Burning Down the House Read online

  Poppy sat in one chair and Steve remained standing, leaning against the fireplace. He had a commanding presence, but he was not in good shape. He wheezed very slightly as he arranged his body against the mantel. So you have essentially completed your studies, he said.

  What studies? said Poppy.

  Your schooling. Your education.

  —

  Poppy looked up at Steve. She sat cross-legged on the wide seat of the chair and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. I want to work, she said.

  Work, he said.

  Yes. Be out in the world. Begin my life.

  You have a life. It began seventeen years ago.

  I mean my real life.

  What do you think your real life is?

  I don’t know. I have to go out and find it.

  Where do you think it will be found?

  If I knew that I wouldn’t have to look for it.

  What kind of work do you want to do?

  What you do.

  What I do?

  Yes. I want to work in real estate.

  He stared at her.

  Isn’t that what you do? she said.

  I suppose that is what they call it.

  Steve squinted at her. Do you have any idea what I really do?

  Make deals, build buildings, move money around. I don’t know. That’s what I have to learn. It seems practical to just get started soon.

  —

  Steve sighed and nodded. He walked over to the other chair and fitted himself into the seat with his legs stretched out far ahead of him like oars off the side of a boat. He was floating, for a moment, preparing to change direction. Holding the oars in the current to shift the vessel. In taking a new tack he would be playing a different role. It was as if he had been sailing in a fierce regatta and now he had decided to gently glide in a canoe.

  —

  He tilted his big chin downward and nodded his head. He appeared to be changing his mind.

  I admire your spunk, sweet Poppy, I really do, he said in a mellow voice. But there’s no reason to rush. Why don’t you want to go to college first: get an education, have fun, then you can come work for me?

  Poppy looked at Steve. He had his eyes shut. Poppy pushed her hair back behind her ear again. She licked her lips and looked over at the corner of the ceiling. I’m sick of people my own age.

  I’m afraid you’re stuck with them, for now. But they will get older. Whom would you prefer to spend time with?

  You.

  Steve leaned his head back and smiled. Ah, he said. Flattery will get you everywhere.

  I’m not flattering you. It’s true.

  He slowly rearranged his body and twisted and leaned forward in his chair so that his face was suddenly enormous to her. He looked very deeply into her eyes.

  Bravest little girl I have ever known. No one in this family has endured as much as you have. Your mother sick, then dying when you were so young. Ever since the day you were born I have considered myself your father. Did you know that?

  Yes.

  And it’s what your mother wanted. She fought and died in that hospital room and you were the most valiant little soldier. Through the tubes and machinery she told me to take care of you and I promised that I would. Forever.

  Steve leaned forward even more. I fought for you. That nanny wanted you. Then that imbecile sister of mine in the Midwest can you imagine? Friends gossiped, said Patrizia didn’t love you. My God we kicked the shit out of them giving you everything. And those barbarians who ran your school, they did not always understand the difficulties you had and how you needed to be treated with special understanding. What a bunch of savages some of those kids were—remember that viral video three years ago—I had to pay a lot to get that taken down from the Internet. Did you know that? You are exceptional and eccentric and I have always protected you. Steve shook his head. He seemed reluctant to say what evidently he felt he was required to say to her. A moral obligation.

  I didn’t know that, said Poppy. Thank you. But I still don’t want to go to college.

  —

  Steve leaned back. He inhaled and exhaled deeply.

  He appeared to be changing his mind yet again, but he was simply changing his tactics.

  —

  What we are confronted with in today’s world are cruel degenerate people with no sensitivity or psychological awareness. Savages with no feelings. Maybe it’s always been this way, but it’s worse now. They are in charge. We are talking about people who are so numb to their fellow human beings that they think they know better how everybody should live. And do you know what happens to people who know what’s best for everybody? They destroy the world. That’s what they do. They dismember and disembowel the individual and boil her flesh and entrails down in a stew with everybody else.

  It is bad enough in the universities but it is far more dangerous in the so-called real world. In the real world people will sell the idea of security but what they are really doing is stealing the most important thing you have: your freedom. This is true. I may be a crony capitalist myself but that is only because there is nothing left to be, do you see what I’m saying? The government, the elites, the billionaires, the trillionaires: what they don’t already own they are in the process of taking, under the guise of being caring and helpful, magnanimous and just. I don’t want to send you out to the front lines at the tender age of seventeen. How could I do that to the memory of your mother?

  He paused. And then:

  I don’t think there’s any question that higher education is a scam to indenture the middle class with the inflated price of tuition and an inside track for the children of the plutocracy to acquire ever more privilege or spread the gospel of globalization or both. But this is what we are left with. This is reality.

  He was watching Poppy. She looked uncomfortable.

  My princess, said Steve. I want you to be safe and I think the safest place right now for you to be is in school. I am being honest with you, sharing the ways of the world. I am not sugar-coating this with platitudes about the liberal arts or the life of the mind or the skills necessary for being a global citizen or what a long rave of pleasure and extended adolescence you will be missing out on if you do not attend college. I am speaking to you as an adult.

