Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“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.

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 .

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.