Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

What did you say to her?

I was just talking to her about her plans.

Why is she crying?

Steve’s face was blank. A blinding blankness like an overcast sky on a March day in the Northeast when there is no sun and no birds and a dead stillness that crushes all hope. Poppy was still crying.

What did you say to her, Steve?

I don’t know what upset her. I have no idea.

What did you say to her that is making her cry?

—

Steve smiled. It is disappointing, he said, when something you wish for and convince yourself is possible is not possible. These are the lessons of youth. I had assumed Poppy knew that I was in some sense humoring her when I suggested I would think about her coming to work for me directly after high school. But it is consistent with my thinking that that course of action would not make sense. I think she must understand that it is her turn to humor me and to consider going to college. At the very least, she has to accept that she cannot work for my company until she is older. Words are words. Poppy, I’m sorry if you misunderstood what I said the other day.

—

She was still crying. Her nose was cherry red and the whites of her eyes were a pale rose against the strong azure of her irises. She had listened to Steve in silence. Roman chuckled softly as he tortured insurgents on the screen. Poppy stood up and walked with her head down to the restroom. Then Steve rose up and spoke quietly to Patrizia, holding his glasses in his hand and listening to her with his head bent forward, exhibiting great concentration and patience. Felix turned in his seat to look at Poppy as she walked back to her seat, her face washed and an impassive look in her eyes. In the car on the way home Steve gave Poppy several thousand dollars in cash and hugged her tightly on the sidewalk before she and the twins and Neva went upstairs.

—

Poppy feels hollow taking the money. She feels like the white-and-pink ceramic piggy bank that lived on her dresser when she was little, the coins clinking against the inside when they fell. She knows the money means something but she doesn’t know what, cannot decode those clinks. Does it mean that she works for Steve or that he is taking care of her as he should? Does it mean that she is independent or that she is a slave to these bills? Does it make her different from anyone else or the same or better or worse or does it not mean anything at all? These questions about money are never talked about with her, around her. Is the money something natural like food or sex or is it manufactured, a construct, another thing among this crowded universe of things? Poppy pushes the money into the bottom of her bag and throws her bag on the linen-upholstered chair in the corner of her room. At her desk she watches one of her favorite music videos on YouTube, the one about the couple where he enlists in the war and she gets mad and then they show her sitting alone on some bleachers at the end. Poppy watches it over and over and over.

—

After that Steve and Patrizia got back into the car and rode downtown each of them silent in the leathery dark and they met friends in Tribeca for dinner.

THAT NIGHT Neva unpacked and settled into the room in which she had spent only one day before leaving for England. This new job had been a trial by fire. But she would last. She could handle Roman and was beginning to understand Felix. Patrizia liked her. Poppy was heartbreaking, tragic, difficult to love and impossible not to. Alix and Ian would barely be around, the same for Jonathan and Miranda. Steve. Steve shook her and left her hollowed and awed, as if she had been granted a glimpse into the underworld. Gleaming, ghostly, but every inch alive, he seemed to be rising and falling at every moment, a catastrophic wave. That night she would listen to him berate Patrizia when they thought that no one could hear them, and his voice was like a great godlike hand sifting through the coals of a fire, unafraid to touch the hottest most scalding embers of another person.

—

She saw him sometimes very early in the morning, before he left for work. She never got used to how big he was, how raw looking, and the way his eyelids sagged as if the tiny muscles in them had been cut with a blade. He wore tailored expensive clothes but he was often unwashed, staying up late working in the toxic firelight of his computers, stewing in the rancid overripeness of unquenchable ambition.

—

You’re getting along okay? he asked her.

Yes, thank you.

You find the boys manageable?

I enjoy them.

Steve smiled. I’ve watched you with them. You’re a good worker. Smart. I have my eye on you, he said, very directly, into her eyes.

—

Neva was afraid that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. It was not a sexual tension, or a romantic tension, but something she experienced as profound and frightening. She realized instinctively that this momentary interaction had brought them fearfully close, as if they were soldiers together in combat, or had witnessed a crime. She felt exhilarated and at the same time uncertain whether she was interpreting the moment correctly. She felt a disintegration of her senses, a delirium that she tried to prevent. There was a siren wailing out on the street that seemed to be coming from a vase of pink flowers on a hall table and a smell of smoke that appeared to be wafting from the bronze chevron-patterned wallpaper.

Neva’s glance moved quickly up from the vase of flowers to Steve’s slightly sagging, philosophical face, his sculpted nose, his head an ancient marble bust. He smiled and began to tie his tie, which he had been holding in one hand and was now wrapping around his neck. Before he buttoned the top button of his shirt she could see the slightest fur of gray hair on his chest. It was the only place he had gray hair: his chest. He did not often swim or go shirtless so she rarely saw his chest although she would see it sometime later on the floor of the apartment when the medics unbuttoned his shirt and again when she would be the only one to notice the malfunctioning machinery in his hospital room as his torso lay panting and shuddering beneath the pale green gown which fell open as he suffered.

I am impressed by you, he said.

She stood silent. She felt an exquisite conflict, a confusion as to whether or not to believe or accept these words, which she realized her soul or something like her soul had been longing to hear.

Who are you? he said. What is your secret?

She thought for a moment about how to answer him.

My secret is that I don’t have any secrets, she said.

His tie was tied by now and he laughed silently. He bent down the better to see her.

I admire your dishonesty, he said.

—

At that moment one of his phones rang. He took it from his pocket. Like a great ponderous mastodon he lumbered down the hallway toward the vast kitchen and took the call. He wrapped his big hand around the phone. He seemed to step into the conversation as if he were casually walking into a bonfire, entering a native element, himself a piece with the licking flames of talk and trades and complex transactions. Someone had misunderstood his instructions and his voice roared low like a thing alive and Neva watched and heard how his power fled out from him like fire catching and racing in chains along a wooden fence, propelled by the wind. She was aware that he was at the center of some tented military encampment, a demented circus lit up by torches in the middle of the howling desert, and beyond him stretched maelstroms, a vortex, a void which he controlled.

—

Three hours later when she and the boys left with Patrizia for the beach it was a hot morning with the sun shattering against the East River into a million glinting shards. The helicopter rose high above the water and flew away from the FDR Drive, the gray buildings, the jagged city. For once the boys looked out the window, and they flew through the sky like little gods, and the shards of glass on the water melted into puddles of white and the boys rode on together and for a few minutes their faces were lit up and warm and newly open to the natural world.