Falling in Place (30 page)

Walking up the steps to Nina’s apartment, he had thought for a second that something was missing—a leader was missing. And no one was behind him. He was there alone, doing this simple thing; and he thought that he was never going to be able to make it to the top, and that if he did, it was too much to expect that he would have a pleasant expression on his face when he got there. He would just have to get there and be there, and then—and then what? The stairs were buckling and shifting under him; they were delivering him to a room that would tilt crazily. He rubbed his face. He hadn’t had any sleep, and he was exhausted, and the faint stinging-itch across his neck, below his ears, had started: the signal that he was about to have a pounding headache. He must have been on the stairs for a long time. He kept looking over his shoulder, as though there were better air below him, and if he turned his head he might be able to breathe. He kept turning his head, and the building was quiet—no one behind him. But every time he moved forward, there were just as many stairs, it seemed. His legs felt heavy. His head. Finally he had dashed up the stairs and gotten to the top, panting, feeling as crazy as one of the brain-damaged people would feel if he were capable of seeing himself in perspective. If the piece of paper drops on the sidewalk instead of into the trash container, so what? So what? he was saying out
loud. So what? he whispered. No one heard the whisper, and he did not hear any noise: no breakfast dishes clattering, no radio music, no alarms going off. He put his hands over his ears and took them away, to see if there was more sound when he removed his hands. His hearing was fading. What if Nina opened the door and said something, said some important thing, and he didn’t know what she was saying? His eyes hurt too much to concentrate on reading her lips. Her lips. Nina. He knocked on the door, and he smiled. He heard something. From inside, he heard water running. And then he knocked again, and then she was there: he could see her breasts almost down to the nipples. She had on the robe she had given him, and when she spoke, he heard what she said. He saw the man, standing to the side. For an awkward second, nobody said anything. He looked behind him and saw the stairs. When he blinked, they stopped slowly swaying
.

Sixteen

ALTHOUGH HE HAD
promised Brandt he would take him to see the Little League game that night, he had gone to the house in Connecticut, instead of going back to Rye. Louise had called him and said that she wanted to talk. “Can you give me a hint?” he said, hoping that he was keeping his voice even. It had to be that she wanted a divorce. All that hanging out with Tiffy Adamson had paid off in the long run; Louise had not called him at the office for a year, except about the most trivial things. Certainly her calling him in New York and asking him to call the house in Connecticut because she was too busy, and Mary had to put hamburger meat out to defrost, was a little dig at him, a reminder that there was a world there he wasn’t a part of. It also let him know how banal she thought that world was, but that she was doing the proper thing, coping with it, while he was not. She had called and asked
him
to ask Mary to put hamburger meat out. He laughed, telling Nina later, and Nina had said that she thought it was sad. “Which part of it?” he said, and she said, “All of it.” So Tiffy had gotten through to Louise. She had convinced her to ask for a divorce.

“No hints,” she said. “Will you be here for dinner, or later?”

“I’ll come for dinner,” he said. He was suddenly feeling generous.
The end of summer was coming, and she was making it easy for him—she was asking him to go instead of making him ask her. She was going to tell him that she wanted a divorce.

After a little while, he felt almost melancholy about it. He told Nick, when he came in with iced coffee for the two of them, that his sadness wasn’t really much about what he was losing: Visiting rights would give him as much time with Mary and John Joel as he spent with them now; and if he gave Louise what she wanted and she was halfway reasonable, they might even be friends in the way they hadn’t been friends for years. His sorrow was that he felt that he was losing so little. Or maybe he had lost a lot, fast, years ago; he had lost it and the loss had never caught up with him, and now he didn’t feel much emotion about saying that it was gone.

“It would serve you right if she demanded a mink coat. If that’s what the call was about,” Nick said. “My wife used to call when we were fighting it out in court. She would be in the courtroom the day before and wouldn’t even look at me, let alone speak, and then as though nothing had happened, she’d call and tell me about an August fur sale at Bendel’s.”

