Ann Beattie - Burning House

“Sure. He asked to come, didn’t he? You could look at his face and see that he enjoyed the auction.”

“Maybe he just does what he’s told.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come over here.”

He sat on the bed. He had stripped down to his under-shorts, and there were goose bumps all over his body. A bird was making a noise outside, screaming as if it were being killed. It stopped abruptly. The goose bumps slowly went away. Whenever he turned up the thermostat he always knew he was going to be sorry along about 5 A.M., when it got too hot in the room but he was too tired to get up and go turn it down. She said that was why they got headaches. He reached across her now for the Excedrin. He put the bottle back on top of the cookbook and gagged down two of them.

“What’s he doing?” he said to her. “I don’t hear him.”

“If you made him go to bed, the way other fathers do, you’d know he was in bed. Then you’d just have to wonder if he was reading under the covers with a flashlight or—”

“Don’t say it,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say that he might have taken more Godivas out of the box my mother sent me. I’ve eaten two. He’s eaten a whole row.”

“He left a mint and a cream in that row. I ate them,” B.B. said.

He got up and pulled on a thermal shirt. He looked out the window and saw tree branches blowing. The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted snow at the end of the week. He hoped it didn’t snow then; it would make it difficult taking Bryce back to Vermont. There were two miles of unplowed road leading to Robin’s house.

He went downstairs. The oval table Bryce sat at was where the dining room curved out. Window seats were built around it. When they rented the house, it was the one piece of furniture left in it that neither of them disliked, so they had kept it. Bryce was sitting in an oak chair, and his forehead was on his arm. In front of him was the coloring book and a box of crayons and a glass vase with different-colored felt-tip pens stuck in it, falling this way and that, the way a bunch of flowers would. There was a pile of white paper. The scissors. B.B. assumed, until he was within a few feet of him, that Bryce was asleep. Then Bryce lifted his head.

“What are you doing?” B.B. said.

“I took the dishes out of the dishwasher and it worked,” Bryce said. “I put them on the counter.”

“That was very nice of you. It looks like my craziness about the dishwasher has impressed every member of my family.”

“What was it that happened before?” Bryce said.

Bryce had circles under his eyes. B.B. had read once that that was a sign of kidney disease. If you bruised easily, leukemia. Or, of course, you could just take a wrong step and break a leg. The dishwasher had backed up, and all the filthy water had come pouring out in the morning when B.B. opened the door — dirtier water than the food-smeared dishes would account for.

“It was a mess,” B.B. said vaguely. “Is that a picture?”

It was part picture, part letter, B.B. realized when Bryce clamped his hands over his printing in the middle.

“You don’t have to show me.”

“How come?” Bryce said.

“I don’t read other people’s mail.”

“You did in Burlington,” Bryce said.

“Bryce — that was when your mother cut out on us. That was a letter for her sister. She’d set it up with her to come stay with us, but her sister’s as much a space cadet as Robin. Your mother was gone two days. The police were looking for her. What was I supposed to do when I found the letter?”

Robin’s letter to her sister said that she did not love B.B. Also, that she did not love Bryce, because he looked like his father. The way she expressed it was: “Let spitting images spit together.” She had gone off with the cook at the natural-food restaurant. The note to her sister — whom she had apparently called as well — was written on the back of one of the restaurant’s flyers, announcing the menu for the week the cook ran away. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he had stood in the spare bedroom — whatever had made him go in there? — and read the names of desserts: “Tofu-Peach Whip!” “Granola Raspberry Pie!” “Macadamia Bars!”

“It’s make-believe anyway,” his son said, and wadded up the piece of paper. B.B. saw a big sunflower turn in on itself. A fir tree go under.

“Oh,” he said, reaching out impulsively. He smoothed out the paper, making it as flat as he could. The ripply tree sprang up almost straight. Crinkled birds flew through the sky. B.B. read:

When I’m B.B.’s age I can be with you allways. We can live in a house like the Vt. house only not in Vt. no sno. We can get married and have a dog.

“Who is this to?” B.B. said, frowning at the piece of paper.

“Maddy,” Bryce said.

B.B. was conscious, for the first time, how cold the floorboards were underneath his feet. The air was cold, too. Last winter he had weather-stripped the windows, and this winter he hadn’t. Now he put a finger against a pane of glass in the dining-room window. It could have been an ice cube, his finger numbed so quickly.

“Maddy is your stepsister,” B.B. said. “You’re never going to be able to marry Maddy.”

His son stared at him.

“You understand?” B.B. said.

Bryce pushed his chair back. “Maddy’s not ever going to have her hair cut again,” he said. He was crying. “She’s going to be Madeline and I’m going to live with only her and have a hundred dogs.”

B.B. reached out to dry his son’s tears, or at least to touch them, but Bryce sprang up. She was wrong: Robin was so wrong. Bryce was the image of her, not him — the image of Robin saying, “Leave me alone.”

He went upstairs. Rather, he went to the stairs and started to climb, thinking of Rona lying in bed in the bedroom, and somewhere not halfway to the top, adrenaline surged through his body. Things began to go out of focus, then to pulsate. He reached for the railing just in time to steady himself. In a few seconds the first awful feeling passed, and he continued to climb, pretending, as he had all his life, that this rush was the same as desire.

“Your brother called,” I say to my husband on the telephone.

“He called to find out if he left his jumpsuit here. As though another weekend guest might have left a jumpsuit.”

“As it happens, he did. I mailed it to him. He should have gotten it days ago.”

“You never said anything about it. I told him …”

“I didn’t say anything because I know you find great significance in what he leaves behind.”

“Pictures of the two of you with your mother, and you were such unhappy little boys …”

“Anything you want me to bring home?” he says.

“I think I’d like some roses. Ones the color of peaches.”

He clears his throat. All winter, he has little coughs and colds and irritations. The irritations are irritating. At night, he hemms over Forbes and I read Blake, in silence.

“I meant that could be found in Grand Central,” he says.

“An éclair.”

“All right,” he says. He sighs.

• • •

“One banana, two banana, three banana, four …”

“I think you have the wrong number,” I say.

“ Fifteen years , and you still don’t know my voice on the phone.”

“Oh,” I say. “Hi, Andy.”

Andy let his secretary use his apartment during her lunch hour to have an affair with the Xerox repairman. Andy was on a diet, drinking pre-digested protein, and he had thrown everything out in his kitchen, so he wouldn’t be tempted. He was allowed banana extract to flavor his formula. The secretary and the repairman got hungry and rummaged through the kitchen cabinets, and all they could find was a gallon jug of banana extract.