Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Peter Spangle,” he had said.

“Cynthia, meet Peter Spangle — a man who knows how to treat a girl who makes three-twenty an hour.”

It had ended with all of them cursing the phone company and hunching over the desk to count quarters together. Then they had gone out for a drink. Spangle’s ex-girlfriend had left the table after she had two gin and tonics and had tried to call Budapest, but during the ten minutes it was going to take for the call to go through, Spangle caught wise, realized what was happening, and managed to stop her. He had not seen the ex-girlfriend after that night, and the next day he had called Cynthia. Cynthia’s fingers were still sore from counting money, and once the effects of the alcohol had worn off, she was not sure that she wanted to see Spangle again. But finally she had said yes, and they had dinner together. She found out that he had once had money, left to him when his father died; he found out that she had been a Bryn Mawr girl. Both of them were unclear about what they were going to be — except lovers, maybe. It was Spangle’s belief that, left alone at their typewriters, after a certain period of time — before or after they have written all the great books — eventually monkeys will become lovers.

The magician had been depressed. New Haven was an ugly city, and it looked doubly grim because he had just come East after a weekend vacation at a mansion in Ojai where he had made rabbits pop out of record executives’ shirt pockets and hypnotized people to bark like dogs until he had sniffed too much coke to continue. They paid him anyway. His mother didn’t have a washing machine, and his clothes were dirty. His mother did not approve of his being a magician, and she was taking it out on him by refusing to wash his clothes. The magician thought that his mother was more childish as a mother than he had been as a child. “Why don’t you just flick your wand like Tinkerbell and make the dirt go away?” she had said. So he bundled up the laundry and walked down the street until he found a laundromat. It was small and crowded — a fat lady with eyes that didn’t focus, as if they had taken a spin through the dryer, a comatose kid, about twenty, who came out of his trance to lift the lid of the washing machine and talk to the clothes, and several other uninteresting people. Naturally he selected the one pretty girl to show one of his magic routines to. She didn’t have a wedding ring on, but she wasn’t very friendly, either: interested, after a while, but not friendly. “You don’t know how to make a washing machine full of pink clothes go back to their original colors, do you?” she had said. People always wanted things from him that were in no way spiritual. He liked spiritual things, and real surprises: donkey tails sprouting from the seats of people’s trousers as they closed their eyes and turned around three times, candles that kept burning after you blew them out. People wanted the errors they had made fixed. They wanted the past to do over again. And of course they wanted money. The one girl the magician had ever loved had had a great sense of humor. She had been a cartographer, and she had been as interested as he was in magic tricks, because they were abstract problems to solve. She had drowned herself when she didn’t get a promotion she had expected. No barrel and chains and the rushing white water of Niagara Falls — just a jump from a rowboat into water so cold she died almost immediately from hypothermia. The girl he had met at the laundromat was nothing like her, except that he had a hunch that she was special. A laundromat was a very good setting in which to test people: If you got a strong vibration from someone in a laundromat, chances were that that person was interesting. So he had followed her when she left the laundromat. Awkwardly, because he knew nothing about sleuthing, but he didn’t think she had noticed him. If she had, she was being very cool. He had written down her address and put the piece of paper in his pocket, along with the multiplying rabbit and the flower that squirted liquid that looked like blood and a whistle only dogs could hear. He had not had the nerve to say anything more to her that night, but he planned to hang around some other night — just casually bump into her — and then he would ask her to have a drink with him. He had a totally harmless pill that he could slip into her drink, and as she sipped the liquid would form a head like beer and boil out of the glass .

He had always known how to start things, but he had never known how to stop things. The nice thing about the tiny pill was that it would only make a drink foam for fifteen seconds .

“DADDY,” John Joel said, “she calls me Prince Piss and Monkey Meat.”

“Your father doesn’t want to be nagged at, John Joel. Forget it,” Louise said.

“Yeah,” Mary said. “He wants you to be quiet. Go climb a tree and dribble spit. We want you out of here.”

“That’s enough,” Mary’s father said.

Under one arm, Mary’s mother, Louise, was carrying a Styrofoam cooler filled with hot dogs and Tab and a bottle of Chablis, the pretzels and potato chips piled on the lid so they wouldn’t get wet. She held her five-year-old’s hand. He pulled on her arm, wanting to pull her, it seemed, to the center of the earth. John, their father, carried a shopping bag with some charcoal, lighter fluid, a radio, a pack of True cigarettes, the late edition of the New York Times and a towel.

They were at the park for a cookout. Nobody had wanted to come, except Brandt, the baby. He was hoping that the three-legged dog would be there. The dog could do everything: It could run, swim, fetch sticks. Brandt was half interested in sighting the dog, half interested in seeing if he could pull his mother over.

“Say anything you want to your brother about his ugly face, but lay off about his weight. Understand?” John said to Mary.

Peter Frampton, on her T-shirt, was looking straight ahead. She nodded yes.

“What about here?” Louise said. “That’s a nice grove back from the road.”

“Closer to the water,” John said.

“Daddy-” John Joel said.

“Are you going to start complaining again when I just told you to be quiet?” Louise said.

“What is it?” John said.

“Daddy, how many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“That’s not what he was going to say,” Mary said. “He was going to nag.”

“I don’t give a shit about feminists,” John said. “I don’t send my secretary for coffee, I go get it myself. Today I walked down the hall to the machine, and it was being repaired. I didn’t say anything. I looked disappointed for a second, I suppose. The person repairing it was a woman. ‘Oh, just send your girl down in about five minutes,’ she said. Very sarcastic.”

“Four,” John Joel said.

The baby screamed, so he didn’t get to say his joke. The baby screamed because his mother had let go of his hand, making him stumble to regain his balance. He knew that if he screamed his father would start screaming at his mother. He had tried to pull her over, and she was stronger: She had almost gotten him to go down.

John didn’t say anything. He kept walking. He slapped the back of his neck to kill a mosquito.

“Daddy, it takes four,” John Joel said.

“Why does it take four?” John said.