Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  He was standing with his back to the bed, looking out the window. A week ago, looking out the same window—but early in the morning, not late at night—he had seen a robin teaching her six babies to fly. He had taken one of the shells, an indescribable blue, to New York, to Nina.

  He knew that Louise was awake, although she was in bed with her eyes closed, and he knew she did not care that he was standing at the window. Or if she did care, it was because it was an opportunity for sarcasm. So many husbands had stood at windows while their wives lay in bed. So many wives had done the same thing. So many people got married and had children and survived it.

  Risky to have mentioned the apartment in New York again. What if she took him up on it?

  “What did you want?” he said. “Be straight with me. Was it some special kind of food you wanted, or did you just not want to be on the picnic?”

  “I love how you care deeply about things late at night.”

  “Maybe the problem is manners,” he said. “Your manners are about as nice as your son and daughter’s.”

  “Sons plural. I have two sons.”

  “You have two sons. You’d like to have three. You’d like to have me be a child, too, so you could be even more rude to me.”

  “I have quite enough children, thank you.”

  “You’re so clever,” he said. “You really do have a snappy come-back for everything these days.”

  “Not everything,” she said. “I don’t know everything.” She turned over in bed. “I don’t want to, either. Why don’t you stop brooding and go to sleep?”

  “You should really see this,” he said. “There are so many shooting stars tonight.”

  “Are you sure it’s not pieces of Skylab falling?”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” he said. “I’m not sure of anything, and I’m tired of your cleverness. You’re not going to quit, are you?”

  She quit. She didn’t say another word, and eventually she fell asleep.

  Four

  “YOU WANT me to always talk to you and tell you what’s the matter, right? So I’m going to talk to you: I’m getting tired of hearing about your weekends with your family.”

  John was standing at the window, looking down on Columbus Avenue. There was a sidewalk café at the end of the block. People were roped in like cattle. Unlike cattle, they had umbrellas over their heads. Water to drink. San Pellegrino, no less. They weren’t going to be stunned by being struck on the head and then hoisted and cut and bled. Maybe one of them was; one, encountering some perverted mugger on the way back to his apartment, might later be found hanging by a meat hook in a deserted warehouse, but the chances were against it. The chances were really against it. That you had a good chance never to end up snagged on a meat hook in a deserted warehouse made going into New York five days a week plausible. Nina, the woman he was in love with, helped too. He knew that he should not talk to her so much about his family, but after the weekend he was always depressed, and she was the person closest to him.

  She was washing her hair in the kitchen sink. He had started to leave clothes at her apartment, and she had started to wear them. At the moment, she was wearing his jockey shorts and nothing else, cupping her hand and pouring water through her hair. With her hair still wet, they would go out to dinner. At ten o’clock Horton Watson was coming to Nina’s apartment. He would stay around for the visit, to make sure she was all right when Horton left—to make sure that Horton did leave—then take a cab to the garage off Third Avenue to get his car and drive back to Rye. Instead of taking the train, he had driven into the city. Once or twice a week he liked to do that: to drive in fast, taking risks, so that some of his hostility was gone before he got to the office. On the days when he did not drive in, he usually went to a health club around the corner from where he worked and played handball during his lunch hour.

  “It’s hard to picture you at a family barbecue,” she said, straightening up and wrapping a towel around her hair. “Do you use one of those three-pronged forks to turn the hot dogs over? One of those devil’s forks? You like to think of yourself as a devil—so bad for having a mistress. Do you have those barbecues to make yourself suffer for your sins?”

  “I loved having barbecues when I was a kid,” he said. “The barbecues aren’t the only thing I feel bad about.”

  “Did you know that eating one charcoal-broiled steak puts as many carcinogens in your body as smoking thirty packs of cigarettes?” she said.

  He was looking at the broken half of the robin’s egg he had brought her from his backyard, holding it as carefully as he had ever held anything in his life. He put it back in the small saucer she kept it in.

