Burning Down the House (6 page)

D
URING THE CEREMONY
Poppy experienced a flooding of inexplicable happiness. She was a member of the wedding party and the small visual, sensory, and communal joys of getting ready with Miranda's friends, the first viewing of the bride in her impeccably elegant custom silk-and-chiffon gown with its simple lines, graceful profile, and radiating sense of purity and hope, the slow procession before the assembled guests, complete with adorably shy ring bearers and sassy flower girls, the vows and their declaration of dreams upheld, all of these elements came together to produce in Poppy a giddy tingling joy, a momentary mystical oneness that lifted her perspective high above the proceedings and enabled her to gaze upon the event with a tenderness that she rarely allowed herself. She felt warmth toward everyone. She felt that they would all take care of her and love her back. Oh, why don't I always feel this way? she thought, floating far in her mind to observe the rows and rows of guests. We're all just people. Why don't we all always feel this way?

Already the wedding ceremony is over and it is time for the reception. Hundreds of colorful hats swim over the grounds and circle like exotic fish. The air is filled with the smell of cooking foods coming from a kitchen area hidden from view. Children, released from the children's tent, run through the gardens and pluck flower petals and throw them and climb in the fruit trees until babysitters see them and call them down. Band music drifts across the lawns and people dance on the grand patio in staccato movements like figures on an old town clock. Poppy passes by a group of kids attempting to organize a game with the help of one adult, Neva, the new nanny. Neva directs the movements of her troops with a singular and beautiful authority that belies her position at the wedding.

Poppy had met Neva briefly but now she stops at a short distance and observes her: her black hair, her acute angles, her green eyes, her sharp shoulders. A punk-rock Russian strength to her unsmiling expression and asymmetrical demeanor. Neva is like a tree with no leaves, no embellishment, no distractions. Spiky branches and rigorous purity. Poppy feels sloppy and silly in her silky dress, however modern and edgy it claims to be. She sees that the children recognize a natural charm and command in Neva and they swarm around her and bump into her on purpose and call out to attract her attention. Poppy finds herself fascinated, intrigued, oddly envious, and somewhat in love with this poised slightly older woman, who is now laughing without smiling, the faintest most self-aware curl of her lip indicating pleasure, as she points and gives directions, surrounded by a little army of screaming and happy children.

Poppy arrives at the grand patio and steps around a lone dancing couple as she nears the back doors of the great house. The doors are open and guests are mingling inside and out but mostly out and she enters into a long library where all seems hushed and empty. She strolls around in her large-brimmed wedding hat with its silk bow past the book-lined walls with their elegant proportions and thin, carved Grecian columns and the low couches and chairs and tables where small porcelain lamps sit in the daylight waiting like contented Buddhas for somebody to realize that they are needed. She walks to the far end of the room toward a corner where a chair is positioned near the window.

There is a solitary attractively disheveled man in this chair and he lifts his gaze from his book to look at her. It is Ian in his wedding suit, with a drink, a book. There are three guests who wander in at the far end of the room and glance at Ian and Poppy briefly before leaving. Poppy stands at an angle facing some leather-bound volumes with her champagne flute at her lips and her bare foot slipping in and out of her high-heeled shoe. She sips and doesn't notice him and Ian shakes a rueful head at her and closes his book and takes a swallow of his drink.

You're not dancing, he says.

Poppy looks around at him from under her brim. Are you talking to me?

I thought you'd be dancing.

That stuff? On the patio? She tilts her chin toward the windows.

Yes, the band, he says.

She looks back at the bookshelves.

The real dancing is later, she says.

I see.

They're having a DJ. Somebody big, she says to the bookshelves.

He stares at her. He gets out of the chair and walks over toward her. So you'll be dancing for real later?

If I feel like it.

Do you think you'll feel like it?

Why do you ask?

Poppy watches the shadowy glints of light and dark which play before her on the rows of books, red burning leather with gold etching. She feels the enormous effort of trying to appear as if she is not paying much attention to Ian. Still managing to act disinterested, she turns to him. His eyes are soft and gray. There is a fine engraved pattern around them, a network of very thin lines that looks like writing. If she could read that language it would explain so much. But she cannot.

He speaks slowly: I hear that you don't want to apply to college. I had a blast in college but admire you for wanting to get on with life, he says.

There is a long but surprisingly not awkward silence between them. Neither of them can quite tell if it is erotic or dull. Ian lifts his eyebrows and continues.

