Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

He nudged her. “Don’t hurt his feelings,” he said.

  The magician was staring at the sidewalk.

  “I did a magic trick with my class the first day of the semester,” Bobby said. “You know that old trick of folding a piece of paper into eight squares so that four of the pieces have two smooth edges? I had the students write down four writers they wanted to study, and I wrote down four writers I wanted to teach, and then I borrowed a scarf from one of my students—beautiful girl—and let her shuffle the pieces of paper on my desk. Then I picked four: three of them mine, one of them theirs. We read Proust, Mann, Flaubert and Richard Brautigan.”

  “They like Brautigan, huh?” the magician said. “I like him too. I have all his books.”

  “They didn’t put down Brautigan—I did. Flaubert was one of their choices.”

  “I love it,” the magician said.

  “She was kidding,” Bobby said. “I’m heterosexual. Not that I wouldn’t be happy to entertain you in New Hampshire.”

  “What did I say?” Cynthia said. “Only that he should go to New Hampshire. You think everything is sexual.”

  “Only in the summer, or when I’m teaching.”

  “I’d like to see New Hampshire,” the magician said.

  “The real place to see is Vermont. I used to live with her”—he hesitated—“friend in Vermont. Some Indian’s living there now, raising corn. That’s all right, I guess, but the house looked shabby. We did a lot of work on the house. There always was a problem with porcupines living underneath it, though. You’d hear them running and scratching all night. Find quills in the yard. A friend’s dog that was visiting attacked one of them and got a snout full of quills. Had to take it to the vet. I said, ‘I was trying acupuncture.’ Vet took me seriously. What a good time we used to have. Vermont was really the scene in those days. Still is, I guess. New Hampshire’s beautiful in its own way.”

  They went to Mamoun’s, and sat at a table in the middle of the room.

  “You know Blake’s poem about the lamb?” Bobby said, reading the menu. “Great poem. I can’t believe that pretty soon I’ll be standing in front of a classroom, smelling chalk. I’m very anxious to see if a certain young lady enrolls in my class again this fall, though.” He took Cynthia’s hand. “She can’t compare,” he said. “Idle interest.”

  “What will you be doing in the fall?” the magician asked.

  “I’m a graduate student,” she said. She stared at the menu. She felt young and stupid, like a teenager dragged along by her parents to meet some friend’s very nice son. Bobby could not possibly have thought that she would want to have dinner with some West Coast crazy who had been bothering her all summer.

  “I hate New Haven,” the magician said. “I’m just staying at my mother’s place for a while. I didn’t grow up here, though. She moved here from Providence when my father died. Not much of a city, that I can tell.” He smiled at Cynthia. “Remember?” he said. “You asked me if I could change the color of your clothes.”

  She said to Bobby: “I had put a red shirt in with the wash by mistake. That’s what he means.”

  “The laundromats in California are nice,” the magician said. “California is nicer than the East.”

  “What exactly do you do out there?” Bobby said. “Magic tricks? How does that work?”

  “Oh,” the magician said, “I’ve got a rep out there. I do parties sometimes. Private parties. I do quite a few parties for a guy who lives out in Ojai.”

  “How long have you been doing it?” Bobby said.

  “Since I got out of college. During college, a little. I met a guy at the Santa Monica pier who got me interested in it. We used to set up on the pier and do some tricks. Now people are afraid to come around, because they think you’re going to ask for money. Or they’re too busy roller-skating.”

  “So you do private parties,” Bobby said.

  “Yeah. One of my best tricks is with a brown paper bag—the kind you get groceries in. I show them the bag inside and out, and I put it over my head, and when one of them lifts it off, my nose is a penis. Of course you can see that it’s a store-bought rubber penis. But they don’t know where it came from.”

  “Would you like to order?” the waitress said.

