Falling in Place (12 page)

“If you don’t like eating at Angela’s, why don’t you eat home more often?” Louise said.

“What is this?” Mary said. “You want me to talk, I talked. I said something, and everybody’s jumping on me.” She turned to John. “How was work this week? You say something.”

He hadn’t known what to say. Perhaps: I’ve got to tell you about my lover’s dope-dealer friend who’s got a tongue as fast as a race car at the Indianapolis 500. That’s because he’s on speed, of course. The grass she bought was from Cuernavaca. Very good stuff. I got stoned before I drove out to Rye, and what do you think I saw there? Grandma, drunk as a skunk, out on the lounge all wrapped in mosquito netting. So I went into the house and called Nina—that’s my lover—and I was half laughing and half crying, and I kept saying to her that she had to help me, but she was stoned and sad that I was gone, and it wasn’t a very good call.

“Why do you always have something sarcastic to say about my going to work? Who do you think supports you? It’s not that unusual to have a father who goes to work, Mary.”

“Angela sleeps with people,” John Joel said.

“What did you say?” Louise said.

John Joel lowered his eyes, but he said it again.

“I don’t even believe this,” Mary said. “Like, she’s my best friend, and I’m supposed to sit here and listen to this from the ten-year-old? I don’t even believe that he lies the way he does.”

“Why did you say that?” John said.

“Because we were talking,” John Joel said.

“You and Angela were talking?”

“No. The four of us. She said something about Angela’s father, didn’t she? So I just said something.”

“You are so out of it,” Mary said.

“Oh yeah? Parker’s cousin works at the garage and he’s got a car behind his shed he’s restoring, and the door was unlocked, and Angela and Toddie was in there.”

“Were
in there,” John said.

“I don’t know if she does or she doesn’t,” Louise said, “but this isn’t what I want to discuss at dinner on Saturday night. Please.”

“Everybody has to talk about just what you want to talk about,” John Joel said.

“You should be nice to us and not speak that way,” John said to John Joel. “Your braces are going to set us back two thousand bucks.”

“I don’t even want them.”

“So what,” Mary said. “You have to have them.” She smirked at John Joel.

Louise turned to John. “Don’t speak to him
kiddingly
about showing respect for his parents. He
should
speak to us nicely, damn it, braces or no braces.”

“Everything’s fucked,” he said. “What does it matter the way things
should
be?”

Louise put her napkin on the table. She refolded it in its original triangle shape. He did not know that Louise knew how to make a napkin cone-shaped. She fitted the napkin into her full water glass, got her purse from the floor and walked out of the restaurant.

“Jesus,” Mary muttered.

“You started it,” John Joel said.

There were little dishes on the table: mustard, duck sauce,
dim
sum
dishes with bits of rice cake, an empty dish where the spareribs had been. And leftover food: a little pork ball in a dark brown sauce, chopped shrimp on lettuce, and the stuffed duck’s foot, which he had ordered out of curiosity. It had indeed been a duck’s foot, with a small ball of something in the claw. The industrious, frugal Chinese. No Chinese would ever be having such a dinner. And this had been an attempt to do something right, instead of taking them on a picnic.

“What do you want to talk about now, brilliant?” Mary said to John Joel.

“Pissball,” John Joel said.

“Maybe if this is the way things are going I
should
get a polyester leisure suit and be an asshole,” John said. “I feel, when I am with my loving family, that everybody is conspiring to beat me down.”

Mary sighed. John Joel reached for the last pork ball.

“No one is going to see where Louise went,” John said. He was not asking a question, just stating a fact.

“So what could I do?” Mary said.

“No one cares,” John said.

“So?” Mary said. “What about you?”

“I care,” he said, “but I have to pay the bill. I don’t work all week—that unusual pastime of mine—for nothing. I am here to pay the bill. One book I remember very well from college has a character in it who behaves well. A novel by Ernest Hemingway, which I’m sure you’ll never read.
The Sun Also Rises
. A woman runs away with some other man, but the hero pays the bills. That’s what I do: I work, and I pay the bill. I also care about where my wife is. Not as much as I would have cared years ago, but enough so that I will summon the waiter and go out and try futilely to find her. Don’t let me interrupt your meal. If I do find her, I can stand outside with her while she screams until you’re done.”

