Burning Down the House Read online

  —

  That she remembers the moment at all will make her feel as though she must have had some awareness, some information. Information that her mind did not actually know it had. This makes her feel guilty. It is a familiar feeling.

  —

  The first time they saw S— they confronted pastoral green lawns and grazing sheep, many louche and unnaturally natural trees, and, after much winding road, a grand and stately stone house. As they pulled up, several men with headsets and strong arms arrived to open doors and whisk away belongings. One of them was the leader of the headset men and he welcomed everyone and gestured to the other men about valises and rooms. Jonathan checked his phone as he made the quick walk from the car to the vast foyer with its enormously high ceiling and checkerboard marble floor. He took a sharp inhalation and then exhaled slowly as he scrolled through his texts. Without looking up, he said to Miranda, and to the assembled in general, that the twins, Felix and Roman, would be arriving later in the day at the airstrip with their mother Patrizia, along with the new nanny, a Slavic girl. As he said “a Slavic girl” Alix saw that he ran his fingers through his hair and looked quickly sideways at Miranda. The last nanny had been Brazilian and Alix could tell that Jonathan hoped the word “Slavic” conjured something pale and unthreatening in Miranda’s mind. And his.

  2

  IT HAD BEEN raining on and off for hours when Ian showed up and then the skies cleared, if only for a little while. Alix had unpacked and tried on her new dress for the wedding and taken it off. She’d put her jeans and sweater back on and looked out the window. It was a gigantic window and you could see the suddenly visible sunlight being thrown down in big fistfuls between the clouds, spilling out onto the extensive and still-wet grounds. She took in the view as if she were draining a glass and then stepped out of the room.

  —

  Again, her thoughts turned to Ian. Ian had been Alix’s best friend since their first week at college nearly twenty years ago. Ian had helped her home from their first party, the one with the nitrous tanks in the apartment at the Roosevelt. Ian had stayed with her until all hours at the Castle Bar, the ripped leatherette seat of the banquette wet with sweat on her miniskirted thighs. Ian now lives across the lobby from her in the Village in the building her father owns, her family having given Ian a rent-stabilized one-bedroom that had made it possible for him to stick it out in the theater world until he had had a hit. Ian brings her stories and confidences at the end of a hard day, handing them to her like the detritus from a little boy’s pocket. She knows Ian keeps secrets from her, but the ones he shares are worth more to her than anything. She knows she is in love with Ian, but she knows that part of why she loves him is that he will never love her back in the same way.

  —

  The long hall in the grand house led to a wide staircase, and Alix followed a band of dusty light along the banister toward the portrait-lined gallery. Just then Ian rounded the corner below, entering from the marble-checkerboard-floored foyer into the gallery, and headed up the staircase. They met halfway on the wide, shallow, green-carpeted steps. Ian stood before Alix and swayed slightly. His wet hair dripped onto his shirt collar. His gray eyes were gentle and clear. He held a piece of luggage in one hand. Are you going to give me a hug or should I just get the hell out of your way?

  Do I look that bad? said Alix.

  Not bad, just distressed. But I’m here now. Ian smiled. You don’t believe it yet, do you?

  He put down his bag.

  Alix looked at his smile. Very familiar, very comforting, an embrace. She tilted her head at him. Really? Do I look okay?

  Ian eyed her up and down. Refined. Aware. Authentic in a cool way. No one else would guess you were having a terrible time.

  Thank you, I think.

  Can you show me to my room?

  Where’s the guy? The headset?

  I told him I’d find it myself.

  Which means I will find it for you. Follow me, she said.

  As they walked, she said, I’m sorry I asked you to come to this.

  Why? I love it! I feel like I’m in a movie.

  Miranda is thinking of calling it off.

  I don’t care. I’m not here for the nuptials. Just to be here for you.

  You are a true friend. Really.

  They crossed a threshold. Ian looked around the grand bedroom. This’ll do, he said.

  They sat side by side on the brocade bedspread and gazed though the room’s original wavy-paned-glass window together, across undulating gardens and lawns.

  —

  Ian remembers sitting so many years ago in college on the lawn outside the library with Alix, the green grass stretching out around them, carpeting their world. The force of that memory sweeps through him for an instant. He feels an ache, a longing to be eighteen. But if I were eighteen I wouldn’t be here, he reasons. And for now that is enough.

  —

  Patrizia here? asked Ian.

  Not yet. Coming soon with the twins and a new nanny.

  Steve?

  Later. No one knows exactly when.

  And where’s Poppy?

  Not yet materialized, said Alix.

  You talk about her as if she were a spirit.

  She is, sort of. She seems to float through life. You know what I mean. Anyway, she has a boyfriend whom she was reluctant to leave, so she’s taking the last possible plane.

  Ian turned to face Alix.

  A boyfriend?

  She’s seventeen. It’s still called a boyfriend isn’t it?

  I thought they just “hooked up.”

  We’re old. We wouldn’t know.

  Ian took off his jacket.

