Falling in Place

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.”

Now, in the office, he was thinking again about Provincetown in the off-season: that it would be nice to stride down a sand dune, feel the sand shifting, see it moving into new patterns. Instead, he would be going to the parking garage: walking down the concrete ramp to the cashier, waiting for the black man to bring his car and turn it over to him, then up the ramp, into the traffic, the long drive from New York to his house in Connecticut. And then he would have dinner with them, watching John Joel taking seconds and thirds, and Mary sullen and bored, and Louise — how would she act? He remembered the night in the Chinese restaurant, and how he had tried to get a conversation going with Mary and failed. He wondered what he would try to talk to them about at dinner. It would be a real challenge to be polite and calm. She would never make a public announcement. He would have to wait until John Joel and Mary weren’t in the room, and then let her speak. Then she could say that he should go, and he could admit that he wanted to go. Then she would either be ugly or not be ugly. Either way, he knew that he would not spend the night, but go back to Rye; and in the morning, before she went to work, he would call Nina and tell her.

Metcalf came into his office, knocking as he walked through the open door.

“Why does Nick hate me?” he said.

“What gave you that idea?”

“He subscribes me to magazines and checks the block where it says they’ll bill you later. He’s one of the best idea men we’ve got, so I pay a hundred bucks a year, probably more, for magazines that come to my house.”

“Why don’t you cancel the subscriptions?”

“You admit it?” Metcalf said.

“No. I just think that if it’s true, you should cancel the subscriptions.”

“I thought that Country Journal was one of his jokes. I just found out that my son was having it sent to me for my birthday.”

John nodded.

“You’re supposed to ask when my birthday is.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“Monday. Bring me a present. A gag present. Just bring something. I’m sick of birthdays without cake and ice cream and presents.” Metcalf picked up a pen from the desk and tossed it in the air. “Look at that. A pen that’s not even the company pen. You work better with your own pen. I like that. Are you happy?”

“I might be going to be happy.”

“Ask me if I’m happy.”

“Are you happy, Metcalf?”

“No. I’m going to be fifty years old.” Metcalf put the pen back on the desk. “I know I’m obnoxious,” he said. “I like to be asked about myself, and nobody ever asks me.” He turned to leave. “You’re my second-best idea man. Does that make you jealous of Nick?”

“No,” he said.

“Trying to create a little friction so I’d have a friend of my own,” Metcalf said. “I haven’t invited either of you to the house this summer. You notice?”

“I noticed.”

“Ask me why.”

“Why?” John said.

“I don’t know,” Metcalf said. “I just don’t feel like having one of my usual summer parties and spending a lot of money on food and liquor just so I can get soused and put everybody on the spot. I’d rather just do it on a smaller basis — walk into your office and toss off an insult or two. You might be going to be happy. Is that what you said?”

“Yes.”

“That makes me jealous. I’m not going to be anything but fifty,” Metcalf said. “Take me seriously about the present.”

When Metcalf left, he closed his eyes and silently prayed that Metcalf would not continue on to Nick’s office and talk the same way. It would take a week to calm Nick down if that happened.

“When will you find out if you’re going to be happy?” Metcalf said, putting his head back in the door.

“Tonight.”

“What do you know,” Metcalf said. “Notice how I don’t ask you what will determine whether you’ll be happy?”

“I noticed.”

“Ask me why.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” John said.

“Because I’ve got some manners. Not many, but a few,” Metcalf said. He smiled and went away. John watched the doorway for a long time before he picked up the phone, certain that Metcalf was gone. He called his mother, to say that he wouldn’t be home until late. The new housekeeper, Ms. Amoy, answered the phone. She said that his mother was sunbathing, and she would have to get her. A long time passed, and then his mother’s sleepy voice came on the phone.

“I’m going to have dinner with Louise tonight,” he said. “I won’t be home until late.”

“In the city?” his mother said.

“No. In Connecticut.”

“You’re always in the city. You live in the city. Why didn’t you have her come in and have dinner there?”

“I didn’t think of it, to tell you the truth. Something she said made me think she wanted to see me there.”

“It’s your life,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You run around too much. You can afford an air conditioner in your car, and you don’t have one.”

“How’s Brandt?” he said.

