by Ann Beattie
She thought he was funny. She couldn’t stop laughing, and she was too weak to laugh; she was trying to pay attention to something, but when she was laughing she couldn’t think what. “Go in the bathroom,” she said. “See what that sound is.”
The sound was the hair dryer Jonathan had turned on for some reason as he got into the shower. It was blowing a blast of air into the shower. He had the shower curtain back so he could feel it, and he was smoking a joint with no hands, letting the water pelt his back. The hair dryer lay on its side on top of the toilet.
“That’s what it was,” she said, when he came back and collapsed beside her again. “I told you I heard something.”
“Maybe some street vendor will come by and holler and we can get a pizza. You’re right about not having somebody come here when we’re so wrecked. We could all take a shower and not dry off, and if we seemed odd, we could tell the guy with the corgi that a tidal wave hit us. The Beach Boys. The fucking Brian Wilson Beach Boys.”
“Don’t you have to work tomorrow?” she said.
“No,” he said.
“What about Jonathan?”
“No. Nobody has to work tomorrow. You don’t have to work tomorrow. Call and tell them the work went away—you tried to catch it, but it got away.”
“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a dancer,” she said.
“That’s totally off the subject,” he said. He blew gently into her hair and watched a strand lift up and fall back in the same place. “I couldn’t get it up to save my life,” he said.
Jonathan came into the room, dripping wet and naked, strutting around singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Jonathan shook his head, went back into the bathroom and closed the door. She heard the roar of the hair dryer again.
Spangle picked up the phone and, without dialing, cupped his hand and said, “Yes, that’s right: large pizza with anchovies and lasagna on top and a pitcher of piñas to travel. Thank you.”
“He’s fucked,” Jonathan said, coming out of the bathroom with his too-big jeans falling down his hips, one toe cut—no, wait: big joke—one toe with polish on the nail. It wasn’t dry, and when he stumbled, it smeared on the wood floor. “What’s he doing?” Jonathan said.
“I have to work tomorrow,” she said.
“You can’t,” Jonathan said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You left the hair dryer on,” she said.
“Refrigerator door, dryer, next you’ll nag me to make my bed. I don’t have a bed. I don’t even live here. I’ve got to shove off. Is he okay?”
“I don’t think I’m okay,” she said. “I can’t drink and smoke. Why did I drink vodka if I was going to smoke?”
“Call that guy at the radio station. Have him figure the situation out and send you a free T-shirt.”
“I’m not calling anybody,” she said.
“I think somebody is playing Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,” Jonathan said. “God damn. I’ve been thinking about them for a week.”
“Make Smokey sing ‘Special Occasion,’ ” he hollered out the window, yelling in Jonathan’s ear. Jonathan grabbed him and pulled him back in. “And make him dance when he sings it! No fudging on the high notes!” he screamed. His voice cracked. He started coughing, and when Jonathan hit him on the back he fell over. Jonathan started laughing then, which made him start coughing too.
“Hans Castorp, go up to the mountain,” he said, coming out of the coughing fit first. Jonathan stood, helping himself up by pulling on the window ledge. He looked down at the street, swaying. The man with the radio had gone away. A man and a woman were standing there, looking up at the window.
“Somebody has tuberculosis,” Jonathan said to the two people on the sidewalk. He didn’t want to yell, but he spoke too quietly. He was just leaning forward, water running off his hair, whispering to the couple on Columbus Avenue.
“I’ve got to go. I’ve got a date,” Jonathan said.
“You’re lying. You don’t have a date.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Jonathan said. “If I come back, I’ll bring a pizza. Green pepper and pepperoni.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “If you’re going, go ahead. You’ve got to dry off, though. You’ll get tuberculosis going out there like that.”
“Oh Christ—how am I going to go to school tomorrow?” Nina said. She got up on one elbow, and tried to blink the room straight. Blinking made it tilt left and right. She said: “Why did I say that? School instead of work?”
