Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Call that guy at the radio station. Have him figure the situation out and send you a free T-shirt.”

“I’m not calling anybody,” she said.

“I think somebody is playing Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,” Jonathan said. “God damn. I’ve been thinking about them for a week.”

“Make Smokey sing ‘Special Occasion,’ ” he hollered out the window, yelling in Jonathan’s ear. Jonathan grabbed him and pulled him back in. “And make him dance when he sings it! No fudging on the high notes!” he screamed. His voice cracked. He started coughing, and when Jonathan hit him on the back he fell over. Jonathan started laughing then, which made him start coughing too.

“Hans Castorp, go up to the mountain,” he said, coming out of the coughing fit first. Jonathan stood, helping himself up by pulling on the window ledge. He looked down at the street, swaying. The man with the radio had gone away. A man and a woman were standing there, looking up at the window.

“Somebody has tuberculosis,” Jonathan said to the two people on the sidewalk. He didn’t want to yell, but he spoke too quietly. He was just leaning forward, water running off his hair, whispering to the couple on Columbus Avenue.

“I’ve got to go. I’ve got a date,” Jonathan said.

“You’re lying. You don’t have a date.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Jonathan said. “If I come back, I’ll bring a pizza. Green pepper and pepperoni.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “If you’re going, go ahead. You’ve got to dry off, though. You’ll get tuberculosis going out there like that.”

“Oh Christ — how am I going to go to school tomorrow?” Nina said. She got up on one elbow, and tried to blink the room straight. Blinking made it tilt left and right. She said: “Why did I say that? School instead of work?”

“She’s got TB and she’s hallucinating,” Spangle said. “Do you think she needs the shower cure?”

“There isn’t any more shower.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I turned it off,” Jonathan said, and bent forward, sliding his hands down his thighs to his knees, laughing. “Fooled you good,” he said.

“Oh fuck,” Nina said. “I’m really going to be mad if I throw up.”

“Lie still,” Jonathan said. “I’ll get you a washcloth.”

“I don’t want a washcloth,” she said.

In a couple of minutes he brought her a washcloth, with very little water squeezed out of it. She moved it from her mouth, where he had put it, up to her forehead. Then she was both cold and dizzy.

“I’ve got to go,” Jonathan said. “Don’t anybody say anything funny, so I can get it together to go.”

He put out his hand and took Nina’s. She didn’t shake it. She just rested her hand in his. “No offense taken,” he said. “We are wrecked.”

He put on the rest of his clothes, talking to himself, telling himself to button buttons, roll up sleeves.

“Admit you don’t have a date,” Spangle said to Jonathan.

“I don’t have a date,” Jonathan said. “I’ve got to go.”

Nobody stopped him. When he left, Nina said, “Can you shut the door?”

“That door?” Spangle said, looking out into the hallway.

“That door,” she said.

“I can shut that door. Sure,” he said. He walked to the door and slammed it, then put his back against it and looked at her. He squinted and moved closer, to see where she was cut. Not blood on the floor by her ear. Good. Something else.

“Hey, Nina,” he said, “I haven’t seen you for so long. How are you? I mean, how were you before you got wrecked?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“You do remember. Come on.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I going to lose my job?”

“You’re not going to lose your job. There’s always another job.”

“What does that mean? That I’m going to lose it?”

“Only if you show up,” he said. He stretched out beside her. “I think I overdid this,” he said. “I overdid this.”

“Where did he go?” she said, looking at the closed door.

“He probably had a date. He has dates at funny hours. I don’t know anybody besides him who’d begin a date at eleven o’clock.”

“He said he didn’t.”

“You can’t tell with him,” he said.

“Well, what time is it?”

“What time is it? It is… this time?”

He held his wrist toward her, but she couldn’t see the numerals on the watch. She saw one hand, sweeping, and a lot of little circles and designs.

“Tell me what time it is,” she said.

He told her that it was ten of three in the morning.

“I have to go to sleep,” she said. “I’ll lose my job.”

“I’d tell you a bedtime story, but I’m too wrecked. I can tell you a poem. Wynken and Blynken and Nod fell asleep and turned into a pod.”

“Don’t,” she said. “I’ll have nightmares. That horrible movie. Somebody was just saying something about that that gave me nightmares.”

“In the morning,” he said, “tell me how you are. Were.”

“Why did I ever do this?” she said.

“It’s our fault. Wicked stuff. I hope he took it with him. Wait a minute: If he’s responsible , I hope he took it with him. How was he when he left?”

“He looks so much younger with his hair cut,” she said.

“He’s such a ladykiller,” he said. “He probably did have a date. I’m too old to have dates. I just look up old friends.” He patted her hand.

“You live with somebody,” she said.

She fell asleep and woke up when he began talking to himself in his sleep. She put her hand on his stomach, and he stopped talking.

When she woke up the next time, she could see his watch. There was a horrible ache over her left eye, and her mouth was dry, but with one eye closed she could see the watch, and she could stand up and go into the bathroom. She wanted to splash water on her face, but she was afraid that touching her face that way might spread the pain. She tilted two aspirin out of the bottle in the medicine cabinet and swallowed them, washing them down with a handful of water. She took off her clothes, put them over the towel rack, and got into the shower. She adjusted the showerhead and ran the water, stepped into it when it was the right temperature. She was sore all over from sleeping on the floor. She had no idea how she had bruised her thigh so badly. She took a quick shower, decided at the last minute to bob her head under the water, and when she saw that she could take that, squirted a little shampoo into her hand and massaged the top of her head. She closed her eyes and let the water beat on her head until she thought the soap was all washed away. Then she got out, stepped onto the floor full of puddles, and stood in water, rather than on the sopping wet bathrug. She dried off, patting her body instead of rubbing it.

The phone rang, but she decided just to let it ring. That, or he could answer it. She turned on the hair dryer, but something was wrong with it: It hardly put out any heat. She patted her hair and wrapped a towel around herself and walked out of the bathroom. He was still asleep. He hadn’t even heard the phone. No: He was smiling at her; awake, but still wiped out. “Good morning,” she said, on her way into the bedroom. She dropped the towel on the bed and got a robe out of the closet. It was John’s robe, that he left at her apartment: a present from her, found in an antique clothing store in the Village, a satin robe with a lunging lion on the back and a rising sun above the pocket on the front, the name Neil P. stitched in script above the blood-red sun.

“I feel like I’m going to live,” she said, holding the robe closed and going out to the living room and standing over him. She tied the sash and rubbed her face and sat down beside him. “Last night was an exception, right?” she said. “You’re really not into dope that way anymore, right?”