“Ms. Amoy, as she prefers to be called, is not so cold-blooded when it comes to Brandt. She and Brandt picked berries today, and she let him drop them into the bread mix. He dumped them all in in a pile, after she told him to sprinkle them, and she didn’t criticize him. He’s taken to calling her ‘A,’ whether because she told him to or not, I don’t know.”

“How are you?” he said.

“I’m all right. I went to the store today, in my air-conditioned car. I haven’t done much else.”

“I’ll see you late tonight,” he said.

“I certainly hope so,” she said. “I like to think of you sleeping. That pleases me as much now as it did when you were a troublesome little child, and I wanted you silent and out of my sight. Now I like to think of you sleeping because I worry that you’ll get sick, leading such a hectic life.”

“Thank you for worrying about me.”

“Worry leads to alcoholism,” she said. “If all the ice has melted in my gin and tonic while I’ve been inside talking to you, I’m just going to dump it out. If the ice is still there, then it’s a signal that God meant me to go on drinking it.”

He hung up, flipped through an artist’s portfolio and wondered whether or not it was deliberate that one long black hair was stretched across two sample layouts on top of the plastic. He lifted the hair off carefully and dropped it to the floor. The person had probably figured that he wouldn’t look through the whole portfolio. He had an idea. He went down the hall, to Amy’s office. Amy had long blond hair she wore in a ponytail. He asked for one of her hairs. She paused a moment, then took the rubber band off and pulled out a hair. She held it out to him.

“Thank you,” he said, taking it carefully. She pushed her hair behind her ears and put the rubber band around it again.

“You’re not going to ask why I wanted it?” he said.

“Jesus,” she said, “what is this? Are you going around in back of Metcalf like his shadow and imitating him?”

“Oh,” he said. “Metcalf was by?”

“I will not answer one more question” she said, and turned back to her typewriter.

He went back to his office and put the hair where the other one had been, then looked through the rest of the portfolio. He wrote himself a note about the artist’s work, put the portfolio to the side of his desk with a note to the secretary to return it. At five o’clock, before anyone else, he left the office. The wise-cracking attendant wasn’t in the garage. Someone else got his car. He got in and wished that he had air conditioning. Out on the street traffic was bumper-to-bumper because of a truck double-parked, and because it was five o’clock. He sat and waited. While traffic slowly filtered through the narrow lane between truck and parked cars, he listened to music on the car radio. He switched the station to the one that gave traffic reports. No bad congestion, it seemed. He went back to the music station, and caught the end of “Blue Bayou.” He turned it off when a message for hemorrhoid sufferers came on.

It had to be that she was leaving him, or asking him to leave her, because why else would she call him at the office and say with that grave tone of voice — that was it, she had sounded grave—that she wanted to see him right away? That night. Tonight. He had been so anxious to face it that he hadn’t even called Nina, as he did every night. He would stop on the way, at a phone. He would just not tell her that it was happening, not until it was all over. He hoped that he and Louise could discuss it tonight, and then the rest of it would be legal technicalities: It would actually be over. The closer he got to the house in Connecticut, the more he doubted it. If she did not want a divorce, though, what could she want on a Tuesday night? What could she want that she couldn’t talk about on the phone?

He smiled to himself, remembering telling Nina that there were pillars at the base of his driveway. There were no pillars, but at the foot of his driveway was a police car parked sideways, blocking the way. He had been about to turn into the driveway without even thinking, and it had taken a few seconds to register that he couldn’t, and another few seconds to register that the black car was a police car. He got out of his car, but he could only stand and stare. He left the engine running, and reached back in through the window to set his hazard light blinking. If it was anything horrible, she would have told him on the phone. She was calm on the phone. But there was no way that a police car blocking his driveway could mean anything good. He walked around it. Two men with walkie-talkies were in his backyard: men in dark suits, standing back by the tree. They looked at him and didn’t say anything. He said nothing to them. The back door was open. If it was something really awful, and if she had not let on, if she had made him walk into it this way deliberately, he was going to kill her. Then he thought, suddenly: Is she dead?

A man with a camera was sitting behind his kitchen table. The camera was beside him on the table and the man, with a can of Coke in front of him, was sitting there with his elbows on the table and his hands cupped one on top of the other, and his chin on his hands. “Who are you?” he said, when John walked in.

