Burning Down the House (9 page)

A
LIX AND POPPY
didn't notice when they left the museum, Alix scurrying, Poppy rambling, down the broad steps toward the sidewalk, that Neva was walking along the other side of Fifth Avenue—beyond the food carts and waiting taxis and the rush of black SUVs and colorful pedestrians—with Roman and Felix. She escorted the two blazered boys through the gorge of buildings on a shadowed side street, turning onto the avenue toward the late-afternoon majesty of the museum and then curving around to stay on the east side of Fifth to deposit Roman at a friend's apartment for a visit of video warfare and interpersonal victimization, an activity Roman was looking forward to after having been beaten at After-School Chess Club by Felix. Neva and Felix rode up with him in the wood-paneled elevator and left him in the hands of the other boy's meek nanny and a spiffy male house manager rushing with a vase of flowers from the kitchen into a library. From the far reaches of the foyer you could see the expansive kitchen, at work in which were two cooks, its floor a neon-green laminate. Investment art in shades of orange and electric pink loomed on the walls and a cartoonish, contemporary Japanese sculpture beckoned toward the living room, but Felix and Neva stayed near the front door, bade a brief goodbye to Roman, and lingered just long enough to see him knock off his shoes and join the other boy in a sports jersey (he had changed out of his school uniform already, not having been enrolled in Chess Club), and with sweaty hair happily race down a hallway to where the electronics awaited.

Neva and Felix now enter the museum. Felix takes a drawing class there once a week and Neva usually wanders the galleries while waiting for him. She and the boys have already settled into a routine only a few weeks into the school year. Patrizia is efficient about signing the children up for activities and arranging a full schedule for Neva to execute. But today instead of looking at paintings or pottery or jewel-encrusted headpieces Neva realizes that she has forgotten some of Felix's art supplies at home and so she rushes back to the apartment to get them for him. She walks briskly up the avenue, the apartment is only a few blocks away, and she enjoys staying on the park side of the street, the full green trees making a canopy above her as if deftly sketched for her to walk beneath.

Under the trees she feels memories dart through her without stopping. Trees, smoke, a dog. She picks up glints of such images all around her and they flash in her brain making sudden connections too brief to comprehend but rushing through her with feeling after feeling. She has the sense of a wild place far back in her past, a welcoming wilderness to which a part of her wishes to return. At the same time she is attuned to the movement of her life speeding forward, onward, under this canopy of trees, toward some goal, gliding, gliding among a million possibilities toward one singular event. She knows that she cannot stop for either one, not the backward past or the uncertain future, knows that she has to keep going, keep soldiering in the present, under these leaves, marching through her memories, bearing her own witness.

She is not going to stop, she will not let anything stop her, and this makes her, underneath the shifting shadows on the sidewalk where nobody is watching her, curl her lips in such a way that she almost appears to be smiling.

That afternoon Steve is home unexpectedly when she enters the apartment. Patrizia is out. Everyone else is out, shopping for the household, doing errands for the household. Even the housekeeper is out purchasing cleaning supplies. Steve is home walking the ruins of the apartment, the new ruins freshly decorated, beautifully appointed, as quiet as the museum, contemporary ruins. Steve and Neva run into each other in a hallway lined with family photographs, all framed in the same kind of frame, an entire wall of witnesses to this encounter. He doesn't fully explain to her why he is home and she doesn't explain to him why she has returned alone. He says something about a doctor's appointment and that he couldn't go straight back to the office. In the carpeted quiet of the hallway it seems as if Steve is on the verge of doing several things: tracing his fingers along her face, confessing some long-ago sin, asking for forgiveness, telling her that he is dying. But he doesn't do any of these things. Instead he says: Come, let's talk for a while in my study. I think I may have some work for you. It might be interesting.

She notices then that she desires him. But she is not attracted to him. They are both suffering, and she is drawn to him. It's impossible to resist, this current.

T
HEY WERE RUNNING
through the opening number when Jonathan entered the theater. He slid in by the front door past the empty ticket windows and made his way into the audience where a few assistant producers and investors sat toward the back behind various crew people, stage managers, and assistants who flanked Ian at the fifth row center. The houselights were on and the velvet seats spread out smooth but naked looking in the daytime and the dancers and actors in their rehearsal clothes stood onstage in a silvery-gray void like beings on another planet.

An old college friend of Ian's, who was a British theater critic, and his wife, a playwright, sat in the last row and gazed upon the proceedings among the other scattered audience members. Their faces registered nothing outwardly but Jonathan could read the billions of impressions of rivalry, condescension, misunderstanding, projection, false enthusiasm, shallow judgment, and studied criticism in their posture, blinks, and subtle movements.

The exuberance of the American musical, said the critic.

The hysteria, said the playwright.

