Ann Beattie - Burning House

“Come and pick up Louise with me, Bradley,” I say. “When you see Martine Cooper, you’ll cheer up about your situation.”

He looks up from his coffee. “You’re forgetting what I’d look like to Martine Cooper,” he says.

Milo is going to California. He has been offered a job with a new San Francisco architectural firm. I am not the first to know. His sister, Deanna, knows before I do, and mentions it when we’re talking on the phone. “It’s middle-age crisis,” Deanna says sniffily. “Not that I need to tell you.” Deanna would drop dead if she knew the way things are. She is scandalized every time a new display is put up in Blooming dale’s window. (“Those mannequins had eyes like an Egyptian princess, and rags. I swear to you, they had mops and brooms and ragged gauze dresses on, with whores’ shoes — stiletto heels that prostitutes wear.”)

I hang up from Deanna’s call and tell Louise I’m going to drive to the gas station for cigarettes. I go there to call New York on their pay phone.

“Well, I only just knew,” Milo says. “I found out for sure yesterday, and last night Deanna called and so I told her. It’s not like I’m leaving tonight.”

He sounds elated, in spite of being upset that I called. He’s happy in the way he used to be on Christmas morning. I remember him once running into the living room in his underwear and tearing open the gifts we’d been sent by relatives. He was looking for the eight-slice toaster he was sure we’d get. We’d been given two-slice, four-slice, and six-slice toasters, but then we got no more. “Come out, my eight-slice beauty!” Milo crooned, and out came an electric clock, a blender, and an expensive electric pan.

“When are you leaving?” I ask him.

“I’m going out to look for a place to live next week.”

“Are you going to tell Louise yourself this weekend?”

“Of course,” he says.

“And what are you going to do about seeing Louise?”

“Why do you act as if I don’t like Louise?” he says. “I will occasionally come back East, and I will arrange for her to fly to San Francisco on her vacations.”

“It’s going to break her heart.”

“No it isn’t. Why do you want to make me feel bad?”

“She’s had so many things to adjust to. You don’t have to go to San Francisco right now, Milo.”

“It happens, if you care, that my own job here is in jeopardy. This is a real chance for me, with a young firm. They really want me. But anyway, all we need in this happy group is to have you bringing in a couple of hundred dollars a month with your graphic work and me destitute and Bradley so devastated by being fired that of course he can’t even look for work.”

“I’ll bet he is looking for a job,” I say.

“Yes. He read the want ads today and then fixed a crab quiche.”

“Maybe that’s the way you like things, Milo, and people respond to you. You forbade me to work when we had a baby. Do you say anything encouraging to him about finding a job, or do you just take it out on him that he was fired?”

There is a pause, and then he almost seems to lose his mind with impatience.

“I can hardly believe , when I am trying to find a logical solution to all our problems, that I am being subjected, by telephone, to an unflattering psychological analysis by my ex-wife.” He says this all in a rush.

“All right, Milo. But don’t you think that if you’re leaving so soon you ought to call her, instead of waiting until Saturday?”

Milo sighs very deeply. “I have more sense than to have important conversations on the telephone,” he says.

Milo calls on Friday and asks Louise whether it wouldn’t be nice if both of us came in and spent the night Saturday and if we all went to brunch together Sunday. Louise is excited. I never go into town with her.

Louise and I pack a suitcase and put it in the car Saturday morning. A cutting of ivy for Bradley has taken root, and she has put it in a little green plastic pot for him. It’s heartbreaking, and I hope that Milo notices and has a tough time dealing with it. I am relieved I’m going to be there when he tells her, and sad that I have to hear it at all.

In the city, I give the car to the garage attendant, who does not remember me. Milo and I lived in the apartment when we were first married, and moved when Louise was two years old. When we moved, Milo kept the apartment and sublet it — a sign that things were not going well, if I had been one to heed such a warning. What he said was that if we were ever rich enough we could have the house in Connecticut and the apartment in New York. When Milo moved out of the house, he went right back to the apartment. This will be the first time I have visited there in years.

Louise strides in in front of me, throwing her coat over the brass coatrack in the entranceway — almost too casual about being there. She’s the hostess at Milo’s, the way I am at our house.

He has painted the walls white. There are floor-length white curtains in the living room, where my silly flowered curtains used to hang. The walls are bare, the floor has been sanded, a stereo as huge as a computer stands against one wall of the living room, and there are four speakers.

“Look around,” Milo says. “Show your mother around, Louise.”

I am trying to remember if I have ever told Louise that I used to live in this apartment. I must have told her, at some point, but I can’t remember it.

“Hello,” Bradley says, coming out of the bedroom.

“Hi, Bradley,” I say. “Have you got a drink?”

Bradley looks sad. “He’s got champagne,” he says, and looks nervously at Milo.

“No one has to drink champagne,” Milo says. “There’s the usual assortment of liquor.”

“Yes,” Bradley says. “What would you like?”

“Some bourbon, please.”

“Bourbon.” Bradley turns to go into the kitchen. He looks different; his hair is different — more wavy — and he is dressed as though it were summer, in straight-legged white pants and black leather thongs.

“I want Perrier water with strawberry juice,” Louise says, tagging along after Bradley. I have never heard her ask for such a thing before. At home, she drinks too many Cokes. I am always trying to get her to drink fruit juice.

Bradley comes back with two drinks and hands me one. “Did you want anything?” he says to Milo.

“I’m going to open the champagne in a moment,” Milo says. “How have you been this week, sweetheart?”

“O.K.,” Louise says. She is holding a pale-pink, bubbly drink. She sips it like a cocktail.

Bradley looks very bad. He has circles under his eyes, and he is ill at ease. A red light begins to blink on the phone-answering device next to where Bradley sits on the sofa, and Milo gets out of his chair to pick up the phone.

“Do you really want to talk on the phone right now?” Bradley asks Milo quietly.

Milo looks at him. “No, not particularly,” he says, sitting down again. After a moment, the red light goes out.

“I’m going to mist your bowl garden,” Louise says to Bradley, and slides off the sofa and goes to the bedroom. “Hey, a little toadstool is growing in here!” she calls back. “Did you put it there, Bradley?”

“It grew from the soil mixture, I guess,” Bradley calls back. “I don’t know how it got there.”

“Have you heard anything about a job?” I ask Bradley.

“I haven’t been looking, really,” he says. “You know.”

Milo frowns at him. “Your choice, Bradley,” he says. “I didn’t ask you to follow me to California. You can stay here.”

“No,” Bradley says. “You’ve hardly made me feel welcome.”

“Should we have some champagne — all four of us — and you can get back to your bourbons later?” Milo says cheerfully.