Burning House (13 page)

“It’s cold,” he said.

“Better ways to keep warm.”

He was looking at the speedometer, to make sure he was driving fast enough. It felt like he was floating. He accelerated a little, watched the needle climb. Drunken driving.

“Pull over,” Elizabeth said, hand over her mouth, other hand on his wrist. He did, quickly, expecting her to be sick.

Wind blew in the car as she jumped out and ran through the leaves unsteadily, over to a stone wall. He looked away as she bent over.

She came back to the car carrying a cat.

“I got myself something nice,” she said, shivering.

“It’s somebody’s cat,” he said.

“He might be your friend, but he’s a real bastard. Telling Jason that lizards are called Lizzie.”

“Get even with Benton,” he said. “Don’t get even with me.”

She looked at him, and he knew exactly where Jason got his perturbed expression, the look that crossed his face when his mother told him that Uncle Cal’s mattress was not a toy.

“That’s what they’re all doing,” she said. “They’re all at Wesley’s house getting even. Olivia singing in the tub to pretend that everything’s cool, Cal being nice to Ena because his last EKG readout scared him and he wants to be sure she’ll nurse him. Benton playing Daddy. That one really kills me.”

The cat hopped into the back seat. He looked at it. Its eyes were glowing.

“What I like about animals is that they’re not pretentious,” she said.

“You’ve taken somebody’s cat,” he said.

She was pathetic and ridiculous, but neither of those things explained why the affection he felt for her was winning out over annoyance. He couldn’t remember if she had propositioned
him, or if he had just imagined it. He put his head against the window. It seemed like a situation he would have found himself in in college. It was a routine from years ago. He took her hand.

“This is silly,” he said.

He did not know her license-plate number, so he put down *?—#! on the registration form. Then, realizing what he had done, he blacked that out and wrote in a series of imaginary numbers.

The motel was on Route 58, just off the Merritt Parkway. He was careful to notice where he was, because he thought that when he went out to the parking lot, she might simply have driven away. He gave the woman his credit card, got it back, slipped the room key across the counter until it fell off the edge into his hand instead of trying to pick it up with his fingers, and went out to the parking lot. She was in the car, holding the cat. He knocked on her window. She got out of the car. The cat, in her arms, looked all around.

“I know where there’s an all-night diner,” she said drunkenly.

“You seem to know your way around very well.”

“I used to come see Wesley,” she said.

She said it matter-of-factly, climbing the stairs in back of him, and at first he didn’t get it. “And I know for a fact that he didn’t intend to use all the servicemen Ena used, and that when he had wood delivered it wasn’t going to be the famous Hanley Paulson who brought it,” she said, as he put the key in the lock and opened the door. “He might have left New York to nursemaid Ena, but he was only going so far. He was a nice person, and people took advantage of him.”

He held her. He put his arms around her back and hugged her. This was Benton’s ex-wife, Wesley’s lover, standing in front of him in a black sweater and black silk underpants, and
instead of its seeming odd to him, it only made him feel left out that he was the only one who had no connection with her.

“Who was the man who drowned with him?” she said, as if Nick would know. “Nobody he cared about, because I never heard of him. I didn’t even know he was Wesley’s friend.”

The cat was watching them. It was sitting in a green plastic chair, and when he looked at the cat, the cat began to lick its paw. Elizabeth drew away from him to see why he had stopped stroking her back.

“Would you like to forget about it and go to the diner?” she said.

“I was thinking about the cat,” he said. “We ought to return the cat.”

“If you want to return the cat, you go return the cat.”

“We can do it later,” he said.

Later, he got hopelessly lost looking for the road where they had gotten the cat. He thought that he had found just the place, but when he got out of the car he saw that there was no stone wall. He carried the cat back to the car and consulted Elizabeth. She had no idea where they were. Finally he had to backtrack all the way to the bar and find the road from there that they had been on earlier. He got out of the car, carrying the cat. He dropped it on the stone wall. It didn’t move.

“It wants to go with us,” Elizabeth called out the window.

“How do you know?” he said. He felt foolish for asking, for assuming that she might know.

“Bring it back,” she said.

The cat sat and stared. He picked it up again and walked back to the car with it. It jumped out of his arms, into the back seat.

