Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  “Bobby,” she said, “would you like it if I went out and brought something back for dinner?”

  He took out a blue index card and jotted down a few words, holding her off with the first finger of his left hand raised. “Okay,” he said, shoving the card in his pocket. “Ready to go. All ready. This is very nice of you. I can’t remember the last time I had two meals out in one day, let alone meals I didn’t have to pay for. This is very nice of you. I love you.”

  “Stop,” she said.

  “Anything,” he said, hands up in surrender. “Anything. I don’t mean to be disagreeable. I’m just wound up. I’m fine.”

  She picked up her keys, got her purse, stopped and considered what to do about the ringing phone.

  “You answer it,” she said to Bobby. “Say I’m not here, if it’s for me. Unless it’s Spangle.”

  “If it’s him, I’d hang up on him.”

  “No you wouldn’t. Answer the phone.”

  “I would. I have to be honest with you.”

  She sighed and headed for the phone.

  “All right, okay, I’ll get it,” he said. He picked it up the second before her hand reached it.

  “Garden of the Fallen Lotus,” he said, in a surprisingly good imitation of a Chinese.

  “Oh Christ,” Tess Spangle said. “I dialed wrong. The last thing I need is some fried won-ton.” She hung up.

  “A woman,” he said. “She said, ‘Oh Christ. I dialed wrong. The last thing I need is some fried won-ton.’ ”

  “His mother,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” Bobby said. The phone was ringing again.

  Love was one thing, survival another. The magician was going to have to leave the East Coast, very soon, to do another private party in Ojai. Amazing how even living rent-free, your money just dribbled away. Movies were expensive, food cost a lot, sixty cents to wash your clothes. His money was almost gone, and he hadn’t made any good contacts around New Haven. He’d pulled a couple of rabbits out of hats at children’s birthday parties, but God—the cost of rabbit food. And living with his mother was impossible. He had to buy things for her. She wouldn’t pay for anything when he was around: All she wanted was to criticize and to get a free ride. She talked about how high her rent was, as though she paid any less when he wasn’t there. She was allergic to the rabbits, and he had to put them in cages out on the fire escape, and he couldn’t put them out there until that part of the building was in shade, so all morning and half the afternoon he was stuck sitting in the park with the rabbits.

  It was unrequited love. Again. There was romance, and then there was the real world. He did not mean the real real world, but the world that he had to work in in order to survive. He knew that the real real world was the Pentagon, not a mansion in Ojai, and he was at least thankful that he was not involved in the real real world. Trying to talk himself out of her, trying to make going away seem bearable, he had been saying to himself that she was in the real world. She worked. Was married. Separated. He had a collection of pick-up sticks; she probably had stock. And there was something about her face, however beautiful, that was not spiritual.

  At the very least, he had to say goodbye. Perhaps some energy would be exchanged, perhaps some cloud of romance would hover over her until she knew that she would have to go to him. Perhaps there would be some sudden epiphany, and her heart would flutter as fast as the wings of a hummingbird, and in time that movement would carry her to him. He would let her know his friend’s number in Ojai, because he didn’t have a phone himself, and the friend’s live-in maid was always around and would know how to get in touch with him. He would like to give her something miraculous: a hummingbird wing, beating; an opal, hot with real fire. He could think of nothing but flowers. Flowers scattered in a path to her car, the essence of beauty tempering her movement into the real world. He wished that the flowers in his mother’s yard were more aromatic. Marigolds smelled sour, like some liquor. They did not feel good against your face. He would like to stroke her face with a white iris. To stroke her with flowers, different flowers for different parts of the body, the way his friend in Ojai stroked women lying naked beside his pool. A rose petal on the forehead. Tickling the bottom of her feet, gently, with a camellia. Watching through his binoculars, he had seen some goddamn fat alley cat sniff the flowers and scratch the yarn away, tugging until he had it, dragging it off only to pounce at it once and then forget it.