  “We didn’t even have steaks. We had hot dogs.”

  “Well,” she said, hugging him from behind. “That’s something to feel very guilty about.”

  She rubbed her hair so that it wasn’t dripping wet and went into the bathroom to hang up the towel. She opened a little jar of cream perfume and dipped into it with her index finger. She patted the finger across her forehead. She smoothed her hair back and went into the living room, where her dress was draped over the back of a chair.

  He watched her pull the dress over her head and tug at it, and step into sandals. The dress was cotton, like a long T-shirt. It was black, and went to her knees, and she looked perfectly beautiful in it. She was ten years older than his daughter. He could slam balls into a wall for a million years, and it would never get rid of his frustration that he had married the wrong person and had the wrong children. His friend at work, Nick, said that the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.

  “You haven’t told me if anybody funny came into the store today.”

  She laughed. “Those people. They feel like they have to explain everything. Everybody who comes into that place is so defensive, as though everything they do is being watched and I’m going to judge them. One woman came in with twin daughters, about eight years old. She had a bag from Olof Daughters she put up on the counter; and she started apologizing for wanting something she knew we didn’t have—cotton knee socks; we didn’t have them—and then she started telling me that her daughters were going to Sweden to visit their father, and telling them, while I stood there, that it wasn’t going to be such a long flight. She stood in the aisle at Lord and Taylor’s for five minutes, apologizing for sending them to Sweden.”

  “That’s okay, but it’s not very funny.”

  “It wasn’t a very good day.”

  “Hungry?”

  “I guess I’d better be. We’ve got to be back here by ten.”

  She got her big purple canvas bag from the bathroom doorknob and they went out.

  “You know what else I’ve been feeling guilty about? That my daughter’s in summer school reading a pile of books I’ve never read myself. I bought Vanity Fair at the bookstore next to my office today. I’m going to start reading it tomorrow, when I take the train in.”

  A man in a white chef’s hat mashed down low on his head passed them, carrying a radio that was blaring Linda Ronstadt singing “Blue Bayou.” Linda Ronstadt was way ahead of him; the man just kept chanting “I’m goin’ back some day” over and over. Hardly anyone on the street looked at him.

  “I saw Carly Simon crossing Fifth Avenue today,” she said. “She had one of her kids by the hand. She was pretty.”

  “Did she stop to say hello to you?”

  “She had so much hair. I look bald by comparison. I don’t think I know one famous person. I have a friend who knows Linda Ronstadt, and my aunt went to school with Joan Kennedy. A girl who lives in my building once went to a beach party and jumped on a trampoline with David Nelson.”

  “David Nelson?”

  “I thought you were older than I am. Ozzie and Harriet,” Nina said, stepping off the curb. “That’s who you think you should be, probably—Ozzie. ‘Harriet, hon, defrost those four steaks, and I’ll flip them on the grill when I’ve finished reading Vanity Fair.�
� ”

  “What am I supposed to do, read some Watergate criminal’s book?”

  “I know somebody who knows Ehrlichman.”

  They went into the restaurant, and he asked for a table in the garden. There was a barrel by their table with a rose tree growing out of it. There was one large, perfect pink rose on the tree. Above them was a fire escape, with pots of geraniums pushed to the far side of the steps.

  “Are you ever going to come live with me?” she said.

  The waitress came to the table and put down two menus. “Excuse me,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that we have no bluefish, and no soft-shell crabs.”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding.

  “Okay?” Nina repeated, stretching across the table to clasp his hand. “When?”

  He smiled at her and shook his head. “August, I guess. At the end of summer.”

  “I hate it that it has to be at the end of summer. That it has to be when something’s over, I mean. We’ll both be thinking more about what’s over than what’s beginning.”

  “I think it’s already begun,” he said, squeezing her legs between his under the table.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I’m talking about how I feel.”

