Ann Beattie - Burning House

“Get even with Benton,” he said. “Don’t get even with me.”

She looked at him, and he knew exactly where Jason got his perturbed expression, the look that crossed his face when his mother told him that Uncle Cal’s mattress was not a toy.

“That’s what they’re all doing,” she said. “They’re all at Wesley’s house getting even. Olivia singing in the tub to pretend that everything’s cool, Cal being nice to Ena because his last EKG readout scared him and he wants to be sure she’ll nurse him. Benton playing Daddy. That one really kills me.”

The cat hopped into the back seat. He looked at it. Its eyes were glowing.

“What I like about animals is that they’re not pretentious,” she said.

“You’ve taken somebody’s cat,” he said.

She was pathetic and ridiculous, but neither of those things explained why the affection he felt for her was winning out over annoyance. He couldn’t remember if she had propositioned him, or if he had just imagined it. He put his head against the window. It seemed like a situation he would have found himself in in college. It was a routine from years ago. He took her hand.

“This is silly,” he said.

He did not know her license-plate number, so he put down *?—#! on the registration form. Then, realizing what he had done, he blacked that out and wrote in a series of imaginary numbers.

The motel was on Route 58, just off the Merritt Parkway. He was careful to notice where he was, because he thought that when he went out to the parking lot, she might simply have driven away. He gave the woman his credit card, got it back, slipped the room key across the counter until it fell off the edge into his hand instead of trying to pick it up with his fingers, and went out to the parking lot. She was in the car, holding the cat. He knocked on her window. She got out of the car. The cat, in her arms, looked all around.

“I know where there’s an all-night diner,” she said drunkenly.

“You seem to know your way around very well.”

“I used to come see Wesley,” she said.

She said it matter-of-factly, climbing the stairs in back of him, and at first he didn’t get it. “And I know for a fact that he didn’t intend to use all the servicemen Ena used, and that when he had wood delivered it wasn’t going to be the famous Hanley Paulson who brought it,” she said, as he put the key in the lock and opened the door. “He might have left New York to nursemaid Ena, but he was only going so far. He was a nice person, and people took advantage of him.”

He held her. He put his arms around her back and hugged her. This was Benton’s ex-wife, Wesley’s lover, standing in front of him in a black sweater and black silk underpants, and instead of its seeming odd to him, it only made him feel left out that he was the only one who had no connection with her.

“Who was the man who drowned with him?” she said, as if Nick would know. “Nobody he cared about, because I never heard of him. I didn’t even know he was Wesley’s friend.”

The cat was watching them. It was sitting in a green plastic chair, and when he looked at the cat, the cat began to lick its paw. Elizabeth drew away from him to see why he had stopped stroking her back.

“Would you like to forget about it and go to the diner?” she said.

“I was thinking about the cat,” he said. “We ought to return the cat.”

“If you want to return the cat, you go return the cat.”

“We can do it later,” he said.

Later, he got hopelessly lost looking for the road where they had gotten the cat. He thought that he had found just the place, but when he got out of the car he saw that there was no stone wall. He carried the cat back to the car and consulted Elizabeth. She had no idea where they were. Finally he had to backtrack all the way to the bar and find the road from there that they had been on earlier. He got out of the car, carrying the cat. He dropped it on the stone wall. It didn’t move.

“It wants to go with us,” Elizabeth called out the window.

“How do you know?” he said. He felt foolish for asking, for assuming that she might know.

“Bring it back,” she said.

The cat sat and stared. He picked it up again and walked back to the car with it. It jumped out of his arms, into the back seat.

“What he says to Jason is very clever,” Elizabeth said, as he started the car. “I’d be amused, if Jason weren’t my son.”

When he found out that she and Wesley had been lovers, it had been clear to him that she was sleeping with him to exorcise Wesley’s ghost, or to get even with him for dying; now he wondered if she had told him to go to the motel to get even with Benton, too.

“If you want Benton to know about what happened tonight, you’re going to have to tell him yourself. I’m not telling him,” he said.

Her face was not at all the face in the picture of Benton’s wallet from years ago. Her eyes were shut as if she were asleep, but her face was not composed.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m used to it,” she said. She rummaged in her purse and pulled her brush out and began brushing her hair. “If the family had known about Wesley and me, they’d write that off as retaliation, too. They love easy answers.”

They were on the road that led to the house, passing houses that stood close to the road. There was nothing in California that corresponded to the lights burning in big old New England houses at night. It made him want to live in this part of the world again, to be able to drive and see miles of dark fields. The apple orchards, the low rock walls, the graveyards. A lot of people went through them, and it did not mean that they were preoccupied with death. The car filled with light when a car with its high beams on came toward them. For a few seconds he saw his hands on either side of the wheel and thought, sadly, that what Wesley had seen about them had never come true.

“At the risk of being misunderstood as looking for sympathy, there’s one other thing I want to tell you about Benton,” Elizabeth said. “He used to put his camera on his tripod and take pictures of Jason when he was an infant — roll after roll. He’d stand by his crib and take pictures of Jason when he was sleeping. I remember asking him why he was taking so many pictures when Jason’s expression wasn’t changing, and you know what he said? He said that he was photographing light.”

Déjà vu: Ena with the afghan, Uncle Cal circling figures on the stock page, knocking his empty pipe against the old wooden chest in front of the sofa with the regular motion of a metronome, Elizabeth reading a book, her feet tucked primly beneath her, coffee steaming on the table by her chair.

“Went out and got drunk,” Uncle Cal said in greeting. “I couldn’t.” He tapped his shirt pocket. It made a crinkling noise. Pipe cleaners stuck out of the pocket, next to a pack of cigarettes.

Elizabeth was reading A Tale of Two Cities . She continued to read as if he hadn’t come into the room. The cat was curled by the side of the chair.

“Hanley Paulson isn’t coming,” Elizabeth said.

“We can go to lunch and leave him a note and the check,” Uncle Cal said.

“That would be just fine,” Ena said. “He’s not a common delivery person — he’s a friend of long standing.”

“Maybe someone told him Wesley was dead, and he isn’t coming.”

“I called him,” Ena said. “Not Wesley.”

“Wesley wouldn’t have paid seventy-five dollars for half a cord of wood,” Elizabeth said.

“Everyone is perfectly free to go out,” Ena said.

Nick went into the kitchen. He saw Benton and Jason and Olivia, all red-cheeked, with puffs of air coming out of their mouths. They were playing some sort of game in which they came very close to Olivia and ducked at the last second, so she couldn’t reach out and touch them. The sky was gray-white, and it looked like snow. Olivia was loosening the scarf around her neck and lighting one of her hand-rolled narrow cigarettes. Either that, or she had stopped caring and was smoking a joint. He watched her puff. A regular cigarette. Olivia’s jeans were rolled to the knee, and the bright red socks she wore reminded him of the large red stocking his uncle had hung by the mantel for him when he was young. “Let’s see Santa fill that,” his uncle had laughed, as the toe of the stocking grazed the hearth. In the morning, his usual stocking was in the toe of the large stocking, and his father was glaring at his uncle. His father did not even like his brother — how could he have wanted to send him to live with him?