“Where’s Louise?” he said. The house was so quiet. So cool, without any air conditioning. He saw a raw chicken, in a roasting pan, on the stove. Plates and glasses and silverware had been pushed aside so the man could lean on the table and drink his Coke. From outside, a buzz from the walkie-talkies droned on, what sounded like a doorbell with a short in it, a doorbell that kept ringing on its one note, maddeningly.

A policeman came into the room, followed by Tiffy Adamson.

“Is she dead?” he said to Tiffy. He knew that he had spoken, but he couldn’t hear his words. The man sitting at the table got up, picked up his Coke can, held it.

“No,” Tiffy said. She sank into a chair across the table from him. He sat in the chair the man had been sitting in, and they faced each other across the table. You sat like this when you visited someone in prison. When you took a seminar in college. When you were at a real estate agent’s buying a house. The policeman stood in back of Tiffy and kept looking over his shoulder.

“There was a shooting,” the policeman said to John. “She isn’t dead. She’s been taken to the hospital.”

“Louise?” he said. “I just talked to Louise. Louise shot herself?”

“No,” Tiffy said. “Louise is all right. Mary was shot.” Tiffy started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Mary?” he said stupidly.

“Put your face between your knees,” the policeman said.

“Do what?” he said.

“You’re going to faint. Put your head down. Put it down.”

He put it down. He felt his cheeks prickling. Surely Louise wouldn’t calmly call him when Mary had been shot? That simply wasn’t possible. They were tricking him.

“Where’s Louise?” he said. It was hard to talk with his head down between his knees. He felt his Adam’s apple pulsing.

“At the hospital,” Tiffy said. “Do you want me to call them for you? She’s not going to die. They had to operate to remove the bullet.”

“What bullet?” he said.

“Put your head down,” the policeman said.

“John Joel shot her,” Tiffy said. She bit her lip, stared at him. He put his head down. She was the last thing he saw. He saw her face, and it shimmered, and then it slowly started to darken as his face got hotter and hotter. He tried to look at his own hands, holding the edge of the table, knowing that if he could blink, if he could break his stare, that he could also breathe, and if he could breathe he wouldn’t pass out. He thought he heard someone talking to him, faintly, and decided that he was talking to himself. The weight he felt was Tiffy’s hands, one on each shoulder, pushing him down into the chair so hard that he thought he would fall through it to the floor. He was still staring, but at nothing — at the refrigerator, the refrigerator in back of where Tiffy had been sitting. So that the refrigerator was actually the last thing he saw, and then when he opened his eyes the first thing he saw again was Tiffy. He saw a glass of water in front of him, with ice in it. He heard the policeman saying that it could have been worse, and he was confused: Had Tiffy called the hospital, and had he talked to Louise? Had Louise really called him and said only that she wanted him to come home? She hadn’t even insisted that he come.

He said to Tiffy: “She called me this afternoon. I just talked to her.”

“She must have called you before it happened,” Tiffy said. Tiffy looked at her watch. “It just happened,” she said. “It didn’t even happen three hours ago.”

“Did you call the hospital?” he said.

“No,” she said. “Is that what you want me to do?”

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“It’s crazy,” she said, “but I was driving by — I’d made strawberry muffins with the berries we picked the other day and I was bringing them. I walked into the kitchen, and we started to talk, and then we heard it.”

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” Tiffy said. “Really.”

“Drink the water,” the policeman said. “Drink it so we can ask you some questions. Are you all right?”

“No,” he said again.

“Put your head down,” the policeman said.

“I’m so sorry,” Tiffy said. “What happened?”

Tiffy was asking him what happened. One of the men with the walkie-talkies came into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took an ice cube out of the bin inside the freezer compartment. “You left your car running,” he said to John. “I turned it off.” He ran the ice cube over his face and neck, dropped it in the sink.

“The gawkers are starting to show,” he said.

“No,” he said. He heard a buzz on the walkie-talkie, and then everything went still, and silent. He heard himself breathing.

“Jesus God,” the man in the suit sighed. “Do I get tired of gawkers.”

“Get out there and chase them off,” the policeman said. He had a notebook open. He was sitting where Tiffy had sat, and he had opened a notebook. Before him was a perfectly blank page.

