Falling in Place (13 page)

“What was Metcalf’s joke?”

“Same old joke,” Nick said. “Jesus Christ. What’s up with you?”

“I tried to call Nina and couldn’t get her. I just wanted to talk to somebody.”

“You should have been around today. The whole city left town. I went with Laurie to the Metropolitan and we sprawled in the grass in Central Park. Nice. Going to Hopper’s tonight. The bad news is that my wife called to say that Martin has to have his tonsils out. I told her to find a more progressive doctor—they don’t yank tonsils the way they used to.” Nick sighed. “I went over there early in the morning and talked to Martin. I asked him if he wanted to come along with us, but he didn’t. He was going roller-skating. A fever almost a hundred, and she lets him go roller-skating.” Nick sighed.

“I’d tell you what I’m in the middle of, but I don’t know myself. I’ll have a good story for you Monday morning. Want to meet me at the Brasserie early for coffee?”

“Sure. Eight?”

“Eight.”

“Nina all right?”

“I guess so. There wasn’t any answer.”

“I almost didn’t answer it. I thought it was Metcalf again. How he stays sober as a judge Monday through Friday, I’ll never know.”

“Valium. That’s not really sober.”

“He doesn’t take that much. Beats me.”

“What was his joke?”

“You know the joke. I’m sure you know it. Stop me, so I don’t have to tell the whole thing: What’s the difference between a Polish woman and a bowling ball?”

“What?” John said.

“Come on. You’ve heard it.”

“I haven’t heard it.”

“Why would anybody laugh at a sexist Polish joke anyway?”

“Okay. Forget it. See you Monday morning.”

“The other thing Metcalf does—Metcalf doesn’t call you on the weekends, does he?”

“No. He doesn’t bother me at work, either.”

“He’s afraid of you. He’s not afraid of me, and he calls me. You know how he starts conversations: ‘Hey, gork—’ Not even hello.”

“Gork?”

“I don’t know. His twin brother’s a neurosurgeon, and he gets these medical acronyms from him. It’s something insulting. I think his brother’s being a famous neurosurgeon fucked him up royal. I was out at his house in Sneden’s Landing last summer when his brother was there, and Metcalf was running around chasing his brother with a bread knife, saying he was going to do a vasectomy.”

When they hung up, John tried Nina again. No answer. He got in the car and drove, fast, to the drugstore. Before he got there, he could see that the lights were out. He pulled into one of the empty places in front of the drugstore and looked around, without getting out of the car. It was getting darker. In half an hour, on the ride home, it would be dark. He didn’t see her. If she had meant to run off, why wouldn’t she have done it when she left the restaurant? He got out of the car and peered into the dark drugstore. He stood with his back to the door, looking to the left and right. A man on a motorcycle pulled into the next space, turned off the ignition and kicked the kickstand down. He had on a helmet, gold and silver flecked, and mirrored sunglasses you could see out of, but not into. “Have change for a quarter?” he asked.

John reached in his pocket. He sorted through a palmful of change, and gave the man two dimes and a nickel.

“Thanks,” the man said. “I was going to buy a Hershey bar, but the drugstore’s closed. Suck-ass motherfucking town.” He walked around the corner.

“Louise!” John hollered. “If you’re here, this is your chance for a ride.”

The man jerked his head around the corner. “What’d you say?” he said.

“I came to pick up my wife,” John said. “You said it about this motherfucking town.” He looked at the motorcycle rider, who looked half interested, half put off. “What’s the difference between a bowling ball and a Polish woman?” John said to him.

The motorcycle rider didn’t miss a beat. “If you were really hungry, you could eat a bowling ball,” he said. He smiled. He was missing a bottom tooth. “Good joke,” the motorcycle rider said, and walked around the side of the drugstore.

John followed him around the corner. The man came to a stop in back of Louise, who was talking on the phone. The man put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and bounced on his toes, as Louise talked on the telephone. The phone booth was against the side of the drugstore. Louise had her hand cupped over the receiver. She was standing with her feet crossed at the ankles, talking quietly. She looked up and saw him.

“I guess you didn’t hear me,” he said, coming up next to her.

“See you tomorrow,” Louise said. “The hero has returned.” Her eyes were red. Her hair was pushed behind her ears, and she looked about twelve years old. Her face was freckled from the sun. She hung up and walked past John without speaking, on her way to the car.

“What was that, a conference call to Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller?”

“Very funny. Feminists as a class are very funny. We all know that.”

“I apologized,” he said. “But you had to get the upper hand, didn’t you?”

“I don’t want to argue,” she said. “What I’d like to do is take a drive out to the water. If you don’t want to do that, I’ll drop you at home.”

He thought about it. It would be nice to see the moon over the water, particularly if she didn’t want to argue.

“All right.”

“In fact, I’d like to drive, unless you would consider that getting the upper hand.”

“You want to drive?”

She nodded yes. He thought about it. When they got to the car, he opened the door on the driver’s side and closed it when she sat
down. As he moved away, the headache hit. When he got to the other side of the car, he was glad to sit down.