  Time was short, and he wanted, at least, to say his goodbye. He had gotten there late, because he had had a fight with his mother, and he had not seen if she had gone into the building. But perhaps she was inside, because he had seen her husband pick up the flowers and skip up the steps with them. At least she would have his flowers.

  Watching from a distance was stupid. He would go and sit on the step, and when she came home, or if she came out, he would tell her that this was goodbye, and that he adored her and wished only good things for her. He would do a trick, if she wanted him to.

  He sat and waited, and finally it happened. He was sitting on the bottom step when the door opened, and she was there. She was there with her husband; and seeing him, she suddenly reached out to grab her husband’s elbow, sucking in her breath.

  “Freeze,” he said, trying to be casual, to joke, to save what was meaningful for a later moment.

  The gun he pointed was a red water pistol. What he shot out of it was a plastic rose.

  Twenty-Three

  IT WAS NOT the vacation he thought they would be having. They were in a borrowed house on the bay in Nantucket. Mary was not with them. She was at Angela’s. John Joel was still at his grandmother’s, and three times a week she and Brandt and the cook went with him into New York and waited while he talked to a psychiatrist. Louise, sitting in a chair beside the pool in the backyard, wrote them letters every day. Not post cards—letters. Post cards to Brandt. When she wrote the letters and post cards, she cupped her left hand over what she was writing, so he wouldn’t see.

  She liked the pool better than the ocean. There was a chair that floated in the pool, and early in the morning when he got up, he would go to the bedroom window and peer out through the shelves of gloxinias, the purple and pink bells of flowers, and Louise would be below, with orange juice, floating in the pool. He would go downstairs and sit on the rim of the pool, his legs in the water halfway to his knees. When the sun got stronger, after an hour or so, he would push himself forward and sink down, go all the way under, exhaling, and then pop up again. Then swim. Then try to get her to go to the beach. When she wouldn’t, he would open the gate at the back of the pool and go down the fifteen steps to the sandy path, and follow it until it widened onto the beach.

  Everyone had forgotten about John Joel’s braces.

  Tiffy called every morning, and every evening Louise called Tiffy. Tiffy had left her husband and found an apartment on Central Park West. A famous painter whose name he had forgotten lived in the building, and Tiffy was going to take painting lessons. Tiffy this, Tiffy that. Tiffy said that Parker’s mother was in bed, trying not to have a miscarriage. Parker’s grandmother was there, taking care of things. When John had dropped Mary off at Angela’s, Angela’s father had had a lot to say about Parker’s mother. Very stupid, he said. Knew nothing about law. Parker’s father was out of town on business. The police had gone to the house several times to question Parker. Angela’s father reported that Parker’s mother had told him, with pride, what Parker said to the police: “If I told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

  He waded out into the water. A woman in a bikini kept throwing a plastic baseball bat into the water for a big golden retriever. He stood there, far enough away so as not to distract them, and watched the bat sail out into the water, time and again. The woman threw like a man, not like a woman. In other ways, she was obviously a woman. The bikini was cut right to the edge of her nipples, but tight, so that no matter how she moved, you couldn’t see anything.

  “Isn’t he great?” the
woman said, as he passed by.

  “Yes. Has he always loved the water?”

  “Oh yes. When he was eight weeks old, my husband waded out into a pond with him and released him, and he stayed there, perfectly still, and then he started paddling. He made it to shore and barked at my husband and threw himself in the dirt and rolled in it, but then he got tired of being mad and inched back in. We can hardly drive past water without him leaping out of the car. He’ll jump off bridges. He’s been off a diving board. He loves it.” The woman was shaking her head, beaming. The dog crouched, eyes wide, waiting for the bat. She turned and threw it. The dog was running before it had left her hand.

  Parker had told his son to jump off a bridge, and he had done it.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” he said. “Can he judge what’s deep enough water to dive into?”

  The woman’s expression changed. “I never thought about that,” she said. “I don’t know if he has a sense of that or not.”

