Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

Nina had gone into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He went into the kitchen and decided to make coffee and try to get his head straight. If she was letting him stay, he should at least try to take her problems seriously. He wondered if he had really offended her by saying that if it hadn’t been her it would have been somebody else. Because he couldn’t imagine her with some middle-aged man, a man with money, who worked at a fancy job and had a fancy house in the suburbs. Lemon lilies on the front lawn. Sprinklers on the putting green at the country club. Was Nina getting old? Was that why that life had started to attract her? He had asked her that, and that had been the wrong thing to say, too: Even if she found it attractive, she said, she wasn’t going to get it. And if she had ever had a chance, it was gone now. He was guilt-stricken and he had admitted that he was a coward, and he was right back there now, wasn’t he? She had been red in the face, about to cry, and then she had sighed and stomped off to the bathroom. She took showers the way other people got drunk or smoked until they were stoned. She would be reincarnated as a water nymph. He could be adrift in the bulrushes and she could be bathing there, and swim after him. Where would the myth go from there? Bobby would have been able to guess, in one of his poems. He always used to imagine beautiful situations that worked out perfectly. Or at least that was the way he had read Bobby’s poems, and it had taken a long time to figure out that Bobby wasn’t smiling because he was flattered, but because of the way he, Spangle, almost always misunderstood them. Spangle had had no ear for irony. Cynthia said that, too. She said that she couldn’t imagine how he had ever passed freshman English. “How can anybody be smart about life when they don’t understand literature?” she had asked him. “What happens to characters happens to characters, and what happens to you and me happens to you and me,” he had said. She had asked him, then, if he was speaking ironically. Maybe not ironically, but humorously? He dodged the question. Probably she was smarter than he was. Probably that was the truth.

He was drinking coffee and listening to News Radio Eighty-Eight. Someone was discussing cottage cheese. He listened as long as he could stand it, then changed the station. Someone was saying something about Joe Cocker, and he felt a tingling in his fingers, on the dial, because he thought that what was being said was that Joe Cocker was dead. But it wasn’t that. The announcer was saying that Joe Cocker hadn’t been heard from for a long time, but he wasn’t saying that he would never be heard from again. There’d been enough of that. Enough of everybody dying. Enough of his not getting his own life together. John wasn’t the only coward. He was settling for biding time, swinging in a hammock, quite literally, over neutral territory. Here was an irony he understood: He was in Nina’s kitchen, wanting her back, and Joe Cocker was singing a song called “Do I Still Figure in Your Life?” He finished the cup of coffee. “Nina?” he hollered. “Want coffee?”

Another irony: While he was sobering up to have a serious talk with her, she had disappeared. He had not heard her go. She had put on her clothes and gone out, without even saying goodbye. Not even the falsely polite goodbye of years ago, when she left Vermont for New York — just a shower, clothes pulled on, purse picked up, gone. He looked for her purse, and when he didn’t see it, he was sure that she had done more than just duck out for a minute.

He finished all the coffee in the pot, waiting for her. The coffee made him edgy. The situation made him edgy. He didn’t have any right in her apartment after all this time, and he was sure that she had left because she didn’t think he would get straight, or care about her problem. She thought he was Groucho or Harpo, just showing up to clown around.

He put Bitches Brew on the stereo and waited. He waited a long time, and blamed himself silently for what had happened. He called the painter’s apartment, looking for advice, he supposed, from his brother, but the phone rang and rang. No brother. If he had any idea where Nina would go, he would go look for her. If he knew who any of her friends were, he would call them, act casual, try to find out if she was there. She must have been very disgusted to just walk out of her apartment and leave it to him. He must have really done and said the wrong things. He resisted the temptation to roll a joint and smoke it. When an argument started on the street he got up and went into the bedroom to watch. One man was shoving another. A woman in spike heels was holding one of the men’s hats, standing there and looking casual. It took him a second to see that a child was standing behind her. He never got a clear look at the child, but while the men yelled and threatened each other, the woman lost interest and started tossing the hat in the air and catching it. She finally put it on her head, took the child by the hand and walked off down the street, and that was what broke up the fight — the tall man wanted his hat. He ran after her, arm outstretched, calling her name. The woman disappeared around the corner and the man behind her followed. Only the short man in the lavender shirt unbuttoned to his waist was left standing on the sidewalk, wiping his forehead. For the first time, Spangle realized that the man’s forehead had been cut. He saw a knife on the ground. He had watched the whole thing, and he hadn’t known what he was looking at. It had just been a series of jerky movements and curses in the half-dark. Even the woman had stood there as though nothing important was happening. The man took off his shirt and pressed it to his head. He walked away, holding the shirt in a wadded-up ball against one side of his head, ignoring the people on the street as they ignored him. Spangle sat on the bed. She was out there. Somewhere, Nina was out there, and if anything happened to her, it would be his fault.

He paced the apartment, turned off Bitches Brew and put on a Mozart string quartet to make himself calm. He called his brother again, but no Jonathan, no answer. How unlike her, just to walk out. How insensitive he had been, not to realize how disturbed she was. She was entitled to her apartment, but he had managed to chase her out of it. The least he could do was be gone when she came home. He deserved to have to worry about her, calling every ten minutes, until he heard her voice and knew that she was back, and safe. He was writing a note to her, apologizing, leaving her the painter’s number and asking her please not to hate him so much that she wouldn’t just call and say that she was all right, when there was a knock on the door. He got up, thinking: She forgot her key. That was what she had liked about the house in Vermont — no locks. But before he pulled the door open, he asked who was there, to make sure. What he had just seen outside had reminded him where he was.

“John,” the voice said.

“What are you doing here?” Spangle said, opening the door.

“What are you doing here?”

“Making a nuisance of myself. She was upset, and I upset her more.” He stood aside and let John in.

“Where is she?” he said.

“She went out. I pissed her off, and she went out. I was just leaving myself. I guess I’ll go ahead and leave. She’ll be happier to see you here than me.”

“I don’t know about that. I called her at work today, and she wouldn’t come to the phone. She was there, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Spangle said. “As far as I know, she worked all day.”

“And you don’t know where she went?”

“No. She was taking a shower, and I was getting myself together drinking coffee in the kitchen. The radio was on pretty loud, and I was daydreaming, I guess, and when she got out of the shower she dressed and went out without saying anything. I deserved it. She didn’t have any way of knowing that I’d get it together.”