The Muzak was playing a medley of songs from
Oklahoma
. It was all high-pitched and too fast.

“In French, it’s
Le Soleil se lève aussi
. I read it my freshman year at Princeton. That was considered very avant-garde then—to go to the Cape in the summer and take novels written in French. You saw L’
étranger
all over the Cape. You know who was President?
Eisenhower. And all these rich kids were wandering around Provincetown reading
L’étranger
. I was not as rich as my classmates, but still rich enough. The real wealth came when my father died, and his attorney could finally make the investments he wanted to make. I don’t think he even embezzles money.”

“Like the suntan lotion,” John Joel said.

“What?” John said.

“Whatever word you just said.”

“Soleil,”
John said. He took a drink of beer, then a sip of tea. His appetite was coming back, and that was inconvenient, because he should be running after Louise. Would be running after her. Any second. “So that’s what you have to say about my fine story. That
soleil
is both a suntan lotion and a word in the title of a novel by Ernest Hemingway.”

“That’s the thing about Angela’s father,” Mary said. “When you do say something, it’s never intelligent enough. If you don’t have a graph, or
Newsweek
, right at the table, what you’re saying doesn’t mean anything.”

“Mary,” John said. “Mary, Mary. Is this actually a defense of your brother?”

“She’s right,” Mary said. “You
are
sarcastic.”

“What do
you
say?” John said to John Joel. “A defense of your old daddy? Mary defends John Joel, John Joel leaps to Daddy’s defense, and like the three bears, they march off to find Mommy.”

“Go ahead and put us down,” Mary said.

“What?” he said.

“No matter what I say now, you’ll just send it back to me. If I open my mouth, you’ll say something nasty.”

“It’s because it’s all too much for me. Do you know how much your crack on the phone about Superman hurt? Don’t you think I might already realize that my existence is a little silly? Do you think I had visions of working at an ad agency dancing in my head like sugarplums? Everybody I work with, with maybe the exception of Nick, is stoned on Valium all day. I think of preposterous ways to sell preposterous products. And I think back to college all the time, Princeton didn’t just come to mind tonight. I thought I was going to be a bright boy. Well… I am that. You don’t want to go to Princeton. I don’t know.”

He stopped talking because Mary was staring at him, and as he looked at her looking at him, he thought: What if Angela really sleeps with people? What if
she
does? What if I’m not the only one keeping quiet? At any rate—whether it was the way he looked, or what he had said, she felt sorry for him. She even did a very grown-up thing: She changed the subject. “I haven’t finished the book,” she said, “but that’s what
Vanity Fair
is like. Things just fall into place.”

When they left the restaurant, Louise was outside. He was surprised. He imagined that he would have to go on a wild goose chase to find her, that she would be deliberately hiding from him, to frighten him and punish him. There she was, on the hood of the car, reading a magazine. The car was parked in front of a drugstore, and she had gone into the drugstore—who knew what she was thinking?—and she had bought a magazine. There was something sad and childish about Louise, sitting on her old Chevy, locked out because she hadn’t brought her keys, her long, tanned, bare legs hanging down, sandals on her feet, legs parted enough that you could see up her skirt. It wasn’t even a self-consciously casual pose; she had really gotten involved in the magazine and forgotten to keep her knees together.

“Apologize” was all she said.

He apologized. He was so relieved to see her, so happy that it was not going to be a night of crazy driving around and calling people she might be with, that he simply apologized. John Joel hung back and didn’t look at her. Mary looked at her and looked away. He got behind the wheel and unlocked the car on their side. Mary and John Joel got in the back seat. Louise leaned into the car. “Take them home,” she said. “When you’ve done that, come back for me. I’m going into the drugstore for a milkshake. That’s what I want—a chocolate milkshake. I’ll be outside when you get back.”

