Falling in Place (41 page)

“She liked the dog better. You know she did. Face it.”

“Of course she didn’t like the dog better than she likes you.”

Mrs. Patterson looked up from the magazine, pretending to be shaking a curl that had fallen on her forehead out of the way. She pushed the curl back in place and bent over the magazine again.

“Mary,” he said, “I don’t want to upset you, but I can’t let you say something like that. You don’t believe that.”

“I was just kidding.”

“No you weren’t. Do you believe that?”

“No,” she said.

“Good,” he said. He thought that she was lying to him and that she had meant it. He was trying to think of what to say next, when a man carrying a lunch tray came in. He took the top off the tray, clattered it onto the shelf underneath his pushcart and said, “There you go,” setting the tray on the tray table. Mrs. Patterson jumped up. There were carrots on the plate. Mashed potatoes. Gray meat.

“Doesn’t
this
look delicious,” Mrs. Patterson said.

He went to the waiting room while she ate. He said that he had to make a phone call and would be right back, but it was a lie. He couldn’t stand to see her eat that food. He couldn’t stand to think that his daughter thought Louise had liked her German shepherd more than she liked her. There was some truth in it, of course. The dog wasn’t distant. It wasn’t self-absorbed. But didn’t adolescents always draw away from their parents? Didn’t they all have a period when they felt superior, when they were critical or distant, just wanting to block their parents out? Mary had blocked them out. They had also blocked her out. His son had shot his daughter. He was not entirely sure who his daughter was. John Joel was much more understandable, even though he still couldn’t believe that he had fired a gun, that he had shot not caring if he killed Mary. He was understandable because … He got up and went into the phone booth. His son wasn’t understandable, and his daughter wasn’t understandable, except now, when she was hurting and punishing her parents for what had happened. Louise was understandable, up to a point. He had thought that he had understood her a while back, when he had been standing at the bedroom window watching shooting stars dart and fade in the sky, and something they had been talking about, whatever it was—somehow she had told him, point-blank, that she didn’t want to know everything. That meant that she knew, and didn’t want confirmation. Didn’t want details. Yet if she knew, and if she didn’t have much feeling for him or even care if he was there, why would she plan a vacation to Nantucket? And if she did, why wouldn’t Tiffy have talked her out of it? Louise had told him that Tiffy said her greatest problem was that she had to develop a sense of
pride. He could tell by the way Tiffy looked at him that she hated him.

He called Nick. It was Saturday, and Nick would be home. He dialed his apartment, and a woman answered.

“He went out for groceries,” the woman said. “Who’s this?”

“It’s John. It’s not important. Tell him I’ll call back.”

“Want me to have him call you?”

“I’m not home. I’m at a phone booth. I’ll call him tonight.”

“You don’t sound good,” the woman said.

“What?” he said. “Who’s this?”

“Carolyn Ross,” she said.

He had never heard of Carolyn Ross.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Fine. I’ll call back later.”

“Sure,” she said. “He should be back in an hour.”

It wasn’t until he put the phone back that he realized that he was seeing yellow shimmering around the edges of things. But he never fainted. He couldn’t be about to faint after doing nothing but standing in his daughter’s room and going out into the corridor to make a phone call. He looked at his hands, and they looked as though small yellow sparks were coming off them. He got out of the phone booth and went to a sofa and sat down. The yellow paled, shimmered, gradually disappeared. He sat there, trying to breathe normally. What would he do with them in Nantucket? Go to the beach. Sail. Watch clouds change shape. Buy fudge. Post cards.

