Burning Down the House (10 page)

P
OPPY CAME FROM
a complicated family but this much can be explained: she knew Ian as the best friend of her considerably older half sister Alix. Technically, Alix was Poppy's first cousin, but Alix's father Steve had adopted Poppy at age six, when Poppy's mother, Steve's sister Diana, had died and left Poppy an orphan. There had never been any father in the picture. At least no one that Poppy knew.

It begins with a child.

Poppy does not know much of anything other than that when she is with Ian nature seems inverted: the air between them pulses but her own heart stops beating every few seconds, the outside world falls silent while a siren in her head blares from atomic synthesizers. There is conversation and a dangerous warmth, a raw heat rippling in what seem like visible waves as she and Ian speak, and Poppy, nervous, red cheeked, talks too quickly and ends up regretting half her words.

Ian is unmarried and pushing forty, and his age, combined with the feral attraction he feels for this teenager, has sentenced him to a low-level appointment with his own mortality, a feeling of dread as if an unpleasant yet unavoidable conference call were perpetually looming. He has no idea what to do with this feeling. His career is reaching new heights after his early successes, and he is not in favor of any distractions from work, such as an entanglement or even an emotional connection. He throws himself more feverishly into the Broadway show he is directing, staying up until all hours at workshops, jumping onstage to demonstrate choreography and gestures, in that way that directors do.

Onstage he is a black silhouette, the bright lights blinding behind him, illuminating nothing. He will be burned into her brain, branded on her frontal cortex. She will be able to call up this image and feel her every emotion singularly fixed on this picture. It is as if the rest of her mind ceases to think and each connection points only to him. It is a reflex and it is a meaningful feeling. She is frightened, awoken, awake.

After weeks of flirtation—texts and e-mails and old-fashioned phone calls—that had begun during Poppy and Alix's brother Jonathan's wedding at a rented estate in the English countryside, Ian and Poppy had been reduced to bodies with heads, no sense in their brains. Poppy had lost the ability to think clearly, to formulate coherent arguments, to do her homework. Ian threw himself even more intensely into his show. When she arrived for the unpaid internship that Alix had secured for her at the theater on the wrong afternoon and found Ian alone in the fifth row center, his hands folded over his chest, his feet up on the seat in front of him, she should have gone home. He should have sent her home. The enveloping darkness of the empty house, the feeling of her feet walking ahead of her down the aisle, and then the slow hours during which they sat side by side in velvet seats, talking and later touching: everything that happened should not have happened. He was too old. She was too young. But something, some encoded understanding that they were meant to be together, compelled them to abandon any notion that this was probably not a good idea.

Should I walk you home?

No, that's okay. I'll find a taxi.

I'll get you one.

No, that's okay. I'm okay.

It's late. I'm coming with you. It's dark outside. Let me help you. I mean help you get a cab.

Poppy and Ian had no plan, no vision of how their relationship would unfold, only a chronic twisting in the pits of their stomachs, a nebulous, persistent sense that what they were doing was inevitable and also a mistake, which propelled them forward. For days, then weeks, there were long, amorous walks and secret meetings at the theater and even Ian's apartment. Receipts and napkins and other mementos of their time together filled Poppy's pockets and book bag and the drawer of her bedside table. Poppy waited for someone to find out, until she realized no one would and she told one friend and then forgot to worry. She followed Ian's lead for how to keep their involvement both daring and secret, hiding in the folds of the curtain until all of the actors and tech people had left, sleeping for a couple of hours at his place before heading uptown, through the galvanized light of early morning in the city before anyone at home woke up.

The silver light blasts off of windows, bounding across rooftops, blinding. She squints, trying to find an explanation for her self, her situation, her unfamiliar ecstasy. Is this just a superficial metropolitan gleam or is it more? Does the sun make any sense? Does morning? She is a vessel of questions, with no answers. Are there answers? She leans back and closes her eyes and calls up an image and her mind fires and the questions fade away.

They had spent several months in this state, sharing every feeling that drifted by, stealing tiny moments and burning glances, and suffering through serious conversations about whether they had any future, until one night, in the grip of a new degree of passion, Poppy came across a letter. Rummaging through Ian's desk while he was in the shower, she had found the bloated white envelope filled with photographs, and for the first time in her life she threw a bottle at a mirror and it broke. It was clumsy and impulsive. She burst into the bathroom and smashed the glass into the medicine cabinet, and Ian, without even stopping the rinsing of his hair, finished his bathing and then calmly explained, with a towel wrapped around his waist, that he had been looking through photos of old girlfriends from the eighties as part of his research for the show.

The corner of the towel drooping, careless, nonchalant. She wants to pull it, rip it out, like ripping out his tongue.

Poppy did not succeed in getting a rise out of Ian at that moment, but her jealousy was duly noted, and it changed things. She had never known her father and been orphaned at six, but there wasn't much for which she had had to fight: she had grown up with marble foyers and private chefs, attentive teachers and other perks of being rich that seemed, from very far away, to make up for a grossly dysfunctional family. Now, for the first time, the instinct that had made her clench her fists while she slept, the impulse that had led her to be fiercely independent and appear aloof and eccentric to her peers, was manifesting itself with a purpose. Possessiveness matured her and gave her definition. It brought out her true nature, her terrible longing and submerged rage. It heightened everything about Poppy: her angled face, her knowing naïveté, her sarcastic smile and adorable wit. Her careless, fearless, superbly plain sense of style and ravishing big eyes. And the womanliness it graced her with caught Ian's attention and made him, finally, begin to love her.

