Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

John sat in the humpback chair, ran his hand over his face. What she had told him had come true: He would come to the apartment knowing she would be there, and she would be gone. At least she was not gone with Spangle. Yet.

“What did you say that disturbed her?”

“It was just some stoned-out discussion.” Spangle was afraid John could read his mind, and knew he had said that if John hadn’t fallen in love with Nina, he would have fallen in love with someone else.

“Do you want me to make you some coffee?” Spangle said.

“Would you?” John said. As Spangle got up to walk into the kitchen, John said, “Did you tell me you were going?”

“I’ll go when she comes back. I think as long as I’m here so late, I’ll just sit around for another minute. I’m sure she’ll be back pretty soon. She was tired when she went out.” Spangle ran the water, filled the pan to put on the stove. “I’m a shit,” he said. “I’ll bet you could murder me for fucking with her head so she disappeared. You two had a good thing going, and suddenly I show up. I’m a shit,” Spangle said. “What she told you was the truth: I didn’t sleep with her.”

“I believed her,” John said.

“But I’m such a shit that I was going to suggest it.”

“I believe that, too.”

“Smart,” Spangle said. “That why she likes you so much?”

“No,” John said. “She’s seen what a good job I’ve done making a life for myself, and she probably thinks she can learn from me. Give her an idea about how to be loyal to the person you marry, how to raise children — things like that.”

“She doesn’t think you’re a shit,” Spangle said.

“I don’t either, really. I’m mad at everyone around me. I got to talk to some shrink that wasn’t much older than my daughter — of course, Nina’s not much older than my daughter — about my anger . See, I was there when my son pulled the trigger.”

“You were?” Spangle said.

“Not in fact, but to all intents and purposes I was there. That’s what she told me, and then when I got angry, she told me that I was angry at my family. She was suggesting to me that I was to blame for my son shooting my daughter. She had even met Parker — his friend, Parker; that’s a long story — and she still thought that what I needed to understand about the situation was that I shared the blame.” John shook his head. “Smart,” he said. “Right-out-of-graduate-school smart.”

“Black or with milk?” Spangle said, getting up.

“Black,” John said.

“Jesus Christ,” Spangle said. “I’m glad I don’t have your life. The only thing I envy you for is Nina.”

“It’s the only thing I’m to be envied for.”

“Is she all right, your daughter?” Spangle said. “Nina said she called the hospital, but they don’t tell you anything over the phone except that the patient hasn’t died. Not that she thought she’d died. She just wanted to call. Maybe I should just shut up.”

“Everybody’s fine. They’re shot, or they’re mentally ill — everybody’s all doped up so that we can forget that it happened, or be calm enough to explore the reasons why it happened. They don’t like it if you refuse to get doped up. That’s part of your anger . It’s part of my anger that I won’t discuss Nantucket with my wife, too. I should get doped up and explore with her the reasons she wants to go to Nantucket. I’m to blame for not celebrating the Fourth of July. I’m to blame for walking out.”

“For walking out of what?”

“A family conference. My daughter couldn’t be there, because she was shot, and my son couldn’t be there, because he’s doped up to sleep all the time, and my other son, who lives with my mother, knows nothing about it and was at a Little League game in Rye. But my mother was there, and she was telling the girl who was right out of graduate school that I was running myself ragged leading such a hectic life, and that she had had a problem with alcoholism until she found something that mattered to her. That her life didn’t really shape up until Brandt came to live with her, and the girl is writing it all down, glaring at me, not even making a pretense of not hating me for whatever off-the-wall thing any of them said. And there’s Louise, wiping her eyes, talking about the beach at Nantucket, and her friend Tiffy — she’s inseparable from this feminist, who thinks all the trouble in the world is the result of sexist fairy tales read to us when we were children. So Louise is talking about sailboats and sunsets, and my mother keeps patting my hand and saying that I never sleep, that she wakes up and hears me at four in the morning, talking on the phone. Damn right, she does — to Nina, in New York. Louise just stared at me when my mother said that. I think she said it on purpose. Obviously I’m not talking to the garage at four a.m.”

“Everything changes,” Spangle said. “It doesn’t make any sense how much everything changes. When I first knew Nina, I would have thought that we’d both be in the country forever, and here she is on Columbus Avenue, and I’m in New Haven — I’m not in New Haven, but one of these days I’ve got to get back there and try to make some sort of order out of that.”

“When they were babies I never thought they’d be children, and when they were children I kept thinking of when they’d be grown. I didn’t think that somewhere in the middle there’d be a gunshot.”

“It’s just crazy,” Spangle said. “Anything can happen. You do something you really believe in, and the next day it doesn’t mean anything to you. The woman I live with in New Haven used to date a Marine, and he came home from Vietnam and acted in a porn film about the war, in drag. I met the guy once, and he told me about pigeons landing outside his window in the morning, how the beating of their wings reminded him of the sound the helicopters made, setting down in the fields. He was living in Harlem. Didn’t care what happened.”

“What happened?”

“Lost track of him.”

John was sipping the hot coffee, coming awake a little. “What do you do?” he said to Spangle.

“I’m a good-for-nothing. I’m on the last few thousand of an inheritance, and then I’ve got to go to work. I just went to Madrid and got my kid brother to come back and go to law school. Hoping he’ll support me someday. Let me sponge off of him.”

“Will he?” John said.

“Maybe. For a while. Or the woman I live with in New Haven. Lived with.”

“You want Nina,” John said.

“I do,” Spangle said. “The thing about Nina is that I can never get used to her. It used to bother me, but she’s lying, man, when she says she’s predictable. She doesn’t know what other women are like if she thinks she’s predictable. I mean, I don’t know how you can live with somebody unless there’s a part of them you can’t fathom. She was so nice to me the other night, and tonight she just walked out, not even a goodbye.” Spangle put down his empty coffee cup. He had now drunk way too much coffee. Bells were ringing in his body.

By the time Nina got back to the apartment, they were no longer talking. John had fallen asleep in the bedroom, in his clothes, on top of the quilt, light on, and Spangle, still wide awake from all the coffee, had been left alone in the living room. John had told him, when he was talking about his day with the psychiatrist, that he had found out guilt was only anger directed inward. But what did you know when you knew that? That he would be guilty if he took Nina from John? He was already angry at himself — what did a little more anger matter?

Nina wasn’t happy to see him. “I asked you to leave,” she said. She said it even before she realized that John was in the bedroom.