If you're interested, there's plenty to do in the theater. After graduation you could be my assistant, or something like that, learn about the electric world of Broadway, he says with an expression that conveys mockery and sincerity at the same time. He lifts his hands, one holding a drink, one splayed out Bob Fosse–style. You know, “All That Jazz,” he says. Think about it. It's not the worst way to start a career. He looks at her with the tiniest smolder, not enough to make him seem lecherous, but just enough so that she is too scared to look at him anymore.

But she couldn't be his assistant because she was going to work for Steve as soon as she finished high school, she explained, and anyway she had outgrown her interest in the theater—she was over that—and she moved away along the books and books and books waving her champagne flute in Ian's direction, and of course he accepted it without following her because she was much too young for him anyway and what else could be done?

But he knows then that he will be communicating with her soon. On the dance floor, during their separate return travels to New York, and back in the city as he crosses paths with her because of his close association with Alix. He knows now as he watches her walk away that somehow she will come to him. He thinks this is an intuition of fate, or a form of hope, but it isn't. It is simply a decision on his part that he is going to get what he wants and do whatever he can, however stealthily, to make this to-him-at-the-moment-minor-dream come true. He is his own gullible mark and a con artist at the same time. This doesn't make him an evil person. He is not one kind of person; like all of us, he has many aspects. But his narcissism is a part of him that he has not yet had to examine or tackle or renounce and so in his personal life he is very often destructive. He is not, at least, as destructive as some people. He knows that, takes some remote comfort in it.

Poppy is self-destructive. The last thing she attempts to do is to hurt deeply anyone other than herself. As she walks away Ian sees her, for an instant, in all her fierce, stunningly pretty, self-destructive glory. He sees her and for a brief flickering moment comprehends her in a way that he does not comprehend himself.

On the dance floor he keeps his eyes on her even when they are not dancing together. She gets dipped by one of Miranda's dashing financier friends. Poppy's short hair practically touching the floor, her bare legs long and angled and stuck to the ground in her pointy-toed silver sling-backed shoes. Her face rapturous, shining, like a very good, very old diamond so clear and colorless that it looks like nothing but is everything, contains and refracts every color. He keeps his eyes on her.

The way these parties end: in intoxication and mistakes and sex and sometimes blood. They drank on and on and ate and danced under another tent and the fireworks fell all over themselves and the wind violated everybody's hair and people walked off into the shadows with one another and couples argued and things were said that could never be unsaid and as the dawn was bleeding faintly over the proceedings Jonathan was kneeling above Miranda in bed and she whispered something to him but he didn't say anything back. He was in his own element, something like fire but not as pure, one of those chemical fires that glows blue and green and orange. Afterward, he lay on his side, burnt wood. The next day by lunchtime most of the guests were gone. The tents came down. Men with headsets removed the party. Ian woke up late and missed the farewell brunch. He stood on the front steps of the house overlooking the wide pale gravel driveway scattered with the remaining revelers just in time to watch the bride and groom drive off in an Aston Martin. It was beginning to drizzle again. There was a silvery sky behind the tall trees.

Watch out, he muttered under his breath to the newlyweds. You might get what you're after.

He had been holding a cup of coffee and now he took a sip from it and turned around and headed back up the green-carpeted staircase to pack his bag.

I
N LONDON
tall men stood in attendance at the hotel entrance and regarded the new arrivals dispassionately. Steve, Patrizia, Neva, the twins, Ian, Alix, and Poppy swept past like some well-appointed band of itinerant jugglers or magicians, circus performers impersonating aristocrats. An understatedly luxurious scarf of ostrich feathers trailed behind Poppy, a plume of smoke from her neck.

Spending a few days in London after the wedding before returning to New York, the family had settled into a routine of meeting for dinner and spending their days separately, the twins taken to parks or attractions by Neva, or Patrizia when she wasn't consuming, Ian and Alix off to neighborhoods and galleries, Poppy left mostly on her own to wander. Steve worked in his London office or at the hotel.

At dinner Ian asked Poppy, How do you like London?

I love it, of course, but I'm a bit lonely this time.

I'd have to say the same.

They both watched Alix covertly as she sat at the far end of the table, her eyes piercing the menu, her expression puzzled, angry, hopeful, and irritated all at once. Poppy unfurled her napkin.

She's deeply depressed, said Poppy.

Who?

You know who. The saintly nun. Sister Alix.

Ian looked down the long table at Alix's judging, critical squint.

How did you two become such enemies?

Whatever do you mean? My biggest worry is that something will happen to her. I pray to God every day that she doesn't injure herself, said Poppy drily, ripping a piece of bread.

No really, how did it happen?

I always looked up to her. And she can't stand that. She prefers to be pitied, or despised.

Are you always so smart?