  He leaned even farther forward and put his hands on his knees. And I promise I will let you work for me when you have finished school. We will conquer the world. There will be an office waiting for you with a big desk and two assistants. Teams working under you. You will ride up seventy stories on a construction site wearing a hardhat and high heels. But you’re still young. There is time. Am I wrong? Can’t this wait? Do you have to run before you can walk?

  —

  Steve’s voice had become mellow and intense at the same time. He inclined his head to one side and looked at Poppy with a sovereign benevolence, another swerve in strategy. Poppy pursed her lips and they twisted to the side and curled as if a balloonist were finishing off a birthday party poodle. She hugged her knees. She widened her eyes at him.

  Why can’t I just come work for you when I finish high school?

  Poppy, you’re breaking my heart.

  Steve was beginning to look tired.

  You don’t really care about school, she said.

  I know but I care about you.

  If you care about me you’ll let me live my life now.

  I’ll think about it.

  That means yes!

  I’ll think about it.

  Oh thank you, she said, leaping up from the chair and embracing him.

  I love you so much, she said.

  I know you do.

  9

  DURING THE CEREMONY Poppy experienced a flooding of inexplicable happiness. She was a member of the wedding party and the small visual, sensory, and communal joys of getting ready with Miranda’s friends, the first viewing of the bride in her impeccably elegant custom silk-and-chiffon gown with its simple lines, graceful profile, and radiating sense of
purity and hope, the slow procession before the assembled guests, complete with adorably shy ring bearers and sassy flower girls, the vows and their declaration of dreams upheld, all of these elements came together to produce in Poppy a giddy tingling joy, a momentary mystical oneness that lifted her perspective high above the proceedings and enabled her to gaze upon the event with a tenderness that she rarely allowed herself. She felt warmth toward everyone. She felt that they would all take care of her and love her back. Oh, why don’t I always feel this way? she thought, floating far in her mind to observe the rows and rows of guests. We’re all just people. Why don’t we all always feel this way?

  —

  Already the wedding ceremony is over and it is time for the reception. Hundreds of colorful hats swim over the grounds and circle like exotic fish. The air is filled with the smell of cooking foods coming from a kitchen area hidden from view. Children, released from the children’s tent, run through the gardens and pluck flower petals and throw them and climb in the fruit trees until babysitters see them and call them down. Band music drifts across the lawns and people dance on the grand patio in staccato movements like figures on an old town clock. Poppy passes by a group of kids attempting to organize a game with the help of one adult, Neva, the new nanny. Neva directs the movements of her troops with a singular and beautiful authority that belies her position at the wedding.

  —

  Poppy had met Neva briefly but now she stops at a short distance and observes her: her black hair, her acute angles, her green eyes, her sharp shoulders. A punk-rock Russian strength to her unsmiling expression and asymmetrical demeanor. Neva is like a tree with no leaves, no embellishment, no distractions. Spiky branches and rigorous purity. Poppy feels sloppy and silly in her silky dress, however modern and edgy it claims to be. She sees that the children recognize a natural charm and command in Neva and they swarm around her and bump into her on purpose and call out to attract her attention. Poppy finds herself fascinated, intrigued, oddly envious, and somewhat in love with this poised slightly older woman, who is now laughing without smiling, the faintest most self-aware curl of her lip indicating pleasure, as she points and gives directions, surrounded by a little army of screaming and happy children.

  —

  Poppy arrives at the grand patio and steps around a lone dancing couple as she nears the back doors of the great house. The doors are open and guests are mingling inside and out but mostly out and she enters into a long library where all seems hushed and empty. She strolls around in her large-brimmed wedding hat with its silk bow past the book-lined walls with their elegant proportions and thin, carved Grecian columns and the low couches and chairs and tables where small porcelain lamps sit in the daylight waiting like contented Buddhas for somebody to realize that they are needed. She walks to the far end of the room toward a corner where a chair is positioned near the window.

  —

  There is a solitary attractively disheveled man in this chair and he lifts his gaze from his book to look at her. It is Ian in his wedding suit, with a drink, a book. There are three guests who wander in at the far end of the room and glance at Ian and Poppy briefly before leaving. Poppy stands at an angle facing some leather-bound volumes with her champagne flute at her lips and her bare foot slipping in and out of her high-heeled shoe. She sips and doesn’t notice him and Ian shakes a rueful head at her and closes his book and takes a swallow of his drink.

  —

  You’re not dancing, he says.

  Poppy looks around at him from under her brim. Are you talking to me?

  I thought you’d be dancing.

  That stuff? On the patio? She tilts her chin toward the windows.

  Yes, the band, he says.

  She looks back at the bookshelves.

  The real dancing is later, she says.

  I see.

  They’re having a DJ. Somebody big, she says to the bookshelves.

  He stares at her. He gets out of the chair and walks over toward her. So you’ll be dancing for real later?

  If I feel like it.

  Do you think you’ll feel like it?

  Why do you ask?

