Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

He stopped talking because Mary was staring at him, and as he looked at her looking at him, he thought: What if Angela really sleeps with people? What if she does? What if I’m not the only one keeping quiet? At any rate — whether it was the way he looked, or what he had said, she felt sorry for him. She even did a very grown-up thing: She changed the subject. “I haven’t finished the book,” she said, “but that’s what Vanity Fair is like. Things just fall into place.”

When they left the restaurant, Louise was outside. He was surprised. He imagined that he would have to go on a wild goose chase to find her, that she would be deliberately hiding from him, to frighten him and punish him. There she was, on the hood of the car, reading a magazine. The car was parked in front of a drugstore, and she had gone into the drugstore — who knew what she was thinking? — and she had bought a magazine. There was something sad and childish about Louise, sitting on her old Chevy, locked out because she hadn’t brought her keys, her long, tanned, bare legs hanging down, sandals on her feet, legs parted enough that you could see up her skirt. It wasn’t even a self-consciously casual pose; she had really gotten involved in the magazine and forgotten to keep her knees together.

“Apologize” was all she said.

He apologized. He was so relieved to see her, so happy that it was not going to be a night of crazy driving around and calling people she might be with, that he simply apologized. John Joel hung back and didn’t look at her. Mary looked at her and looked away. He got behind the wheel and unlocked the car on their side. Mary and John Joel got in the back seat. Louise leaned into the car. “Take them home,” she said. “When you’ve done that, come back for me. I’m going into the drugstore for a milkshake. That’s what I want — a chocolate milkshake. I’ll be outside when you get back.”

Driving home, he no longer felt relieved. He put the radio on and heard two people discussing a recipe for bleu cheeseburgers. When the woman gave the direction “add two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce,” the announcer said, “Worcestershire sauce.” He echoed everything she said, and when he did, the woman said “Uh-huh” and continued. At the end, the man said, “Doesn’t that sound good?” and the woman said, “Oh, it is.” The man thanked her. She said he was welcome. Another voice broke in, apologized for interrupting, then started again, saying that tomorrow there would be more suggestions for summer barbecues. “You know,” the announcer said, “a lot of people out there don’t like bleu cheese. I think these can be made just as well with your favorite cheese — cheddar or jack or whatever.” A song from Saturday Night Fever came on. He had gone to that movie with Nina, and when John Travolta gave away the first-prize trophy he and his date had won to the couple who should have won the dance contest, Nina had leaned over and whispered: “That’s you.” It was a little irritating that she pretended he had such good impulses, that his guilt was so great. She asked him, when they first met, if he was a Catholic. She kept up the joke, too: Late one night, after he had made love to her, before he went back to Rye, she had come into the bathroom when he was showering, pushed back the shower curtain a few inches and said: “I will hear your confession.” Cold air had come into the shower and something about the tone of her voice and the rush of air had actually frightened him; he had never been in a confessional, but he sympathized for the first time with people who had. It was easy to make her stop teasing, though. All he had to do was reach out and touch her fingertips. He took very hot showers — so hot she wouldn’t get in with him unless he agreed to let her regulate the water — and that night, one of the first nights he was with her, he could remember the steam escaping, how quickly she became foggy, her smile through the fog, their fingers touching. He had had to stare to see her, and only partly because of the steam. For a second he had thought she was unreal, that she had always been an apparition. He knew that he had to look at her, and keep looking. If he had not reached out to touch her, it might have gone on forever. Nina’s smile, through the steam. The smile that was worth suffering a blast of cold for.

“You ran a stop sign,” John Joel said.

“Leave him alone,” Mary said.

John said nothing. He slowed down. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw John Joel, pressed against one side of the back seat, and Mary, all the way to the other side. He wondered if they might really hate each other, if when they were adults they would live on different coasts and exchange Christmas cards. What was it like, so early in your life, not to love someone you were supposed to love?

He thought: I’m not John Travolta. I’m Father Frank Junior, in a disco for the first time, caught up in it and put off by it. At first, he had been uneasy with her friends — all young, a lot of them spacey, one or two more heavily into drugs than he could be comfortable with. He had accused her of liking him because he was safe and sane, a father-figure. “That’s a lot of easy bullshit,” she said. “But I like it that you think you’re sane.”

He pulled into the driveway — imagine her thinking, even for a second, that there would be columns at the base of his driveway — and the car sideswiped bushes weighted down by the rain the day before. Big white flowers brushed against the side of the car. He turned off the ignition and got out and stretched. He looked at the sky. It was still light, but the moon was already out. By the car was John Joel’s tree, the tree where the robin had built its nest. He wished that he had something to concentrate on other than what was coming: that he could be holding the delicate piece of egg, blue like no other blue, and that he could feel its lightness and fragility. The blue egg, in the little dish in Nina’s apartment.

On the way back to pick up Louise, he stopped at a phone. He asked the operator to charge the call to his home phone. “Is there anyone there to verify?” she said. “No,” he said, without any hesitation. A butterfly — late in the day for a butterfly — hovered by the phone for a minute. He looked again at the moon, more visible now that the sky was a little darker. He shook his head at the absurdity of what he was doing: standing at a phone on a country road, as though no one was at home, no one was waiting, as though Nina would pick up the phone in her apartment on Columbus Avenue and suddenly his heart would stop pounding and he would feel the breeze that was blowing. The butterfly flew away. The phone rang ten times, and then he hung up and went back to the car. He sat there for a minute before starting it. Then he put the radio on. The same song from Saturday Night Fever was playing, as though the last twenty minutes — half hour? — had never happened. Things just fall into place . If Mary knew that, from reading the book or from what she knew of life, she could not deserve to flunk any course, let alone English. Of course, if that was what she thought, then there wasn’t much point in her trying to organize her life or in any of the things he had believed about getting ahead, the necessity of getting ahead, when he was her age. Maybe a few years older. He got out of the car and got the operator again, and billed another call to his home phone. He called Nick. Nick picked it up on the first ring. “Goddamn Metcalf,” Nick said. “Called me twice today with the same joke. I keep telling him that I don’t like jokes. He tries to joke with me about not liking jokes. Metcalf.”

“What was Metcalf’s joke?”

“Same old joke,” Nick said. “Jesus Christ. What’s up with you?”