Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

He had intended to play it cool, but for days he had been thinking about seeing her, and it was a hot night and he couldn’t sleep, and finally it started to make sense to him that he should dress and go out. He wouldn’t see her, but he would see where she lived. Maybe his walking by would generate some good energy and he could send it to her, and she would feel it. She would probably be asleep. It was almost one in the morning. He would think thoughts of love and close his eyes and try to send the thoughts like little darts into her dreams .

He put on his white painter’s pants with the loops on the sides. Keys on key rings dangled from each side of his pants. Keys to the crazy millionaire Tucker’s house in Beverly Hills: Tucker gave away keys because he thought that it would assure him of not being killed in some bizarre Manson-type murder. His astrologer had told him so, and he kept a brandy snifter full of Andes mints, matches from The Palm, and house keys on the hall table by the door. Keys to his friend Roy’s beachhouse in Malibu: three locks on the front door, and Roy wouldn’t see an astrologer on a bet. The keys to his mother’s apartment here in New Haven. A key that he had had for years, found in Golden Gate Park, a heavy, old-fashioned key with a tiny piece of tape across the top with J. Brown lettered on it. He liked to think that it would fit the lock in Governor Jerry Brown’s apartment. That would be a lot more status than having one of the many keys to Tucker’s .

He wished that he had her key. He would put it in the lock, thinking good thoughts: that she shouldn’t be afraid, that he only wanted to talk to her, that he was willing to talk about things other than magic. To tell the truth, he got tired of thinking and talking about magic all the time; he had been reading the newspaper at his mother’s and getting mad about all the injustices in the world, and about how little the country did for its citizens. He had read, in the New York Times, that the mayor was not in favor of shooting pigeons, although the mayor did agree with somebody else who had said that they were like rodents with wings. If the mayor and all his staff and all the working people in New York got together and thought, it might be possible to send messages to the pigeons to get them to go away and roost somewhere else. He was glad that the mayor was not going to give his okay to pigeon-killing, even though he said he didn’t like the pigeons. People gave the okay to things too much, and that ruined the world for magic. When so many things of all sorts were happening, people’s minds got overloaded, and they stopped caring whether a woman was sawed in half or levitated from a table. They didn’t care that one rabbit could burst into twenty. It would be hard to care about magic if you read the paper every night, because there were so many explanations: why pigeons thrived in New York, how we could be sure that there wasn’t gasoline hidden in tanks in New Jersey, what you could do if you were followed by someone you thought meant you harm, how to plant zucchini. When people did calm down and got ready to watch magic, all they cared about was what was behind it. Or else they wanted something from it: They wanted you to wave a wand and send the pigeons out of New York; they wanted to believe that you could make their zucchini multiply overnight, instead of waiting for the seeds to germinate. But he was thinking about magic again, and he’d sworn to himself that this would be a real vacation, and he wouldn’t think about magic all the time. He tried to think about national health insurance, but his mind bogged down and he got images of dogs leaping through hoops and disappearing . A green plant on a table, then the plant covered by a cloth, and when the cloth was pulled back, an orchid was blooming on the plant. He wondered if it would make an impression if he took her an orchid. He did not think that there was anywhere to buy an orchid in New Haven at one in the morning (he thought he knew where he could do it in Malibu), and even if he had it, of course, she would be asleep. His mother’s Vogue had suggested that the caring hostess might put a fresh orchid on her guest’s pillow .

His mother heard the keys jingling and said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to take a walk,” he said .

“When are you going back to California?” she said .

He wished she would stop asking that. He wondered if even an orchid would shut her up, and decided that it wouldn’t. He didn’t answer her. He picked up his false nose, on impulse, and put it in the pants pocket and went out the door. He turned around and pulled the knob three times, to make sure that it was really closed and not just stuck. She always got up after him to check the door — it was a funny door — and if he did manage to have a nice night somehow, he wouldn’t want to ruin it by coming back to the apartment and having to listen to one of her tirades .

He walked until he came to her block, and then to her building. He was nervous. He had given up cigarettes six months ago, so he fished his false nose out of his pants pocket and tapped it onto his nose, took it off again, put it in place again. Then he put it back in his pocket. The one rabbit that became twenty was in the pocket, too. She had liked that. Maybe he had just shown her too much too quickly. He could have shown her the tricks over a period of time .

He was not sure which window was hers. One was dark — the one he thought was hers — and in several other apartments there was faint bluish light. As he watched, someone began to move around one of the apartments. The person opened the window. It wasn’t her. Maybe it was her husband, if she really had a husband. The way she had said it, he had doubted it, and he was usually good at picking up those vibrations. He crossed the street and looked at the building, sending good thoughts into the windows. In response, music started playing. The thoughts had gotten in to the people! They were joyful; there was music! He crossed the street again, and close to the building he heard that it was a sad song he had listened to when he was a child; but it didn’t sound like Debbie Reynolds singing. “Wish I knew that he knew what I’m thinkin’ of… ” It was always so hard to get through to people, even if you tried to speak to them directly sometimes; by sending thoughts, you could do better than speaking to them. He reached in his pocket and took out a handkerchief and tossed it toward the windows on the third floor. As it rose, the handkerchief opened and unfolded into something close to the shape of a dove. He kissed the tips of his fingers and waved his hand in the direction of the handkerchief-bird. Then, when it fell, he retrieved it and shook it flat and put it in his pocket. Of course, at almost two A.M., she would not be awake. But somehow — psychically — hadn’t his loving thoughts come home to roost?

“THIS IS a friend of mine from college,” Nina said. “I can tell from the expression on your face what you’re thinking. A great number of people act very strangely, but my strangeness is that I’m so predictable. I didn’t sleep with him.”

The man, whoever he was, laughed. He got up from the sofa, where he was sprawled in his underwear, and came forward, with his hand out. “It’s true,” he said. “How do you do? I’m Peter Spangle.”