Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  He sat down and rolled up his pants leg and pushed down the sock. Underneath the sock was an ankle strap that had a small zipper in it. Horton rolled the four bills she had given him into tight tubes and flattened them with his thumb. He put them in the band, pulled up his socks and stood up. “I hear that at midnight tonight New York City goes on odd-even gas rationing. What times we live in. Glad I’ve got my feet to carry me. Big as wings, even if they’re not quite as powerful. And if they fail, I’ve got an addict friend up at a station on 125th Street. No problem with my getting off the ground, though. Just thought I might wait till I got to the fine area of Annandale-on-Hudson and unchained my bicycle before I ingested anything. Fine way to spend a weekend in the country.”

  “What about your music?” Nina said. “Will you be playing with Ray when he gets out of the hospital?”

  “Thirty years old, with a hematoma,” Horton said. “Think on it. He’s gonna bounce back, though. He’s thinking real clearly now. Time before when I saw him he was about as flaky as Mama’s pie crust. This time he was seeing clear. We’ll be back playing music.” Horton tossed his hat from one hand to the other. “Everything’s on the high sign,” he said. “Full moon coming up. Nice gentle breeze out there tonight. It’s a fine night to think on those things, and what I left you stands to be a big help.” He sighed. “Cuernavaca,” he said. “Just turns my head around to think of all the places out there I haven’t been. Nelson Rockefeller sure would have liked to keep this man from them, too. Damn shame about Nelson Rockefeller dropping dead.” Horton smiled. “Always enjoy conversing with you,” he said to John. He put his hat on. “Tip of the hat,” he said, tipping his hat on the way out.

  Walking toward his mother, John thought: What was it I was thinking earlier today about her new-found health and sobriety? If he were not stoned what he was looking at would be very funny indeed.

  He was looking at his mother, who had fallen asleep on the redwood lounge in the backyard. Hating mosquitoes and mortally afraid of bees, she had wrapped herself in gauze before she stretched out. The spotlight outside the back door lit up a circle of light on the lawn, where she sat. For a moment—for too long a moment—he got sidetracked looking at the crazy motion of all the white moths floating and flying in the lamplight. He looked back, and she was still there. It was certain she was drunk, or she would have awakened when he drove up the driveway.

  He wondered if the gauze had crept over her in sleep, like the creeping white fungus in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He stood very still. A cricket was chirping. There were stars, and Horton was right—or nearly right: The moon was almost full. He rubbed his hand over his face, exhausted. Leave her there or wake her up? She looked like a mummy. She looked like she was dead. Behindhis head, he heard the buzzing of a mosquito. He wanted to be back with Nina, curled beside her. He wanted this not to be happening, even if by the next day he could change things so that it would be a funny story to tell Nina. He felt a wild longing to be back with her, in the apartment on Columbus Avenue, as he stood and stared. His mother was as still as the grass, and more silent than anything else in nature.

  Five

  THOUGH SHE didn’t see much point to it, Cynthia decided to do what the administration wanted her to do. What they had suggested, in their memos to the summer school staff, was that they think of ways to get the students involved in literature: There were recordings of writers reading from their work; there were films, which needed to be ordered two weeks in advance; the teachers might have the students read aloud or act out some scenes from the works they were reading.

  After sitting up late Sunday night, drinking wine and playing Go with the woman who lived next door, Cynthia had gotten out of bed to face the beginning of another week of teaching with a slight hangover that the memory of having done well at Go wasn’t doing much to help. Today the students would be acting out scenes from Macbeth. Those mindless, untroubled, silly rich kids would be examining their hands and pacing and raging, talking about the meaning of growing old, feigning shock and horror. Mary Knapp and Angela Dowell and Terri LeBoyer would be standing in a schoolroom, circling a wastebasket, discussing their meeting on the heath with Macbeth (gesturing to the corridors with rows of lockers). Then Billy what’s-his-name would pretend to have a revelation. Was it possible that in his life he had ever had a genuine moment of insight? Cynthia thought not. Unless he had realized, say, that McDonald’s was serving fewer French fries. Billy what’s-his-name would stand beneath the Stars and Stripes, in front of the chalk-hazed blackboard, and looking out at his classmates’ uncomprehending, bored faces, tell them that “all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.”

