Burning House

LEARNING TO FALL

Ruth’s house, early morning: a bowl of apples on the kitchen table, crumbs on the checkered tablecloth. “I love you,” she says to Andrew. “Did you guess that I loved you?” “I know it,” he says. He’s annoyed that his mother is being mushy in front of me. He is eager to seem independent, and cranky because he just woke up. I’m cranky, too, even after the drive to Ruth’s in the cold. I’m drinking coffee to wake up. If someone said that he loved me at this moment, I’d never believe him; I can’t think straight so early in the morning, hate to make conversation, am angry at the long, cold winter. Andrew and I are both frowning at Ruth’s table and she — as always — is tolerating us. “More coffee?” Ruth asks me. I nod yes, and let her pour it, although I could easily get up and walk to the stove for the pot. “What about brushing your hair?” she says to Andrew. He gets up and leaves the room, comes back with her wooden brush and begins to brush his hair. “Not over the table, please,” she says. He has finished. He puts the brush on the table and looks at me. “We’re going to miss the train,” he says. “There’s plenty of time,” Ruth says. Andrew looks at the clock and sighs loudly. Ruth laughs. She rubs her finger around the top of the open honey jar and sucks it. “Come on,” I say to Andrew. “You’re right. I’d rather be early than late.” I ask Ruth: “Anything from the city?” If she did want something, she wouldn’t say — she hates to take things, because she has no money to buy things in return. Nor does she want many things around: the kitchen has only a table and four chairs. What furniture she has came with the house. “No, thanks,” she says, and turns off the radio. She says again, as we go out the door, “Thanks.” She has a hand on each of our backs as I open the door and cold floods into the house.

Once or twice a month, on Wednesdays, Andrew and I take the train from Connecticut to New York, and I walk down the streets and into stores and through museums with him, holding his little hand, which is as tight as a knot. He does not have friends his own age, but he likes me. After eight years, he trusts me.

Today he is wearing his blue jeans with the Superman patch on the knee. If Superman launched himself from Andrew’s knee, he would be flying a foot or so off the ground. People would think that small figure in blue was a piece of trash caught by the wind, a stick blowing, something to gather their hems against.

“I’m hungry again,” he says.

Andrew knows that I don’t eat during the day. He says again because he has already had oatmeal at home and a pastry at the fast-food shop across from the train in Westport at ten o’clock, and now it’s only twelve — too early to eat another meal — and he knows I’m going to say: “Again?”

Andrew. The morning before the night he was born, Ruth and I swam in Hall’s Pond. She loved it that she could float, heavy as she was, about to deliver. She loved being pregnant and wanted the child, although the man who was the father begged her to have an abortion and finally left her six months before Andrew was born. On the last day that we swam in Hall’s Pond, she was two weeks overdue. There wasn’t a sign of the pain yet, but her tension made me as dizzy as the hot sun on my head as I stood in the too-cold water.

And that night: holding her hand, my hand finally moving up her arm, as if she were slipping away from me. “Take my hand,” she kept saying, and I would rub my thumb on her knuckles, squeeze her hand as hard as I dared, but I couldn’t stop myself from grasping her wrist, the middle of her arm, hanging on to her elbow, as if she were drowning. It was the same thing I would do with the man who became my lover, years later — but then it would be because I was sinking.

Andrew and I are walking downhill in the Guggenheim Museum, and I am thinking about Ray. Neither of us is looking at the paintings. What Andrew likes about the museum is the view, looking down into the pool of blue water speckled with money.

I stand beside him on the curving walkway. “Don’t throw coins from up here, Andrew,” I say. “You might hurt somebody.”

“Just a penny,” he says. He holds it up to show me. A penny: no tricks.

“You’re not allowed. It could hit somebody in the face. You could hurt somebody, throwing it.”

I am asking him to be careful of hurting people. When he would not be born, an impatient doctor used forceps and tugged him out, and there was slight brain damage. That and some small paralysis of his face, at the mouth.

He pockets the penny. His parka has fallen off one shoulder. He doesn’t notice.

“We’ll get lunch,” I say. “Take your pennies and throw them in the pool when we get down there.”

He gets there before me. I look down and see him making his wishes. I doubt that he knows yet what to wish for. Other people are throwing money. Andrew is shy and just stands there, eyes closed and squinting, holding his pennies. He likes to do things in private. You can see the disappointment on his face that other people are in the world. He likes to run with his arms out like the wings of a plane; he likes to be in the first seat in the train compartment — to sit with only me where three seats face two seats across from them. He likes to stretch his legs. He hates cigarette smoke, and the smell of perfume. In spring, he sniffs the breeze like an old man sniffing cognac. He is in the third grade at the elementary school, and so far he has had only slight trouble keeping up. His teacher — who has become Ruth’s friend — is young and hopeful, and she doesn’t criticize Ruth for the notes she writes pretending that Andrew has been ill on the day the two of us were really in New York. Andrew makes going to the city fun, and for that — and because I know him so well, and I pity him — I almost love him.

