Falling in Place

Fourteen

SPANGLE’S MOTHER was wondering if she should have her old mouton coat updated, as she put it, for Cynthia to wear in the winter. Cynthia listened, keeping the phone clamped against her ear with her raised shoulder, carefully stroking clear nail lacquer on her fingernails as she talked. The smell was powerful so close to her nose, and she wished that she could put the brush down and sit comfortably in a chair and do her nails and not have to talk to Spangle’s mother. It was wrong to blame Spangle for his mother. It was even wrong to blame Spangle’s mother for trying to be nice, but it had been a long day of teaching, and their stupid faces still bobbed before her in the empty apartment, and she did not think that she could be tactful much longer.

“I suppose you don’t want it, even if I have the bottom part narrowed,” Spangle’s mother said.

“I think the coat I have is fine. I appreciate your offering, but I don’t really think I’d be comfortable in a fur coat.”

“Don’t think I’m dense. Don’t think I don’t know what you mean,” Spangle’s mother said, “but in terms of mental as opposed to physical comfort, think about how you would feel with some perfume squirted on and a strand of pearls and a thick, warm mouton. You could update the look yourself by dyeing your hair red and chopping it into one of those crew cuts and wearing neon pants and a cowboy shirt. Don’t think I don’t read fashion magazines anymore. I do. I read them, and I know that women want to look like whores at a party, and that work is considered a party. Stiletto heels at work. Silver skirts. Really.”

“I appreciate the offer,” Cynthia said.

“It’s wicked to keep it hanging there in its little purple garment bag. I can’t wear it because it reminds me of happier times. I wish I could just put that coat back on, and squirt on some Toujours Moi and fasten my pearl necklace and feel good, the way I did in the old days. My husband’s dead. Two sons, both in Madrid, and a biopsy that fortunately came out benign. Two sons crazy as loons. I put them in their little sleeper suits and read them bedtime stories, and they grew up handsome and smart and ended up with psychiatrists and amphetamine problems and they ran away, both of them, on my money, to Madrid.” She sighed. “Their father’s money. Whatever.”

“I don’t want to take the coat because I’m not sure that I should take something when I don’t know if I’m going to be around or not,” Cynthia said. “This isn’t my idea of living together this summer, that he disappears to Madrid and sends me one one-sentence post card.”

“You’re mad,” Spangle’s mother said. “I’m mad, too. It’s my money and your time. That gives us a common bond. The mouton would give us another one: I’d give a fine present, and you’d be indebted. If the next lump is malignant, I could count on a visit from you.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say. You know I’d come to see you.”

“I think that when called upon, most people fish out a travel brochure.”

“You insisted that he go to Madrid.”

“Oh no. You’re mistaken there. I insisted that he track down his flesh-and-blood brother to bring him back to this country. He has a responsibility to his brother. His brother has followed his example for years. If Peter told him to sniff nutmeg, he sniffed nutmeg. I’m not exaggerating. All of a sudden the Hardy Boys books had a dusting of nutmeg over them.”

“Then grass and drugs,” Cynthia said, finishing the sentence for her.

“Sports cars, grass and drugs. My God: I used to measure out little spoonfuls of medicine and wobble forward to their little-baby mouths with them, and I cut aspirin in quarters, and they grew up and jumped into a sports car and threw away their money on houses they never wanted and women they hardly knew and drugs — they’d try anything. My God: He told me he wanted to go to Bard College because it was a small place — it was so pretty there, and he wouldn’t just disappear in the system. Bard College.”

“I’m sorry,” Cynthia said, “but I’m very tired. I want to hang up and do some things before I have to go to bed.”

“Oh, I know. I’m from another world. What must you think about a woman who grew up getting another pearl for her necklace every Christmas and birthday? I was so embarrassed that the chain filled up so slowly with pearls. I don’t know where I put that thing.”

