Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  “He’ll get you pregnant. Then what will you do?”

  “Honey, I am not helpless.”

  “He’s going to trick you, somehow.”

  “You’re the one I’m worried about. It would be just like Spangle to come back to New Haven and propose to you, and I think you might even do it.”

  “No. I feel differently from the way I felt when he left. It’s hot in this apartment and I work all the time, and I feel like I’ve been abandoned. I’m not in the mood to tie a bandanna around my head and be a happy housewife.”

  “Come to the Vineyard. We’ll have the house full-time, after this weekend. It’s going to be a Mustang convertible.”

  “Thanks for the invitation. I’ll probably come.”

  “Spangle’s welcome, you know. I say awful things about him, but I like him. I even downplayed how crazy he was a minute ago. That was a nice thing to do for him, wasn’t it?”

  “It would take a lot more than a casual remark from you to convince me at this point. I keep having the feeling that he’s not in Madrid, but I guess he is. I mean, where would he be? He wasn’t mad at me when he left. He was kidding around, like always.”

  “Anybody could be anywhere. I’d say listen to your hunches.”

  “I feel like he’s around. I feel that way about the magician, too, so maybe it’s just paranoia.”

  “I thought you told me this magician kept appearing.”

  “He does. But not every time. Never in the morning.”

  “Stay in until morning,” she said. “Jesus.” She was chewing again. “I got lonesome for you tonight. I liked it when we saw each other more. Why don’t you come live near us in Philadelphia?”

  “Why don’t you find me a job?”

  “I found you a man. Good-looking, too. Forty-nine, to be honest with you, but a very nice body. He doesn’t even wear glasses. And there are no children. One Irish wolfhound only. He talks about getting another one, but I doubt it. You can see him running down the beach every morning with the dog from all the windows across the front of the house we’re going to be renting. Sometimes it just kills me that Bill has so much money. Like Dylan says: ‘I can’t help it if I’m lucky.’ ”

  “Where does Dylan say that?”

  “The song about how somebody gets shot and he runs away with the man’s wife, and she’s got all her husband’s money. Bill’s wife just dropped dead at fifty-four. I never even met her. I have nothing to feel guilty about. You’ve got a job and I don’t, though. Not that I ever wanted one, but maybe that was because I worked such shit jobs. Remember the telephone company? That awful dress shop where everything stank of incense?” She laughed. “God, there’s a whole bank of white hyacinths in the courtyard outside this window. The spotlight is on them, and there are moths flying above them, a storm of moths. You promise to come to the Vineyard?”

  “I promise,” Cynthia said.

  When she hung up, she went to the window again. A police car drove down the block very fast and turned the corner with its light flashing. A tall, thin girl that she recognized walked into the building. It seemed to be a normal night of street life. She was probably silly for staying in, for letting some pathetic, odd man get to her so much that she wouldn’t go out for food. She wouldn’t. She went back into the bedroom, set the alarm for early and went to bed.

  It was strange not to have Spangle in the bed. She had gotten used to the way he tore the covers up from the bottom and turned and thrashed all night, flapping his arms like some big, heavy bird. She was even used to him screaming, his arms covering his head, his body tensed for the fireball that he imagined rolling toward him like a bowling ball rolling down the lane—the lane was the bed he slept in. It was so quiet in bed when Spangle wasn’t there. She bounced on the mattress a couple of times, to hear it make a noise. Then it was quiet again. When Spangle was there, he fell asleep so deeply so soon that she spent the first hour in bed awakening him, consoling him, carefully pulling covers out of his fist, across herself. When she was alone, she thought. She thought about what had become of her sister, and about Mrs. Pendergast’s breasts, and about what she had said—that she only wanted to play tennis. There were a lot of things for which graduate school did not prepare you. That was the virtue of it, Spangle said—that you could spend years learning, and in the end, almost nothing you learned would apply. But Cynthia thought it would be helpful if something prepared you for a talk with Mrs. Pendergast. When she had to think quickly, she could never think of anything to say. Her advice to Spangle was easy—she had it down to four words now: “There is no fireball.” She had not even thought of that many words to say when Mrs. Pendergast had started crying. It seemed wrong just to say no when she was asked if she played tennis. But that was the one word she had said. She suddenly remembered which Dylan song it was: the one that began, “Someone’s got it in for me.”

  He had intended to play it cool, but for days he had been thinking about seeing her, and it was a hot night and he couldn’t sleep, and finally it started to make sense to him that he should dress and go out. He wouldn’t see her, but he would see where she lived. Maybe his walking by would generate some good energy and he could send it to her, and she would feel it. She would probably be asleep. It was almost one in the morning. He would think thoughts of love and close his eyes and try to send the thoughts like little darts into her dreams.