  —

  Poppy watches the shadowy glints of light and dark which play before her on the rows of books, red burning leather with gold etching. She feels the enormous effort of trying to appear as if she is not paying much attention to Ian. Still managing to act disinterested, she turns to him. His eyes are soft and gray. There is a fine engraved pattern around them, a network of very thin lines that looks like writing. If she could read that language it would explain so much. But she cannot.

  —

  He speaks slowly: I hear that you don’t want to apply to college. I had a blast in college but admire you for wanting to get on with life, he says.

  —

  There is a long but surprisingly not awkward silence between them. Neither of them can quite tell if it is erotic or dull. Ian lifts his eyebrows and continues.

  —

  If you’re interested, there’s plenty to do in the theater. After graduation you could be my assistant, or something like that, learn about the electric world of Broadway, he says with an expression that conveys mockery and sincerity at the same time. He lifts his hands, one holding a drink, one splayed out Bob Fosse–style. You know, “All That Jazz,” he says. Think about it. It’s not the worst way to start a career. He looks at her with the tiniest smolder, not enough to make him seem lecherous, but just enough so that she is too scared to look at him anymore.

  —

  But she couldn’t be his assistant because she was going to work for Steve as soon as she finished high school, she explained, and anyway she had outgrown her interest in the theater—she was over that—and she moved away along the books and books and books waving her champagne flute in Ian’s direction, and of course he accepted it without following her because she was much too young for him anyway and what else could be done?

  —

  But he knows then that he will be communicating with her soon. On the dance floor, during their separate return travels to New York, and back in the city as he crosses paths with her because of his close association with Alix. He knows now as he watches her walk away that somehow she will come to him. He thinks this is an intuition of fate, or a form of hope, but it isn’t. It is simply a decision on his part that he is going to get what he wants and do whatever he can, however stealthily, to make this to-him-at-the-moment-minor-dream come true. He is his own gullible mark and a con artist at the same time. This doesn’t make him an evil person. He is not one kind of person; like all of us, he has many aspects. But his narcissism is a part of him that he has not yet had to examine or tackle or renounce and so in his personal life he is very often destructive. He is not, at least, as destructive as some people. He knows that, takes some remote comfort in it.

  —

  Poppy is self-destructive. The last thing she attempts to do is to hurt deeply anyone other than herself. As she walks away Ian sees her, for an instant, in all her fierce, stunningly pretty, self-destructive glory. He sees her and for a brief flickering moment comprehends her in a way that he does not comprehend himself.

  —

  On the dance floor he keeps his eyes on her even when they are not dancing together. She gets dipped by one of Miranda’s dashing financier friends. Poppy’s short hair practically touching the floor, her bare legs long and angled and stuck to the ground in her pointy-toed silver sling-backed shoes. Her face rapturous, shining, like a very good, very old diamond so clear and colorless that it looks like nothing but is everything, contains and refracts every color. He keeps his eyes on her.

  —

  The way these parties end: in intoxication and mistakes and sex and sometimes blood. They drank on and on and ate and danced under another tent and the fireworks fell all over themselves and the wind violated everybody’s hair and people walked off into the shadows with one another and couples argued and things were said that could never be unsaid and
as the dawn was bleeding faintly over the proceedings Jonathan was kneeling above Miranda in bed and she whispered something to him but he didn’t say anything back. He was in his own element, something like fire but not as pure, one of those chemical fires that glows blue and green and orange. Afterward, he lay on his side, burnt wood. The next day by lunchtime most of the guests were gone. The tents came down. Men with headsets removed the party. Ian woke up late and missed the farewell brunch. He stood on the front steps of the house overlooking the wide pale gravel driveway scattered with the remaining revelers just in time to watch the bride and groom drive off in an Aston Martin. It was beginning to drizzle again. There was a silvery sky behind the tall trees.

  Watch out, he muttered under his breath to the newlyweds. You might get what you’re after.

  He had been holding a cup of coffee and now he took a sip from it and turned around and headed back up the green-carpeted staircase to pack his bag.

  10

  IN LONDON tall men stood in attendance at the hotel entrance and regarded the new arrivals dispassionately. Steve, Patrizia, Neva, the twins, Ian, Alix, and Poppy swept past like some well-appointed band of itinerant jugglers or magicians, circus performers impersonating aristocrats. An understatedly luxurious scarf of ostrich feathers trailed behind Poppy, a plume of smoke from her neck.

  —

  Spending a few days in London after the wedding before returning to New York, the family had settled into a routine of meeting for dinner and spending their days separately, the twins taken to parks or attractions by Neva, or Patrizia when she wasn’t consuming, Ian and Alix off to neighborhoods and galleries, Poppy left mostly on her own to wander. Steve worked in his London office or at the hotel.

  At dinner Ian asked Poppy, How do you like London?

  I love it, of course, but I’m a bit lonely this time.

  I’d have to say the same.

  They both watched Alix covertly as she sat at the far end of the table, her eyes piercing the menu, her expression puzzled, angry, hopeful, and irritated all at once. Poppy unfurled her napkin.