Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  When the boat docked, Cynthia saw the man in the Mouse-keteer hat again, but this time he was lying on the grass on his stomach, guitar next to him like one person stretched next to another. She sat on a bench in Battery Park for quite a while, face turned toward the sun. Then she got up and walked toward the World Trade Center. She kept losing sight of it and had almost given up when she saw it ahead of her. She liked to walk through it. She went inside and walked around, looking in bookstore windows, into the flower shop. When she left, she took a cab back to Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street and got her car. She was as tired as she used to get when Spangle was there pointing everything out.

  Back in the apartment in New Haven, she got her wish. When she opened the mailbox, the first thing she saw was a post card of Spanish dancers in brightly colored skirts, wide as Ferris wheels. She ran upstairs and opened the door before she read it. She even put on the kitchen fan before she read it. Then she sat on the kitchen counter and turned the card over. The message was not all she had hoped it would be. She read: “Sí, Señorita! The castanets click shut faster than a Southern debutante’s cunt. Olé and see you soon. Love, Spangle.”

  Why Spangle? Because there was no one like him, that was part of it. One day in Berkeley he had taken her hand, before they were even out of bed, and asked if he could hold it all day. When they had to go to the bathroom, they had walked back to the apartment so they wouldn’t have to let go of each other’s hands. They had walked along swinging hands. They had propped their elbows on a tabletop and hand-wrestled. He had kissed her hand, rubbed it. “I’m pretending I can keep you,” he had said. “I’m pretending it’s as easy as this.”

  Six

  JOHN JOEL did not like his grandmother’s house. Everything in the house was lumpy: The arms of all the chairs had carvings on them, the bedspreads felt like popcorn, even the dinner plates, with the embossed eagles, made it seem like there was something underneath your food that shouldn’t be there. Most of the things, of course, were not to be touched—especially not the vases that were all over the house, centered on black lacquered pedestals. On the first floor, there were heavy brocade drapes that were pulled back in the morning by the housekeeper; underneath them were thin white curtains that stayed drawn so that the sunlight would not fade the colors in the vases. None of the vases were filled with flowers. Outside in his grandmother’s garden were clematis, roses, phlox, daisies, violets, coleus, lilacs and marigolds. A gardener came to take care of them, and when he left, he carried away piles of flowers—usually two cardboard boxes full, in the back seat of his car. He tied the stems together loosely with string, misted them, washed his hands under the outside faucet, shook them dry, then got in the car and went away without saying goodbye. He was a good gardener, even though John Joel’s grandmother said he was eccentric. He asked his father what “eccentric” meant, and his father said, “Just imagine your grandmother.” His mother said that his grandmother dignified her alcoholism by calling it an eccentricity. He noticed that lately his grandmother did not drink.

  John Joel did not like his brother. His brother was always pulling and screaming. His brother was baby pretty, with shiny hair and big blue eyes, and his bedroom was as large as the living room at home. There were umbrella stands in Brandt’s room filled with his grandfather’s canes. They fascinated John Joel. If he could have anything his brother had, it would have been those canes: canes with ivory handles carved in the shape of leaping fish or dancing couples, ebony canes inlaid with mother-of-pearl vines that wound their way up the cane and burst into bouquets near the handle. There was one cane, long and thin, covered with the skin of a rattlesnake. When Brandt wasn’t in the room, John Joel loved to go in and spread the canes out like pick-up sticks and carefully lift and touch each one, examining the tiny carvings that were much more interesting than the carvings on his grandmother’s chairs, smelling the way the different canes smelled. The rattlesnake cane smelled like soap. You could see the tongue of the lion’s head in one of the canes, and he liked to touch the tip of his tongue to the wooden tongue, to hold the cane away from his face and glare at it, to imagine that he was as powerful as the squinting, roaring lion.