Cynthia hung up, being careful not to touch the phone with her nails. She was becoming less and less sure that if he came back from Madrid she would even want to see him. Might as well give up on him and do something else. Screw Mary Knapp’s father, who acted at lunch as though he wanted to screw her.

But she was starting to dislike men. She was starting to get very tired of all the hassles they caused, the way they just put themselves in front of you, and suddenly you had a barrier to run around. They were stronger; they did have a different kind of energy. Spangle didn’t have any money, and he’d managed a trip to Spain, while she was teaching five days a week in a hot classroom — teaching boys who thought everything was either funny or pointless. When they were vocal, it was always the boys. And the goddamn magician, that completely crazy, boring, stupid magician who hounded her. If the police weren’t men, she would call the police and try to get them to keep him away from her. She went to the window and looked out. A fat woman was walking a cat on a leash. A man was walking a few paces in front of her, smoking a cigar. She tried to figure out if they were together. A teenage boy in a light-blue leisure suit ran down the street, and the man with the cigar turned to look. Cynthia saw that what she had taken for a man was really a woman — a tall, heavy woman smoking a cigar. The woman with the cigar waited. The woman with the cat caught up with her. They walked down the street together. The magician was nowhere to be seen, but if she went out he would be there. He knew that she was sick of talk about magic, and a couple of nights ago he had switched the topic to health insurance: Everyone should demand national health insurance. He had asked her to have a donut and coffee with him, and she had refused. She had even told him to leave her alone, that she was going to tell her husband that he was bothering her. That didn’t stop him, because obviously her husband wasn’t there. She went into the kitchen and turned on the useless fan. The idea of Spangle as a husband amused her. Once, she had wanted that: Spangle, off stoned in Madrid, who probably thought that he was going to come back and worm his way into her heart again. On the shelf above the sink was a bottle of tequila with a worm in the bottom. She thought that it would be nice to pickle her students: to have rows of canning jars, with little shrunken students inside. She wondered if the magician could help her with that plan. Because he was out there. She was sure that he was out there. If she stepped out he would be there — it would be as simple as holding out a sugar cube to a horse, a pole to a sinking person. If she went out, the magician would come for her.

She drank some Kahlua and felt sorry for herself. She put an ice cube in the glass and drank some more, tilting the glass and knocking the ice cube against the side.

She curled up in a chair in the living room and wrote her sister a letter, an ugly letter that accused her of selling out for money. She asked her sister if she would like a newly tailored mouton coat. There was no danger in writing her sister such a letter, because unless a carrier pigeon came for it, there would be no way to get it to her. There would be no way, because the mailbox was on the street and so was the magician. If she really thought that it would be as simple as her going out and his snapping to her side like a piece of iron to a magnet, she would call the police and let it all happen. But she realized that if she called them, either they would come and the magician would see them and not approach her, or else, inexplicably, he would not be there. Then she, herself, would be perceived as yet another New Haven nut. She reread the letter. It was coherent and true, and if she had the nerve, she would mail it. She had to agree with Spangle’s mother that it was awful to see people throwing their lives away, and her sister was being very one-minded about dedicating herself to a rich, eccentric old man. Cynthia went into the kitchen and poured the last of the Kahlua into the glass. The first drink was all right, but the second and third were candy-sweet. She thought about calling Mary Knapp’s father and asking him to come over with a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic. He would. She thought he would. She thought that Spangle had no right to have stayed with her so long—he had stayed with her, not the other way around — only to take off, stay away. He could be anywhere, doing anything. And she had to get calls about mouton coats. If she picked up the phone — which was ringing — and it was Tess Spangle again, she was just going to hang up.