Tiffy was still there when he and Louise got back from the hospital after midnight. They had given Louise a shot of something, and made her take a pill, and given him more pills to give her later, and he had been horrified that they were going to over-medicate her and that she would die right there in the hospital. The doctors asked if he was all right. The police offered to drive them home. He said that they were fine. He agreed to talk to the police more the next day. Mary was in bed, a bullet removed from her side, and John Joel was there too, on a different floor of the hospital. He had thought that his wife was going to ask for a divorce. Nick had thought that she was going to ask for a fur coat. What had happened was that while his wife was talking to Tiffy Adamson and stuffing chicken to put in the oven, his son had shot his daughter — with a gun he had gotten from Parker, apparently. A gun he had fired a shot with, then dropped on the ground. Then John Joel and Parker had climbed down from the tree and were standing there, looking no more amazed than children caught stealing cookies from a jar. Louise had opened the back door, and there they had stood, and Mary was on the ground.

“She was a bitch,” John Joel had said, when John went into his hospital room. He was in bed, and he looked tired. Fat and pale and tired, the way any ten-year-old would look at midnight. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” John had said to the nurse who stood in the room. He had not been able to say it to John Joel. He had turned and said it to the nurse. The nurse had acted as if he hadn’t spoken. She might as well have been a paper cutout of a nurse. She just stood and looked blank-faced. She was all in white, and his son was all in white. He could think of nothing but Mary’s blouse, the blouse that Louise was holding outside the operating room when he got to the hospital, the blouse that they were trying to pry away from her, saying, “She’s alive. She’ll be fine.” They wanted the blouse, and Louise wasn’t giving it to them. “We need that,” they said, and another person tugged. Louise held on to it.

In the room, he had hugged John Joel. He had heard his son’s breathing, and his own breathing, and he realized that his breath was coming fast and hard, and his son’s breathing was the calm breathing of near-sleep, that he was squeezing and not getting squeezed in return.

He had been going to take Brandt to a Little League game.

His mother had told him to get an air conditioner for his car. He had wished for an air conditioner for his car. That was something he had thought about, a few hours before — being cool in his car.

He had said that he could drive home with no problem, and he had been lying. He wanted to tell them that he couldn’t, but he had found himself saying that he had driven there, and of course he could drive back. The young cop offered two times to drive him. “You could get your car in the morning” the young cop had said, and his partner had said, “He knows that,” as he tried to nudge the young cop along. “I didn’t know that,” John had said. What he meant was that he hadn’t thought about it. “You what?” the cop said. The young cop looked back at him. “Ride?” the young cop said. He had raised his hand, then had no idea why he had done it. He had waved to the cops. “Nothing,” he had said. He and Louise had ridden to the lobby with the cops, and then the cops had turned and gone one way, and he and Louise had gone another. He was trying to think of the fastest route home, and he couldn’t visualize any of it; he couldn’t even remember one way to get home. But when he got out on the road — he drove by sight, not by road signs, anyway — he would remember instantly. He wanted to remember instantly. He wanted to be home, but he was not sure if he could drive there. For a second, the older cop’s face had blurred and he had thought that it wasn’t a face at all, but a scarab. Then the lines had hardened into features again.

Tiffy and her husband were in the house. When they came in, Tiffy’s husband rose to greet them, as if they were visitors. Tiffy just sat and stared. Her husband asked if he wanted them to go. He wanted them to go. “No,” he said. “Sit down,” Tiffy’s husband said. They sat down. Tiffy got up and put her arm around Louise’s shoulder. “You were right,” Louise said to Tiffy. “It was a shot.” “Everything’s all right,” Tiffy said. “I called the hospital. They said you were coming home. We didn’t know if we should go or stay. Do you want us to sleep in the living room? Just so we can answer the phone or something?” Louise looked at John. “That’s very nice of you,” he said. He was thinking: I was at work today. I worked, and I drove back to Connecticut, and Mary and John Joel are in the hospital, and he did it because she was a bitch. He said she was a bitch. It was true that someone could dress very conventionally and still be evil: Nixon with his jacket and tie walking on the beach, for example. But Mary — Gingerbread Mary — a bitch? He wondered what his son had meant by that.