  They ordered. Cynthia looked around the restaurant. Two women, each reading her own paperback copy of Going Too Far, waiting for their food. A man at a table, alone. At the front of the restaurant, where they had come in, was a counter, and a man behind it, cooking. There were giant jars of honey on the counter. In the pastry case was halvah, baklava, some kind of pudding.

  “Rickie Lee Jones is invited to this wrap party in Ojai I’m going back to do,” the magician said. “I think I saw her a couple of years ago, before she was famous, playing the piano in the lobby of the Marmont. I was there to do a party in one of the suites. I had a tube with insects in it inside my jacket, and it fell out as I was walking past the desk, and all these flies and moths flew up, right in front of the man behind the desk, and started swirling around. Sometimes really embarrassing things happen. There’s a trick called ‘The Telephone Wizard.’ You have a friend ready on the phone, and you spread out a deck of cards… ”

  She stopped listening. This was absolutely ridiculous. Bobby was completely involved with the magician, nodding, fiddling excitedly with his hair, twisting the strands into tighter curls. As she was looking around the restaurant, one of her former professors came in and stood at the counter.

  “… so I dialed the number and asked for the Wizard. I had no idea I’d gotten a wrong number. It sounded like my friend Bill. Well—sort of. I thought he’d been drinking. I had had trouble talking him into staying home until ten o’clock that night, because his friend Griffin was in town, and they wanted to go down to the Troubadour. But here’s the far-out thing: Whoever answered the phone knew the trick! It’s not that common a trick. He started counting: ‘Ace, two, three… ’ and—” He stopped talking, said to Cynthia, “Do you know this trick?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I didn’t think so. I didn’t want to bore you. I could just get to the punch line if you knew it.” The magician wiped his forehead on a napkin. He went on. “So the card she had put her penny on was the three of hearts. The guy on the other end is counting, and when he gets to three I break in and ask if I’m talking to the Wizard. Now, unbeknownst to me, all the time this is happening, Jack, whose house this is, is trying to get his phone to work so everybody can hear. He has those awful speakers that broadcast what the person you’re talking to is saying. I really think those things are offensive. Answering machines are bad enough. Anyway. That was the cue, you see. He knew the card was a three of something. So he started counting again. ‘Clubs, hearts—’ Then I interrupted, her card being the three of hearts, and gave her the telephone. She dated Robert Evans for a while, before he married Ali MacGraw. I don’t know what happened to her. Anyway, she took the phone from me, and I was expecting Bill to say, Three of hearts’ and hang up and go to the Troubadour, but it wasn’t Bill at all. It was some nut. Suddenly he starts talking to her about eating her snatch, and then the goddamn speakers started to work, and she was standing there while he was talking about eating her out. I couldn’t understand what Bill was doing. I mean, at this point, I realized it wasn’t Bill, but I couldn’t believe that I’d dial a wrong number and somebody would not only know the trick, but he’d go along with it! He even told her her card was the three of hearts, then went right on talking about eating her out.”

  The waitress, lowering a plate in front of Bobby, caught Cynthia’s eye. She looked curious. Cynthia looked at her lap.

  “That’s one for Brautigan,” the magician said. He looked at Cynthia. “Excuse me,” he said. He spread his napkin over his lap. “I’m not like that,” he said. “I was shocked when it happened.” He bit into his sandwich. “It lost me business, too.”

  “You said you’re staying here with your mother?” Bobby said. “What does your mother think
about your being a magician? Doesn’t seem like a thing many mothers would approve of. What do you think?”

  “She doesn’t,” the magician said. “She’d like it if I’d put my rabbits in their cage out on the fire escape and let them sweat to death. She’s not even sympathetic to the rabbits.”

  “You know, I’m a college professor,” Bobby said. “You can’t get more respectable than that. My mother would like it better if I was a priest. She thinks I should be a priest or a psychiatrist, because I have such insight into people.”

  “People love to think that things can be easy,” the magician said. “My mother likes to think the rabbits can just live on air. She was upset when she saw me chopping their dinner. Bad enough I had to disillusion her about rabbits popping out of top hats. She didn’t want to see me feeding them.”

