Burning House (6 page)

When Milo brings Louise back on Saturday night they are not in a good mood. The dinner was all right, Milo says, and Griffin and Amy and Mark were amazed at what a good hostess Louise had been, but Bradley hadn’t been able to eat.

“Is he still coming down with a cold?” I ask. I was still a little shy about asking questions about Bradley.

Milo shrugs. “Louise made him take megadoses of vitamin C all weekend.”

Louise says, “Bradley said that taking too much vitamin C was bad for your kidneys, though.”

“It’s a rotten climate,” Milo says, sitting on the living-room sofa, scarf and coat still on. “The combination of cold and air pollution …”

Louise and I look at each other, and then back at Milo. For weeks now, he has been talking about moving to San Francisco, if he can find work there. (Milo is an architect.) This talk bores me, and it makes Louise nervous. I’ve asked him not to talk to her about it unless he’s actually going to move, but he doesn’t seem to be able to stop himself.

“O.K.,” Milo says, looking at us both. “I’m not going to say anything about San Francisco.”

“
California
is polluted,” I say. I am unable to stop myself, either.

Milo heaves himself up from the sofa, ready for the drive back to New York. It is the same way he used to get off the sofa that last year he lived here. He would get up, dress for work, and not even go into the kitchen for breakfast—just sit, sometimes in his coat as he was sitting just now, and at the last minute he would push himself up and go out to the driveway, usually without a goodbye, and get in the car and drive off either very fast or very slowly. I liked it better when he made the tires spin in the gravel when he took off.

He stops at the doorway now, and turns to face me. “Did I take all your butter?” he says.

“No,” I say. “There’s another stick.” I point into the kitchen.

“I could have guessed that’s where it would be,” he says, and smiles at me.

When Milo comes the next weekend, Bradley is still not with him. The night before, as I was putting Louise to bed, she said that she had a feeling he wouldn’t be coming.

“I had that feeling a couple of days ago,” I said. “Usually Bradley calls once during the week.”

“He must still be sick,” Louise said. She looked at me anxiously. “Do you think he is?”

“A cold isn’t going to kill him,” I said. “If he has a cold, he’ll be O.K.”

Her expression changed; she thought I was talking down to her. She lay back in bed. The last year Milo was with us, I used to tuck her in and tell her that everything was all right. What that meant was that there had not been a fight. Milo had sat listening to music on the phonograph, with a
book or the newspaper in front of his face. He didn’t pay very much attention to Louise, and he ignored me entirely. Instead of saying a prayer with her, the way I usually did, I would say to her that everything was all right. Then I would go downstairs and hope that Milo would say the same thing to me. What he finally did say one night was “You might as well find out from me as some other way.”

“Hey, are you an old bag lady again this weekend?” Milo says now, stooping to kiss Louise’s forehead.

“Because you take some things with you doesn’t mean you’re a bag lady,” she says primly.

“Well,” Milo says, “you start doing something innocently, and before you know it it can take you over.”

He looks angry, and acts as though it’s difficult for him to make conversation, even when the conversation is full of sarcasm and double-entendres.

“What do you say we get going?” he says to Louise.

In the shopping bag she is taking is her doll, which she has not played with for more than a year. I found it by accident when I went to tuck in a loaf of banana bread that I had baked. When I saw Baby Betsy, deep in the bag, I decided against putting the bread in.

“O.K.,” Louise says to Milo. “Where’s Bradley?”

“Sick,” he says.

“Is he too sick to have me visit?”

“Good heavens, no. He’ll be happier to see you than to see me.

“I’m rooting some of my coleus to give him,” she says. “Maybe I’ll give it to him like it is, in water, and he can plant it when it roots.”

When she leaves the room, I go over to Milo. “Be nice to her,” I say quietly.

“I’m nice to her,” he says. “Why does everybody have to act like I’m going to grow fangs every time I turn around?”

“You were quite cutting when you came in.”

“I was being self-deprecating.” He sighs. “I don’t really know why I come here and act this way,” he says.

“What’s the matter, Milo?”

But now he lets me know he’s bored with the conversation. He walks over to the table and picks up a
Newsweek
and flips through it. Louise comes back with the coleus in a water glass.

