Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  “You’re mad that I asked them,” he said. “They were coming here anyway. I couldn’t very well not invite them to stop by.”

  “Nick and Laurie,” she said. She moved her leg, and the chair swirled a little in the pool. She was almost facing him, but still she hadn’t looked up.

  “We’ll go out to eat,” he said. “We’ll go to that restaurant you like.”

  “So that you can keep Nick posted,” she said, “you can tell him that I’ve asked for a divorce.”

  “What?” he said. “Who have you asked for a divorce?”

  She looked up. “You,” she said. There was a report on the radio about which traveler’s checks to buy. A reporter had bought traveler’s checks and left them home on purpose. American Express had come through for her. The people at the Holiday Inn where she had gone to fill out a form and get new checks had been very polite.

  “If that’s what you want,” he said. He thought to himself: coward.

  “Nick and Laurie,” she said, and moved her leg again. The chair twirled.

  “You don’t want to see Nick and Laurie,” he said.

  “I’ll see Nick and Laurie,” she said. “I’ll stay the rest of the week, too. You can go, if you want to.”

  “Do you want to take a walk?” he said.

  “To see if the woman in the bikini is still throwing sticks for her dog? That made me so nostalgic. My poor goddamn dog. Goddamn me, too, for not being able to get the dog out of my head.”

  He wondered if it was orange juice in her cup. Seagulls were squawking.

  “You saw me talking to her?” he said. “You came down to the beach?”

  “I started to, but I saw you in the distance, talking to her. Do you realize that you’re only embarrassing yourself? I saw her at the drugstore, at the counter, in a tight white skirt, and the man sitting on the stool next to her wasn’t more than eighteen years old. Not her son, either. That woman must be forty-five.”

  “So what makes you think that I was interested in her?”

  “You’re interested in dogs?”

  “I like dogs,” he said. “I didn’t worship Mr. Blue the way you did, but it was your dog.”

  “Mary told me that she talked to you about getting a dog, and that you didn’t seem too keen on the idea.”

  “Should I have? Is that what you want?”

  “As you said to Mary, if I wanted a dog, I’d just go out and get a dog. I’m not like you, actually. If I decide I want something, I just act on that impulse.”

  “Why not be specific with your insults?” he said.

  “I’m not insulting you. Maybe by implication I am. Saying that you’re like me. To be fair to myself, what I said was that I was like you.” She kicked the water, turned. She was sunburned, too. Her face was shiny, her hair wet. She had been swimming. Drinking. It was not orange juice in the cup.

  “Here’s something you haven’t thought about,” she said. “What if I told you to take care of the children? What if I moved with Tiffy to New York?”

  It was something he hadn’t thought about. He was silent, trying to figure out if she was bluffing.

  “Scare you?” she said. “Your mother wouldn’t take two more, would she?”

  “They’re my children,” he said. “Do you think that I wouldn’t take them?”

  “I don’t think they’d go,” she said. She spun again. “That’s just a guess,” she said. “You know when Brandt had the measles? He got them again—German measles. Your mother had never had German measles.” She laughed. “She called today. She’s peppered.”

  “What are you drinking?” he said.

  “If you stay,” she said, “I want to rent a boat.”

  “I want you to take a walk with me on the beach and sober up.”

  “I want it to stay summer,” she said. “I hate Connecticut in the winter. You know what I particularly hate? The birds still hopping around in the cold, the little seed bells you have to hang in the trees for them. Those brown and white seeds all over the leaves. Then the snow.”

  “Where would you rather be?” he said.

  She said, smiling, “Where would you?”

