Burning House (15 page)

Justin was making tea again, to sober up. His hand was over the burner, going an inch lower, half an inch more …

“Play chicken with him,” he whispered to me. “Don’t you be the one who gets burned.”

A lady walks past us, wearing a blue hat with feathers that look as if they might be arrows shot into the brim by crazy Indians. She smiles sweetly. “The snakes are crawling out of Hell,” she says.

In a bar, on Lexington, Nick says, “Tell me why you love me so much.” Without a pause, he says, “Don’t make analogies.”

When he is at a loss—when he is lost—he is partly lost in her. It’s as though he were walking deeper and deeper into a forest, and I risked his stopping to smell some enchanted flower or his finding a pond and being drawn to it like Narcissus. From what he has told me about Barbara, I know that she is deep and cool.

Lying on the cold white paper on the doctor’s examining table, I tried to concentrate not on what he was doing but on a screw holding one of the four corners of the flat, white ceiling light.

As a child, I got lost in the woods once. I had a dandelion with me, and I used it, hopelessly, like a flashlight, the yellow center my imaginary beam. My parents, who might have saved me, were drunk at a back-yard party as I kept walking the wrong way, away from the houses I might have seen. I walked slower and slower, being afraid.

Nick makes a lot of that. He thinks I am lost in my life. “All right,” I say as he nudges me to walk faster. “
Everything’s
symbolic.”

“How can you put me down when you make similes about everything?”

“I do not,” I say. “The way you talk makes me want to put out my knuckles to be beaten. You’re as critical as a teacher.”
The walk is over. He’s even done what I wanted: walked the thirty blocks to her apartment, instead of taking a cab, and if she’s anxious and looking out the window, he’s walked right up to the door with me, and she’ll see it all—even the kiss.

It amazes him that at the same time variations of what happens to Barbara happen to me. She had her hair cut the same day I got mine trimmed. When I went to the dentist and he told me my gums were receding slightly, I hoped she’d outdo me by growing fangs. Instead, when my side started to hurt she got much worse pains. Now she’s slowly getting better, back at the apartment after a spinal-fusion operation, and he’s staying with her again.

Autumn, 1979. On the walk we saw one couple kissing, three people walking dogs, one couple arguing, and a cab-driver parked in front of a drugstore, changing from a denim jacket to black leather. He pulled on a leather cap, threw the jacket into the back seat, and drove away, making a U-turn on Park Avenue, headed downtown. One man looked at me as if he’d just found me standing behind the counter of a kissing booth, and one woman gave Nick such a come-on look that it made him laugh before she was even out of earshot.

“I can’t stand it,” Nick says.

He doesn’t mean the craziness of New York.

He opens the outside door with his key, after the kiss, and for a minute we’re squeezed together in the space between locked doors. I’ve called it jail. A coffin. Two astronauts, strapped in on their way to the moon. I’ve stood there and felt, more than once, the lightness of a person who isn’t being kept in place by gravity, but my weightlessness has been from sadness and fear.

Barbara is upstairs, waiting, and Nick doesn’t know what to say. I don’t. Finally, to break the silence, he pulls me to him.
He tells me that when I asked for his hand earlier, I called it “the hand.”

His right hand is extended, fingers on the bone between my breasts. I look down for a second, the way a surgeon must have a moment of doubt, or even a moment of confidence, looking at the translucent, skin-tight rubber glove: his hand and not his hand, about to do something important or not important at all.

“
Anybody
else would have said ‘your hand,’” Nick says. “When you said it that way, it made it sound as if my hand was disembodied.” He strokes my jacket. “You’ve got your security blanket. Let me keep all the parts together. On the outside, at least.”

Disembodied, that hand would be a symbol from Magritte: a castle on a rock, floating over the ocean; a green apple without a tree.

Alone, I’d know it anywhere.

The woods Jake and Laura Ann were walking in were a few miles from his aunt’s house, in a remote corner of Pennsylvania. His aunt was in Key Biscayne for the winter. The night before, they had trained the car headlights on the stump where she kept a jar with the house key hidden inside. Leaving New York had been a sudden whim; all day he had been thinking about the farm, and when he had mentioned it late at night to Laura Ann she had sprung out of bed and begun dressing, half seriously, half mocking. This was a just punishment for so much fretfulness. He had already complained that he wanted a garage that didn’t cheat him. That he wished the damned cleaner would smile less and lose his clothes less often. And snow falling on a Friday night—what was the point, when alternate-side-of-the-street parking couldn’t be suspended?

“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 sexy 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.