Falling in Place (37 page)

He hated to talk to her on the telephone and always had. That night he had made a fool of himself by blurting out: “Listen—do you want any donuts?” When he called her at work she could never reply to what he said, and what he said was never what he meant to say. Someone was always standing behind him waiting for the phone; or he’d call from the office and he’d hear her voice and realize how bleak his surroundings were, and overwhelmed by that, would be unable to talk. Or at phones along the highway: He’d know the road was out there and he could never put it out of his mind. There were always dark spaces, highways, impatient people—something to make what he was saying, or trying to say, not make sense. He would call and tell her he loved her as someone pushed change into a vending machine. Something they wanted would be falling through the machine—a soft drink or a candy bar—and his eye would wander, and it would seem that everything was so mundane, that his words couldn’t carry any conviction. He woke her up more than he should. He would get obsessed with calling her. At night, in New York, he would tear himself away from her, and then he would stop to call three times before he got back to Rye and then call again from the dark hallway, whispering like a criminal who had broken into the house. He would talk to her about love, standing in the dark of his mother’s house, feeling like a child who couldn’t possibly know what he was saying. Then, sometimes, he would explain to her, when she was sleepy and perturbed, why he knew he wasn’t getting through to her: Suddenly he would be telling her something that wasn’t about the two of them at all, but about his mother and father, some memory, or he would describe the place he was calling from, his hand nervously touching the phone, putting his finger into the dial, touching inside the 1, the 2, the 3, his finger probing the phone as if one circle might be the right one, and somehow he
would really connect with her. Again and again, standing in the same place, late at night, in the dark, Henri the poodle staring and panting as he whispered, he would hear her voice and his finger would start to move, as though the phone were a Ouija board. Or sometimes he would know that he had awakened her and say nothing about love, say only that he was sorry for having made her get up to answer the phone. Once he had called her from a phone outside the parking garage—he had left her apartment, so upset about leaving that he had walked for half an hour instead of taking a cab—and there was something wrong with the phone. He had had to put four dimes in before he made the connection, and when she answered, he had only been able to tell her that he had walked, that there was a phone out of order in New York. Then he had stared at a couple walking by; he had held the phone tightly in one hand, his claim check for his car in the other, and he remembered thinking that if he let the phone go, he was going to disappear. He had dropped endless nickels into the phone and kept her talking for an hour. She didn’t understand about him and the phone. He tried to explain it to her in person, but even then he never really got through. At first when he would leave and call her half an hour later, an hour later, she got angry and accused him of being paranoid and checking on her. She had first said that to him on the phone, and he couldn’t deal with criticism on the phone: He would just lose his words, and be silent, and then she would think that he had gone, and he would panic, thinking: Please don’t hang up. Think I’m not here, but please don’t hang up. It was only in the movies that you could jiggle the cradle of a telephone up and down saying three or four times “Hello? Hello?” and still be connected. He couldn’t stand it, either, if she joked on the phone. Once, five minutes after he had left her, he had called and told her he loved her and she had said, sounding genuinely confused, “Who is this?” He would seek out phones because they connected him to her, knowing all the time that that was an illusion: a piece of black plastic, his hand on a piece of black plastic miles away from her hand. How could he think he was touching her? He would call her and imagine her standing there, holding the telephone. She was used to all of it by now. She said “That’s okay” reflexively when he said he was sorry for
waking her; she would tell him without protest whether she was sitting or standing, wearing clothes or pajamas: whatever he wanted to know. She had said to him, early on, that maybe it would be better if they didn’t talk on the telephone, and he had been amazed that she hadn’t understood: It was like admitting that they were defeated. They were already separated too much, and the phone was a false link, but still a link. “You wouldn’t not answer your phone, would you?” he had said. “Maybe if you didn’t look around you when you called,” she said, “you could concentrate on what you wanted to say.” So he had closed his eyes, holding the phone against his ear, everything black. She had given him a toy telephone for Christmas, her face glued in the center, smiling a big smile. When you dialed the phone, a childish voice would say: “I am five, how old are you?” Dial again, and the voice would say: “Will you be my friend?” He knew that it was funny, but it also wasn’t funny: It was his nightmare telephone, the telephone on which you couldn’t say what you wanted, on which words were just words and went nowhere. He had given the toy telephone to Nick to give his son. He would have given it to Brandt, but he didn’t even want it around. The little circular picture was in his desk drawer. It reminded him of the telephone, and it was the one picture of Nina he didn’t really like to look at. But he kept it. It was there. Until Nina had shown him, he had never thought about his favorite sleeping position: on his side, with one arm along his body, the other arm raised, fingers curled, just below the ear. In bed one night, she had faced him, imitating his position, and said, “Hello, John? Everything all right?”

He opened his eyes and saw that she was on the bed facing him now, and he wanted to rouse himself to console her. But his body felt heavy—the sudden heaviness you feel when you’ve been treading water and are about to sink, a signal from your body that it isn’t worth it to fight anymore. He was lying on his back, hot and heavy on the mattress, and she was on her side, supporting herself on one arm, her free hand resting on the sheet. If she were to put her hand on him, that little bit of added weight would push him under. He looked at her hand, and not at her face. It was such a small hand, the fingers long and thin—he had forgotten if he had ever held such a hand when he was young, when his own hand was smaller.

