Burning House (2 page)

“What’s up now?” Andrew says, laying down the cheeseburger. He always eats them the same way, and it is a way I have never seen another child eat one: he bites around the outside, eating until only the circle at the center is left.

I look at my watch. The watch was a Christmas present from Arthur. It’s almost touching that he isn’t embarrassed to give me such impersonal presents as eggcups and digital
watches. To see the time, you have to push in the tiny button on the side. As long as you hold it, the time stays lit, changes. Take away your hand and the watch turns clear red again.

“We’re going to Bonnie’s studio. She’s printed the pictures Ruth wanted. Those pictures she took the Fourth of July—we’re finally going to see them.”

I feel in my pocket for the check Ruth gave me to pay Bonnie.

“But where are we going?” he says.

“To Spring Street. You remember your mother’s friend with the long hair to her waist, don’t you? You know where Bonnie lives. You’ve been there before.”

We take the subway, and Andrew sits in the crowded car by squeezing himself onto the seat next to me and sitting on one hip, his left leg thrown over mine so that we must look like a ventriloquist and a dummy. The black woman sitting next to him shifts over a little. He stays squeezed against me.

“If Bonnie offers you lunch, I bet you take it,” I say, poking the side of his parka.

“I couldn’t eat any more.”

“You?” I say.

“String bean,” he says to me. He pats his puffy parka. Underneath it, you would be able to see his ribs through the T-shirt. He is lean and would be quite handsome except for the obvious defect of his mouth, which droops at one corner as if he’s sneering.

We are riding on the subway, and Ruth is back at the tiny converted carriage house she rents from a surgeon and his wife in Westport. Like everything else in the area, it is overpriced, and she can barely afford it—her little house with not enough light, with plastic taped over the aluminum screens and the screens left in the windows because there are no storm windows. Wood is burning in the stove, and herbs are clumped in a bag of gauze hung in the pot of chicken stock. She is
underlining things in books, cutting coupons out of newspapers. On Wednesdays she does not have to go to work at the community college where she teaches. She is waiting for her lover, Brandon, to call or to come over: there’s warmth, soup, discoveries about literature, and, if he cares, privacy. I envy him an afternoon with Ruth, because she will cook for him and make him laugh and ask nothing from him. She earns hardly any money at the community college, but her half-gallons of wine taste better than the expensive bottles Arthur’s business friends uncork. She will reach out and touch you to let you know she is listening when you talk, instead of suggesting that you go out to see some movie for amusement.

Almost every time when I take Andrew home Brandon is there. It’s rare that he goes there any other day of the week. Sometimes he brings two steaks. On Valentine’s Day he brought her a plant that grows well in the dim light of the kitchen. It sits on the window sill behind the sink and is weaving upward, guided by tacks Ruth has pushed into the window frame. The leaves are thick and small, green and heart-shaped. If I were a poet, those green leaves would be envy, closing her in. Like many people, he does envy her. He would like to be her, but he does not want to take her on. Or Andrew.

The entryway to Bonnie’s loft is so narrow, painted bile-green, peeling and filthy, that I always nearly panic, thinking I’ll never get to the top. I expect roaches to lose their grip on the ceiling and fall on me; I expect a rat to dart out. I run, silently, ahead of Andrew.

Bonnie opens the door wearing a pair of paint-smeared jeans, one of Hal’s V-neck sweaters hanging low over her hips. Her loft is painted the pale yellow of the sun through fog. Her photographs are tacked to the walls, her paintings hung. She hugs both of us and wants us to stay. I take off my coat and
unzip Andrew’s parka and lay it across his legs. The arms stick out from the sides, no hands coming through them. It could be worse; Andrew could have been born without hands or arms. “I’ll tell you what I’m sick of,” Ruth said to me not long after he was born, one of the few times she ever complained. “I’m sick of hearing how things might have been worse, when they might also have been better. I’m sick of lawyers saying to wait—not to settle until we’re sure how much damage has been done. They talk about damage with their vague regret, the way the weatherman talks about another three inches of snow. I’m sick of wind whistling through the house, when it could be warm and dry.” She is never sick of Brandon, and the two steaks he brings, although he couldn’t come to dinner the night of Andrew’s birthday, and she is not bitter that Andrew’s father has had no contact with her since before the birth. “Angry?” Ruth said to me once. “I’m angry at myself. I don’t often misjudge people that way.”