“What he says to Jason is very clever,” Elizabeth said, as he started the car. “I’d be amused, if Jason weren’t my son.”

When he found out that she and Wesley had been lovers, it had been clear to him that she was sleeping with him to exorcise Wesley’s ghost, or to get even with him for dying; now he wondered if she had told him to go to the motel to get even with Benton, too.

“If you want Benton to know about what happened tonight, you’re going to have to tell him yourself. I’m not telling him,” he said.

Her face was not at all the face in the picture of Benton’s wallet from years ago. Her eyes were shut as if she were asleep, but her face was not composed.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m used to it,” she said. She rummaged in her purse and pulled her brush out and began brushing her hair. “If the family had known about Wesley and me, they’d write that off as retaliation, too. They love easy answers.”

They were on the road that led to the house, passing houses that stood close to the road. There was nothing in California that corresponded to the lights burning in big old New England houses at night. It made him want to live in this part of the world again, to be able to drive and see miles of dark fields. The apple orchards, the low rock walls, the graveyards. A lot of people went through them, and it did not mean that they were preoccupied with death. The car filled with light when a car with its high beams on came toward them. For a few seconds he saw his hands on either side of the wheel and thought, sadly, that what Wesley had seen about them had never come true.

“At the risk of being misunderstood as looking for sympathy, there’s one other thing I want to tell you about Benton,” Elizabeth said. “He used to put his camera on his tripod and take pictures of Jason when he was an infant—roll after roll. He’d stand by his crib and take pictures of Jason when he was sleeping. I remember asking him why he was taking so
many pictures when Jason’s expression wasn’t changing, and you know what he said? He said that he was photographing light.”

Déjà vu: Ena with the afghan, Uncle Cal circling figures on the stock page, knocking his empty pipe against the old wooden chest in front of the sofa with the regular motion of a metronome, Elizabeth reading a book, her feet tucked primly beneath her, coffee steaming on the table by her chair.

“Went out and got drunk,” Uncle Cal said in greeting. “I couldn’t.” He tapped his shirt pocket. It made a crinkling noise. Pipe cleaners stuck out of the pocket, next to a pack of cigarettes.

Elizabeth was reading
A Tale of Two Cities
. She continued to read as if he hadn’t come into the room. The cat was curled by the side of the chair.

“Hanley Paulson isn’t coming,” Elizabeth said.

“We can go to lunch and leave him a note and the check,” Uncle Cal said.

“That would be just fine,” Ena said. “He’s not a common delivery person—he’s a friend of long standing.”

“Maybe someone told him Wesley was dead, and he isn’t coming.”

“I called him,” Ena said. “Not Wesley.”

“Wesley wouldn’t have paid seventy-five dollars for half a cord of wood,” Elizabeth said.

“Everyone is perfectly free to go out,” Ena said.

Nick went into the kitchen. He saw Benton and Jason and Olivia, all red-cheeked, with puffs of air coming out of their mouths. They were playing some sort of game in which they came very close to Olivia and ducked at the last second, so she couldn’t reach out and touch them. The sky was gray-white, and it looked like snow. Olivia was loosening the scarf around her neck and lighting one of her hand-rolled narrow
cigarettes. Either that, or she had stopped caring and was smoking a joint. He watched her puff. A regular cigarette. Olivia’s jeans were rolled to the knee, and the bright red socks she wore reminded him of the large red stocking his uncle had hung by the mantel for him when he was young. “Let’s see Santa fill that,” his uncle had laughed, as the toe of the stocking grazed the hearth. In the morning, his usual stocking was in the toe of the large stocking, and his father was glaring at his uncle. His father did not even like his brother—how could he have wanted to send him to live with him?

Uncle Cal came into the kitchen and took cheese out of the refrigerator.

“I’m going to grill some French bread with cheese on top,” he said. “Will anyone share my lunch?”

“Give me whatever you’re having,” Ena said.

“No, thank you,” Elizabeth said.

“Not good for me, but I love it,” Uncle Cal said to Nick. “You?”

“Sure,” Nick said.

“You watch it so it doesn’t get too brown,” Uncle Cal said, smoothing Brie over the two halves of bread. “I’m going out for a second to clear my lungs.”

