Burning House by Ann Beattie Page A

parents had given him an archery set, and he had talked his father into setting it up outside in the snow. His father had been drunk and had taken a fruit cake from the kitchen counter and put the round, flat cake on top of his head like a hat, and stood to the side of the target, tipping his fruitcake hat, yelling to Nick to shoot it off his head while his mother rapped on the window, gesturing them inside.
    “I hope you enjoyed your stay,” the woman behind the desk said to Benton.
    “Fine,” Benton said.
    “How you doing?” Dennis Hopper said.
    “Fine,” the woman behind the desk said. She reached around Benton and handed Dennis Hopper his mail.
    The security guard was sitting on a chair drinking a Coke. He was staring at them. Nick hoped that by the time he got them to the airport Olivia would have stopped crying.
    “Want to come East and liven up the wake?” Benton said to Nick.
    “They don’t want to see me,” Olivia said. “Why can’t I go back to the apartment?”
    “You’re who I live with. My brother just died. We’re going to be with my family.”
    “I wish I could go,” Nick said. “I wish I could act like everybody else in my office—phone in and say I’m having an anxiety attack.”
    “Come with us,” Olivia said, squeezing his hand. “Please.”
    “I can’t just get on a plane,” he said.
    “If there’s a seat,” she said.
    “I don’t know,” Nick said. “Are you serious?”
    “I’m serious,” Benton said. “Olivia’s probably as serious as she gets on Valium.”
    “That was nasty,” she said. “I’m not stoned.”
    “I don’t know,” Nick said. Olivia looked at him. “About the plane, I mean,” he said.
    “She misunderstands things when she’s stoned,” Benton said.
    They got into Nick’s car and he pulled out onto the narrow, curving road behind the hotel. “I’ll call Ilena,” Nick said. “Are we going to miss the plane if I go back into the hotel?”
    “We’ve got time,” Benton said. “Go on.”
    He left the car running and went back into the hotel. The security guard was making funny whiny noises and shuffling across the floor, and the girl behind the desk was laughing. She saw him looking at them and called out: “It’s an imitation of one of the rabbits in
Watership Down
.”
    The security guard, amused at his own routine, crossed his eyes and wiggled his nose.
    The house in Weston was huge. It was a ten-room house on four acres, the back lawn bordered by massive fir trees, and in front of them thick vines growing large, oblong pumpkins. Around the yard were sunflowers, frost-struck, bent almost in half. Nick squatted to stare at one of their black faces.
    He had seen the sunflowers curving in the moonlight when they arrived the night before and Benton’s mother, Ena, lit the yard with floodlights; the flowers were just outside the aura of light, and he had squinted before he was able tomake out what they were. It was morning now, and he was examining one. He ran his fingers across its rough face.
    The reality of Wesley’s death hadn’t really hit him until he got to the house, walked across the lawn, and went inside. Then, although he hadn’t seen Wesley for years, and had never been to the house, Nick felt that Ena didn’t belong there, and that Wesley was very far away.
    Ena had been waiting for them, and the house had been burning with light—hard to see from the highway, she had told Benton on the phone—but inside there was a horrible pall over everything, in spite of the brightness. He had not been able to get to sleep, and when he had slept, he had dreamed about the gigantic, bent sunflowers. Wesley was dead.
    The movie they had shown on the plane, which they stared at but did not listen to, had a scene in it of a car chase through San Francisco, with Orientals smiling in the back seat of a speeding car and waving little American flags. It did not seem possible that such a thing could be happening if Wesley was really