Burning House (22 page)

Martin pushes aside a low-hanging branch, so I can walk by. “You know what Barnes told me this morning?” he says. “He sees his regular shrink on Monday mornings, but a few weeks ago he started seeing a young woman shrink on Tuesdays and not telling either of them about the other. Then he said he was thinking about giving both of them up and buying a camera.”

“I don’t get it.”

“He does that—he starts to say one thing, and then he adds some non sequitur. I don’t know if he wants me to question him or just let him talk.”

“Ask.”

“You wouldn’t ask.”

“I’d probably ask,” I say.

We’re walking on leaves, through bright-green fern. From far away now, he tosses another stone, but it misses the branch; it doesn’t go near the balloon.

“You know what it is?” Martin says. “He never
seems
vague or random about anything. He graduated first in his class from medical school. All summer, the bastard hit a home run every time he was up at bat. He’s got that charming, self-deprecating way of saying things—the way he was talking about the swimming pool. So when he seems to be opening up to me, it would be unsophisticated for me to ask
what going to two shrinks and giving up both of them and buying a camera is all about.”

“Maybe he talks to you because you don’t ask him questions.”

Martin is tossing an acorn in the air. He pockets it, and squeezes my hand.

“I wanted to make love to you last night,” he says, “but I knew she’d be walking through the living room all night.”

She did. She got up every few hours and tiptoed past the fold-out bed and went into the bathroom and stayed there, silently, for so long that I’d drift back to sleep and not realize she’d come out until I heard her walking back in again. Audrey has had two miscarriages in the year she’s been with Barnes. Audrey, who swore she’d never leave the city, never have children, who hung out with poets and painters, married the first respectable man she ever dated—her brother’s best friend as well—got pregnant, and grieved when she lost the first baby, grieved when she lost the second.

“Audrey will be all right,” I say, and push my fingers through his.

“We’re the ones I’m worried about,” he says. “Thinking about them stops me from talking about us.” He puts his arm around me as we walk. Our skin is sweaty—we have on too many clothes. We trample ferns I’d avoid if I were walking alone. With his head pressed against my shoulder, he says, “I need for you to talk to me. I’m out of my league with you people. I don’t know what you’re thinking, and I think you must be hating me.”

“I told you what I thought months ago. You said you needed time to think. What more can I do besides move so you have time to think?”

He is standing in front of me, touching the buttons of his wool shirt that I wear as a jacket, then brushing my hair behind my shoulders.

“You went, just like that,” he says. “You won’t tell me what your life is like.”

He moves his face toward mine, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but he only closes his eyes, puts his forehead against mine. “You know all my secrets,” he whispers, “and when we’re apart I feel like they’ve died inside you.”

At dinner, we’ve all had too much to drink. I study Martin’s face across the table and wonder what secrets he had in mind. That he’s afraid of driving over bridges? Afraid of gas stoves? That he can’t tell a Bordeaux from a Burgundy?

Barnes has explained, by drawing a picture on a napkin, how a triple-bypass operation is done. Audrey accidentally knocks over Barnes’s glass, and the drawing of the heart blurs under the spilled water. Martin says, “That’s a penis, Doctor.” Then he scribbles on my napkin, drips water on it, and says, “That is also a penis.” He is pretending to be taking a Rorschach test.

Barnes takes another napkin from the pile in the middle of the table and draws a penis. “What’s that?” he says to Martin.

“That’s a mushroom,” Martin says.

“You’re quite astute,” Barnes says. “I think you should go into medicine when you get over your crisis.”

Martin wads up a napkin and drops it in the puddle running across the table from Barnes’s napkin. “Did you ever have a crisis in
your
life?” he says to him, mopping up.

“Not that you observed. There were a few weeks when I thought I was going to be second in my class in med school.”

“Aren’t you embarrassed to be such an overachiever?” Martin says, shaking his head in amazement.