“I’m sick,” he said. “I’ve got a headache. Let’s just go sit by the water.”

“That was where I was going.”

The air changed when they went around the next bend. He reached out and turned off the radio; in his pain, he had been conscious of, and not conscious of, the way to stop the quiet rumble of the man’s voice. Leaning forward to turn off the radio sent a jab of pain through the top of his head. He rubbed it. He closed his eyes and kept rubbing.

“You know what I’d like?” she said. “Even if you hate me. Hate all of us. I’d like to go to Nantucket before the summer is over.”

“I thought you didn’t like it there.”

“I’ve been having dreams about it. There were things I did like. I’d like it if we could rent a boat.”

“You made me sell the boat,” he said.

“You did nothing but complain and worry all summer. And all winter, whenever anybody mentioned the boat, you’d roll your eyes and talk about how many problems it had and how much it cost. Remember on Christmas Eve when you started going through July and August’s checks, and adding up the cost of keeping up the boat?”

“Christmas makes me nervous. I was acting funny because it was Christmas Eve.”

“That’s a lie,” she said. “When you don’t want to talk straight, you don’t talk straight.”

“I don’t want to talk,” he said. He had also just realized that the window on his side was rolled up. He put it down and put his elbow out the window. He tried to rest his head on his arm, but that made his head pound worse.

“I’d sympathize if I thought this had to do with your emotions,” she said, “but at the risk of making you mad, I’ll say it anyway: You should tell them to hold the MSG. MSG gives you headaches.”

The air was almost cold. He waited for her to tell him to put up the window, but she didn’t. He opened his eyes and looked
at her, finally. Her short hair was lifted by the breeze, but it just fluttered in place; there was no way for it to tangle, no strand long enough to blow forward and obscure her face. She had on lipstick. She had had an argument with him, and eaten, and talked on the phone, and through it all, her lips were not their real color. They were pinker. A color pink he didn’t see women wear anymore, but he thought it was preferable to the red-black lipstick women in the office wore. Their nails were always painted the color of a bruise.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t see any reason why we can’t go to Nantucket.”

“Agreeable of you,” she said. “I’m surprised. Should I press my luck?”

“Why not? Go ahead.”

“It’s either you or me, and I would rather that you do it. Someone has to speak to Mary’s teacher. She won’t get credit for the course if she gets a D, and all of her papers but one are D’s.”

“What’s the matter with her?” he said.

“Ask her teacher.”

“Okay,” he said. “When?”

“Call and make an appointment.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Remember when she was born and you used to blow on the fuzz on top of her head and she liked it so well she’d close her eyes?”

She stopped on the hill above the marina and got out. He sat there while she climbed on the hood of the car again and looked at the boats bobbing. A man and a woman were dancing on the deck of one, in their bathing suits, to “Heart of Glass” on a portable radio. Down the road, he could see the cluster of cars at the soft ice-cream stand. A big black dog, the sort of dog a boy would run away with, knapsack on his back, in a Norman Rockwell painting, bounded down the middle of the street. No cars came by. He made it to the ice-cream stand, a boy about eight years old trailing behind him with a leash. It was almost dark, and he worried for both the boy and the dog. Louise was watching them, too. Probably she was thinking about her dog that had died. Years ago, before she decided that fishing was cruel, she used to fish at
the marina, from the base of the hill, or from the Pendergasts’ boat. The dog went with her and sat, quiet and panting, and leaped with joy when she pulled up a fish. Then he would lick it and guard it as it flopped. The dog had immense respect for Louise, and Louise for the dog.

He got out and sat beside her. The people on the boat were summer people. The Pendergasts’ boat was there, but they weren’t on it. He was glad, because he did not want to have a drink with anybody. He thought that an ice cream would taste good. He asked Louise if she wanted to walk down.

“In a minute,” she said.

He watched her watching the boats. Her eyes were still red, and she didn’t seem to care what she looked like. She had brushed up against something and gotten dirt on her leg. She ignored him as he looked at her. Finally he looked away, into the water, almost still, inky and still, lit up by the three-quarter moon.

After a while they walked to the ice-cream stand. The big black dog was there, hanging around, begging for ice cream. The boy with the leash was nowhere around. John asked a little boy in line ahead of him if he knew where the dog’s owner was. “Nope,” the boy said. The dog was staring at John. If the dog was still there when he got to the window, he was going to buy it a dish of ice cream.

The dog was still there. He got it a large dish of vanilla, and he and Louise got vanilla cones. The dog almost dove into the dish. “Hey! Lookit the stupid dog!” one boy said, and John almost exploded. “Leave the dog alone,” he managed to say, calmly. He stood there while the boy and his friend backed off. They had been about to grab the dog’s dish. John half wished that he had let them, and that the dog had bitten them. The dog slurped and slurped. Melted ice cream ran down John’s wrist, because he forgot to keep turning the cone and licking.

