Burning House (16 page)

When he returned that summer, the city looked grim. Few places to see the sky, buildings crowding each other. He looked out the window of the cab and saw a sharp-nosed gargoyle above the door of a building; he saw bums curled with their backs to buildings, sleeping expressionlessly, as if they had just shared some intimacy with the sidewalk. He thought about calling Mary, but didn’t. She had an answering machine, and he didn’t want to risk hearing Mary’s voice that was not Mary’s voice.

His last thought before he went to sleep now made him smile: as he had passed a man walking his golden retriever, the man had said to the dog, “I don’t believe you, Morty. You pissed on the one sign of life in that treebox.”

Laura Ann knew Mary. Those tearful late-night phone calls she had made months ago weren’t to some mystery lover, as he had at first suspected, but to Mary. And then the phone
calls stopped and she began to be nice to him again. “You pretend to be so casual,” she said. “It’s a good cover-up, but I know what’s underneath. I know how you spend hours with your calculator meticulously going over your bank statement. I know that you’ll even read a bad book to the end. I know how you make love.”

The last time he saw Mary, she was sitting at a table inside the Empire Diner when he was walking by. She didn’t see him. On his way back from his cash machine, he walked into the Empire. They were squirting Windex on the table where Mary and her friends had been. He went to the phone at the end of the counter and said what he’d wanted to say for a long time. “If I love anybody, I love you, Laura Ann. Admit that you’ve never forgiven me. I don’t want to come back and walk into that strain again.”

“You wouldn’t come back if you didn’t want to,” she said.

The woman at the piano bobbed her shoulders as she played “Fascinatin’ Rhythm.” A man in a gorilla suit walked in and began talking to one of the waiters, gesturing with his paw. A chauffeur, arms crossed, waited outside by a long white Cadillac.

“You love me,” she said. Then, in a near whisper: “The way I cheat and chip dried food off the plates when I’m setting the table. The way I rub your shoulders. My perfume.”

“Your voice,” he said.

“I’m exhausted.” She sighed. “Don’t take it personally if I’ve gone to sleep when you come home.”

The counterman was talking in a huddle with a waitress. “I
told
him that we don’t take reservations. ‘You show up, that’s when we take your name,’ I said to him. ‘You come back with four other people, we’ll give you the back table.’ I was just doing my job.”

Jake searched through his wallet and took out a business card. He dialed another number.

“This is Doctor Garfield,” Garfield’s voice said. “I’m not
available at this time. Please leave your message at the tone, or call me at my home in an emergency.” Garfield gave his home number, and there was a beep. Listening to the silence that followed, Jake thought: Alexander Graham Bell would never have believed that it would come to this.

Walking back to the apartment, he thought about what he had always been sure he loved: the fields in Pennsylvania, acres of them, stretching away from his aunt’s farm, so flat and green. And the porch swing, missing the middle board, that he sat on to watch sunsets. The tangled mounds of peas that he tied around thick stakes in the garden, trying to keep them growing upward. The summer his uncle ripped the honeysuckle off the porch and poured poison on the ground—the stub where the vine had begun. The porch, where the honeysuckle used to crisscross the screen, the floor transformed into complicated patterns of lace when the sunlight shone through the leaves. And the time he begged to be dressed in the neighbor’s bee-keeping suit, the big spaceman helmet with netting over the front covering his head and face, and then the unexpected, horrible dread he had felt as bees swarmed around him and crawled on the suit. He had stayed rooted to the spot, paying no attention to the neighbor, who shouted from his tractor in the not-too-far distance that it was all right—there wasn’t any way he could hurt the bees. It was a million times worse than being zipped into the stiff yellow rain slicker and sent off to school. In the field, he had been petrified. Finally, the neighbor’s voice had reached him and he knew he had to move, and he
did
move, trying hopelessly to shrug away the bees. Then he managed to turn his back on the hives, and eventually, as he walked, they disappeared behind him. He was at that point of life where he realized he wasn’t supposed to cry anymore, but he was on the verge of tears when he sat eating toast in the neighbor’s kitchen, toast soggy with butter and spread with thick, dark honey, hardly
able to swallow because his throat was so constricted. Later, watching television, looking at the way astronauts floated toward each other to connect in space, he would think about the way he must have looked. There had been one acid trip, one of the last, when he had felt that same heavy disembodiment—that he was grounded, and he had to move, but it was impossible, and if he had taken off, he would have drifted not far from the ground, at a peculiar tilt, like the old man walking through air in the Chagall painting. This realization—and this present life of confusion—was a long way from his thoughts, when he had rocked in a swing missing a board, on the front porch of a house in Pennsylvania.