Where are we going? she asked.

To a movie, he said.

To a movie? In a movie theater? Really?

What? Is that so crazy?

Can't we just watch something at your place?

No, we're seeing an old movie. A real film. And it would be sacrilegious not to see it in a theater.

Okay, if you say so, Grandpa.

Look, I'm proud that I was formed by the twentieth century. No Internet, no texting, no cyberbullies. We had art. We had live, communal experiences.

People tweet while they watch TV, you know, Poppy said, knowing this would drive him crazy.

Oh Jesus, he said, smiling wildly, and took her by the hand.

They were running across Houston Street. The Saturday after Thanksgiving and the day ending so early it felt like what she imagined it might feel like in Sweden. A blue, crisp holiday air and a vibration of excitement, the intersection of urban consumerist buzz and genuine social well-being, people looking one another in the face if not the eyes along the sidewalks, bustling families and children in parkas that left their arms puffed out at an angle as if they were ginger-cookie people, little happy robots breathing in the brisk New York City climate that changed block to block, but that was on this evening maintaining a steady supply of wintertime cheer, fellow feeling, camaraderie among strangers, something akin to joy.

He took her to see
L'Atalante,
by Jean Vigo, at the Film Forum. Ian held Poppy in the darkness and she thought it was the most beautiful movie, the most beautiful day of her life. When the skipper dove underwater and imagined that he saw his wife circling, circling with one arm curved loosely above her head, her white dress shimmering, Poppy felt a wave of pleasure wash over her as if she herself were underwater, circling, circling. It was warm and cool under the water, fast and slow. Temperature and time floated away, melted, disappeared. Only being was left, being and circling in the water.

The love they share is an attempt to express the inexpressible. There is no word for what they have, who they become when they are together. It is theirs and they belong to it.

Alix invited Ian, as usual, to the family's holiday party at Steve and Patrizia's apartment and of course Poppy was there, bantering with Steve's business associates, flirting with the bartender, swiping canapés from silver trays with a sophisticated, practiced touch. The tables bulged with arrangements of fruit and ornaments, pale green grapes and pears and orbs made of glass, and burnished, dusky-gold garlands running the lengths of the tablecloths and slipping their thick dark leaves and glinting metallic beads in between plates of smoked salmon, sliced steak, bowls of brioche rolls, sourdough rolls with olives and rosemary, and wheat rolls with raisins and hazelnuts. Who spent time thinking up so many different kinds of rolls?

Poppy was sitting now on a long, low oyster velvet-covered couch and Ian watched from a careful distance as she talked to Felix. Felix stood by the couch, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, at peace in his trousers and leather shoes and jacket and the bow tie that he had insisted on wearing in spite of Patrizia and Roman's objections. Ian could see the way Poppy treated Felix with graceful kindness, a reverence that she reserved for very few people. She looked at him thoughtfully, patiently, recognizing his complex inner life and dignifying what others might have deemed his eccentricities by listening to him, answering his questions, allowing his truthful eyes to rest on her.

Later, when Felix had gone to sleep and Poppy and Ian were seated on a different couch, this one a chesterfield upholstered in sovereign blue, having been unable to avoid each other for an entire evening, the two of them balanced dessert plates on their laps amid a large group engaged in conversation about sports, politics, technology, and television. At first, Ian had thought of offering his opinion on a recent political scandal but the actual idea dissolved in his brain and he found himself unable to understand why anyone would care about the incident. Similarly, Poppy considered proffering her thoughts on the latest hot movie star and whether he was hotter or less hot than another hot actor but as she was opening her mouth it occurred to her that she was completely uninterested in the subject. In keeping the nature of their relationship a secret, she and Ian were carrying on their own private conversation, not spoken but some internal communication that heightened the energy connecting them and kept them close. Joyful, afraid, joyfully afraid, they sat at either end of the long sofa, smiling at other people, pretending to listen, nibbling at their ganache, falling more and more in love.

SO IT REALLY WAS
a tragedy when the housekeeper told Jonathan about the receipts and souvenirs and Jonathan told Steve about Poppy's affair with Ian and Steve told Ian that he, Ian, was Poppy's biological father. Steve was a ferociously intelligent self-made mogul who had scaled the sheer-glass mountainsides of the international real estate community to become a member of the planetary elite. He was sixty-two, and he was wearing a bespoke suit on his large, unmuscular frame. He stood up and took his jacket off, hanging it carefully on the back of his chrome-and-leather chair, and walked around his desk to position himself, as he rolled up his shirtsleeves, to sit, just barely, on the front of the desk, looking down at Ian. After explaining to him how he knew that Ian was Poppy's father and that he wanted Ian to never tell Poppy of this relationship, because, of course, as Ian would agree, such knowledge would be devastating to her, Steve insisted, effectively, that Ian sign a confidentiality agreement. Therefore, in spite of Ian's feelings for Poppy, in spite of his stunned recognition that he was facing, for the first time in his life, a moral dilemma—the kind of thing that in his mind only occurred in screenplays and nineteenth-century novels—in spite of his idea of himself as a good and relatively speaking noble person, when Ian broke up with Poppy and hurt her more than she could possibly understand, he was not legally permitted to tell her why.