  He walked on, feeling like a cloud that had darkened the beach.

  Every little thing that happened was getting blown out of proportion in his head. The night before, they had made shish-kebabs and cooked them on the hibachi by the pool, and he had burned his tongue, biting into a chunk of beef too soon. He had wanted to cry, to spit out the hot meat and cry. He had sucked air into his mouth instead, said nothing; but after dinner he had taken it out on her, undressing and diving into the pool, not speaking. She carried the plates into the house and didn’t come out again. From the water, he watched the coals, still glowing. Shivering in the water, he looked back at the house and saw the light on in the bedroom. The light went off. She had gone to bed at nine-thirty.

  It was Friday, and Nick and Laurie, who were going to be on Martha’s Vineyard to visit friends, were going to stop at the house that night. He had asked Louise if that was all right, or if she would prefer to be alone. She had not said that she preferred to be alone, and after a few seconds she had said that it was all right. He had the feeling that she thought it was an odd request, but nothing harmful—like someone asking if he can brush his teeth in front of you. He hated it that even on vacation she had brought the little plastic key, and was rolling the toothpaste up, from the bottom. He had removed the key, flushed it down the toilet, and squeezed the tube hard, in the middle. She had not said anything about it. He had been embarrassed after he had done it. He had been embarrassed after he questioned the woman in the bikini. Embarrassed, the night before, when he had thrown off his clothes and a breeze had come up and she had seen him shiver before he jumped. Embarrassed that she had picked up the plates and washed them. Embarrassed that she had gone to bed. To cheer himself up, he kept thinking about what Nick told him—that not all of it was his fault. His mother said so, too. Only Louise did not say so. The female psychiatrist, whom he seemed always to talk to, had granted that it was true, but seemed to think that it was unimportant to notice in what ways he wasn’t responsible. He wanted to think that it was over, but actually very little of it was over. Nobody knew yet what damage had really been done to all of them. In the evening, he liked to walk on the beach and watch the sun go down. It was so simple to see that the day was over, that the blackness would spread out, intensify. When he was alone, he lost all sense of time: He might sit for an hour, two hours, three. He sat alone in the den downstairs, while upstairs Louise slept. He went over and over it in his mind, gaining no ground. All the facts were so simple: that it wasn’t a good marriage, that he loved Nina, that his son had shot his daughter. Louise would not watch the sunset with him because the sun was huge and deep-pink above the water, and when she looked at it, all she could think of was blood. The blood swirling in Nina’s sink: a little cut, a small tragedy. The blood on the ground: the cops had blasted it away with the garden hose. They had cleaned up as though someone had made a faux pas. They had taken pictures of the bloody ground, and then they had washed the area with a hose: the polite host, passing no comment, silently mopping up spilled wine.

  Nina felt responsible. “You talk as though you were a magnet,” he said to her, “as though I had to be pulled along. You’re not being fair to either of us. You aren’t acknowledging that this is still the right place for me to be. That you want me here.” She had kept crying. “Look,” he had said, “isn’t this where I belong?”

  “I was a magnet,” Nina had said. “I had advantages she didn’t have. I did pull you along.”

  “What advantages?”

  “Because I’m young, and she’s not. Because I have this small, quiet place for you to be, and at home it’s the way you always tell me it is when you have a barbecue or something awful like that. You like it here because you’re left alone.”

  “I could be in a cave and be left alone.”

  “It is a cave,” she had shouted. “It’s cramped, it’s not cozy. I hate it that you love it so much, that you have so much and you want so little.”

  “What do I have?” he had said, and she had been completely exasperated. “Pillars at the end of my driveway,” he had smiled. “What else?”

  “Acres of land. Children. A big house. Try to realize what you have.”

  “You’re what I want.”

