Burning House Read online

  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.

  JACKLIGHTING

  It is Nicholas’s birthday. Last year he was alive, and we took him presents: a spiral notebook he pulled the pages out of, unable to write but liking the sound of paper tearing; magazines he flipped through, paying no attention to pictures, liking the blur of color. He had a radio, so we could not take a radio. More than the radio, he seemed to like the sound the metal drawer in his bedside table made, sliding open, clicking shut. He would open the drawer and look at the radio. He rarely took it out.

  Nicholas’s brother Spence has made jam. For days the cat has batted grapes around the huge homemade kitchen table; dozens of bloody rags of cheesecloth have been thrown into the trash. There is grape jelly, raspberry jelly, strawberry, quince, and lemon. Last month, a neighbor’s pig escaped and ate Spence’s newly planted fraise
des bois plants, but overlooked the strawberry plants close to the house, heavy with berries. After that, Spence captured the pig and called his friend Andy, who came for it with his truck and took the pig to his farm in Warrenton. When Andy got home and looked in the back of the truck, he found three piglets curled against the pig.

  In this part of Virginia, it is a hundred degrees in August. In June and July you can smell the ground, but in August it has been baked dry; instead of smelling the earth you smell flowers, hot breeze. There is a haze over the Blue Ridge Mountains that stays in the air like cigarette smoke. It is the same color as the eye shadow Spence’s girlfriend, Pammy, wears. The rest of us are sunburned, with pink mosquito bites on our bodies, small scratches from gathering raspberries. Pammy has just arrived from Washington. She is winter-pale. Since she is ten years younger than the rest of us, a few scratches wouldn’t make her look as if she belonged, anyway. She is in medical school at Georgetown, and her summer-school classes have just ended. She arrived with leather sandals that squeak. She is exhausted and sleeps half the day, upstairs, with the fan blowing on her. All weekend the big fan has blown on Spence, in the kitchen, boiling and bottling his jams and jellies. The small fan blows on Pammy.

  Wynn and I have come from New York. Every year we borrow his mother’s car and drive from Hoboken to Virginia. We used to take the trip to spend the week of Nicholas’s birthday with him. Now we come to see Spence, who lives alone in the house. He is making jam early, so we can take jars back with us. He stays in the kitchen because he is depressed and does not really want to talk to us. He scolds the cat, curses when something goes wrong.

  Wynn is in love. The girl he loves is twenty, or twenty-one. Twenty-two. When he told me (top down on the car, talking into the wind), I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. There were enough facts to daze me; she had a name, she was one of his students, she had canceled her trip to Rome this summer. The day he told me about her, he brought it up twice; first in the car, later in Spence’s kitchen. “That was not my mother calling the other night to say she got the car tuned,” Wynn said, smashing his glass on the kitchen counter. I lifted his hand off the large shard of glass, touching his fingers as gently as I’d touch a cactus. When I steadied myself on the counter, a chip of glass nicked my thumb. The pain shot through my body and pulsed in my ribs. Wynn examined my hands; I examined his. A dust of fine glass coated our hands, gently touching, late at night, as we looked out the window at the moon shining on Spence’s lemon tree with its one lemon, too heavy to be growing on the slender branch. A jar of Lipton iced tea was next to the tub the lemon tree grew out of—a joke, put there by Wynn, to encourage it to bear more fruit.

  Wynn is standing in the field across from the house, pacing, head down, the bored little boy grown up.

  “When wasn’t he foolish?” Spence says, walking through the living room. “What kind of sense does it make to turn against him now for being a fool?”

  “He calls it mid-life crisis, Spence, and he’s going to be thirty-two in September.”

  “I know when his birthday is. You hint like this every year. Last year at the end of August you dropped it into conversation that the two of you were doing something or other to celebrate his birthday.”

  “We went to one of those places where a machine shoots baseballs at you. His birthday present was ten dollars’ worth of balls pitched at him. I gave him a Red Sox cap. He lost it the same day.”

  “How did he lose it?”

  “We came out of a restaurant and a Doberman was tied by its leash to a stop sign, barking like mad—a very menacing dog. He tossed the cap, and it landed on the dog’s head. It was funny until he wanted to get it back, and he couldn’t go near it.”

  “He’s one in a million. He deserves to have his birthday remembered. Call me later in the month and remind me.” Spence goes to the foot of the stairs. “Pammy,” he calls.

  “Come up and kill something for me,” she says. The bed creaks, “Come kill a wasp on the bedpost. I hate to kill them, I hate the way they crunch.”

  He walks back to the living room and gets a newspaper and rolls it into a tight tube, slaps it against the palm of his hand.

  Wynn, in the field, is swinging a broken branch, batting hickory nuts and squinting into the sun.

