Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Who was the guy?” she said.

  Anita laughed. “Larry.”

  “You looked unhappy getting out of the car.”

  Unhappy? Anita looked up, trying to gauge Kathy’s intent—if she had been offended or if she was simply probing for information. “I guess I’m just generally kind of unhappy.”

  “You’re seeing him, though.”

  It was asked like a rival sister might ask it, a challenge.

  “Yes.”

  Kathy smiled. “Is he Your Future?”

  “I don’t even know what I’m going to be eating for breakfast tomorrow, let alone who’ll be my future.”

  “Porridge,” Kathy said. “With almonds and dried apples.”

  * * *

  Usually she had trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places, but on the couch in Kathy’s sewing room, sleep found her quickly. It was as if the apartment had wrapped itself around her and was rocking her. She dreamed, for the first time, about the plane crash. It started out familiarly, more or less the way it really happened. She and Paul were in the yard, having a disagreement, though in the dream she couldn’t quite tell what it was about. Paul mumbled, she mumbled back. It was hot. When the plane came, its engines mingled with their argument, until the three sounds were indistinguishable from one another. The plane’s shadow appeared in the yard and grew steadily, like a storm cloud.

  Then she noticed Larry standing miserably in the shadow, like a cartoon character beneath a falling anvil.

  “It’s Larry!” she said.

  “Ah, don’t worry about it,” Paul said.

  The shadow moved toward the forest, and Larry began to jog, then to run, to keep under it. “I’ll catch it!” he called out to Anita. Then he was swallowed by the trees, and the plane’s shadow ballooned ridiculously over everything, bringing the yard into an ominous half-dusk. In a blur of sickly gray, the plane plunged into the ground, sending a smokeless silo of apocalyptic fire into the air. The dusk spread itself out over the forest, as far as the eye could see, and the treetops were bathed in firelight. She was cold when she woke, and the bright outdoors looked queer and false.

  “You look shell-shocked,” Kathy told her at the breakfast table. There was the porridge, steaming in twin bowls before them, with brown sugar and cream poured over it. “Did you sleep badly? Is the couch okay?”

  “Fine. It’s fine. I had a bad dream.”

  Kathy raised her eyebrows. She looked perfectly rested, serene and unwrinkled in her white nightgown. Her hair was frizzy from sleep and rose above her like a halo. She rustled the newspaper and took part of it out. “Here’s section C,” she said. “Classifieds.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Anita tasted the porridge. It was very good, and she said so. Kathy thanked her and went back to her section of newspaper. This manner of Kathy’s—a seemingly effortless nonchalance, even around a relative stranger—was incomprehensible to her, an inexplicable weirdness that made Kathy seem, at times, barely human. To Anita, the situation was basically wrong, an uncomfortable anomaly of which the best had to be made. To Kathy it seemed only like another fairly pleasant day, flavored with a few inconvenient quirks. Anita cleared her throat, though she had nothing to say. Kathy didn’t look up.

  She opened the paper to the apartment ads, spread it flat in front of her bowl, and began to read. At first the ads were impenetrable. Everything was in code. She felt out of her element, as if people who looked for apartments were people who were always looking for apartments and that she was an unwanted visitor to their peculiar country. But slowly the listings began to sink in. They weren’t what Anita wanted.

  SUNNY 1-br daylight basement. No smokers. No pets. 1313 Hood Way. $450/mo. Call Petra, 276-9915.

  SPACIOUS, CLEAN bsmt studio, cool in summer, garbage pd. No pets, smokers. $375 + $300 dep, call Dave with references, 276-3818.

  “Are they kidding?” she said.

  “What?”

  “These ads! Four-fifty for a basement? In Marshall? That’s insane!”

  Kathy laughed. “That’s how much it costs to live now.”

  She looked up. “What are you paying for this place?”

  “Five-fifty.”

  “That’s half your salary!”