He couldn’t. He could do it for a week, two weeks, but he couldn’t do it for the rest of his life. He thought of Metcalf, and how he took his lover with him for the family’s annual East Hampton vacation. He told his wife she was there to help with the children, and the woman came along. Year after year she came along. He paid her on Fridays, and she took the checks. She lived on Park Avenue, in an apartment Metcalf rented for her. It galled Metcalf that she actually cashed the checks, when he gave her almost twenty thousand dollars a year, plus an apartment on Park Avenue. They did it for five summers, and then Metcalf’s wife informed him at the last minute that her sister was taking the children for July, and that the vacation could be for just the two of them. Proud of thinking quickly, Metcalf had said that he felt
duty-bound to have the
au pair
anyway, because she had been counting on the money, and that she could come and take care of the house. When he told Jenny, his mistress, what he had worked out, she just stared at him silently. He had no idea, Metcalf said, that asking her to clean house had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. When he left, Jenny called his wife and told her what was going on. Bad enough that she had to put up with two bratty kids every summer—she was not going to clean somebody’s house, she told Metcalf’s wife. Metcalf showed up in the office the first of August, when everybody thought he would be gone, because his wife and Jenny were in the East Hampton house, and they wanted two weeks to work it out and become pals before he went there. Metcalf kept threatening to get in his car and put a stop to it, but he never did. He spent the last two weeks of August there and said that although he’d lost respect for Jenny, he had still never been kissed the way she kissed him, and he was going to go on supporting her. “For a kiss,” Metcalf said. “Not a lay, a kiss. The way she kisses.” Metcalf had come back and slammed tennis balls against the wall in the corridor outside his office, letting his phone ring, getting violently angry if anyone objected to the noise or asked him a question. “A
kiss,”
Metcalf kept saying over and over. “A good
kiss
should be everybody’s birthright.”

A young man in his early twenties, at the other end of the sofa, was watching John out of the corner of his eye. John was trying to look normal, to convince his body that it could function normally. It would be humiliating to fall over in the waiting room. He tried to breathe normally. To blink. It was difficult not to blink hard and often when you thought about blinking. It was hopeless the way it was hopeless to be aware of your tongue and not have it feel too big for your mouth. The man was holding something out to him, with a little corona of light around it. The light faded as John stared at the pack of gum with one piece slid out, finally realizing what it was. “No thanks,” he said. He tried to remember the last time he had chewed gum. With Brandt, about a year ago, to show him how to chew without making faces. Pilar, his mother’s cook, had introduced him to chewing gum. She also let him eat raw cookie dough, which was bad for him. However, as his mother
always said when she finished a list of grievances against Pilar, she never skimped on lime in the gin and tonics, and never once had they run out of ice. Her stews were very good, although she would make them all summer long unless she was stopped. His mother had recently given Pilar some cookbooks with recipes for cold summer meals. Diced cucumber and cold salmon loaf. Argentine eggs with pasta. He had just been offered a stick of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, and his mouth was watering as much as it would if he had taken the stick and chewed it. He could smell the gum. He looked at the young man. The man was looking at him.

“It’s a bitch,” the man said.

He nodded. “You know somebody who’s a patient here?”

“My wife. She was cutting the lawn, and she fell over. I thought she was dead. What a bitch. Mower kept going and crashed into the house. I wouldn’t have known. Had the television on. What a bitch.” He snapped his gum three times. “How about you?” he said.

“You probably read it in the papers,” John said. “My son shot my daughter.”

“I haven’t seen a paper in two weeks. My wife and I were in Ashland, Oregon. Come home and unpack, and the next day, whammo! She’s on her back in the yard. I thought she was kidding. They think it’s her heart, but nothing shows.” He had stopped chewing. “I don’t know what to say about what you said. I heard you, but I don’t know what to say. They young kids, fooling around, or what?”

“Ten and fifteen. My son is ten.”

“Holy shit,” the man said. “An accident, huh? How’d he get a gun?”

“Apparently it was around his friend’s house, in a box. The kid’s father didn’t have any idea his son knew the gun was there. How the gun got out of the box and into my son’s hands is still up in the air.”

“Holy shit,” the man said. “Ten and fifteen. She all right?”

“Yes. She’s going to be all right.”

“Holy holy,” the man said. “Lucky she wasn’t blown away. If you can say anybody’s lucky who’s been shot. I didn’t read about it in the papers. What’s it like, having a story about you in the
paper? Never mind. That isn’t any of my business. You don’t chew gum? There’s a Coke machine hidden behind that door.”

The man pointed. He had a turquoise and silver ring on his index finger. His nails were a little long, and dirty.

“Thanks. I might get one later.”