  Reaching for her toothbrush, she thought of the beginning of “Howl.” She was born the year “Howl” came out, but she still felt sure that she was one of the people Ginsberg was talking about. She always felt sorry for herself on Monday morning. Spangle was taking his time about getting back from Spain, and she had no idea how to get the fan out of the kitchen window so she could turn it facing outward; all that was happening now was that hot air was being blown into the apartment. Nevertheless, when she walked into the kitchen for her morning glass of juice (with a teaspoon of protein powder), she turned on the fan and stood in front of it. Skylab was supposed to fall on the twelfth of July.

  When she turned on the car radio, she was in time for the golden oldie of the morning: the Doors, with Jim Morrison, singing “Touch Me.” It was followed by a shouted statement that today was an odd day, and only cars with license plates ending in an odd number could get gas. The announcer gave examples of odd numbers: one, three, five…

  She thought that she did not deserve such a summer job, and that the day was going to be a disaster. She was tempted to follow the NEW YORK signs all the way to New York.

  She pulled off into the breakdown lane and sat there, staring straight ahead. The windshield was dirty. Blondie was singing “Heart of Glass.” There was no real introduction to that song; it just started, sounding like music from outer space, seeming to be pulsed out instead of played. Cars whizzed by. Monday. Always a difficult day: A lot of people got depressed on Monday. In order to keep her job, it was necessary to get back onto the highway and drive to school and listen to teenagers recite lines memorized from Macbeth as they circled a wastebasket To watch Karin Larsen hold out a hand, her wrist loaded with thin gold chains, to hear her say that there was no way the hand would ever be clean.

  The sun went behind a cloud, and she followed the pink cloud as the road curved, a cool breeze blowing through the window.

  The Merritt Parkway was quite nice. A man in a sports car, passing her, looked over and smiled. She smiled back: They were both whizzing along, it was a fine day, they were both young.

  She began to feel better. It was summer, and she was twenty-two, and she had a lover, if he ever got back from Spain. She could call the school and think of something to say. She could call and tell Diana DeWitt, the vice-principal, who wore sundresses patterned with butterflies the size of dinner plates, that driving to school she had realized that she was young. Not silly young like her students, but still young enough to know that she should be in New York today, not standing in a schoolroom that smelled like an eraser. Smiling, she knew not to call. She knew to keep going past the service area where there would be a phone.

  From a phone booth on Sixth Avenue, she called Connecticut information and got the number of the school and, with horns honking and a woman singing in a loud soprano as she walked by holding a poodle on a leash, told the secretary in the principal’s office that she was in the emergency room, having her stomach pumped. A taxi screeched its brakes and honked long and loud at an out-of-state car hesitating before making a right turn.

  She wandered through a store near the phone. Inside were pillows of various sizes, decorated with satin flamingoes and bits of rhinestone and lace. She particularly liked a blue satin pillow in the shape of a half moon, with a pretty lady’s face pai
nted on it and curls of angel-white hair along the seam. A man was walking through the store, selling roses from a wicker basket. There was a tiny dog in his jacket pocket, all popping eyes and panting tongue. A woman trying on a pair of black gaucho pants bought a white rose and tapped the little dog on its nose before she stuck the long-stemmed rose through a braid that hung down the back of her head. The moon pillow was fifty dollars. She bought a gumball from the machine by the door on the way out and a parrot on a stand above the machine said “Thank you.” A salesgirl with wavy hair and red-black lipstick looked, with no expression, at Cynthia leaving. Her shirt said “God Is Coming and She Is Pissed.”

