Burning House (14 page)

“We’re going to play baseball,” Jason shouted, running into the living room. “And I’m first at bat, and you’re first base, and Nick can pitch.”

Olivia came in and sat down, still in her coat, shivering.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “He’s just taking a few pumpkins we don’t have any use for.”

“Come on,” Jason said, tugging Nick’s arm. “Please.”

“Leave him alone if he doesn’t want to do what you want him to do, Jason,” Elizabeth said. She had just come back into the room.

“Who was that on the phone?” Ena said. She took a drink of bourbon. Nick noticed that she had put a sprig of mint in the glass.

“That person named Richard. He read something from a book called
An Exaltation of Larks
.” Elizabeth shook her head. “He’s the one you call The Poet, isn’t he, Cal? Wasn’t the man who called two days ago and read that long poem by Donne named Richard?”

“It’s not a practice I’ve ever heard of,” Ena said. “I think it was the same man.”

“Come on,” Jason whined to Elizabeth. “Aren’t you going to come out and play baseball?”

“I wasn’t invited.”

“You’re so touchy,” he said. “You’re invited. Come on.”

Nick and Elizabeth got their coats and walked out the back door into the cold. Benton had found a chewed-up baseball bat in the back of the garage, and a yellow tennis ball. As they got into position to play, Hanley Paulson’s son passed through the game area, carrying an armful of pumpkins. The back
hatch of his car was open, and there were already about a dozen pumpkins inside. He closed the hatch and started the car and bumped down the driveway, raising his fist and shaking it from side to side when Uncle Cal waved goodbye.

Looking at his watch, Nick wondered if it could be possible that the boy had stacked all the wood and gathered the pumpkins in only half an hour. It was amazing what could be accomplished in half an hour.

The night before Nick left for L.A., there was a big dinner. Ena cooked it, saying that it was to make up for the Thanksgiving dinner she hadn’t felt like fixing. Everyone said that this dinner was very good and that on Thanksgiving no one had been hungry.

“I would have made a pumpkin pie, but the pumpkins disappeared,” Ena said, looking across the table at Uncle Cal.

“What do you mean?” he said. “The kid took two or three pumpkins. There must be a dozen left out there.”

“He took all the pumpkins,” Ena said.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Uncle Cal said. “Where’s the flashlight? I’ll go out and get you a pumpkin.”

Uncle Cal and Ena were both drunk. She had not wanted to make a pie, and he did not want to go outside in the cold to shine a flashlight into the pumpkin patch.

“I was mistaken,” Ena said finally. “I thought you had given him all the pumpkins.”

“He got them himself,” Uncle Cal said. “I didn’t give him anything. I let him round them up.” He cut into his roast beef. “He was just a kid,” he said.

“Olivia hasn’t touched her roast beef,” Ena said.

“You talk about me as though I’m not here,” Olivia said.

“What does she mean?” Ena said.

“I mean that you don’t address me directly. You talk
about
me, as though I’m not here.”

“I realize that you are here,” Ena said.

“I’m enjoying this roast beef,” Uncle Cal said. “If Morris could see me now, he’d die. Morris is my decorator. Doesn’t eat meat. Talks about it all the time, though, so that you’d think there were plates of meat all over
reminding
him about how much
meat
there was in the world.”

“Your decorator,” Olivia said.

“Yes?” Uncle Cal said.

“Don’t be pissy,” Benton said.

“I don’t think anybody even remembers why we’re here. It seems to me that this is just another family gathering where everybody lolls around by the fireplace and drinks.” Olivia took a sip of her wine. Nick winced, because he had seen her taking Valium in the kitchen before dinner.

“That’s uncivilized,” Ena said.

“
This
is uncivilized,” Olivia said.

Nick had expected one of them—probably Olivia—to begin crying. But it was Jason who began to cry, and who ran from the table.

Elizabeth had left the table to go after Jason, and Benton had followed her upstairs without saying anything else to Olivia.

