Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  She had once said that he was a coward. Cowardly to leave his family and not totally cut the tie. Cowardly to go, and cowardly to return, and all the time he was in Connecticut feeling heavy—his heart heavy. He felt old, and more tired than he felt when he was physically tired, driving home late to his mother’s house in Rye. The truth was that he didn’t have much grace. He could have eased Louise into discussions, but he hadn’t. Louise could still take him by surprise, and he was afraid of that. The only thing that had taken him by surprise that had been a good surprise, a surprise he could deal with, had been Nina. When she had opened the door and he had seen the man standing there, he had misunderstood, in a flash, what kind of scene he had walked in on; and he had only been able to stand there, as stunned as he was when somebody pulled a trick on him on the telephone, unable to think about what was happening but staring at her breast, the robe fallen away so that he saw the curve of her breast almost to the nipple. He had no idea what he would have done or said if she had not spoken. He could imagine standing there still.

  At the hospital, it had seemed that he was watching the action from a great distance, as if he were standing outside a dance hall where strobe lights were flashing. The hospital had seemed garishly bright, and he had closed his eyes often, needing to rest them. When he opened them, he would get a flash of something new, something he would only see quickly: the blood-covered shirt, the notebook that was open and then closed, a needle going into Louise’s arm. When he blinked the needle had been pulled out; Louise had been standing and then she was sitting. He saw people but not groups of people; a nurse’s hand, but not the nurse’s body. His son, in a white bed: For a second he had seen all of him, a little boy in a bed, but then he had seen only his eyes. John Joel had said that Mary was a bitch. His mouth had moved, but nothing else, and he had wanted to move toward him, but the nurse had stepped in. He blinked, and then the nurse was between him and his son, and he was staring at her hand, turning. The corridor stretched before him, long and narrow and bright; and from there, somehow, to the inside of the car, with Louise on the seat beside him. Then he managed to focus on the important things, one by one: key in ignition, hand on wheel, foot on accelerator. He had gotten to New York the same way. He had not seen the whole backyard, but only the tree under which it had happened; and then he had seen his car, gotten into the car, and from there to New York it was a series of simple, mechanical movements. They tell you when you are learning to drive not to stare straight ahead, but to take in what is happening around you. Next to him was an empty seat. He looked at his hands on the wheel, then through the windshield, and then at the speedometer: He watched the needle climb and climb until he was going the right speed. He knew that he was falling asleep, and that he shouldn’t sleep. Her hand was on his chest, but he had been wrong—it was inadequate to hold him down. He wasn’t heavy, as he had thought, but light, speeding.

  “What’s the matter?” she said, when he sprang up from the bed.

  He stood in the room, shaking sleep out of his head. He had to go back, but he was afraid to move out of the room, afraid to move from the spot he stood in. Nina was standing beside him, pulling his arm the way Brandt did, but she had more power. She could lead him back to the bed. He blinked, and he was sitting on the bed, Nina’s arm around his shoulder, Nina pressing up against him. She was crying. He talked to her, said words, said something, but she kept on crying. Talking to her was as futile as trying to get to the top of the stairs. Time had stopped. He was telling her that they were stopped, and she was shaking her head no. She didn’t believe him? He decided to trust her. He smiled and pulled her down on the bed with him. If time hadn’t stopped, then it was safe to sleep, and when he woke up things would go on. It was possible that things could go on. If he slept, it did not mean that he would sleep forever.

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  He thought that she knew him so well that she had read his mind. He thought she was asking him whether or not he was going to stay awake.

  On his side, next to her in the bright room, he slept.

  He dreamed that Nina was on a train. It was a train in a foreign country, a train somewhere in Europe, and it was winter, a bright day, bare trees and bright sun as the train took a curve and straightened again. She had on a winter coat, black, and she was sitting in a compartment alone, on a long wooden bench that faced another wooden bench. She was looking at the haze of passing scenery out the window. And then a couple came into the compartment, a man and a wife. They had a newspaper with them, the New York Times, and when they put a section aside she asked to see it. They were surprised that she was also an American. Just the three of them, two facing one, Nina in her black coat. She had taken the paper, unfolded it, turned the page, and there was his picture. Sitting on the train and opening a newspaper she had found his obituary, and that was how she learned that he was dead.