Nick was talking, but John was only half listening to him. He was looking at the picture of his family, minus Brandt, on Nantucket, and thinking how sad it must be to have old pictures, happy pictures, and suddenly see something ironic in them years later. Or for those pictures to give you a sense that something meaningful had been lost. He looked at the picture, and felt the same way he had felt when the roll of film came back from the camera store, the same way he had felt when he picked out the one he wanted to have enlarged to five by seven—that this was the expected picture. It was a picture he had known would exist one day before he ever met and married Louise. He stared at Mary’s bathing suit, at the rows of gingerbread men, arms outstretched, touching hands. A band of gingerbread men, and then another, and then another, as evenly spaced, as regular, as the gray bands on his mother’s television screen, but not rolling—no movement. Just the line of them, brown and expressionless. The gingerbread men looked like Mr. Bill. The man in the camera store had said that it would cost more, but that they could fix the print; they could burn in the deck, for instance. “Burn it?” John had said.
The man at the camera store was young—probably some starving young photographer, probably some genius of a photographer, sick to death of looking at pictures like this day after day. “When you develop a picture—if it’s there in the negative—you can give some parts of the picture more exposure time than the rest, and that will darken it, bring in detail.” He had been so interested in the things the man described that he had bought a book about developing and printing pictures that he found for a dollar at a tag sale that summer. But he had not had the picture improved. He had just wanted it enlarged, and then he had framed it. No burning or dodging. Holding back, putting more in—it was a joke, how sexual everything was. He looked at Louise, her stomach big with Brandt, forcing her rows of gingerbread men to curve.

He had a picture of Nina that he loved—the only picture he had ever seen of her as a child, a picture her mother had sent to her when she was cleaning out the house. It had been taken, Nina thought, at a table in a seafood restaurant they went to in Atlantic City. Nina was sitting in an inside chair, next to her mother, a too-large white sailor’s hat perched on her head like Jughead’s crown, and her hands were neatly folded on the table—it could have been a Bible, instead of a food-stained tablecloth—and Nina looked beatific. He had had trouble explaining to her why he used that word. The glass of ginger ale—it had one of those silly paper umbrellas resting on the rim of the glass, and a cherry sunk halfway down—might have been a chalice. Her face was clear and pretty, and she looked like the Nina he knew now did when she was sleeping; but her big child’s eyes were open in the picture, and she was smiling a little more than she ever did in her sleep. Her father sat across from her. He had her wide-set eyes, her widow’s peak, her mouth. Her uncle—her mother’s brother—sat next to her father. There was a beer bottle in front of her uncle’s place, a Coke bottle beside a glass where her mother sat, and her father had a glass on a stem, a martini glass. Nina could remember her father telling the woman who came to the table to photograph them that he would take one big picture and a set of matchbooks. What had become of a dozen matchbooks with Nina’s family on them?

“When they start to harden, they want fur,” Nick was saying. “Ever notice that? When their hair gets dry and they go to exercise
class and get all toned up, they start thinking about fur.” Nick puffed on his cigarettte, not inhaling. “When they start to get old, and they’re afraid of getting cold. They think about being hard and cold and in the ground, and the answer is a mink coat.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Metcalf just passed on one of his accounts to me. I’ve got to think of some way to convince the twenty-five-and-under crowd that they want to wear mink and not worry about dead animals. I’ve got to convince people twenty-five and under that it doesn’t matter that some animal is trapped and killed.” Nick got up and looked out the window. “I don’t want to,” Nick said. “Days like today, I’d like to just lie in the grass naked. Maybe I could do something along the lines of the avocado ads, where the woman grows the plant from the pit. I could offer the twenty-five-and-under crowd a free bag of mink bones with their coat. Tell them their wishes would all come true if they wished on a mink bone. Poor minks. Poor fuckers.”

Nick wandered out of the office. In the corridor he turned and said: “I wish you luck. I really do. I hope she wants a divorce and doesn’t take you for everything you’ve got. But I guess it doesn’t matter much to you. I guess you’re serious about liking that tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue.”