  —

  The ache of a moment ago is gone, his inchoate feelings for Poppy replacing the ache with a drift of desire. He thinks, he wishes, he knows: he is young.

  She just finished her junior year, right? He said, Where’s she going to apply to college?

  College. He remembers: meeting Alix, their instant closeness, her introducing him to new worlds, to her aunt Diana, the surprisingly glamorous grad student who would become his mentor. He can’t imagine anything more idyllic than his time at college.

  —

  She doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to leave the boyfriend. Isn’t very into school these days. Steve is annoyed.

  So what will happen?

  She’ll go.

  You’re sure?

  We’ll see. How are you? How’s the show?

  A curl formed on Ian’s mouth. His eyes shut and opened a little too slowly.

  It’s going well. A lot of late nights. Thank God I love the music. The story’s good but it needs work.

  You’re reliving the eighties! Our youth. How fun.

  Ian closed and opened his eyes again.

  That’s why I’m doing it, right?

  No. You’re doing it to make a lot of money. Your shows always do.

  You’re wrong. My shows make money, but I don’t. And anyway, that’s not why I do it.

  Oh really? You do it for art?

  Don’t be an idiot. I mean, yes, for art, but that’s not the only reason.

  He had gotten up and hung his jacket in the closet. He went to the bathroom and took a plush towel and was rubbing his head with it to dry his hair.

  He smiled and they looked at each other for a long time.

  I do it so I won’t buy a gun and blow my brains out in a gorgeous red mess all over the wall.

  Ah, she said. Got it. Would you like to greet the bride and groom?

  —

  This family, he thinks. It is amazing how people can be so lucky and so miserable. Alix, with her inability to feel pleasure, how can she go on? But she does and he loves her for it, in spite of it, because of it. Along with her money, she has an unseemly almost-buffoonish sense of gloom. He accepts her, her unhappiness, not only accepts it, likes it.

  3

  JONATHAN STOOD in his underwear holding his phone. He said Come in when Ian an
d Alix knocked and then Oh fuck when he looked at his texts. When they walked in, he said: Patrizia and the twins just landed. Who wants to come with me to get them?

  You guys have a good time, said Alix. Enjoy.

  Ian stood waiting and as Alix walked out he grabbed her hand but she kept walking.

  You sending me to the wolves? he called after her. I just got here.

  Jonathan ripped the tag off of a sweater with his teeth and let it drop to the floor. He pulled the garment over his head as if he’d just killed an animal and was wearing its skin. He did the same thing with his pants. He left the room a crime scene of bags and clothes and products. He and Ian went out and down the hall. Vlad was waiting in a larger car on the gravel drive.

  —

  Has Alix always been such a bitch? Jonathan said. You’ve known her about as long as I have.

  Yes, said Ian. But she’s nothing compared to you.

  Jonathan smiled out the window. His jaw twitched. You’re so right, he said. He tilted his head forward, laughing, and began to slide into a knowingly sexy slouch.

  Ian ignored it and looked out his own window into the infinite shades of green. Ian thinks: I must believe that Poppy will be on this plane, otherwise why would I be in the car with Jonathan. This is the only explanation.

  —

  At the airstrip, Roman was running down the field waving his arms around and kicking up dirt and laughing maniacally. He looked like a sped-up film of a person from another era, only instead of from the past he had come from the future. His brother Felix was the opposite: slow, graceful, curious, a vision of a boy from a previous century. Behind them the plane was already taxiing and gliding away into the dreamy British afternoon.

  —

  Jonathan had pushed the fantasy of his much-younger half brothers’ Slavic nanny out of his mind for a few hours and now it arrived before him in the flesh and he seemed to unhinge inside and surrender air. Ian saw this happen as they approached her. The young woman was walking with Patrizia, Jonathan’s stepmother, who eventually greeted him in her courtly way. Ian could tell by the way Jonathan closed his eyes when he kissed Patrizia that he was affected by the presence of the new woman.

  Now the party can start, Jonathan said breathlessly, although he hadn’t been running.

  Patrizia kissed him several times on alternating cheeks and introduced him to Neva. They nodded hello. Ian too made his hellos. Now the plane was far away and there were horses grazing in the distance and some wild pheasants prancing around a tree. Ian could see that Neva was in her twenties. He could see Jonathan seeing Neva.

  —

  She was beautiful but not pretty.

  —

  Roman, she called, come take your jacket. It’s raining. She had an appealing accent. She excused herself and walked quickly to catch up with the boys.

  —

  Ian thinks about what an asshole Jonathan is and at the same time Ian thinks about Poppy. He is disappointed that she wasn’t on the plane, isn’t with Patrizia and the kids, even though he was told that she wasn’t coming until later. His wishful thinking becomes real in his mind again and again. It is like a play that is always running for him. The longest-running show on earth, in Ian’s head. He smiles to himself, but this does nothing to change the reality that he is always dreaming.

  4

  NEVA MET UP with Roman and handed him his jacket and continued to carry his backpack. She cajoled him into putting on the jacket and playfully wrestled one of his arms into a sleeve while he pulled out the other and it went on this way. She leaned into him with her shoulder and pressed against one sleeve to keep him from extracting his arm, Roman squirming and kicking and pressing his head into her body. She led him toward the car. Roman kept shaking his head as if he were saying a perpetual no to the world.