As they were walking away, a girl got out of a car giggling. A boy jumped out the other side, and then another boy. It was the two Bergman boys. Andy with his long mane of nearly white hair, cowboy shirt unbuttoned except for one button above his cowboy belt. The buckle was enormous, shaped like Texas, mother-of-pearl, surrounded by a thick silver rim. Andy was the errant son—
the last John had heard, Andy had flunked out of his second college and was doing lights for a band in New York. Lloyd was almost as tall as his brother, but without the mane of hair. He had on yellow aviator glasses, and he had caught up with the laughing girl and was pretending to be about to grab her, lunging and zigzagging from side to side like a basketball player blocking a shot. She had something she wasn’t giving him, and John might have found out what it was if Andy Bergman hadn’t recognized him and said hello. Then the game stopped. Angela pushed her hair out of her face and said hello very properly. She had on canvas shoes with high heels, shorts, and a tight T-shirt.

“What do you think?” Louise said, walking away, licking her cone. “Is what John Joel said true? Can you really tell by looking at them?”

They walked to the car in the dark. With his tongue cold from the ice cream, his headache felt better. He leaned against the car for a minute before he got in. He would have thought no about Nina, when actually she had been attracted to him and had been waiting for him to ask. So the fact that he thought yes about Angela probably meant no. He got in the car, chewing the last of the cone.

“What you did for the dog was nice,” she said. “You didn’t really dislike Mr. Blue, did you? Why did you act like you didn’t like my dog?”

“It just got to be a standing joke. I don’t know why.”

“But you liked him.”

“Yeah. Of course I liked him.”

“I am not going to cry,” Louise said. “I am going to drive, and if I did not cry in the restaurant I am not going to cry now.”

When they were home, in the bedroom, she lay on her side, leafing through the magazine on the floor. He looked down and saw a picture of a woman standing beside a car with its door open, her hand on the door, her foot raised, resting on the doorsill, a gold buckle on her shoe. The woman was looking off to the left. She wore a scarf, long and white, the sort Isadora Duncan must have had hundreds of. The scarf dangled down the front of a maroon velvet jacket, and beneath the jacket was a long pleated skirt, as silvery as tinsel. Behind the woman was a string of fuzzy lights. A
person with cataracts would have seen the lights that way, all aura and haze. The scarf was so white you couldn’t see the texture. The woman’s fingers held the edge of the scarf, as she stood with one foot in the door, one foot on the pavement, looking away.

“Vogue,” Louise said. “Care to make a comment?”

“I like the scarf,” he said.

He went into the bathroom. Through the wall he could hear, very faintly, the radio playing in Mary’s bedroom. She did not seem to be worried about flunking English in summer school. He supposed that it was his obligation to Mary to confront her teacher and say: She told me that
Vanity Fair
was about how things just fall into place. She’s fifteen years old and she knows
that
. Why is she failing English? He would imply, of course, that the teacher was not attuned to Mary. Not stimulating her. He tried to imagine Mary stimulated. She was always lethargic, resigned, sarcastic—though she had been right about
his
sarcasm. She had been the one to end that game, at dinner: Mary grew weary of things. He wondered if she might be weary of her weariness. If yes meant no in Angela’s case, then no might mean yes in Mary’s. He shook the thought away. He took a shower, blasting himself with hot water. He took four Excedrin before he got into the shower. It felt as if they had lodged about six inches down his chest and were there, still and heavy, like pebbles in a pond. He soaped himself briskly. The suds came up fast. Just as fast, he rinsed them off. He cupped his hands and splashed water on his face, then held his breath and turned his face up into the spray. When he took his face out, he thought he heard “Heart of Glass,” but when he turned the water off, he realized that what he had been hearing had been a man’s voice on the radio. It was not “Heart of Glass” for the second time that day, the millionth time this summer, after all. Nick had told him that once in Boston, years ago, he had been out of money and out of food, and the woman he lived with had left to keep bees with a sixty-year-old ex-professor of Slavic languages, and his eighteen-year-old sister had just put her baby up for adoption, and the girl he had hoped would be his new girl had called to say she had drawn night duty for the rest of the week. He had been sprawled in the hot Boston apartment he shared
with four other people, the window in his room jammed so that it would open only a couple of inches, wearing the same clothes he had worn for four days, with a slow, drumming toothache coming on and no money, late at night. The people in the apartment next door had come home and they had been laughing, and he knew that pretty soon he was going to have to listen to them, having more fun on their mattress than he was having on his, and the most he had been able to do was roll to the far side of his mattress. And then two amazing things had happened. A breeze had started, as strong as the low speed of a fan, a breeze after days of nothing but still air; and at the same time, from the apartment next door, a song so beautiful that he had wept but decided to stay alive: Diana Ross singing “Everything’s Good About You.” Nick credited the breeze and the song with saving his life. Nick was only five years younger than he was, but when Nick told stories like that, it broke his heart, as much as his heart broke when something terrible happened to one of his children. Actually, nothing really terrible had ever happened. A couple of frightening runs to the emergency room with infants whose fevers rose and rose and wouldn’t break, but lately—summer school? The crisis was that Mary was not doing well in summer school. He would take care of it.