Burning House (11 page)

“I’ll drive you to the airport,” Nick said.

“God damn it,” Benton said, “I don’t mean to be ungracious, but I realize that, Nick.” Benton was packing Olivia’s suitcase. He looked at the bedside table and sighed and held the suitcase underneath it and swept everything in. He put a sign about the continental breakfast the hotel served back on the table.

“I really love you,” Olivia said, “and when something awful happens, you treat me like shit.”

Olivia got up and Nick put his arm around her shoulder and steered her toward the door. Benton came behind them, carrying both suitcases.

“You were lucky you could get a plane this close to Thanksgiving,” Nick said.

“I guess I was. Forgot it was Thanksgiving.”

“Maybe people don’t go home for Thanksgiving anymore,” Nick said.

Nick was remembering what Thanksgiving used to be like, and the good feeling he got as a child when the holidays came and it snowed. One Christmas his parents had given him an archery set, and he had talked his father into setting it up outside in the snow. His father had been drunk and had taken a fruit cake from the kitchen counter and put the round, flat cake on top of his head like a hat, and stood to the side of the target, tipping his fruitcake hat, yelling to Nick to shoot it off his head while his mother rapped on the window, gesturing them inside.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” the woman behind the desk said to Benton.

“Fine,” Benton said.

“How you doing?” Dennis Hopper said.

“Fine,” the woman behind the desk said. She reached around Benton and handed Dennis Hopper his mail.

The security guard was sitting on a chair drinking a Coke. He was staring at them. Nick hoped that by the time he got them to the airport Olivia would have stopped crying.

“Want to come East and liven up the wake?” Benton said to Nick.

“They don’t want to see me,” Olivia said. “Why can’t I go back to the apartment?”

“You’re who I live with. My brother just died. We’re going to be with my family.”

“I wish I could go,” Nick said. “I wish I could act like everybody else in my office—phone in and say I’m having an anxiety attack.”

“Come with us,” Olivia said, squeezing his hand. “Please.”

“I can’t just get on a plane,” he said.

“If there’s a seat,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious,” Benton said. “Olivia’s probably as serious as she gets on Valium.”

“That was nasty,” she said. “I’m not stoned.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. Olivia looked at him. “About the plane, I mean,” he said.

“She misunderstands things when she’s stoned,” Benton said.

They got into Nick’s car and he pulled out onto the narrow, curving road behind the hotel. “I’ll call Ilena,” Nick said. “Are we going to miss the plane if I go back into the hotel?”

“We’ve got time,” Benton said. “Go on.”

He left the car running and went back into the hotel. The security guard was making funny whiny noises and shuffling across the floor, and the girl behind the desk was laughing. She saw him looking at them and called out: “It’s an imitation of one of the rabbits in
Watership Down
.”

The security guard, amused at his own routine, crossed his eyes and wiggled his nose.

The house in Weston was huge. It was a ten-room house on four acres, the back lawn bordered by massive fir trees, and in front of them thick vines growing large, oblong pumpkins. Around the yard were sunflowers, frost-struck, bent almost in half. Nick squatted to stare at one of their black faces.

He had seen the sunflowers curving in the moonlight when they arrived the night before and Benton’s mother, Ena, lit the yard with floodlights; the flowers were just outside the aura of light, and he had squinted before he was able to
make out what they were. It was morning now, and he was examining one. He ran his fingers across its rough face.

The reality of Wesley’s death hadn’t really hit him until he got to the house, walked across the lawn, and went inside. Then, although he hadn’t seen Wesley for years, and had never been to the house, Nick felt that Ena didn’t belong there, and that Wesley was very far away.

Ena had been waiting for them, and the house had been burning with light—hard to see from the highway, she had told Benton on the phone—but inside there was a horrible pall over everything, in spite of the brightness. He had not been able to get to sleep, and when he had slept, he had dreamed about the gigantic, bent sunflowers. Wesley was dead.

The movie they had shown on the plane, which they stared at but did not listen to, had a scene in it of a car chase through San Francisco, with Orientals smiling in the back seat of a speeding car and waving little American flags. It did not seem possible that such a thing could be happening if Wesley was really dead.