  Nicholas lived for almost a year, brain-damaged, before he died. Even before the accident, he liked the way things felt. He always watched shadows. He was the man looking to the side in Cartier-Bresson’s photograph, instead of putting his eye to the wall. He’d find pennies on the sidewalk when the rest of us walked down city streets obliviously, spot the chipped finger on a mannequin flawlessly dressed, sidestep the one piece of glass among shells scattered on the shoreline. It would really have taken something powerful to do him in. So that’s what happened: a drunk in a van, speeding, head-on, Nicholas out for a midnight ride without his helmet. Earlier in the day he’d assembled a crazy nest of treasures in the helmet, when he was babysitting the neighbors’ four-year-old daughter. Spence showed it to us—holding it forward as carefully as you’d hold a bomb, looking away the way you’d avoid looking at dead fish floating in a once nice aquarium, the way you’d look at an ugly scar, once the bandages had been removed, and want to lay the gauze back over it. While he was in the hospital, his fish tank overheated and all the black mollies died. The doctor unwound some of the bandages and the long brown curls had been shaved away, and there was a red scar down the side of his head that seemed as out of place as a line dividing a highway out west, a highway that nobody traveled anyway. It could have happened to any of us. We’d all ridden on the Harley, bodies pressed into his back, hair whipped across our faces. How were we going to feel ourselves again, without Nicholas? In the hospital, it was clear that the thin intravenous tube was not dripping life back into him—that was as farfetched as the idea that the too-thin branch of the lemon tree could grow one more piece of fruit. In the helmet had been dried chrysanthemums, half of a robin’s blue shell, a cat’s-eye marble, yellow twine, a sprig of grapes, a piece of a broken ruler. I remember Wynn actually jumping back when he saw what was inside. I stared at the strangeness such ordinary things had taken on. Wynn had been against his teaching me to ride his bike, but he had. He taught me to trust myself and not to settle for seeing things the same way. The lobster claw on a necklace he made me was funny and beautiful. I never felt the same way about lobsters or jewelry after that. “Psychologists have figured out that infants start to laugh when they’ve learned to be skeptical of danger,” Nicholas had said. Laughing on the back of his motorcycle. When he lowered the necklace over my head, rearranging it, fingers on my throat.

  It is Nicholas’s birthday, and so far no one has mentioned it. Spence has made all the jam he can make from the fruit and berries and has gone to the store and returned with bags of flour to make bread. He brought the Daily Progress to Pammy, and she is reading it, on the side porch where there is no screening, drying her hair and stiffening when bees fly away from the Rose of Sharon bushes. Her new sandals are at the side of the chair. She has red toenails. She rubs the small pimples on her chin the way men finger their beards. I sit on the porch with her, catcher’s mitt on my lap, waiting for Wynn to get back from his walk so we can take turns pitching to each other.

  “Did he tell you I was a drug addict? Is that why you hardly speak to me?” Pammy says. She is squinting at her toes. “I’m older than I look,” she says. “He says I’m twenty one, because I look so young. He doesn’t know when to let go of a joke, though. I don’t like to be introduced to people as some child prodigy.”

  “What were you addicted to?” I say.

  “Speed,” she says. “I had another life.” She has brought the bottle of polish with her, and begins brushing on a new layer of red, the fingers of her other hand stuck between her toes from underneath, separating them. “I don’t get the feeling you people had another life,” she says. “After all these years, I still feel funny when I’m around people who’
ve never lived the way I have. It’s just snobbishness, I’m sure.”

  I cup the catcher’s mitt over my knee. A bee has landed on the mitt. This is the most Pammy has talked. Now she interests me; I always like people who have gone through radical changes. It’s snobbishness—it shows me that other people are confused, too.

  “That was the summer of sixty-seven,” she says. “I slept with a stockbroker for money. Sat through a lot of horror movies. That whole period’s a blur. What I remember about it is being underground all the time, going places on the subway. I only had one real friend in the city. I can’t remember where I was going.” Pammy looks at the newspaper beside her chair. “Charlottesville, Virginia,” she says. “My, my. Who would have thought twitchy little Pammy would end up here?”

  Spence tosses the ball. I jump, mitt high above my head, and catch it. Spence throws again. Catch. Again. A hard pitch that lets me know the palm of my hand will be numb when I take off the catcher’s mitt. Spence winds up. Pitches. As I’m leaning to get the ball, another ball sails by on my right. Spence has hidden a ball in his pocket all this time. Like his brother, he’s always trying to make me smile.

  “It’s too hot to play ball,” he says. “I can’t spend the whole day trying to distract you because Wynn stalked off into the woods today.”

  “Come on,” I say. “It was working.”

  “Why don’t we all go to Virginia Beach next year instead of standing around down here smoldering? This isn’t any tribute to my brother. How did this get started?”

  “We came to be with you because we thought it would be hard. You didn’t tell us about Pammy.”

  “Isn’t that something? What that tells you is that you matter, and Wynn matters, and Nicholas mattered, but I don’t even think to mention the person who’s supposedly my lover.”

  “She said she had been an addict.”

  “She probably tried to tell you she wasn’t twenty-one, too, didn’t she?”