It was someone named Bobby, whom she didn’t know, who said he was an old friend of Spangle’s from the Cambridge and Vermont days and wanted to know if Spangle wanted to come to a party at a waterfall in New Hampshire. She told him that Spangle was in Madrid. He told her that he was going to be going to Africa in September. After they had finished talking, he said: “I haven’t called the wrong number, have I? I really wanted to get in touch with Spangle. I haven’t seen him since 1972. Last week I called a wrong number — a restaurant, to make a reservation — and they took my name and number and everything, and I’d never reached the goddamn place. I went to the restaurant and we couldn’t eat dinner. My girlfriend was with me,” he said. “We’re going to Africa together.”

She hung up and sat in the chair. From the apartment next door, she could hear music. It was a group of people singing “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The people next door had come over once, the first week she stayed in the apartment, early in the morning, to see if she had any goat’s milk she could spare. “Oh man, I really didn’t think so, but the things you least expect can happen sometimes,” the man had said. The woman with him had just said, “Thank you anyway.” She never talked much, Cynthia found out — in fact, the first time she knocked on the door, wanting Cynthia to play Go with her, she had just smiled and held out the box. They apparently had a record of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and were singing along with it. There seemed to be lots of people singing. There was a noise that sounded like a chair crashing. The record played on, but the people stopped singing. After quite a while, during which Cynthia thought black thoughts about Spangle and her students, someone started singing “Tammy.” The woman who sang it had a clear, high voice that would have been very pleasurable to listen to, if she had been singing something other than “Tammy.”

Cynthia thought that she would like to have enough money to have a house in the country — Spangle had once had that — and to be able to sit in it and not hear a sound. There would be no phone in the house, and there would be no colorful locals, and if there were, they wouldn’t be magicians. They would be traditionally crazy, maybe — religious fanatics, conservatives. It would be nice if there was a garden, and a deer or two; and if the deer grazed in the garden, she would not shoot them. It would be nice to worry, every summer, about what to do with so much zucchini. Zucchini bread. Zucchini bisque. Zucchini biscuits. Zucchini soufflé. Zucchini balls. Zucchini-lentil casserole. Zucchini with zucchini sauce. How had she gotten bombed on three Kahluas?

It was unbelievable. Pendergast’s mother had come in, and why had she wanted her son to pass the course, in spite of his having failed every assignment? Because she did not think that she could cope with one more thing after her double mastectomy. She had said this wearing a thin cotton blouse that was as flat as a piece of paper against her chest. “All I want to do is play tennis and enjoy my summer and hope that I live,” Pendergast’s mother had said to her. The woman had smelled of alcohol. Scotch, probably. Drunk or not, the woman had no breasts. The thought of it made Cynthia jump out of the chair. She went to the window again, and looked out. The street was empty. Finally a little girl and her mother came by. She watched them until they were out of sight. Of course she couldn’t flunk Pendergast. She wondered if she could flunk Mary Knapp. She wondered if she would ever have a better job than the one she had this summer.

There was a fight going on in the hall. A woman was crying. She thought about putting the chain on and peeking out, but decided not to. The woman who was crying — no, a different woman, because the crying kept on — was saying: “You recorded me singing ‘Tammy,’ you son-of-a-bitch. You give me that goddamn cassette.” Another noise that sounded like a chair breaking. People running down the stairs. She went to the window and looked out. A girl about twenty, in a long, wraparound Indian cotton skirt, red running shoes, and a silver halter top was running to the left, and a man was chasing a woman, running to the right. The man caught the woman, picked her up and carried her back toward the building. They passed the building, though, and laughing, continued down the street. Why couldn’t the magician be interested in them? Another woman, with a sailor’s cap and white pants and a black shirt, came down the steps. She didn’t seem to be drunk. She turned around to wave, and Cynthia jerked her head back from the window. She peeked again, to see if the magician was out there. He was, but she couldn’t see him. He really did manage to come out of nowhere. She tried to imagine where he could be hiding that he would have a view of the street in front of the building, but she never saw him.

Pendergast’s mother had asked her if she played tennis.