  Twenty

  “I’M STILL looking around the farm, and I’m able to count all the chickens. Seems like there hasn’t been one chicken dinner, if you know what I mean. Chickens still going every which way, you keep hearing about how they get their heads chopped off and their bodies go running forward, but when I look around, I don’t even see any feathers. More and more chickens, nicer and nicer farm. Pastoral. People would say I was an evil character for dealing a few drugs, but look who gets blown away. Not my chickens. Way I look at it, we’re all still struttin’ around Maggie’s Farm. Bunch of chickens struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine. You pick up a newspaper and read about what happened at Three Mile Island, you try to tell me that my chickens are causing any trouble like that. Might be a little stoned, but they’re just struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine, and nobody’s catching them for nothing. Too many bad things pinned on drugs. No way that ten-year-old was high, according to you, and there he was, up in a tree, shooting down. No way drugs explain why this is a bad world. Chickens got all upset a while back there, thinking the sky was falling. Acid didn’t do that. The United States space program did that. Chickens ought to squawk. They fucking ought to claw the dirt about that one. Not that there’s any good it would do them. United States government doesn’t have to pay attention to a little bit of scratching in the dirt.”

  Horton was stoned. He was trying to get a Morton’s chicken pot pie out of its foil baking dish and onto one of Nina’s plates. He liked to remove the top piece intact, but it was already in three pieces, and he hadn’t even tilted the pie onto the plate yet. He worked the fork around the edge again, tilted the pie. “Good a thing to eat as any other,” he said. “Cheap, too. Hey, I made a joke. Talking about chicken, and I said cheap.”

  “I feel responsible,” she said. “I’ve talked to John about this every day for a week, and I still feel responsible.”

  “Homewrecker? You feel like a bad lady homewrecker? People don’t want their house disturbed, they don’t go out looking to disturb it. He just wanted the lights burning all night in the chicken coop. Wanted more production. Willing to risk a tasteless egg or two to take on more.”

  “Will you please stop talking about chickens?” Spangle said.

  He was cutting his steak. No place Nina suggested for dinner had pleased them, and finally they had smoked up again and gone to the food store, and this was what they had come back with. One steak, one Morton’s chicken pie, and eight bags of Doritos.

  “You told me these were great,” Spangle said, biting a Dorito. “Same old taco chips. I don’t see any difference.”

  “This is really getting to me,” Nina said. “There’s a real crisis in my life, and I end up entertaining the Marx Brothers.”

  “No way we’re the Marx Brothers,” Horton said. “Take a look. I’m black, he’s white. We might be half-brothers, if Mama was fooling around with the wrong rooster, but there is no way you can take in the two of us and say we’re brothers. Shit. We’re not even soul brothers. You know who’s a soul man now? Not Huey, not Eldridge. Fatso, on Saturday Night Live.” Horton
bit into another Dorito. “You think brother Huey traded in his wicker throne for modular furniture? What do you bet me?”

  “Come on,” Spangle said. “We go to Vermont and get some sort of jobs. We get out of all this. We can take Horton with us, and he can raise chickens. You like that plan, Horton?”

  “The Grand Concourse is as close as I care to come to the country. Spent enough time in the country in my Bard College days. Makes me nervous just to look up above me and see greenery in people’s windows. Makes me nervous to see any plants but the necessary five-leaf kind. Unhealthy life in the country.”

  “Spangle,” she said, “would you be saying this if I hadn’t told you about what happened in John’s family? You came here the other night with the intention of asking me to come back to you and move to Vermont?”

  “I came back because I felt myself coming back. I haven’t gone back to New Haven because I can’t see myself walking into that apartment in New Haven again. The other night when I was sprawled out on your floor I got to thinking that cities make people crazy.”