“She’s got TB and she’s hallucinating,” Spangle said. “Do you think she needs the shower cure?”
“There isn’t any more shower.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I turned it off,” Jonathan said, and bent forward, sliding his hands down his thighs to his knees, laughing. “Fooled you good,” he said.
“Oh fuck,” Nina said. “I’m really going to be mad if I throw up.”
“Lie still,” Jonathan said. “I’ll get you a washcloth.”
“I don’t want a washcloth,” she said.
In a couple of minutes he brought her a washcloth, with very little water squeezed out of it. She moved it from her mouth, where he had put it, up to her forehead. Then she was both cold and dizzy.
“I’ve got to go,” Jonathan said. “Don’t anybody say anything funny, so I can get it together to go.”
He put out his hand and took Nina’s. She didn’t shake it. She just rested her hand in his. “No offense taken,” he said. “We are wrecked.”
He put on the rest of his clothes, talking to himself, telling himself to button buttons, roll up sleeves.
“Admit you don’t have a date,” Spangle said to Jonathan.
“I don’t have a date,” Jonathan said. “I’ve got to go.”
Nobody stopped him. When he left, Nina said, “Can you shut the door?”
“That door?” Spangle said, looking out into the hallway.
“That door,” she said.
“I can shut that door. Sure,” he said. He walked to the door and slammed it, then put his back against it and looked at her. He squinted and moved closer, to see where she was cut. Not blood on the floor by her ear. Good. Something else.
“Hey, Nina,” he said, “I haven’t seen you for so long. How are you? I mean, how were you before you got wrecked?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“You do remember. Come on.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I going to lose my job?”
“You’re not going to lose your job. There’s always another job.”
“What does that mean? That I’m going to lose it?”
“Only if you show up,” he said. He stretched out beside her. “I think I overdid this,” he said. “I overdid this.”
“Where did he go?” she said, looking at the closed door.
“He probably had a date. He has dates at funny hours. I don’t know anybody besides him who’d begin a date at eleven o’clock.”
“He said he didn’t.”
“You can’t tell with him,” he said.
“Well, what time is it?”
“What time is it? It is… this time?”
He held his wrist toward her, but she couldn’t see the numerals on the watch. She saw one hand, sweeping, and a lot of little circles and designs.
“Tell me what time it is,” she said.
He told her that it was ten of three in the morning.
“I have to go to sleep,” she said. “I’ll lose my job.”
“I’d tell you a bedtime story, but I’m too wrecked. I can tell you a poem. Wynken and Blynken and Nod fell asleep and turned into a pod.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I’ll have nightmares. That horrible movie. Somebody was just saying something about that that gave me nightmares.”
“In the morning,” he said, “tell me how you are. Were.”
“Why did I ever do this?” she said.
“It’s our fault. Wicked s
tuff. I hope he took it with him. Wait a minute: If he’s responsible, I hope he took it with him. How was he when he left?”
“He looks so much younger with his hair cut,” she said.
“He’s such a ladykiller,” he said. “He probably did have a date. I’m too old to have dates. I just look up old friends.” He patted her hand.
“You live with somebody,” she said.
She fell asleep and woke up when he began talking to himself in his sleep. She put her hand on his stomach, and he stopped talking.
When she woke up the next time, she could see his watch. There was a horrible ache over her left eye, and her mouth was dry, but with one eye closed she could see the watch, and she could stand up and go into the bathroom. She wanted to splash water on her face, but she was afraid that touching her face that way might spread the pain. She tilted two aspirin out of the bottle in the medicine cabinet and swallowed them, washing them down with a handful of water. She took off her clothes, put them over the towel rack, and got into the shower. She adjusted the showerhead and ran the water, stepped into it when it was the right temperature. She was sore all over from sleeping on the floor. She had no idea how she had bruised her thigh so badly. She took a quick shower, decided at the last minute to bob her head under the water, and when she saw that she could take that, squirted a little shampoo into her hand and massaged the top of her head. She closed her eyes and let the water beat on her head until she thought the soap was all washed away. Then she got out, stepped onto the floor full of puddles, and stood in water, rather than on the sopping wet bathrug. She dried off, patting her body instead of rubbing it.