Bobby called again, this time to give her a message for Spangle. The message was that he was saving an article for Spangle from the New York Times about umbrella bamboo, which flowers once every hundred years, then dies. All the world’s umbrella bamboo was about to flower and die. “It’s not as depressing as it sounds, if you read the article,” Bobby said. “When Spangle gets back, ask him to call me. Here’s my number. Have you got a pencil?”

She found enough Grand Marnier, left over from a soufflé they had made a long time ago, to have a shot-glassful. She drank it, thinking that it was probably possible to combine zucchini and Grand Marnier. The Desperation Cookbook, she would call it. At the end of every recipe it could say, “If desperate, substitute any ingredients.” My God — imagine not having your breasts. What awful things happened to women.

She went into the bedroom and undressed. She took her cotton nightgown from the foot of the bed and put it on, thinking that she would shower later. There was nothing in the apartment to eat, and undressing removed the temptation to go out and find food. There was a New York Times on the bedroom floor. She got into bed, put Spangle’s pillow behind her pillow, and stretched out. Flipping through the paper, she found some answers to a quiz she hadn’t seen:

2. Mr. Niehouse, an American businessman, was rescued and returned to the United States after having been held captive by leftist guerrillas in Venezuela since his kidnapping in February 1976.

3. The number of passenger cars has remained about the same.

She looked through the rest of the paper. Mayor Koch, she found out, had refused to control the pigeon problem by shooting them. His reason was: “When you go after a pigeon, all the people who love pigeons will hate you.” She read about police officer Ignatius Gentile, who jumped in front of a subway car in Brooklyn. She learned that Bloomingdale’s had quickly sold out of its Skylab Protective Helmet. She spent most of the time studying the crossword puzzle, wondering about 49 down: “—Across the Table,” 1934 song. Five letters. The Grand Marnier was gone. Spangle was in Madrid. Pendergast’s mother’s breasts were gone. Only the magician was sure to be out there, all revved up, full of tricks, eager to talk. If she thought he was dangerous, she would have been terrified, but she was more frightened of that crazy what’s-his-name in her class, with his motorcycle and his painted-on smile, than she was of the magician. Maybe she could agree to have coffee and donuts with him in exchange for his coming to her class and doing magic tricks. He could have the students jump through a burning hoop, and if they missed, what the hell.

The phone rang, and she almost didn’t answer it, but at the last minute, the eighth ring, she thought that it might be Spangle. She went to the phone. It was her sister. Cynthia told her that she had written her a letter, but that she didn’t have to worry — it wouldn’t get mailed. In the morning she would be sober, and in the morning, when she dared to go out, the temptation to send it would be gone.

“How nasty was it?” her sister said.

“I said you’d sold out for money and security.”

“That’s certainly true. What was the nasty part?”

Cynthia sighed. “I’m glad I didn’t bother to go mail it.”

“What did you mean before, when you said that in the morning you’d dare to go out?”

“Oh, I wasn’t really serious. There’s some creepy guy around here who’s from the West Coast — I guess that part is true, at least — and he’s got a crush on me. Guess what he is.”

“A midget?”

“No. A serious guess.”

“A Rolfer.”

“No. You’re getting close. Sort of close.”

“Don’t let a Rolfer touch you. It’s just sadism.”

“Come on, guess.”

“Where on the West Coast?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Not much help. Is he a shrink of any kind?”

“No.”

“Movies.”

“Nope. Not movies.”

“If he’s not a midget Rolfer who’s writing a screenplay, I can’t guess.”

“A magician. A pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat type magician.”

“Jesus. I’d watch out for him.”

“I guess I wouldn’t talk about him so much if he didn’t sort of give me the creeps. I’ve only seen him three times actually, but he just appears. He’s odd. He talks like we’re old friends.”

“You’re right. Don’t go out. You can insult me on the phone. It’s Bill’s money, too. Fifteen cents for a stamp.”

“Is he richer and richer?” Cynthia said.

“God, yes. Of course. He wants to have a baby.”

