Falling in Place (9 page)

“You don’t know the name of her best friend?”

“Well,” his father said. “Aren’t we finding fault with our old dad left and right today.”

“Adamson,” John Joel said.

“I don’t care what her name is,” his father said.

“I was trying to tell you a really good joke the other night in the park, and you didn’t care about that, either.”

“What joke?”

“You don’t even remember.”

“I hear a lot of jokes. That’s what you do in the workaday world, my friend: You fend off disaster and listen to jokes.”

“I don’t want to go to the dentist.”

“What do you want to do? Lie in the tree?”

“I don’t always lie in the tree,” John Joel said.

“You’re acting like a five-year-old today.”

“You’re just taking me because she told you to.”

“No indeed,” John said. “I’m doing my best to insure a happy future for my son, so that when he goes out into the workaday world, people will take him seriously. They don’t take short men
or men with buck teeth seriously. Read what
Psychology Today
says about what’s taken seriously. You with your beautiful straight teeth are going to be taken seriously, and then you can sit around and fend off disaster and listen to jokes. When you laugh, you’ll do it with a set of sparkling white teeth.”

“If you don’t want to take me, don’t take me. I don’t want to go.”

“How did we get into this? I got you an appointment. Seeing this guy is like getting in to see King Tut. He’s not going to do anything today. He’s just going to look at your teeth. Maybe take an X-ray.”

“But then he’s going to do something.”

“I can’t help it that your teeth are getting crooked.”

His father brought the car to a stop with a screech of tires that made the garage attendant look up and stare. His father sat there expressionless until the attendant came to the car. The attendant put a piece of paper under the windshield wiper and handed a smaller piece of paper to his father. His father put it in his inside pocket and he and John Joel got out of the car. Walking up the ramp, the attendant called: “How long?”

“Two o’clock,” John said. “ ‘Happy ever after in the market place,’ ” he sang under his breath.

They walked two blocks crosstown to the orthodontist’s office. His father pushed a buzzer and they were buzzed in. The receptionist was pregnant, wearing a T-shirt with “Baby” printed across it, and an arrow pointing down. She gave his father a form to fill out and smiled around him at John Joel. When she stood up to take the piece of paper back, John Joel stared at her huge stomach. She smiled again.

“I’ll wait and hear what he has to say,” his father said.

John Joel shrugged. “I’m not a baby,” he said.

“Can you remember what he said?”

“He hasn’t said anything yet,” John Joel said. It was useless; his father never knew when somebody was kidding, and there was no point in telling him it was a joke, because it had been such a lame one. “I’ll remember,” John Joel said.

“And you’re going to wait for Nick to pick you up, right? At eleven. He’ll be in the waiting room when you get out. Okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?” John Joel said.

What John had taken to be small photographs of teeth were, he realized, photographs of shells. There was also a basket of shells on the table in front of the couch, and there were small plastic stands that supported shells on the tables at either end of the room. An old
Life
magazine with Ike and Mamie smiling their round-faced smiles was on one table, along with the current issue of
Variety
, the
National Enquirer
and
Commentary
. John looked over the magazines, thinking that this orthodontist was going to cost. He was reluctant to leave John Joel. At his son’s age, he would have waited for his father to leave and then bolted. The pregnant receptionist wouldn’t have had a chance of catching him. He looked at John Joel, slumped in a chair, leafing through a magazine, and decided that his son would do no such thing. Mary was right that John Joel hated to exert himself. He was fat and pale, and the braces were going to make him look even more like the Cheshire cat.

“Okay, I’ll take off,” he said. “I’ll see you and Nick outside of the museum.”

“How come Nick’s taking me to the museum?”

“Because he wasn’t going to be busy today. He said he’d like to.”

John Joel shrugged.

“Okay,” John sighed. “See you at lunchtime.”

“So are we going to another Fourth of July party on that guy’s roof?”

“What did you say?” John was halfway across the room when he heard his son speaking to him. “You’re talking about the party last year?”

“Yeah. Are we going again?”

“Do you want to go again?”

“I just wanted to know.”

“Well, I just want to know if you
want
to go again. That’s not a complicated question, is it?”

“I liked that roof. I just didn’t like the fireworks.”

“I don’t think he lives there anymore. I think he moved to the East Side a couple of months ago.”

“He wasn’t a good friend of yours?”

“No. Why?”

“So how come you went to his party?”

“I work with him. He invited me. How come you’re so talkative all of a sudden?”

“I just wanted to know.”

“I don’t think he’s having a party this year.”

“No big deal,” John Joel said.

John sat down again, thinking that John Joel must have started that conversation to get him to stay. Maybe he was afraid of going to see the orthodontist, or maybe he doubted that Nick would show up. John picked up a magazine.

“I thought you were going,” John Joel said.

“Do you want me to go?”

“Sure,” John Joel said.

John sighed and got up. He tried to open the door, but he had to catch the receptionist’s eye to be buzzed out. She looked at him suspiciously. She looked at him the way his mother would look at him if she knew that he was leaving John Joel alone. She always acted like New York was a huge cage that you walked into, with animals about to leap when you made the first sudden move. She was always jumpy in New York. It was the one thing she had in common with Louise. The most innocent things disturbed Louise: water gushing from a fire hydrant, a woman leaning out a window who was obviously only going to water her plants. Every siren made her turn her head; everyone who stared at her in a subway car was going to follow her off. In the beginning, he had only thought about making her happy by moving them to the suburbs. Now she hated him for being able to cope with the city when she couldn’t. And she hated the suburbs because there weren’t any intelligent people. Tiffy was intelligent. Only Tiffy. The truth was, she liked
normal
intelligent people, and they were hard to find. Even Nick was too strange for her. A cowboy hat and a black date made him, in her mind, no different from an extra in a Fellini movie. Horst, who had had the Fourth of July party the year before, couldn’t have been as normal as he seemed if he slept in his sleeping bag, naked. Which part of that is odd? John had asked her. “Both parts,” she had said. He had hoped that just the sleeping bag would seem odd.