The phone rang, but she decided just to let it ring. That, or he could answer it. She turned on the hair dryer, but something was wrong with it: It hardly put out any heat. She patted her hair and wrapped a towel around herself and walked out of the bathroom. He was still asleep. He hadn’t even heard the phone. No: He was smiling at her; awake, but still wiped out. “Good morning,” she said, on her way into the bedroom. She dropped the towel on the bed and got a robe out of the closet. It was John’s robe, that he left at her apartment: a present from her, found in an antique clothing store in the Village, a satin robe with a lunging lion on the back and a rising sun above the pocket on the front, the name Neil P. stitched in script above the blood-red sun.
“I feel like I’m going to live,” she said, holding the robe closed and going out to the living room and standing over him. She tied the sash and rubbed her face and sat down beside him. “Last night was an exception, right?” she said. “You’re really not into dope that way anymore, right?”
“Never,” he said.
“Do you want an aspirin?” she said.
“I’m okay,” he said. “What time is it?”
She picked up his wrist and looked, and told him it was five of seven. He groaned.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to work,” he said.
“Stay here and sleep,” she said. “If you feel better later, pick up a little.”
“Whew,” he said. “In Nina’s apartment on Columbus Avenue.”
“You were putting me down good last night,” she said. “Calling me the New York working girl.”
“I hope you didn’t pay attention to me.”
“I didn’t.”
“I wonder where Jonathan is,” he said. He got up, slowly, and went to the window. “Leave your window open here and no bugs get in,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s amazing.”
She went back into the bathroom, to brush her teeth. She closed the door and bent over the sink, and realized that the aspirin had already started to work; the blinding pain was disappearing from above her eye. Her eyes were bloodshot. She was going to have to wear dark glasses.
“Nobody came in through the window,” he said, outside the bathroom door. “Want me to tempt fate for real and answer the door?”
“There’s somebody at my door?” she said, opening the bathroom door.
She came out of the bathroom, and went to the door. She forgot to ask who it was. The chain wasn’t on, because neither of them had remembered to put it on when Jonathan left. In fact, she opened the door certain that it would be Jonathan.
John was standing there, and even before he realized that a man was standing beside her, he looked terrible. It was the first time he had ever come to the apartment in the morning. He walked in without saying anything, and then just stood there, looking from Nina to Peter Spangle.
He walked up the stairs, trying to remember that he was in love. There was a fact, and an important one: He was in love. He was there because she said more in a glance than anyone else said in a touch, and a touch from her meant more than an embrace from anyone else. When you were in love, it was logical to go be with the person you loved. Only, he didn’t know where to begin. What he had to talk about seemed to have nothing to do with the world of love and everything to do with the world of hate, and that world had never been real when he was with Nina. If she was getting away, it was because he was letting her get away. She was inside the apartment. He knew that she would not have left for work yet. She would be having her little-girl breakfast of cereal and fruit, and brushing her hair, listening to the news on the radio, tidying up the room. She wasn’t mean in the morning. You could talk to her and she’d answer. The two times they had gone away together, he had been amazed at how cheerful she was in the morning. He tried to remember that it was morning now, that if he put his mind to it, he could stop his legs from shaking enough to climb the stairs, that at the top was Nina, that he could reach out and touch her and she would be there. He felt as crazy and foolish as an old drunk who finds his way home but can’t remember to climb the stairs, so he’s found in the morning and catches hell anyway. God—if he was really comical. If she meant that, really, and didn’t just say it to tease, because she was fond of him. If it was all explained in Passages: a simple answer. Nothing was simple. Not even loving Nina was simple. This was the only place he could imagine being, and already he felt that the place wasn’t there, that he wasn’t going to make it to the top of the stairs, and that if he did, he wouldn’t know where to