Free Burning House by Ann Beattie Page B

a Hawaiian shirt with men in gondolasrowing across his chest. His chest was large and well developed from lifting weights. His legs—and he was all leg, under the white shorts—were solid as trees. The only looseness in him anywhere was in his speech—a slight slur from being stoned. The necklace of tiny shells he had gotten in the Philippines, back in the days when he was a black belt in karate who repaired cameras for a living, dangled like a noose under one of the gondoliers’ heads. He and Holly had been lovers once for a couple of weeks.
    That afternoon Todd and I floated far from shore in the state park, in a rented rowboat “She had a breech birth and a Caesarean and she’s seeing a shrink twice a week and she still has a problem with drugs,” he said. “Permission. Is she kidding? What could I stop her from doing, anyway?” The boat bobbed over a ripple of water. “Permission,” he said. “Has she ever heard of the women’s movement?”
    When our boat drifted near the shoreline, I saw a tree branch curving into the lake—the split branch of a dogwood among pointed firs. Looking down into the water, I was sure that I could follow the slant of the shadow to the bottom, but I had dived into this water—I had mistaken eighteen or twenty feet for only six. The breeze was blowing, making the surface of the water ripple like patterns of lace.
    “If she really needs my help,” Todd said, “I could give her some advice on marketing pottery. When our aunt dies, she’ll come into some inheritance money. I’ve been looking into debentures,” he said.
    Before I left for Vermont, I bought an answering machine. My friend Linda goes over to the apartment every four or five days to water the plants and listen to the tape, to see if there are any important messages. Last week she called and said that there was one she ought to play for me. She put the machine on playback and held the telephone to the microphone. It was Jason, the first message in so many months that I’d lost count: “Hello, machine. This is the voice you wantedto hear. It’s calling to ask if you want to meet me for dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. I’m backing up, as you can tell. Doesn’t this thing ever run out of tape? It’s eleven o’clock Sunday morning, and I’m at the Empire Diner.” A pause. Quietly: “I miss you.”
    “The aloe has white flies,” Linda said. “I’ve never known an aloe to get white flies. I sprayed it with the thing from the kitchen sink, and when I go back next week, I’ll zap it with bug spray.”
    On Monday, after Linda called, I walked down the driveway to shovel some of the gravel that had been delivered into the potholes that had deepened over the winter. I got the shovel from where it leaned against the tree, flicked caterpillars off the handle, and started digging into the pile of gravel, thinking that I shouldn’t call Jason back. He didn’t say he was leaving her. If I did something physical, I might not think about it. The mailman came, and I took the pile of letters. And there it was, on top: the letter from Ash, the one we all knew he’d write. Ash, with no phone, in Tennessee Ash without Holly.
    I walked to the high hedge of purple lantana—as impossible that lantana would thrive in Vermont as that an aloe would get white flies—and did one of the most awful things I’ve ever done. I read the letter. I slit the envelope carefully, with the long nail of my index finger, so I could patch it together and feign ignorance when Holly saw that the envelope was ripped. I was thinking of a lie before I even read it. I’d say that there might have been money in it (why would Ash send money?) and someone at the post office held it to the light and … No: I’d just put all the mail in the mailbox and let her get it, and look blank. The same expression I got on my face when Jason talked about himself and his wife doing the things of ordinary life. Jason had gone to get the Sunday paper. Hundreds