“You said what you thought,” Uncle Cal said to Olivia. “Nothing wrong with that.”

Olivia got up and stalked away from the table.

“She did what she felt like doing,” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong with anything, is it?” Ena said to Cal.

“My heart,” he said. “You should see that last EKG. Looked like an ant’s-eye view of the Himalayas, where there should have been a pretty straight line. Of course you have a straight line, straight as a piece of string, you’re dead. It should have been bumpy, I mean—but not like it was.”

“Then what are you doing yoga for?” Ena said. “You’ll kill yourself twisting into all those stupid positions.”

“Probably going to be dead anyway,” Uncle Cal said, tapping his pocket.

“Stop being morose,” Ena said.

“Might stop being anything,” Cal said.

“Stop worrying about your
health,
” Ena said. “It’s what’s in the cards. Wesley was a young man, and he drowned.”

“That was an accident,” Uncle Cal said. “An accident.”

“It wasn’t any accident,” Olivia hollered from the living room.

“It
was,
” Elizabeth said. She had come downstairs again, and she looked like she was about to murder somebody.

“Elizabeth—” Nick said.

Elizabeth sat down and smoothed her skirt and smiled to show that she was all right, calm and all right. Then she began to cry.

Nick got up and put his arm around her, sitting on his heels and crouching by her chair. He said her name again, but it didn’t do any good. It hadn’t done any good the night before, either, in the motel room.

Upstairs, Jason was pretending to be a baby. Benton had gotten him into his pajamas and had taken the sheet from the bed and was holding Jason, sheet thrown around him like a huge poncho, facing the window. Jason was afraid, and he was trying to pretend that it was animals he was afraid of. He wanted to know if there were bears in the woods. “Not around here,” Benton said. Fox, then? Maybe—“but they don’t attack people. Maybe none around here, anyway.” Jason wanted to know where all the animals came from.

“You know where they came from. You know about evolution.”

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Tell me.”

“Tell you the whole history of evolution? You think I went to school yesterday?”

“Tell me something,” Jason said.

Benton told him this fact of evolution: that one day dinosaurs shook off their scales and sucked in their breath until they became much smaller. This caused the dinosaurs’ brains to pop through their skulls. The brains were called antlers, and the dinosaurs deer. That was why deer had such sad eyes, Benton told Jason—because they were once something else.

My favorite jacket was bought at L. L. Bean. It got from Maine to Atlanta, where an ex-boyfriend of mine found it at a thrift shop and bought it for my birthday. It was a little tight for him, but he was wearing it when he saw me. He said that if I had not complimented him on the jacket he would just have kept it. In the pocket I found an amyl nitrite and a Hershey’s Kiss. The candy was put there deliberately.

In the eight years I’ve had it, I’ve lost all the buttons but the top one—the one I never button because nobody closes the button under the collar. Four buttons are gone, but I can only remember how the next-to-last one disappeared: I saw it dangling but thought it would hold. Later, crouched on the floor, I said, “It stands to reason that since I haven’t moved off this barstool, it has to be on the floor
right here,
” drunkenly staring at the floor beneath my barstool at the Café Central.

Nick, the man I’m walking with now, couldn’t possibly fit into the jacket. He wishes that I didn’t fit into it, either. He hates the jacket. When I told him I was thinking about
buying a winter scarf, he suggested that rattails might go with the jacket nicely. He keeps stopping at store windows, offering to buy me a sweater, a coat. Nothing doing.

“I’m going crazy,” Nick says to me, “and you’re depressed because you’ve lost your buttons.” We keep walking. He pokes me in the side. “Buttons might as well be marbles,” he says.

“Did you ever play marbles?”

“Play marbles?” he says. “Don’t you just look at them?”

“I don’t think so. I think there’s a game you can play with them.”

“I had cigar boxes full of marbles when I was a kid. Isn’t that great? I had marbles and stamps and coins and
Playboy
cutouts.”