  She made it come back to him: the rooms, the apartment on Columbus Avenue, the place he had been trying all day not to think about, staring at the ocean, the beach. Seagulls instead of pigeons. Salt air instead of the subway smell. His feet sinking into the sand. His feet so heavy he could hardly lift them, the slight creaking of the stairs. “Be quiet,” Nina had whispered, putting her finger to her lips. “The landlady!” He had turned to see a heavy woman in a black dress, her hair in pigtails, coming out the front door of Nina’s building, a big white patent-leather purse gleaming under the streetlight. It was the night they had come back to the apartment and Horton had been there, slumped like a Mexican taking a siesta. In front of the landlady, Horton had put his arms around Nina’s hips. The woman looked shocked and hurried past them down the steps. “She hates me,” Nina laughed. “She sticks her head out the door to see if I’ve brought anybody home with me. She has a daughter who’s the same way.”

  He had said to John Joel, on the train, “Not your type, huh?” Condescending. He had been condescending to somebody who would pick up a gun and shoot somebody else. That was not something a child would do. His child had done it. If he had underestimated John Joel that much, maybe John Joel had known all along that Nina was his girl, not Nick’s. Maybe John Joel knew that while he was kidding him, saying that she wasn’t his type.

  “I’m going to drive to the fish market,” he said. “You don’t want to go out to dinner.”

  “I’ll be sober.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because you’ll watch over me.” She smiled. Turned the page of her book.

  He sighed, and sat on the edge of the pool, swinging his legs over the side. He did watch her. He watched her and tried to think of good things about her, because he was so inclined to dislike her. If she hadn’t wanted to come, she should have said so. If she hadn’t wanted to see Nick, or let him see Nick, she should have said that, too. Good things, he reminded himself. That she had gotten drunk, but didn’t seem to intend to get drunker; that she had been about to take a walk with him on the beach before, until she had misunderstood his exchanging a few pleasantries with a woman for flirtation. She had once drawn a hopscotch game on the kitchen floor, amazed that he didn’t know how to do it, and they had used as a stone a kumquat from a fruit basket her aunt had sent them for Christmas. Hopping through the kitchen. Christmas, when she always gave him presents he would like. Jumping into the pile of leaves he had raked in the backyard. Winter memories: Most of them were winter memories.

  At five o’clock, when Nick and Laurie showed up, she was sitting on a lounge chair beside the pool, wearing a blue T-shirt and white cotton pants. A towel that had been on her wet hair was around her neck. She was polite.

  “We’re just staying for a little while,” Nick said. “We got a late start. We’ve got to get to our friends’ house pretty soon.” He said it before he even sat down.

  Laurie kicked off her shoes and sat on the rim of the pool. She had on the kind of mirrored sunglasses that you can’t see into: He looked and saw the red clouds reflected, and a large shadow that must have been him. You could only tell by her mouth that she was happy.

  Nick had brought a horseshoe game. “I’ve wanted to play all summer,” he said. “Does anybody else want to play?”

  He went down to the beach with Nick. Nick ground the stake into the sand, then handed him a horseshoe. “My grandmother had one of these over her back door,” he said. “For luck.”

  “Did she have good luck?” John said.

  “Not particularly. About average. She also pitched horseshoes. Come to think of it, she was very good at that.”

  “Shit, what are you doing with a horseshoe game?”

  “How’s it going?” Nick said to him. Nick threw a horseshoe. Missed. “What I’m doing with it is that it ma
kes me nervous to be around the two of you and I thought it would give us something to do.”

  “We could drink.”

  “Okay,” Nick said.

  “I was kidding. Louise is just sobering up.”

  “How’s it going?” Nick said.

  “All right,” he said. For some reason, he thought that it would be betraying Louise to say that she had asked for a divorce.

  “If it’s going okay, then I’m supposed to tell you that Nina’s back, and she wants you to call her.”

  The horseshoe went thump in the sand. Neither of them had hit the stake.

  “When did you hear from her?” he said.

  “She called me yesterday. I don’t know anything. I told it to you just the way she told it to me.”

  “She wants me to be in a good mood if she’s giving me bad news,” he said. “That’s what it is.”

  “You don’t know till you call,” Nick said.

  “How did she sound?”

