Burning Down the House Page 4

  Poppy stared down at Alix.

  Jonathan without looking up said to Alix, I don’t know why you’re being so rude—can you just say hello?

  Alix said: I’m resting. She can see that. And I saw her five days ago in New York. This is not some major reunion.

  Jonathan laughed a little breath.

  What are you laughing at? said Poppy.

  Miranda got out of the water, grabbed a towel, and slid over toward Poppy. I won’t hug, she said, because I’m all wet, but we’re so glad you’re here.

  Thanks for saying so but it doesn’t really seem like it.

  Miranda slipped her sandals on and headed back to the house.

  Poppy stared down at Alix again. Poppy’s eyes were very blue and narrowed.

  Alix readjusted her position.

  Poppy made big dramatic pinwheel motions in the air around her head, an act of mime that left Jonathan breath-laughing again. Hello, she said, waving broadly at Alix.

  I’m tired. It’s been stressful around here. Don’t push it, said Alix.

  Push it? Push it? Poppy said. What is wrong with you? Can’t you be civil?

  Hello, Poppy, Alix said, from underneath the hat.

  Why am I the only mature one around here? said Poppy.

  —

  A languid wind brushed through the trees making them heave and sigh. Poppy dropped her boots on the grass and took her dress off over her head. She let the loose fabric fall to the ground. She bent her thin arms around her back and unclasped her bra. Her rib cage rippled like the inside of a piano. She stepped out of her boy-shorts underwear and dropped all of her sheer decorative lingerie on top of her dress. She swept past the pile of clothes and when she reached the edge of the pool she straightened up and turned her head over her shoulder to look at Alix and Jonathan. Neither of them looked at her.

  —

  The wind had stopped, no stirring leaves. Under the water, intersecting wavering ovals of light surrounded her in an electrified net. The bottom of the pool was painted a chalky white. She swam to one end and back and hauled herself out and made footprints like the shadows of faraway birds. Then she came to the pile of clothes and stood there.

  Alix and Jonathan ignored her.

  Poppy stood naked and dripping.

  Jonathan gazed upward and then back to his phone.

  How about showing a person a little love? said Poppy.

  Jonathan stood up.

  Poppy started shivering and Jonathan pointed to a stack of neatly folded towels on a weathered wooden table.

  Go, cover yourself up, he said. He made a shooing motion with the hand that held the phone.

  Poppy’s face clouded. You assholes, she said. She stood over Alix and dripped on her. Jonathan’s expression did not change. He just brought up his hand with the phone in it and held it above her as if he were going to strike. A great show of force in the silence. A clicking into place of the unnatural natural order. Then Alix lifting herself up onto her elbows, the rustle of her hat falling off her head.

  Poppy stood her ground. You guys are so old, she said.

  Alix and Jonathan didn’t respond. There was a swooning of air through the trees. Poppy found Jonathan’s eyes with hers.

  And you are an infant, he said.

  I feel sorry for your future children if this is how you treat an infant.

  Alix said something about how she was getting soaked and this was ridiculous and Jonathan put your arm down. Then Poppy bent over and picked up her clothes. Then she walked to the edge of the pool. Then she threw her clothes into the water.

  Jonathan’s face drained. Poppy, don’t do that. Look I’m sorry, he said, unemotionally.

  —

  She walked back over toward him and Jonathan pulled away from her like a man avoiding a drunk on the sidewalk.

  He stepped farther back as she lunged at him with her wet arms. Then he stepped back again. Poppy leaped lightly onto the lounge chair and pulled the phone out of his hand. Jonathan froze. She scrolled through his texts and read a couple of them out loud. They were meaningless. Then she selected a number from his contacts and made a call as she walked quickly to the other end of the pool.

