Falling in Place

Nineteen

NINA HAD once said that he was a coward, and in a way he was relieved that she had said it. It was not a surprise to her now that he was acting this way. Her dismay was all about the situation and did not have much to do with the fact that he wasn’t behaving heroically.

He had reached Louise at the hospital, and he had not been able to lie to her. He told her that he had flipped, and before he could say anything else, she had said, “I can imagine where you flipped to. You flipped. I like that.” She hung up.

He walked a straight line from the telephone to the bedroom. Someone on the street was carrying a radio that was playing “Heart of Glass.” Nina was lying the way he had left her, one leg on the bed, one leg hanging off. He was not crying and she was not crying. He was staring at her and she was staring at him.

“Why didn’t you say something when I opened the door?” she said. “Are you in shock?”

She reached up and felt his forehead when he sat down, and he smiled. Was that how you found out if someone was in shock?

“I should have said something,” he said, sitting beside her on the bed. He remembered the spot of blood on the kitchen counter. Peeling the orange. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“You just got in the car and came here? You came here from the hospital?”

He nodded yes.

“That’s scary. That you’d do that. What were you going to do if I wasn’t here?”

“I knew you’d be here.”

“What if I hadn’t been here last night?”

“What are you trying to tell me?” he said. “You were here last night. I haven’t heard from you that you’re sleeping anywhere else. You’re going to tell me you are?”

“No,” she said. “But it would have been so awful if you had come all this way and I wasn’t even here. And I hate to think that you think I’m so reliable. I keep telling you not to keep thinking I’m perfectly rational and stable.”

“More rational and stable than some people, apparently. He’s ten years old. Ten years old.”

“And that was all he’d say to you? That she was a bitch?”

He shook his head no, and lay down on the bed, on his back. He lay there with his eyes closed and began to re-create Nina’s apartment from memory. You walk in the front door, and you’re in the living room. High ceiling, white walls. A circle of peeling paint on the ceiling, above the radiator. A piece of stained glass, found at a dump in Vermont, repaired, now hung in one of the three windows across the front of the living room: one butterfly wing, blue and gold, one half of the body and head, one antenna, leaded around the edges. A blue sofa. A chair covered in striped blue material, bulging like a hunchback, but so wide that you can sit sideways in it, comfortably. A worn Oriental rug, patched with colorless material that looks like tightly woven burlap; zigzags like lightning, yellow and blue, with a gold, blue and white border of geometrically shaped flowers; and in the middle, parallelograms with designs inside that look like four arrows pointing to the same space — the shape of a cross. A painting of two yellow birds, one facing left, one right, that she liked and he paid too much for, in a junk shop on Third Avenue. Her high school graduation picture, cut out of her yearbook and framed. A watercolor of an egg-plant superimposed on an American flag. Those three pictures, all in a row, on the left-hand wall. The right-hand wall, bare, opening into the kitchen. The kitchen. The shelf over the sink, with mugs and bowls from the Mad Monk pottery store. A bowling trophy of her father’s, 1956, the year his team won a tournament, on the counter next to the sink. Stains in the sink that nothing would remove. Out of the kitchen, back in the living room. On either side of the sofa, stereo speakers raised up on cinderblocks covered with black velvet. A closet door next to the bathroom door. The bathroom. Swedish ivy growing in a pot on the toilet tank, hanging down so you have to know where to reach between the leaves to flush. Black and white tiles. No rug. White shower curtain, white towels, white washcloths. A yellowed swan decal on the mirror. The tiny window above the tub that opens out. Out of the bathroom, back in the living room. The bookshelf, loaded with books and soapstone bookends, almost a dozen pairs of them. In the middle of one shelf, bookends push the books to the left and to the right, and in the space between, little things she has had for years. A hand-painted chocolate cup with a raised gold flower. A small picture, in a frame, of her godchild, Abbie, whom she hasn’t seen for five years. A glass candlestick, too high to hold a candle and still fit in the bookcase. A wooden toy with a weight on the bottom, so that when you lift it and swing the ball, a bear plays a drum. A small metal skunk with a slot under its tail to hold a penny. A post card, framed, of skaters in Central Park at the turn of the century. A lipstick tube, mother-of-pearl, with a pearly rose on top. A tiny red glass vase. Two metal toy soldiers, their faces almost peeled away, standing side by side. A black rubber tarantula. Out of the living room into the bedroom. There are two brown rugs, one on each side of the bed. The rugs look and feel like velvet. There is one window above the radiator, with a bamboo shade and old lace curtain. The other window, in back of the bed, has a shade with thicker bamboo and no curtain. The bed is a mattress on a platform a foot off the floor, and it is covered with an antique quilt with a design that looks like a pinwheel in the center. Two narrow closets, one to the left of the door, one to the right. A brass coatrack heaped with clothes that won’t fit in the closets, brass visible only at the bottom. At night it looks like a tall monster coming to get you: You see sleeves without hands, a coat with no body, a hat tossed on the top tilts forward, but there’s no bowed head inside. Books are piled on the floor, in piles that often topple, next to the coatrack. A big wooden box, almost a foot high, with someone’s initials on it and a broken lock is next to the bed. She keeps tissues inside, a pen, a pad. There is one silver iced-tea spoon in the box. There is a porcelain doll’s arm. A scarf with tiny black flowers. A plastic bag full of grass. Rolling papers. Matches. Miniatures of Drambuie.

He couldn’t imagine, when he first came to the apartment, how she could live in such a small place, how in spite of some pretty or funny objects, she really owned so little. The mugs above the sink, all lined up, were her only glasses. Six small bowls. Two large bowls. A pile of old plates, all different. “What are you doing?” she had said to him. “You’re looking at my plates? Aren’t you supposed to sneak off and look in the medicine cabinet?” He had been a little drunk. A few minutes later, in the bathroom, he had opened the medicine cabinet, or tried to — it was old, built into the wall, and the door was stuck. It had creaked when he pulled, and he had heard her laugh in the other room. He had put a record on her stereo and his hand was shaking and he scratched it. He had kept moving around, expecting something to happen, expecting to find something. It had all looked so unfamiliar. They didn’t have the same books. They didn’t have the same records. They didn’t even take the same patent medicine. In the bathroom, he had gotten the hiccoughs, and he had said that he was going out for a second — he’d be right back. He could remember going into an all-night donut shop and ordering coffee at the counter, so it wouldn’t look suspicious, his opening a pack of sugar. The coffee had come, and while it steamed, he had opened the packet of sugar, poured it out into the spoon, swallowed. He held his breath. No more hiccoughs. The one thing he knew he could count on was that particular cure for hiccoughs. When he took a sip of the hot coffee, he burned his tongue. Swallowing, he had realized that he was more drunk than he’d thought. He had gone to a pay phone at the back of the shop and called Nina. “I’m still welcome back, right?” he had said. “John,” she had said, “where are you? What was that about? Did I do something wrong?” “Don’t make me laugh,” he had said. “I’ll get the hiccoughs.” Standing in a donut shop, staring at two homosexuals piling hand on top of hand on the counter, all four hands in a pile, the bottom hand out, back on top, pulling out, piling up. “You don’t think I’m crazy?” he had said to her. “Crazy?” she had said. “Where are you? I don’t understand. I thought you’d just suddenly decided to leave.” He laughed. No hiccoughs. “What is going on?” she had said.

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.