by Ann Beattie
Nina had gone into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He went into the kitchen and decided to make coffee and try to get his head straight. If she was letting him stay, he should at least try to take her problems seriously. He wondered if he had really offended her by saying that if it hadn’t been her it would have been somebody else. Because he couldn’t imagine her with some middle-aged man, a man with money, who worked at a fancy job and had a fancy house in the suburbs. Lemon lilies on the front lawn. Sprinklers on the putting green at the country club. Was Nina getting old? Was that why that life had started to attract her? He had asked her that, and that had been the wrong thing to say, too: Even if she found it attractive, she said, she wasn’t going to get it. And if she had ever had a chance, it was gone now. He was guilt-stricken and he had admitted that he was a coward, and he was right back there now, wasn’t he? She had been red in the face, about to cry, and then she had sighed and stomped off to the bathroom. She took showers the way other people got drunk or smoked until they were stoned. She would be reincarnated as a water nymph. He could be adrift in the bulrushes and she could be bathing there, and swim after him. Where would the myth go from there? Bobby would have been able to guess, in one of his poems. He always used to imagine beautiful situations that worked out perfectly. Or at least that was the way he had read Bobby’s poems, and it had taken a long time to figure out that Bobby wasn’t smiling because he was flattered, but because of the way he, Spangle, almost always misunderstood them. Spangle had had no ear for irony. Cynthia said that, too. She said that she couldn’t imagine how he had ever passed freshman English. “How can anybody be smart about life when they don’t understand literature?” she had asked him. “What happens to characters happens to characters, and what happens to you and me happens to you and me,” he had said. She had asked him, then, if he was speaking ironically. Maybe not ironically, but humorously? He dodged the question. Probably she was smarter than he was. Probably that was the truth.
He was drinking coffee and listening to News Radio Eighty-Eight. Someone was discussing cottage cheese. He listened as long as he could stand it, then changed the station. Someone was saying something about Joe Cocker, and he felt a tingling in his fingers, on the dial, because he thought that what was being said was that Joe Cocker was dead. But it wasn’t that. The announcer was saying that Joe Cocker hadn’t been heard from for a long time, but he wasn’t saying that he would never be heard from again. There’d been enough of that. Enough of everybody dying. Enough of his not getting his own life together. John wasn’t the only coward. He was settling for biding time, swinging in a hammock, quite literally, over neutral territory. Here was an irony he understood: He was in Nina’s kitchen, wanting her back, and Joe Cocker was singing a song called “Do I Still Figure in Your Life?” He finished the cup of coffee. “Nina?” he hollered. “Want coffee?”
Another irony: While he was sobering up to have a serious talk with her, she had disappeared. He had not heard her go. She had put on her clothes and gone out, without even saying goodbye. Not even the falsely polite goodbye of years ago, when she left Vermont for New York—just a shower, clothes pulled on, purse picked up, gone. He looked for her purse, and when he didn’t see it, he was sure that she had done more than just duck out for a minute.
He finished all the coffee in the pot, waiting for her. The coffee made him edgy. The situation made him edgy. He didn’t have any right in her apartment after all this time, and he was sure that she had left because she didn’t think he would get straight, or care about her problem. She thought he was Groucho or Harpo, just showing up to clown around.
He put Bitches Brew on the stereo and waited. He waited a long time, and blamed himself silently for what had happened. He called the painter’s apartment, looking for advice, he supposed, from his brother, but the phone rang and rang. No brother. If he had any idea where Nina would go, he would go look for her. If he knew who any of her friends were, he would call them, act casual, try to find out if she was there. She must have been very disgusted to just walk out of her apartment and leave it to him. He must have really done and said the wrong things. He resisted the temptation to roll a joint and smoke it. When an argument started on the street he got up and went into the bedroom to watch. One man was shoving another. A woman in spike heels was holding one of the men’s hats, standing there and looking casual. It took him a second to see that a child was standing behind her. He never got a clear look at the child, but while the men yelled and threatened each other, the woman lost interest and started tossing the hat in the air and catching it. She finally put it on her head, took the child by the hand and walked off down the street, and that was what broke up the fight—the tall man wanted his hat. He ran after her, arm outstretched, calling her name. The woman disappeared around the corner and the man behind her followed. Only the short man in the lavender shirt unbuttoned to his waist was left standing on the sidewalk, wiping his forehead. For the first time, Spangle realized that the man’s forehead had been cut. He saw a knife on the ground. He had watched the whole thing, and he hadn’t known what he was looking at. It had just been a series of jerky movements and curses in the half-dark. Even the woman had stood there as though nothing important was happening. The man took off his shirt and pressed it to his head. He walked away, holding the shirt in a wadded-up ball against one side of his head, ignoring the people on the street as they ignored him. Spangle sat on the bed. She was out there. Somewhere, Nina was out there, and if anything happened to her, it would be his fault.
