Ann Beattie - Burning House

“Krypto and Baby Kal-El,” Tompkins said, coming toward them with both hands outstretched. Benton smiled and shook both of Tompkins’s hands. Then Nick shook his hand too, certain that any feeling of warmth came from Tompkins’s just having shaken hands with Benton.

“I’m so excited,” Tompkins said. He went to the long window behind where Benton and Nick sat on the sofa and pulled the string that drew the drapes apart. “Dusk falls on Gotham City,” Tompkins said. He sat in the heavily carved chair beside the sofa. “All for me?” he said, raising his eyebrows at the crates. “If you like them,” Benton said. The driver came into the library with a bottle of ouzo and a pitcher of orange juice on a tray. He put it on the small table midway between Benton and Tompkins.

“Sit down. Sit down and have a look,” Tompkins said excitedly. The man sat on the floor by the crates, leaning against the sofa. Benton took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and began undoing the first crate.

“I’m using my special X-ray vision,” Tompkins said, “and I love it already.”

Tompkins got up and crouched by the open crate, fingers on the top of the frame, obviously enjoying every second of the suspense, before he pulled the picture out.

“Money and taste,” the driver said to Nick.

“You could not remember the simplest song lyric,” Tompkins said to his driver, slowly drawing out the painting. “Money and time, ” he sighed, pulling the canvas out of the crate. “Money and time,” he said again, but this time it was halfhearted; he was interested in nothing but the picture he held in front of him. Benton was always amazed by that expression on Tompkins’s face. It made Benton as happy as he had been years before when he and Elizabeth were still married, and it had been his morning routine to go into Jason’s bedroom, gently shake him awake, and see his son’s soft blue eyes slowly focus on his own.

It was three days after Benton had sold all his paintings to Tompkins, and Nick had gone to the hotel where Olivia and Benton were staying to try to persuade them to go to lunch.

The light came into the hotel room in a strange way. The curtains were hung from brass rings, and between the rings, because the curtains did not quite come to the top of the window, light leaked in. Benton and Olivia kept the curtains closed all day — what they saw of the daylight was a pale band across the paint.

Olivia was lounging on the bed in Benton’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt imprinted with a picture of the hotel, and when Nick laughed at her she pointed to his own clothing: white cowboy boots with gold-painted eagles on the toes, white jeans, a T-shirt with what looked like a TV test pattern on it. Nick had almost forgotten that he had brought Olivia a present. He took his hand out of his pocket and brought out a toy pistol in the shape of a bulldog. He pulled the trigger and the dog’s mouth opened and the bulldog squeaked.

“Don’t thank me,” Nick said, putting it on the bedside table with the other clutter. “A blinking red light means that you have a message,” he said. He picked up the phone and dialed the hotel operator. “Nothing to it,” Nick said, patting Olivia’s leg. “Red light blinks, you just pick up the phone and get your message. If Uncle Nickie can do it, anybody can.”

He tickled Olivia’s lips with an uneaten croissant from the bedside table. He was holding it so she could bite the end. She did. Nick dipped it in the butter, which had become very soft, and held it to her mouth again. She puffed on her joint and ignored him. He took a bite himself and put it back on the plate. He went to the window and pulled back the drapes, looking at the steep hill that rose in back of the hotel.

“I wish I lived in a hotel,” he said. “Nice soft sheets, bathroom scrubbed every day, pick up the phone and get a croissant.”

“You can get all those things at home,” Benton said, wrapping a towel around him as he came out of the bathroom. The towel was too small. He gave up after several tugs and threw it over the chair.

“The sheets I slept on last night illustrated the hunt of the Unicorn. Poor bastard is not only fenced in, but I settled my ass on him. Manuela does nothing in the bathroom but run water in the tub and smoke Tiparillos. Maybe on the way home I’ll stop and pick up some croissants.” Nick closed the window. “Christmas decorations are already going up,” he said. He took a bottle of pills out of his pocket and put them on the table. The label said: “Francis Blanco: 2 daily, as directed.”

“Any point in asking who Francis Blanco is? ” Benton said.

“You’re hovering like a mother over her chicks,” Nick said. “Someday that bottle will grow wings and fly away, and then you’ll wonder why you cared so much.” Nick clasped his hands behind him. “Francis Blanco just overhauled my carburetor,” he said. “You don’t have to look far for anything.”

In spite of the joke about being Uncle Nickie, Nick was Benton’s age and four years younger than Olivia. Nick was twenty-nine, from a rich New England family, and he had come to California four years before and made a lot of money in the record industry. His introduction to the record industry had come from a former philosophy professor’s daughter’s supplier. In exchange for the unlisted numbers of two Sag Harbor dope dealers, Dex Whitmore had marched Nick into the office of a man in L.A. who hired him on the spot. Nick sent a post card of the moon rising over the freeways to the professor, thanking him for the introduction to his daughter, who had, in turn, introduced him to her yoga teacher, who was responsible for his gainful employment. Dex Whitmore would have liked the continuation of that little joke; back East, he had gone to the professor’s house once a week to lead the professor’s daughter in “yoga exercises.” That is, they had gone to the attic and smoked dope and turned somersaults. Dex had been dead for nearly a year now, killed in a freak accident that had nothing to do with the fact that he sold drugs. He had been waiting at a dry cleaner’s to drop off a jacket when a man butted in front of him. Dex objected. The man took out a pistol and put a bullet in his side, shooting through a bottle of champagne Dex had clasped under his arm. Later Dex’s ex-wife filed a suit for more money from his estate, claiming that he had been carrying the bottle of champagne because he was on his way to reconcile with her.

Nick hadn’t succeeded in getting Benton and Olivia to leave the hotel. He was hungry, so he parked his car and went into a bakery. The cupcakes looked better than the croissants, so he bought two of them and ate them sitting at the counter. It embarrassed him that Benton and Olivia couldn’t stay at his house, but the year before, when they were in L.A., his dog had tried to bite Olivia. Ilena, the woman he lived with, also disliked Olivia, and he half thought that somehow she had communicated to the dog that he should lunge and growl.

He peeled the paper off of the second cupcake. One of the cupcakes had a little squirt of orange and red icing on top, piped out to look like maize. The other one had a crooked glob of pale brown, an attempt at a drumstick.

Nick was a friend of long standing, and used to most of Benton’s eccentricities — including the fact that his idea of travel was to go somewhere and never leave the hotel. He and Benton had grown up in the same neighborhood. Benton had once supplied Nick with a fake I.D. for Christmas; Nick had turned Benton on to getting high with nutmeg. Each had talked Dorothy Birdley (“most studious”) into sleeping with the other. Benton presented Nick as brilliant and sensitive; Nick told her, sitting underneath an early-flowering tree on the New Haven green, that Benton’s parents beat him. In retrospect, she had probably slept with them because she was grateful anyone was interested in her: she had bottle-thick glasses and a long pointed nose, and she was very self-conscious about her appearance and defensive about being the smartest person in the high school.