  “I can’t erase my life,” he said. He picked up the menu. “I’m so used to complaints that I think everybody’s complaining,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know what you were saying.”

  “I wanted bluefish,” she said. “On top of everything else, I was thinking about baked bluefish all afternoon.”

  He was thinking that his wife was going to get custody of Brandt. Although he didn’t love his mother, he felt sorry that she would be losing the one thing she had formed an attachment to besides Ming vases.

  There was a child wandering around the restaurant who was younger than his son, but who looked like him. He had come by once before, and shyly made eyes at Nina. She had lifted her napkin from her lap and shaken it out and put it over her eyes, slowly lowering it as she winked at the child and raised it again. He must have been two years old, wearing blue corduroy shorts and a shirt with a worm coming out of an apple on the front.

  The waitress came back to the table, and they both ordered salmon. He had tried to get John Joel to taste different kinds of fish because fish had fewer calories than meat, but his son couldn’t stand the sight or smell of fish. John Joel was still fat and carnivorous; it was obvious that he was sneaking food because he was still just as overweight, even though Louise had put him on a diet. He had a double chin that John often felt like taking hold of to shake some sense into him. John Joel never looked good in the summer: He got blotchy pink, but didn’t tan, and the shorts and shirts he wore made his body look worse than his winter clothes did. Up in his tree, resting on the limb, he reminded John of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

  “I’m sorry I’m grumpy,” she said. “I’ve been in a bad mood all day.”

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I didn’t have a very good weekend either. I got a letter from an old boyfriend who’s over in Europe, and all he talked about was how he’d blown all his money. I’m not very sympathetic to people who have a lot of money to piss away. I was thinking about you out on your three acres of land, and I was feeling very cooped up in that tiny apartment. How can you like that apartment so much? Just because it’s so different from what you have?”

  “It is small. One of the pillars at the end of my driveway is as wide as your bedroom.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Yes. There aren’t any pillars at the end of the driveway.”

  A man was standing beside Nina’s chair. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but your little boy wandered into the kitchen, and we’ll have to ask you to keep him at the table. He could get hurt in the kitchen.”

  “What?” Nina said.

  “He isn’t our child,” John said.

  The maître d’ looked puzzled. He turned and looked at a couple sitting at a table in the opposite corner. John looked, too. The woman was talking drunkenly, and the man was paying no attention to her; he was laughing silently and pointing at the maître d’ in a parody of the way someone would ridicule another person.

  “Very amusing,” the maître d’ said, without apologizing to John. He went to the corner table and began to argue with the man, who now also looked drunk. The little boy stood with his back to the kitchen door, staring at them. The next person who came through the door was going to trip over him. John sighed and didn’t watch. He broke off another piece of salmon and put it in his mouth.

  “God,” Nina said. “Those people must be crazy. Look at the poor little boy—he’s not even going up to his parents’ table.”

  “I hope you don’t want kids,” he said. “I’m a rotten father.”

  “I don’t think you’d be a rotten father.”

  “As I said: I hope you don’t want kids.”

  “I’m not the only one in a bad mood,” Nina said. She ate a leaf of lettuce with her fingers. “I wish I could see your house,” she said. “I’d like to see the pillars that don’t exist at the end of the driveway.”

  “The driveway isn’t even paved. It’s gravel.”

  “Ah,” Nina said. “You also want me to feel sorry for you. Next you’ll give me the line my mother always gives me: that there are great jobs for college graduates, if only they will go out and find them. You know what my mother’s done her whole life? Played bridge and gone to the track in the summer.”

  “How come you were an only child?” he said.

  “My father says it’s because my shoes were so expensive. He was shocked. They had to be Stride-Rites, with a quarter-inch built-up arch. I was flat-footed.” She took a drink of wine. “My mother says it’s because my father said my shoes were too expensive.”