Only sometimes. Mostly I'm a spoiled brat.

He didn't think she was. He never would. But he would hear her call herself that again on the floor of his apartment as she cried into his arms and she would use that phrase later to describe him when he found her with her lip bleeding and her cheek bruised yellowish blue.

After the main course the waiter returned for the millionth time and brushed the crumbs from the table into a silver scoop. Another waiter carried a fan of dessert menus at the ready like giant playing cards, as if there might be some fabled game of high-stakes poker among these groomed and shining outlaws. When the meal was entirely finished they grabbed their satchels and donned their light outerwear and moved back into the night. The waiters stood side by side. They waited in their uniforms, buttons gleaming, watching the party of eight drift effortlessly through the dining room. All glowing in the rosy-amber chandeliered lighting, these wondrous lucky humans, like science-fictional royalty. Replicas of some species that roamed the earth millennia ago, long before anyone could remember.

Neva saw upscale tourists from around the world and spiffy locals with their children navigating the parks throughout the day. The Blessed. Former nomads and hunter-gatherers celebrating the cultivation of nature into paths and borders, little rivers and charming gardens. They nodded to her, and their children ran up and tried to engage the twins and sometimes balls were tossed or words exchanged.

She saw young women with clotted mascara so thick it looked like caterpillars were growing from their eyelids. They were smoking cigarettes, walking arm in tattooed arm, eyeing the world suspiciously. She saw the elect themselves rolling prams big as small cars, the future lucky ones snuggled tenderly inside, and she saw herds of consumers carrying glossy shopping bags like weaponry and shields, armed with crests and titles of every description, their logos twisted from humble images of leaves or fruit or clouds into distorted symbols, brightly colored fragments of life as reduced and severed from nature as if they were cutoff human ears or human teeth or human limbs and the carriers themselves at first seemingly benign but on closer inspection crazed looking and wild in their anxious eyes and raw laughter. Neva did not know whether to love all of these people or hate them or forgive them or denounce them or accept them for what they were: a visitation from some alien planet that had entirely taken over this one.

Back at the hotel, foremost among these visitors, unreal in dimension and disarming with his benevolent gaze, awaited Steve. His office was too crowded and he preferred to do business today in his hotel suite. The enormity of his skeleton especially when he rose from a chair and unfolded himself was disorienting, an optical illusion. He was not muscular or fat or even broad, but of another scale entirely from everybody else. He was alone in the room and when Neva entered with the twins earlier than expected she was surprised to see him in a chair, his legs outstretched, a device in his hands, his reading glasses perched on his nose like a bird on a branch of a gigantic wind-twisted tree.

It's fine, he said, without looking up from his reading. The boys can stay in their room. I have some business to do here.

Neva settled the boys, who were tired from a day at the Tower of London imagining beheadings and the vomit of gore that would spew from lopped heads of naughty kings and upstarts, in front of an even-more-gruesome video game for Roman and the annotated Sherlock Holmes for Felix.

Then she closed the door behind her and walked through the central living area toward her own small room and saw Steve engaged in conversation with another man. He must have entered quietly. Neva stood in the corner of the vast yellow-fabric wallpapered room and watched them. When Steve's eyes quickly glanced at her he gave her a silent nod. Or he seemed to nod. She felt that he had indicated that she should stay. Then he continued speaking to the man.

His name was Grant. He was a young distant cousin of Steve's but one whom Steve took seriously, perhaps because of a long history with Grant's parents. He was in his early thirties and he was a chef. He had big plans for a restaurant empire. He needed a permit to build on a genius location in Laos, on the water. But there was a problem getting the permits. The local officials were being difficult.

Steve had no contacts there.

Grant knew that. He said he'd find the contacts but he needed help persuading the officials. He said he knew that Steve was brilliant at this sort of negotiation. He said Steve must have people who could help.

Three weeks later Ian traveled with Jonathan and Grant to Vang Vieng. Steve had suggested that Jonathan bring someone along to babysit and as it turned out Ian had time off from the show while some construction work was being done in the theater. Ian was there to keep Grant out of trouble while Jonathan conducted business. Ian did not have any real idea what the business was but he was happy to take a few days in Laos with the lovely girls who threw flowers from the hillsides and swam slick and topless in the water and the Bob Marley music pouring like tequila into the river and Grant introducing him to new pleasures. One day they went on flying fox swings over the Nam Song while tripping on hallucinogenic cocktails from beachfront bars. A few days later amid the seasonal rushing of the river two Australian men were killed while tubing without life jackets and drifted back downriver bloated and naked, their skin the blue-pink ombré of iridescent fish. Then it was time to go home.