Ena was at the house because she thought that assembling there was a tribute to Wesley—no matter that in the six months he’d lived there he never invited the family to his house, and that the things they saw there now made Wesley more of an enigma And they had already begun to take his things. They obviously felt guilty or embarrassed about it, because when the three of them came in the night before, people began to confess: Elizabeth had taken Wesley’s Rapidograph, for Jason; for herself she had taken a dome-shaped paperweight, a souvenir of Texas with a longhorn cow facing down a cowboy with a lasso underwater, in a tableau that would fill with snow when the dome was shaken; Uncle Cal had taken a picture of Ena as a schoolgirl, in a heart-shaped frame. Ena had taken a keyring with three keys on it from Wesley’s night table. She did not know what locks the keys fit, because she had tried them on everything in the house
with no luck, but they were small antique keys and she wanted to get a chain for them and wear them as a necklace. Wesley was dead, drowned in Lake Champlain, two life vests floating near where the boat capsized, no explanation.

Benton came out of the house. It was a cold morning, and it was early; Nick did not feel too cold because he had found a jacket on a hook by the back door—Wesley’s, no doubt—and put it on. Benton, in the black velvet jacket, hugged his arms in front of him.

“I just realized that I dragged you here from California,” Benton said. “What are you doing out here?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I came out to look around.”

“What did you find?”

“Pumpkins still growing in his garden.”

At the back of the lawn, past a tangle of leafless berry bushes, was a fallen-down chicken coop. The roof barely cleared their heads. There was a cement floor, and most of the walls were still standing, but they were caving in, or missing boards.

“Long time since this was in operation,” Benton said.

“Imagine Wesley out in the country,” Nick said.

Most of the back wall was missing from the coop. When they came to the end, Nick jumped down, about five feet, to the ground, and Benton jumped behind him. The woods were covered with damp leaves, thickly layered.

“Although the shape that coop was in, I guess he was hardly the gentleman farmer,” Benton said. “What do you think about the way Ena’s acting?”

“Ena’s edgy.”

“She is,” Benton said. He pushed a branch out of his face; it was so brittle that it snapped. He used the piece of broken branch to poke at other branches. “I went into Jason’s bedroom and thought about kidnapping him. I didn’t even have the heart to wake him up to say hello.”

“What time was it when you came out?”

“Seven. Seven-thirty.”

They saw a white house to their left, just outside the woods, and turned back for Wesley’s house. Wind chimes were clinking from a tree beside the chicken coop—long green tubes hitting together.

Nick hadn’t seen the chimes when he walked back to the chicken coop earlier. They reminded him of the strange graveyard he and Wesley and Benton had gone through when they were in college and Wesley was a senior in high school, on a trip they took to see a friend who had moved to Charlemont, Massachusetts. It was Christmastime, after a snow, and Benton and Nick had been wearing high rubber boots. Wesley, as usual, had on his sneakers. They had sighted the snowy graveyard, and it had been somebody’s idea to walk through it. Wesley had been the first one out of the car, and he had also been the first to sight the broomstick slanted into the ground like a flagpole, with wind chimes hanging from the top of it. It was next to one of the tombstones. There was a deep path leading to it—someone had put it there earlier in the day. It looked crazy—a touch from Mardi Gras, nothing you would expect to see standing in a graveyard. The ground was frozen beneath the snow—the person had dug hard to put the broomstick in, and the chimes tinkled and clanked together in the wind. Wesley had photographed that, and also a tombstone with a larger-than-life dog stretched on top—a Borzoi, perhaps, or some odd cross—and the dog appeared to be looking toward a tree that cast a shadow. There was snow mounded on the dog’s head and back, and the tree branches it looked toward were weighted with snow.

“You know that picture Wesley took in the graveyard?” Nick said.

“The dog? The one you told him would make a fine Christmas card?”

Nick nodded yes. “You know what fascinates me about photographs? Did you ever notice the captions? Photographer
gets a shot of a dwarf running out of a burning hotel and it’s labeled ‘New York: 1968.’ Or there’s a picture of two humpbacked girls on the back of a pony, and it says ‘Central Park: 1966.’ ”

“I remember those, too,” Benton said. “I wonder why he never showed them? Nobody else in this family is modest. Even Elizabeth tacks her drawings up alongside Jason’s.” Benton kicked some moss off his shoe. “It irritated the hell out of him that I’d put my camera on a tripod and wait for the right shot. Remember how he used to carry on about how phony that was?” Benton had stopped to look at some mint, sticking out between the rubble. “He idolized you,” Benton said.