He paced the apartment, turned off Bitches Brew and put on a Mozart string quartet to make himself calm. He called his brother again, but no Jonathan, no answer. How unlike her, just to walk out. How insensitive he had been, not to realize how disturbed she was. She was entitled to her apartment, but he had managed to chase her out of it. The least he could do was be gone when she came home. He deserved to have to worry about her, calling every ten minutes, until he heard her voice and knew that she was back, and safe. He was writing a note to her, apologizing, leaving her the painter’s number and asking her please not to hate him so much that she wouldn’t just call and say that she was all right, when there was a knock on the door. He got up, thinking: She forgot her key. That was what she had liked about the house in Vermont—no locks. But before he pulled the door open, he asked who was there, to make sure. What he had just seen outside had reminded him where he was.
“John,” the voice said.
“What are you doing here?” Spangle said, opening the door.
“What are you doing here?”
“Making a nuisance of myself. She was upset, and I upset her more.” He stood aside and let John in.
“Where is she?” he said.
“She went out. I pissed her off, and she went out. I was just leaving myself. I guess I’ll go ahead and leave. She’ll be happier to see you here than me.”
“I don’t know about that. I called her at work today, and she wouldn’t come to the phone. She was there, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Spangle said. “As far as I know, she worked all day.”
“And you don’t know where she went?”
“No. She was taking a shower, and I was getting myself together drinking coffee in the kitchen. The radio was on pretty loud, and I was daydreaming, I guess, and when she got out of the shower she dressed and went out without saying anything. I deserved it. She didn’t have any way of knowing that I’d get it together.”
John sat in the humpback chair, ran his hand over his face. What she had told him had come true: He would come to the apartment knowing she would be there, and she would be gone. At least she was not gone with Spangle. Yet.
“What did you say that disturbed her?”
“It was just some stoned-out discussion.” Spangle was afraid John could read his mind, and knew he had said that if John hadn’t fallen in love with Nina, he would have fallen in love with someone else.
“Do you want me to make you some coffee
?” Spangle said.
“Would you?” John said. As Spangle got up to walk into the kitchen, John said, “Did you tell me you were going?”
“I’ll go when she comes back. I think as long as I’m here so late, I’ll just sit around for another minute. I’m sure she’ll be back pretty soon. She was tired when she went out.” Spangle ran the water, filled the pan to put on the stove. “I’m a shit,” he said. “I’ll bet you could murder me for fucking with her head so she disappeared. You two had a good thing going, and suddenly I show up. I’m a shit,” Spangle said. “What she told you was the truth: I didn’t sleep with her.”
“I believed her,” John said.
“But I’m such a shit that I was going to suggest it.”
“I believe that, too.”
“Smart,” Spangle said. “That why she likes you so much?”
“No,” John said. “She’s seen what a good job I’ve done making a life for myself, and she probably thinks she can learn from me. Give her an idea about how to be loyal to the person you marry, how to raise children—things like that.”
“She doesn’t think you’re a shit,” Spangle said.
“I don’t either, really. I’m mad at everyone around me. I got to talk to some shrink that wasn’t much older than my daughter—of course, Nina’s not much older than my daughter—about my anger. See, I was there when my son pulled the trigger.”
“You were?” Spangle said.
“Not in fact, but to all intents and purposes I was there. That’s what she told me, and then when I got angry, she told me that I was angry at my family. She was suggesting to me that I was to blame for my son shooting my daughter. She had even met Parker—his friend, Parker; that’s a long story—and she still thought that what I needed to understand about the situation was that I shared the blame.” John shook his head. “Smart,” he said. “Right-out-of-graduate-school smart.”
“Black or with milk?” Spangle said, getting up.
“Black,” John said.
“Jesus Christ,” Spangle said. “I’m glad I don’t have your life. The only thing I envy you for is Nina.”
“It’s the only thing I’m to be envied for.”
“Is she all right, your daughter?” Spangle said. “Nina said she called the hospital, but they don’t tell you anything over the phone except that the patient hasn’t died. Not that she thought she’d died. She just wanted to call. Maybe I should just shut up.”
“Everybody’s fine. They’re shot, or they’re mentally ill—everybody’s all doped up so that we can forget that it happened, or be calm enough to explore the reasons why it happened. They don’t like it if you refuse to get doped up. That’s part of your anger. It’s part of my anger that I won’t discuss Nantucket with my wife, too. I should get doped up and explore with her the reasons she wants to go to Nantucket. I’m to blame for not celebrating the Fourth of July. I’m to blame for walking out.”
“For walking out of what?”
“A family conference. My daughter couldn’t be there, because she was shot, and my son couldn’t be there, because he’s doped up to sleep all the time, and my other son, who lives with my mother, knows nothing about it and was at a Little League game in Rye. But my mother was there, and she was telling the girl who was right out of graduate school that I was running myself ragged leading such a hectic life, and that she had had a problem with alcoholism until she found something that mattered to her. That her life didn’t really shape up until Brandt came to live with her, and the girl is writing it all down, glaring at me, not even making a pretense of not hating me for whatever off-the-wall thing any of them said. And there’s Louise, wiping her eyes, talking about the beach at Nantucket, and her friend Tiffy—she’s inseparable from this feminist, who thinks all the trouble in the world is the result of sexist fairy tales read to us when we were children. So Louise is talking about sailboats and sunsets, and my mother keeps patting my hand and saying that I never sleep, that she wakes up and hears me at four in the morning, talking on the phone. Damn right, she does—to Nina, in New York. Louise just stared at me when my mother said that. I think she said it on purpose. Obviously I’m not talking to the garage at four a.m.”