  One of the two men who had just been seated at a table adjacent to theirs was looking appreciatively at Nina. He didn’t stop until John caught his eye. The man had long hair and a T-shirt that said “Chicken Little Was Right”; the man sitting with him had on a business suit and a black band tied high on his arm. The fedora on the table belonged to one of them. When John stopped looking, the little boy was walking toward their table, eyeing the hat that rested slightly over the edge.

  “My youngest son has the measles,” he said. “Have you had the measles?”

  “This is very romantic talk,” she said, running her foot up his leg.

  “Have you?”

  “Measles,” she said. “Yes. I have had measles.”

  She really was not in a very good mood. Ordering a bottle of wine instead of a glass had been her idea. If she continued to drink the wine as quickly as she had been, there was no doubt that they would make it back to her apartment with time to spare before Horton Watson got there.

  Nina had first introduced Horton to John as “a ghost from the past.” “Are you saying I’m a spook?” Horton had asked. It was very odd, Horton’s smile. He had false teeth, and they were shiny white and perfectly even. Horton smiled a lot. If what people were saying to him didn’t make him smile, he told a joke or just muttered to himself. Horton would only go a few minutes without smiling.

  They left the restaurant and walked back to Columbus Avenue. Horton was already there, on the front step, white hat pulled low over his eyes, looking—except that he was tall and thin—like a Mexican taking a siesta. A white puff went up from below his hat. Horton was smoking a cigarette.

  “There I was on Park Avenue,” Horton said, pushing back the brim of his hat. “Martini cocktail. Nice shiny Steinway piano I could play. Not that the lady would have liked any song I might have selected to play, but I could have gone ahead and played it anyway while she, you know, pretended to really rock to it. No, I said to myself: Horton, a man has got to honor his commitments. Turns out I was a little early—might have banged out a tune or two before I left. ‘Course, she was itchy for me to leave. Bad enough her husband knows she smokes. Man doesn’t want to come home and see so
me spook banging out songs on his piano. Business is business, of course, but no reason for the man to see the business. All he’s got to see is a neat little box left behind, joints all in a row.” They went into the building, and the landlady opened her door and looked at them. Horton grabbed Nina on the stairs, laughing.

  “With high-paying business deals like this one, who needs enemies?” Horton said, as Nina put the key in the door and opened it. “Nice lady has no habit at all, doesn’t even drink martini cocktails. But you’ve got to do a thing just for old times’ sake. Plus which I have to pass down this street on the way to my dear old mother’s anyway. Got to visit her at her bedside. ‘Oh, Mother, what big eyes you have!’ and Mama’s gonna say, ‘I’m stoned.’ ” Horton gulped down a glass of water. “Humid night,” he said. “What I have is Cuernavaca grown, and quite tasty. Seventy an ounce.” Horton smiled. “Moving on up the line to beautiful Annandale-on-Hudson, for a weekend in the country. I’ve got a bicycle chained to a tree there. Guess I’ll do a little business and take a spin on my bicycle. I was such a misfit when I was a boy that I had training wheels on my bicycle for a full year. Took me to become a pothead and then give it up to have my brain get stable enough to have the balance I have today. When I was a child I had no power of balance. Don’t things come upon you as you get old, though. This morning I was looking in the mirror and I saw a little cluster of white, up by the temple. Have to get my hair bleached and dyed lavender like some faggot, so I don’t get bothered by noticing that.”

  He took a small bag of grass out of the back pocket of his pants and went into her bedroom and put it in a suitcase she kept pushed under her bed.

  “Believe I might move on down the line,” he said, smiling.

  “Can I fix you a sandwich? There’s vodka, if you’ll drink anything besides martinis.”

  “I believe not. I think I’ll just take my new-found riches and hide them away, so if some leprechaun is walking down Columbus Av, there’s not going to be any temptation—I mean, so’s the leprechaun’s not attracted to my green stuff. Bad enough the riffraff you’ve got to fight off these days.” He smiled at Nina. “Seventy even,” he said.