“I wonder how many people are sitting around here, or lying in bed here, wondering what they did wrong? I left the room because the lady my wife shares it with was being examined. Not examined, butchered. A bone marrow extract. My God. One day in Ashland, the next day here.” The man lit a cigarette, offering one to John. John shook his head no. “Not exactly the next day. I barrel-assed back from Ashland, but it still took five days, you know? Not the next day really, but so to speak. Holy shit. I can’t believe I’m sitting here. Her sister’s coming, and it’s just as well if I can have a word with her before she goes in to see my wife. Her sister’s a nun, and my wife is an agnostic, and I want to try to get her to keep religion out of it. Just seeing her sister in her penguin get-up sets her off as it is. Some orders wear normal clothes now, but not her sister’s order. They voted no. Imagine. Jesus.”

“I thought I was going to faint a few minutes ago,” John said.

“You looked like it,” the man said. “I was all set to slide down the sofa and push your head between your knees. That works, you know.”

“I should go back to her room now,” John said. “They were having lunch.”

“My wife blew lunch yesterday,” the man said. “Cottage cheese and custard. Maybe not exactly cottage cheese, but something like it. I wonder how many people are sitting around this hospital right at this minute, trying to figure things out. This place is probably sending out more vibes than the Rand Corporation.”

He tried Nick again. This time nobody answered the phone. He let it ring six times, then hung up and took his dime back. He wondered if Metcalf could be right: Would Nick really be so childish as to subscribe Metcalf to magazines? It was absurd the way Nick always got riled up about Metcalf: He had a picture of Metcalf (taken at a picnic several years ago) enlarged to eight by ten, and hung it on the bathroom wall, in his apartment, to
decondition himself. Nick thought that if he could look at Metcalf’s face without going wild, he could handle him better in person. But the picture just drove him crazy. One night when he was drunk, he got spooked about going into the bathroom, even though he knew where the picture was and wouldn’t have to look in that direction; he went into the kitchen instead and peed into an empty wine bottle. That absurdity, and the absurdity of Metcalf’s scheme to keep his lover around. The absurdity of being out of your mind, showing up at six in the morning, seven in the morning, whatever it was, at your lover’s apartment and finding a man there, even if nothing was going on. The craziness of going there. The craziness of finding happiness when you couldn’t have it; or of planning to have it, only to have
this
happen. It had happened. And Mary was in the room, waiting for him. He walked down the corridor and into her room. Her face was white, and her hospital gown and the sheets; and the sun had shifted so that the blinds looked bright white, strongly illuminated from behind. The nurse was taking Mary’s temperature. When he was a child, his mother had gone around in the evening with a thermometer in her mouth, because she had read somewhere that it would firm up the jawline. For a while his mother had cared about wrinkles. He could remember his father suggesting a straw instead, because a thermometer was depressing. His mother said that a straw would not be the same. You had to know the mercury was in there. You had to be steady and careful. You could not bite down. The thermometer they had at the hospital stood in a white plastic stand when it was not in use.

“Your mother’s in with John Joel,” he said. “Did I tell you that? She told me that she’s coming to see you at two or three. And Angela called this morning, and I told her it would be all right to visit. Was that all right to tell her?”

“She’s going to think I look gross,” Mary said.

“We’re all glad you’re all right. That’s all,” John said.

“That’s not all Angela thinks. I talked to her on the phone yesterday, and all she wanted to hear about was how big a bandage it was. She thinks it’s better that this happened than that I lost my tits like Marge Pendergast, or something. She wanted to know if they bathed me in bed every day. She thinks it’s a resort. She’s pretty stupid sometimes.”

“Should I have told her not to come?”

“Sure,” Mary said. “She’s only my best friend.”

“Your temperature’s normal. I’m not supposed to give any of that information, but it is, and why should I hold out on you about good news?” the nurse said.

“She doesn’t have circles under her eyes today,” John said.

“When she did, nobody said anything, and that was the right thing to do,” the nurse said. “It’s discouraging to patients to be told they look bad. I’ve been in rooms where people walked in and clamped their hands over their mouths.”