Driving home, he no longer felt relieved. He put the radio on and heard two people discussing a recipe for bleu cheeseburgers. When the woman gave the direction “add two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce,” the announcer said, “Worcestershire sauce.” He echoed everything she said, and when he did, the woman said “Uh-huh” and continued. At the end, the man said, “Doesn’t that sound good?” and the woman said, “Oh, it is.” The man
thanked her. She said he was welcome. Another voice broke in, apologized for interrupting, then started again, saying that tomorrow there would be more suggestions for summer barbecues. “You know,” the announcer said, “a lot of people out there don’t like bleu cheese. I think these can be made just as well with your favorite cheese—cheddar or jack or whatever.” A song from
Saturday Night Fever
came on. He had gone to that movie with Nina, and when John Travolta gave away the first-prize trophy he and his date had won to the couple who should have won the dance contest, Nina had leaned over and whispered: “That’s you.” It was a little irritating that she pretended he had such good impulses, that his guilt was so great. She asked him, when they first met, if he was a Catholic. She kept up the joke, too: Late one night, after he had made love to her, before he went back to Rye, she had come into the bathroom when he was showering, pushed back the shower curtain a few inches and said: “I will hear your confession.” Cold air had come into the shower and something about the tone of her voice and the rush of air had actually frightened him; he had never been in a confessional, but he sympathized for the first time with people who had. It was easy to make her stop teasing, though. All he had to do was reach out and touch her fingertips. He took very hot showers—so hot she wouldn’t get in with him unless he agreed to let her regulate the water—and that night, one of the first nights he was with her, he could remember the steam escaping, how quickly she became foggy, her smile through the fog, their fingers touching. He had had to stare to see her, and only partly because of the steam. For a second he had thought she was unreal, that she had always been an apparition. He knew that he had to look at her, and keep looking. If he had not reached out to touch her, it might have gone on forever. Nina’s smile, through the steam. The smile that was worth suffering a blast of cold for.

“You ran a stop sign,” John Joel said.

“Leave him alone,” Mary said.

John said nothing. He slowed down. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw John Joel, pressed against one side of the back seat, and Mary, all the way to the other side. He wondered if they might really hate each other, if when they were adults they would live on different coasts and exchange Christmas cards. What
was it like, so early in your life, not to love someone you were supposed to love?

He thought: I’m not John Travolta. I’m Father Frank Junior, in a disco for the first time, caught up in it and put off by it. At first, he had been uneasy with her friends—all young, a lot of them spacey, one or two more heavily into drugs than he could be comfortable with. He had accused her of liking him because he was safe and sane, a father-figure. “That’s a lot of easy bullshit,” she said. “But I like it that you think you’re sane.”

He pulled into the driveway—imagine her thinking, even for a second, that there would be columns at the base of his driveway—and the car sideswiped bushes weighted down by the rain the day before. Big white flowers brushed against the side of the car. He turned off the ignition and got out and stretched. He looked at the sky. It was still light, but the moon was already out. By the car was John Joel’s tree, the tree where the robin had built its nest. He wished that he had something to concentrate on other than what was coming: that he could be holding the delicate piece of egg, blue like no other blue, and that he could feel its lightness and fragility. The blue egg, in the little dish in Nina’s apartment.

On the way back to pick up Louise, he stopped at a phone. He asked the operator to charge the call to his home phone. “Is there anyone there to verify?” she said. “No,” he said, without any hesitation. A butterfly—late in the day for a butterfly—hovered by the phone for a minute. He looked again at the moon, more visible now that the sky was a little darker. He shook his head at the absurdity of what he was doing: standing at a phone on a country road, as though no one was at home, no one was waiting, as though Nina would pick up the phone in her apartment on Columbus Avenue and suddenly his heart would stop pounding and he would feel the breeze that was blowing. The butterfly flew away. The phone rang ten times, and then he hung up and went back to the car. He sat there for a minute before starting it. Then he put the radio on. The same song from
Saturday Night Fever
was playing, as though the last twenty minutes—half hour?—had never happened.
Things just fall into place
. If Mary knew that, from reading the book or from what she knew of life, she could not deserve to flunk any course, let alone English. Of course, if that was what she
thought, then there wasn’t much point in her trying to organize her life or in any of the things he had believed about getting ahead, the necessity of getting ahead, when he was her age. Maybe a few years older. He got out of the car and got the operator again, and billed another call to his home phone. He called Nick. Nick picked it up on the first ring. “Goddamn Metcalf,” Nick said. “Called me
twice
today with the same joke. I keep telling him that I don’t like jokes. He tries to joke with me about not liking jokes. Metcalf.”