  “It is,” Kathy said. “Heat included, though. Except they keep it at a brisk sixty-five all winter.”

  All the ads were like the first two, dismal and demanding. She borrowed a pen and began to circle the ones that didn’t seem too bad: downtown one-bedroom, no pets, $470; “huge studio” near the University, heat paid, $400. She’d never thought of rent as a major expense. She lived in a room of a large house in college and paid ninety dollars for the privilege, and since then she hadn’t had to pay a thing. Thanks to Paul.

  But she had money. She’d been saving since they came here, mostly in a joint account that they would have to settle (she would give him half, probably, though she thought that if she wanted to she could keep more), but some in her own account that Paul had never known about. She never had any real plans for it, but it had long been a comfort to her, and now she would probably need it—for her rent and deposit, for some new furniture. For a divorce lawyer. Would they need one? Would it be an amicable parting? She knew nothing about this, and now didn’t want to have to. This was not a new life she was starting, but a backtracking upon the old one. There was no such thing as a new one.

  She took a breath and circled another apartment: spacious room in family dwelling, private bath, $300, call Denise.

  “How do you know my salary?”

  Anita looked up. “What?”

  Kathy wore an expression of amicable distrust. “You said my rent was half my salary. How do you know my salary?”

  Anita shrugged. “I just do. It’s a teller’s salary. I used to be a teller.”

  Kathy seemed to accept this and looked down at the paper, open to the comics. But it dawned on Anita why she really knew: she looked up people’s accounts on the computer sometimes, just to see what they deposited each month. She felt caught in the act. Embarrassed, she folded back the classifieds and stood up.

  “Beetle Bailey’s getting beaten up again,” Kathy said. “A shame.”

  “Can I use the phone?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Anita went to the telephone and started dialing.

  * * *

  Five possibilities today. She dropped off Kathy at the bank, then borrowed her car and filled it with gas. She bought a giant paper cup of coffee from the gas station.

  Her first appointment was the downtown one-bedroom. It was in a large brick building, the landlady had told her, “right across from the detached facility.” This turned out to be a lobbyless drive-up bank, the one all the tellers at her bank used to work at and hated, where a long row of idling cars was lined up for their transactions. It was the primary view from the apartment building, which, though brick, still managed to look like an abandoned warehouse. The windows were little arrow-slits and the door was made of steel and painted green.

  The landlady was waiting for her on the stoop. “I’ve been waiting,” she said.

  “I’m on time,” Anita told her, and the woman frowned. She had an aggressively combed head of puffy silver hair that stopped just above the shoulders. Anita watched it sway as she followed her through a dark hallway that smelled like cat urine.

  “Current tenant’s still here,” the landlady told her, knocking on the door. Nobody answered, and they went in.

  The floor was covered with clothes and dirty dishes, and the curtains were drawn. There was an overwhelming odor of a human body, and the smell of cigarette smoke. Anita remembered that smokers were not allowed, but the landlady seemed not to notice. She stood in the center of the room and pointed. “Bathroom, closet, bedroom, kitchenette, closet.”

  “I don’t think it’s for me,” Anita told her.

  “Garbage and water’s paid. Not heat and lights.”

  “Really, I don’t think I’m going to tak
e it.”

  The landlady’s hands fell to her hips. “Do you know what kind of schedule I have here? Do you understand that my time is valuable?”

  “Well, I…”

  “You can see yourself out, lady.”

  Anita drove to the place “near U.” and found it was actually nice—wood floors, which she liked, and lace curtains that had been left by a previous tenant—but it was small and there was a fraternity next door. A window opened onto a window of the fraternity, and through it Anita could see a Ping-Pong table and a brightly glowing Coke machine. The guy from the rental agency was thin and had round glasses and a sunken chest. He adjusted his necktie incessantly. “Do those guys have a lot of parties?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Really?” Through the window, she could see a cluster of crushed beer cans lying under a bush.