begin. He would have to invent some logical explanation for what he was going to tell her, or maybe it was just because he was in a panic that he thought that. He realized that he was in a panic, and that gave him enough energy, returned enough breath to him, that he was able to continue walking up the stairs. He couldn’t believe what he had left behind, what he had just walked out on. He had thought at the time that he was doing the logical thing, that he was doing something out of self-preservation. There had been so much chaos: He had been afraid that he was losing his senses, going deaf. And only the summer before, the six of them, his mother, Brandt, John Joel, Louise, Mary and he, had been at the carnival. Brandt—as usual—hanging on to his arm and trying to bring him to the ground, dangling and swaying. They had been a family at a carnival. He had been awake all night, and he couldn’t think straight. He knew that he would have to get to the point and not edge up toward it; that he couldn’t talk to her about the summer before, the things they had done as a family; that there was no point in trying to explain to her that they were typical; that maybe even his love for her figured in a pattern; that they were typical and then suddenly they weren’t. He was going to say to her: I want you to help me. He didn’t know what help he needed. He had no memory of how he had gotten from Connecticut to New York. He did remember being in the city, and taking the car to the garage he usually went to, the keys left behind, the cab to Nina’s. The cab driver had talked to him about the weather they were supposed to have over the weekend, and he had remembered, only then, what day it was. He had just stuffed wadded bills into the cab driver’s hand because he couldn’t think—he might as well have been a man in a foreign country where he didn’t understand the currency. Better just to overpay and run, to be embarrassed that way rather than the other. He tried to breathe more softly. He wanted to at least be breathing normally when she saw
him. More than anything he wanted to see her standing there. He wanted no harm to have come to her, at least. At the top of the stairs he made a fist and knocked. The reverberation that began in his hand shot through his arm and ended in his heart. And then she opened the door.
Fourteen
SPANGLE’S MOTHER was wondering if she should have her old mouton coat updated, as she put it, for Cynthia to wear in the winter. Cynthia listened, keeping the phone clamped against her ear with her raised shoulder, carefully stroking clear nail lacquer on her fingernails as she talked. The smell was powerful so close to her nose, and she wished that she could put the brush down and sit comfortably in a chair and do her nails and not have to talk to Spangle’s mother. It was wrong to blame Spangle for his mother. It was even wrong to blame Spangle’s mother for trying to be nice, but it had been a long day of teaching, and their stupid faces still bobbed before her in the empty apartment, and she did not think that she could be tactful much longer.
“I suppose you don’t want it, even if I have the bottom part narrowed,” Spangle’s mother said.
“I think the coat I have is fine. I appreciate your offering, but I don’t really think I’d be comfortable in a fur coat.”
“Don’t think I’m dense. Don’t think I don’t know what you mean,” Spangle’s mother said, “but in terms of mental as opposed to physical comfort, think about how you would feel with some perfume squirted on and a strand of pearls and a thick, warm mouton. You could update the look yourself by dyeing your hair red and chopping it into one of those crew cuts and wearing neon pants and a cowboy shirt. Don’t think I don’t read fashion magazines anymore. I do. I read them, and I know that women want to look like whores at a party, and that work is considered a party. Stiletto heels at work. Silver skirts. Really.”
“I appreciate the offer,” Cynthia said.
“It’s wicked to keep it hanging there in its little purple garment bag. I can’t wear it because it reminds me of happier times. I wish I could just put that coat back on, and squirt on some Toujours Moi and fasten my pearl necklace and feel good, the way I did in the old days. My husband’s dead. Two sons, both in Madrid, and a biopsy that fortunately came out benign. Two sons crazy as loons. I put them in their little sleeper suits and read them bedtime stories, and they grew up handsome and smart and ended up with psychiatrists and amphetamine problems and they ran away, both of them, on my money, to Madrid.” She sighed. “Their father’s money. Whatever.”