Falling in Place (35 page)

“The other one, I guess. At least, he never told me that she was operated on.”

“Yeah. I knew that one. I didn’t know the one who lost her stomach.”

Bobby was rolling a joint. He rolled it, looked at it, put it on the table. “You want a report on his flyaway ladybug,” he said. “I don’t know. We only overlapped by a week—she came, I went. Pretty. Scrawny. Smart. Left, finally, to go to New York. We went to see her there one night after our dealer got shot in a parking lot in Brattleboro, because Spangle knew she knew somebody in New York. I think she was going to school in New York, and I think Spangle had given her a little bread when she split. Anyway, this guy Horton came over. Somebody she and Spangle had known at Bard. That’s right—she wasn’t going to school in New York, she’d been at Bard with Spangle. I don’t know
what
she was doing in New York. She lived on Columbus Avenue. Now I’m starting to remember. She hadn’t been there long, and she was painting the walls white the night we went over, and Horton was fucking around, writing stuff on the wall in white paint before she painted it, stuff about… Jesus—this comes back to me: He kept telling what he called Italian-Mormon jokes, about the Angel Tortoni. He was scribbling away on the wall, and it was hard as hell to get his attention. All we wanted was grass.” Bobby smiled. “It’s funny now. It wasn’t funny then. I thought anybody that bizarro had to be a narc.” He lit the joint, inhaled, handed it to her. She waved it away. He stubbed it out. He sat silently, waited, exhaled slowly. “She still had her high school yearbook. Under their pictures they all had their favorite saying, and then it predicted what would become of them. I don’t remember what the prediction was for her. I just remember the first line of Blake’s sunflower poem under her name. Odd.” Bobby examined the extinguished cigarette. “I was a lifeguard,” he said. “Splash splash.”

“I wonder how come women always want to know about other women, and men never want to know about other men?”

“Other way around,” he said. “I can’t stand it if I don’t find out who happened before me, or is happening along with me. I try to find out the first time I see a woman.”

“I think that’s atypical. Men never ask me about other men I’ve seen.”

“Who do you see besides Spangle?”

She laughed. “That’s funny,” she said, “because the answer is nobody. I met somebody nice last week, but it was business.”

“I find the finest ladies on business. Returning a book, interviewing job candidates. Agents, hopefully. I’m only talking to women agents.”

“You seem pretty crazy about the ladies.”

“Oh, I am. I’ve proposed twice this year alone. I know I’m going to do it again. I always propose more in the summer. If I lived in California, I’d be married.”

“Why?” she said.

“The weather. Hot weather makes me propose. Ladies in bathing suits and halter tops and shorts, going skinny-dipping and hiking, walking in back of them when we’re hiking through the woods… ”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I’m not. I’m glad summer isn’t any longer than it is.”

“What would you do if one accepted?”

“Marry her. I never propose unless I’m serious.”

He bent another beer can in half and set it carefully on the table, on top of
American Photographer
. He had taken the magazine out of his suitcase, and looking at the cover—a woman with long hair, in high heels squatting—she thought that maybe it was because of the cover that he was carrying it around. He didn’t have a camera, and there was nothing to indicate that he cared anything about photography. He had also brought a green book bag and an antique straw suitcase full of clothes and cassette tapes. He said that he was learning Spanish as well as French, and that he was listening to cassette recordings of some recent novels, including
The Thorn Birds
. “What do you think?” he said. “Books on Tape is a wonderful idea. Much better than listening to junk on the car radio, but what do you think? Are they going to break into my car when they see the cassette deck in New York? If I park in a garage, am I better off?” He was rummaging in the suitcase for a handkerchief. He found it and wiped his face. “It’s hot,” he said. “It’s not just me? You don’t look very hot.”

“I’m hot,” she said. “Do you want to go out somewhere and sit for a while, and get cool?”