  “She didn’t sound any way. All right. She sounded all right.”

  “I’m going to go call her.”

  “Don’t do that to me,” Nick said. “What if Louise walks in the house when you’re on the phone? I don’t want to be here if there’s going to be some fight. I just got done fighting with Laurie’s brother about how she’s black and I’m white.”

  “Then we’ll go back to the house, and you ask for some liquor we don’t have, and I’ll go get it. There’s a phone at the liquor store.”

  “Oh Christ. What if you get depressed and don’t come back? Then what?”

  “I’m not that out of control.”

  The horseshoe spun around the stake. “Proof,” John said.

  “Dumb luck,” Nick said. “I’m not even saying it’s going to be bad news, but if it is, you’d better come back.”

  They walked toward the horseshoe stake.

  “What liquor don’t you have?” Nick said.

  “We have just about everything. Ask for something weird.”

  They went back to the house. Louise was sitting on the rim of the pool, dangling her legs alongside Laurie’s. They were sipping drinks.

  “What have you got there?” Nick said.

  “Gin and tonic,” Laurie said.

  “You know what I’ve been wanting to try?” Nick said. “Have you seen those ads for that liqueur made from melons?”

  “I’ve never seen you drink anything but Scotch or beer,” Laurie said.

  “That sounds disgusting,” Louise said.

  “It’s green,” Nick said. “I can’t think of the name of the stuff.”

  “Go get yourself a bottle,” John said. “The liquor store is two minutes away.”

  “Nah,” Nick said.

  “Go ahead,” John said.

  “You come with me,” Nick said. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Are you serious?” Laurie said. “Melon liqueur?”

  “I’ll get it,” John said. “If they have it.”

  “He’d do anything for you,” Louise said. She sipped her drink. “Melon liqueur is a favor?” Laurie said.

  Louise shrugged. Nick sat beside them, kicked off his sandals.

  “Be right back,” John said. “Anybody want anything else?”

  They didn’t. He went into the house, picked up the car keys and his wallet, went out the front door and jumped in his car. At the liquor store, he bought a bottle of Midori, surprised at how expensive it was. Then he waited while an old man shouted into the phone about what the doctor had said was causing his high blood pressure. “I will too buy beer,” the old man said. “I call to give you good news, and you start nagging. I told you it was all heredity.” He had on a California Angels baseball cap, a white Lacoste shirt, madras bermudas and white knee socks. He wore red running shoes. He hung up and stood staring at the phone, fuming, his face nearly as red as the shoes, while John stood politely in back of him, waiting for him to move away. Finally he did. As John talked to the operator, the old man began to lift six-packs of beer out of the cooler and pile them on the counter.

  “I knew you’d call,” she said. “Hi. I came home.”

  He could tell that it wasn’t going to be bad. It wasn’t going to be something horrible. It was going to be all right.

  “We’re getting divorced,” he said.

  “You and me?” she said.

  “Never,” he said.

  “I came home.”

  “Don’t hang up,” he said.

  “Why would I hang up?”

  “Don’t say something I don’t want to hear.”

  “There’s nothing to say that you wouldn’t want to hear. I went to Stockbridge. I rode up that far with Spangle, and it would have been so easy to keep driving, to just keep going. We got stoned and smooched. That was all.”

  “Take it back,” he said.

  “Take what back?”

  “That you smooched.”

  “We did. In bed. In a motel in Stockbridge. With our clothes on. Maybe it was for old times’ sake. Maybe the other would have been, too.”

  “Don’t tell me any more,” he said.

  “There’s nothing more to tell.”

  “I’m red in the face because of heredity,” the old man shouted at the clerk behind the counter. “Give me some bags of those salted peanuts.”

  “Don’t hang up,” he said.

  “I won’t. I wanted to tell you something. I thought you might be amused. It’s not funny, really. It’s just so strange.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “You’re not going to say something I don’t want to hear?”