  “Do you know what I did?” she had said. “I got a friend of mine to drive me to your house. Do you believe that I did that? Do you know why I did it? Because if there were pillars, I was never going to speak to you again. Because you pretend your house is nothing, that all of it is nothing, and I know it isn’t true. That house is beautiful. I looked up the driveway and saw a huge tree. I can’t understand what you want with this—with this tiny apartment, with me. Because I’m pretty? Why do you like me? I can’t remember.”

  “It’s not as though I want to burrow into this apartment and never leave,” he said.

  “You’re not answering the question.”

  “God almighty. I show you how I love you, don’t I? I’ve told you why I love you. Because we have good times together, because there’s no such thing as time when I’m with you.”

  “You always look at your watch and leave,” she had said.

  Slow time. Slow motion. It had been a hard climb to get to her, in more senses than one. It had been hard to face his feelings for her, when he thought he had all his feelings arranged, under control. It was as if somebody had stood up in the middle of a familiar song and played a brilliant solo: Was it worth being amazed, when things got disturbed so that they would always seem odd if you put them back together the way they were? He had debated. He had not slept with her. And then he had slept with her and pretended it did not matter. It was so difficult, and he was so slow in coming around to what he had to do. She was right that he hid in her apartment. He was hiding from himself, or at best playing peek-a-boo, pretending it was a safe game and that there were only little surprises: the infant seeing that it’s still a friend behind the fingers. Rules of the game: The peek-a-boo is always gentle, never shouted. You disappear, but can still be seen. The house in Rye. The house in Connecticut. The apartment on Columbus Avenue. She had joked that he would come back reincarnated as confetti. His son had shot his daughter, and little blood vessels, little pieces of tissue, had torn apart, frayed.

  Nina was away in the Berkshires, and he couldn’t call her for two more nights. She had taken a week off and gone away to think. For two of those days, at least, Peter Spangle, on his way to see an old friend in New Hampshire, would be with her. He could really see how you killed somebody over love, but he could not see how you shot someone out of hatred. Maybe that was what it appeared to be, too—that John Joel hated Mary. For the millionth time, the billionth time, he thought: My son shot my daughter.

  It was late afternoon. He headed back toward the house. He could feel the heat rising from his collarbones and his shoulders, and he knew that he had gotten too much sun, that his shoulders were going to hurt. He touched the skin with his fingertips and he could feel the soreness, like pressing on a bruise. When John Joel and Mary were litt
le children and they had splinters, bug bites, cuts, he used to examine them before he rubbed medicine on the area or carefully pinched up the skin to draw out a splinter. He hated it when they cringed from him. He was being so gentle. He could remember, one time, yelling at Mary, “You’re not being fair. I put my finger an inch away from the cut to steady your arm so I could see if you got glass in it. I couldn’t possibly be hurting you. You’re just afraid because I’ve got big hands.” Louise had thought that that was hilarious. She had started laughing, and that had started Mary crying, and he had been so angry that he had stalked off, his hands at his sides feeling like they were encased in catcher’s mitts. As Nick said, it was not all his fault.

  He watched a child playing in the wet sand at the water’s edge, pressing what looked like a gigantic cookie cutter into the sand, standing back and looking approvingly at what she was creating: a chain of big ducks, beaks to tails, stretching and stretching until a wave washed over them, and the child began again, a little farther back.

  The woman with the dog was gone. About where she had stood was a woman in a white sailor’s hat, sitting in a lawn chair pulled a little way into the water, her big legs stretched in front of her. “Hawaii is better,” she said as he passed.

  He went back to the path and climbed the steps, feeling how smooth the sand had worn the soles of his feet.

  Louise had brought a radio outside. It was playing softly, sitting on the metal top of a table that had a hole, but no umbrella they could find.

  “They’re putting the former manager of the Beatles in jail for tax evasion,” she said. She did not look up. She was reading a paperback.

  “Did you plan to go to the store for food, or shall we just go out for dinner when Nick and his friend come?” she said.

  “Laurie,” he said.

  “Laurie,” she said. “Which?”