  He was at his grandmother’s house because in the morning, when his father drove into New York, he was going with him. He was going to the orthodontist because his front teeth were starting to stick out. Then his father’s friend Nick was taking him to the Whitney to see a sculpture show, and in the afternoon he and his father and Nick were having lunch, and then his father was taking him home. His father had asked him if he would like to sit around his office until five o’clock, and he had said that he would, but apparently his father understood from his tone of voice that he didn’t delight in the idea. (John Joel heard his father explaining this to his mother on the phone the night before. “Don’t think I don’t accommodate myself to the children, too,” he had said.) The other time John Joel had sat around his office his father had refused to give him any more money for the candy machine after the first quarter, and he had stayed on his father’s sofa reading comics for hours, while his father picked up the telephone, said hello, and tilted back in his chair, looking at the ceiling and sighing, saying hardly anything except “It figures.” Nick came in a lot, though, and that was nice. He liked Nick pretty well. Well enough to wish that Nick was his father instead of John. Last year at a Fourth of July party on top of somebody’s roof in New York, Nick had followed John Joel into the kitchen to say that he didn’t like fireworks either, and sympathized with him: Without a few gin and tonics, he said, he wouldn’t have been smiling either. He had shown John Joel where the television was and found him a program he liked. “Even their goddamn sparklers feel like needles shooting into your hand,” Nick had said. Nick had stared at his hand. He had been holding a wet glass, full of gin and tonic. He had fished out the lime and given it to John Joel. “It’s a jaundiced cherry,” he had said, probably knowing that John Joel wasn’t fond of limes, but wanting to give him something anyway. At least Nick told jokes and laughed; his father turned all jokes into serious occasions, or into excuses to give lectures. The other nice thing about that Fourth of July was that Mary had gone to spend the night with Angela, and Brandt had had a cold and stayed in Rye. After the party on the roof, his parents and Nick and Nick’s girlfriend Laurie had gone to see a James Bond movie. Nick had smuggled a flask into the movie house, and as he got drunker, he got more and more angry about the picture. Later, when Nick and the girl were dropped off at Laurie’s apartment, his mother had gotten angry at his father: Interesting, she said, that he knew where her apartment was without being told. Was that what was in vogue now, leaving your wife for a young black woman and then raving about sexism in James Bond movies? His father had defended Nick; he had said that Nick was just drunk, that Laurie was a very nice woman, and that he had no apologies to make about knowing where she lived because several times when he had his car in town he had dropped Nick there after work, on his way back to Rye, and he had even stopped in for a drink. “That means a mad orgy,” his father had said. Then she had tried to argue with John Joel. She had asked why Nick took him inside and parked him in front of the television. “I was in there already,” he had said. “Why?” his mother had asked. So he had echoed Nick, and said that the sparklers were like needles. His mother had turned around and looked at his father. “That’s what he thinks the Fourth of July is,” she had said. “Needles going into your hand.” “He thinks what he thinks,” his father had said. “That’s right,” his mother said. “Everything’s cool: screwing black women ten years younger than you, boozing in the movie theater, taking every occasion to get drunk.” “You don’t see him on every occasion,” his father had said. John Joel had curled up in the back seat and stopped listening to them. Listening to them made him tired, and the night was over, and pretty soon they would be back at his grandmother’s, where all the lights would be on, even though she and Brandt were asleep, so that when they came in they wouldn’t knock over a
ny of the vases. Then, when everyone was finally in bed, he could go downstairs and open the cabinets and eat. He planned to eat the rest of the M&M’s, and to skip a few of them across the floor for Henri to chase. When his father put on the car radio, that meant that no one was to talk.

  “What are we doing this Fourth of July?” he asked his father on the ride into New York.

  “I hadn’t thought about it. What do you want to do?” his father said.

  “Are we going somewhere?”

  His father looked at him. His father was driving fast, and if his mother had been there, she would have made him slow down. “I just asked what you wanted to do,” his father said.

  “Nothing,” John Joel said. “I just wondered.”

  “Did you decide you liked fireworks?”

  “I like fireworks,” John Joel said.

  His father looked at him again but didn’t say anything. Then he put on the radio. “Hey. Billie Holiday,” his father said. “Listen to this.”

  They listened to the song.

  “Do you know who she was?” his father said.

  “Black,” John Joel said.

  “Black?” his father said. His father looked at the roof of the car, shifting in the seat to lean back, the way he did in his office when he got a phone call. “Yes,” his father said. “But I’m not sure that really gets to the heart of Billie Holiday.” The news came on and his father changed the station. “Maybe Eldridge Cleaver would think so,” his father said. His father changed lanes.

  “The old Eldridge Cleaver.”

  “The last day of school Bobby Pendergast brought snakes to school. Things that are called snakes. You light them and they go chizzz and curl up and burn. They look like a black snake when they’re burned out.”

  “You want me to get some of those for the Fourth of July?”

  “On the Fourth of July when Mary’s curled up asleep, you can light her,” John Joel said.

  His father was changing lanes again. He looked at John Joel and cut the wheel, making the car swerve back to where he had been. When the driver behind him honked his horn, John honked back and flashed his brake lights. “Mary,” his father repeated. “A joke, right? I don’t really have to pay for a child shrink, too, along with an orthodontist.”

  “You don’t have any sense of humor,” John Joel said.

  “Don’t criticize me. It’s ten in the morning and I’m late for work so I can drop you at this orthodontist’s, who is the only acceptable orthodontist in the world according to your mother’s greal pal Tiffy whatever-her-name-is.”

  “You don’t know the name of her best friend?”

  “Well,” his father said. “Aren’t we finding fault with our old dad left and right today.”

  “Adamson,” John Joel said.

  “I don’t care what her name is,” his father said.

  “I was trying to tell you a really good joke the other night in the park, and you didn’t care about that, either.”

  “What joke?”

  “You don’t even remember.”

  “I hear a lot of jokes. That’s what you do in the workaday world, my friend: You fend off disaster and listen to jokes.”

  “I don’t want to go to the dentist.”

  “What do you want to do? Lie in the tree?”

  “I don’t always lie in the tree,” John Joel said.

  “You’re acting like a five-year-old today.”

  “You’re just taking me because she told you to.”

  “No indeed,” John said. “I’m doing my best to insure a happy future for my son, so that when he goes out into the workaday world, people will take him seriously. They don’t take short men or men with buck teeth seriously. Read what Psychology Today says about what’s taken seriously. You with your beautiful straight teeth are going to be taken seriously, and then you can sit around and fend off disaster and listen to jokes. When you laugh, you’ll do it with a set of sparkling white teeth.”