“You know what you could do,” I say. “Wet a napkin and put it around that cutting and then wrap it in foil, and put it in water when you get there. That way, you wouldn’t have to hold a glass of water all the way to New York.”

She shrugs. “This is O.K.,” she says.

“Why don’t you take your mother’s suggestion,” Milo says. “The water will slosh out of the glass.”

“Not if you don’t drive fast.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with my driving fast. If we go over a bump in the road, you’re going to get all wet.”

“Then I can put on one of my dresses at your apartment.”

“Am I being unreasonable?” Milo says to me.

“I started it,” I say. “Let her take it in the glass.”

“Would you, as a favor, do what your mother says?” he says to Louise.

Louise looks at the coleus, and at me.

“Hold the glass over the seat instead of over your lap, and you won’t get wet,” I say.

“Your first idea was the best,” Milo says.

Louise gives him an exasperated look and puts the glass down on the floor, pulls on her poncho, picks up the glass again and says a sullen goodbye to me, and goes out the front door.

“Why is this my fault?” Milo says. “Have I done anything terrible? I—”

“Do something to cheer yourself up,” I say, patting him on the back.

He looks as exasperated with me as Louise was with him. He nods his head yes, and goes out the door.

“Was everything all right this weekend?” I ask Louise.

“Milo was in a bad mood, and Bradley wasn’t even there on Saturday,” Louise says. “He came back today and took us to the Village for breakfast.”

“What did you have?”

“I had sausage wrapped in little pancakes and fruit salad and a rum bun.”

“Where was Bradley on Saturday?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t ask him.”

She almost always surprises me by being more grownup than I give her credit for. Does she suspect, as I do, that Bradley has found another lover?

“Milo was in a bad mood when you two left here Saturday,” I say.

“I told him if he didn’t want me to come next weekend, just to tell me.” She looks perturbed, and I suddenly realize that she can sound exactly like Milo sometimes.

“You shouldn’t have said that to him, Louise,” I say. “You know he wants you. He’s just worried about Bradley.”

“So?” she says. “I’m probably going to flunk math.”

“No, you’re not, honey. You got a C-plus on the last assignment,”

“It still doesn’t make my grade average out to a C.”

“You’ll get a C. It’s all right to get a C.”

She doesn’t believe me.

“Don’t be a perfectionist, like Milo,” I tell her. “Even if you got a D, you wouldn’t fail.”

Louise is brushing her hair—thin, shoulder-length, auburn hair. She is already so pretty and so smart in everything except math that I wonder what will become of her. When I was her age, I was plain and serious and I wanted to be a tree surgeon. I went with my father to the park and held a
stethoscope—a real one—to the trunks of trees, listening to their silence. Children seem older now.

“What do you think’s the matter with Bradley?” Louise says. She sounds worried.

“Maybe the two of them are unhappy with each other right now.”

She misses my point. “Bradley’s sad, and Milo’s sad that he’s unhappy.”

I drop Louise off at Sarah’s house for supper. Sarah’s mother, Martine Cooper, looks like Shelley Winters, and I have never seen her without a glass of Galliano on ice in her hand. She has a strong candy smell. Her husband has left her, and she professes not to care. She has emptied her living room of furniture and put up ballet bars on the walls, and dances in a purple leotard to records by Cher and Mac Davis. I prefer to have Sarah come to our house, but her mother is adamant that everything must be, as she puts it, “fifty-fifty.” When Sarah visited us a week ago and loved the chocolate pie I had made, I sent two pieces home with her. Tonight, when I left Sarah’s house, her mother gave me a bowl of Jell
-O
fruit salad.

The phone is ringing when I come in the door. It is Bradley.

“Bradley,” I say at once, “whatever’s wrong, at least you don’t have a neighbor who just gave you a bowl of maraschino cherries in green Jell
-O
with a Reddi-Wip flower squirted on top.

“Jesus,” he says. “You don’t need me to depress you, do you?”

“What’s wrong?” I say.

He sighs into the phone. “Guess what?” he says.

“What?”

“I’ve lost my job.”