He took a shower first, digging into the book bag for the necessary
things. “We have towels,” she said, and he said, “I always carry my own. Feel this towel. Isn’t that great? The most wonderful lady gave me that. Four summers ago we were stretched out on the beach at Ogunquit on this towel.” He took out a soap dish with a piece of ribbon tied around it. He went into the bathroom, saying, “I thought I’d put Horton out of my head. I’m surprised I remembered so much about him. What do you think? I didn’t do the wrong thing telling you a few things about his old ladybug, did I?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He closed the bathroom door, and when she heard the water running she shivered, realizing how hot she was.

She thought about Spangle in Madrid, and wondered if he was staying there because life here was uninteresting. She had put in so many years with Spangle—a lot of them because he wanted it a lot more than she ever had—so that by staying away, he was withholding more than himself from her. With him gone, part of her past was gone, and that was hard to deal with because the present wasn’t any too happy. Soon it would be September, and she would be back in school. She smiled, thinking about the way Spangle got her out of bed, if he got up before she did: He put on the record of the Yardbirds singing “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.” A lot of things had gone wrong between them the past year, but she couldn’t believe that he’d stay in Madrid and not even contact her. She was tempted to want him to stay, just because it would upset his mother, but she had also started to worry. The good thing about being her students’ age, she remembered, was being in love with somebody who was around. Some of her girlfriends tortured themselves by loving boys at private schools or military schools, but most of them had a day-by-day boyfriend. Her boyfriend from high school had become a Marine and later acted in an underground porn film about Vietnam that she never got to see. Someone who had seen the film told her that he was in drag in the film—a peasant woman who got raped. The person who had seen it and told her that was pretty unreliable, though. He himself was a failed actor, and it would be like him to be jealous of her old boyfriend and to make up a lie like that. When she turned twenty-one, her old boyfriend had had a birthday cake
that said “OM” made for her at Carvel. That was after the Marines, and before the porn film. During the break, there had been an ice-cream cake.

Bobby came out of the bathroom wearing the same denim shorts and a new T-shirt, with a picture of a chocolate-chip cookie on it that seemed as big as a pizza. Famous Amos. He had rolled up the short sleeves punk-style. “You thought of a place to get bagels that’s air conditioned?” he said.

She knew a place, but they’d have to drive to it. That was okay with Bobby. He got his car keys and said he’d take them.

The car was parked in the No Parking zone outside the building. A ticket was clamped under one wiper-blade, and he got in and started the car without removing it. After a couple of blocks he turned on the windshield wiper. “Damn,” he said, for the first time, when the wipers kept going back and forth, the ticket underneath the blade. He stopped the car, got out and ripped up the ticket and threw it in the street, got back in. He pushed a cassette into the tape deck and listened for a couple of minutes to a man reading with a slight accent, not exactly a British accent but close, in a somber, quiet voice: “… George Washington. Famous portrait of Washington left unfinished because artist took on more than he could handle. Very ambitious artist. Washington who chases his slaves or Jefferson?”

Bobby hit the button, and the cassette popped out. “I don’t think I’m in the mood for that,” he said.

The seats of his Mazda were covered with terrycloth. There was a rainbow painted on the floor. The floor was all vinyl, no rug: It was a beautifully painted rainbow that she didn’t feel right about putting her feet on. Hanging from the rear-view mirror was a pencil sharpener, and on the dashboard was a souvenir of New York City: the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, about an inch apart, on a bronze base. A woman’s ring was hung around the Statue of Liberty’s arm. Around the Empire State Building there were tabs from soft-drink cans. In the back seat was an engine from a toy train. An unopened pack of Camels was on the floor, and several other parking tickets. The bumper sticker, she noticed before she got in, said “I Brake for People Who Brake.” He had noticed her looking at it. One of his students (“beautiful girl—it is
absolutely necessary to keep your hands off of first-year students”) had given it to him. She had also sent him a hand-knit red turtle-neck sweater at Christmas. Next year, he said, he was going to look her up and invite her for dinner and see how serious she was.

In the restaurant she had a Swiss cheese sandwich with mushrooms on pita bread, and he ate three onion bagels, two with cream cheese and the last one with butter.