“Don’t do it.”

“Honey, I wouldn’t. Things are just calming down with us. I overate strawberries, and you remember how fruit used to make me break out? I went to a dermatologist and told him I sprayed myself with cologne all over, and he said it was the cologne, of course, and that I had to stop using it. I made him put it in writing. At first Bill wanted me to try new scents, but I told him that the dermatologist had said no: nothing on my skin but Castile soap. So for the first time in years I don’t smell like a florist’s. If he hints around about trying a new cologne, I just buy a pint of strawberries and eat them on the sly. But the baby thing — my God. He read that Leboyer book, which he got from some guy flying first-class with him from Atlanta to New York, and by the time he hit LaGuardia, he could hardly wait to get the limo home to tell me that he thought something of ours should be born to the Moonlight Sonata. God. The idiots you meet in first class.”

“You’re not going to marry him, are you?”

“Well, I might. I just wouldn’t have a baby. I know it’s corny, but I really do love the Moonlight Sonata, and once I’d gritted my teeth through it, it would be ruined forever.”

“What are you eating?” Cynthia said.

“A vegetable burrito. Leftovers from last night’s dinner. The same man who gave him the Leboyer book gave him a recipe for vegetable burritos, and he went out and bought all the ingredients and made them. God.” She stopped chewing. “But the reason I called is to say that we’re going to have a house on the Vineyard next month, and we want you to come see us. He has a rich friend who isn’t too old. Fortyish. He’d love to meet you. Spangle doesn’t deserve you. If he wanted to get home he could haul ass, you know.”

“I’m pretty disgusted with him. With his mother, too. She calls almost every damn night, and she means to be nice, but I just can’t stand to talk to her. She’s crazier than Spangle, in her way.”

“I never thought Spangle was particularly crazy. I just don’t think he has enough money. We’ll have a convertible on the Vineyard.”

“He’ll get you pregnant. Then what will you do?”

“Honey, I am not helpless.”

“He’s going to trick you, somehow.”

“You’re the one I’m worried about. It would be just like Spangle to come back to New Haven and propose to you, and I think you might even do it.”

“No. I feel differently from the way I felt when he left. It’s hot in this apartment and I work all the time, and I feel like I’ve been abandoned. I’m not in the mood to tie a bandanna around my head and be a happy housewife.”

“Come to the Vineyard. We’ll have the house full-time, after this weekend. It’s going to be a Mustang convertible.”

“Thanks for the invitation. I’ll probably come.”

“Spangle’s welcome, you know. I say awful things about him, but I like him. I even downplayed how crazy he was a minute ago. That was a nice thing to do for him, wasn’t it?”

“It would take a lot more than a casual remark from you to convince me at this point. I keep having the feeling that he’s not in Madrid, but I guess he is. I mean, where would he be? He wasn’t mad at me when he left. He was kidding around, like always.”

“Anybody could be anywhere. I’d say listen to your hunches.”

“I feel like he’s around. I feel that way about the magician, too, so maybe it’s just paranoia.”

“I thought you told me this magician kept appearing.”

“He does. But not every time. Never in the morning.”

“Stay in until morning,” she said. “Jesus.” She was chewing again. “I got lonesome for you tonight. I liked it when we saw each other more. Why don’t you come live near us in Philadelphia?”

“Why don’t you find me a job?”

“I found you a man. Good-looking, too. Forty-nine, to be honest with you, but a very nice body. He doesn’t even wear glasses. And there are no children. One Irish wolfhound only. He talks about getting another one, but I doubt it. You can see him running down the beach every morning with the dog from all the windows across the front of the house we’re going to be renting. Sometimes it just kills me that Bill has so much money. Like Dylan says: ‘I can’t help it if I’m lucky.’ ”

“Where does Dylan say that?”