  “Not at night, anyway.”

  Outside, in the yard, Anita said, “Well, I’m a little concerned about noise. I know students can get pretty rowdy.”

  Beyond the fraternity house rose the clock tower of the University’s Main Hall. “This isn’t a real student-y neighborhood,” he told her.

  They were all like this. People lied baldly to her and snapped at her questions with gleeful rudeness. Roofs sagged, faucets wheezed moist air; walls were dark with spray-painted graffiti and carpets were torn into long, curling strips. One place she actually liked was above a veterinarian’s house; the veterinarian confessed that there had been a suicide in the apartment weeks before, and responded to her horror with an extemporaneous lecture on euthanizing animals.

  This went on for several days. In the evenings she cried and in the mornings she read the newspaper. By Thursday she was considering leaving town.

  “I’m going to call Larry,” she told Kathy.

  “You shouldn’t. Not until you have a place.”

  “I miss him.”

  “You miss the idea of him. You’re really calling because you’re desperate and you want him to talk you into moving into his place.” She threw up her hands. “You’re not bothering me. You can stay as long as you want, unless it’s like a month.”

  But she broke down and did it. She called his house and got the answering machine, then hung up just after it beeped. After that she went to “her” room and tried to ignore the apartment’s lushness, which at this point had come to seem aggressive and burdensome to her, like an impossibly heavy coat. She thought about him, about his smell, which she had thought was as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror, but which she had, to her surprise, completely forgotten. She could only remember Paul’s. She had always liked the smell of Paul’s sweat, which had a sweetness to it, even when it was the lazy sweat that came from not moving in the summer; she liked his hair, which smelled like toast and pine trees. She remembered loving him, and for the moment anyway was not sure she didn’t still.

  Now she got up and went to the phone again, intending, she tried to conceal from herself, to call her own number, Paul’s number. Just to see how he was. She stopped in front of the phone and shoved her hands into her pockets. Kathy looked up from the table.

  “What now?”

  “Nothing.”

  She closed the book she was reading and came to stand between Anita and the phone. “Which one are you thinking of calling?”

  “Neither. Both. I don’t know.”

  And then it rang, startling them both. Kathy picked it up. “Just a minute,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece with her palm.

  “Who is it?”

  “Larry. I think.”

  They stared at one another, and Anita stuck out her hand. Kathy put the phone into it. She held it for a second, then handed it back. Kathy lifted it to her lips and said, “I don’t think she can talk right now.” She nodded. “All right. I will.” She hung up.

  “You will what.”

  “Tell her I miss her.”

  At that moment, there wasn’t a person in the world she wanted to talk to or see. “Whatever,” she said, and went to bed.

  She lay there awake, thinking that she should have taken the veterinarian’s apartment while she had the chance. She was beginning to feel the understanding of home slipping away from her—by leaving the place she’d been all her life, leaving the house she’d lived in for years afterward, she was losing her innocence by degrees. She wondered if someday she would forget how to live in one place, how to know its quirks so well that they ceased to be quirks, that they appeared as important to its existence as its streets or walls or people. Now, Marshall seemed static to her: people came and went, buildings were built and destroyed, but those things were simply the endless trade of interchangeable parts and had nothing to do with a place’s identity. When you went there, you simply sunk into the changeless whole.

  In the morning, she fussed over the newspaper and gulped the tea that Kathy had made her. Everything was an irritation: the tablecloth, the hot tea, even the paper itself, left neatly folded for her on the table when she stumped out of the sewing room. She found herself reading every ad twice, three times, and when she finally gave up and put the paper aside she found Kathy staring at her over the centerpiece, a spray of dried flowers stuck into a teapot.

  “Do you like your job?” Kathy said.

  “My job?” It felt like a picked-up strand of a conversation they’d left off some time before, one Anita didn’t remember.

  “Yes. You’re the loan officer at the bank?” They both laughed at this, but Kathy stopped first. “So do you like it?” she asked.