  Jonathan followed her. He was breathing heavily and he cursed and pointed at her, following her around the pool. Poppy turned back quickly and feinted and then threw the phone over Jonathan’s shoulder onto the stone paving. The guts and innards of the mechanism sprayed and Jonathan’s knees bent and his Oh fuck echoed. Poppy had already run over to collect the parts and she pitched each piece into the water before Jonathan had even picked up the splintered walnut cover and she skipped the little battery across the surface of the pool and yelled a Goodbye you expensive made-in-China piece-of-shit toy into the air as the bits of metal and plastic sank.

  —

  Poppy surveyed the scene. Alix looked exhausted and spent and Jonathan was leaning over with his hands on his knees. Neither of them moved. Poppy strode over to the table with the towels on it and wrapped one around her body and secured it in between her breasts and headed away down the path. The birds were gone. The breeze was entirely gone too. She tucked her wet hair behind her ears and walked back to the house.

  7

  SHE WOKE FROM a long nap on top of the velvet bedspread, one foot touching the purple T. Anthony suitcase that was still open and unpacked and spilling with clothes from her earlier rummaging. The ceiling of the room was painted with tiny gold starlike shapes and she blinked up at them as if she’d landed on the moon. The towel had unwound from her body into a twisted, discarded bandage and her naked limbs splayed out on the bed as if she had fallen from a great height to land here.

  —

  She barely remembers what happened at the pool, has dreamed it away. What she remembers she writes off as dysfunctional family dynamics, a phrase she had learned by the time she was ten. She is still half dreaming, half happy, half alive.

  —

  Her head felt tight around her skull and the muscles behind her eyes pulled taut in knots. She sat up and looked around. She’d stashed some pills in the suitcase—the reason she hadn’t wanted anyone else to carry it—and she sat up and dug her hands into the inner side pocket of the bag and retrieved a bottle. She unscrewed the top, fished out a pale peach-colored pellet with her finger and put it in her mouth. She sat up a little straighter and closed her eyes and made some spit and swallowed. Then she opened her eyes and swallowed the last powdery bitter spit. The tiny stars on the ceiling retreated into their distant galaxy and spun away into a painted heaven. After a while she rose and dressed and went out to look for the rest of her family.

  —

  Her family. She always tells people that her family is like the House of Agamemnon or something out of Faulkner because everyone in it can be so mean. She has no idea how appropriate the references are, or how much more there really is to tragedy. She does not realize the wide discrepancies between what she thinks of these people, how she feels about them, and the images she has of them in her mind. She carries with her an image of Steve that is benevolent, magnanimous, and generous, although she also knows him to be controlling, manipulative, and cruel, and her feelings, her feelings about him are entirely different from her thoughts and images. Her feelings for him are radical and gigantic and too much for one brain or heart to bear. They dwarf her. Next to them she is the smallest blade of grass. They walk all over her. They trample her. It is only possible to see these feelings as enormous masked figures enacting a drama in an amphitheater. The moonlight casting long shadows so that the people in the audience are alternately lit up and obscured. And she, she is that blade of grass, watching the play from between two stones where the slightest growth of green has been bestowed by a fortunate accident of sun.

  —

  They were nowhere in sight. The house was quietly bustling with staff. There were maids making beds and men filling vases with flowers and assistants of one sort or another placing bottled water in every room. Some of the
headset men were moving pieces of furniture around. In the portrait gallery on the second floor, which ran practically the entire length of the house, long tables were being arranged and set for the rehearsal dinner tonight. It was the first event of the wedding weekend at which real guests, nonfamily members, would be in attendance. Miranda and Jonathan had invited at least a hundred and fifty people to the intimate affair and three hundred were expected tomorrow for the ceremony. A tent was being set up outside, not for the wedding but for the babysitters and young children. Inside, it housed a trampoline, video games, many televisions, sports equipment, a refrigerator, and several playpens filled with baby toys. Poppy wandered around, drifting unreal through a circus of childhood, a museum of distraction. Eventually she left the tent out an opening on the far side and found herself in a small garden with a wrought-iron bench. She fished out a second pill from her pocket and let the acrid fire burn its way down the length of her throat.