Nick looked out the window. Uncle Cal was bending forward, cupping his hands, lighting a cigarette. He had only taken one puff when a car pulled into the driveway.

“Is that Hanley’s truck?” Ena called.

“It’s just a car,” Nick said.

“I hope it isn’t someone coming to express sympathy unannounced,” Ena said. She was still wearing her pajamas, and a quilted Chinese coat.

Nick watched as a boy got out of the car and Benton went to talk to him. Benton and the boy talked for a while, and then Benton left him standing there, Jason circling his car
with one arm down, one arm high, buzzing like a plane. Benton pushed open the kitchen door.

“Where do you want the wood stacked?” he called.

“Is that Hanley Paulson?” Ena asked, getting up.

“It’s his son. He wants to know where to put the wood.”

“Oh, dear,” Ena said, pulling off her jacket and going to the closet for her winter coat. “Outside the kitchen door where it will be sheltered, don’t you think?”

Benton closed the kitchen door.

“Where’s Hanley?” Ena said, hurrying past Nick. Still in her slippers, she went onto the lawn. “Are you Hanley’s son?” Nick heard her say. “Please come in.”

The boy walked into the kitchen behind Ena. He had a square face, made squarer by dirty blond bangs, cut straight across. He stood in the kitchen, hands plunged in his pockets, looking at Ena.

“Where would you like the wood, ma’am?” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “well, Hanley always stacks it at my house under the overhang by the kitchen door. We can do the same thing here, don’t you think?”

“It’s ten dollars extra for stacking,” the boy said.

When the boy left the kitchen, Ena went out behind him. Nick watched her standing outside the door as the boy went to his car and backed it over the lawn. He opened the back hatch and began to load the wood out.

“This is very dry wood?” Ena said.

“This is what he gave me to deliver,” the boy said.

Jason put his arms up for a ride, and Benton plopped him on his shoulders. Jason’s dirty shoes had made streaks down the front of Benton’s jacket. Uncle Cal put his arm through Olivia’s, and the two of them began to walk toward the back of the property. Nick watched Ena as she looked first toward Uncle Cal and Olivia, then to Benton and Jason, charging a squirrel, Benton hunching forward like a bull.

“Everyone has forgotten about lunch,” Ena said, corning back into the kitchen. She broke off a piece of the cooked bread and took a bite. She put it on the counter and poured herself a drink, then went back into the living room with the piece of bread and the glass of bourbon and sat in her chair, across from Elizabeth.

“Hanley Paulson would have come in for coffee,” Ena said. “I don’t know that I would have wanted that young man in for coffee.”

Nick tore off a piece of bread and went into the living room. Ena was knitting. Elizabeth was reading. He thought that he might as well get the plane that night for California. He got up to answer the phone, hoping it was Ilena, but Elizabeth got up more quickly than he, and she went into the dining room and picked it up. She spoke quietly, and he could only catch a few words of what she said. Since Ena could hear no better than he could, he did not think she was crying because the phone calls expressing sympathy about Wesley’s death made her remember. He felt certain that she was weeping because of the way things had worked out with Hanley Paulson’s son. It was the first time he had ever seen Ena cry. She kept her head bent and sniffed a little. Elizabeth was on the phone a long while, and after a few deep sniffs Ena finally raised her head.

“How do your parents like Scottsdale, Nickie?” she said.

“They like it,” he said. “They always wanted to get away from these cold winters.”

“The winter is bad,” Ena said, “but the people have great character. At least they used to have great character.” She began to knit again. “I can’t imagine why Cal would leave that fabulous house in Essex for that monstrosity in East Hampton. You always liked it here, didn’t you, Nickie?”

“I was hoping it would snow,” he said. “But I guess with just my cowboy suit, I’m not really prepared for it.”

Uncle Cal came into the living room and asked Ena if he
should tip Hanley Paulson’s son. Ena told him that she didn’t see why, but Nick could tell from Uncle Cal’s expression that he intended to do it anyway.

“He wants to know if it’s all right to take a few of the pumpkins,” Uncle Cal said. Before Ena answered, he said: “Of course I told him to help himself.”