“The song about how somebody gets shot and he runs away with the man’s wife, and she’s got all her husband’s money. Bill’s wife just dropped dead at fifty-four. I never even met her. I have nothing to feel guilty about. You’ve got a job and I don’t, though. Not that I ever wanted one, but maybe that was because I worked such shit jobs. Remember the telephone company? That awful dress shop where everything stank of incense?” She laughed. “God, there’s a whole bank of white hyacinths in the courtyard outside this window. The spotlight is on them, and there are moths flying above them, a storm of moths. You promise to come to the Vineyard?”

“I promise,” Cynthia said.

When she hung up, she went to the window again. A police car drove down the block very fast and turned the corner with its light flashing. A tall, thin girl that she recognized walked into the building. It seemed to be a normal night of street life. She was probably silly for staying in, for letting some pathetic, odd man get to her so much that she wouldn’t go out for food. She wouldn’t. She went back into the bedroom, set the alarm for early and went to bed.

It was strange not to have Spangle in the bed. She had gotten used to the way he tore the covers up from the bottom and turned and thrashed all night, flapping his arms like some big, heavy bird. She was even used to him screaming, his arms covering his head, his body tensed for the fireball that he imagined rolling toward him like a bowling ball rolling down the lane — the lane was the bed he slept in. It was so quiet in bed when Spangle wasn’t there. She bounced on the mattress a couple of times, to hear it make a noise. Then it was quiet again. When Spangle was there, he fell asleep so deeply so soon that she spent the first hour in bed awakening him, consoling him, carefully pulling covers out of his fist, across herself. When she was alone, she thought. She thought about what had become of her sister, and about Mrs. Pendergast’s breasts, and about what she had said — that she only wanted to play tennis. There were a lot of things for which graduate school did not prepare you. That was the virtue of it, Spangle said — that you could spend years learning, and in the end, almost nothing you learned would apply. But Cynthia thought it would be helpful if something prepared you for a talk with Mrs. Pendergast. When she had to think quickly, she could never think of anything to say. Her advice to Spangle was easy — she had it down to four words now: “There is no fireball.” She had not even thought of that many words to say when Mrs. Pendergast had started crying. It seemed wrong just to say no when she was asked if she played tennis. But that was the one word she had said. She suddenly remembered which Dylan song it was: the one that began, “Someone’s got it in for me.”

He had intended to play it cool, but for days he had been thinking about seeing her, and it was a hot night and he couldn’t sleep, and finally it started to make sense to him that he should dress and go out. He wouldn’t see her, but he would see where she lived. Maybe his walking by would generate some good energy and he could send it to her, and she would feel it. She would probably be asleep. It was almost one in the morning. He would think thoughts of love and close his eyes and try to send the thoughts like little darts into her dreams.

He put on his white painter’s pants with the loops on the sides. Keys on key rings dangled from each side of his pants. Keys to the crazy millionaire Tucker’s house in Beverly Hills: Tucker gave away keys because he thought that it would assure him of not being killed in some bizarre Manson-type murder. His astrologer had told him so, and he kept a brandy snifter full of Andes mints, matches from The Palm, and house keys on the hall table by the door. Keys to his friend Roy’s beachhouse in Malibu: three locks on the front door, and Roy wouldn’t see an astrologer on a bet. The keys to his mother’s apartment here in New Haven. A key that he had had for years, found in Golden Gate Park, a heavy, old-fashioned key with a tiny piece of tape across the top with J. Brown lettered on it. He liked to think that it would fit the lock in Governor Jerry Brown’s apartment. That would be a lot more status than having one of the many keys to Tucker’s.

