Ann Beattie - Burning House

“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 -Ofruit 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 -Owith 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.

This is not what I expected, either. We have sounded like two wise adults, and then suddenly he has changed and sounds very tender. I realize the situation is still the same. It is two of them on one side and me on the other, even though Bradley is in my kitchen.