Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“It’s a bitch,” the man said.

He nodded. “You know somebody who’s a patient here?”

“My wife. She was cutting the lawn, and she fell over. I thought she was dead. What a bitch. Mower kept going and crashed into the house. I wouldn’t have known. Had the television on. What a bitch.” He snapped his gum three times. “How about you?” he said.

“You probably read it in the papers,” John said. “My son shot my daughter.”

“I haven’t seen a paper in two weeks. My wife and I were in Ashland, Oregon. Come home and unpack, and the next day, whammo! She’s on her back in the yard. I thought she was kidding. They think it’s her heart, but nothing shows.” He had stopped chewing. “I don’t know what to say about what you said. I heard you, but I don’t know what to say. They young kids, fooling around, or what?”

“Ten and fifteen. My son is ten.”

“Holy shit,” the man said. “An accident, huh? How’d he get a gun?”

“Apparently it was around his friend’s house, in a box. The kid’s father didn’t have any idea his son knew the gun was there. How the gun got out of the box and into my son’s hands is still up in the air.”

“Holy shit,” the man said. “Ten and fifteen. She all right?”

“Yes. She’s going to be all right.”

“Holy holy,” the man said. “Lucky she wasn’t blown away. If you can say anybody’s lucky who’s been shot. I didn’t read about it in the papers. What’s it like, having a story about you in the paper? Never mind. That isn’t any of my business. You don’t chew gum? There’s a Coke machine hidden behind that door.”

The man pointed. He had a turquoise and silver ring on his index finger. His nails were a little long, and dirty.

“Thanks. I might get one later.”

“I wonder how many people are sitting around here, or lying in bed here, wondering what they did wrong? I left the room because the lady my wife shares it with was being examined. Not examined, butchered. A bone marrow extract. My God. One day in Ashland, the next day here.” The man lit a cigarette, offering one to John. John shook his head no. “Not exactly the next day. I barrel-assed back from Ashland, but it still took five days, you know? Not the next day really, but so to speak. Holy shit. I can’t believe I’m sitting here. Her sister’s coming, and it’s just as well if I can have a word with her before she goes in to see my wife. Her sister’s a nun, and my wife is an agnostic, and I want to try to get her to keep religion out of it. Just seeing her sister in her penguin get-up sets her off as it is. Some orders wear normal clothes now, but not her sister’s order. They voted no. Imagine. Jesus.”

“I thought I was going to faint a few minutes ago,” John said.

“You looked like it,” the man said. “I was all set to slide down the sofa and push your head between your knees. That works, you know.”

“I should go back to her room now,” John said. “They were having lunch.”

“My wife blew lunch yesterday,” the man said. “Cottage cheese and custard. Maybe not exactly cottage cheese, but something like it. I wonder how many people are sitting around this hospital right at this minute, trying to figure things out. This place is probably sending out more vibes than the Rand Corporation.”

He tried Nick again. This time nobody answered the phone. He let it ring six times, then hung up and took his dime back. He wondered if Metcalf could be right: Would Nick really be so childish as to subscribe Metcalf to magazines? It was absurd the way Nick always got riled up about Metcalf: He had a picture of Metcalf (taken at a picnic several years ago) enlarged to eight by ten, and hung it on the bathroom wall, in his apartment, to decondition himself. Nick thought that if he could look at Metcalf’s face without going wild, he could handle him better in person. But the picture just drove him crazy. One night when he was drunk, he got spooked about going into the bathroom, even though he knew where the picture was and wouldn’t have to look in that direction; he went into the kitchen instead and peed into an empty wine bottle. That absurdity, and the absurdity of Metcalf’s scheme to keep his lover around. The absurdity of being out of your mind, showing up at six in the morning, seven in the morning, whatever it was, at your lover’s apartment and finding a man there, even if nothing was going on. The craziness of going there. The craziness of finding happiness when you couldn’t have it; or of planning to have it, only to have this happen. It had happened. And Mary was in the room, waiting for him. He walked down the corridor and into her room. Her face was white, and her hospital gown and the sheets; and the sun had shifted so that the blinds looked bright white, strongly illuminated from behind. The nurse was taking Mary’s temperature. When he was a child, his mother had gone around in the evening with a thermometer in her mouth, because she had read somewhere that it would firm up the jawline. For a while his mother had cared about wrinkles. He could remember his father suggesting a straw instead, because a thermometer was depressing. His mother said that a straw would not be the same. You had to know the mercury was in there. You had to be steady and careful. You could not bite down. The thermometer they had at the hospital stood in a white plastic stand when it was not in use.

“Your mother’s in with John Joel,” he said. “Did I tell you that? She told me that she’s coming to see you at two or three. And Angela called this morning, and I told her it would be all right to visit. Was that all right to tell her?”

“She’s going to think I look gross,” Mary said.

“We’re all glad you’re all right. That’s all,” John said.

“That’s not all Angela thinks. I talked to her on the phone yesterday, and all she wanted to hear about was how big a bandage it was. She thinks it’s better that this happened than that I lost my tits like Marge Pendergast, or something. She wanted to know if they bathed me in bed every day. She thinks it’s a resort. She’s pretty stupid sometimes.”

“Should I have told her not to come?”

“Sure,” Mary said. “She’s only my best friend.”

“Your temperature’s normal. I’m not supposed to give any of that information, but it is, and why should I hold out on you about good news?” the nurse said.

“She doesn’t have circles under her eyes today,” John said.

“When she did, nobody said anything, and that was the right thing to do,” the nurse said. “It’s discouraging to patients to be told they look bad. I’ve been in rooms where people walked in and clamped their hands over their mouths.”

He pulled the small chair up to her bed. “Was lunch good?” he said.

“Suck-o,” Mary said.

“I was down in the sitting room, and I thought over what you said. Do you think it would be nice for all of us if there was a dog? We could get a dog when we come back from the vacation.”

“You’re moving back?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. Her eyes glazed when he said it, like a sick person’s. “In any case, we’re taking a vacation, and I think that you’re right — your mother might like a dog, and you might like it, too. What do you say?”

“You forgot him,” Mary said. “He’s coming back too, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Sure. After a little while. He’s talking to some doctors now, and he’s going to be staying with Grandma for a while.”

“She must think the sky is falling.”

“I imagine she does. She doesn’t cover up very well. When she’s upset she cries and raves. She knocked over one of her vases. You would have liked to have seen it. Pilar ran into the room and dealt with it. Pilar can deal with anything. I once saw Pilar swatting a fly with one hand while she was using a whisk to beat an egg with the other, and she never missed a beat.”