  “Sure, usually.”

  “Would you say most people are like you? They like their jobs?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess they do.”

  Kathy leaned toward her. “Anita,” she said, “people hate their jobs. I hate my job. You’ve been in the teller line, haven’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you don’t notice? The tellers hate each other. At First Marshall, all the tellers hate me and they hate being tellers.” She noiselessly sipped her tea. “I might be exaggerating a little, but really—it’s boring, thankless, bad on the feet.”

  This surprised Anita—she had enjoyed being a teller—but she didn’t understand why Kathy was telling her this. It must have registered on her face, because Kathy said, “What I’m saying is, I have a life. Most people have lives that don’t have anything to do with their jobs. You probably don’t think your loan officer life is really separate from the rest of your life. It’s all one big life, right?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “I have this nice place, and this is where I live my real life. I like to make stuff, and if I have a lover he comes here and never to the bank. It’s a good life, and I’m very happy with it.”

  She has lovers? Anita thought. But of course she must have. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you have a little contempt for me, and you shouldn’t.” She held a hand out. “Don’t start denying it, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just that you can’t go around thinking like that. You’ll end up hating yourself for getting into a relationship that didn’t work, and you won’t be able to enjoy trying again.” She paused, her eyes bright. “I want us to understand each other, if we’re going to be friends.”

  In the silence afterward, Anita thought she heard, somewhere outside, a child screaming, and before the sound had died out, before she could replay it in memory, she was lifted and thrown back down by a tide of loneliness so strong that her chair groaned and she slumped in it like a dummy. “Oh!” she said quietly, and Kathy’s hand, still extended toward her across the table, took her own and held it. “What have I gone and done?” she must have said, because Kathy told her, “You did the right thing.” All she could do was believe this, so she did, digging her fingers into it like it was the last clod of dirt sticking to the cliff-edge that had fallen away beneath her.

  “Are you all right?” Kathy finally asked her.

  “I guess.”

/>   “Okay, then.” Kathy pulled her hand away and folded it into the other, leaving Anita to grab hold of the chair’s arms to keep from slipping farther. She felt like a child. “Time to pull yourself together.”

  * * *

  And then, as if by decree, an apartment fell into her lap. The newspaper had turned up nothing, and she spent that morning driving around, looking for For Rent signs on doors and lawns. She found several, but the owners were never home; she peeked in through windows at dingy houses full of worthless crap, and decided that there were no apartments in Marshall she could live in, that she belonged in Paul’s house, with Paul, no matter what he would and would not provide her, that she should move back in with her parents, that she should sleep on the street, quit her job, buy a rifle and a cabin in the woods and kill and eat things. Her joy at the passing of each minute was cruelly and endlessly obliterated by the arrival of the next.

  Then, driving too fast down Ninth, she saw a black blur jump out at her from the left. She slammed on the brakes and squeezed her eyes shut, and when she opened them it was gone: under the wheels? Dead in the gutter? Was it a dog, a cat? The car had stalled. She took the keys out of the ignition and sat a moment, breathing, and her breath appeared dimly on the cool of the windshield. She opened the door and crouched at the side of the car, looking under the tires. Nothing there. The gutter, empty. There were several other cars, parked along the sidewalk, and looking under them turned up nothing. She got back in, restarted the car and pulled over.

  To her left was a brick building, tall for Marshall—three stories—surrounded by shrubs. Directly in front stood a small cardboard sign attached to a thin wooden post, and next to it a wide yard, where a middle-aged man was cutting the grass with an old-fashioned push mower. It looked like strenuous work. He was putting all of his weight into it, and was working in a T-shirt. A blue ski parka lay in the already-cut lawn nearby.

  She stepped out and walked across the lawn to the man. He was lean, slightly stooped, his face a rictus of exertion. He wore glasses that made his face a little foggy around the nose. When she approached he looked up.