Free Burning Down the House by Jane Mendelsohn

was often unwashed, staying up late working in the toxic firelight of his computers, stewing in the rancid overripeness of unquenchable ambition.
    —
    You’re getting along okay? he asked her.
    Yes, thank you.
    You find the boys manageable?
    I enjoy them.
    Steve smiled. I’ve watched you with them. You’re a good worker. Smart. I have my eye on you, he said, very directly, into her eyes.
    —
    Neva was afraid that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. It was not a sexual tension, or a romantic tension, but something she experienced as profound and frightening. She realized instinctively that this momentary interaction had brought them fearfully close, as if they were soldiers together in combat, or had witnessed a crime. She felt exhilarated and at the same time uncertain whether she was interpreting the moment correctly. She felt a disintegration of her senses, a delirium that she tried to prevent. There was a siren wailing out on the street that seemed to be coming from a vase of pink flowers on a hall table and a smell of smoke that appeared to be wafting from the bronze chevron-patterned wallpaper.
    Neva’s glance moved quickly up from the vase of flowers to Steve’s slightly sagging, philosophical face, his sculpted nose, his head an ancient marble bust. He smiled and began to tie his tie, which he had been holding in one hand and was now wrapping around his neck. Before he buttoned the top button of his shirt she could see the slightest fur of gray hair on his chest. It was the only place he had gray hair: his chest. He did not often swim or go shirtless so she rarely saw his chest although she would see it sometime later on the floor of the apartment when the medics unbuttoned his shirt and again when she would be the only one to notice the malfunctioning machinery in his hospital room as his torso lay panting and shuddering beneath the pale green gown which fell open as he suffered.
    I am impressed by you, he said.
    She stood silent. She felt an exquisite conflict, a confusion as to whether or not to believe or accept these words, which she realized her soul or something like her soul had been longing to hear.
    Who are you? he said. What is your secret?
    She thought for a moment about how to answer him.
    My secret is that I don’t have any secrets, she said.
    His tie was tied by now and he laughed silently. He bent down the better to see her.
    I admire your dishonesty, he said.
    —
    At that moment one of his phones rang. He took it from his pocket. Like a great ponderous mastodon he lumbered down the hallway toward the vast kitchen and took the call. He wrapped his big hand around the phone. He seemed to step into the conversation as if he were casually walking into a bonfire, entering a native element, himself a piece with the licking flames of talk and trades and complex transactions. Someone had misunderstood his instructions and his voice roared low like a thing alive and Neva watched and heard how his power fled out from him like fire catching and racing in chains along a wooden fence, propelled by the wind. She was aware that he was at the center of some tented military encampment, a demented circus lit up by torches in the middle of the howling desert, and beyond him stretched maelstroms, a vortex, a void which he controlled.
    —
    Three hours later when she and the boys left with Patrizia for the beach it was a hot morning with the sun shattering against the East River into a million glinting shards. The helicopter rose high above the water and flew away from the FDR Drive, the gray buildings, the jagged city. For once the boys looked out the window, and they flew through the sky like little gods, and the shards of glass on the water melted into puddles of white and the boys rode on together and for a few minutes their faces were lit up and warm and newly open to the natural world.

13
    A LONG WIDE ROAD that cut through the city like an absence of city, cars swerving all over the