Burning House (20 page)

Hugo did not bark when the truck pulled into the drive.

“Hi,” he says. “What a beautiful day. Here you go.”

He holds out a clipboard and a pen.

“Forty-two,” he says, pointing to the tiny numbered block in which I am to sign my name. A mailing envelope is under his arm.

“Another book,” he says. He hands me the package.

I reach up for it. There is a blue label with my name and address typed on it.

He locks his hands behind his back and raises his arms, bowing. “Did you notice that?” he says, straightening out of
the yoga stretch, pointing to the envelope. “What’s the joke?” he says.

The return address says “John F. Kennedy.”

“Oh,” I say. “A friend in publishing.” I look up at him. I realize that that hasn’t explained it. “We were talking on the phone last week. He was—People are still talking about where they were when he was shot, and I’ve known my friend for almost ten years and we’d never talked about it before.”

The UPS man is wiping sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief. He stuffs the handkerchief into his pocket.

“He wasn’t making fun,” I say. “He admired Kennedy.”

The UPS man crouches, runs his fingers across the grass. He looks in the direction of the garage. He looks at me. “Are you all right?” he says.

“Well—” I say.

He is still watching me.

“Well,” I say, trying to catch my breath. “Let’s see what this is.”

I pull up the flap, being careful not to get cut by the staples. A large paperback called
If Mountains Die
. Color photographs. The sky above the Pueblo River gorge in the book is very blue. I show the UPS man.

“Were you all right when I pulled in?” he says. “You were sitting sort of funny.”

I still am. I realize that my arms are crossed over my chest and I am leaning forward. I uncross my arms and lean back on my elbows. “Fine,” I say. “Thank you.”

Another car pulls into the driveway, comes around the truck, and stops on the lawn. Ray’s car. Ray gets out, smiles, leans back in through the open window to turn off the tape that’s still playing. Ray is my best friend. Also my husband’s best friend.

“What are you doing here?” I say to Ray.

“Hi,” the UPS man says to Ray. “I’ve got to get going. Well.” He looks at me. “See you,” he says.

“See you,” I say. “Thanks.”

“What am I doing here?” Ray says. He taps his watch. “Lunchtime. I’m on a business lunch. Big deal. Important negotiations. Want to drive down to the Redding Market and buy a couple of sandwiches, or have you already eaten?”

“You drove all the way out here for lunch?”

“Big business lunch. Difficult client. Takes time to bring some clients around. Coaxing. Takes hours.” Ray shrugs.

“Don’t they care?”

Ray sticks out his tongue and makes a noise, sits beside me and puts his arm around my shoulder and shakes me lightly toward him and away from him a couple of times. “Look at that sunshine,” he says. “Finally. I thought the rain would never stop.” He hugs my shoulder and takes his arm away. “It depresses me, too,” he says. “I don’t like what I sound like when I keep saying that nobody cares.” Ray sighs. He reaches for a cigarette. “Nobody cares,” he says. “Two-hour lunch. Four. Five.”

We sit silently. He picks up the book, leafs through. “Pretty,” he says. “You eat already?”

I look behind me at the screen door. Hugo is not here. No sound, either, when the car came up the driveway and the truck left.

“Yes,” I say. “But there’s some cheese in the house. All the usual things. Or you could go to the market.”

“Maybe I will,” he says. “Want anything?”

“Ray,” I say, reaching my hand up. “Don’t go to the market.”

“What?” he says. He sits on his heels and takes my hand. He looks into my face.

“Why don’t you—There’s cheese in the house,” I say.

He looks puzzled. Then he sees the stack of mail on the grass underneath our hands. “Oh,” he says. “Letter from John.” He picks it up, sees that it hasn’t been opened. “O.K.,” he says. “Then I’m perplexed again. Just that he wrote you?
That he’s already in Berkeley? Well, he had a bad winter. We all had a bad winter. It’s going to be all right. He hasn’t called? You don’t know if he hooked up with that band?”