It wasn’t at all what I was expecting to hear. I was ready to hear that he was leaving Milo, and I had even thought that that would serve Milo right. Part of me still wanted him punished for what he did. I was so out of my mind when
Milo left me that I used to go over and drink Galliano with Martine Cooper. I even thought seriously about forming a ballet group with her. I would go to her house in the afternoon, and she would hold a tambourine in the air and I would hold my leg rigid and try to kick it.

“That’s awful,” I say to Bradley. “What happened?”

“They said it was nothing personal—they were laying off three people. Two other people are going to get the ax at the agency within the next six months. I was the first to go, and it was nothing personal. From twenty thousand bucks a year to nothing, and nothing personal, either.”

“But your work is so good. Won’t you be able to find something again?”

“Could I ask you a favor?” he says. “I’m calling from a phone booth. I’m not in the city. Could I come talk to you?”

“Sure,” I say.

It seems perfectly logical that he should come alone to talk—perfectly logical until I actually see him coming up the walk. I can’t entirely believe it. A year after my husband has left me, I am sitting with his lover—a man, a person I like quite well—and trying to cheer him up because he is out of work. (“Honey,” my father would say, “listen to Daddy’s heart with the stethoscope, or you can turn it toward you and listen to your own heart. You won’t hear anything listening to a tree.” Was my persistence willfulness, or belief in magic? Is it possible that I hugged Bradley at the door because I’m secretly glad he’s down and out, the way I used to be? Or do I really want to make things better for him?)

He comes into the kitchen and thanks me for the coffee I am making, drapes his coat over the chair he always sits in.

“What am I going to do?” he asks.

“You shouldn’t get so upset, Bradley,” I say. “You know you’re good. You won’t have trouble finding another job.”

“That’s only half of it,” he says. “Milo thinks I did this deliberately. He told me I was quitting on him. He’s very
angry at me. He fights with me, and then he gets mad that I don’t enjoy eating dinner. My stomach’s upset, and I can’t eat anything.”

“Maybe some juice would be better than coffee.”

“If I didn’t drink coffee, I’d collapse,” he says.

I pour coffee into a mug for him, coffee into a mug for me.

“This is probably very awkward for you,” he says. “That I come here and say all this about Milo.”

“What does he mean about your quitting on him?”

“He said … he actually accused me of doing badly deliberately, so they’d fire me. I was so afraid to tell him the truth when I was fired that I pretended to be sick. Then I really
was
sick. He’s never been angry at me this way. Is this always the way he acts? Does he get a notion in his head for no reason and then pick at a person because of it?”

I try to remember. “We didn’t argue much,” I say. “When he didn’t want to live here, he made me look ridiculous for complaining when I knew something was wrong. He expects perfection, but what that means is that you do things his way.”

“I
was
. I never wanted to sit around the apartment, the way he says I did. I even brought work home with me. He made me feel so bad all week that I went to a friend’s apartment for the day on Saturday. Then he said I had walked out on the problem. He’s a little paranoid. I was listening to the radio, and Carole King was singing ‘It’s Too Late,’ and he came into the study and looked very upset, as though I had planned for the song to come on. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Whew,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t envy you. You have to stand up to him. I didn’t do that. I pretended the problem would go away.”

“And now the problem sits across from you drinking coffee, and you’re being nice to him.”

“I know it. I was just thinking we look like two characters in some soap opera my friend Martine Cooper would watch.”

He pushes his coffee cup away from him with a grimace.

“But anyway, I like you now,” I say. “And you’re exceptionally nice to Louise.”

“I took her father,” he says.

“Bradley—I hope you don’t take offense, but it makes me nervous to talk about that.”

“I don’t take offense. But how can you be having coffee with me?”

“You invited yourself over so you could ask that?”

“Please,” he says, holding up both hands. Then he runs his hands through his hair. “Don’t make me feel illogical. He does that to me, you know. He doesn’t understand it when everything doesn’t fall right into line. If I like fixing up the place, keeping some flowers around, therefore I can’t like being a working person, too, therefore I deliberately sabotage myself in my job.” Bradley sips his coffee.

“I wish I could do something for him,” he says in a different voice.