He went into a coffee shop, feeling guilty for leaving John Joel alone in the doctor’s office. But he hated to treat him like a child,
the way Louise did. Maybe letting him handle it on his own would give him self-confidence. He drank a black coffee, pouring a little water into the cup to cool it while two men who worked there argued about what song titles ought to be put in the jukebox. A tall fat man sitting on a stool at the counter kept whispering to them, cupping his hand over a piece of paper. “ ‘Greek selection’ is good enough,” one said, and the other hit him with a dishtowel, saying, “The songs have names. You think all Greek songs are ‘Never on Sunday’?” Finally, both men had towels and were slapping each other’s shoulders. Two women waited by the cash register. “ ‘Oh you can kiss me on a Mon-day, a Mon-day, a Mon-day,’ ” one man sang, and the tall fat man shrugged in disgust. The other man swatted the man who was dancing and singing. “Can I have a bagel and a coffee to go?” one of the women by the cash register said. “ ‘Or you can kiss me on a Tues-day, a Tues-day, a Tues-day, a Tues-day’s very good,’ ” the man sang. He was jumping in the air and clicking his heels together, hands cupped over his head. “ ‘Greek selection,’ ” the other man said. “Just write it down, and that’s that.” The tall man put his head in his hands and let it all go on. One of the women walked out, but the one who had asked for the bagel just gave her order again. John left a dollar, without asking for a check, and went out. The coffee had given him a lift. He looked up at the sky: still overcast, but a few breaks of light. He checked his watch and went to the corner and looked for a cab. Cabs came by him so fast that they looked like they had been launched. Finally he saw an empty one and hailed it. “Thirty-ninth and Fifth,” he said.

He hardly ever went into Lord and Taylor’s because it made him sad that she worked there. But he wanted to see her. He felt as if he had been running and running and had never touched base. It was a kind of anxiety that came on him lately: that he was rushing forward, but leaving something behind. Not that he could grab her over the counter at Lord and Taylor’s. And he had no idea what he was going to say when he saw her.

He leaned on the counter and waited while she folded something and handed it to a customer and thanked her. She knew he was there, but didn’t acknowledge him.

“You know what Lois Lane wonders when she’s flying with
Superman?” Nina said, without showing any surprise at seeing him.

“What?”

“She’s thinking: Can you read my mind?”

“I can’t. What are you thinking?”

“That I don’t like working at Lord and Taylor’s, and I’m embarrassed for you to be here.”

“Why should you be embarrassed? Your mother is the only one who believes in success for college grads, right?”

“This place is creepy. You don’t belong here. I hope I don’t belong here.”

“Can you read
my
mind?” he said. “I feel like it’s been steamrollered. I feel like a tumbleweed might blow out of my ear when the winds shift in the desert in there.”

“God,” she said. “Stop it.”

“I can’t come over tonight,” he said. “John Joel’s at the orthodontist’s, and I’ve got to take him back to Rye this afternoon.”

“Then come back,” she said.

“Come back
again
?” he said. He hesitated. “Maybe I should have dinner with them.”

“Then do it,” she said.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sit around and get stoned,” he said.

She shrugged.

“I’ll drive back in,” he said. “I’m meeting him for lunch. He and Nick and I are having lunch. Maybe that’s good enough.”

“Listen,” she said. “If you think you should have dinner with them tonight, do it.”

“He was telling me… Did you ever see those things called snakes? They’re about the size of a cigarette, and when you light them they expand and curl like a snake? I hadn’t thought about them since I was a kid. Do you know the things I’m talking about?”

“I don’t think Lord and Taylor’s carries them.”

“Come on,” he said. “You know the things I mean?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re not just saying that?”

“No. Why would I pretend to know what snakes are? The boy
who lived next door to us used to light snakes. What about them?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to get some snakes and sparklers for the Fourth of July?”

“All right,” she said. “Why?”

“You sound like my kid.”

“Is this another one of your things about how much younger I am than you? Even if I am, I’m more together than you are.”

“That’s the truth.”

“Maybe you ought to go to work,” she said. She laid her hand over his.

“I was scared to death of those things,” he said. “The truth of it is that I hated caps and cherry bombs and snakes. How did I ever make it through the Army?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was barely born. Remember?”

“I want to get a snake and have you light it, okay? You light it, and this time if I feel like jumping back, I jump back.”

He realized for the first time that a woman was waiting politely beside him, holding a package of panty hose.

The de rigueur picture on the desk: Nantucket, rented boat, August vacation. The children: not the children as they really were, even then. Mary in her gingerbread-man bathing suit, wet pigtails tied with red ribbons, staring seriously into the camera; John Joel still a baby, sitting on the deck at Louise’s feet, Louise’s face a little blurred because at the last second she had moved slightly, trying to make him look into the camera. Before he was fat. When he still had his downy, shoulder-length baby hair. Louise tall and tanned, seven months pregnant, wearing a gingerbread-man bathing suit like Mary’s, but without the ruffle. And from the left, harsh sunlight, washing out the deck so that it looked as if Louise was poised on the edge of something, a woman not bending forward to direct her little boy’s attention to the lens, but moving to protect him from something more serious. At the right was the jagged shadow of the ship’s big sail. How strange that years later he would be fascinated not by the people but by the light and shadow, the light washing out one side of the photograph and the dark shadow jabbing toward them from the other side. He could not remember, and the picture did not help him
remember, what it was like to take a family vacation in Nantucket. How easy to look back and see that things were ending, going wrong. Even the way shadows fell in a snapshot became symbolic
.