I shake my head no.

“I tried to call you yesterday,” he says. “You weren’t home.”

“I went into New York.”

“And?”

“I went out for drinks with some friends. We went to the fireworks.”

“So did I,” Ray says. “Where were you?”

“Seventy-sixth Street.”

“I was at Ninety-eighth. I knew it was crazy to think I might run into you at the fireworks.” A cardinal flies into the peach tree.

“I did run into Bobby last week,” he says. “Of course, it’s not really running into him at one o’clock at Le Relais.”

“How was Bobby?”

“You haven’t heard from him, either?”

“He called today, but he didn’t say how he was. I guess I didn’t ask.”

“He was O.K. He looked good. You can hardly see the scar above his eyebrow where they took the stitches. I imagine in a few weeks when it fades you won’t notice it at all.”

“You think he’s done with dining in Harlem?”

“Doubt it. It could have happened anywhere, you know. People get mugged all over the place.”

I hear the phone ringing and don’t get up. Ray squeezes my shoulder again. “Well,” he says. “I’m going to bring some food out here.”

“If there’s anything in there that isn’t the way it ought to be, just take care of it, will you?”

“What?” he says.

“I mean—If there’s anything wrong, just fix it.”

He smiles. “Don’t tell me. You painted a room what you thought was a nice pastel color and it came out electric pink.
Or the chairs—you didn’t have them reupholstered again, did you?” Ray comes back to where I’m sitting. “Oh, God,” he says. “I was thinking the other night about how you’d had that horrible chintz you bought on Madison Avenue put onto the chairs and when John and I got back here you were afraid to let him into the house. God—that awful striped material. Remember John standing in back of the chair and putting his chin over the back and screaming, ‘I’m innocent!’ Remember him doing that?” Ray’s eyes are about to water, the way they watered because he laughed so hard the day John did that. “That was about a year ago this month,” he says. I nod yes.

“Well,” Ray says. “Everything’s going to be all right, and I don’t say that just because I want to believe in one nice thing. Bobby thinks the same thing. We agree about this. I keep talking about this, don’t I? I keep coming out to the house, like you’ve cracked up or something. You don’t want to keep hearing my sermons.” Ray opens the screen door. “Anybody can take a trip,” he says.

I stare at him.

“I’m getting lunch,” he says. He is holding the door open with his foot. He moves his foot and goes into the house. The door slams behind him.

“Hey!” he calls out. “Want iced tea or something?”

The phone begins to ring.

“Want me to get it?” he says.

“No. Let it ring.”

“Let it ring?” he hollers.

The cardinal flies out of the peach tree and onto the sweeping branch of a tall fir tree that borders the lawn—so many trees so close together that you can’t see the house on the other side. The bird becomes a speck of red and disappears.

“Hey, pretty lady!” Ray calls. “Where’s your mutt?”

Over the noise of the telephone, I can hear him knocking around in the kitchen. The stuck drawer opening.

“You
honestly
want me not to answer the phone?” he calls.

I look back at the house. Ray, balancing a tray, opens the door with one hand, and Hugo is beside him—not rushing out, the way he usually does to get through the door, but padding slowly, shaking himself out of sleep. He comes over and lies down next to me, blinking because his eyes are not yet accustomed to the sunlight.

Ray sits down with his plate of crackers and cheese and a beer. He looks at the tears streaming down my cheeks and shoves over close to me. He takes a big drink and puts the beer on the grass. He pushes the tray next to the beer can.

“Hey,” Ray says. “Everything’s cool, O.K.? No right and no wrong. People do what they do. A neutral observer, and friend to all. Same easy advice from Ray all around. Our discretion assured.” He pushes my hair gently off my wet cheeks. “It’s O.K.,” he says softly, turning and cupping his hands over my forehead. “Just tell me what you’ve done.”

