Burning House

RUNNING DREAMS

Barnes is running with the football. The sun strikes his white pants, making them shine like satin. The dog runs beside him, scattering autumn leaves, close to Barnes’s ankles. By the time they get from the far end of the field to where Audrey and I are sitting, the dog has run ahead and tried to trip him three times, but Barnes gives him the football anyway. Barnes stops suddenly, holds the football out as delicately as a hostess offering a demitasse cup, and drops it. The dog, whose name is Bruno, snaps up the football — it is a small sponge-rubber model, a toy — and runs off with it. Barnes, who is still panting, sits on the edge of Audrey’s chaise, lifts her foot, and begins to rub her toes through her sock.

“I forgot to tell you that your accountant called when you were chopping wood this morning,” she says. “He called to tell you the name of the contractor who put in his neighbor’s pool. I didn’t know you knew accountants socially.”

“I knew his neighbors,” Barnes says. “They’re different neighbors now. The people I knew were named Matt and Zera Cartwright. Zera was always calling me to ask for Librium. They moved to Kentucky. The accountant kept in touch with them.”

“There’s so much about your life I don’t know,” Audrey says. She pulls off her sock and turns her foot in his hand. The toenails are painted red. The nails on her big toes are perfectly oval. Her heels have the soft skin and roundness of a baby’s foot, which is miraculous to me, because I know she used to wear high heels to work every day in New York. It also amazes me that there are people who still paint their toenails when summer is over.

Predictably, Bruno is trying to bury the football. I once saw Bruno dig a hole for an inner tube, so the football will only be a minute’s trouble. Early in the summer, Barnes came back to the house late at night — he is a surgeon — and gave the dog his black bag. If Audrey hadn’t been less drunk than the rest of us, and able to rescue it, that would have been buried, too.

“Why do we have to build a pool?” Audrey says. “All that horrible construction noise. What if some kid drowns in it? I’m going to wake up every morning and go to the window and expect to see some little body—”

“You knew how materialistic I was when you married me. You knew that after I got a house in the country I’d want a pool, didn’t you?” Barnes kisses her knee. “Audrey can’t swim, Lynn,” he says to me. “Audrey hates to learn new things.”

We already know she can’t swim. She’s Martin’s sister, and I’ve known her for seven years. Martin and I live together — or did until a few months ago, when I moved. Barnes has known her almost all her life, and they’ve been married for six months now. They were married in the living room of this house, while it was still being built, with Elvis Presley on the stereo singing “As Long as I Have You.” Holly carried a bouquet of cobra lilies. Then I sang “Some Day Soon”—Audrey’s favorite Judy Collins song. The dog was there, and a visiting Afghan. The stonemason forgot that he wasn’t supposed to work that day and came just as the ceremony was about to begin, and decided to stay. He turned out to know how to foxtrot, so we were all glad he’d stayed. We had champagne and danced, and Martin and I fixed crêpes.

“What if we just tore the cover off that David Hockney book,” Audrey says now. “The one of the man floating face down in a pool, that makes him look like he’s been pressed under glass? We could hang it from the tree over there, instead of wind chimes. I don’t want a swimming pool.”

Barnes puts her foot down. She lifts the other one and puts it in his hand.

“We can get you a raft and you can float around, and I can rub your feet,” he says.

“You’re never here. You work all the time,” Audrey says.

“When the people come to put in the pool, you can hold up your David Hockney picture and repel them.”

“What if they don’t understand that, Barnes? I can imagine that just causing a lot of confusion.”

“Then you lose,” he says. “If you show them the picture and they go ahead and put in the pool anyway, then either it’s not a real cross or they’re not real vampires.” He pats her ankle. “But no fair explaining to them,” he says. “It has to be as serious as charades.”

Martin tells me things that Barnes has told him. In the beginning, Martin didn’t want his sister to marry him, but Barnes was also his best friend and Martin didn’t want to betray Barnes’s confidences to him, so he asked me what I thought. Telling me mattered less than telling her, and I had impressed him long ago with my ability to keep a secret by not telling him his mother had a mastectomy the summer he went to Italy. He only found out when she died, two years later, and then he found out accidentally. “She didn’t want you to know,” I said. “How could you keep that a secret?” he said. He loves me and hates me for things like that. He loves me because I’m the kind of person people come to. It’s an attribute he wishes he had, because he’s a teacher. He teaches history in a private school. One time, when we were walking through Chelsea late at night, a nicely dressed old lady leaned over her gate and handed me a can of green beans and a can opener and said, “Please.” On the subway, a man handed me a letter and said, “You don’t have to say anything, but please read this paragraph. I just want somebody else to see it before I rip it up.” Most of these things have to do with love, in some odd way. The green beans did not have to do with love.

Martin and I are walking in the woods. The poison ivy is turning a bright autumnal red, so it’s easy to recognize. As we go deeper into the woods we see a tree house, with a ladder made of four boards nailed to the tree trunk. There are empty beer bottles around the tree, but I miss the most remarkable thing in the scene until Martin points it out: a white balloon wedged high above the tree house, where a thin branch forks. He throws some stones and finally bounces one off the balloon, but it doesn’t break it or set it free. “Maybe I can lure it down,” he says, and he picks up an empty Michelob bottle, holds it close to his lips, and taps his fingers on the glass as if he were playing a horn while he blows a slow stream of air across the top. It makes an eerie, hollow sound, and I’m glad when he stops and drops the bottle. He’s capable of surprising me as much as I surprise him. We lived together for years. A month ago, he came to the apartment I was subletting late one night, after two weeks of not returning my phone calls at work and keeping his phone pulled at home — came over and hit the buzzer and was standing there smiling when I looked out the window. He walked up the four flights, came in still smiling, and said, “I’m going to do something you’re really going to like.” I was ready to hit him if he tried to touch me, but he took me lightly by the wrist, so that I knew that was the only part of my body he’d touch, and sat down and pulled me into the chair with him, and whistled the harp break to “Isn’t She Lovely.” I had never heard him whistle before. I had no idea he knew the song. He whistled the long, complex interlude perfectly, and then sat there, silently, his lips warm against the top of my hair.

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.”