Falling in Place (34 page)

“Come on,” Parker said, walking to the back of the lawn.

Parker climbed the tree. John Joel climbed behind him. He wished that his mother knew he was home, that she would call him. He hoped she might look out the kitchen door and see him. She had put on the sprinkler, and it was turning in a circle, jetting water out over her iris, wetting the abelia bush. The bees hovered anyway, jerking back from the spray, a few flying forward, into the soaking bush. Some bees hung to the wet bright-green branches, clustered almost like Japanese beetles, even though the water kept raining into the bush.

“What do you want now?” John Joel said.

“Ambush,” Parker said.

On cue—exactly on cue—John Joel saw Angela and Mary, walking into the field.

“Pshew! Pshew!” Parker said, aiming the gun at a bird hopping by the tree. “Wait’ll you see
Moonraker
, when all those guys floating in space get zapped by lasers.”

“Put that away,” John Joel said. “You’ll scare her. If she sees you with that, it’s going to get me in trouble with my mother.” John Joel stared at Parker. “I
mean
it,” he said. “I’m
telling
you.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Parker said. He seemed more dismayed than angry. He seemed unreasonable. Parker had the gun in his right hand, and John Joel, on his left, couldn’t think how to get it away from him.

“You are really stupid,” Parker said. “You think I’d carry a gun around that had a bullet in it? That would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it? If you’re so scared, you can hold on to it, so I don’t blow your sister away,” Parker said, handing him the gun. “You love your sister? You fall in love with your sister?”

“I hate her,” John Joel said.

Angela waved and turned back toward her house. Mary walked forward, jumping over something, zigzagging because she knew the path to take to avoid poison ivy. If his mother saw her in the field, Mary would catch hell. He hoped that his mother would come out into the backyard and see her.

Mary didn’t see them in the tree, or if she did, she was doing a better-than-average job of ignoring them. A bird flew away as she was almost out of the field. She turned and flicked something off the back of her jeans. Something small fell back into the field, a burr or a bug.

He called her name, and pulled the trigger, because he thought that Parker had been telling the truth. He didn’t even have the gun aimed, and still he hit her.

Tiffy lifted the slice of lemon out of her glass of iced tea and let tea drip into the glass. She sucked the lemon, put it on the table next to the glass
.

“I never thought about it until last night—it never struck me as strange in any way, because I’m so conditioned. I’m so slow to come around to understanding some things. Think about it: The fairy godmother changes a pumpkin into a coach, mice into horses, a rat into a coachman, lizards into footmen, and work clothes into a silver and gold dress, and what does she say when she sends her off to the ball? To be back at midnight. If she had the power to do all those other things, did she really lack the power to make them last past midnight? It’s just another story about virginity. You’ve got to read
My Mother, My Self.
Nancy Friday can’t be wrong.” Tiffy sucked on the lemon. “Interesting, too, that she doesn’t transform anything into glass slippers—that she touches her magic ring to Cinderella’s work clothes to turn them into fine threads, but the glass slippers are just brought forward, as if they always existed. Do you know what Freud says about shoes?”

Then they heard the shot. They both knew it was a shot, but
Louise said to Tiffy, “What was that?” and Tiffy said what it was. They got up from the table together, and Louise heard another sound, the sound of Tiffy’s glass turning over. She looked back at the table and saw Tiffy reaching for the toppled glass, but too late: a pale-brown puddle was washing over Perrault’s
Fairy Tales.
Louise stared stupidly. She was afraid to look, because she knew what it was. She knew that something horrible had happened, because there had been no sound before the shot, and no sound after it was fired: It just existed in itself, strange and loud, and then there was nothing but whatever it was she was going to see when she got to the door. The door was closed—Tiffy had suggested that, saying that the kitchen would be cooler with the fan going and the door closed, that the screen door let in more hot air than… 
.

While she was thinking, Tiffy passed her and threw open the door
.

Eighteen

CYNTHIA HAD
talked to Bobby on the phone, and now she was talking to him in person. Spangle’s old friend had become a writer, and he was on his way to New York to talk to agents. That didn’t delight him, but as he talked he found more and more reasons to like the idea of going to New York. Bagels—he could get bagels there. Bookstores—he might be able to find a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s book about writing a novel at a bookstore he’d heard about off Broadway at 95th. He had heard that a copy was there, and the stupid friend who’d told him—his friend Honig was so stupid he couldn’t believe it—he’d told Honig to look for the book, and Honig hadn’t realized that he had meant he should also buy it. Used-clothing stores—they might have a cowboy shirt similar to one he had lost, with a satin skull that looked as if it had been drawn by Georgia O’Keeffe sewn over the pocket.

“How did you lose a shirt?” she said.

“I was at the laundromat and I think somebody saw it going into the washing machine and pulled it out when I left to buy a newspaper. That’s all I can think. I’ve lost shoes, because I’ve forgotten I was wearing them. You know—at a lake or something, you just walk back to the car not thinking about shoes—but I can’t think
myself how else I could have lost the cowboy shirt. Actually, maybe cowboy shirts aren’t really my thing. Maybe it was just that one I liked. I hate cowboy
boots
. These are what I like.”