He wished that he had her key. He would put it in the lock, thinking good thoughts: that she shouldn’t be afraid, that he only wanted to talk to her, that he was willing to talk about things other than magic. To tell the truth, he got tired of thinking and talking about magic all the time; he had been reading the newspaper at his mother’s and getting mad about all the injustices in the world, and about how little the country did for its citizens. He had read, in the New York Times, that the mayor was not in favor of shooting pigeons, although the mayor did agree with somebody else who had said that they were like rodents with wings. If the mayor and all his staff and all the working people in New York got together and thought, it might be possible to send messages to the pigeons to get them to go away and roost somewhere else. He was glad that the mayor was not going to give his okay to pigeon-killing, even though he said he didn’t like the pigeons. People gave the okay to things too much, and that ruined the world for magic. When so many things of all sorts were happening, people’s minds got overloaded, and they stopped caring whether a woman was sawed in half or levitated from a table. They didn’t care that one rabbit could burst into twenty. It would be hard to care about magic if you read the paper every night, because there were so many explanations: why pigeons thrived in New York, how we could be sure that there wasn’t gasoline hidden in tanks in New Jersey, what you could do if you were followed by someone you thought meant you harm, how to plant zucchini. When people did calm down and got ready to watch magic, all they cared about was what was behind it. Or else they wanted something from it: They wanted you to wave a wand and send the pigeons out of New York; they wanted to believe that you could make their zucchini multiply overnight, instead of waiting for the seeds to germinate. But he was thinking about magic again, and he’d sworn to himself that this would be a real vacation, and he wouldn’t think about magic all the time. He tried to think about national health insurance, but his mind bogged down and he got images of dogs leaping through hoops and disappearing. A green plant on a table, then the plant covered by a cloth, and when the cloth was pulled back, an orchid was blooming on the plant. He wondered if it would make an impression if he took her an orchid. He did not think that there was anywhere to buy an orchid in New Haven at one in the morning (he thought he knew where he could do it in Malibu), and even if he had it, of course, she would be asleep. His mother’s Vogue had suggested that the caring hostess might put a fresh orchid on her guest’s pillow.

His mother heard the keys jingling and said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to take a walk,” he said.

“When are you going back to California?” she said.

He wished she would stop asking that. He wondered if even an orchid would shut her up, and decided that it wouldn’t. He didn’t answer her. He picked up his false nose, on impulse, and put it in the pants pocket and went out the door. He turned around and pulled the knob three times, to make sure that it was really closed and not just stuck. She always got up after him to check the door — it was a funny door — and if he did manage to have a nice night somehow, he wouldn’t want to ruin it by coming back to the apartment and having to listen to one of her tirades.

He walked until he came to her block, and then to her building. He was nervous. He had given up cigarettes six months ago, so he fished his false nose out of his pants pocket and tapped it onto his nose, took it off again, put it in place again. Then he put it back in his pocket. The one rabbit that became twenty was in the pocket, too. She had liked that. Maybe he had just shown her too much too quickly. He could have shown her the tricks over a period of time.

He was not sure which window was hers. One was dark — the one he thought was hers — and in several other apartments there was faint bluish light. As he watched, someone began to move around one of the apartments. The person opened the window. It wasn’t her. Maybe it was her husband, if she really had a husband. The way she had said it, he had doubted it, and he was usually good at picking up those vibrations. He crossed the street and looked at the building, sending good thoughts into the windows. In response, music started playing. The thoughts had gotten in to the people! They were joyful; there was music! He crossed the street again, and close to the building he heard that it was a sad song he had listened to when he was a child; but it didn’t sound like Debbie Reynolds singing. “Wish I knew that he knew what I’m thinkin’ of… ” It was always so hard to get through to people, even if you tried to speak to them directly sometimes; by sending thoughts, you could do better than speaking to them. He reached in his pocket and took out a handkerchief and tossed it toward the windows on the third floor. As it rose, the handkerchief opened and unfolded into something close to the shape of a dove. He kissed the tips of his fingers and waved his hand in the direction of the handkerchief-bird. Then, when it fell, he retrieved it and shook it flat and put it in his pocket. Of course, at almost two A.M., she would not be awake. But somehow — psychically — hadn’t his loving thoughts come home to roost?