Bonnie fixes Andrew hot chocolate. My hands are about to shake, but I take another cup of coffee anyway, thinking that it might just be because the space heater radiates so little heat in the loft. Andrew and I sit close together, the white sofa spreading away on either side of us. Andrew looks at some of Ruth’s photographs, but his attention drifts away and he starts to hum. I fit them back in the Manila envelope, between the pieces of cardboard, and tie the envelope closed. He rests his head on my arm, so that it’s hard to wind the string to close the envelope. While his eyes are closed, Bonnie whispers to me: “I couldn’t. I couldn’t take money from her.”

She looks at me as if I’m crazy. Now it’s my problem: how am I going to give Ruth the check back without offending her? I fold the check and put it in my pocket.

“You’ll think of something,” Bonnie says softly.

She looks hopeful and sad. She is going to have a baby, too. She knows already that she is going to have a girl. She knows
that she is going to name her Ora. What she doesn’t know is that Hal gambled and lost a lot of money and is worried about how they will afford a baby. Ruth knows that, because Hal called and confided in her. Is it modesty or self-preservation that makes Ruth pretend that she is not as important to people as she is? He calls, she told me, just because he is one of the few people she has ever known who really enjoy talking on the telephone.

We take the subway uptown, back to Grand Central Station. It is starting to fill up with commuters: men with light, expensive raincoats and heavy briefcases, women carrying shopping bags. In another couple of hours Arthur will be in the station on his way home. The Manila envelope is clamped under my arm. Everyone is carrying something. I have the impulse to fold Andrew to me and raise him in my arms. I could do that until he was five, and then I couldn’t do it any more. I settle for taking his hand, and we walk along swinging hands until I let go for a second to look at my watch. I look from my watch to the clock. They don’t agree, and of course the clock is right, the watch is not. We have missed the 3:05. In an hour there is another train, but on that train it’s going to be difficult to get a seat. Or, worse, someone is going to see that something beyond tiredness is wrong with Andrew, and we are going to be offered a seat, and he is going to know why. He suspects already, the way children of a certain age look a little guilty when Santa Claus is mentioned, but I hope I am not there when some person’s eye meets Andrew’s and instead of looking away he looks back, knowing.

“We’re going to have to wait for the next train,” I tell him.

“How come?”

“Because we missed our train.”

“Didn’t you know it when you looked at your watch at Bonnie’s?”

He is getting tired, and cranky. Next he’ll ask how old I am. And why his mother prefers to stay with Brandon instead of coming to New York with us.

“It would have been rude to leave earlier. We were only there a little while.”

I look at him to see what he thinks. Sometimes his thinking is a little slow, but he is also very smart about what he senses. He thinks what I think—that if I had meant to, we could have caught the train. He stares at me with the same dead-on stare Ray gives me when he thinks I am being childish. And, of course, it is because of Ray that I lingered. I always mean not to call him, but I almost always do. We cross the terminal and I go to a phone and drop in a dime. Andrew backs up and spins on his heel. His parka slips off his shoulder again. And his glove—where is his glove? One glove is on the right hand, but there’s no glove in either pocket. I sound disappointed, far away when Ray says hello.

“It’s just—he lost his glove,” I say.

“Where are you?” he says.

“Grand Central.”

“Are you coming in or going out?”

“Going home.”

His soft voice: “I was afraid of that.”

Silence.

“Ray?”

“What? Don’t tell me you’re going to concoct some reason to see me—ask me to take him off, man to man, and buy him new gloves?”