Suddenly the young woman playing Jane Eyre and one of the other players spun around and kicked and sang something and the company all turned and shifted and began to move in a line down the stage toward marks drawn in chalk on the floor that denoted a destination. Men in tight sweatpants were leaping onto one another and looping their arms around necks and shoulders. By the time the men had jumped down and thrown themselves onto the floor under the lifted feet of some of the women and with their arms outstretched along the stage, more dancers were beginning to appear from the wings, a moving frieze of arching and bending bodies that trembled and swayed to the rising music. They crossed the stage and vanished back into the wings and reappeared again one by one and by now the lighting designer was at work and so they were silhouetted phantoms with kicking legs that seemed to stir up an unreal shimmering smoke as they wove together and separated and divided into angles and rows and then coalesced and in the lightening aura around them there began to appear what seemed to be a second company of dancers behind them but which were their shadows cast elongated and precise, lurid and howling against a scrim at the back of the stage. Their immense voices and wild screams filled up the theater like a ghostly orchestra heard through some faulty transmission from the underworld normally unheard.

Okay, now let's have you murmuring, engaging the audience as you crisscross downstage, called Ian, and as he spoke they did what he described, extending their faces and arms out to the phantom audience. The footlights came on and colored rays glazed their skin and made them into garish psycho killers who called out to the empty seats from the distant decade of the 1980s. The first chorus began.

The Jane Eyre character was standing in one corner of the stage on her own holding a giant torch which would be lit during production and which she used to fend off the oncoming killers as if in a dream. The dancers passed close by her, one by one, turning, twisting, spinning, and drew close to her and then crumbled away as she defended herself with the invisible flame.

The company now lay on the ground as the number ended. Some of the dancers breathed more heavily than the rest and others sat up impatient for the notes and next routine. Jane Eyre stood at ease now, adjusting her cropped dance sweater. Others chatted quietly to one another.

They walked up onstage, Ian, the stage manager, and the choreographer. They each picked different people to talk to and began gesturing and enacting various movements. Ian looked for a moment offstage to where the killer dancers had fled. He instructed Jane Eyre not to look at them as they danced off and to concentrate on the forces propelling toward her. He conferred with the stage manager and jumped off the stage.

The theater critic and the playwright sat in a stupor. They were nakedly uncomfortable and they looked around the bustling theater as if in a nudist colony or a strip club. Jonathan moved elegantly out of his seat along his row, approaching some investors and producers and making conversation. Then he reached the seats of the critic and the writer.

He stood over them—they were still conferring in their seats—like a nightclub owner stopping at a table of tourists. The lighting designer was playing around and now a golden light suffused the theater while the stage sat in a reddish darkness. Jonathan was standing by their seats, looking down at them before they noticed him. They were discussing commedia dell'arte and its influence on musical theater. Jonathan placed a hand on the critic's shoulder.

Angus, long time no see, he said.

What? Angus turned, startled.

Jonathan smiled.

Oh, hello, said the playwright, named Kai. Angus, she said to her husband as if translating, it's Jonathan, Ian's friend, Alix's brother.

What do you think of the show? Jonathan asked.

They critiqued, politely, emphasizing that musical theater was not really their thing. Jonathan towered over them, casual, comfortable, listening with a bemused expression to their hesitations and exaggerated admiration. Jonathan let them know that he was thinking of investing in the production.

From a huddle with his associates and assistants Ian emerged and strolled up the aisle. A few of the performers were left onstage, some had headed backstage and several roamed the aisles collecting bags and heading out for a break. Ian patted them and squeezed their shoulders as he passed them. They accepted his attentions hungrily, happily, some childishly. They stepped aside as he opened his arms to embrace Jonathan.

Entertaining? Ian said to Angus and Kai.

They were nodding enthusiastically with their heads, all the while withholding any real praise with their bodies and tone of voice. They had just come from Warsaw where they'd seen an incredible experimental production of Ibsen, very political, they explained.
A Doll's Horse?
said Ian.
Hedda Hair?
said Jonathan. The playwright looked at them.

What do you make of the concept? said Ian. The Jane Eyre meets Talking Heads idea?

Nothing yet, said Angus. I'd need to see the whole thing first.

What do you think of the staging?

It's hard to tell, said Kai. Without the set, or costumes.

That's good, said Ian, who didn't really care what they thought. Because it's all going to change anyway. This is a work in progress. Early days still.

He gazed down at them and thought about how many years he had known them. At one time, he had considered them friends. But ever since his early success they had treated him resentfully, dismissively. Now he saw them as pompous and pretentious and deeply vain in spite of their bland academic outfits and aggressively aging hair. They'd followed his successful career as if they were bird-watchers and he some common pigeon who had inexplicably been accepted by a flock of rare eagles. They no more believed in his talent than they believed that they themselves might be untalented. Over the years they had won prizes and fellowships and commissions and professorships. They had been invited to lecture and appeared in numerous footnotes. These achievements had been like snakebites on their egos, swelling them out of proportion to the rest of their beings so that their sense of importance bulged and tottered on top of them like extra heads, as if they were monsters in a fable, muzzled, drooling, snouted, skin split to reveal pink bone and yellow ooze. There was a flurry of conversation as Ian tried to swat away their lumbering passive-aggressive attacks and Jonathan enjoyed the performance like a stallion watching smaller animals argue over a rodent.

After Angus and Kai left the theater Jonathan told Ian he'd like to invest in the show. Then he said: So Alix tells me Poppy is starting an internship with you. Interesting.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

—
W. H. AUDEN
, “The More Loving One”