We go to his favorite place for hamburgers — a tiny shop on Madison Avenue with a couple of tables in the front. The only time we sat at a table was the time that Ray met us there, Andrew liked sitting at a table, but he was shy and wouldn’t say much because Ray was there. The man behind the counter knows us. I know that he recognizes us, even though he doesn’t say hello. We always order the same thing: I have black coffee (advertised as the world’s best); Andrew has a bacon cheeseburger and a glass of milk. Because Ruth has taught him to make sure he looks neat, he wipes the halo of milk off his mouth after every sip. His hands get sticky from the milk-wet napkin.

Today it is bitter cold, and I am remembering that hot and distant summer. I have hardly been swimming in eight years — not since Arthur and I moved downstate, away from Hall’s Pond. When we were in graduate school together, Ruth and I would go there to study. She would have her big, thick Russian novels with her, and I was always afraid she would drop one into the water. Such big books, underlined, full of notes, it would have seemed more than an average tragedy if she had lost one. She never did. I lost a gold chain (a real one), and my lighter. One time my grocery list fell out of my book into the water and I saw the letters bleed and haze and disappear as it went under.

We went there earlier in the day than other people — not that many people knew about Hall’s Pond then — so we always got to sit on the big rock. Later in the day, people would come and sit on the smaller rock, or stand around on the pier going out to the water. Some of the people swam naked. One time a golden retriever jumped onto our rock, crouched, and threw its head back and howled at the sky, then ran away through the woods, its feet blackening in the wet dirt by the water’s edge. Ruth was freaked out by it. She wrote a poem, and in the poem the dog came to give a warning. Not an angel, a dog. I stared at the poem, not quite understanding it. “It’s meant to be funny,” she said. When the dog ran off, Ruth had put her hands over her mouth. The next summer, when I married Arthur, she wrote a poem about the bouquet I carried. The bouquet had some closed lilies, and in the poem she said they were like candles — as big as Roman candles to her eye, as if my bunch of flowers were going to explode and shower down. I laughed at the poem. It was the wrong reaction. Now, because things have come apart between Arthur and me, it has turned out to be prophetic.

“What’s up now?” Andrew says, laying down the cheeseburger. He always eats them the same way, and it is a way I have never seen another child eat one: he bites around the outside, eating until only the circle at the center is left.

I look at my watch. The watch was a Christmas present from Arthur. It’s almost touching that he isn’t embarrassed to give me such impersonal presents as eggcups and digital watches. To see the time, you have to push in the tiny button on the side. As long as you hold it, the time stays lit, changes. Take away your hand and the watch turns clear red again.

“We’re going to Bonnie’s studio. She’s printed the pictures Ruth wanted. Those pictures she took the Fourth of July — we’re finally going to see them.”

I feel in my pocket for the check Ruth gave me to pay Bonnie.

“But where are we going?” he says.

“To Spring Street. You remember your mother’s friend with the long hair to her waist, don’t you? You know where Bonnie lives. You’ve been there before.”

We take the subway, and Andrew sits in the crowded car by squeezing himself onto the seat next to me and sitting on one hip, his left leg thrown over mine so that we must look like a ventriloquist and a dummy. The black woman sitting next to him shifts over a little. He stays squeezed against me.

“If Bonnie offers you lunch, I bet you take it,” I say, poking the side of his parka.

“I couldn’t eat any more.”

“You?” I say.

“String bean,” he says to me. He pats his puffy parka. Underneath it, you would be able to see his ribs through the T-shirt. He is lean and would be quite handsome except for the obvious defect of his mouth, which droops at one corner as if he’s sneering.

We are riding on the subway, and Ruth is back at the tiny converted carriage house she rents from a surgeon and his wife in Westport. Like everything else in the area, it is overpriced, and she can barely afford it — her little house with not enough light, with plastic taped over the aluminum screens and the screens left in the windows because there are no storm windows. Wood is burning in the stove, and herbs are clumped in a bag of gauze hung in the pot of chicken stock. She is underlining things in books, cutting coupons out of newspapers. On Wednesdays she does not have to go to work at the community college where she teaches. She is waiting for her lover, Brandon, to call or to come over: there’s warmth, soup, discoveries about literature, and, if he cares, privacy. I envy him an afternoon with Ruth, because she will cook for him and make him laugh and ask nothing from him. She earns hardly any money at the community college, but her half-gallons of wine taste better than the expensive bottles Arthur’s business friends uncork. She will reach out and touch you to let you know she is listening when you talk, instead of suggesting that you go out to see some movie for amusement.

