Ann Beattie - Burning House

“Ash,” I said to him. “What really matters to her is having Peter.”

I always wondered if what I said made him decide for sure to go to Tennessee.

Her brother, Todd, came for the last two weeks in August. He had always been suspicious of the men his sister loved, and he was suspicious of Ash. “He’s one of those smiling Southern boys you outgrow. They wear the same belts all their lives,” he said. But he loved Holly, and he tried to give impartial advice.

“I know it’s sick,” Holly said to Todd, rocking with him on the back porch, “but our father’s dead and I’ve made you into the permission-giver, and I guess what I’m hoping is that you’ll tell me to go to Tennessee.”

“You wouldn’t leave Peter if I told you to.”

“What if I made a success of myself, and I could fly back to Boston all the time?”

“It’s not what you want to hear,” he said, “but I remember when he was just learning to walk, and somebody took a picture of him with a flash, and he turned to you and he was blind. He was blind the way people get snowblind. I remember how the two of you felt your way toward each other — how you were both just arms and legs. You’re his mother.”

“And I go to a shrink in Montpelier and everybody thinks I’m very fragile, don’t they?”

“Ash sat with me on this porch and told me he wanted at least three children. Kids aren’t going to distract you from Peter. They’re just going to remind you of him. Don’t you remember when Georgia exploded that flash cube in his face and he turned around from the birthday cake like it had been a land mine? Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam.”

He went into the house for iced tea, which he brought back to us on a heavy silver tray, one of those family heirlooms you can’t imagine owning but can’t imagine getting rid of. While he was gone, I said to Holly: “It’s twelve years later, and almost every day, he gets the war into the conversation. He went to Nebraska to keep punishing himself.”

When we finished drinking our tea, Todd and I decided to go swimming. Holly was a little angry at Todd, and she stayed behind to throw pots with Percy Green. Percy Green was stoned, so he didn’t realize what he’d walked in on. “I pick up on something,” he said. “That marvelous creative energy.” He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with men in gondolas rowing across his chest. His chest was large and well developed from lifting weights. His legs — and he was all leg, under the white shorts — were solid as trees. The only looseness in him anywhere was in his speech — a slight slur from being stoned. The necklace of tiny shells he had gotten in the Philippines, back in the days when he was a black belt in karate who repaired cameras for a living, dangled like a noose under one of the gondoliers’ heads. He and Holly had been lovers once for a couple of weeks.

That afternoon Todd and I floated far from shore in the state park, in a rented rowboat “She had a breech birth and a Caesarean and she’s seeing a shrink twice a week and she still has a problem with drugs,” he said. “Permission. Is she kidding? What could I stop her from doing, anyway?” The boat bobbed over a ripple of water. “Permission,” he said. “Has she ever heard of the women’s movement?”

When our boat drifted near the shoreline, I saw a tree branch curving into the lake — the split branch of a dogwood among pointed firs. Looking down into the water, I was sure that I could follow the slant of the shadow to the bottom, but I had dived into this water — I had mistaken eighteen or twenty feet for only six. The breeze was blowing, making the surface of the water ripple like patterns of lace.

“If she really needs my help,” Todd said, “I could give her some advice on marketing pottery. When our aunt dies, she’ll come into some inheritance money. I’ve been looking into debentures,” he said.

Before I left for Vermont, I bought an answering machine. My friend Linda goes over to the apartment every four or five days to water the plants and listen to the tape, to see if there are any important messages. Last week she called and said that there was one she ought to play for me. She put the machine on playback and held the telephone to the microphone. It was Jason, the first message in so many months that I’d lost count: “Hello, machine. This is the voice you wanted to hear. It’s calling to ask if you want to meet me for dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. I’m backing up, as you can tell. Doesn’t this thing ever run out of tape? It’s eleven o’clock Sunday morning, and I’m at the Empire Diner.” A pause. Quietly: “I miss you.”

“The aloe has white flies,” Linda said. “I’ve never known an aloe to get white flies. I sprayed it with the thing from the kitchen sink, and when I go back next week, I’ll zap it with bug spray.”

On Monday, after Linda called, I walked down the driveway to shovel some of the gravel that had been delivered into the potholes that had deepened over the winter. I got the shovel from where it leaned against the tree, flicked caterpillars off the handle, and started digging into the pile of gravel, thinking that I shouldn’t call Jason back. He didn’t say he was leaving her. If I did something physical, I might not think about it. The mailman came, and I took the pile of letters. And there it was, on top: the letter from Ash, the one we all knew he’d write. Ash, with no phone, in Tennessee Ash without Holly.

I walked to the high hedge of purple lantana — as impossible that lantana would thrive in Vermont as that an aloe would get white flies — and did one of the most awful things I’ve ever done. I read the letter. I slit the envelope carefully, with the long nail of my index finger, so I could patch it together and feign ignorance when Holly saw that the envelope was ripped. I was thinking of a lie before I even read it. I’d say that there might have been money in it (why would Ash send money?) and someone at the post office held it to the light and … No: I’d just put all the mail in the mailbox and let her get it, and look blank. The same expression I got on my face when Jason talked about himself and his wife doing the things of ordinary life. Jason had gone to get the Sunday paper. Hundreds of miles away, he had eaten French toast — that was what he always ordered at the Empire. I could hear the piano playing, see our reflections in the shiny black tabletops that gave us fun-house-mirror faces. A chic, funny place, no place Holly would ever sit with Ash. What he was asking her to do, in the letter, was to be with him. “They’re probably poisoning you against me,” he wrote, “but they don’t know everything. They’re in the country with you, but they’re city people. They’re the kind who cut before they’re even sure the bite was from a snake. They’ll try to soothe your wounds, but in the end they’ll get you. I know that there isn’t much for you here, but if you could come down for just a little while, the distance from that incestuous world might do you good. I don’t think children are interchangeable, but there’s time in life for more than one thing. I’ve just read a book — here’s something your sophisticated friends would like — I was reading a book and I found out that because of the way space curves, there are stars that everybody thinks of as twin stars, but they’re really the same one. Are you sure that I’m the naïve country boy Jane and your brother want you to think I am? Come down here, just for a week, and stand at the back door with me when the breeze is blowing and my arm is around you and look up at the sky. Then say yes or no.”

A cardinal was in the road. A brightly colored, male cardinal. It stood there like a vulture — a vulture ready to feed on an animal that had been killed. But nothing was dead. The bird was small for a cardinal. No more a real omen than the little piece of paper you pull out of your fortune cookie that misspells something you should believe.