Falling in Place (14 page)

He got out of the shower and threw his sweaty clothes into the hamper, but not before removing the small package, wrapped in paper napkins, from his shirt pocket. He put it on the back of the sink, and reached in the medicine cabinet for adhesive tape and scissors. He cut off the right-size piece and taped it to the dry edge of the sink, then dried himself well and unfolded the napkins. Inside was the duck foot from the Chinese restaurant, gray and curved. He taped the duck foot securely to his penis, then put on his pajamas and went into the bedroom. If she didn’t laugh, it was really all over. It was even more all over than he had thought it could be. He got into bed and she closed the magazine and dropped it on the floor.

“Hot night,” he said.

She was lying on her back, with her eyes closed. She had combed her hair, and her lipstick was gone.

He struggled out of his pajama top. Then the bottoms. She didn’t look. He pulled the sheet over them and took her hand.

He got up on one elbow and kissed her on the forehead. She had no expression on her face, before or after.

“Hey,” he said, moving her hand down his stomach.

“Not on your life,” she said.

He kept moving her hand, until her fingers were touching the duck foot. She yanked her hand away, turned toward him, pulled back the sheet. He held his breath, trying to choke back his laughter. She looked into his eyes.

“Is this what you and the New York girls are into?” she said.

The grotesquely funny was obviously much in vogue. Women wore purple pedal pushers and hacked off their hair with a razor. A put-on. To be ugly is to be funny. To be funny is, maybe, to get through. But did he even realize that the horrible duck foot was a joke directed at himself and his own sexuality? He had changed so much. He would do things more childish than what the children did, and although he didn’t actually harm himself, there was something self-destructive in his shock tactics. A month before—three weeks before, five weeks, it didn’t matter—when there had been so much sun and the blackberry bush bore fruit so early in the summer, he had been picking up sticks in the grass before he mowed it, and she had been planting seeds in the garden. She had looked up to see him clasping his heart in mock-horror, a circular smear of red on his forehead. She had watched him lurch toward her, eyes big, the ugly red smear like a child’s finger-painting, then collapse without a word. He had mashed the blackberries and pretended to be wounded. He had been playing a game with her, but she could not imagine what part he had expected her to take. She had almost wanted to rush toward him—not because
she was fooled, but just that if she grabbed him, if she got that close, she might find out something. Or break the tension. Or even laugh with him. But what he had done hadn’t really been that funny. The strangeness of it, the impetuousness with which he had acted, had convinced her that he really did have another life: not the life in Rye, but another life, a real life, a life she didn’t understand anymore. When he finally got up—slowly, like an exhausted person doing a final push-up—he had cocked his head and looked at her, and not wanting to look fazed, she had smiled at him. Just smiled. And then she had gone on sprinkling seeds, evenly, looking to see where they hit the dirt. They were so tiny that of course she couldn’t see. She would see when they came up. She would find out what was going on with John when he left her
.

But Mary: What she had done, plucking her eyebrows, hadn’t been done as a joke at all. That was pathetic because it wasn’t an imitation of a joke, like pedal pushers spoofing what had been a genuinely ugly fashion; it was an imitation of what Mary really thought was beauty
.

Louise rolled over in bed. She had been so upset because with her eyebrows plucked, Mary’s eyes had looked so large. They had looked so innocent. It had been an innocent gesture to pluck her eyebrows, and harmless, really. Yet when Louise saw Mary’s eyes, it had made her sadder than she had been in a long time. Sadder than she had been when John went through his crazy charade on the lawn. As much as John wanted to be a child, Mary had wanted to be a grownup, and that was even more pathetic
.

Nine

DID PEOPLE
ever walk into a high school, however different it might be from where they had gone to high school, and not feel, by the sight and smell of it, somehow transported through time, back to their own school?

The lockers at Mary’s school were gray metal, with built-in locks. The lockers at his school, which he would not have believed he remembered, he could envision in exact detail. They had been green metal, with padlocks, and they had had vents in the top. All that had been trapped in there had been books, yet there had been vents in the doors—a half-gesture at letting something breathe.

He was surprised that he felt nervous, that he didn’t feel on top of things, ready to talk as one adult to another. He felt like a child again. A crazy image flashed through his mind of himself, slamming a handball against the wall at the far end of the hall, slamming it and slamming it until he was caught and punished.

He took the small folded piece of paper out of his pocket. The teacher’s name was Cynthia Forrest. He had not planned what he was going to say to Cynthia Forrest. He thought that perhaps his stomach felt funny because he was hungry and hadn’t eaten,
or because he had wanted to talk to Nina on the phone and he couldn’t get her. He had called Lord and Taylor’s and they had tried to connect him, but no one picked up the phone. He sent her a message, squeezing his eyes shut and making a wish: Me, Nina. Pick it up. Not some lady wanting to order stockings with gold flecks in them. Me. In Connecticut. Answer.

He walked into the classroom. He had passed only three students in the corridors—none of them kids he knew—and he hated empty places. He still hated to be the only person walking up a flight of stairs, the first person in line. Behind him, it seemed as though wind might rush in.

“You’re Mary’s father,” she said, getting up from her desk and putting out her hand. Her hand was light, and shaking it disturbed him. He didn’t know why. He smiled at her. His eye was drawn to her desk—the same sort of desk his teachers had had, the color of dry leaves, with nicks and scratches. Were there any desks with nice wood in schoolrooms?