She had once said that he was a coward. Cowardly to leave his family and not totally cut the tie. Cowardly to go, and cowardly to return, and all the time he was in Connecticut feeling heavy—his heart heavy. He felt old, and more tired than he felt when he was physically tired, driving home late to his mother’s house in Rye. The truth was that he didn’t have much grace. He could have eased Louise into discussions, but he hadn’t. Louise could still take him by surprise, and he was afraid of that. The only thing that had taken him by surprise that had been a good surprise, a surprise he could deal with, had been Nina. When she had opened the door and he had seen the man standing there, he had misunderstood, in a flash, what kind of scene he had walked in on; and he had only been able to stand there, as stunned as he was when somebody pulled a trick on him on the telephone, unable to think about what was happening but staring at her breast, the robe fallen away so that he saw the curve of her breast almost to the nipple. He had no idea what he would have done or said if she had not spoken. He could imagine standing there still.

At the hospital, it had seemed that he was watching the action from a great distance, as if he were standing outside a dance hall where strobe lights were flashing. The hospital had seemed garishly bright, and he had closed his eyes often, needing to rest them. When he opened them, he would get a flash of something new, something he would only see quickly: the blood-covered shirt, the notebook that was open and then closed, a needle going into Louise’s arm. When he blinked the needle had been pulled out; Louise had been standing and then she was sitting. He saw people but not groups of people; a nurse’s hand, but not the nurse’s body. His son, in a white bed: For a second he had seen all of him, a little boy in a bed, but then he had seen only his eyes. John Joel had said that Mary was a bitch. His mouth had moved, but nothing else, and he had wanted to move toward him, but the nurse had stepped in. He blinked, and then the nurse was between him and his son, and he was staring at her hand, turning. The corridor stretched before him, long and narrow and bright; and from there, somehow, to the inside of the car, with Louise on the seat beside him. Then he managed to focus on the important things, one by one: key in ignition, hand on wheel, foot on accelerator. He had gotten to New York the same way. He had not seen the whole
backyard, but only the tree under which it had happened; and then he had seen his car, gotten into the car, and from there to New York it was a series of simple, mechanical movements. They tell you when you are learning to drive not to stare straight ahead, but to take in what is happening around you. Next to him was an empty seat. He looked at his hands on the wheel, then through the windshield, and then at the speedometer: He watched the needle climb and climb until he was going the right speed. He knew that he was falling asleep, and that he shouldn’t sleep. Her hand was on his chest, but he had been wrong—it was inadequate to hold him down. He wasn’t heavy, as he had thought, but light, speeding.

“What’s the matter?” she said, when he sprang up from the bed.

He stood in the room, shaking sleep out of his head. He had to go back, but he was afraid to move out of the room, afraid to move from the spot he stood in. Nina was standing beside him, pulling his arm the way Brandt did, but she had more power. She could lead him back to the bed. He blinked, and he was sitting on the bed, Nina’s arm around his shoulder, Nina pressing up against him. She was crying. He talked to her, said words, said something, but she kept on crying. Talking to her was as futile as trying to get to the top of the stairs. Time had stopped. He was telling her that they were stopped, and she was shaking her head no. She didn’t believe him? He decided to trust her. He smiled and pulled her down on the bed with him. If time hadn’t stopped, then it was safe to sleep, and when he woke up things would go on. It was possible that things could go on. If he slept, it did not mean that he would sleep forever.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

He thought that she knew him so well that she had read his mind. He thought she was asking him whether or not he was going to stay awake.

On his side, next to her in the bright room, he slept.

He dreamed that Nina was on a train. It was a train in a foreign country, a train somewhere in Europe, and it was winter, a bright day, bare trees and bright sun as the train took a curve and straightened again. She had on a winter coat, black, and she was sitting in a compartment alone, on a long wooden bench that faced another wooden bench. She was looking at the haze of passing scenery out the window. And then a couple came into the compartment, a man and a wife. They had a newspaper with them, the
New York Times,
and when they put a section aside she asked to see it. They were surprised that she was also an American. Just the three of them, two facing one, Nina in her black coat. She had taken the paper, unfolded it, turned the page, and there was his picture. Sitting on the train and opening a newspaper she had found his obituary, and that was how she learned that he was dead
.

Twenty

“I’M STILL
looking around the farm, and I’m able to count all the chickens. Seems like there hasn’t been one chicken dinner, if you know what I mean. Chickens still going every which way, you keep hearing about how they get their heads chopped off and their bodies go running forward, but when I look around, I don’t even see any feathers. More and more chickens, nicer and nicer farm. Pastoral. People would say I was an evil character for dealing a few drugs, but look who gets blown away. Not my chickens. Way I look at it, we’re all still struttin’ around Maggie’s Farm. Bunch of chickens struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine. You pick up a newspaper and read about what happened at Three Mile Island, you try to tell me that my chickens are causing any trouble like that. Might be a little stoned, but they’re just struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine, and nobody’s catching them for nothing. Too many bad things pinned on drugs. No way that ten-year-old was high, according to you, and there he was, up in a tree, shooting down. No way drugs explain why this is a bad world. Chickens got all upset a while back there, thinking the sky was falling. Acid didn’t do that. The United States space program did that. Chickens ought to squawk. They fucking ought to claw the
dirt
about
that one. Not that there’s any good it would do them. United States government doesn’t have to pay attention to a little bit of scratching in the dirt.”