’s father, on the other hand, left home; the job Benton thought he’d landed with a gallery fell through, and he went to work as a clerk in a framing store. In December, six months after he married Elizabeth, she was pregnant. Then it was Nick who did the driving and Benton who drank. Coming out of a bar together, the night Benton told Nick that Elizabeth was pregnant, Benton had been so argumentative that Nick was afraid he had been trying to start a fight with him.

“I end up on the bottom, and you end up on the top, after your father tried to talk your mother into shipping you out to his brother’s in Montana in high school, you drove him so crazy. Now he’s advising you about what stock to buy.”

“What are you talking about?” Nick had said.

“I told you that. Your mother told my mother.”

“You never told me,” Nick said.

“I did,” Benton said, rolling down the window and pitching his cigarette.

“It must have been Idaho,” Nick said. “My uncle lives in Idaho.”

They rode in silence. “I’m not so lucky,” Nick said, suddenly depressed. “I might have Ilena’s car, but she’s in Honolulu tonight.”

“What’s she doing there?”

“She’s with a tea merchant.”

“What’s she doing with a tea merchant?”

“Wearing orchids and going to pig barbecues. How do I know?”

“Honolulu,” Benton said. “I don’t have the money to get to Atlantic City.”

“What’s there?”

“I don’t have the money to eat caramel corn and see a horse jump off a pier.”

“Have you talked to her about an abortion?” Nick said.

“Sure. Like trying to convince her the moon’s a yo-yo.”

He rolled down his window again. Wind rushed into the car and blew the ashes around. Nick saw the moon, burning white, out the side window of the car.

“I don’t have the money for a kid,” Benton said. “I don’t have the money for popcorn.”

To illustrate his point, he took his wallet out of his back pocket and dropped it out the window. “Son of a bitch, I don’t believe it,” Nick said. They were riding on the inside lane, fast, and there was plenty of traffic behind them. What seemed to be a quarter of a mile beyond where Benton had thrown his wallet, Nick bumped off the highway, emergency lights flashing. The car was nosed down so steeply on the hill rolling beneath the emergency lane (which he had overshot) that the door flew open when he cracked it to get out. Nick climbed out of the car, cursing Benton. He got a flashlight out of the trunk and started to run back, remembering having seen some sort of sign on the opposite side of the road just where Benton had thrown his wallet. It was bitter cold, and he was running
with a flashlight, praying a cop wouldn’t come along. Miraculously, he found the wallet in the road and darted for it when traffic stopped. He ran down the median, back to the car, wallet in his pocket, beam from the flashlight bobbing up and down. “God damn it,” he panted, pulling the car door open.

The light came on. For a few seconds no cars passed. Everything on their side of the highway was still. Nick’s heart felt like it was beating in his back. Benton had fallen up against the door and was slumped there, breathing through his mouth. Nick pulled the wallet out of his pocket and put it on the seat. As he dropped it, it flopped open. Nick was looking at a picture of Elizabeth, smiling her madonna smile.

He drove back to the hotel to get Olivia and Benton for dinner. The lobby looked like a church. There were no lights on, except for dim spotlights over the pictures. Nobody was in the lobby. He went over to the piano and played a song. A man came down the steps into the room, applauding quietly when he finished.

“Quite nice,” the man said. “Are you a musician?”

“No,” Nick said.

“You staying here, then?”

“Some friends are.”

“Strange place. What floor’s your friend on?”

“Fourth,” Nick said.

“Not him, then,” the man said. “I’m on the third, and some man cries all night.”

He sat down and opened the newspaper. There was not enough light in the lobby to read by. Nick played “The Sweetheart Tree,” forgot how it went halfway through, got up and went into the phone booth. It was narrow and high, and when he closed the wood door he felt like he was in a confessional.

“Father, I have sinned,” he whispered. “I have supplied
already strung-out friends with Seconal, and I have been unfriendly to an Englishman who was probably only lonesome.”

He dialed his house. Ilena picked it up.

“Reconsider,” he said. “Come to dinner. We’re going to Mr. Chow’s. You love Chow’s.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to her,” Ilena said.

“Come on,” he said. “Go with us.”

“She’s always stoned.”

“Go with us,” he said.

llena sighed. “How was work?”

“Work was great. Exciting. Rewarding. All that I always hope work will be. The road manager for Barometric Pressure called to yell about there not being any chicken tacos in the band’s dressing room. Wanted to know whether I did or did not send a telegram to New York.”

“Well,” she said. “Now I’ve asked about work. Only fair that you ask me about the doctor.”

“I forgot,” he said. “How did it go?”

“The bastard cauterized my cervix without telling me he was going to do it.”

“God. That must have hurt.”

“I see why people go around stoned. I just don’t want to eat dinner with them.”

“Okay, Ilena. Did you walk Fathom?”

“Manuela just had him out. I threw the Frisbee for him half the afternoon.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“I can hardly stand up straight.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll see you later,” Ilena said.

He went out of the phone booth and walked up the stairs. Pretty women never liked other pretty women. He rang the buzzer outside Benton and Olivia’s room.

Benton opened the door in such a panic that Nick smiled, thinking he was clowning because Nick had told him earlier
that he was too lethargic. It only took a few seconds to figure out it wasn’t a joke. Benton had on a white shirt hanging outside his jeans and a tie hanging over his shoulder. Olivia had on a dress and was sitting, still as a mummy, hands in her lap, in a chair with its back to the desk.

“You know that call? The phone call from Ena? You know what the message was? My brother’s dead. You know what the hotel told Ena days ago? That I’d checked out. She called back, and today they told her I was here. Wesley is dead.”

“Oh, Christ,” Nick said.

“He and a friend were on Lake Champlain. They drowned. In November, they were out in a boat on Lake Champlain. Today was the funeral. Why the hell did they tell her I’d checked out? It doesn’t matter anymore why they told her that.” Benton turned to Olivia. “Get up,” he said. “Pack.”

“There’s no point in my going,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I’ll fly to New York with you and go to the apartment.”

“Elizabeth would hate not to see you,” Benton said. “She likes to see you and clutch Jason from the hawk.”

“Elizabeth is at your mother’s?” Nick said.

“Elizabeth misses no opportunity to ingratiate herself with my family. They’re not at my mother’s. They’re at his house, in Weston, for some reason.”

“I thought he lived on Park Avenue.”

“He moved to Connecticut.” Benton slammed his suitcase shut. “For God’s sake, I’ve made plane reservations. Will you pack your suitcase?”