Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

—

Every day, he paced back and forth in front of the stage, reliving his debauched, intellectual, and weirdly innocent early adulthood, bewildered by the feeling that his life had changed so much and not at all. A banal revelation, he knew, but it led him to the less-ordinary understanding that in the middle of his life he was becoming aware that there was no such thing as the middle. Either everything was the middle, in which case there was nothing on either side to make it, by definition, the middle, or everything was the beginning, or, of course, everything, and he did not like to think about this, was the end. He had not forgotten his time in college. On the contrary, he remembered it vividly and in detail, but his memory was changed by all that had happened since: his first play, which had been an unexpected hit, his ambivalence about its success, his descent into despair about the politics and pretensions of the artist’s life, his subsequent escape into directing, his realization that no world was better than any other, people were people. By now, everything was new again, and this equal parts giddy and depressing sense of the eternal newness of life contributed to his leading himself and Poppy astray. The relationship made him on the surface feel closer to his college days, and underneath reminded him annoyingly of his distance from that time, his hunger for an irretrievable excitement, his disappointment with either praise or criticism of his work, and the many slender, well-read, and hyperarticulate women with whom he had blundered through much of his life. The scent and seduction of Poppy had been very familiar to him, and he felt certain that his scent would become familiar to her, as no doubt she would meet other men like him when she left, in a year, for college, or real life, or whatever.

—

Then came the day when Poppy had found the letter on his desk. He had experienced it before — the flash of violent anger from a jealous woman, furious with hurt. But this time he saw how the hurt opened other hurts and changed Poppy, made her tough, and he watched her more closely from that point on, with her round eyes growing elegantly narrower every day, and for the first time in his life, he allowed someone — Poppy — in completely.

—

Now he feels that orange surge beginning again and at the same time feels himself attempting to extinguish it, like an insect in the process of committing suicide.

—

The love they have is an attempt to express the inexpressible. There is no word for what they have, who they become when they are together. It is theirs and they belong to it.

—

Take it away and they feel expelled, afraid, unknown, bereft. Unwanted, unalive, alone.

—

It is impossible to extinguish this without denying who he is. So he will have to deny who he is, become someone else. He makes the decision — it is not really a decision, he has no real choice — to do that. He decides to do that for her.

—

After he left Steve’s office, Ian went down to the rink at Rockefeller Center and looked at the skaters. Across the ice, past the little kids clinging to the railing and the girls practicing spins, past the older couples holding both hands with crossed arms and pushing expertly forward, skated an actress from the show. There was the escape he craved, just within reach. He did not show up at the theater for the next two days, but when he returned he found Poppy. She had, obviously, been acutely aware of his absence. One of the notebooks that he kept backstage had been ripped apart, and the pages lay scattered around a garbage can, like pieces of a carcass, illustrating her frenzy and despair. He picked up the strewn bits of paper and carried them to the audience, where he sat with them in his lap for a long time. Three nights later, he found a plastic Baggie stuffed in his jacket pocket. It contained hundreds of shredded slices of a photograph. It took him a while, but he eventually puzzled together that they were fragments of a picture of Poppy. Some nights later he finally called her, breaking the tense silence that existed between them at the theater, and she came over to his apartment. He broke down when he saw her, his face twisting in a series of awkward expressions. He promised he would stop seeing the actress from the show, acted as if that were the only problem, and they fell asleep side by side, fully clothed, after nothing more than an embrace.

—

Poppy can still see the ceiling of that room, will always be able to see it. The blank expanse onto which she had projected romance, passion, real love, and now hurt, betrayal, confusion, pure pain. Each one of the feelings has been thrown up onto the ceiling above Ian’s bed like shadows in The Allegory of the Cave, the cave she had learned about last year in eleventh grade Social and Political Philosophy with Mr. Newman. She had liked reading Plato, but even now could not reconcile her awareness that each of those fleeting feelings had felt so real, each one with its own distinct shape against the wall: plantlike, animal-like fringed clouds, Rorschach tests of her emotional development as it passed by, shadowy, across the Benjamin Moore Linen White — painted ceiling, with the sense that they were unreal, illusions, reflections of bodily sensations that while hers and hers alone still may or may not have depended on some truth outside the reality of herself. Was that truth Ian? Real Love? Some Platonic sunlight burning beyond human vision, above University Place, above Greenwich Village, New York City, all the cities on the planet, the world? Did such a sun exist? Did it matter? Did it make any difference at all if her interpretation of events was real or unreal as long as her feelings had felt real to her? Whenever she remembers that ceiling she will feel a sharp acute pain, as if her heart muscle tears a little bit. She will always feel a sadness when she remembers those feelings, those shadows, that color, that ceiling.

—

The following night she rode up in the elevator and rang the doorbell to Ian’s apartment and he greeted her without a smile for the first time. She could sense his hesitation as he stood on the threshold, one foot holding the door ajar, as if he were frightened by her presence. Her head, a riot of confusion, throbbed painfully. He let her in: the rooms looked the same as before, but she breathed in a different scent, not of another woman but of a cleanliness that admitted no earth, no skin, no dirt, and she could tell that he had scrubbed the apartment clean of their passion, of her, and she could see him now, sitting in a chair, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

IAN LEFT POPPY sitting in the corner of the couch with her face in her hands while he stood up to walk to the kitchen to get her a glass of water.

—

I’m so sorry, he said, heading back toward her. His voice had the flat unreverberating sound emitted by someone who knows that the only words available to him are useless clichés, however true they might be. His face was pale and strained, nervous and determined. He could not believe that he was in this situation, and his amazement at the circumstances made him seem robotic and unconvincing.

—

I know this seems crazy and completely out of the blue, but I promise you it’s the best thing for both of us. I love you. I know you don’t believe me right now, but it’s true. Please, can you please let me see your face? Poppy? Poppy. The last thing in the world I would ever want to do is hurt you. Please, Poppy. Please believe me.

—

He sat down on the couch and with the water in one hand he tried to touch her arm or stroke her hair. She batted him away. He was putting the glass very gently on the coffee table when Poppy lifted her head and pulled one elbow back as if she were stretching a bow. It wasn’t something she’d ever done before except perhaps in a nightmare and now it surprised her with its ease. She furled her fingers into a fist and raised her arm up high and put her weight behind her shoulder and slammed her naked anger against his back and hit him and then she did it again.