Burning Down the House (7 page)

O
N THE JET
from London back to New York there were two pilots, two flight attendants, superb food, cashmere blankets. There were no rules about not using electronics. Poppy surfed fashion sites for a while until Patrizia got up from her generous leather seat next to Steve, and Poppy assumed her place in it. She wrapped her thin self up in a thick blanket. Steve ignored her for some time and then removed his reading glasses and fell into conversing with her. He spoke warmly to her and with a studied expansiveness of spirit. From time to time Roman and Felix looked up from their devices and noticed, expressionless, Steve speaking to Poppy in a way that he rarely spoke to them. It wasn't merely because of the difference in age that he used an unusual tone with her; it was because she aroused an intensity in everyone.

Why does she always get what she wants? said Roman under his breath.

Felix shot him a look. She doesn't, he said, and kept reading.

Steve was already leaning in and lowering his voice to Poppy.

He studied her face with a deep understanding that wetted his eyes. He sketched for her the problematic nature of her desire to work for him instead of going to college, his hands holding his glasses and sculpting in the air with an architectural clarity invisible diagrams of the obstacles before her. He presented for her consideration the complexities of land-use transactions, references to obscure tax codes, the psychological difficulties of people in their twenties who lose their way, certain passages from Shakespeare that related to her ambition and impatience, speculations on what might become of her future if she were to isolate herself from her peers in a way that constituted practically an anthropological experiment. Poppy listened to him with great attention and before he was done she had started crying.

Patrizia returned from the restroom and her fifteen minutes of moving her legs. She looked down at Steve.

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.

T
HAT 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.

A
LONG WIDE ROAD
that cut through the city like an absence of city, cars swerving all over the dirt, no lanes, small buildings, almost too small for people, stretching out from either side of the road. This was Laos and Ian felt uncharacteristically free as he and Jonathan and Grant sped out of Vientiane toward the riverside town in which Grant wanted to build a restaurant.

They rode in the direction of green misty mountains that huddled behind one another like children's heads forming a crowd around something of interest. In this case it was just wide brown road, fewer cars now, some bicyclists, backpackers here and there walking in twos and threes. The air felt light and floral and as if there were nothing separating Ian from his vacation. He was one with the easy sweetness and lazy freedom. That he was here on some mission, to be useful in some way, escaped him and lifted like a kite into the sky. Eventually, gone.

At the tourist town twenty-somethings had overtaken the local culture: tubing, zip-lining, mushroom shakes, everyone half naked, the village children dealing drugs, the bars open all night, the idea of civilization floating down the river like a used condom. Grant and Ian headed to get a drink while Jonathan met with two officials in a back room. They sat at a wooden table, discussing.

Jonathan listened to their reasons for declining a permit. The town was overrun. These tourists had no respect for the Laotians. It was time to crack down on the partying, not encourage it. Music was blowing into the dim room from riverside beaches. Jonathan sipped a Coke and sniffed as he listened to the two men make their case.

Thing is, he said when they finished, my cousin really believes in this restaurant. He thinks it will be good for the town. He'll keep it clean.

That's what they all say, the men said.

Jonathan looked down at the table and smiled with his jaw. Well, this time it's true.

The officials sat silently.

He looked back up at the men.

You know, it could all disappear in a minute. You might think that would be good but all the money coming in: poof, gone, that wouldn't be so good. You're lucky all these kids like coming here.

One of the men closed his eyes. The other lit a cigarette.

Might not be so great for you if the kids moved on someplace else. Like, if it got dangerous around here and they decided to find a new party town.

What do you mean, dangerous?

I don't know. Like for example if a few too many of these drunk kids got in the tubes or on the zip lines and fell in the water during the rapid season. That kind of thing. The area could get a bad reputation.

It's the law that they have to wear life jackets.

Jonathan laughed. Some of them look a little too—a lot too—stoned to pay attention to that.

What are you saying?

I'm not saying anything. Just you might want to think about how important this commerce is to you. The American way is to welcome business, not discourage it.

This is not America.

Jonathan finished his Coke.

Yeah, I get that, he said putting down the bottle. Just think about it. I'll be here for a couple of days.

He found Ian and Grant and the three of them hiked several miles to some caves. The hike was hot and the bugs flew in and out of Ian's eyes and mouth. In the damp cave Jonathan handed over money to a man who nodded and translated to his friends while Grant kept a lookout into the blindingly white sunny entrance bounded by leaves. Ian waited outside, as Jonathan had asked him to. The bugs were a little better at the mouth of the cave.

The next day, a few of the men from the cave help two tourists locate some exceptionally strong cocktails. Now, in the afternoon, the tourists are guided to a flying fox, a zip line that runs above the water. The two muscular men get strapped, without life jackets, into their harnesses.

On an opposite hill the man who had taken the money in the cave takes out a gun. The two tourists swing along the line. Neither courage nor fear in their faces, just an expression of astonished pleasure. The man on the hillside lifts his black gun and he pulls the trigger and the shot hits the place where the harnesses attach to the line.

The explosion is muffled by the sound of the rushing river. Just a shudder of foliage that not even nearby hikers would notice. Two strong athletic bodies drop down in a sudden plummet of flesh and the expressions on their faces smear from excitement to terror in a blur like a face in a Francis Bacon painting. There was one in Steve's office. Jonathan had always admired it.

Holy shit, Grant says later when he hears about the accident.

Oh my God, Ian says.

Drunken idiots, Jonathan says.

Jonathan knows that he has gone too far, that Steve would be upset with him if he were to find out, but he figures that Steve will never find out. That no one will.

And he is usually correct in these matters.

The bodies of the two Australians were found later that day. Local officials announced that new laws would be enacted to prevent zip-lining during the rapid season. Life jackets are mandatory, tourists were reminded. Flyers went up on the doors of the bars. Before they left, Jonathan and Ian and Grant stopped off at an office in a neighboring town and picked up a permit for Grant's restaurant. Jonathan took them out for a last drink that night and held the permit up to the torchlight and turned it this way and that and said: We could have just forged this thing. It's like a handwritten receipt. Just one stamp on it that could be anything.

Ian's face looked somber and confused. I keep thinking about those two guys whipping around in the water like underwear in a washing machine, he said.

Poor assholes, said Jonathan.

Taste this, Grant said.

They each had a forkful of the sauce-covered fish that he was eating. He said he was going to put something like it on his menu, but with more of a citrusy flavor. It would be his signature dish. Ian and Jonathan closed their eyes while they savored the food and made odd moaning sounds. Strange, pained manifestations of delight came over their shadowy faces, under the flare of the flickering torches.