Burning House by Ann Beattie Page B

opened the door on their side of the car.
    Benton hesitated a moment before reaching into the trunk. Glued to the underside of the trunk was a picture of Raquel Welch in a sequined gown. With her white teeth and tightly clothed, sequined body she looked like a mermaid in a nightmare.
    Benton was in California because Allen Tompkins paid him triple what he could get for his paintings in New York. Benton had met Tompkins years ago, when he had been framing one of his paintings, staying on after his shift at theframe shop in New Haven where he worked was over. Tompkins had asked Benton how much the picture he was working on would cost when it was framed. “It’s my painting, not for sale,” Benton had told him. Very politely, Tompkins had asked if he had others. That night, Benton called Nick, drunk, raving that a man he had just met had given him a thousand dollars
cash
. He had gone out with Benton the next night, Benton laughing and running from store to store, to prove to himself that the money really bought things. Benton had bought a brown tweed coat and a pipe. That joke had only turned sour when Benton’s wife, Elizabeth, commended him for selecting such nice things.
    Now, seven years later, Benton was wearing jeans and a black velvet jacket, and they were sitting in Tompkins’s library. It was cluttered with antique Spanish furniture, the curtains closed, the room illuminated by lamps with bases in the shape of upright fish that supported huge Plexiglas conch shell globes in their mouths. The lamps cast a lavender-pink light. Three Turkish prayer rugs were lined up across the center of the room—the only floor covering on the white-painted floorboards.
    “Krypto and Baby Kal-El,” Tompkins said, coming toward them with both hands outstretched. Benton smiled and shook both of Tompkins’s hands. Then Nick shook his hand too, certain that any feeling of warmth came from Tompkins’s just having shaken hands with Benton.
    “I’m so excited,” Tompkins said. He went to the long window behind where Benton and Nick sat on the sofa and pulled the string that drew the drapes apart. “Dusk falls on Gotham City,” Tompkins said. He sat in the heavily carved chair beside the sofa. “All for me?” he said, raising his eyebrows at the crates. “If you like them,” Benton said. The driver came into the library with a bottle of ouzo and a pitcher of orange juice on a tray. He put it on the small table midway between Benton and Tompkins.
    “Sit down. Sit down and have a look,” Tompkins said excitedly. The man sat on the floor by the crates, leaning against the sofa. Benton took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and began undoing the first crate.
    “I’m using my special X-ray vision,” Tompkins said, “and I love it already.”
    Tompkins got up and crouched by the open crate, fingers on the top of the frame, obviously enjoying every second of the suspense, before he pulled the picture out.
    “Money and taste,” the driver said to Nick.
    “You could not remember the simplest song lyric,” Tompkins said to his driver, slowly drawing out the painting. “Money and
time,
” he sighed, pulling the canvas out of the crate. “Money and time,” he said again, but this time it was halfhearted; he was interested in nothing but the picture he held in front of him. Benton was always amazed by that expression on Tompkins’s face. It made Benton as happy as he had been years before when he and Elizabeth were still married, and it had been his morning routine to go into Jason’s bedroom, gently shake him awake, and see his son’s soft blue eyes slowly focus on his own.
    It was three days after Benton had sold all his paintings to Tompkins, and Nick had gone to the hotel where Olivia and Benton were staying to try to persuade them to go to lunch.
    The light came into the hotel room in a strange way. The curtains were hung from brass rings, and between the rings, because the curtains did not quite come to the top of