Ann Beattie - Burning House

“You know that call? The phone call from Ena? You know what the message was? My brother’s dead. You know what the hotel told Ena days ago? That I’d checked out. She called back, and today they told her I was here. Wesley is dead.”

“Oh, Christ,” Nick said.

“He and a friend were on Lake Champlain. They drowned. In November, they were out in a boat on Lake Champlain. Today was the funeral. Why the hell did they tell her I’d checked out? It doesn’t matter anymore why they told her that.” Benton turned to Olivia. “Get up,” he said. “Pack.”

“There’s no point in my going,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I’ll fly to New York with you and go to the apartment.”

“Elizabeth would hate not to see you,” Benton said. “She likes to see you and clutch Jason from the hawk.”

“Elizabeth is at your mother’s?” Nick said.

“Elizabeth misses no opportunity to ingratiate herself with my family. They’re not at my mother’s. They’re at his house, in Weston, for some reason.”

“I thought he lived on Park Avenue.”

“He moved to Connecticut.” Benton slammed his suitcase shut. “For God’s sake, I’ve made plane reservations. Will you pack your suitcase?”

“I’ll drive you to the airport,” Nick said.

“God damn it,” Benton said, “I don’t mean to be ungracious, but I realize that, Nick.” Benton was packing Olivia’s suitcase. He looked at the bedside table and sighed and held the suitcase underneath it and swept everything in. He put a sign about the continental breakfast the hotel served back on the table.

“I really love you,” Olivia said, “and when something awful happens, you treat me like shit.”

Olivia got up and Nick put his arm around her shoulder and steered her toward the door. Benton came behind them, carrying both suitcases.

“You were lucky you could get a plane this close to Thanksgiving,” Nick said.

“I guess I was. Forgot it was Thanksgiving.”

“Maybe people don’t go home for Thanksgiving anymore,” Nick said.

Nick was remembering what Thanksgiving used to be like, and the good feeling he got as a child when the holidays came and it snowed. One Christmas his parents had given him an archery set, and he had talked his father into setting it up outside in the snow. His father had been drunk and had taken a fruit cake from the kitchen counter and put the round, flat cake on top of his head like a hat, and stood to the side of the target, tipping his fruitcake hat, yelling to Nick to shoot it off his head while his mother rapped on the window, gesturing them inside.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” the woman behind the desk said to Benton.

“Fine,” Benton said.

“How you doing?” Dennis Hopper said.

“Fine,” the woman behind the desk said. She reached around Benton and handed Dennis Hopper his mail.

The security guard was sitting on a chair drinking a Coke. He was staring at them. Nick hoped that by the time he got them to the airport Olivia would have stopped crying.

“Want to come East and liven up the wake?” Benton said to Nick.

“They don’t want to see me,” Olivia said. “Why can’t I go back to the apartment?”

“You’re who I live with. My brother just died. We’re going to be with my family.”

“I wish I could go,” Nick said. “I wish I could act like everybody else in my office — phone in and say I’m having an anxiety attack.”

“Come with us,” Olivia said, squeezing his hand. “Please.”

“I can’t just get on a plane,” he said.

“If there’s a seat,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious,” Benton said. “Olivia’s probably as serious as she gets on Valium.”

“That was nasty,” she said. “I’m not stoned.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. Olivia looked at him. “About the plane, I mean,” he said.

“She misunderstands things when she’s stoned,” Benton said.

They got into Nick’s car and he pulled out onto the narrow, curving road behind the hotel. “I’ll call Ilena,” Nick said. “Are we going to miss the plane if I go back into the hotel?”

“We’ve got time,” Benton said. “Go on.”

He left the car running and went back into the hotel. The security guard was making funny whiny noises and shuffling across the floor, and the girl behind the desk was laughing. She saw him looking at them and called out: “It’s an imitation of one of the rabbits in Watership Down .”

The security guard, amused at his own routine, crossed his eyes and wiggled his nose.

The house in Weston was huge. It was a ten-room house on four acres, the back lawn bordered by massive fir trees, and in front of them thick vines growing large, oblong pumpkins. Around the yard were sunflowers, frost-struck, bent almost in half. Nick squatted to stare at one of their black faces.

He had seen the sunflowers curving in the moonlight when they arrived the night before and Benton’s mother, Ena, lit the yard with floodlights; the flowers were just outside the aura of light, and he had squinted before he was able to make out what they were. It was morning now, and he was examining one. He ran his fingers across its rough face.

The reality of Wesley’s death hadn’t really hit him until he got to the house, walked across the lawn, and went inside. Then, although he hadn’t seen Wesley for years, and had never been to the house, Nick felt that Ena didn’t belong there, and that Wesley was very far away.

Ena had been waiting for them, and the house had been burning with light — hard to see from the highway, she had told Benton on the phone — but inside there was a horrible pall over everything, in spite of the brightness. He had not been able to get to sleep, and when he had slept, he had dreamed about the gigantic, bent sunflowers. Wesley was dead.

The movie they had shown on the plane, which they stared at but did not listen to, had a scene in it of a car chase through San Francisco, with Orientals smiling in the back seat of a speeding car and waving little American flags. It did not seem possible that such a thing could be happening if Wesley was really dead.

Ena was at the house because she thought that assembling there was a tribute to Wesley — no matter that in the six months he’d lived there he never invited the family to his house, and that the things they saw there now made Wesley more of an enigma And they had already begun to take his things. They obviously felt guilty or embarrassed about it, because when the three of them came in the night before, people began to confess: Elizabeth had taken Wesley’s Rapidograph, for Jason; for herself she had taken a dome-shaped paperweight, a souvenir of Texas with a longhorn cow facing down a cowboy with a lasso underwater, in a tableau that would fill with snow when the dome was shaken; Uncle Cal had taken a picture of Ena as a schoolgirl, in a heart-shaped frame. Ena had taken a keyring with three keys on it from Wesley’s night table. She did not know what locks the keys fit, because she had tried them on everything in the house with no luck, but they were small antique keys and she wanted to get a chain for them and wear them as a necklace. Wesley was dead, drowned in Lake Champlain, two life vests floating near where the boat capsized, no explanation.

Benton came out of the house. It was a cold morning, and it was early; Nick did not feel too cold because he had found a jacket on a hook by the back door — Wesley’s, no doubt — and put it on. Benton, in the black velvet jacket, hugged his arms in front of him.

“I just realized that I dragged you here from California,” Benton said. “What are you doing out here?”