  “United States space program makes people crazy,” Horton said. “These chicken pies have really stood the test of time. Same chicken pies I remember from my childhood.”

  “I can’t say yes or no right now. I’m all mixed up. I hadn’t even thought about you for so long, and now you’re back here and you want it to be like you never left. It didn’t work out the other time we tried it, remember? You were more eager for me to leave than I was.”

  “But I was here a week later, wasn’t I?”

  “Your dealer got shot. You came here to connect with Horton.”

  “I’m reliable,” Horton said. “Never been shot. Never care to be.”

  “But you’re going to think about it,” Spangle said.

  “You’ve been with Cynthia for so many years. You’re just going to push that out of your mind?”

  “I didn’t have any plans to be lobotomized. I just had an idea that the two of us could try again.”

  “I want to be by myself,” Nina said.

  “What I like,” Horton said, “is just the opposite. I like people around that I can talk to. I like to be able to have a thought and spill it out. You can’t tell what a thought will be till it’s spilled out, like dice. I’m not so crazy yet that I sit around and rap with myself.”

  “Have you ever in your life been at a loss for something to say, Horton?” Spangle said. Horton thought. “I don’t believe so. I believe the good Lord gave me a tongue to talk. Pointless to have a tongue if you don’t talk. Like an anteater showing no interest in ants.”

  “I think you’d like Vermont, Horton,” Spangle said. “I think it would inspire you.”

  “I’ve got a bicycle chained to a tree if I get in the country mood. Go get my bicycle any day. Just waiting for me, chained to a tree.”

  “Jesus,” Nina said. “I keep feeling like it’s my fault.”

  “Don’t,” Spangle said. “If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else.”

  “That’s flattering,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “I was trying to tear him down, not you. I want you, not him.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “That was an awful thing to say.”

  “You just told me that it was random. That he happened to meet you when you were with some girlfriend, visiting her boyfriend, and in walked John, so you ended up having dinner that night.”

  “That wasn’t what you meant. You meant that I was just somebody he happened to pick up.”

  “Don’t fight,” Horton said. “It ruins my digestion.”

  “Don’t keep joking,” she said to Horton. “This is my life.”

  “I just joke to keep talking. Don’t think anything of it. Don’t have a serious thought in my head some days. Today seems to be one of those days. I feel like I’m in the barrel going over the waterfall—reach a certain point, and it’s just inevitable that you’re going to get going faster and faster. Did either of you hear anything about a danger at Niagara Falls? Something a while back that I missed, apparently.”

  “Whatever it was, the news didn’t get to Madrid,” Spangle said.

  “And what kind of a job would I get?” she said. “What is there to do in Vermont but be a waitress in some diner? All winter it’s horrible—cold and snowy.”

  “At least there aren’t gutters to get clogged,” he said.

  “Put yourself in a barrel,” Horton said. “Roll through the snow. Have him push you along with a stick.”

  “I think you ought to come with us, Horton. In case we get snowed in and get bored.”

  “Oh no,” Horton said. “Put my ideas into practice, and half of them would kill you.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I believe I have some business to transact in a half-hour. Think I’ll just go into the bathroom and tidy myself up.” Horton shook his head. “You know I dated a lady for a spell who used to say that? It meant she was putting in her diaphragm.” He carried his plate to the kitchen. “Tidying herself up. Yes indeed,” Horton said, walking through the living room to the bathroom.

  “Hey, Horton,” Spangle said. “What about the music? When’s your buddy getting out of the hospital?”

  “That’s the rest of the story. The lady ran off with my friend. He’s already out of the hospital, and she’s off with him somewhere, and both of them embarrassed to face me. I joke all the time because I have such a sad life. She’s probably tidying herself up about now. Here I stand, all alone, combing my hair.” He closed the bathroom door.

