Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“I don’t even know Victor,” she said.

“You’ll like Victor. He doesn’t have any interest in what he’s doing. He just fell into doing it, answering an ad in the SoHo News . He thought they were looking for somebody to drive an ice-cream truck.”

She laughed. The first laugh all day.

“I know it,” he said. “Poor Victor. Victor had such an amazing record collection, and he just put them in boxes and carried the boxes out to the street and started selling them. I can’t believe it. He has to move to New Hampshire.”

The operator broke in: “It is now three minutes. Signal when through.”

Bobby seemed not to have heard. “He thought the ad was worded so vaguely because it was a job driving an ice-cream truck, and he thought it would be fun to drive an ice-cream truck. He didn’t mind. He tried to find the ad to show me, but he’d thrown it away. I wrote a poem about it. He’s very upset. I have to get Victor out of New York.” She heard trucks roaring by. “He had ‘Please Crawl Out Your Window,’ ” he said. “He had these records of Sherpas playing wind whistles. At least he got some money for ‘Please Crawl Out Your Window.’ He’s very upset because there was an item in Rolling Stone about the new Dylan record being religious. That upsets Victor very much. Oh — it’s not that, it’s the place he’s working. You won’t believe what an injustice has been done, when you meet Victor.”

“I don’t want to meet Victor,” she said.

“I’ve told you the story all wrong. I did everything that I intended not to do. I spilled the beans about Spangle and I told you that I wanted you to live with me and I didn’t give you a balanced picture of Victor. Believe me, you’d like Victor.”

“Why don’t you hang up, and we can talk about this when I see you?”

More traffic, Bobby shouting something into the phone about bagels.

“That’s nice,” she said, guessing at what he was saying. “But if you want me to live with you, you can hardly object that I’m taking you to dinner.”

“Will you?” Bobby said.

“Live with you? Of course not. I’m going back to Yale in the fall.”

“We can commute,” Bobby said. “The Mazda is totally reliable. In the snow we can take the train. This is the wrong time to ask you. It must have been terrible, going into the classroom and thinking of what to say to them about that girl that got shot.”

“They seemed more human,” she said.

“People talk about people having hearts on their sleeves. I think that people always have their emotions outside of them — pieces of their soul in a sneeze, even. They have eyes like a deer that’s been shot. Nobody can cover up. You should have known Victor before, and then see Victor now. And he’s a genius . He can point to the one wrong word in a thousand. It’s like perfect pitch, but he has it with words.”

“Why don’t you come back to New Haven, if you’re coming,” she said.

“Because I can’t hang up this way. I have to know that you’ll let me have another chance. That if I can calm down, you’ll let me try to talk to you about all this again.”

“I really don’t want to hear any more about Victor,” she said.

“What have I done?” Bobby said. “I’ve distorted everything. You think Victor is just another crazy. If you knew him, you’d see that he’s absolutely innocent, that he falls into these things because of some honest misunderstanding. He would enjoy driving an ice-cream truck. That’s really the truth. If something really bad hadn’t happened to his head, he never would have boxed up his records and gone out to sell them. He told me he was having nightmares of flying saucers, and he figured out that it was the records — his lost records. Do you think you could meet Victor and forget what I’ve told you and just see if you like him or not?”

“Bobby,” she said.

A truck went by. A blur of noise. Bobby shouting over the truck, all of it indistinguishable.

“Will you be there?” he shouted.

“Why not?” she said.

“How does something like this happen?” he said. “What do you think?”

“How does what happen?”

“What I’ve been saying to you. My stopping there by chance, and just when I was deciding that I had to have you, Victor sees Marielle, and she says that Spangle’s in New York.”

“I’m not a piece of pie,” she said.

“I know you’re not pie. I’m expressing myself all wrong. Will you be there, so we can talk about this calmly?”

“We have to talk calmly,” she said. “I’ve had about all I can take today.”

“Be there,” Bobby said. “I promise — totally calm. Any way you want it.”

“Jesus. I just want to forget this summer and go back to school in the fall.”

“You don’t mean that. At least come to the waterfall party and think about it. You have to give things a chance. I’m already writing something about the waterfall party. Did you know that Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage without having been to war?”

“Please,” she said. “Can you tell literary anecdotes later? It’s very hard to hear you. Could you just hang up?”

A truck went by. She was sure that he hadn’t heard the last part of what she’d said. “Please?” she said.

“… fact,” he said. “A fact, not an anecdote.”

She hung up and started to cry. She cried the way she had been tempted to cry when she walked into the classroom and the air was different, the faces were different, the game wasn’t the same. She walked in as a teacher, and they wanted answers. They didn’t know how to ask for them, but by the way they looked at her, she could tell they wanted to know what had happened. And she had wanted to cry: not to analyze, not to begin to plow through some explanation, just to join them, and cry. Instead, she had begun to talk about The Old Man and the Sea , and they had stared at her like the young boy staring at Santiago. They were too old for her to get them busy making get-well cards. Finally she had told them that things just happen. She had just said it, tried it on like some article of clothing that wasn’t hers. But for a while she could parade around in cynicism.

Actually she fell into things because she wasn’t cynical enough. Spangle had tricked her when he had offered to drive her back East, from Berkeley, years ago. What he wanted was for her to be in Berkeley with him, not in school. He really had no respect for what she was doing, but he liked her, or needed her, or whatever it was, and he pretended to be doing something nice for her, but actually he had done it as a ploy: In return for being so nice about escorting her back, he was expecting her not to stay. When he stopped holding her hand, she knew what it meant, but she paid no attention to it: like paying no attention to a shadow on the wall at night because the lock is secure. Paying no attention, really, out of absolute fear. She had been terrified of losing him, because so much of her life was tied up with him. They weren’t just her experiences, they were theirs ; and if he went off with a piece of them, it would be like a lock without a key, a ring without a stone. He had wanted them to get married, and when she said no, he had never asked again. He had stopped almost everything, except teasing her in a way that was more cruel than affectionate. Embarrassing her by drawing her face on the ditto master, tickling her until she screamed, making sex into a joke, sending her post cards to shock her, like a dirty little boy, instead of the letter she wanted. Even a lying letter would have sufficed. And if he wasn’t coming back, a note, a brief call, at least, about that too. She had been so willing to believe him. She cried, because she had been so willing to believe him. She had even thought that his not understanding irony in literature proved what an honest, trusting person he was: If it was printed on the page, it was to be taken straight. If he was what he said he was, not what he appeared to be, then you had to believe him, didn’t you? No. You didn’t have to do anything. Not even stay with him because he had said, once, that what he wanted was always to have you. She remembered that she had given him a kite, and after flying it once he had pinned it to the wall, for fear of damaging it. She had thought that she understood him perfectly, and obviously she had not. The kite might stay safely on the wall, but he would fly off himself, fly off and be gone, no word. He would protect an inanimate thing, and hurt her. Hold hands with her all day, because inside he was free, floating, nothing was restricting him.