Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Never,” he said.

“Do you want an aspirin?” she said.

“I’m okay,” he said. “What time is it?”

She picked up his wrist and looked, and told him it was five of seven. He groaned.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to work,” he said.

“Stay here and sleep,” she said. “If you feel better later, pick up a little.”

“Whew,” he said. “In Nina’s apartment on Columbus Avenue.”

“You were putting me down good last night,” she said. “Calling me the New York working girl.”

“I hope you didn’t pay attention to me.”

“I didn’t.”

“I wonder where Jonathan is,” he said. He got up, slowly, and went to the window. “Leave your window open here and no bugs get in,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s amazing.”

She went back into the bathroom, to brush her teeth. She closed the door and bent over the sink, and realized that the aspirin had already started to work; the blinding pain was disappearing from above her eye. Her eyes were bloodshot. She was going to have to wear dark glasses.

“Nobody came in through the window,” he said, outside the bathroom door. “Want me to tempt fate for real and answer the door?”

“There’s somebody at my door?” she said, opening the bathroom door.

She came out of the bathroom, and went to the door. She forgot to ask who it was. The chain wasn’t on, because neither of them had remembered to put it on when Jonathan left. In fact, she opened the door certain that it would be Jonathan.

John was standing there, and even before he realized that a man was standing beside her, he looked terrible. It was the first time he had ever come to the apartment in the morning. He walked in without saying anything, and then just stood there, looking from Nina to Peter Spangle.

He walked up the stairs, trying to remember that he was in love. There was a fact, and an important one: He was in love. He was there because she said more in a glance than anyone else said in a touch, and a touch from her meant more than an embrace from anyone else. When you were in love, it was logical to go be with the person you loved. Only, he didn’t know where to begin. What he had to talk about seemed to have nothing to do with the world of love and everything to do with the world of hate, and that world had never been real when he was with Nina. If she was getting away, it was because he was letting her get away. She was inside the apartment. He knew that she would not have left for work yet. She would be having her little-girl breakfast of cereal and fruit, and brushing her hair, listening to the news on the radio, tidying up the room. She wasn’t mean in the morning. You could talk to her and she’d answer. The two times they had gone away together, he had been amazed at how cheerful she was in the morning. He tried to remember that it was morning now, that if he put his mind to it, he could stop his legs from shaking enough to climb the stairs, that at the top was Nina, that he could reach out and touch her and she would be there. He felt as crazy and foolish as an old drunk who finds his way home but can’t remember to climb the stairs, so he’s found in the morning and catches hell anyway. God — if he was really comical. If she meant that, really, and didn’t just say it to tease, because she was fond of him. If it was all explained in Passages: a simple answer. Nothing was simple. Not even loving Nina was simple. This was the only place he could imagine being, and already he felt that the place wasn’t there, that he wasn’t going to make it to the top of the stairs, and that if he did, he wouldn’t know where to begin. He would have to invent some logical explanation for what he was going to tell her, or maybe it was just because he was in a panic that he thought that. He realized that he was in a panic, and that gave him enough energy, returned enough breath to him, that he was able to continue walking up the stairs. He couldn’t believe what he had left behind, what he had just walked out on. He had thought at the time that he was doing the logical thing, that he was doing something out of self-preservation. There had been so much chaos: He had been afraid that he was losing his senses, going deaf. And only the summer before, the six of them, his mother, Brandt, John Joel, Louise, Mary and he, had been at the carnival. Brandt — as usual — hanging on to his arm and trying to bring him to the ground, dangling and swaying. They had been a family at a carnival. He had been awake all night, and he couldn’t think straight. He knew that he would have to get to the point and not edge up toward it; that he couldn’t talk to her about the summer before, the things they had done as a family; that there was no point in trying to explain to her that they were typical; that maybe even his love for her figured in a pattern; that they were typical and then suddenly they weren’t. He was going to say to her: I want you to help me. He didn’t know what help he needed. He had no memory of how he had gotten from Connecticut to New York. He did remember being in the city, and taking the car to the garage he usually went to, the keys left behind, the cab to Nina’s. The cab driver had talked to him about the weather they were supposed to have over the weekend, and he had remembered, only then, what day it was. He had just stuffed wadded bills into the cab driver’s hand because he couldn’t think — he might as well have been a man in a foreign country where he didn’t understand the currency. Better just to overpay and run, to be embarrassed that way rather than the other. He tried to breathe more softly. He wanted to at least be breathing normally when she saw him. More than anything he wanted to see her standing there. He wanted no harm to have come to her, at least. At the top of the stairs he made a fist and knocked. The reverberation that began in his hand shot through his arm and ended in his heart. And then she opened the door .

SPANGLE’S MOTHER was wondering if she should have her old mouton coat updated, as she put it, for Cynthia to wear in the winter. Cynthia listened, keeping the phone clamped against her ear with her raised shoulder, carefully stroking clear nail lacquer on her fingernails as she talked. The smell was powerful so close to her nose, and she wished that she could put the brush down and sit comfortably in a chair and do her nails and not have to talk to Spangle’s mother. It was wrong to blame Spangle for his mother. It was even wrong to blame Spangle’s mother for trying to be nice, but it had been a long day of teaching, and their stupid faces still bobbed before her in the empty apartment, and she did not think that she could be tactful much longer.

“I suppose you don’t want it, even if I have the bottom part narrowed,” Spangle’s mother said.

“I think the coat I have is fine. I appreciate your offering, but I don’t really think I’d be comfortable in a fur coat.”

“Don’t think I’m dense. Don’t think I don’t know what you mean,” Spangle’s mother said, “but in terms of mental as opposed to physical comfort, think about how you would feel with some perfume squirted on and a strand of pearls and a thick, warm mouton. You could update the look yourself by dyeing your hair red and chopping it into one of those crew cuts and wearing neon pants and a cowboy shirt. Don’t think I don’t read fashion magazines anymore. I do. I read them, and I know that women want to look like whores at a party, and that work is considered a party. Stiletto heels at work. Silver skirts. Really.”