As they ate, she found out things about Spangle she hadn’t known: that he used to cook seven different kinds of spaghetti sauce; that he read and liked Norman O. Brown; that while he was fixing up his house, he watched soap operas on TV; that he had been so terrified of a grass snake he saw slither under his raspberry bushes that he wore thigh-high fishing boots whenever he picked berries. It sounded like a calm and funny existence, and she wondered what had driven him out of the woods. He had been afraid to go on with that life, and she had no idea why. Even Bobby admitted that Spangle was probably not the same person he had known: For one thing, Spangle hadn’t told her about him, and in the old days, all of Spangle’s friends knew all his other friends. Whenever it rained in Vermont, Bobby said, he and Spangle used to joke about the house as Noah’s Ark. The couples moved around a little, but they didn’t move out, except for one or two times when things got too ugly. The first spring in the house, there were four couples living there when Bobby went there alone, and the backyard was a mud pond, and the people with rubber boots carried the people who didn’t have them on their shoulders when they went out for food, or to the movies. Spangle had an answering service so that his mother couldn’t get through. Spangle’s brother Jonathan would come up sometimes on the weekends with stolen turkeys from the supermarket where he worked, and they had regular Thanksgiving feasts all through April and May. The girl who had a lot of her stomach removed had been involved with Jonathan for a while.

They went back to the apartment and she watched his going-to-bed routine: pushups, another shower and two spins of “Forever Young.” He said he would rather sleep on the floor than on the sofa. “God,” Bobby said. “I hope the first agent I see tomorrow is beautiful and single. Did I ruin your night? Did I keep you from doing your work?”

Her work was
The Old Man and the Sea
, and she had reread it twice recently. She told him honestly that he hadn’t, and went into the bedroom. She closed the door to undress, but opened it again when she was ready to sleep because so little air stirred in the apartment. When she went out to get a glass of ice water to put by the bed, she saw Bobby, earphones on his head, stretched on the floor like Christ crucified. He also reminded her of a pilot shot down. He still had on his denim shorts, and his feet in the orange running shoes were crossed at the ankle, and the music must have been loud, because his eyes stayed closed, and he never heard her come through the room. She tiptoed past him.

He was up before she was in the morning. When she went into the living room, she saw a white bag with donuts open on the table. On a blue index card was written: “Dame Daphne’s Revenge?” He had made coffee. He was in the bathroom, shaving. He had also gotten the paper. She took a donut out of the bag and bit into it, even though eating in the morning would make her sluggish. She was thinking about what she was going to do: She was going to talk about irony to students who, ironically, were too stupid to perceive irony. They were not going to care that Santiago got his great fish. They were just going to read it, and like the stupid tourists looking down at the skeleton and the boat, hardly even wonder about it. The book was perfect to close the course with, because it was a perfect comment on the course. Actually, it was the only novel they had read all the way through, and that was because it was short, and because she had argued with the assistant principal that they would have the wrong idea about literature if they just read bits and pieces. Not too long ago, she had cared enough to argue. Well, it was perfect: She was Santiago, and her students were the tourists. And the shark? What was out there that her students would have to grapple with? Nothing. They were unintelligent because they had easy lives. They were not stalked by anything. Their grappling with complexity was having a debate about what musician was playing on a guitar break. She had heard two of them arguing about that in the hallway the week before. It was probably the first argument she had heard all summer. They capitulated so easily. They all thought alike, so there was no tension. They looked alike. They were attractive, and you could tell that their families had money,
but they were no more substantial than the white carcass slung beside Santiago’s boat.

She realized that she was getting carried away with making analogies and bit into the donut. A few crumbs rolled down the front of her white nightgown.

“I’ve never talked to an agent before,” Bobby said. “I wonder what you’re supposed to do when you walk in. I’ve always wondered what people did when they walked into a shrink’s office for the first time.” He had slicked back his hair—he was bald on top, but the hair was long and curly and frizzy on the sides, and now it hung in tiny wet curls. He had on jeans and a white shirt with “Don B.” sewn in red thread above the pocket, and he was wearing the sort of sunglasses people who work in factories wear, with clear plastic cups at the sides so that nothing can get in their eyes.