“I don’t think about it one way or another. It was expected of me. When I was in high school, I got stropped by my old man for every grade that wasn’t an A.”

“Is that true?” Audrey says. “Your father beat you?”

“It’s true,” Barnes says. “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.” He pours himself some more wine. “I can’t stand pain,” he says. “That’s part of why I went into medicine. Because I think about it all the time anyway, and doing what I do I can be grateful every day that it’s somebody else’s suffering. When I was a resident, I’d go to see the patient after surgery and leave the room and puke. Nurses puke sometimes. You hardly ever see a doctor puke.”

“Did you let anybody comfort you then?” Audrey says. “You don’t let anybody comfort you now.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Barnes says. He takes a drink of wine, raising the glass with such composure that I wouldn’t know he was drunk if he wasn’t looking into the goblet at the same time he was drinking. He puts the glass back on the table. “It’s easier for me to talk to men,” he says. “Men will only go so far, and women are so single-minded about soothing you. I’ve always thought that once I started letting down I might lose my energy permanently. Stay here and float in a swimming pool all day. Read. Drink. Not keep going.”

“Barnes,” Audrey says, “this is awful.” She pushes her bangs back with one hand.

“Christ,” Barnes says, leaning over and taking her hand from her face. “I sound like some character out of D. H. Lawrence. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He gets up. “I’m going to get the other pizza out of the oven.”

On the way into the kitchen, he hits his leg on the coffee table. Geodes rattle on the glass tabletop. On the table, in a wicker tray, there are blue stones, polished amethysts, inky-black pebbles from a stream, marbles with clouds of color like smoke trapped inside. The house is full of things to touch—silk flowers you have to put a finger on to see if they’re real, snow domes to shake, Audrey’s tarot cards. Audrey is looking at Martin now with the same bewildered look that she gets when she lays out the tarot cards and studies them. Martin
takes her hand. He is still holding her hand when Barnes comes back, and only lets go when Barnes begins to lower the pizza to the center of the table.

“I’m sorry,” Barnes says. “It’s not a good time to be talking about my problems, is it?”

“Why not?” Martin says. “Everybody’s been their usual witty and clever self all weekend. It’s all right to talk about real things.”

“Well, I don’t want to make a fool of myself anymore,” Barnes says, cutting the pizza into squares. “Why don’t you talk about what it’s like to have lived with Lynn for so many years and then suddenly she’s famous.” Barnes puts a piece of pizza on my plate. He serves a piece to Martin. Audrey holds her fingers above her plate. For a drunken minute, I don’t realize she’s saying she doesn’t want more food—her fingers are hovering lightly, the way they do when she picks up a tarot card.

“Last Monday I put in an all-nighter,” Barnes says to me. “Matty Klein was with me. We were riding down Park Avenue afterwards, and your song came on the radio. We were both so amazed. Not at what we’d just pulled off in five hours of surgery but that there we were in the back of a cab with the sun coming up and you were singing on the radio. I’m still used to the way you were singing with Audrey in the kitchen a while ago—the way you just sing, and she sings along. Then I realized in the cab that that wasn’t private anymore.” He takes another drink of wine. “Am I making any sense?” he says.

“It makes perfect sense,” Martin says. “Try to explain that to her.”

“It’s not private,” I say. “Other things are private, but that’s just me singing a song.”

Barnes pushes his chair back from the table. “I’ll tell you what I never get over,” he says. “That I can take my hands out of somebody’s body, wash them, get in a cab, go home,
and hardly wait to get into bed with Audrey to touch her, because that’s so mysterious. In spite of what I do, I haven’t found out anything.”

“Is this leading up to your saying again that you don’t know why I’ve had two miscarriages?” Audrey says.

“No, I wasn’t thinking about that at all,” Barnes says.

“I’ll tell you what I thought it was about,” Martin says. “I thought that Barnes wanted me to tell everybody why I’ve freaked out now that Lynn’s famous. It doesn’t seem very … timely of me to be pulling out now.”