  “I can’t imagine that it would bother you. It’s just so strange. I guess the truth is that it bothers me, but I don’t understand it.” She was smoking grass. He could hear her drawing in, waiting. Nina, in the apartment on Columbus Avenue. He could really understand how someone would shoot because of love.

  “You remember your dream?” she said. “That depressing dream that didn’t make any sense? Well, I dreamed an answer to it in Stockbridge. The air conditioning was blowing on high and we couldn’t turn it down, and it was too hot without it and too cold with it, so we were huddled in bed together, but I was still freezing, and that night I had a dream that picked up where your dream left off.”

  She laughed. He was listening to Nina laugh on the phone. They would invite the landlady to the wedding. Mary had told him to be where he wanted to be, and he was going to take her at her word. The psychiatrist was in the business of fixing people up, and he could fix John Joel. Louise did not love him. She was paranoid about things that were not happening and she didn’t care about things that were. The night he had stood looking at the shooting star, she had said to him that she didn’t know everything, and she didn’t want to.

  Nina’s dream: She was on a trip—she didn’t know where. She got cold, and went into a store to buy a coat. She bought it—a long black coat with a collar she turned up against the wind. She had not been upset that she was in a strange country, but when she left the store she was suddenly confused: Everything looked strange, and people came by talking in an unfamiliar language. The coincidence of having a dream, she said, that overlapped his dream: It was like walking down a street, thinking of a song, and suddenly the person you pass starts to whistle it. She had dreamed this: That standing on the sidewalk outside the store she had reached into the pocket of the coat, and she had been surprised to discover that there were mittens inside.

  Twenty-four

  THE MAGICIAN’S name was George.

  When Bobby saw him sitting on the steps of Cynthia’s building, he figured it out immediately: the path of flowers to the car; the bunch of flowers near the steps. As fast as she grabbed his arm, frightened, he understood and began to smile.

  Harmless. It would figure that Bobby would think the magician was harmless. On the off-chance that he was harmless, she still did not want to stand and converse with him.

/>   “I have a crush on you,” the magician said.

  “I don’t even know this man’s name,” she said to Bobby.

  “George,” the magician said. “I have to go back to California. I wanted to talk to you one more time.”

  “We’re going out to eat,” she said.

  Wrong thing to have said.

  “Why don’t you come along?” Bobby said. He looked at Cynthia; he had just remembered that she was paying. Even Bobby was smart enough to figure out that this man wouldn’t be rolling in money.

  They both looked at her: the boy who had found a puppy, and the puppy that thought it had found a home.

  “I’ve had about all I can take,” she said.

  “This is such a New York thing,” Bobby said. “Let me see that water pistol. Where’d you get that?”

  “Hollywood,” the magician said. “The magic store I go to in Hollywood.”

  “A magic store? Really? Are you a magician?” Bobby didn’t wait for an answer. “How did you two meet?” he said to Cynthia.

  “In a laundromat,” she said. She wouldn’t look at the magician.

  “You were so nice to talk to,” the magician said. He said to Bobby, “She was so nice to talk to.”

  “Where do you want to eat?” Cynthia said to Bobby. She was walking fast. She could kill him. She could take one of his blue index cards and make it into an airplane with a sharply pointed nose and sail it into his eye. It was Spangle’s fault. Spangle’s friend. Spangle who had moved in with her years ago, when she didn’t really want him. And now he’d moved out, without even telling her, leaving her with a crazy friend—woods queer, she guessed—and a magician who followed her around and hounded her. At least he had said that he was going back to California.

  “I can’t believe it,” Bobby said, shaking his head. “You were courting her. That’s so wonderful. She is special.”

  “You’re her husband?” the magician said.

  “Can we leave my life out of it?” she said. She stared at the magician.

  Bobby said, “We just met.”

  “I’m not coming to New Hampshire with you,” she said. “Why don’t you see if George wants to come?”