Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Wait a minute,” she said, lifting his hand off his leg, grabbing it hard. “What is going on?”

“I don’t know how to say this,” he said. “I’m just starting to realize that it’s odd that I’m here. Will you call Nick? Can you see if he’s going to be around?”

“Call Nick at home?” she said.

“It’s early in the morning, isn’t it? I forgot that. I can call Nick later,” he said.

“In the meantime, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What if you had slept with him? What if I walked in on that?”

“You could call before you come over.”

“But I never even thought about that. I think of this as home.”

“It’s my home. Your home is in Connecticut. Or Rye. Wherever you want to say it is.”

“It’s here,” he said, balling up a pillow. “It’s here, whatever you say.” He threw the pillow, hard. It tipped over an empty bottle — a ginger-ale bottle with cigarette butts in it. He stared at the chaos of the room.

“Nina,” he said, “I was coming up those stairs, and you don’t know what I was going through, trying to get to the top. It would have been such a goddamn soap opera if you had been here with somebody else.”

“Maybe it’s a soap opera anyway. A quick dinner and an off-camera fuck. Sometimes I think trying to keep you is hopeless, like trying to keep a hat from blowing away in the wind, when you can’t even put your hand up to hold it. I feel that powerless — that I can’t even grab on to the edge of something. If we hadn’t gotten stoned, I don’t know what things would have been like when you appeared here this morning. I just know that I’m tired of trying to keep things together. I feel like I don’t have any control. I’m sick of it. I might as well sit here and smoke the rest of that grass and lose my job, and not fucking care . You can support me, like a real mistress. Make this a real soap opera.” She got up, because her words were coming out funny, and she thought she was going to cry. She picked up the bowl of cereal and sat down again. She realized that the bowl was not a crystal ball, but she stared into it.

“You can’t go to work,” he said. “You aren’t going to work, are you?”

“You’d better tell me what’s going on. I’ve given all the explanation you deserve, and more, about what was going on here. Now you tell me why you showed up here at seven-thirty in the morning, and why I can’t go to work.”

“It’s not a quick dinner and a quick fuck. I’ve spent eight hours here a lot of nights. I’ve gotten back to Rye at three in the morning, and had to work the next day.”

“You want it to be over. Is that it?”

“That is the last thing I want.”

“Shall we play twenty questions?”

“Can we go lie down? Just lie down?”

He wouldn’t talk when they went into the bedroom. After a long while he rolled from his back to his stomach. He was too still, and too quiet, to be asleep. She decided to say nothing and wait. She even felt sorry enough for him, after a while, to put her hand on his back. She got up on one arm and put her hand on his back, stroked it down his spine, up again, lightly massaged his neck. She stared at the clock. Five minutes passed. She called Lord and Taylor’s and said that she was sick. Crying helped. She went back to bed and saw that he had rolled over on his back again, and that his eyes were very red — from being against the pillow, or because he had cried, she couldn’t tell. She stroked her hand down his chest. She unbuttoned his shirt and stroked the bare skin.

“Okay,” she said. “What?”

“What I was feeling coming up those stairs,” he said. “It was like coming to you was happening in slow motion. There were so many feelings, and they kept getting heavier and heavier. They were stopping me from moving.”

“It’s good you didn’t get stoned with us. If you think that when you’re straight, you wouldn’t have been a good influence last night.”

“Last night,” he said. “My God. Last night.”

“Look,” she said, “tell me you’re all right, and we can sleep, or you can have me play twenty questions, or if you just want to talk, I’ll listen to you. All right?”

Her finger was tracing the line of his breastbone. He could close his eyes, and feel a small path being traced on his body. Her finger inched along, traveling little distances. He had driven, on no sleep, from Connecticut to New York, gone to the garage, gotten a cab to her apartment, and now he was feeling more than he had felt in all the time he had been awake, traveling, going crazily from one place to the next. He was here, and still. Her finger was moving, curving around his body.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Mary isn’t. John Joel shot her.”

He was walking up the stairs. It was a simple accomplishment — the sort of thing they teach brain-damaged people to do. Later, when they master the mechanics of climbing, they teach them not to frown or squint. The trick is not to show that you’re concentrating. There was a school for brain-damaged people — teenage children, mostly — somewhere near where he worked, and several times during his lunch hour he had seen them parading down the street. They had things to do: trash to throw away. Well — maybe that was the only thing. They had trash to throw away. He and Nick had been coming back from lunch the first time, and Nick had called his attention to them. As months went by he and Nick had watched their progress. It was horribly slow progress, and it might never have occurred to them to think of it as progress at all if Nick hadn’t noticed the way they had stopped holding hands. At first, they held hands like small schoolchildren. Then they walked close together, almost shoulder to shoulder. Then, by the time spring came, when everybody else in the city was walking close together — men steering women along, their hands on their bare shoulders, people hip to hip on the grass in Central Park — the brain-damaged people had let go of each other and walked farther apart. Either they had been taught not to frown and look frightened or the spring had touched them in some way. One time, as they watched, a man carrying a blaring cassette player got into the middle of them, and they started to scatter like frightened ducks; then the two men at the front came and tried to round them up. Eventually they did, and the parade huddled together again and turned the corner. Nick claimed he watched because it reminded him that there were worse problems than having to deal with Metcalf. He claimed he watched because Nick had gotten him hooked. He was not used to seeing slow, regular movement in the city. He had gotten used to watching people slap down change for the newspaper without missing a beat, to arms suddenly stretched out for cabs, to people walking down a street so that you couldn’t tell whether or not they were together. Even when they spoke to each other, that didn’t mean for sure that they were together .

Walking up the steps to Nina’s apartment, he had thought for a second that something was missing — a leader was missing. And no one was behind him. He was there alone, doing this simple thing; and he thought that he was never going to be able to make it to the top, and that if he did, it was too much to expect that he would have a pleasant expression on his face when he got there. He would just have to get there and be there, and then — and then what? The stairs were buckling and shifting under him; they were delivering him to a room that would tilt crazily. He rubbed his face. He hadn’t had any sleep, and he was exhausted, and the faint stinging-itch across his neck, below his ears, had started: the signal that he was about to have a pounding headache. He must have been on the stairs for a long time. He kept looking over his shoulder, as though there were better air below him, and if he turned his head he might be able to breathe. He kept turning his head, and the building was quiet — no one behind him. But every time he moved forward, there were just as many stairs, it seemed. His legs felt heavy. His head. Finally he had dashed up the stairs and gotten to the top, panting, feeling as crazy as one of the brain-damaged people would feel if he were capable of seeing himself in perspective. If the piece of paper drops on the sidewalk instead of into the trash container, so what? So what? he was saying out loud. So what? he whispered. No one heard the whisper, and he did not hear any noise: no breakfast dishes clattering, no radio music, no alarms going off. He put his hands over his ears and took them away, to see if there was more sound when he removed his hands. His hearing was fading. What if Nina opened the door and said something, said some important thing, and he didn’t know what she was saying? His eyes hurt too much to concentrate on reading her lips. Her lips. Nina. He knocked on the door, and he smiled. He heard something. From inside, he heard water running. And then he knocked again, and then she was there: he could see her breasts almost down to the nipples. She had on the robe she had given him, and when she spoke, he heard what she said. He saw the man, standing to the side. For an awkward second, nobody said anything. He looked behind him and saw the stairs. When he blinked, they stopped slowly swaying .