Burning Down the House (11 page)

I
AN HAD FIRST
met Steve over twenty years ago, when Ian and Alix were freshmen in college, but he had never in all those years received a phone call from him. Who knows how long Steve had been waiting to make the call, but on that particular day Ian answered his cell, arrived shortly thereafter on a high floor of a building in Rockefeller Center, and, after walking down the gleaming corridor lined with modern art as violently and visibly expensive as if it had been painted in blood brushed on with thousand-dollar bills, learned from Steve that he, Ian, was Poppy's biological father.

Ian did not believe it, not even when Steve, sitting behind his gargantuan desk in his spotless office, explained coolly that his sister Diana, Ian's former writing teacher, had told Steve so, shortly before she died. Ian did not believe it when Steve described how Diana had known from her intimate, perhaps drunken, conversations with Ian that he had been making extra money to pay for his off-campus apartment by donating sperm at the local sperm bank. Ian did not believe it—because he could not bear to believe it—when Steve told him that Diana had been able to get Ian's sperm because she had known that he had lied on the medical intake form, Ian having told her, laughing over vodka and tonics at the Castle Bar, that he had claimed on the questionnaire that his mother was in perfect health, that he had been captain of his high-school basketball team, and, just for fun, that he knew French, Italian, Swahili, and ancient Greek. It was easy, Diana had told Steve drily from her hospital bed, tubes worming their way from her nose and arms, to look for the basketball captain who spoke Swahili. There were only two.

Ian's equanimity, whatever was left of it, slid to the floor as if he were shedding a skin. He felt naked, cold, exposed. Being told his own secret was a new kind of humiliation, and one he quickly rejected. That he had possessed a mystery previously unknown to him could have stirred his lively sense of drama, but it did not. Instead, he struggled to regain his self-control in the face of knowledge about himself which was too painful to comprehend. In an instinctive gasp of emotion, his love for Poppy rushed through him, a sudden warmth, a radiating orange glow, and then dissipated, like the fading blink of a firefly's pulsing brightness. Now he felt naked and dark. This was shock. He had never really experienced shock.

Ian would have been more prepared to respond to the news that it was Steve who was his, Ian's, biological father, and that he was leaving Ian his vast real estate empire, its tentacles extending and gripping tightly around the globe, to inherit and oversee, effective immediately. But that could not have been further from Steve's intent.

Steve walked around his desk to position himself, as he rolled up his shirtsleeves, to sit, just barely, on the front of the desk, looking down at Ian.

Ian hoped that the glow from a moment before would return to warm him, but it had been extinguished. Or, rather, he had extinguished it in an act of self-protection. But he waited, waited for it to return.

Ian was saying: I don't know what to say. I'm stunned. I need some time to process this information.

To Steve, the word “information” meant many things. Information was the currency that greased the wheels of commerce, and which you hoarded and then revealed with care—let it slip from your grasp too easily and you would never succeed. Information was knowledge, the means by which people learned about one another, obtained access to their inner machinery, and then manipulated them. Sometimes, information was fatal, something that chased you until it caught up with you and struck you down in the thriving prime of consciousness. But as Steve watched Ian, who had gone pale except for a bright redness around his eyes, it became evident to him that information was not, not in any universe that he was master of at least, something that you needed to “process.”

Steve had wondered for years when Ian would become aware of his relationship to Poppy and step forward to make some claim. To begin with, everyone always suspected that Poppy's father must be someone whom Diana knew—she wasn't the type to just let anyone share her child's DNA. She was an intellectual, an artist, and very, very picky. All three traits had combined to keep her unmarried, according to her mother and brother. Was she too intimidating—slender Diana with the ferocious blue eyes and patrician nose? People surmised for years that the father must be Diana's first boyfriend from graduate school, the genius one who went on to found an Internet company in the nineties and then killed himself in the dot-com bust. Others guessed that it was Diana's editor, the one who convinced her to write lush, political, historical fiction and who made her semifamous, the one with the fluffy hair and the decisive cheekbones. But no one, not even Alix, had ever made the connection that Ian was the father, in spite of the fact that Diana obviously adored him—he was her favorite student—and he had remained close with the family for all this time. Perhaps it was because he was several years younger than Diana and seemed so eternally boyish, even well into his thirties. Or perhaps it was because no one wanted to see, thought Steve, because from his point of view the physical resemblance between Ian and Poppy was clear, if not uncanny. It had seemed strange and tragic to everyone when Diana died that there was no one to come forward and claim paternity. Who was this hidden man, this secret father, who would let his own child be orphaned? Who was this Arthur Dimmesdale character who would not accept his responsibility and shoulder his moral obligation? The tragedy was mitigated somewhat by the Victorian-novel good fortune of Steve's being a billionaire and raising his niece in plutocratic splendor. But the questions and guesses and rumors persisted. Now Steve had finally, for Ian only, cleared up the confusion.

Don't you want to know why I'm telling you now? Steve asked, somewhat like a villain in a thriller.

Obviously I have a lot of questions, Ian replied.

Disappointingly, Steve thought.

I'm telling you because it has come to my attention that you have been spending a lot of time with Poppy, now that she is working on your—and here he hesitated as if having a hard time saying the silly word—musical. And I am uncomfortable with the idea that you might misinterpret any, shall I say, unconscious forces that might draw her to you. I had hoped not to have to share this with you, not only because it was not something my sister wanted me to divulge to anyone, even yourself, but also because you do not impress me as a person who would be a good father…figure. Here Steve paused to see if his insult had fully registered, but he received no indication if it had. He continued: I have given great consideration to telling you, and I am only doing so to keep my Poppy safe. I also want to keep her happy, which means I fully expect and insist that you never say anything to her about this. Obviously, and here he smiled, in a menacing impersonation of empathy, it would be traumatic and possibly devastating information to encounter, particularly for an adolescent.

Just so that they were both completely clear about their understanding, Steve went on, he'd had some papers written up. Due to the sensitive nature of the information therein, he said he'd appreciate it if Ian could look them over now—he could sit down on the couch on the other side of the room if he'd like and make himself more comfortable—and then sign them. It was very straightforward, basically a nondisclosure agreement, which he was sure Ian must have seen before, his line of work being the entertainment business. Then he said he was very pleased that they had had this talk.

Steve held out the forms to the shaking figure in the chair. Ian took one cursory look over them and, his hands trembling, asked for a pen and signed. And that was how he found out that he was Poppy's father.

If Ian had been another kind of person, someone less interested in professional success and others' approval and more curious about the whorls and depths of human psychology, he probably would have spent more time having wondered about Poppy's parentage. As it was, he had given the question very little thought, and had assuaged whatever guilt and soothed whatever sadness he had felt about his beloved late mentor's young child by thinking of himself as an “important grown-up” in her life, someone who appeared from time to time with interesting stories from the world of adults and with excellent wide-eyed listening skills. He had shown enthusiasm for her interests over the years, the play kitchen and sparkly tutus, the books and movies and byzantine social world of girls, and just as he was becoming interested in Poppy as a female he was excited when Alix had suggested to him that he hire her, smart, sophisticated, well-educated Poppy, to be an intern on his show. But the musical—a rollicking exploration of 1980s America seen through the eyes of a group of friends and based on his own drug-addled yet somehow indelible experiences of college, deconstructionism, the Reagan years, and New York nightlife—sent him so far back into the cataracts of his own myopia that he was less inclined than ever to consider from whose sperm his new girlfriend had sprung, divided, evolved, and been spawned.

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.