She was, as she had said she would be, in bed. She didn’t open her eyes, although he thought that she had heard him walk in. If she had, this particular night, those steady green eyes might have had the power Kryptonite had on Superman. He was always struggling to think that he didn’t need her. That love didn’t mean need. That crazy conflict acid produced, of having your senses touched sharply, yet knowing you were powerless to respond. Even before acid, that sudden, strength-sucking anxiety—the fear, standing in front of the big white boxes of bees swarming in and out.

What strength it took just to lie there, eyelids lightly closed, nothing to suggest that the way she looked, curled on the bed, was a position difficult to maintain. He knew that if he asked her in the morning, she would look at him with exasperation and say that she had been asleep.

He sat at the foot of the bed. She had not pulled the shade. The streetlight, streaming light through the curtains, blotched her body—luminous shapes that were almost a triangle, almost a circle. If she had opened her eyes and seen him sitting there, smiling fondly, whatever he told her about being unsure of whether they should stay together would be discounted. Her
version of it would be that he thought about her so much and stared so often because he was in love. It would be like the story the neighbor told his aunt and uncle all summer: how he had loved those bees, how he had been mesmerized by them. And how, being a gentle boy, he had not wanted to make a move if it might possibly hurt them.

Bryce was sitting at the kitchen table in his father’s house, cutting out a picture of Times Square. It was a picture from a coloring book, but Bryce wasn’t interested in coloring; he just wanted to cut out pictures so he could see what they looked like outside the book. This drawing was of people crossing the street between the Sheraton-Astor and F. W. Woolworth. There were also other buildings, but these were the ones the people seemed to be moving between. The picture was round; it was supposed to look as if it had been drawn on a bottle cap. Bryce had a hard time getting the scissors around the edge of the cap, because they were blunt-tipped. At home, at his mother’s house in Vermont, he had real scissors and he was allowed to taste anything, including alcohol, and his half sister Maddy was a lot more fun than Bill Monteforte, who lived next door to his father here in Pennsylvania and who never had time to play. But he had missed his father, and he had been the one who called to invite himself to this house for his spring vacation.

His father, B.B., was standing in the doorway now, complaining because Bryce was so quiet and so glum. “It took quite a few polite letters to your mother to get her to let loose of you for a week,” B.B. said. “You get here and you go into a slump. It would be a real problem if you had to do anything important, like go up to bat with the bases loaded and two outs.

“Mom’s new neighbor is the father of a guy that plays for the Redskins,” Bryce said.

The scissors slipped. Since he’d ruined it, Bryce now cut on the diagonal, severing half the people in Times Square from the other half. He looked out the window and saw a squirrel stealing seed from the bird feeder. The gray birds were so tiny anyway, it didn’t look as if they needed anything to eat.

“Are we going to that auction tonight, or what?” Bryce said.

“Maybe. It depends on whether Rona gets over her headache.”

B.B. sprinkled little blue and white crystals of dishwasher soap into the machine and closed it. He pushed two buttons and listened carefully.