Almost every time when I take Andrew home Brandon is there. It’s rare that he goes there any other day of the week. Sometimes he brings two steaks. On Valentine’s Day he brought her a plant that grows well in the dim light of the kitchen. It sits on the window sill behind the sink and is weaving upward, guided by tacks Ruth has pushed into the window frame. The leaves are thick and small, green and heart-shaped. If I were a poet, those green leaves would be envy, closing her in. Like many people, he does envy her. He would like to be her, but he does not want to take her on. Or Andrew.

The entryway to Bonnie’s loft is so narrow, painted bile-green, peeling and filthy, that I always nearly panic, thinking I’ll never get to the top. I expect roaches to lose their grip on the ceiling and fall on me; I expect a rat to dart out. I run, silently, ahead of Andrew.

Bonnie opens the door wearing a pair of paint-smeared jeans, one of Hal’s V-neck sweaters hanging low over her hips. Her loft is painted the pale yellow of the sun through fog. Her photographs are tacked to the walls, her paintings hung. She hugs both of us and wants us to stay. I take off my coat and unzip Andrew’s parka and lay it across his legs. The arms stick out from the sides, no hands coming through them. It could be worse; Andrew could have been born without hands or arms. “I’ll tell you what I’m sick of,” Ruth said to me not long after he was born, one of the few times she ever complained. “I’m sick of hearing how things might have been worse, when they might also have been better. I’m sick of lawyers saying to wait — not to settle until we’re sure how much damage has been done. They talk about damage with their vague regret, the way the weatherman talks about another three inches of snow. I’m sick of wind whistling through the house, when it could be warm and dry.” She is never sick of Brandon, and the two steaks he brings, although he couldn’t come to dinner the night of Andrew’s birthday, and she is not bitter that Andrew’s father has had no contact with her since before the birth. “Angry?” Ruth said to me once. “I’m angry at myself. I don’t often misjudge people that way.”

Bonnie fixes Andrew hot chocolate. My hands are about to shake, but I take another cup of coffee anyway, thinking that it might just be because the space heater radiates so little heat in the loft. Andrew and I sit close together, the white sofa spreading away on either side of us. Andrew looks at some of Ruth’s photographs, but his attention drifts away and he starts to hum. I fit them back in the Manila envelope, between the pieces of cardboard, and tie the envelope closed. He rests his head on my arm, so that it’s hard to wind the string to close the envelope. While his eyes are closed, Bonnie whispers to me: “I couldn’t. I couldn’t take money from her.”

She looks at me as if I’m crazy. Now it’s my problem: how am I going to give Ruth the check back without offending her? I fold the check and put it in my pocket.

“You’ll think of something,” Bonnie says softly.

She looks hopeful and sad. She is going to have a baby, too. She knows already that she is going to have a girl. She knows that she is going to name her Ora. What she doesn’t know is that Hal gambled and lost a lot of money and is worried about how they will afford a baby. Ruth knows that, because Hal called and confided in her. Is it modesty or self-preservation that makes Ruth pretend that she is not as important to people as she is? He calls, she told me, just because he is one of the few people she has ever known who really enjoy talking on the telephone.

We take the subway uptown, back to Grand Central Station. It is starting to fill up with commuters: men with light, expensive raincoats and heavy briefcases, women carrying shopping bags. In another couple of hours Arthur will be in the station on his way home. The Manila envelope is clamped under my arm. Everyone is carrying something. I have the impulse to fold Andrew to me and raise him in my arms. I could do that until he was five, and then I couldn’t do it any more. I settle for taking his hand, and we walk along swinging hands until I let go for a second to look at my watch. I look from my watch to the clock. They don’t agree, and of course the clock is right, the watch is not. We have missed the 3:05. In an hour there is another train, but on that train it’s going to be difficult to get a seat. Or, worse, someone is going to see that something beyond tiredness is wrong with Andrew, and we are going to be offered a seat, and he is going to know why. He suspects already, the way children of a certain age look a little guilty when Santa Claus is mentioned, but I hope I am not there when some person’s eye meets Andrew’s and instead of looking away he looks back, knowing.

“We’re going to have to wait for the next train,” I tell him.

“How come?”

“Because we missed our train.”

“Didn’t you know it when you looked at your watch at Bonnie’s?”

He is getting tired, and cranky. Next he’ll ask how old I am. And why his mother prefers to stay with Brandon instead of coming to New York with us.

“It would have been rude to leave earlier. We were only there a little while.”

