Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“I wonder how come women always want to know about other women, and men never want to know about other men?”

“Other way around,” he said. “I can’t stand it if I don’t find out who happened before me, or is happening along with me. I try to find out the first time I see a woman.”

“I think that’s atypical. Men never ask me about other men I’ve seen.”

“Who do you see besides Spangle?”

She laughed. “That’s funny,” she said, “because the answer is nobody. I met somebody nice last week, but it was business.”

“I find the finest ladies on business. Returning a book, interviewing job candidates. Agents, hopefully. I’m only talking to women agents.”

“You seem pretty crazy about the ladies.”

“Oh, I am. I’ve proposed twice this year alone. I know I’m going to do it again. I always propose more in the summer. If I lived in California, I’d be married.”

“Why?” she said.

“The weather. Hot weather makes me propose. Ladies in bathing suits and halter tops and shorts, going skinny-dipping and hiking, walking in back of them when we’re hiking through the woods… ”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I’m not. I’m glad summer isn’t any longer than it is.”

“What would you do if one accepted?”

“Marry her. I never propose unless I’m serious.”

He bent another beer can in half and set it carefully on the table, on top of American Photographer . He had taken the magazine out of his suitcase, and looking at the cover — a woman with long hair, in high heels squatting — she thought that maybe it was because of the cover that he was carrying it around. He didn’t have a camera, and there was nothing to indicate that he cared anything about photography. He had also brought a green book bag and an antique straw suitcase full of clothes and cassette tapes. He said that he was learning Spanish as well as French, and that he was listening to cassette recordings of some recent novels, including The Thorn Birds . “What do you think?” he said. “Books on Tape is a wonderful idea. Much better than listening to junk on the car radio, but what do you think? Are they going to break into my car when they see the cassette deck in New York? If I park in a garage, am I better off?” He was rummaging in the suitcase for a handkerchief. He found it and wiped his face. “It’s hot,” he said. “It’s not just me? You don’t look very hot.”

“I’m hot,” she said. “Do you want to go out somewhere and sit for a while, and get cool?”

He took a shower first, digging into the book bag for the necessary things. “We have towels,” she said, and he said, “I always carry my own. Feel this towel. Isn’t that great? The most wonderful lady gave me that. Four summers ago we were stretched out on the beach at Ogunquit on this towel.” He took out a soap dish with a piece of ribbon tied around it. He went into the bathroom, saying, “I thought I’d put Horton out of my head. I’m surprised I remembered so much about him. What do you think? I didn’t do the wrong thing telling you a few things about his old ladybug, did I?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He closed the bathroom door, and when she heard the water running she shivered, realizing how hot she was.

She thought about Spangle in Madrid, and wondered if he was staying there because life here was uninteresting. She had put in so many years with Spangle — a lot of them because he wanted it a lot more than she ever had — so that by staying away, he was withholding more than himself from her. With him gone, part of her past was gone, and that was hard to deal with because the present wasn’t any too happy. Soon it would be September, and she would be back in school. She smiled, thinking about the way Spangle got her out of bed, if he got up before she did: He put on the record of the Yardbirds singing “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.” A lot of things had gone wrong between them the past year, but she couldn’t believe that he’d stay in Madrid and not even contact her. She was tempted to want him to stay, just because it would upset his mother, but she had also started to worry. The good thing about being her students’ age, she remembered, was being in love with somebody who was around. Some of her girlfriends tortured themselves by loving boys at private schools or military schools, but most of them had a day-by-day boyfriend. Her boyfriend from high school had become a Marine and later acted in an underground porn film about Vietnam that she never got to see. Someone who had seen the film told her that he was in drag in the film — a peasant woman who got raped. The person who had seen it and told her that was pretty unreliable, though. He himself was a failed actor, and it would be like him to be jealous of her old boyfriend and to make up a lie like that. When she turned twenty-one, her old boyfriend had had a birthday cake that said “OM” made for her at Carvel. That was after the Marines, and before the porn film. During the break, there had been an ice-cream cake.

Bobby came out of the bathroom wearing the same denim shorts and a new T-shirt, with a picture of a chocolate-chip cookie on it that seemed as big as a pizza. Famous Amos. He had rolled up the short sleeves punk-style. “You thought of a place to get bagels that’s air conditioned?” he said.

She knew a place, but they’d have to drive to it. That was okay with Bobby. He got his car keys and said he’d take them.

The car was parked in the No Parking zone outside the building. A ticket was clamped under one wiper-blade, and he got in and started the car without removing it. After a couple of blocks he turned on the windshield wiper. “Damn,” he said, for the first time, when the wipers kept going back and forth, the ticket underneath the blade. He stopped the car, got out and ripped up the ticket and threw it in the street, got back in. He pushed a cassette into the tape deck and listened for a couple of minutes to a man reading with a slight accent, not exactly a British accent but close, in a somber, quiet voice: “… George Washington. Famous portrait of Washington left unfinished because artist took on more than he could handle. Very ambitious artist. Washington who chases his slaves or Jefferson?”

Bobby hit the button, and the cassette popped out. “I don’t think I’m in the mood for that,” he said.

The seats of his Mazda were covered with terrycloth. There was a rainbow painted on the floor. The floor was all vinyl, no rug: It was a beautifully painted rainbow that she didn’t feel right about putting her feet on. Hanging from the rear-view mirror was a pencil sharpener, and on the dashboard was a souvenir of New York City: the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, about an inch apart, on a bronze base. A woman’s ring was hung around the Statue of Liberty’s arm. Around the Empire State Building there were tabs from soft-drink cans. In the back seat was an engine from a toy train. An unopened pack of Camels was on the floor, and several other parking tickets. The bumper sticker, she noticed before she got in, said “I Brake for People Who Brake.” He had noticed her looking at it. One of his students (“beautiful girl — it is absolutely necessary to keep your hands off of first-year students”) had given it to him. She had also sent him a hand-knit red turtle-neck sweater at Christmas. Next year, he said, he was going to look her up and invite her for dinner and see how serious she was.

In the restaurant she had a Swiss cheese sandwich with mushrooms on pita bread, and he ate three onion bagels, two with cream cheese and the last one with butter.

As they ate, she found out things about Spangle she hadn’t known: that he used to cook seven different kinds of spaghetti sauce; that he read and liked Norman O. Brown; that while he was fixing up his house, he watched soap operas on TV; that he had been so terrified of a grass snake he saw slither under his raspberry bushes that he wore thigh-high fishing boots whenever he picked berries. It sounded like a calm and funny existence, and she wondered what had driven him out of the woods. He had been afraid to go on with that life, and she had no idea why. Even Bobby admitted that Spangle was probably not the same person he had known: For one thing, Spangle hadn’t told her about him, and in the old days, all of Spangle’s friends knew all his other friends. Whenever it rained in Vermont, Bobby said, he and Spangle used to joke about the house as Noah’s Ark. The couples moved around a little, but they didn’t move out, except for one or two times when things got too ugly. The first spring in the house, there were four couples living there when Bobby went there alone, and the backyard was a mud pond, and the people with rubber boots carried the people who didn’t have them on their shoulders when they went out for food, or to the movies. Spangle had an answering service so that his mother couldn’t get through. Spangle’s brother Jonathan would come up sometimes on the weekends with stolen turkeys from the supermarket where he worked, and they had regular Thanksgiving feasts all through April and May. The girl who had a lot of her stomach removed had been involved with Jonathan for a while.