Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Okay,” he said, nodding.

“Okay?” Nina repeated, stretching across the table to clasp his hand. “When?”

He smiled at her and shook his head. “August, I guess. At the end of summer.”

“I hate it that it has to be at the end of summer. That it has to be when something’s over, I mean. We’ll both be thinking more about what’s over than what’s beginning.”

“I think it’s already begun,” he said, squeezing her legs between his under the table.

“I’m serious,” she said. “I’m talking about how I feel.”

“I can’t erase my life,” he said. He picked up the menu. “I’m so used to complaints that I think everybody’s complaining,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know what you were saying.”

“I wanted bluefish,” she said. “On top of everything else, I was thinking about baked bluefish all afternoon.”

He was thinking that his wife was going to get custody of Brandt. Although he didn’t love his mother, he felt sorry that she would be losing the one thing she had formed an attachment to besides Ming vases.

There was a child wandering around the restaurant who was younger than his son, but who looked like him. He had come by once before, and shyly made eyes at Nina. She had lifted her napkin from her lap and shaken it out and put it over her eyes, slowly lowering it as she winked at the child and raised it again. He must have been two years old, wearing blue corduroy shorts and a shirt with a worm coming out of an apple on the front.

The waitress came back to the table, and they both ordered salmon. He had tried to get John Joel to taste different kinds of fish because fish had fewer calories than meat, but his son couldn’t stand the sight or smell of fish. John Joel was still fat and carnivorous; it was obvious that he was sneaking food because he was still just as overweight, even though Louise had put him on a diet. He had a double chin that John often felt like taking hold of to shake some sense into him. John Joel never looked good in the summer: He got blotchy pink, but didn’t tan, and the shorts and shirts he wore made his body look worse than his winter clothes did. Up in his tree, resting on the limb, he reminded John of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland .

“I’m sorry I’m grumpy,” she said. “I’ve been in a bad mood all day.”

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I didn’t have a very good weekend either. I got a letter from an old boyfriend who’s over in Europe, and all he talked about was how he’d blown all his money. I’m not very sympathetic to people who have a lot of money to piss away. I was thinking about you out on your three acres of land, and I was feeling very cooped up in that tiny apartment. How can you like that apartment so much? Just because it’s so different from what you have?”

“It is small. One of the pillars at the end of my driveway is as wide as your bedroom.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Yes. There aren’t any pillars at the end of the driveway.”

A man was standing beside Nina’s chair. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but your little boy wandered into the kitchen, and we’ll have to ask you to keep him at the table. He could get hurt in the kitchen.”

“What?” Nina said.

“He isn’t our child,” John said.

The maître d’ looked puzzled. He turned and looked at a couple sitting at a table in the opposite corner. John looked, too. The woman was talking drunkenly, and the man was paying no attention to her; he was laughing silently and pointing at the maître d’ in a parody of the way someone would ridicule another person.

“Very amusing,” the maître d’ said, without apologizing to John. He went to the corner table and began to argue with the man, who now also looked drunk. The little boy stood with his back to the kitchen door, staring at them. The next person who came through the door was going to trip over him. John sighed and didn’t watch. He broke off another piece of salmon and put it in his mouth.

“God,” Nina said. “Those people must be crazy. Look at the poor little boy — he’s not even going up to his parents’ table.”

“I hope you don’t want kids,” he said. “I’m a rotten father.”

“I don’t think you’d be a rotten father.”

“As I said: I hope you don’t want kids.”

“I’m not the only one in a bad mood,” Nina said. She ate a leaf of lettuce with her fingers. “I wish I could see your house,” she said. “I’d like to see the pillars that don’t exist at the end of the driveway.”

“The driveway isn’t even paved. It’s gravel.”

“Ah,” Nina said. “You also want me to feel sorry for you. Next you’ll give me the line my mother always gives me: that there are great jobs for college graduates, if only they will go out and find them. You know what my mother’s done her whole life? Played bridge and gone to the track in the summer.”

“How come you were an only child?” he said.

“My father says it’s because my shoes were so expensive. He was shocked. They had to be Stride-Rites, with a quarter-inch built-up arch. I was flat-footed.” She took a drink of wine. “My mother says it’s because my father said my shoes were too expensive.”

One of the two men who had just been seated at a table adjacent to theirs was looking appreciatively at Nina. He didn’t stop until John caught his eye. The man had long hair and a T-shirt that said “Chicken Little Was Right”; the man sitting with him had on a business suit and a black band tied high on his arm. The fedora on the table belonged to one of them. When John stopped looking, the little boy was walking toward their table, eyeing the hat that rested slightly over the edge.

“My youngest son has the measles,” he said. “Have you had the measles?”

“This is very romantic talk,” she said, running her foot up his leg.

“Have you?”

“Measles,” she said. “Yes. I have had measles.”

She really was not in a very good mood. Ordering a bottle of wine instead of a glass had been her idea. If she continued to drink the wine as quickly as she had been, there was no doubt that they would make it back to her apartment with time to spare before Horton Watson got there.

Nina had first introduced Horton to John as “a ghost from the past.” “Are you saying I’m a spook?” Horton had asked. It was very odd, Horton’s smile. He had false teeth, and they were shiny white and perfectly even. Horton smiled a lot. If what people were saying to him didn’t make him smile, he told a joke or just muttered to himself. Horton would only go a few minutes without smiling.

They left the restaurant and walked back to Columbus Avenue. Horton was already there, on the front step, white hat pulled low over his eyes, looking — except that he was tall and thin — like a Mexican taking a siesta. A white puff went up from below his hat. Horton was smoking a cigarette.

“There I was on Park Avenue,” Horton said, pushing back the brim of his hat. “Martini cocktail. Nice shiny Steinway piano I could play. Not that the lady would have liked any song I might have selected to play, but I could have gone ahead and played it anyway while she, you know, pretended to really rock to it. No, I said to myself: Horton, a man has got to honor his commitments. Turns out I was a little early — might have banged out a tune or two before I left. ‘Course, she was itchy for me to leave. Bad enough her husband knows she smokes. Man doesn’t want to come home and see some spook banging out songs on his piano. Business is business, of course, but no reason for the man to see the business. All he’s got to see is a neat little box left behind, joints all in a row.” They went into the building, and the landlady opened her door and looked at them. Horton grabbed Nina on the stairs, laughing.