“Please sit down,” she said.

He sat on one of the low desks with an inkwell. Used now for gum, of course. To hide notes, as if in the hole of a tree. He wiggled his thumb in the inkwell and felt better when his finger rested on a bump of dried gum. If you knew some of the inevitables, it kept you on top of things. Nick’s philosophy: Know as much as you can, because one tiny thing might help you. Nick knew how to tie fifteen kinds of knots.

“What can I tell you?” Cynthia said.

“I’m here because my wife and I are worried about Mary’s doing poorly in summer school. It was quite a shock that she failed English to begin with, and my wife says she isn’t doing much better now.”

Cynthia nodded and didn’t say anything.

“Why?” he said.

“Why?” Cynthia said. “One reason?”

She did not say it unkindly, but he was taken aback. He felt as ridiculous, as out of control, as he had thought he would a few minutes ago when he was walking down the hallway, reminding himself that he was one adult who would be talking to another adult.

“I know there isn’t any one reason for anything,” he said, “but I wondered if you had any ideas.”

“What does Mary say?”

He thought: She thinks of you as Lost in the Forest, but obviously you are not.

“Actually,” he said, “we were talking this past weekend, and I tried to get her to talk about one of the books you were having them read.
Vanity Fair
. I must say she didn’t seem eager to talk about it. I don’t think kids are comfortable talking about books when they’re her age. I know I wasn’t. But that isn’t what I started to say.”

She was looking at him. She looked tired. She was quite pretty, and he wondered what she was really thinking. Whatever she had been thinking earlier had been erased. He looked at the swirls and streaks of white on the blackboard behind her.

“What were you going to say?”

“Oh,” he said, looking back at her. “Sorry. I was going to say that she acted as if
Vanity Fair
was silly. I asked her how she felt about Dobbin and she seemed to think he was ludicrous. But later she said a very perceptive thing. We were talking about something else entirely, and she said, in passing, that
Vanity Fair
seemed to be about how things just fall into place.”

He realized that he was leaning quite far forward. He eased himself farther back on the desk. Looked at her, trying not to appear anxious. He was anxious. He was not sure about what. About what Mary had said, in part. He was wondering if that was true. Maybe things just fell quickly because of gravity, and when they stopped, you said they were in place.

That thought disturbed him so much that he stood up.

“You’ve read
Vanity Fair,”
she said.

He nodded yes. He did not tell her that he had just bought it.

“I wonder if you’d like to have lunch,” he said. “Have you already eaten? I mean, you might just want to go on with what you were doing, and not spend an hour listening to some student’s father–” He broke off.

She got up. “I’ll go to lunch with somebody who’s read Thackeray. Sure,” she said. “Just a minute.”

And then he was alone in the room. It seemed strange to be
there alone—almost as if something dangerous might happen. He wondered what might happen, and smiled at the image that flashed through his head of himself, backing up toward the dusty blackboard as though a magnet were drawing him, getting his clothes dirty. He would have to wear this same jacket and this same pair of pants into the city.

Everybody he knew had problems with their children. They all had children who needed braces, or were doing poorly in school, or had run away. Last week, Metcalf’s eight-year-old son had fallen and broken his glasses, and Metcalf had brought them into New York to get new lenses made up. That morning he kept calling people into his office to see the glasses. He had put them on the corner of his desk, on a stand with a curved piece of brass that usually held a strange shell. A small pair of glasses, both lenses cracked, tiny cracks like the points of fire shooting away from a sparkler: a small pair of horn-rimmed glasses, useless to see out of, set out for people to look at like an
objet d’art
. “Eight years old, and blind as a bat without them. On my lunch hour I’m taking them to a place that can grind new lenses and put them in by five o’clock, and then I’m driving out to Sneden’s Landing with them and giving them to Paul, and he’ll put them on and see again. He’s a nice kid, and he’ll probably even thank me. He was upset about breaking them, and he cried. Eight years old, and blind as a bat. I’m the big-shot today. I give him his sight back for forty smackers. Costs that much only because the frames got screwed up, too. But he’s blind. Eight years old, and my kid is blind. When I was eight years old, I was blind, too. My wife has 20–15, my kid and I are blind.” Coming out of Metcalf’s office, Nick had turned to him and said, “I almost did it that time. I really almost walked over to him and smashed him. He tosses off everything as a joke, constantly. If he came back from the dead, you know what he’d do? Deface his own gravestone.” It had seemed irrelevant to tell Nick that years before, when he first came to work for the agency, he had gone out with Metcalf one Friday after work and they had gotten drunk, and Metcalf had gotten maudlin and talked about how he was going to be cremated, no stone, his ashes scattered over Korea, because he had liked Korea. Not the war part, but Korea. He had liked Korea.

“Okay,” Cynthia said, coming back into the room. She had combed her hair and did not look quite as tired. He suggested a restaurant a few miles down the road from the school, and she said she’d follow him in her car. At lunch, he was going to have to think of something to say to her, to find some way to get her to pass Mary. He would certainly never think of anything to say to Mary to persuade her that she should try harder. If he were Nick, he could dazzle Cynthia with all the knots he could tie. He smiled. Nick had sworn to him that that really dazzled women. That they would do anything for a man who could tie fifteen different knots.