  —

  There was a fountain in the middle of the garden with a bronze fish jumping and drooling and the stone basin had been occupied by the debris of visiting tourists trying their luck, pennies and other foreign coins lay drowned at the bottom of the gray water with bits of lichen and oxidized green upon the surface of the metals. Huge trees hung around the perimeter of the garden and threw a cool darkness over the fountain and on closer inspection the fish held several rusty coins in its mouth, diverting the flow of water and creating a drool as opposed to a spout. Poppy stood blinking in the very early evening stillness. Then she saw the outline of a boy. It was just a subtle disturbance in the distance and it led her toward a path that branched off of the garden. She swiped a cold nickel from the fountain and set out after Felix.

  She took the path down toward a fork and realized at the fork that one of the paths led to the pool. She was still following a hint of boy way up ahead of her. She entered a stretch of the path which reminded her uncomfortably of her earlier escapade with Jonathan and then made her way up a rise in the road which swerved her mind around to more uplifting thoughts or perhaps it was the little pill kicking in now and here she was at the pool again. Her clothes had been fished out of the water and laid on the wooden table. The pile of towels had been set up on one of the lounge chairs. Next to the drying clothes some helpful groundskeeper had placed a neat array of all the dead pieces from Jonathan’s broken phone. Felix was picking them up one at a time, investigating, seeing if he could fit them back together.

  —

  He was fingering the dead bits when he looked up and saw Poppy. He stood there very still but for his radiant smile.

  Poppy! he called out.

  I see you found my mess.

  Mess?

  I believe I am responsible for this mess, she said. All that junk on the table.

  Felix ran to her as she approached him and he clasped her around the waist. This isn’t a mess: these are specimens, he said into her T-shirt. The remains of a visit from aliens who came down and took a swim and left some of their robot parts behind. You could never make a mess, he said.

  Poppy grabbed him close. She kissed the top of his head. You are a genius and my best friend and the only grown-up around here, she whispered into his hair.

  —

  Felix is her little mystic. When she is with him she feels understood and the world seems understandable. His compassionate expression, his sensitive remarks. His laugh is the chuckle of a philosopher. He has an X-ray vision that sees that she is a good person. She holds on to his vision of her, grasps it, whenever she can. Sometimes he puts his hand on her shoulder as if he is Aristotle pondering the secrets of the ages and she feels so much gratitude that she melts from his touch.

  —

  They sat down next to each other at the edge of the pool with their legs dangling in the water. Felix was wearing a bathing suit and an SPF long-sleeved shirt although by now it was approaching dusk. Long days in June that graze on time and fade never completely into night. After a while Felix slid into the pool and swam funny, short width-wise laps. He made his way back and forth and back and forth enjoying the simple pushing of his feet and touching of his fingers on the rough side of the structure. He liked knowing and feeling the boundaries of this domain. Then he propelled himself underwater and circled the perimeter like some baby shark of a thought testing the outer limits of a wholly wretchedly limited but endlessly shifting and renewable consciousness.

  8

  THE DINNER WAS in the past now, the long tables in the portrait gallery disassembled and put back into storage, the dark red linens waiting to be laundered. The flowers dying. Poppy was lying naked under the covers with her clothes spread all over the room and on the bed around her when a knock came at the door and the door opened.

  She opened her eyes. Through the late-night haze she could make out the slim silhouette of Patrizia. Poppy rolled over onto her stomach.

  Patrizia entered the room and sat on the bed beside her.

  She reached down and with a long finger pushed Poppy’s bangs to the side.

  Hello there, said Patrizia.

  What do you want?

  To talk. We didn’t get to talk at the dinner. So many people.

  Poppy was rolling over and sitting up with the covers held to her collarbone. They drooped slightly from her light grasp and she sat there practically exposed.

  What the hell? It’s the middle of the night.