He called Nina at Lord and Taylor’s to tell her that Louise had called, and that he thought she was going to ask for a divorce. He changed his mind about telling her, though, and he was half glad when he was connected with the wrong person. He knew that Nina thought he was a coward. “A wise coward,” she said, qualifying it. “I don’t know that I’d walk out on a family.” She had had dreams, when they first met, that she was bobbing in the water along with Louise and John Joel and Brandt and Mary, and that he was in a boat only large enough to take one of them on board. Sometimes he would reach for her, sometimes Louise, sometimes one of the children. She would tread water for what seemed like hours. And then she would dream the rest of it: No matter who he reached for, everything got blurry, and then she was somewhere looking down, puzzled because what was in the boat was a starfish, or a sea nettle, a sea anemone, a water lily, a conch shell. Some small, beautiful sea creature would be in the boat with him. She had told
him the dream in early May, the second time they had gone away together, to Nick’s sister’s house in Provincetown. High up on one of the dunes, a bright day with still an edge of winter, she had suddenly remembered, looking out at the water, her peculiar dreams about the drifting boat, the outstretched arm. They had sat on top of one of the dunes, the beach deserted, and she had told him about it, shaking her head in embarrassment, because the dream obviously meant that she thought he could save her. He had made light of it. The truth was that he did not think of her as someone who needed saving. He thought that she could save
him
, that her light grip on his arm, as they sat on top of the dune, was anchoring his body to the earth. Who
would
he really save if they were all in the water? He thought that he would try to haul all of them into the boat, too ashamed to claim the one he really wanted. She was right: He was a coward. He kicked a little sand down the slope and watched it gather more with it and go like a trickle of water until it stopped. Now the shape of the dune was different, though no one else would notice. He looked at it. He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t know what to say when she was so honest. He didn’t know how to say, simply, okay, if you think that having me will save you, you can have me. If he could really have believed that he would be leaving Louise and the children to save
her
, then he probably would have done it instantly, but he was sure that he was leaving to save himself. She thought she couldn’t cope very well with things, but she could. She was more complicated than she knew. She dreamed questions while he dreamed answers: In the morning her questions were still good, but his answers were simple, facile. They didn’t apply. Later that day he and Nina had gone back to the house, sure that everyone would know that they had made love, and Nick had been in the kitchen with Laurie, who was his girl then, scrubbing clean a bucket of mussels. They had had a stew made of mussels and shrimp, and they had all gotten a little drunk on ale. Nick’s sister had a movie projector, and they had watched
Dial M for Murder
after dinner, and then gone for a walk along the beach. Nick’s straw hat had blown off, and Laurie had chased it into the cold, black water. When she retrieved it, she shook it and put it on, holding the hat with one hand, and Nick’s hand with her other. Back at the
house, Nick had talked about living with people who mattered to you: having some huge, grand house somewhere by the sea, and all your good friends living in the house. There couldn’t be any cats, because he hated cats; but there could be dogs, hundreds of collies, poking their long snouts into everything, miracle collies that would go to the beach to sniff out mussels and come up with truffles instead. Truffles would roll around the huge house like billiard balls. They would play indoor miniature golf with truffles. Nick’s sister had sighed. She was just back from France, and had made the mistake of telling him about the white truffle she had brought back with her. The next afternoon they had eaten it, grated over pasta. When they left on Sunday night, they were high on nothing but the good time they had had. He and Nick had bought a present for Nick’s sister at a greenhouse they walked to early Sunday morning: a plant with pink and silver leaves. He remembered driving a nail into the top of her window frame, and Nick standing below him, handing up the plant. Those wide, tall windows, the view of grapevines and poison ivy just starting to leaf out, clots of tangled green pouring over rocks and onto the sand behind the house. And then the way that scene had looked later, when it was almost dark: the way the vines turned and tangled had reminded him of some nightmare creature crawling toward him, all legs and arms and lumpy greenness. He had jumped when Nina touched him from behind. He hadn’t known she was there. She had complained—jokingly, but she had also been serious—that he never let her out of his sight. That was Nina: She thought he was her salvation, and she didn’t want him around all the time. What Nick had said earlier about a group of friends living together had really touched him; he talked to Nina about it, standing at the darkening window. It was so nice to see plants outside, instead of a parade of retards; it was so nice to be able to breathe clean air. “You’d never make it living this way,” she had said. “You’d be like Thoreau, going home to get his wash done.”