Annie brings a hand-delivered letter to her father. They stand together on the deck that extends far over the grassy lawn that slopes to the lake, and he reads and she looks off at the water. When she was a little girl she would stand on the metal table pushed to the front of the deck and read the letters aloud to her father. If he sat, she sat. Later, she read them over his shoulder. Now she is sixteen, and she gives him the letter and stares at the trees or the water or the boat bobbing at the end of the dock. It has probably never occurred to her that she does not have to be there when he reads them.

Dear Jerome,

Last week the bottom fell out of the birdhouse you hung in the tree the summer Annie was three. Or something gnawed at it and the bottom came out. I don’t know. I put the wood under one of the big clay pots full of pansies, just to keep it for old times’ sake. (I’ve given up the fountain pen for a felt-tip. I’m really not a romantic.) I send to you for a month our daughter. She still wears
bangs, to cover that little nick in her forehead from the time she fell out of the swing. The swing survived until last summer when—or maybe I told you in last year’s letter—Marcy Smith came by with her “friend” Hamilton, and they were so taken by it that I gave it to them, leaving the ropes dangling. I mean that I gave them the old green swing seat, with the decals of roses even uglier than the scraggly ones we grew. Tell her to pull her bangs back and show the world her beautiful widow’s peak. She now drinks spritzers. For the first two weeks she’s gone I’ll be in Ogunquit with Zack. He is younger than you, but no one will ever duplicate the effect of your slow smile. Have a good summer together. I will be thinking of you at unexpected times (unexpected to me, of course).

Love,
Anita

He hands the letter on to me, and then pours club soda and Chablis into a tall glass for Annie and fills his own glass with wine alone. He hesitates while I read, and I know he’s wondering whether the letter will disturb me—whether I’ll want club soda or wine. “Soda,” I say. Jerome and Anita have been divorced for ten years.

In these first few days of Annie’s visit, things aren’t going very well. My friends think that it’s just about everybody’s summer story. Rachel’s summers are spent with her ex-husband, and with his daughter by his second marriage, the daughter’s boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s best friend. The golden retriever isn’t there this summer, because last summer he drowned. No one knows how. Jean is letting her optometrist, with whom she once had an affair, stay in her house in the Hamptons on weekends. She stays in town, because she is in love with a chef. Hazel’s the exception. She teaches summer school, and when it ends she and her husband and their son go to Block Island for two weeks, to the house they always rent. Her husband has his job back, after a year in A.A. I study her life and wonder how it works. Of the three best
friends I have, she blushes the most easily, is the worst dressed, is the least politically informed, and prefers AM rock stations to FM classical music. Our common denominator is that none of us was married in a church and all of us worried about the results of the blood test we had before we could get a marriage license. But there are so many differences. Say their names to me and what comes to mind is that Rachel cried when she heard Dylan’s
Self Portrait
album, because, to her, that meant that everything was over; Jean fought off a man in a supermarket parking lot who was intent on raping her, and still has nightmares about the arugula she was going to the store to get; Hazel can recite Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and bring tears to your eyes.

Sitting on the deck, I try to explain to Annie that there
should
be solidarity between women, but that when you look for a common bond you’re really looking for a common denominator, and you can’t do that with women. Annie puts down
My Mother/My Self
and looks out at the water.

Jerome and I, wondering when she will ever want to swim, go about our days as usual. She’s gone biking with him, so there’s no hostility. She has always sat at the foot of the bed while Jerome was showering at night and talked nonsense with me while she twisted the ends of her hair, and she still does. At her age, it isn’t important that she’s not in love, and she was once before anyway. When she pours for herself, it’s sixty-forty white wine and club soda. Annie—the baby pushed in a swing. The bottom fell out of the birdhouse. Anita really knows how to hit below the belt.

Jerome is sulky at the end of the week, floating in the Whaler.

“Do you ever think that Anita’s thinking of you?” I ask.

“Telepathy, you mean?” he says. He has a good tan. A scab by his elbow. Somehow, he’s hurt himself. His wet hair is drying in curly strands. He hasn’t had a haircut since we came to the summer house.