  He put on his white painter’s pants with the loops on the sides. Keys on key rings dangled from each side of his pants. Keys to the crazy millionaire Tucker’s house in Beverly Hills: Tucker gave away keys because he thought that it would assure him of not being killed in some bizarre Manson-type murder. His astrologer had told him so, and he kept a brandy snifter full of Andes mints, matches from The Palm, and house keys on the hall table by the door. Keys to his friend Roy’s beachhouse in Malibu: three locks on the front door, and Roy wouldn’t see an astrologer on a bet. The keys to his mother’s apartment here in New Haven. A key that he had had for years, found in Golden Gate Park, a heavy, old-fashioned key with a tiny piece of tape across the top with J. Brown lettered on it. He liked to think that it would fit the lock in Governor Jerry Brown’s apartment. That would be a lot more status than having one of the many keys to Tucker’s.

  He wished that he had her key. He would put it in the lock, thinking good thoughts: that she shouldn’t be afraid, that he only wanted to talk to her, that he was willing to talk about things other than magic. To tell the truth, he got tired of thinking and talking about magic all the time; he had been reading the newspaper at his mother’s and getting mad about all the injustices in the world, and about how little the country did for its citizens. He had read, in the New York Times, that the mayor was not in favor of shooting pigeons, although the mayor did agree with somebody else who had said that they were like rodents with wings. If the mayor and all his staff and all the working people in New York got together and thought, it might be possible to send messages to the pigeons to get them to go away and roost somewhere else. He was glad that the mayor was not going to give his okay to pigeon-killing, even though he said he didn’t like the pigeons. People gave the okay to things too much, and that ruined the world for magic. When so many things of all sorts were happening, people’s minds got overloaded, and they stopped caring whether a woman was sawed in half or levitated from a table. They didn’t care that one rabbit could burst into twenty. It would be hard to care about magic if you read the paper every night, because there were so many explanations: why pigeons thrived in New York, how we could be sure that there wasn’t gasoline hidden in tanks in New Jersey, what you could do if you were followed by someone you thought meant you harm, how to plant zucchini. When people did calm down and got ready to watch magic, all they cared about was what was behind it. Or else they wanted something from it: They wanted you to wave a wand and send the pigeons out of New York; they wanted to believe that you could make their zucchini multiply overnight, instead of waiting for the seeds to germinate. But he w
as thinking about magic again, and he’d sworn to himself that this would be a real vacation, and he wouldn’t think about magic all the time. He tried to think about national health insurance, but his mind bogged down and he got images of dogs leaping through hoops and disappearing. A green plant on a table, then the plant covered by a cloth, and when the cloth was pulled back, an orchid was blooming on the plant. He wondered if it would make an impression if he took her an orchid. He did not think that there was anywhere to buy an orchid in New Haven at one in the morning (he thought he knew where he could do it in Malibu), and even if he had it, of course, she would be asleep. His mother’s Vogue had suggested that the caring hostess might put a fresh orchid on her guest’s pillow.

  His mother heard the keys jingling and said, “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to take a walk,” he said.

  “When are you going back to California?” she said.

  He wished she would stop asking that. He wondered if even an orchid would shut her up, and decided that it wouldn’t. He didn’t answer her. He picked up his false nose, on impulse, and put it in the pants pocket and went out the door. He turned around and pulled the knob three times, to make sure that it was really closed and not just stuck. She always got up after him to check the door—it was a funny door—and if he did manage to have a nice night somehow, he wouldn’t want to ruin it by coming back to the apartment and having to listen to one of her tirades.

  He walked until he came to her block, and then to her building. He was nervous. He had given up cigarettes six months ago, so he fished his false nose out of his pants pocket and tapped it onto his nose, took it off again, put it in place again. Then he put it back in his pocket. The one rabbit that became twenty was in the pocket, too. She had liked that. Maybe he had just shown her too much too quickly. He could have shown her the tricks over a period of time.

  He was not sure which window was hers. One was dark—the one he thought was hers—and in several other apartments there was faint bluish light. As he watched, someone began to move around one of the apartments. The person opened the window. It wasn’t her. Maybe it was her husband, if she really had a husband. The way she had said it, he had doubted it, and he was usually good at picking up those vibrations. He crossed the street and looked at the building, sending good thoughts into the windows. In response, music started playing. The thoughts had gotten in to the people! They were joyful; there was music! He crossed the street again, and close to the building he heard that it was a sad song he had listened to when he was a child; but it didn’t sound like Debbie Reynolds singing. “Wish I knew that he knew what I’m thinkin’ of… ” It was always so hard to get through to people, even if you tried to speak to them directly sometimes; by sending thoughts, you could do better than speaking to them. He reached in his pocket and took out a handkerchief and tossed it toward the windows on the third floor. As it rose, the handkerchief opened and unfolded into something close to the shape of a dove. He kissed the tips of his fingers and waved his hand in the direction of the handkerchief-bird. Then, when it fell, he retrieved it and shook it flat and put it in his pocket. Of course, at almost two A.M., she would not be awake. But somehow—psychically—hadn’t his loving thoughts come home to roost?

  Fifteen

  “THIS IS a friend of mine from college,” Nina said. “I can tell from the expression on your face what you’re thinking. A great number of people act very strangely, but my strangeness is that I’m so predictable. I didn’t sleep with him.”

  The man, whoever he was, laughed. He got up from the sofa, where he was sprawled in his underwear, and came forward, with his hand out. “It’s true,” he said. “How do you do? I’m Peter Spangle.”