  It was actually nice to be in the city without Spangle, because he liked to talk to everybody, and it was hard to make any progress. Spangle would have talked to the man with the flowers about his dog. He would certainly have said something to the salesgirl. He stopped to listen to street musicians and stayed for whole songs, even if the musicians were no good. Putting a quarter in the open instrument case, he would ask questions about their instruments, or just wonder how the day was going for them. Spangle noticed lush trees growing on the roofs of buildings, new editions of books he already owned in bookstore windows, pieces of paper advertising things he always thought would be interesting, six-toed people wearing sandals. He didn’t miss a thing. And he was always thinking that he saw someone he knew, most of them people he wouldn’t have stopped to speak to if they had been the right people: Mr. Binstock, the man who used to run the good fish restaurant oh the Cape; a friend of a friend from Cambridge, 1968, minus beard and long hair. But had that guy worn glasses? Spangle could keep it up all day. In a bar, he’d talk to the bartender, study the jukebox, read the menu even if he wasn’t eating. He would go home with a tacky rhinestone pin of a jet plane, what looked like a gnawed Tarot card found on Macdougal Street, a Lyndon Johnson key ring, a perfectly fine pen that had been lying on the sidewalk right in front of him, a record he had been looking for for ten years, an acorn that looked like a peanut, picked up in Washington Square Park. Then, at the end of the day, he would always say to her: “Do you have any idea where I parked the car?” The last time she had been in New York with Spangle he had bought a jacket in a secondhand store that fit him as well as one that had been custom-made. It was made of light-gray wool with nubs of white in it. (“It looks like a chicken picked the threads out of it! I’m going to be some lounge lizard in this one. Maybe I should get some Bryl-creem.”) Also a copy of On the Road, reissued with a new cover, a package of post cards of sporting events in China, a half-pound of chocolate cookies that looked like spun lace, and a roach clip with a little heart-shaped piece of mother-of-pearl inlaid in each side. They had had moussaka for lunch and homemade tortellini in Little Italy for dinner, and a drink in SoHo, and ice cream on Bleecker Street. “I love it,” Spangle always said, driving away, “but I don’t think I could live there. I mean: When would you think?” He would be munching on cookies from Miss Grimble’s as he shook his head and the car hit potholes, jumped up, came down again.

  She had had a long and very on-and-off-again relationship with Spangle. When they had not been together for very long, he had left and gone to Berkeley. That summer he wrote to her and she sold her bicycle and some books and bought a one-way ticket to California. Most days they would go to lie in the grass and read in one of the small parks. The first week she was there, a couple had appeared with a cocker spaniel, a doberman and a goat. The goat had taken an interest in Cynthia. Spangle, playing with a Frisbee, had sailed it close to her, and the goat had bolted in terror, almost knocking her flat. Everyone ran to see if she was hurt: the goat’s owners, Spangle, the man Spangle was throwing the Frisbee with. And she couldn’t stop crying—not because of being frightened by the goat, but because it had occurred to her that she was in Berkeley, California, where she knew no one but Spangle, and that she had been in danger, even if it was just a silly sort of danger. Of course Spangle began to talk to the goat’s owner. It was an African Pygmy goat, and it was trained to pee outside; for the other, the woman said, they just picked up the pellets. The woman was a chef; the man had gotten his Ph.D. from Berkeley, writing his dissertation on Turgenev. He was unemployed. They looked familiar to Spangle, but he did not look familiar to them. Squatting beside Cynthia, Spangle had kept saying what a coincidence it was that the book Cynthia was reading was On the Eve. The four of them had gone to a coffee shop on Telegraph Avenue and left the two dogs and the goat tied outside. She and Spangle had been about to go to the movies to see Grand Hotel when he took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and saw that it was playing the next afternoon, not that afternoon. So they had stayed in the coffee shop for another cup, while Spangle and the man traded lines from Grand Hotel. They exchanged phone numbers, writing them down on napkins. They never called each other. A month later, Cynthia ran into the woman walking near the university, and they went for coffee. She gave the woman their phone number again, and the woman gave her theirs; she and Spangle meant to call, but never got around to it. Then, two days before they were leaving Berkeley, the woman called and asked them for dinner. Dinner had been three kinds of cold soup. They were serenaded by a scratchy Miles Davis record coming through one speaker, and later by a fight downstairs which ended with some woman going outside and picking up a rock from the tiny rock garden and banging it against the door, shouting through the open window to the man inside, who had long since stopped making any noise.