It makes me laugh.

“You know what, lady?” Ray says. “I do better amusing you over the phone than in person.”

A woman walks by, carrying two black poodles. She has on a long gray fur coat and carries the little dogs, who look as if they’re peeking out of a cave of fur, nestled in the crook of
each arm. Everything is a Stan Mack cartoon. Another woman walks across the terminal. She has forgotten something, or changed her mind—she shakes her head suddenly and begins to walk the other way. Far away from us, she starts to run. Andrew turns and turns. I reach down to make him be still, but he jerks away, spins again, loses interest and just stands there, staring across the station.

“Fuck it,” Ray says. “Can I come down and buy you a drink?”

More coffee. Andrew has a milkshake. Ray sits across from us, stirring his coffee as if he’s mixing something. Last year when I decided that loving Ray made me as confused as disliking Arthur, and that he had too much power over me and that I could not be his lover anymore, I started taking Andrew to the city with me. It hasn’t worked out well; it exasperates Ray, and I feel guilty for using Andrew.

“New shoes,” Ray says, pushing his leg out from under the table.

He has on black boots, and he is as happy with them as Andrew was with the pennies I gave him this morning. I smile at him. He smiles back.

“What did you do today?” Ray says.

“Went on an errand for Ruth. Went to the Guggenheim.”

He nods. I used to sleep with him and then hold his head as if I believed in phrenology. He used to hold my hands as I held his head. Ray has the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.

“Want to stay in town?” he says. “I was going to the ballet. I can probably get two more tickets.”

Andrew looks at me, suddenly interested in staying.

“I’ve got to go home and make dinner for Arthur.”

“Milk the cows,” Ray says. “Knead the bread. Stoke the stove. Go to bed.”

Andrew looks up at him and smiles broadly before he gets self-conscious and puts his hand to the corner of his mouth and looks away.

“You never heard that one before?” Ray says to Andrew. “My grandmother used to say that. Times have changed and times haven’t changed.” He looks away, shakes his head. “I’m profound today, aren’t I? Good it’s coffee and not the drink I wanted.”

Andrew shifts in the booth, looks at me as if he wants to say something. I lean my head toward him. “What?” I say softly. He starts a rush of whispering.

“His mother is learning to fall,” I say.

“What does that mean?” Ray says.

“In her dance class,” Andrew says. He looks at me again, shy. “Tell him.”

“I’ve never seen her do it,” I say. “She told me about it—it’s an exercise or something. She’s learning to fall.”

Ray nods. He looks like a professor being patient with a student who has just reached an obvious conclusion. You know when Ray isn’t interested. He holds his head very straight and looks you right in the eye, as though he is.

“Does she just go plop?” he says to Andrew.

“Not really,” Andrew says, more to me than to Ray. “It’s kind of slow.”

I imagine Ruth bringing her arms in front of her, head bent, an almost penitential position, and then a loosening in the knees, a slow folding downward.

Ray reaches across the table and pulls my arms away from the front of my body, and his touch startles me so that I jump, almost upsetting my coffee.

“Let’s take a walk,” he says. “Come on. You’ve got time.”

He puts two dollars down and pushes the money and the check to the back of the table. I hold Andrew’s parka for him and he backs into it. Ray adjusts it on his shoulders. Ray bends over and feels in Andrew’s pockets.

“What are you doing?” Andrew says.

“Sometimes disappearing mittens have a way of reappearing,” Ray says. “I guess not.”

Ray zips his own green jacket and pulls on his hat. I walk out of the restaurant beside him, and Andrew follows.

“I’m not going far,” Andrew says. “It’s cold.”

I clutch the envelope. Ray looks at me and smiles, it’s so obvious that I’m holding the envelope with both hands so I don’t have to hold his hand. He moves in close and puts his hand around my shoulder. No hand-swinging like children—the proper gentleman and the lady out for a stroll. What Ruth has known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.