House on Fire

27

“You’re the first of the guests to come down,” Paul said. “You’re all late sleepers. Layla is still trying to adjust from Hong Kong time. She should be down in an hour or so. And Cameron—”

“Cameron is Cameron,” said Hayden, like an old joke. A rueful laugh.

“And I imagine his girlfriend got just as pissed as he did,” said Paul. “They seemed compatible. What was her name again?”

“Hildy,” said Hayden, in sweatpants and Wesleyan sweatshirt.

“Pissed?” said Sukie. “In the British sense?”

“Of course. Blotted. Legless.” Paul shook his head. He was wearing blue striped pajamas and looked, with his gray cowlick, like an overgrown child. He was sitting at the head of the table as if he’d called a meeting. He had a sad little potbelly.

I looked around for a moment. This was a huge commercial-grade kitchen, with a couple of ten-burner stainless-steel Vulcan gas ranges and ovens, steel hoods, two huge True refrigerators. Exposed brick walls, brown tile floors. Nothing fancy in here. This wasn’t a kitchen built for show. It was used mostly by professional cooks, who could prepare a lot of meals here; it looked recently updated. Pot racks mounted on the ceiling. A giant KitchenAid mixer. A Bunn commercial coffeemaker.

“Your dad a late sleeper?” I asked.

“Not him. He’s having his morning massage.”

“You know, Rosa’s dying,” said Hayden. “We all have to visit her. She’s still in Queens.”

“I’d heard she wasn’t well, but I had no idea she was dying,” said Sukie.

“Stage-four cancer,” said Hayden.

“Rosa took care of us younger kids,” Sukie explained. “We all loved her.”

The kitchen door swung open, and I turned around to see if it was Maggie.

But it was Conrad Kimball, wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with an unbuttoned gray cardigan over it, reading glasses on a chain around his neck. He was smiling.

I could feel the mood shift. Everyone was suddenly less relaxed.

“Morning, Dad,” they called out, nearly in unison. “Morning.”

“Good morning,” he proclaimed. “Where is my beloved? She’s not back yet?”

“Natalya?” said Sukie. “She’s not catching up on her beauty sleep?” She said it in an innocent way, but I knew it was a jab.

“No, she’s an early riser,” Conrad replied. “Ever since Young Pioneer camp. She went for a walk in the woods. On the trails. She said it reminds her of the forests outside of Moscow. Well, she’s bound to get hungry sometime soon.”

“Wasn’t it raining earlier?” asked Hayden.

“It cleared up nicely,” said Paul.

Sukie poured her father a mug of coffee and handed it to him. “You’re in a good mood this morning,” she said to him.

“A good massage always puts me in a good frame of mind. Almost makes me forget the call I got yesterday from the director of the Whitney.”

“Let me guess,” said Paul. “They want you to give another gallery.”

“He was asking, in the most delicate way possible, whether I’d be agreeable to changing the name of the Kimball Gallery.”

“Changing it to what?” said Hayden.

“Just... taking down the name. They’ve had a lot of protests against us. All those crazies out there, the nutjobs, the sob sisters.”

“What did you tell him?” asked Sukie. She pulled out a chair for him, not a stool.

“I said, ‘What do you think Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would say if you asked her the same thing?’”

“Daddy, there’s a lot of anger out there,” Sukie said.

“And you’re not helping,” he said. “Going to all these funerals. Only a matter of time before the Wall Street Journal does a story about you, and it’s the rats are deserting the sinking ship. It’s goddamn disloyal to the family.” He said it like a slap.

“People are OD’ing by the thousands every year, Daddy. They’re snorting Oxydone like cocaine. Hundreds of—”

“You know what mistake I made with you?” Conrad said, raising a stubby index finger. “Letting you go to Oberlin.”

“What’s wrong with Oberlin?” said Hayden.

“Oberlin was great,” Sukie said.

“It’s where she got indoctrinated with all her high ideals,” said Conrad. Then he smiled, as if to brush it off.

“Did you tell Dad about Sundance?” said Hayden.

“What’s this?” said Conrad.

“Her new documentary just got accepted to Sundance. Isn’t that fantastic?”

“Hey, congrats, Sukie,” said Paul.

“Yeah, isn’t that great?” Sukie said.

“Sundance,” said Conrad. “That’s one of those little festivals in some cutesy town where people go to watch documentaries like yours, right?”

“Well, yeah,” said Sukie.

He shook his head, smiled in amusement. “Like a drug that never makes it out of trials. How’s your book?” Now he was talking to Paul.

“So I’ve got a bit of good news too,” Paul replied. “Finally.”

“Oh, yeah, what’s that?” said Hayden.

“So an editor at Dodd Merriwether really loves my book proposal, and I think they’re going to make an offer.”

“What’s your book?” I asked. Someone nearby was knocking on a door.

“It’s a social history. A cultural history. Basically, it’s about how we got to be so ass-backward and upside down. As a culture, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I could see his sisters’ eyes starting to glaze over.

“At first it was going to start with the sixties. But then I realized the fifties are really the sixties, you know? Ginsberg, the Beats, Transcendental Meditation, all that shit.”

The knocking on the kitchen door continued.

“The fifties. Postwar era. Except, actually, you know, wrong war. It’s after the First World War that you see this whole — well, a culture of nihilism, really. Like, we’ve just burned down Western civilization, and we’re okay with it. So long as we’ve got our gas masks.”

“Okay, Paul, he gets it,” Sukie interrupted.

The knocking continued, but no one got up.

“Sounds like a great idea for a book,” I lied. Paul had gone to Harvard, then spent ten years in grad school in art history. He never finished his dissertation. For a while he was a teaching fellow at Harvard, then he taught expository writing there.

But Paul wasn’t done yet. “I’m thinking like All That Is Solid Melts into Air or The Culture of Narcissism — I mean, we’re talking a big book.” He mentioned the titles of the books as if everyone should know them.

“What kind of an offer are we talking about?” asked Conrad.

“Someone’s at the door,” said Hayden.

“Natalya wouldn’t knock,” said Conrad.

Sukie got up to answer it.

“Maybe six figures,” said Paul.

“I guess it helped that I played a couple rounds of golf with that fat German guy who owns the joint.”

“Dodd Merriwether is owned by a German holding company,” Paul explained to his siblings.

“A privately held publishing company. Been in Dieter’s family for five generations. Used to publish hymnals, he told me.”

“I don’t want your help, Dad,” said Paul.

I could hear Hayden talking to whoever was at the door. I heard Spanish being spoken, a male voice.

“Too late,” said Conrad. “I always do what I can to help my children. I can’t avoid it. Ask Hayden how she came by—”

“Paul, you speak Spanish fluently, right?” said Hayden, coming from across the room. By her side was a gnarled older Hispanic-looking guy in jeans and boots and a twill work shirt, clutching a battered straw hat to his torso.

“Buenos días, Santiago,” Conrad said. “¿Pasa algo?”

The old man bowed his head toward Conrad and then the others. He was younger than Conrad by at least twenty years, but a life of hard work in the sun had knotted and aged him.

“Buenos días, patrón,” he said. “No — bueno, pos sí, patrón, encontramos un cadáver. Tábamos tirando la hojarasca en el bosque y vimos una mujer. Muerta.” He craned his neck in a funny direction, and I realized he was doing an imitation.

Paul said, “They found a woman’s body. In the woods.”