  At the end of the summer Spangle thought it would be a good idea to drive her back East. They took turns driving, and she made it back to school two days before classes started. In those two days, he worked on her constantly to forget about college and come back to the West Coast with him. She wouldn’t. Finally he moved in with her. Their only disagreements were about the West Coast versus the East Coast. That, and Spangle’s childishness: He would hide behind doors and jump out at her, or come to the door naked when she had a friend with her. When he was out of the apartment, he would call her and pretend, always convincingly, to be a librarian demanding an overdue book, or someone at the garage saying they had made a mistake fixing her car and under no circumstances to drive it, or someone from one of her classes asking her for a date.

  Her family didn’t like him. At Thanksgiving dinner he announced his switch to vegetarianism; he wouldn’t laugh at their jokes; he was seven years older than she was. She lost touch with him in 1977, when he left for nine months to get his head straight. He became a lifeguard at a country club pool in Hyannis and, in the winter, a copy editor in Boston. Then he came back as though he had hardly been gone, gradually easing himself out of Valium and back to grass. All of this—even Berkeley—was after the time when he had money. They had been together again for two years, and if he came back from Spain, they would still be together.

  She looked in her wallet and saw that she had more money than she had thought. She got a cab and went to Battery Park and stood in line to buy a ticket for the boat ride to the Statue of Liberty. In spite of the sign posted to the left of the ticket window saying how long the ride was, the women in front of Cynthia kept debating whether it was a long ride or a short ride. One wanted to take the ride no matter what, but the other was hesitant. One wanted to stand in line, and the other didn’t know if they weren’t wasting time. Both looked at their watches. They had the same conversation twice before they got to the window and began to question the ticket seller. Going away with their tickets, both looked at their watches.

  There was hardly any wait. The line was forming, the boat was there, and she got into the crowd. A lot of people had cameras. Cameras and children. On one of the benches a man in a Mouse-keteer hat sat playing his guitar and singing an off-key version of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”

  On the boat, she went to the upper deck and sat at the far end of one of the benches. When the boat began to move, she got up and leaned against the railing, looking back at New York. She could see more and more of it, at first larg
er and larger, then suddenly smaller as the boat moved forward. It was cold and windy and sunny, and she missed Spangle. She kept watching the skyline. There was a feeling of power in going away from it.

  She stared behind her the whole way out, and it was only at the last minute that she looked to her left and saw the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t get off. She sat there and looked all around, waiting for the ride back to begin. A few other people also stayed behind: a girl in her early twenties with a man in his fifties who kept pulling her sweater tighter over her chest, his fingers lingering on her small breasts as he adjusted the sweater; a man with a briefcase who tapped his thumb on the lock and never stopped staring at the Statue of Liberty; a young couple with an infant, who spoke in whispers, and a woman in a pink skirt slit halfway up her thigh and a thick, pale-pink sweater, who carried a small dog pressed against her chest. Passing Cynthia, she told the dog, “Je suis très fatiguée.”

  Sailing back to New York, Cynthia began to feel a little guilty. They wouldn’t have been able to get a substitute that late in the day, and she couldn’t understand why she had taken such a dislike to so many of the students. She thought that, in part, it might be jealousy. She had always thought that it might be nice to be an ordinary person with an ordinary mind—at best, their minds were ordinary. Spangle always said that that was just wishful thinking: People not worrying about errors in Shakespeare criticism were worried about their wash not coming out clean. And everyone was worried about Skylab.

  A little boy sitting in back of Cynthia said quite clearly, “I want to be a car.”

  The woman sitting next to Cynthia laughed quietly when the child spoke. She shifted a little farther away and put her head on the shoulder of the man next to her. He kissed her forehead. Cynthia pretended to be looking at the horizon. She had liked being alone for a while, but Spangle had been gone too long. She closed her eyes and made a wish: that when she got back to his apartment, there would be a letter from him saying that he was coming back on schedule. It was true that he drove her crazy in New York, making her look up and down and into windows, but he also pointed out cabs coming too fast, people talking to themselves that it was best to cross the street to avoid.