Free Burning House by Ann Beattie

stained glass above the front door was beautiful. When he became a lawyer, the house in the suburbs they moved to wasn’t her taste, either, but she planted nicotiana plants that bloom at night—the most wonderful-smelling flowers I have ever known.
    Peter was a breech birth, delivered, finally, by Caesarean. I sat in the waiting room with her husband, thinking: things aren’t working out, and they won’t even let us hear her crying. I had been spending a weekend in the country with my lover when Holly called to say she was going to the hospital. It was almost a month early—they were visiting friends in New York. I remember sitting in the waiting room, smelling of turpentine. Jason, the man I was in love with, had taken me to his house in East Hampton. A few hours before Holly called, I had been asleep in the sun, at the end of his dock, and because he thought it would be funny, because he couldn’t resist, he had dipped into the bucket of gray paint—he was painting the dock—and stroked the wide brush full of cold, smooth paint over both knees as I slept. It didn’t wash off in the water, and I had to use turpentine, wiping it again and again across my knees with his wife’s torn blouse, more amused than I let on that he had done it, wondering how I could love a man who had a wife whose discarded blouses were from Saks. When the phone rang, a few hours before we were going to drive back to the city, Holly said: “I’m going to Lenox Hill. I’m saving myself some time.” Then all at once Jason was dabbing at my knees with turpentine, telling me that I did too have time to dive off the dock, that it didn’t matter if my hair was wet, that if I swam, I wouldn’t have to shower. “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re not having the baby.” No—time would pass, and then I wouldn’t even have Jason. He’d reconcile with his wife, and her mysterious arthritis would disappear, and she’d be back playing the violin. But that day it seemed impossible. It was easy enough to sleep inthe sun when back in the city I didn’t even sleep late at night, in my dark apartment. Jason had been enough in love to pull pranks. In his house, I pulled on my jeans, no underwear underneath, borrowed a T-shirt from him, rushed out of the house never suspecting that it was one of the last times I’d ever see it. The very last time would be in winter, when I sat in the car and he went in to see that a pipe that had frozen had been repaired correctly. He was going back to his wife. I didn’t want to see the presents I’d given him that were still inside: the moose cookie jar, the poster of a brigade of roaches: “
Con más poder de atrapar para matar bien muertas las cucarachas fuertes
.” Percy Green’s drawing of a foot with a hugely elongated big toe, captioned “Stretching the Mind.”
    The day Holly went into labor we had taken a fast ride back to the city, the top down on his big, white Ford, wet hair flapping against my head like dog’s ears. No: I wasn’t having this baby. The next spring, I would have an abortion. I would go to a restaurant with a surreally beautiful garden, and Jason would sit next to me, under the umbrella, before I went to the hospital. Pink flowers would fall into our hair, our laps, our food. I couldn’t eat anything. I couldn’t even tell him why. I dropped raw shrimp under the table, praying for the cat that didn’t exist. Sipped a mimosa and spit the liquor back into the glass. My hand on top of his, his other hand sliding up my leg, under the big napkin—a ghastly foreshadowing of the white sheet they’d spread across me an hour later. “Eat,” Jason said. “You have to eat something.” Smiling. Touching. Hiding my food like a child, letting the pink flowers cover what they could.
    Later that year, when Holly left her husband and moved to Vermont, she said to me: “Men are never going to be our salvation.” We both believed it, enough to prick fingers and touch blood bubble to