Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

—

At the airstrip, Roman was running down the field waving his arms around and kicking up dirt and laughing maniacally. He looked like a sped-up film of a person from another era, only instead of from the past he had come from the future. His brother Felix was the opposite: slow, graceful, curious, a vision of a boy from a previous century. Behind them the plane was already taxiing and gliding away into the dreamy British afternoon.

—

Jonathan had pushed the fantasy of his much-younger half brothers’ Slavic nanny out of his mind for a few hours and now it arrived before him in the flesh and he seemed to unhinge inside and surrender air. Ian saw this happen as they approached her. The young woman was walking with Patrizia, Jonathan’s stepmother, who eventually greeted him in her courtly way. Ian could tell by the way Jonathan closed his eyes when he kissed Patrizia that he was affected by the presence of the new woman.

Now the party can start, Jonathan said breathlessly, although he hadn’t been running.

Patrizia kissed him several times on alternating cheeks and introduced him to Neva. They nodded hello. Ian too made his hellos. Now the plane was far away and there were horses grazing in the distance and some wild pheasants prancing around a tree. Ian could see that Neva was in her twenties. He could see Jonathan seeing Neva.

—

She was beautiful but not pretty.

—

Roman, she called, come take your jacket. It’s raining. She had an appealing accent. She excused herself and walked quickly to catch up with the boys.

—

Ian thinks about what an asshole Jonathan is and at the same time Ian thinks about Poppy. He is disappointed that she wasn’t on the plane, isn’t with Patrizia and the kids, even though he was told that she wasn’t coming until later. His wishful thinking becomes real in his mind again and again. It is like a play that is always running for him. The longest-running show on earth, in Ian’s head. He smiles to himself, but this does nothing to change the reality that he is always dreaming.

NEVA MET UP with Roman and handed him his jacket and continued to carry his backpack. She cajoled him into putting on the jacket and playfully wrestled one of his arms into a sleeve while he pulled out the other and it went on this way. She leaned into him with her shoulder and pressed against one sleeve to keep him from extracting his arm, Roman squirming and kicking and pressing his head into her body. She led him toward the car. Roman kept shaking his head as if he were saying a perpetual no to the world.

She maneuvered him into the SUV. As she was about to get in, the other boy, Felix, came up from behind her. He looked right through his brother who was by now playing a video game and got into the car and took out a book. He was carrying his own backpack. Neva swung herself up into the enormous vehicle and crouched into the last row, behind the boys. She watched the two of them, each intently focused on his occupation. They didn’t look back.

Patrizia and Jonathan and Ian settled in and Vlad took the wheel and the car rolled off and passed by the runway again where another plane was landing and it was bigger than the first and a few more men were standing around watching it, some just admiring its size. The plane stopped and one man emerged and stood on the steps leading down to the airstrip and this was Steve. Hulking, almost ungainly but not awkward, standing on the edge of the world. Surveying, studying, simultaneously rejecting and engaging. A larger more encompassing version of his son Jonathan, as if sleek, handsome Jonathan had been swollen with thoughts and strategies and bloated with the burdens of running an empire, had been drained of some color as in a faded but important photograph, growing more significant, not less, with age. Steve: Patrizia’s husband, Alix and Jonathan’s father, Roman and Felix’s father, Poppy’s uncle and father. Steve: whose fortune made possible this wedding, this plane, these people, this life. As Neva pulled away in the car Steve turned and seemed to notice her from a great distance, seeing right through the tinted window. He turned his head as if he wanted her to be aware that he was watching her. When she looked back at him she thought she could feel his eyes staring directly into hers. She took two energy bars out of the backpack and handed them to Roman and Felix and the SUV went sliding out past the tiny airport along the lovely road back to the house.

—

Riding in the car Neva is reminded of another car ride, her first car ride, sixteen years ago. She was ten. She remembers gliding through the countryside as if on water. Now she glides through another country, another landscape, and feels as if she herself is the water. A river. The River Neva. She has let life run through her. She has suffered. She has survived. She knows this about herself so completely that this knowledge is simply a part of who she is. She is stoic like a river. She is sensuous like a river. She does not need people, like a river. The river takes everything that is thrown at it, into it, and keeps moving, moves on. She has taken everything and moved on. She has made a new life, found a place in the world. She takes care of children. She keeps them afloat. There is nothing she cannot carry. She is deep and her inner current is a storm of force in which somebody could sink. She is calm like a river. She is reflective like a river. She is strong. She is incredibly, terrifyingly, unapologetically strong.

—

Now come hours of solitude, hours of time change. Hours of unpacking for the boys while they eat dinner with the family and she is left alone. She’s never been to England before and she notices the way the sun bleeds slowly through layers of colored silk and evening comes on in blue glimmers and a thrilling coolness arrives and blows the leaves and flowers. The night air brings sounds of laughter and debate and bitter tones and honest whispers and the boys fall into bed with their hair swept over their faces.

—

She keeps to herself to avoid explanations, the complicated exposition that accompanies a new job and always tires her. Her room adjoins the boys’ and she listens to them move in their sleep as if they are playing soccer throughout the night.

—

She recalls a conversation on the plane with Patrizia, their words, mostly Patrizia’s words, flying along like birds darting in and out of the clouds beside the plane. Patrizia drank wine and she talked to Neva as if they’d known each other forever and her confidences fell from her mouth like teeth in some dream about losing all of your teeth, clattering and a little bloody.

Over the ocean Patrizia tells Neva that she has been trying to have another child for a long time. In a kind of monologue, half drunk, her eyes half closing, she describes years of needles, years of drugs. All for another baby, she says, wistfully, angry, mocking herself. She doesn’t seem to care if the boys can hear her, but they aren’t listening.

—

Neva wonders on the plane if she will ever have children of her own, Children of the River. She once read an article about children born of rape in Rwanda. They were called Children of Bad Memories. Her children if she has them will be Children of Good Memories. Her children if she has them will be loved. She has some long-ago good memories but few recent ones. She will make some good memories. She decides to do that. Yes, she thinks, I will figure out how to do that.

—

In the middle of the night Neva realizes that she hasn’t eaten dinner. She goes downstairs in the dark and finds the kitchen.

Inside, dim light and the gleaming angles of appliances here and there. A gnawing sound vibrating from an old refrigerator and the only food in it bottled water, champagne, and eggs. In the glow from the open fridge she could make out a figure leaning against the counter, through the gloom, his hand locked around the neck of a bottle of champagne. He nodded to a glass on the counter. Neva picked it up and held it out and he filled her glass and she sipped and drank. The liquid was arid, elegant. She sipped again.