  He shook the man’s hand. Nina went into the kitchen, and he could see her, bowl of cereal on the counter at her side, peeling an orange.

  “I have to talk to you,” John said, going into the kitchen. He rubbed his hand across her shoulder blades, low, where the yellow tiger was lunging. “My robe,” he said. “Nina?” he said.

  “I’ve got to go to work. I don’t have a rich husband like you to support me. If I don’t go to work, I get fired. It’s nobody’s fault but mine that I got wrecked last night, but I am trying—” She nicked her thumb cutting the orange. She put the knife down and went to the cold water and turned it on. She put her cut finger under the water, and started to cry.

  Jesus Christ, he thought: blood.

  “You two want to talk. I guess I ought to get going anyway,” Spangle said. He pulled his T-shirt over his head. “What she said was the truth,” he said, brushing his hair out of his face.

  “I’m sure it is the truth.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t much matter to anybody,” Nina said. “We never really discussed it, but since you think I’m so perfect, that must be something you’re liberal-minded about, right?”

  John leaned over, bracing himself with his elbows on the kitchen counter. “Why are you doing this?” he said. “Nina?”

  “What are you doing here at seven o’clock in the morning? I might like a little privacy. People show up whenever they want, spend the night—you don’t show up and spend the night, you do that when you feel inclined and you don’t when you don’t, and you show up in the morning as though I’d owe you some apology.”

  “I’m going to call you,” Spangle said. “Take care.”

  “Wait,” Nina said. “Just wait.”

  She followed Spangle out of the apartment, closing the door behind her. “I embarrassed you,” she said, at the foot of the stairs.

  “You didn’t embarrass me. You’re his girl, right? You didn’t sleep with me. We both agree. How can I be embarrassed?”

  “Please don’t go,” she said. “Wait a minute. I’m not even clear on what you two were doing here.”

  “We flew back from Madrid and I didn’t feel like going back to New Haven, and he certainly didn’t want to check in with my mother, and my esteemed brother scored some hash in the toilet at Kennedy and we looked you up in the phone book, and the rest of it—Horton what’s-his-name—is all your fault.” Spangle looked down, shook his head, laughed. “My motives weren’t pure,” he said. “Maybe if we hadn’t gotten wrecked, you wouldn’t have been telling him the truth this morning.”

  “I would have told him the truth whatever it was.”

  “Then I’m glad we didn’t. After a night like that, the last thing I need is to have my head knocked all the way off.”

  “I’m embarrassed now,” Nina said.

  “Then we’re even,” he said. “You were right. I was embarrassed. You ought to go back up.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I still can’t believe that I’m standing in this hallway talking to you. The two of you were in Spain all these years?”

  “I was just over there a couple of weeks. He was shacked up with some señorita who was trying to get him to pay for a lot of expensive dental work she needed done, it turns out. I went over to get him.”

  “I wish I had a sister or a brother,” she said.

  “You’ve got good friends. Reliable friends,” he said. “They might go a few years without seeing you, but eventually they show up.”

  “It makes me nervous that everything just happens,” she said. “I mean, I can sort of count on people, sometimes, but other times… for some reason, I just didn’t appreciate his coming over here this morning unannounced.”

  “You’d better go back,” Spangle said. “Jonathan’s going to be staying with friends in the West Village. I’ll be coming in to see him. Can we see you? Straight?”

  “What about the girl you live with? Isn’t she coming?”

  “I’ve been trying to think about that, and all I know is that right now I can’t think about that. I don’t think I’m going back to New Haven right away. She blames me for living. She’s got a lousy job this summer, and she takes it out on me. I guess she’s got a right to. I’m just not up for it today.”


  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to leave you the key? You could come back here when I’m at work. You could use some sleep.”

  “The offer’s just for the key and sleep?”

  She sighed, shook her head no, but said, “I don’t know. Do you want it?”

  “I’d be a real shit to louse things up for you,” he said. “No. But let’s have dinner, you and me and Jonathan.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” He turned to go.

  “It was so strange seeing you again. I shouldn’t have gotten that stuff from Horton. It was my fault.”

  “I don’t know how to deal with anything either,” he said. He took his comb out of his pocket, ran it through his hair a few times. He could only comb the top part; his hair was long, and it had gotten hopelessly matted from the ears to the shoulder. He looked the way he had at Bard. If she remembered correctly what he had looked like when he first walked in, he had even looked healthy. No living on Drake’s Ring Dings and reds; the sunshine of—where was it?

  “Where were you in Spain?” she said.

  “Madrid.” He shook his head. “I know,” he said. “Fucked, fucked, fucked. Call you later in the week.”

  “Call me,” she said.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “Call me,” she said.

  He laughed and she smiled. She went upstairs smiling. She had not recovered as well from the night before as she had thought; she realized it when she went to open the door: Her finger was still bleeding, and blood stained the sleeve of the robe. She took it off the minute she got in the door, disgusted, and took it to the bathroom, holding the sleeve under cold water in the sink.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, standing in the doorway to the bedroom. He wanted her to say: Nothing. What’s the matter with you? She didn’t answer him.