Ann Beattie - The Burning House: Short Stories

ACCLAIM FOR
ANN BEATTIE

Ann Beattie is a genuine literary talent.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Beattie has rendered the nuances of relationships as masterfully as John Updike. She writes with such precision that her words seem to create photographs in the mind.

Houston Chronicle

[Beattie is] a master chronicler of our life and times.

Newsday

Beattie evokes her characters with clarity and accuracy and creates a poignancy around them the kind of powerful, haunting quality that we feel in The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

[With] her absolute ear and her masterly deadpan humor, the results are dazzling. Beattie is a natural writer.

The New Yorker

Beattie writes with quiet and subdued sympathy and exhibits a casual grace and knowing moves.

Time

ANN BEATTIE
THE BURNING HOUSE

Ann Beattie and her husband, Lincoln
Perry, live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

BOOKS BY
ANN BEATTIE

Distortions
Chilly Scenes of Winter
Secrets & Surprises
Falling in Place
The Burning House
Love Always
Where Youll Find Me
Picturing Will
What Was Mine
Another You

Copyright 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Irony & Pity, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto, Originally published in hardcover by
Random House, Inc., New York, in 1982.

Portions of this book have previously appeared in the following:
Ms., Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, the Carolina Quarterly, and the Washington Post Sunday Magazine.

The following stories originally appeared in The New Yorker:
The Burning House, Greenwich Time, Waiting, The Cinderella Waltz, Running Dreams, Afloat, Gravity, Girl Talk, Like Glass, Desire.

Jacklighting originally appeared in Antaeus.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Rams Horn Music for permission to reprint lyrics from Forever Young by Bob Dylan. Copyright 1973, 1974 Rams Horn Music. All rights reserved.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Beattie, Ann.
The burning house.
I. Title.
PS3552.E177B8
813.54
82-5292
eISBN: 978-0-307-76571-0
AACR2

v3.1

Again, for David

Ruths 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. Hes annoyed that his mother is being mushy in front of me. He is eager to seem independent, and cranky because he just woke up. Im cranky, too, even after the drive to Ruths in the cold. Im drinking coffee to wake up. If someone said that he loved me at this moment, Id never believe him; I cant 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 Ruths table and sheas alwaysis 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. Were going to miss the train, he says. Theres 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. Youre right. Id rather be early than late. I ask Ruth: Anything from the city? If she did want something, she wouldnt sayshe 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 Andrews 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.

Im hungry again, he says.

Andrew knows that I dont 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 oclock, and now its only twelvetoo early to eat another mealand he knows Im going to say: Again?

Andrew. The morning before the night he was born, Ruth and I swam in Halls 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 Halls Pond, she was two weeks overdue. There wasnt 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 couldnt 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 laterbut 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. Dont 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.

Youre 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 doesnt notice.

Well get lunch, I say. Take your pennies and throw them in the pool when we get down there.