  Soon after Horton left she asked Spangle to leave too, but he told her that he wanted to stay, and she didn’t press him to go. He had been staying with his brother, in some painter’s apartment in the West Village. His brother had a date that night, and had asked him to get lost. The painter was out of town for a week, gambling in Atlantic City. Jonathan had been sleeping in the painter’s bed, and he had been sleeping in a hammock in the kitchen. Instead of wallpaper in the kitchen, the painter had tacked up stills from old movies, and when Spangle couldn’t sleep, his eye would wander over the walls to pictures of Debbie Reynolds behind the microphone in “Singin’ in the Rain,” Sandra Dee in a modest bathing suit, Annette Funicello in her Mouse-keteer costume, Kate Smith singing, Sissy Spacek at the dance in Carrie, Esther Williams on the edge of a diving board, Joan Crawford behind a desk working for Pepsi, Mae West, Britt Ekland, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, glossy picture after glossy picture, pinned to the wall with yellow push-pins. None of the painter’s work had been put up in the apartment. It was all at his studio in SoHo. Jonathan had been there, and he had said it was filled with mannequins and pinball machines, pictures stacked everywhere, racing forms on the floor, a one-armed bandit on the tank of a broken toilet, a geranium growing out of the toilet bowl. The painter hated to paint in the summer, and would go to the studio just to play with the machines and water the plant. He had recently met a woman who admired his work and had a condominium in Atlantic City, and he had started going there and gambling when her husband wasn’t around. Gambling was a new kick. Before that, it had been weight-lifting. Before that, snuff films. James Wright’s poetry. Homosexuality.

  Spangle had not thought for a long time about the bomb exploding. Looking at Esther Williams or Mae West before he fell asleep seemed the perfect antidote. You could not look at Mae West and close your eyes and worry about a bomb exploding. Other things, but not that.

  Lying in limbo in the hammock, he had thought a lot about Nina, and about how he would like to try again with her. (He had realized the appropriateness of the hammock right away, and had told Jonathan to put his quarter away: no need to flip for the bed.) Not that Cynthia had done anything wrong, but they were beginning to seem like an old married couple. She was even getting tolerant of his nightmares, soothing him perfunctorily. She had stopped complaining to him, and he had stopped complaining to her. The realization that he did not have a private, separate existence from her began to bother him
. He liked Madrid because she had not seen it. He was nostalgic for Vermont for the same reason. They had been to Vermont together a couple of times in the summer, but she had never seen the Vermont of frozen winters and deer hunters and bare trees by the river. She had never known what it felt like to have a house full of lights and music and people, a house full of constant activity, while outside snow fell silently, mounds of wet, silent snow, covering bushes and piling on roofs, rising as high on top of the hanging bird-feeder as the feeder itself. If he had it to do over again, there would not be quite so many people. There would be just as big a house, though, even if part of it had to be closed off. He had torn down walls and sanded floors and glazed windows, and as fast as he had worked, Bobby had written poems about it all. Coming back to the States, on the plane, he had read one of Bobby’s poems in a magazine. Crazy Bobby—everything had been an inspiration to him. It was a standing joke with his friends that he could turn anything into a poem: Once he had put the light on in the car and taken an index card out of the glove compartment as they waited on a flooded road in Boston for AAA to come tow them out. The runs they used to make from Vermont to Boston, when it was absolutely necessary to see Night of the Living Dead or eat kosher food. Impossible to believe that he had lost touch with so many of those people. Maybe Cynthia would just let him go. The hammock could metamorphose into a huge basket, and he could be set among the bulrushes, and free of her, he would be saved by someone or something else. But it was hard to imagine finding a new person to love when he was still attached to so many people from the past. In Madrid, he had thought of Cynthia, not of going back to the States to try to find a new girl. It amazed him when that sort of thing happened. It amazed him that Nina’s lover, John, could just go over to his friend Nick’s apartment, and that Nick’s girlfriend would have brought her friend along, and that friend would be Nina. That they would joke and talk. That he would end up taking her to dinner that night, and the next night, too; and that then they would go to her apartment. She said that he was so curious that he had even gone through the medicine cabinet. Just like that, you could walk into somebody’s life? He was nowhere near John’s age, and he was the one who felt old: He was the one who couldn’t believe such a thing was possible.