“He’s dead and I work at Boulevard Records and handle complaints about chicken that doesn’t show up,” Nick said. “He didn’t idolize me.”

They were coming closer to the house, and the tinkling of the chimes was faint. They were walking by the pumpkin vines that wove across the ground in front of the tall black-green trees.

Nick was thinking of another one of Wesley’s photographs—one he had taken when he and Benton were still in college. The three of them had been in a booth in a restaurant in New Haven, on a Sunday, and Wesley had said, “Don’t move.” They were waiting for their order, and Nick’s hands were resting on the New York
Times
. The picture was pale gray and Nick had been absolutely astonished to see what Wesley had made his hands look like. One hand seemed to be clasping the other as though it was a strange hand. Both hands had been eerily beautiful, the newspaper out of focus beneath them—hands, suspended, with one cradling, or sheltering, the other. When Wesley showed him the photograph he had been so surprised that he couldn’t speak. Finally, having had time to think, he said something close to what he meant, but not exactly what he wanted to ask. “How
did you get that softness?” he had asked Wesley, and Wesley had hesitated. Then he had said: “I developed it in Acufine.”

They went quietly into the house and stood by the heat grate in the kitchen. Nick took down a pan hanging from a nail in the beam over the stove and filled it with water for coffee. Then he sat on the kitchen table. The only real detail they knew of Wesley’s death was that the life vests had been floating near the boat. Ena had told them about it the night before. The life vests had stopped in time for Nick. She did not say anything about the color, but Nick knew as she talked that they were bright orange, and the water was gray and deep. One floated beside the boat, one farther off. He had to catch his breath when the image formed. He was as shocked as if he had been there when they recovered the body.

Benton was finding cups, putting the filter in the coffee pot. Benton turned off the burner. The bubbles grew smaller. Steam rose from the pan.

“We’re both thinking the same thing, aren’t we?” Benton said. “Capsized boat, life vests floating free, middle of winter.”

“ ‘Lake Champlain: 1978,’ ” Nick said.

Ena was knitting. The afghan covered her lap and legs and spilled onto the floor, a wide flame pattern of brown and tan and green.

“You look like a cowboy, Nickie,” she said. “Why do young men want to look like cowboys now?”

“Leave him alone,” Elizabeth said.

“I didn’t mean to criticize. I just wanted to know.”

“What am I supposed to dress like?” Nick said.

“My husband wore three-piece suits, and ties even on Saturday, and after thirty-five years of marriage he left me to marry his mistress, by whom he had a five-year-old son.”

“Forget it,” Uncle Cal said. He was leaning against the
fireplace, tapping his empty pipe against the wood, looking at Ena through yellow-tinted aviator glasses. “Spilled milk,” he said. “My brother’s a fool, and pretty soon he’s going to be an old fool. Then see how she likes him when he dribbles his martini.”

“You never got along with him before he left me,” Ena said. “You can’t feign objectivity.”

“Don’t talk about it in front of Jason,” Elizabeth said.

Jason and Benton had just come inside. Benton had been holding a flashlight while Jason picked the mint Benton and Nick had discovered earlier.

“Pick off the leaves that the frost got, and then we’ll tie the stalks with rubber bands and hang them upside down to dry,” Benton said.

It had gotten colder outside. The cold had come in with them and spread like a cloud to the living room, where it stayed for a minute until the heat began to absorb it.

“Why do they have to be upside down?”

“So the leaves can’t speak and criticize us for picking them.”

“You don’t hear all that stuff about plants having feelings anymore,” Uncle Cal said. “That was a big item, wasn’t it? Tomato plants curling their leaves when the guy who’d burned them the day before stuck a book of matches in their face the next day.” He lit his pipe.

Squeals from the kitchen as Benton held Jason upside down. “Can you talk upside down?” Benton said. “Talk to Daddy.”