Bobby held up his foot. He had a huge foot, and he was wearing bright-orange running shoes with a white stripe curving around the side. “Can’t wear these to teach in,” Bobby said. “Got to get shoes. What else is there to buy besides cowboy boots for shoes? Some goddamn old man’s shoes that lace up? Jesus, do I hate to think about teaching.”

“When does the semester—” she said.

“Hey!” Bobby said, before she finished her sentence. “Excuse me for breaking in, but when I think of something, if I don’t say it, I lose it.” He took off his glasses, blew on them, wiped them on the tail of his shirt. “I forgot what I was going to say,” he said.

“Were you going to say something about teaching?”

“Oh,” he said. “Right. Right. I was going to ask you about Yale. You said you’re at Yale.”

“I don’t even want to think about it. I just want a vacation. All I want is a rest, and for this heat wave to break.”

“Where did I say that bookstore was?” Bobby said.

“Broadway and 95th.”

“God!” Bobby said. “If you hadn’t remembered, I would have lost it just like that.”

He snapped his fingers. They didn’t make any sound, because his hands were wet. He was drinking beer, and the can was sweating. Bobby kept wiping his hand on his denim shorts. “What are they going to do, come into my classroom and carry me out? What am I buying shoes for, and wearing slacks with a crease down the front?
These
are my shoes, you know?”

Bobby held up his big puffy orange foot. “Do you have a piece of paper?” he said. “If I don’t write down that address, I’ll get there and I’ll never remember it.”

When Bobby wrote, he bent his head and put his eye down close to the page, the way a young child writes, having to concentrate both on the idea and on the handwriting. Bobby’s handwriting
was just about illegible. Three typists who had been given his novel had quit. When he wanted to be sure to understand his writing himself, he printed. He explained all this to her as he continued the message to himself: “Kathryn and Daphne?”

“Just had an idea,” Bobby said. He put the top back on the pen. He put the pen in his pocket, realized it was hers, took it out and put it on the table. A little blue card fell out with the pen. The blue card said:
“Zut alors!”
Bobby looked embarrassed. He turned the card over; it was a foreign language flash card. She read, in English, “My goodness!”

“My pockets,” Bobby sighed, pulling a wad of papers out of his shirt pocket. He spread the things out over the table. There was a fake twenty-dollar bill that he said his nephew had given him, a folded piece of yellow paper that turned out to be a receipt from the dry cleaner’s (“The shirt!” Bobby said, pointing to a line of writing. “I’ve found my shirt!”), a thin pocket calculator, a gum wrapper, several index cards with notes for poems on them, a photo-booth picture, one of three, that he kept meaning to send his sister for her locket (not his idea, she wanted the thing), and a dried leaf that he wanted to try to find out about. She didn’t know what it was. “What do you think?” he said. “Is this a common leaf?”

“What did you do with the other pictures?” she said.

“I gave them to women,” he said. “They were profile shots. I look better in profile.” He examined his running shoes. “Don’t want to go running, do you?” he said.

“It’s too hot.”

“Maybe later,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said.

“You really wouldn’t mind if I slept on the sofa tonight? I don’t like to drive into New York at night. I would like a bagel, though. Maybe later we can go out and find a bagel.” He finished his beer and bent the can in half. He took it to the kitchen and threw it away, opened the refrigerator and took out another one. It was Coors beer. He had brought a six-pack with him.

“Tell me about your job,” he said. “How does that work?”

“How does it work?” she said, amused that he had put it that way. “Well—I get up in the morning and drive to the high school
and go into the classroom, where eager, bright students await me: eager to go home and blast any ideas out of their heads with rock music. Some of them try to appear even more ignorant than they are, though, so maybe they’re brighter than they seem.” She took a sip of his beer. “Anyway,” she said, “they don’t know anything, and they won’t when the summer is over, either. The administration’s idea of education is a real kick: You have them read parts of books and plays, and you show them movies and play them records, and you have them enact little scenes. I’d like to give them
The Story of O
and let them enact some scenes.”

“The Story of O
,” Bobby said. “That used to be one of Spangle’s favorite books.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “When?”

“Up at his old house in Vermont. I went up there last summer with a lady love. I was nostalgic for the place. Some Indian was living there, growing corn. I’m not kidding: some guy in a serapé—my lady love said it was a beach towel; she swore it was—with his hair in a braid, dark-skinned guy, a hippie, I guess a hippie dressed up like an Indian, and he was out there picking corn when we pulled up. I was going to say I used to live there and ask if we could walk around, but the guy looked pretty flipped out, and he had a doberman tied to one of the poles that held up the clothesline, and it looked like it was just tied up with twine. The stuff you wrap packages with. Nothing more than that. He’d painted the shutters red, too, and I was sure the place was going to look lousy inside, so I put it in reverse and took off. What is it about Vermont, do you think? What’s the story on that?”

“Isn’t it the same in New Hampshire?”

“No,” he said. He took one of the blue index cards out of his pocket, bent his head and wrote a few words down. He put the index card back in his pocket.

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”

“You should get him to take you there and show you the place. Maybe it would depress him, though. He did a lot of work inside that house.”

“Did you know his girlfriend?”

“The one that had part of her stomach removed, or the other one?”