“Remember now,” he said, “I don’t want you getting excited at the auction if you see something you want. You put your hand up, and that’s a
bid
. You have to really, really want something and then ask me before you put your hand up. You can’t shoot your hand up. Imagine that you’re a soldier down in the trenches and there’s a war going on.”

“I don’t even care about the dumb auction,” Bryce said.

“What if there was a Turkish prayer rug you wanted and it had the most beautiful muted colors you’d ever seen in your life?” B.B. sat down in the chair across from Bryce. The back of the chair was in the shape of an upside-down triangle. The seat was a right-side-up triangle. The triangles were
covered with aqua plastic. B.B. shifted on the chair. Bryce could see that he wanted an answer.

“Or we’ll play Let’s Pretend,” B.B. said. “Let’s pretend a lion is coming at you and there’s a tree with a cheetah in it and up ahead of you it’s just low dry grass. Would you climb the tree, or start running?”

“Neither,” Bryce said.

“Come on. You’ve either got to run or
something
. There’s known dangers and unknown dangers. What would you do?”

“People can’t tell what they’d do in a situation like that,” Bryce said.

“No?”

“What’s a cheetah?” Bryce said. “Are you sure they get in trees?”

B.B. frowned. He had a drink in his hand. He pushed the ice cube to the bottom and they both watched it bob up. Bryce leaned over and reached into the drink and gave it a push, too.

“No licking that finger,” B.B. said.

Bryce wiped a wet streak across the red down vest he wore in the house.

“Is that my boy? ‘Don’t lick your finger,’ he takes the finger and wipes it on his clothes. Now he can try to remember what he learned in school from the
Book of Knowledge
about cheetahs.”

“What
Book of Knowledge?
”

His father got up and kissed the top of his head. The radio went on upstairs, and then water began to run in the tub up there.

“She must be getting ready for action,” B.B. said. “Why does she have to take a bath the minute I turn on the dishwasher? The dishwasher’s been acting crazy.” B.B. sighed. “Keep those hands on the table,” he said. “It’s good practice for the auction.”

Bryce moved the two half circles of Times Square so that they overlapped. He folded his hands over them and watched the squirrel scare a bird away from the feeder. The sky was the color of ash, with little bursts of white where the sun had been.

“I’m the same as dead,” Rona said.

“You’re not the same as dead,” B.B. said. “You’ve put five pounds back on. You lost twenty pounds in that hospital, and you didn’t weigh enough to start with. You wouldn’t eat anything they brought you. You took an intravenous needle out of your arm. I can tell you, you were nuts, and I didn’t have much fun talking to that doctor who looked like Tonto who operated on you and thought you needed a shrink. It’s water over the dam. Get in the bath.”

Rona was holding on to the sink. She started to laugh. She had on tiny green-and-white striped underpants. Her long white nightgown was hung around her neck, the way athletes drape towels around themselves in locker rooms.

“What’s funny?” he said.

“You said, ‘It’s water over the—’ Oh, you know what you said. I’m running water in the tub, and—”

“Yeah,” B.B. said, closing the toilet seat and sitting down. He picked up a Batman comic and flipped through. It was wet from moisture. He hated the feel of it.

The radio was on the top of the toilet tank, and now the Andrews Sisters were singing “Hold Tight.” Their voices were as smooth as toffee. He wanted to pull them apart, to hear distinct voices through the perfect harmony.

He watched her get into the bath. There was a worm of a scar, dull red, to the left of her jutting hipbone, where they had removed her appendix. One doctor had thought it was an ectopic pregnancy. Another was sure it was a ruptured ovary. A third doctor—her surgeon—insisted it was her appendix, and they got it just in time. The tip had ruptured.

Rona slid low in the bathtub. “If you can’t trust your body not to go wrong, what can you trust?” she said.

“Everybody gets sick,” he said. “It’s not your body trying to do you in. The mind’s only one place: in your head. Look, didn’t Lyndon Johnson have an appendectomy? Remember how upset people were that he pulled up his shirt to show the scar?”