  She maneuvered him into the SUV. As she was about to get in, the other boy, Felix, came up from behind her. He looked right through his brother who was by now playing a video game and got into the car and took out a book. He was carrying his own backpack. Neva swung herself up into the enormous vehicle and crouched into the last row, behind the boys. She watched the two of them, each intently focused on his occupation. They didn’t look back.

  Patrizia and Jonathan and Ian settled in and Vlad took the wheel and the car rolled off and passed by the runway again where another plane was landing and it was bigger than the first and a few more men were standing around watching it, some just admiring its size. The plane stopped and one man emerged and stood on the steps leading down to the airstrip and this was Steve. Hulking, almost ungainly but not awkward, standing on the edge of the world. Surveying, studying, simultaneously rejecting and engaging. A larger more encompassing version of his son Jonathan, as if sleek, handsome Jonathan had been swollen with thoughts and strategies and bloated with the burdens of running an empire, had been drained of some color as in a faded but important photograph, growing more significant, not less, with age. Steve: Patrizia’s husband, Alix and Jonathan’s father, Roman and Felix’s father, Poppy’s uncle and father. Steve: whose fortune made possible this wedding, this plane, these people, this life. As Neva pulled away in the car Steve turned and seemed to notice her from a great distance, seeing right through the tinted window. He turned his head as if he wanted her to be aware that he was watching her. When she looked back at him she thought she could feel his eyes staring directly into hers. She took two energy bars out of the backpack and handed them to Roman and Felix and the SUV went sliding out past the tiny airport along the lovely road back to the house.

  —

  Riding in the car Neva is reminded of another car ride, her first car ride, sixteen years ago. She was ten. She remembers gliding through the countryside as if on water. Now she glides through another country, another landscape, and feels as if she herself is the water. A river. The River Neva. She has let life run through her. She has suffered. She has survived. She knows this about herself so completely that this knowledge is simply a part of who she is. She is stoic like a river. She is sensuous like a river. She does not need people, like a river. The river takes everything that is thrown at it, into it, and keeps moving, moves on. She has taken everything and moved on. She has made a new life, found a place in the world. She takes care of children. She keeps them afloat. There is nothing she cannot carry. She is deep and her inner current is a storm of force in which somebody could sink. She is calm like a river. She is reflective like a river. She is strong. She is incredibly, terrifyingly, unapologetically strong.

  —

  Now come hours of solitude, hours of time change. Hours of unpacking for the boys while they eat dinner with the family and she is left alone. She’s never been to England before and she notices the way the sun bleeds slowly through layers of colored silk and evening comes on in blue glimmers and a thrilling coolness arrives and blows the leaves and flowers. The night air brings sounds of laughter and debate and bitter tones and honest whispers and the boys fall into bed with their hair swept over their faces.

  —

  She keeps to herself to avoid explanations, the complicated exposition that accompanies a new job and always tires her. Her room adjoins the boys’ and she listens to them move in their sleep as if they are playing soccer throughout the night.

  —

  She recalls a conversation on the plane with Patrizia, their words, mostly Patrizia’s words, flying along like birds darting in and out of the clouds beside the plane. Patrizia drank wine and she talked to Neva as if they’d known each other forever and her confidences fell from her mouth like teeth in some dream about losing all of your teeth, clattering and a little bloody.

  Over the ocean Patrizia tells Neva that she has been trying to have another child for a long time. In a kind of monologue, half drunk, her eyes half closing, she describes years of needles, years of drugs. All for another baby, she says, wistfully, angry, mocking herself. She doesn’t seem to care if the boys can hear her, but they aren’t listening.

 
—

  Neva wonders on the plane if she will ever have children of her own, Children of the River. She once read an article about children born of rape in Rwanda. They were called Children of Bad Memories. Her children if she has them will be Children of Good Memories. Her children if she has them will be loved. She has some long-ago good memories but few recent ones. She will make some good memories. She decides to do that. Yes, she thinks, I will figure out how to do that.

  —

  In the middle of the night Neva realizes that she hasn’t eaten dinner. She goes downstairs in the dark and finds the kitchen.

  Inside, dim light and the gleaming angles of appliances here and there. A gnawing sound vibrating from an old refrigerator and the only food in it bottled water, champagne, and eggs. In the glow from the open fridge she could make out a figure leaning against the counter, through the gloom, his hand locked around the neck of a bottle of champagne. He nodded to a glass on the counter. Neva picked it up and held it out and he filled her glass and she sipped and drank. The liquid was arid, elegant. She sipped again.

  I would be happy with water, she said.

  The man took a swig and then topped off her glass.

  You think you would, he said, but you’re mistaken.

  Solitary, large but not muscular, his eyes searching as if seeking out some hidden meaning beyond enlightenment, beyond reason or spirit or truth.

  Really, said Neva, I’m okay with water.