  “If you don’t want to take me, don’t take me. I don’t want to go.”

  “How did we get into this? I got you an appointment. Seeing this guy is like getting in to see King Tut. He’s not going to do anything today. He’s just going to look at your teeth. Maybe take an X-ray.”

  “But then he’s going to do something.”

  “I can’t help it that your teeth are getting crooked.”

  His father brought the car to a stop with a screech of tires that made the garage attendant look up and stare. His father sat there expressionless until the attendant came to the car. The attendant put a piece of paper under the windshield wiper and handed a smaller piece of paper to his father. His father put it in his inside pocket and he and John Joel got out of the car. Walking up the ramp, the attendant called: “How long?”

  “Two o’clock,” John said. “ ‘Happy ever after in the market place,’ ” he sang under his breath.

  They walked two blocks crosstown to the orthodontist’s office. His father pushed a buzzer and they were buzzed in. The receptionist was pregnant, wearing a T-shirt with “Baby” printed across it, and an arrow pointing down. She gave his father a form to fill out and smiled around him at John Joel. When she stood up to take the piece of paper back, John Joel stared at her huge stomach. She smiled again.

  “I’ll wait and hear what he has to say,” his father said.

  John Joel shrugged. “I’m not a baby,” he said.

  “Can you remember what he said?”

  “He hasn’t said anything yet,” John Joel said. It was useless; his father never knew when somebody was kidding, and there was no point in telling him it was a joke, because it had been such a lame one. “I’ll remember,” John Joel said.

  “And you’re going to wait for Nick to pick you up, right? At eleven. He’ll be in the waiting room when you get out. Okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be okay?” John Joel said.

  What John had taken to be small photographs of teeth were, he realized, photographs of shells. There was also a basket of shells on the table in front of the couch, and there were small plastic stands that supported shells on the tables at either end of the room. An old Life magazine with Ike and Mamie smiling their round-faced smiles was on one table, along with the current issue of Variety, the National Enquirer and Commentary. John looked over the magazines, thinking that this orthodontist was going to cost. He was reluctant to leave John Joel. At his son’s age, he would have waited for his father to leave and then bolted. The pregnant receptionist wouldn’t have had a chance of catching him. He looked at John Joel, slumped in a chair, leafing through a magazine, and decided that his son would do no such thing. Mary was right that John Joel hated to exert himself. He was fat and pale, and the braces were going to make him look even more like the Cheshire cat.

  “Okay, I’ll take off,” he said. “I’ll see you and Nick outside of the museum.”

  “How come Nick’s taking me to the museum?”

  “Because he wasn’t going to be busy today. He said he’d like to.”

  John Joel shrugged.

  “Okay,” John sighed. “See you at lunchtime.”

  “So are we going to another Fourth of July party on that guy’s roof?”

  “What did you say?” John was halfway across the room when he heard his son speaking to him. “You’re talking about the party last year?”

  “Yeah. Are we going again?”

  “Do you want to go again?”

  “I just wanted to know.”

  “Well, I just want to know if you want to go again. That’s not a complicated question, is it?”

  “I liked that roof. I just didn’t like the fireworks.”

  “I don’t think he lives there anymore. I think he moved to the East Side a couple of months ago.”

  “He wasn’t a good friend of yours?”

  “No. Why?”

  “So how come you went to his party?”

  “I work with him. He invited me. How come you’re so talkative all of a sudden
?”

  “I just wanted to know.”

  “I don’t think he’s having a party this year.”

  “No big deal,” John Joel said.

  John sat down again, thinking that John Joel must have started that conversation to get him to stay. Maybe he was afraid of going to see the orthodontist, or maybe he doubted that Nick would show up. John picked up a magazine.

  “I thought you were going,” John Joel said.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “Sure,” John Joel said.

  John sighed and got up. He tried to open the door, but he had to catch the receptionist’s eye to be buzzed out. She looked at him suspiciously. She looked at him the way his mother would look at him if she knew that he was leaving John Joel alone. She always acted like New York was a huge cage that you walked into, with animals about to leap when you made the first sudden move. She was always jumpy in New York. It was the one thing she had in common with Louise. The most innocent things disturbed Louise: water gushing from a fire hydrant, a woman leaning out a window who was obviously only going to water her plants. Every siren made her turn her head; everyone who stared at her in a subway car was going to follow her off. In the beginning, he had only thought about making her happy by moving them to the suburbs. Now she hated him for being able to cope with the city when she couldn’t. And she hated the suburbs because there weren’t any intelligent people. Tiffy was intelligent. Only Tiffy. The truth was, she liked normal intelligent people, and they were hard to find. Even Nick was too strange for her. A cowboy hat and a black date made him, in her mind, no different from an extra in a Fellini movie. Horst, who had had the Fourth of July party the year before, couldn’t have been as normal as he seemed if he slept in his sleeping bag, naked. Which part of that is odd? John had asked her. “Both parts,” she had said. He had hoped that just the sleeping bag would seem odd.