Tiffy and Louise had gone upstairs. He had heard Louise crying, and Tiffy talking. He hardly knew Tiffy’s husband, and didn’t know what to say to him. They sat there awkwardly for a while, and then Tiffy’s husband said that he thought he would take a walk — did he want to come? He said no. He thought that if he went out to walk, he would start running. He was afraid that he would run until he died. He had been so frightened, watching them swabbing Louise’s arm. He had thought: It’s not to calm her — they’re tricking us. “Is this what you want?” he had said to Louise, but the needle was already in her arm. The doctor turned and glared at him. Then the piece of cotton in place, the nurse clamping her finger over it and pushing Louise down into a chair. She sat very still in the chair, and didn’t seem to care that she was being stared at. She didn’t really seem to notice that he was there, either. She noticed when he walked in, but then she didn’t seem to notice him. In the car, she sat with her knees drawn up, hands clasped around them. He had tried to take her hand, but she wouldn’t let go. He had put his hand over her hands, steered with one hand. He had found the way home, and now he did not want to go out walking. He thought about calling his mother, Nick, Nina. He couldn’t imagine what he would say. And then he had fallen asleep. He woke up and saw that an hour had passed. He heard Tiffy, still upstairs, still talking. Her husband had not come back. He began to pace the house. He went out to the kitchen and opened the back door. Insects were chirping. Moths came from nowhere and flapped past him, into the bright room. He looked at the tree, at the back of the yard, remembered lifting the robin’s egg, gently, from the grass: the fragile egg, safe in a dish in Nina’s apartment. John Joel had shot Mary from up in that tree, the same tree where the robins had built their nest, the same tree he had voluntarily vacated until the birds were gone. The tree he watched, and kept the neighbor’s fat orange cat away from. He closed the door and went to the kitchen table and sat down. Dishes were pushed to one side, and the day’s mail, full of bills and advertisements, was on the table, too, and as he flipped through, he found it. He found it and knew instantly why she had called him. It was a travel brochure on Nantucket, and there was a petition—“Petition for Nantucket Vacation” was written across the top of a piece of paper — signed by Louise and John Joel and Mary. They were asking to be taken to Nantucket. That was what it was all about. The idea of packing bathing suits and going to Nantucket seemed more grotesque to him than setting off with snowshoes for Alaska. He put the brochure down, as shocked as if he had found a letter to Louise from a lover. That was what she had called him about.

Then he drove. He meant to drive for a while and go back to the house, but he got lost, and then he found the Merritt Parkway, and it seemed more logical to go than to stay. He was speeding, watching the needle climb. And when he looked at the road again he realized where he was, how close to New York he was getting, and he pushed hard on the accelerator. There was too much wind at such a high speed, so he put his window halfway up. He was going to keep driving for a while, and then go back. He knew he wasn’t. He looked at his watch and wondered where so many hours had gone. He must have looked at the clock in the house wrong, or maybe his watch was wrong. A van with a plastic flower on the aerial passed him. A Honda Civic passed him. He was amazed that he was driving so slowly. He looked at the needle and saw that he was going thirty. He pushed hard, watched the needle climb to forty, fifty, sixty. He held it at sixty, watching the sky gradually lighten.

And then he was in New York, and the light was even, and he didn’t know what to do but start the usual routine. He took the car to the garage, he walked up the cement ramp to the street, and walked for miles before he thought to hail a cab. “Some son of a bitch threw up after I picked him up at Studio 54,” the driver said. “I hope it doesn’t still stink back there.”

“Have you been driving all night?” he asked the cabbie.

“Yeah. I been working eleven to eleven. Beat the heat.”

He pushed a wad of money into the man’s hand and got out, in front of Nina’s building. He felt light-headed. He stood there and tried not to look like a crazy man or a drunk still stumbling from the night before. A woman with a baby in a stroller walked by and didn’t look at him, and a teenage girl dropped her eyes and quickened her pace. A garbage truck was out. It was going to be a hot, hazy day. Nina was right that he was a coward. How could he even admit to her what he had done? He would have to call Louise with some excuse. He had an appointment to talk with the police. But he was not even in Connecticut. He was in New York, in front of Nina’s, and the trick was to get into the building and up the stairs.

Child’s play: one foot in front of the other. Child’s play: bend your finger, pull the trigger. His son had shot his daughter.