I look at him to see what he thinks. Sometimes his thinking is a little slow, but he is also very smart about what he senses. He thinks what I think — that if I had meant to, we could have caught the train. He stares at me with the same dead-on stare Ray gives me when he thinks I am being childish. And, of course, it is because of Ray that I lingered. I always mean not to call him, but I almost always do. We cross the terminal and I go to a phone and drop in a dime. Andrew backs up and spins on his heel. His parka slips off his shoulder again. And his glove — where is his glove? One glove is on the right hand, but there’s no glove in either pocket. I sound disappointed, far away when Ray says hello.

“It’s just — he lost his glove,” I say.

“Where are you?” he says.

“Grand Central.”

“Are you coming in or going out?”

“Going home.”

His soft voice: “I was afraid of that.”

Silence.

“Ray?”

“What? Don’t tell me you’re going to concoct some reason to see me — ask me to take him off, man to man, and buy him new gloves?”

It makes me laugh.

“You know what, lady?” Ray says. “I do better amusing you over the phone than in person.”

A woman walks by, carrying two black poodles. She has on a long gray fur coat and carries the little dogs, who look as if they’re peeking out of a cave of fur, nestled in the crook of each arm. Everything is a Stan Mack cartoon. Another woman walks across the terminal. She has forgotten something, or changed her mind — she shakes her head suddenly and begins to walk the other way. Far away from us, she starts to run. Andrew turns and turns. I reach down to make him be still, but he jerks away, spins again, loses interest and just stands there, staring across the station.

“Fuck it,” Ray says. “Can I come down and buy you a drink?”

More coffee. Andrew has a milkshake. Ray sits across from us, stirring his coffee as if he’s mixing something. Last year when I decided that loving Ray made me as confused as disliking Arthur, and that he had too much power over me and that I could not be his lover anymore, I started taking Andrew to the city with me. It hasn’t worked out well; it exasperates Ray, and I feel guilty for using Andrew.

“New shoes,” Ray says, pushing his leg out from under the table.

He has on black boots, and he is as happy with them as Andrew was with the pennies I gave him this morning. I smile at him. He smiles back.

“What did you do today?” Ray says.

“Went on an errand for Ruth. Went to the Guggenheim.”

He nods. I used to sleep with him and then hold his head as if I believed in phrenology. He used to hold my hands as I held his head. Ray has the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.

“Want to stay in town?” he says. “I was going to the ballet. I can probably get two more tickets.”

Andrew looks at me, suddenly interested in staying.

“I’ve got to go home and make dinner for Arthur.”

“Milk the cows,” Ray says. “Knead the bread. Stoke the stove. Go to bed.”

Andrew looks up at him and smiles broadly before he gets self-conscious and puts his hand to the corner of his mouth and looks away.

“You never heard that one before?” Ray says to Andrew. “My grandmother used to say that. Times have changed and times haven’t changed.” He looks away, shakes his head. “I’m profound today, aren’t I? Good it’s coffee and not the drink I wanted.”

Andrew shifts in the booth, looks at me as if he wants to say something. I lean my head toward him. “What?” I say softly. He starts a rush of whispering.

“His mother is learning to fall,” I say.

“What does that mean?” Ray says.

“In her dance class,” Andrew says. He looks at me again, shy. “Tell him.”

“I’ve never seen her do it,” I say. “She told me about it — it’s an exercise or something. She’s learning to fall.”

Ray nods. He looks like a professor being patient with a student who has just reached an obvious conclusion. You know when Ray isn’t interested. He holds his head very straight and looks you right in the eye, as though he is.

“Does she just go plop?” he says to Andrew.

“Not really,” Andrew says, more to me than to Ray. “It’s kind of slow.”

I imagine Ruth bringing her arms in front of her, head bent, an almost penitential position, and then a loosening in the knees, a slow folding downward.

Ray reaches across the table and pulls my arms away from the front of my body, and his touch startles me so that I jump, almost upsetting my coffee.

“Let’s take a walk,” he says. “Come on. You’ve got time.”

He puts two dollars down and pushes the money and the check to the back of the table. I hold Andrew’s parka for him and he backs into it. Ray adjusts it on his shoulders. Ray bends over and feels in Andrew’s pockets.

“What are you doing?” Andrew says.

“Sometimes disappearing mittens have a way of reappearing,” Ray says. “I guess not.”

Ray zips his own green jacket and pulls on his hat. I walk out of the restaurant beside him, and Andrew follows.

“I’m not going far,” Andrew says. “It’s cold.”

I clutch the envelope. Ray looks at me and smiles, it’s so obvious that I’m holding the envelope with both hands so I don’t have to hold his hand. He moves in close and puts his hand around my shoulder. No hand-swinging like children — the proper gentleman and the lady out for a stroll. What Ruth has known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.