Ann Beattie - Burning House

Before he had gone to California the previous spring, he had tried to clear his head about what he wanted. When Derek called from Los Angeles and threw around phrases like “in the money” or “out of the money,” discussing closing transactions and sure ways to beat the system, all he could think of was that silliness in Bonnie and Clyde when Bonnie and Clyde go to the movies and watch Ginger Rogers and the chorus singing “We’re in the Money” in Gold Diggers of 1933 . Now his brother was in California with a teenage girlfriend, driving a silver Porsche and practically living on undercooked pasta. He visited him and was amazed at his brother’s life — that Derek and Liz sat on the sofa and bent over a small, square pin with a picture of Elvis Costello on it and snorted coke off of Elvis’s face the way millions of middle-class people sat down for an evening cocktail.

He came back to New York with huaraches from Olvera Street and ten pints of the best-tasting strawberries he had ever eaten. He remembered standing on the other side of the X-ray machine at the airport, watching the fuzzy stacks of strawberries pass through. Thinking about The Situation, he had drunk too much wine and smoked too much with his brother, and he had fixated on one little aspect of Mary or Laura Ann: Laura Ann’s hair versus Mary’s wide-set eyes. Taking an overview? Laura Ann, naked, long and smooth-skinned; Mary, her sexy adolescent thinness, her flat breasts. Mary had given him an ultimatum: Decide or forget it. Laura Ann, who didn’t know he was having an affair then, had given him a soft leather traveling bag.

When he returned that summer, the city looked grim. Few places to see the sky, buildings crowding each other. He looked out the window of the cab and saw a sharp-nosed gargoyle above the door of a building; he saw bums curled with their backs to buildings, sleeping expressionlessly, as if they had just shared some intimacy with the sidewalk. He thought about calling Mary, but didn’t. She had an answering machine, and he didn’t want to risk hearing Mary’s voice that was not Mary’s voice.

His last thought before he went to sleep now made him smile: as he had passed a man walking his golden retriever, the man had said to the dog, “I don’t believe you, Morty. You pissed on the one sign of life in that treebox.”

Laura Ann knew Mary. Those tearful late-night phone calls she had made months ago weren’t to some mystery lover, as he had at first suspected, but to Mary. And then the phone calls stopped and she began to be nice to him again. “You pretend to be so casual,” she said. “It’s a good cover-up, but I know what’s underneath. I know how you spend hours with your calculator meticulously going over your bank statement. I know that you’ll even read a bad book to the end. I know how you make love.”

The last time he saw Mary, she was sitting at a table inside the Empire Diner when he was walking by. She didn’t see him. On his way back from his cash machine, he walked into the Empire. They were squirting Windex on the table where Mary and her friends had been. He went to the phone at the end of the counter and said what he’d wanted to say for a long time. “If I love anybody, I love you, Laura Ann. Admit that you’ve never forgiven me. I don’t want to come back and walk into that strain again.”

“You wouldn’t come back if you didn’t want to,” she said.

The woman at the piano bobbed her shoulders as she played “Fascinatin’ Rhythm.” A man in a gorilla suit walked in and began talking to one of the waiters, gesturing with his paw. A chauffeur, arms crossed, waited outside by a long white Cadillac.

“You love me,” she said. Then, in a near whisper: “The way I cheat and chip dried food off the plates when I’m setting the table. The way I rub your shoulders. My perfume.”

“Your voice,” he said.

“I’m exhausted.” She sighed. “Don’t take it personally if I’ve gone to sleep when you come home.”

The counterman was talking in a huddle with a waitress. “I told him that we don’t take reservations. ‘You show up, that’s when we take your name,’ I said to him. ‘You come back with four other people, we’ll give you the back table.’ I was just doing my job.”

Jake searched through his wallet and took out a business card. He dialed another number.

“This is Doctor Garfield,” Garfield’s voice said. “I’m not available at this time. Please leave your message at the tone, or call me at my home in an emergency.” Garfield gave his home number, and there was a beep. Listening to the silence that followed, Jake thought: Alexander Graham Bell would never have believed that it would come to this.

Walking back to the apartment, he thought about what he had always been sure he loved: the fields in Pennsylvania, acres of them, stretching away from his aunt’s farm, so flat and green. And the porch swing, missing the middle board, that he sat on to watch sunsets. The tangled mounds of peas that he tied around thick stakes in the garden, trying to keep them growing upward. The summer his uncle ripped the honeysuckle off the porch and poured poison on the ground — the stub where the vine had begun. The porch, where the honeysuckle used to crisscross the screen, the floor transformed into complicated patterns of lace when the sunlight shone through the leaves. And the time he begged to be dressed in the neighbor’s bee-keeping suit, the big spaceman helmet with netting over the front covering his head and face, and then the unexpected, horrible dread he had felt as bees swarmed around him and crawled on the suit. He had stayed rooted to the spot, paying no attention to the neighbor, who shouted from his tractor in the not-too-far distance that it was all right — there wasn’t any way he could hurt the bees. It was a million times worse than being zipped into the stiff yellow rain slicker and sent off to school. In the field, he had been petrified. Finally, the neighbor’s voice had reached him and he knew he had to move, and he did move, trying hopelessly to shrug away the bees. Then he managed to turn his back on the hives, and eventually, as he walked, they disappeared behind him. He was at that point of life where he realized he wasn’t supposed to cry anymore, but he was on the verge of tears when he sat eating toast in the neighbor’s kitchen, toast soggy with butter and spread with thick, dark honey, hardly able to swallow because his throat was so constricted. Later, watching television, looking at the way astronauts floated toward each other to connect in space, he would think about the way he must have looked. There had been one acid trip, one of the last, when he had felt that same heavy disembodiment — that he was grounded, and he had to move, but it was impossible, and if he had taken off, he would have drifted not far from the ground, at a peculiar tilt, like the old man walking through air in the Chagall painting. This realization — and this present life of confusion — was a long way from his thoughts, when he had rocked in a swing missing a board, on the front porch of a house in Pennsylvania.

She was, as she had said she would be, in bed. She didn’t open her eyes, although he thought that she had heard him walk in. If she had, this particular night, those steady green eyes might have had the power Kryptonite had on Superman. He was always struggling to think that he didn’t need her. That love didn’t mean need. That crazy conflict acid produced, of having your senses touched sharply, yet knowing you were powerless to respond. Even before acid, that sudden, strength-sucking anxiety — the fear, standing in front of the big white boxes of bees swarming in and out.

What strength it took just to lie there, eyelids lightly closed, nothing to suggest that the way she looked, curled on the bed, was a position difficult to maintain. He knew that if he asked her in the morning, she would look at him with exasperation and say that she had been asleep.