Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Believe me,” Spangle said. “Watch all the nice notes you get.”

“And you’re going to go to the garden party with me?”

“ ‘Can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself,’ ” Spangle sighed. “I am going to be on a mission of great importance, retrieving my brother from the mysteries of Madrid. Hoping he isn’t already married and that there isn’t already an olive-skinned infant and a maid he’s two-timing Rosita with. Hoping to get him back to law school. My esteemed brother. Have to be careful not to piss him off, though. I’m almost out of the money the old man left me, but he hasn’t run out of his. As far as I know.”

“Move over,” she said .

“Speak right into the microphone,” Spangle said, kicking back the sheet and taking his penis in his hand. “Do you think there are really tankers full of crude oil off the coast that the United States is stopping from making deliveries? Are you angry about gas rationing?”

“Get over,” she said, nudging him with her hip .

“Come closer,” Spangle said. “The mike isn’t picking this up.”

“I’m going to have to deal with your neurotic mother all the time you’re in Madrid.”

“Do you think… ” Spangle said, raising his pelvis in the air and pointing his penis toward her .

“God almighty,” she said. “If you want to play with yourself don’t let me interrupt.”

She pushed until she had enough bed space to lie down on .

“I’m a tanker,” Spangle said, rolling toward her, holding his erect penis, “and I’m steaming in to make a delivery.”

“Get off,” she said. “I’m not amused, Spangle.”

“What’s today’s date?” he said. “Tomorrow had better be an odd day, because I’ll never make it to Bradley Field on an eighth of a tank.”

CYNTHIA DREAMED that she was falling. It was a late afternoon fright dream. When she took naps after teaching, she often had to wake herself up in the middle of some nightmare. At night she slept all right, but when she napped she was likely to have nightmares. It was worth the risk, though: When she slept, she forgot the students, and if she had a nightmare and shook herself awake, she was always glad to find herself in her lover’s apartment, instead of at the high school. Her sister had left her the key to her condominium while she was in Mexico for the summer, but Cynthia found the cramped New Haven apartment more comfortable. That, and that idiotic Mitch Auerberg — he was older than the rest of them, and had failed a similar course the summer before — who had followed her home one day on his motorcycle and gunned it and streaked off when she saw him. He was probably hiding in the bushes like Popeye, waiting for her to go out back of the building in her bathing suit so he could scare her — she did not think he was capable of worse than that. She went on the assumption that there was no great malice in those children, and that was what kept her going to work every day.

She found a joint on the night table and lit it, got out of bed and went into the kitchen. She turned on the window fan and undid her pigtails, putting the rubber bands on the counter. An ant ran around them and disappeared down the crack between the wall and the counter. Her lover, Peter Spangle, would not let her buy any chemical bug killers; his own nightmares were about being at the test site when an atomic bomb was detonated. He was sure that it was the odor of Raid that provoked his nightmares. Raid, he insisted: not all the acid he had taken; not the recent newspaper reports linking exposure to radiation with cancer.

Spangle was in Madrid, trying to talk his brother Jonathan into returning to law school. His mother had paid for the trip to Madrid. She had paid for his brother’s trip, too, not realizing that Jonathan had intended his vacation to be a year long. She was afraid, now that Peter was in Madrid, that he would stay too — that the country had some secret power over highly intelligent white American males. She called the apartment often, to see if there was any word on how things were going. She also complained that her new wall-to-wall carpeting was fuzzing, and that as soon as an avocado seed took root, it rotted. When Spangle had been in the apartment and his mother called, she only spoke briefly to Cynthia, to exchange a few banalities. Now that her son was gone and she had no one else to talk to, she sometimes called twice a night. Cynthia was tempted to pick up the phone and say, in her most faraway voice: “This is the spirit of Madrid, and I have captured your sons forever. Don’t watch for them in the breeze or in sunlight. I have their power. I have sucked their souls as empty as the inside of a straw.”

Enough dope smoking for the day. Strange how hard two tokes could hit. They could wipe you out when you were not yet wide awake.

She went to look in the refrigerator. She settled for leftover hummus and some pita bread and sat on the counter and dipped the bread into the bowl. It tasted like baby food. When she finished eating, though, there would be no one to wipe her chin and put her on her back to admire her while she kicked her legs. Instead, she would go to the laundromat — the one next door to the donut shop, to torture herself for having given up refined sugar.

How could the students not care about the pilgrimage to Canterbury? How could she care that such idiots did not care? How could Mitch what’s-his-name have had the nerve to follow her as she walked to her sister’s apartment and then make a twisted face at her, letting her see that it was him? Didn’t they care that she could take it out on them later, in the classroom? Didn’t they care that they were making such fools of themselves in front of an adult? She would have been mortified not to have appeared sophisticated when she was their age.

But where did sophistication get you? It got you selected for an education at a classy college, and when you graduated, this kind of part-time job was the best thing you could get, and the pay was no good, and your brain — after so much time realizing that she had a brain — was now being challenged by trivia. How can I kill bugs without using bug spray? Where is the best place to wash clothes? Should I or should I not go out to the swimming pool in back of my sister’s condominium? By the time her education was completed, her brain would be worn down to a little stub, pencil shavings on the floor.

“My hair hurts,” Spangle’s mother said when Cynthia picked up the telephone. “I had it in a rubber band yesterday, but this is the first time it’s hurt, so I don’t think it’s that. It’s Freudian, I guess. It feels like somebody’s tugged it.”

She was not calling about her hair.

“Tell me without my having to ask whether you’ve heard from him.”

“I haven’t. I told you that when he left, he said they’d be back this Friday.”

“One little par avion, you’d think. Anyway, I’m hoping they’re really coming back. I’ve lost five pounds. It’s a combination of worrying and eating nothing but poached eggs and drinking Perrier.”

“I was about to eat when you called,” Cynthia said. Anything to get her off the phone.

“Don’t tell me if it was fettuccine. I love all those coiled pastas, ready to spring into calories: tortellini and fettuccine and all those curlycue things like enchanted snakes.”

Heavy breathing. Cynthia would have been frightened if Tess Spangle had done that early in the conversation, before she identified herself.