  I just wanted to chat. I didn’t mean to upset you.

  You are upsetting me. Because you are waking me up.

  Is it true that you told people last night that you are not going to apply to college? I won’t get angry, I’d just like to know.

  Why? Who cares about this?

  Steve. He wants to discuss your future.

  My future?

  Yes.

  What future?

  The future that comes after today. Tomorrow, et cetera.

  I can’t think about that.

  He says that you must. You know what that means?

  Now?

  Poppy groaned and pulled some clothes from various points on the bed and hauled them over her head and legs. She pulled on the low boots and put two pills wrapped in Kleenex in her right bootleg and stood up next to the bed pulling on a long cardigan sweater over her T-shirt.

  —

  Patrizia was still sitting on the side of the bed in her silk bathrobe. Her legs were crossed. She had a large ring on one of her fingers, which she examined while Poppy got dressed. When she saw what emerged once Poppy had scrambled into clothes she shook her head.

  Did you have too much to drink tonight? she said.

  I don’t drink, said Poppy. I only take prescription drugs.

  Patrizia ignored this.

  College is a big party. Why wouldn’t you go?

  I don’t want a big party. I want to begin my life.

  Please, Poppy. Don’t be so melodramatic. No one ever “begins” their life. And anyway, you’ll get so many perks if you go to school: an apartment, an allowance, new people.

  I’m sick of school. And people.

  Patrizia eyed her. She slid the big ring up and down her finger. What do you want to do? she said.

  Work.

  Work, said Patrizia. That would be a novel experience.

  —

  Poppy looked plaintively at Patrizia. She looked at her hair. Patrizia’s shoulder-length hair was brown, the color and sheen of high-quality leather or very expensive chocolate. Sometimes Poppy could make out tiny strands of gray mingling amid the rich gloss. Didn’t you work? asked Poppy.

  —

  I came from Italy when I was twenty-two, right after university. I worked as a business reporter. Working all hours, slaving in the system. It was fun and interesting for a while, but it couldn’t contain me. If I hadn’t met Steve I don’t know where I’d be today. I was unfulfilled. He set me on a path to salvation. I would be sitting in a small apartment by myself drinking rosé in front of costume dramas or worse if he
hadn’t found me. He saw something in me worth investing in and he sees something in you.

  Now who’s being melodramatic?

  Just come with me and talk to him.

  —

  They walked down the dark hallway with Patrizia glamorous and ghostly in her pale silk rippling and Poppy sullen and slouching behind her like something being taken into captivity. They passed by many closed rooms where the draft wailed under the doors and by paintings on the walls that hung patient and speechless in the night.

  —

  Steve was occupying a suite of rooms at the farthest end of the house. Patrizia opened the door to a passageway that led into the central living area. The walls were covered in an oversize toile print that in the dim lighting made it seem as if tiny people frolicking in boats and swings all over the room were being thrown into larger shadows on the walls. Patrizia strode in her wafting robe to the opposite side of the room where Steve was wearing headphones and sitting at a desk.

  He was staring at a laptop, with his tablet out on the table and a book open on his lap and papers and two phones atop the desk. Patrizia tapped him on the shoulder and waited. Steve typed away and listened and read and did not look up. Poppy could hear a faint whistling and clanking from some antique faraway pipes. Other than that there was only the sound of Steve’s tapping fingers.

  When he was finished he took off the headphones and turned around. He looked at Patrizia and then he looked at Poppy and then turned back to his laptop and he read over what he had written on the screen. He nodded and shut the computer and stood up letting the book fall to the floor and paying no attention to it. He kicked it slightly as he maneuvered from between the chair and the desk. The book ended up open and askew on the floor, pages side down, flat and praying that it would not be kicked again.

  —

  Steve took large steps over to Poppy and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then he motioned to two upholstered chairs at one end of the room facing a fireplace and led the way in that direction. Patrizia headed out of the room and closed a door behind her. Sit down, Steve said.