“Everything changes,” Spangle said. “It doesn’t make any sense how much everything changes. When I first knew Nina, I would have thought that we’d both be in the country forever, and here she is on Columbus Avenue, and I’m in New Haven—I’m not in New Haven, but one of these days I’ve got to get back there and try to make some sort of order out of that.”
“When they were babies I never thought they’d be children, and when they were children I kept thinking of when they’d be grown. I didn’t think that somewhere in the middle there’d be a gunshot.”
“It’s just crazy,” Spangle said. “Anything can happen. You do something you really believe in, and the next day it doesn’t mean anything to you. The woman I live with in New Haven used to date a Marine, and he came home from Vietnam and acted in a porn film about the war, in drag. I met the guy once, and he told me about pigeons landing outside his window in the morning, how the beating of their wings reminded him of the sound the helicopters made, setting down in the fields. He was living in Harlem. Didn’t care what happened.”
“What happened?”
“Lost track of him.”
John was sipping the hot coffee, coming awake a little. “What do you do?” he said to Spangle.
“I’m a good-for-nothing. I’m on the last few thousand of an inheritance, and then I’ve got to go to work. I just went to Madrid and got my kid brother to come back and go to law school. Hoping he’ll support me someday. Let me sponge off of him.”
“Will he?” John said.
“Maybe. For a while. Or the woman I live with in New Haven. Lived with.”
“You want Nina,” John said.
“I do,” Spangle said. “The thing about Nina is that I can never get used to her. It used to bother me, but she’s lying, man, when she says she’s predictable. She doesn’t know what other women are like if she thinks she’s predictable. I mean, I don’t know how you can live with somebody unless there’s a part of them you can’t fathom. She was so nice to me the other night, and tonight she just walked out, not even a goodbye.” Spangle put down his empty coffee cup. He had now drunk way too much coffee. Bells were ringing in his body.
By the time Nina got back to the apartment, they were no longer talking. John had fallen asleep in the bedroom, in his clothes, on top of the quilt, light on, and Spangle, still wide awake from all the coffee, had been left alone in the living room. John had told him, when he was talking about his day with the psychiatrist, that he had found out guilt was only anger directed inward. But what did you know when you knew that? That he would be guilty if he took Nina from John? He was already angry at himself—what did a little more anger matter?
Nina wasn’t happy to see him. “I asked you to leave,” she said. She said it even before she realized that John was in the bedroom.
Sitting alone, drinking coffee, looking around the delicatessen and seeing other people, she thought: My God—there are actually other people, like me, sitting here alone. Spangle was so animated that it was like being with several people. That overflow of energy made her nervous. Having people around all the time made her nervous. She thought, sometimes, that if she lived in a tent, people would come and crawl into the tent. Some days she wanted to say to the landlady downstairs: “You’re right—this life I’m leading is crazy. Do something to help me. Get them out of here.” They were men, always. Not women. Not that there were that many men, but John, and Horton, and Jonathan and Spangle, all in such a short time period. It was too much. She had bought the paper and was enjoying sitting alone, no longer feeling guilty for having walked out. She was imitating John’s behavior, and liking it. If they did not mind barging in, she should not mind sneaking out. The other thing to think was that she was already a bad person, damned forever, for causing trouble in John’s marr
iage. His son had shot his daughter. The little boy she had had lunch with not long ago had pulled the trigger of a gun and his sister was in the hospital, and there were lawyers involved, psychiatrists. That poor fat child had shot his sister. She stirred her coffee and wondered, if she and John had children, whether they would be pretty or whether they would look like John Joel. She had never seen his daughter. She was ten years older than his daughter. He kept saying that, as though she and his daughter had something in common. Her cut finger still hurt, and she hated pain. She could not imagine what it would be like to be shot. She lived in New York City, and she could not imagine any of the possibilities: rape, muggings, murder. That was something she read about in the paper. John Joel’s shooting Mary was something she read about in the paper. She thought that what Horton said about being comfortable in the city made sense. In the city she just did not have time to think all the time and to be frightened: You either adjusted or you went crazy. In the country, every branch rattling against the house became frightening. She had hated the night noises in the country.
She paid her bill at the cash register at the front of the delicatessen. There was an index card Scotch-taped to the side of the register, with a smiling face on it that said: SMILE, I HAVEN’T HAD A VACATION IN FOUR YEARS. The FOUR had been crossed out and 4½ was written above it.
She went back and just what she thought would happen happened: She walked in and Spangle was there. She told him what she thought about that and, exhausted, went into the bedroom.
It could have been anything in the bed—a lump, in the dark. It was what she thought it was, though. It was John. He moved in the bed. He opened his eyes and looked at her as she was undressing.