Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“I have quite enough children, thank you.”

“You’re so clever,” he said. “You really do have a snappy come-back for everything these days.”

“Not everything,” she said. “I don’t know everything.” She turned over in bed. “I don’t want to, either. Why don’t you stop brooding and go to sleep?”

“You should really see this,” he said. “There are so many shooting stars tonight.”

“Are you sure it’s not pieces of Skylab falling?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” he said. “I’m not sure of anything, and I’m tired of your cleverness. You’re not going to quit, are you?”

She quit. She didn’t say another word, and eventually she fell asleep .

“YOU WANT me to always talk to you and tell you what’s the matter, right? So I’m going to talk to you: I’m getting tired of hearing about your weekends with your family.”

John was standing at the window, looking down on Columbus Avenue. There was a sidewalk café at the end of the block. People were roped in like cattle. Unlike cattle, they had umbrellas over their heads. Water to drink. San Pellegrino, no less. They weren’t going to be stunned by being struck on the head and then hoisted and cut and bled. Maybe one of them was; one, encountering some perverted mugger on the way back to his apartment, might later be found hanging by a meat hook in a deserted warehouse, but the chances were against it. The chances were really against it. That you had a good chance never to end up snagged on a meat hook in a deserted warehouse made going into New York five days a week plausible. Nina, the woman he was in love with, helped too. He knew that he should not talk to her so much about his family, but after the weekend he was always depressed, and she was the person closest to him.

She was washing her hair in the kitchen sink. He had started to leave clothes at her apartment, and she had started to wear them. At the moment, she was wearing his jockey shorts and nothing else, cupping her hand and pouring water through her hair. With her hair still wet, they would go out to dinner. At ten o’clock Horton Watson was coming to Nina’s apartment. He would stay around for the visit, to make sure she was all right when Horton left — to make sure that Horton did leave — then take a cab to the garage off Third Avenue to get his car and drive back to Rye. Instead of taking the train, he had driven into the city. Once or twice a week he liked to do that: to drive in fast, taking risks, so that some of his hostility was gone before he got to the office. On the days when he did not drive in, he usually went to a health club around the corner from where he worked and played handball during his lunch hour.

“It’s hard to picture you at a family barbecue,” she said, straightening up and wrapping a towel around her hair. “Do you use one of those three-pronged forks to turn the hot dogs over? One of those devil’s forks? You like to think of yourself as a devil — so bad for having a mistress. Do you have those barbecues to make yourself suffer for your sins?”

“I loved having barbecues when I was a kid,” he said. “The barbecues aren’t the only thing I feel bad about.”

“Did you know that eating one charcoal-broiled steak puts as many carcinogens in your body as smoking thirty packs of cigarettes?” she said.

He was looking at the broken half of the robin’s egg he had brought her from his backyard, holding it as carefully as he had ever held anything in his life. He put it back in the small saucer she kept it in.

“We didn’t even have steaks. We had hot dogs.”

“Well,” she said, hugging him from behind. “That’s something to feel very guilty about.”

She rubbed her hair so that it wasn’t dripping wet and went into the bathroom to hang up the towel. She opened a little jar of cream perfume and dipped into it with her index finger. She patted the finger across her forehead. She smoothed her hair back and went into the living room, where her dress was draped over the back of a chair.

He watched her pull the dress over her head and tug at it, and step into sandals. The dress was cotton, like a long T-shirt. It was black, and went to her knees, and she looked perfectly beautiful in it. She was ten years older than his daughter. He could slam balls into a wall for a million years, and it would never get rid of his frustration that he had married the wrong person and had the wrong children. His friend at work, Nick, said that the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.

“You haven’t told me if anybody funny came into the store today.”

She laughed. “Those people. They feel like they have to explain everything. Everybody who comes into that place is so defensive, as though everything they do is being watched and I’m going to judge them. One woman came in with twin daughters, about eight years old. She had a bag from Olof Daughters she put up on the counter; and she started apologizing for wanting something she knew we didn’t have — cotton knee socks; we didn’t have them — and then she started telling me that her daughters were going to Sweden to visit their father, and telling them, while I stood there, that it wasn’t going to be such a long flight. She stood in the aisle at Lord and Taylor’s for five minutes, apologizing for sending them to Sweden.”

“That’s okay, but it’s not very funny.”

“It wasn’t a very good day.”

“Hungry?”

“I guess I’d better be. We’ve got to be back here by ten.”

She got her big purple canvas bag from the bathroom doorknob and they went out.

“You know what else I’ve been feeling guilty about? That my daughter’s in summer school reading a pile of books I’ve never read myself. I bought Vanity Fair at the bookstore next to my office today. I’m going to start reading it tomorrow, when I take the train in.”

A man in a white chef’s hat mashed down low on his head passed them, carrying a radio that was blaring Linda Ronstadt singing “Blue Bayou.” Linda Ronstadt was way ahead of him; the man just kept chanting “I’m goin’ back some day” over and over. Hardly anyone on the street looked at him.

“I saw Carly Simon crossing Fifth Avenue today,” she said. “She had one of her kids by the hand. She was pretty.”

“Did she stop to say hello to you?”

“She had so much hair. I look bald by comparison. I don’t think I know one famous person. I have a friend who knows Linda Ronstadt, and my aunt went to school with Joan Kennedy. A girl who lives in my building once went to a beach party and jumped on a trampoline with David Nelson.”

“David Nelson?”

“I thought you were older than I am. Ozzie and Harriet,” Nina said, stepping off the curb. “That’s who you think you should be, probably — Ozzie. ‘Harriet, hon, defrost those four steaks, and I’ll flip them on the grill when I’ve finished reading Vanity Fair.’ ”

“What am I supposed to do, read some Watergate criminal’s book?”

“I know somebody who knows Ehrlichman.”

They went into the restaurant, and he asked for a table in the garden. There was a barrel by their table with a rose tree growing out of it. There was one large, perfect pink rose on the tree. Above them was a fire escape, with pots of geraniums pushed to the far side of the steps.

“Are you ever going to come live with me?” she said.

The waitress came to the table and put down two menus. “Excuse me,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that we have no bluefish, and no soft-shell crabs.”