Burning House by Ann Beattie Page A

romantic lunch—pink petals all overour laps, on the table—and I couldn’t tell him. I had on a wrap-around skirt, and he slid his chair close to mine and was teasing, putting his hand underneath it, and I said to him, “I
am
eating, Jason,” and “I love you—I can’t eat.” He wanted to go to my apartment. “I have an appointment,” I said. “Tonight,” he said. “I can’t tonight,” I said. “Another night. Some other night.” He thought I was kidding. When he called, hours later, expecting to come over, I was lying in my bed, after the abortion, Linda sitting in a chair reading, watching, and I was trying not to sound woozy, in spite of the fact that they’d given me so many pills Linda almost had to carry me from the building to the cab. I had done it because I didn’t have the nerve to test him—to find out if he loved me more than he loved his wife. Ash loved Holly, and that went a long way toward explaining why we looked so much alike, yet she was more beautiful. She walked like somebody who was loved. She didn’t avoid looking into people’s eyes for the same reason I did when she walked through the city. I thought how lucky she was—even though sometimes she could be frighteningly unhappy—the night I held her and rocked her in my lap. I knew for sure that I was right about her good luck a week later, when I stood at the window, about to pull the shades in my room to take a nap, and I looked out and saw Ash’s old car, parked at the end of the treacherous driveway, and Ash, running toward the house, a huge torch of red gladiolas raised above his head.

WINTER: 1978
     

    The canvases were packed individually, in shipping cartons. Benton put them in the car and slammed the trunk shut.
    “They’ll be all right?” the man asked.
    “They survived the baggage compartment of the 747, they’ll do O.K. in the trunk,” Benton said.
    “I love his work,” the man said to Nick.
    “He’s great,” Nick said, and felt like an idiot.
    Benton and Olivia had just arrived in L.A. Nick had gone to the airport to meet them. Olivia said she wasn’t feeling well and insisted on getting a cab to the hotel, even though Nick offered to drive her and meet Benton at Allen Tompkins’s house later.
    The man who had also come to the airport to meet Benton was Tompkins’s driver. Nick could never remember the man’s name. Benton was in L.A. to show his paintings to Tompkins. Tompkins would buy everything he had brought. Benton was wary of Tompkins, and of his driver, so he had asked Nick to meet him at the airport and to go with him.
    “How was your flight?” Nick said to Benton. All three of them were in the front seat of the Cadillac.
    “It was O.K. We were half an hour late taking off, but I guess they made up the time in the air. The plane was only a few minutes late, wasn’t it?”
    “Allen and I are flying to Spain for Christmas,” the driver said.
    On the tape deck, Orson Welles was broadcasting
The War of the Worlds
. Cars seldom passed them; the man drove sixty-five, with the car on cruise control, nervously brushing hair out of his eyes. The last time Nick rode in this car, a Jack Benny show, complete with canned laughter, had been playing on the tape deck.
    “An Arab bought the house next door, and he’s having a new pool put in. It’s in the shape of different flowers: one part of it’s tulip-shaped, and the other part is a rose. I asked, and the pool man told me it was supposed to be a rose.” The driver kneaded his left shoulder with his right hand. He was wearing a leather strap around his wrist with squares of hammered silver through the middle.
    “Have you been to Marbella?” the driver said. “Beverly Hills is the pits. Only
he
would want to live in Beverly Hills.”
    They were on Allen Tompkins’s street. “Hold it,” the driver said to Benton and Nick, taking the car off cruise control but slowing only slightly as he pulled into the steep driveway. He hopped out and