“All at the same time?”

“What do you mean?”

“The stamps didn’t come before the
Playboy
pictures?”

“Same time. I used the magnifying glass with the pictures instead of the stamps.”

The left side of my jacket overlaps the right, and my arms are crossed tightly in front of me, holding it closed. Nick notices and says, “It’s not very cold,” putting an arm around my shoulders.

He’s right. It isn’t. Last Friday afternoon, the doctor told me I was going to have to go to the hospital on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, to have a test to find out if some blockage in a Fallopian tube has been causing the pain in my left side, and I’m a coward. I have never believed anything in
The Bell Jar
except Esther Greenwood’s paranoid idea that when you’re unconscious you feel pain and later you forget that you felt it.

He’s taken his arm away. I keep tight hold on my jacket with one hand and put my other hand around his wrist so he’ll take his hand out of his pocket.

“Give me the hand,” I say. We walk along like that.

The other buttons fell off without seeming to be loose. They came off last winter. That was when I first fell in love with Nick, and other things seemed very unimportant. I thought then that during the summer I’d sew on new buttons. It’s October now, and cold. We’re walking up Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks away from the hospital where I’ll have the test. When he realizes it, he’ll turn down a side street.

“You’re not going to die,” he says.

“I know,” I say, “and it would be silly to be worried about anything short of dying, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t take it out on me,” he says, and steers me onto Ninety-sixth Street.

There are no stars this evening, so Nick is talking about the stars. He asks if I’ve ever imagined the thoughts of the first astronomer turning the powerful telescope on Saturn and seeing not only the planet but rings—smoky loops. He stops to light a cigarette.

The chrysanthemums planted down the middle of Park Avenue are just a blur in the dark. I think of de Heem’s flowers: move close to one of his paintings and you see a snail curled on the wood, and tiny insects coating the leaves. It happens sometimes when you bring flowers in from the garden—a snail that looks and feels like pus, climbing a stem.

Last Friday, Nick said, “You’re not going to die.” He got out of bed and moved me away from the vase of flowers. It was the day I had gone to the doctor, and then we went away to visit Justin for the weekend. (Ten years ago, when Nick started living with Barbara, Justin was their next-door neighbor on West Sixteenth Street.) Everything was lovely, the way it always is at Justin’s house in the country. There was a vase of phlox and daisies in the bedroom, and when I went
to smell the flowers I saw the snail and said that it looked like pus. I wasn’t even repelled by it—just sorry it was there, curious enough to finger it.

“Justin’s not going to know what you’re crying about. Justin doesn’t deserve this,” Nick whispered.

When touched, the snail did not contract. Neither did it keep moving.

Fact: her name is Barbara. She is the Boulder Dam. She is small and beautiful, and she has a hold on him even though they never married, because she was there first. She is the Boulder Dam.

Last year we had Christmas at Justin’s. Justin wants to think of us as a family—Nick and Justin and me. His real family is one aunt, in New Zealand. When he was a child she made thick cookies for him that never baked through. Justin’s ideas are more romantic than mine. He thinks that Nick should forget Barbara and move, with me, into the house that is for sale next door. Justin, in his thermal slippers and knee-high striped socks under his white pajamas, in the kitchen brewing Sleepytime tea, saying to me, “Name me one thing more pathetic than a fag with a cold.”

Barbara called, and we tried to ignore it. Justin and I ate cold oranges after the Christmas dinner. Justin poured champagne. Nick talked to Barbara on the phone. Justin blew out the candles, and the two of us were sitting in the dark, with Nick standing at the phone and looking over his shoulder into the suddenly darkened corner, frowning in confusion.

Standing in the kitchen later that night, Nick had said, “Justin, tell her the truth. Tell her you get depressed on Christmas and that’s why you get drunk. Tell her it’s not because of one short phone call from a woman you never liked.”