“When did I say that what I wanted was to be famous?” I say.

“I can’t do it,” Audrey says. “It’s too hard to pretend to be involved in what other people are talking about when all I can think about are the miscarriages.”

She is the first to cry, though any of us might have been.

Bruno, the dog, has shifting loyalties. Because Martin threw the football for him after dinner, he has settled by our bed in the living room. His sleep is deep, and fitful: paws flapping, hard breaths, a tiny, high-pitched yelp once as he exhales. Martin says that he is having running dreams. I close my eyes and try to imagine Bruno’s dream, but I end up thinking about all the things he probably doesn’t dream about: the blue sky, or the hardness of the field when the ground gets cold. Or, if he noticed those things, they wouldn’t seem sad.

“If I loved somebody else, would that make it easier?” Martin says.

“Do you?” I say.

“No. I’ve thought that that would be a way out, though. That way you could think I was just somebody you’d misjudged.”

“Everybody’s changing so suddenly,” I say. “Do you realize that? All of a sudden Barnes wants to open up to us, and you want to be left alone, and Audrey wants to forget about the
life she had in the city and live in this quiet place and have children.”

“What about you?” he says.

“Would it make sense to you that I’ve stopped crying and feeling panicky because I’m in love with somebody else?”

“I’ll bet that’s true,” he says. I feel him stroking the dog. This is what he does to try to quiet him without waking him up—gently rubbing his side with his foot. “Is it true?” he says.

“No. I’d like to hurt you by having it be true, though.”

He reaches for the quilt folded at the foot of the bed and pulls it over the blanket.

“That isn’t like you,” he says.

He stops stroking the dog and turns toward me. “I feel so locked in,” he says. “I feel like we’ve got to come out here every weekend. I feel it’s inevitable that there’s a ‘we.’ I feel guilty for feeling bad, because Barnes’s father beat him up, and my sister lost two babies, and you’ve been putting it all on the line, and I don’t feel like I’m keeping up with you. You’ve all got more energy than I do.”

“Martin—Barnes was dead-drunk, and Audrey was in tears, and before it was midnight I had to admit I was exhausted and go to bed.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “You don’t understand what I mean.”

We are silent, and I can hear the house moving in the wind. Barnes hasn’t put up the storm windows yet. Air leaks in around the windows. I let Martin put his arm around me for the warmth, and I slide lower in the bed so that my shoulders are under the blanket and quilt.

“What I meant is that I’m not entitled to this,” Martin says. “With what he goes through at the hospital, he’s entitled to get blasted on Saturday night. She’s got every right to cry. Your head’s full of music all the time, and that wears you down, even if you aren’t writing or playing.” He whispers,
even more quietly, “What did you think when he said that about his father beating him?”

“I wasn’t listening to him any more than you two were. You know me. You know I’m always looking for a reason why it was all right that my father died when I was five. I was thinking maybe it would have turned out awful if he had lived. Maybe I would have hated him for something.”

Martin moves his head closer to mine. “Let me go,” he says, “and I’m going to be as unmovable as that balloon in the tree.”

Bruno whimpers in his sleep, and Martin moves his foot up and down Bruno’s body, half to soothe himself, half to soothe the dog.

I didn’t know my father was dying. I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what dying was. I’ve always known simple things: how to read the letter a stranger hands me and nod, how to do someone a favor when they don’t have my strength. I remember that my father was bending over—stooped with pain, I now realize—and that he was winter-pale, though he died before cold weather came. I remember standing with him in a room that seemed immense to me at the time, in sunlight as intense as the explosion from a flashbulb. If someone had taken that photograph, it would have been a picture of a little girl and her father about to go on a walk. I held my hands out to him, and he pushed the fingers of the gloves tightly down each of my fingers, patiently, pretending to have all the time in the world, saying, “This is the way we get ready for winter.”