  She sighed. She felt as if she had been pushed onstage during a comedy routine. What was making everything seem even more unreal was that she could not get the real tragedy out of her mind: Only a little while ago Mary Knapp had gotten shot. Their lives must be chaos now. She was sorry for Mary; and, knowing how exasperating Mary could be, she had some sympathy for her brother, who had probably shot her out of the same frustration that had made her want to scream when Mary shrugged and didn’t care about something for the umpteenth time. She drank her tea. The magician was explaining a card trick to Bobby, and Bobby was taking notes on a blue index card.

  She had met Spangle by chance. Stayed with him by chance. Not entirely. Not entirely true. She had not been cynical enough. One moment, for her, that seemed genuinely magical, had outweighed so much that was tiresome, pointless—even the things that were mean about him. He had not been kidding when he held her hand and said that he wanted to think that it would be that easy to keep her. He was all around her, like the tiny foam-rubber rabbits that had burst out of the larger rabbit the magician had pressed into her hand. Spangle was always springing up when she didn’t expect him. Jumping out of the closet at her. But also dodging work to be sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, without telling her he was going to do it, to hold her hand for a minute before she went in and faced a root canal. What she had done for him, in return, was to say that there was no fireball when there was.

  As they walked out of the restaurant, the magician was griping about too many demands being made on him. “It freaks me out when people think I can cure disease,” he said. “I really clam up when I’m asked anything about that. A friend of mine—the friend from the Santa Monica pier—got in big trouble when he said offhandedly that a woman who was having trouble with her night vision ought to take some Vitamin A. She dosed herself with the stuff until she was as orange as a carrot, and dropped dead. She was married to a lawyer.” He shook his head. “It’s a rotten world,” he said. “No wonder people want answers. No wonder they want to have parties and get distracted. Sometimes something nice happens, though. Like getting to spend time with you guys.” He turned to Cynthia, who had been trying to walk a little ahead of them. “Even if it happened at the last minute, I made two friends. I know we’re going to see each other again. Tell me if I’m not right,” he said. “If I sent you a white orchid in December, with no card, wouldn’t you know it was from me?”

  “You don’t do voodoo, do you?” Bobby said. “That was something a poet would say: voodoo/do you. No, wait: It’s a Frank Sinatra song. I almost pirated a Frank Sinatra song.” Bobby shook his head. “Can I see those binoculars?”

  “No voodoo,” the magician said. “I don’t fool with anything messy.” He took his binoculars from around his neck and handed them to Bobby. Bobby trained them on a bird in a tree.

  “I’ve got to get binoculars,” Bobby said. “Why didn’t I think of that? I’m going to buy the most powerful binoculars I can find.” Bobby handed them to her. “This is so amazing,” he said. “Look through these. Look at the way everything jumps at you.”

  “Here’s my card,” the magician was saying, talking to Bobby as she stood still on the sidewalk, looking through the binoculars. “I know that we’ll meet again,” the magician said.

  “Let me walk you home,” Bobby said to the magician. “Do you ever cast spells, make ladies fall in love with men?”

  “Keep the binoculars,” the magician said to Cynthia. “Please.” He put his hand on top of hers, and then he and Bobby began to walk away. She watched until they turned the corner.

  The next time she raised the binoculars, she saw Spangle, sitting on the front step of the building, eating an ice-cream cone. She stared, pressing the binoculars hard against her eyes. Finally he looked her way, stood up. He saw her. He was smiling. She could see that, as he ran, getting larger and larger, until he was right on her, a blur.

  “Save me,” she said, half-jokingly, falling against him without ever lowering the binoculars.

  “I was locked out,” he said. “Jonathan and I were broke one night in Madrid, and he made a wish by throwing the key into a fountain.”

  “What did he wish for?” she said, head buried in his shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” Spangle said. “The usual, I guess.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ann Beattie lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.