Falling in Place

Twenty-Two

THIS IS HOW she found out that Spangle was back in the States: Bobby, in New York, had given his friend Victor the rough draft of chapters one and two of the novel he was writing; and Victor, who thought his apartment might burn and knowing that Bobby never made photocopies, had walked to the photocopying shop on Third Avenue around the corner from his apartment. There he found an old acquaintance, a woman he had dated years ago, manning the counter. From Marielle Dekker, Victor had found out that Jonathan Spangle was in town. She had just run into him at Kenny’s Castaways. She said that she had been surprised to find out that he had a brother, because she had thought she remembered a discussion in the far-distant past, when he had attributed his selfishness to being an only child. But there the brother had sat, drinking beer. Victor told Bobby that he had run into Marielle Dekker, and that she had just run into Jonathan and Peter Spangle at Kenny’s Castaways. Bobby had said that he had just tried to look up Spangle, and had been told he was in Madrid: What was he doing at Kenny’s Castaways? Secretly he was delighted. He found Cynthia very attractive, and fair was fair — if Spangle was back, and not interested, he was interested. Bobby had made Victor call Marielle Dekker to ask if there had been a woman with Peter Spangle. No. Peter Spangle had been there alone. Well — fair was fair: If he was back from Madrid and not interested, the road to Cynthia was clear.

After his appointments in New York, and a couple of nights at Victor’s apartment (a big Buddha in the corner, wearing a rubber Nixon mask, very realistic), he started back to New Haven.

Cynthia was still freaked out by the shooting, and she wondered what was the correct thing to do. What kind of a note do you write to the father of a student who has been shot? Say that she was sorry — just that, perhaps. Thank him for lunch. Mention subtly that Mary would pass the course. Hope that she would recover from her injuries so she would be able to read the first chapters of a lot of novels. A gift, perhaps: pages torn out of the Great Books. Quote Elvis Costello? “ ‘Accidents will happen …’ ”

She was thinking about it, pen in hand, when the phone rang. It was Bobby, who had been gone for more than two weeks, calling as if he had just left, from a phone on the highway, asking her not to eat. He was on his way to New Haven, and if she’d wait for him, and they could go out to dinner. She agreed. There was a pause. Then he said, “Have I got news for you.”

“What is it?” she said.

“First of all,” he said, “I would like to talk to you at dinner about the possibility of your coming to live with me.”

“What’s the joke?”

“No joke. The joke’s on you, apparently. Victor saw Marielle, and Marielle just saw Spangle and Jonathan having a night on the town. New York town.”

“What?” she said. “Who’s Muriel?”

“She’s an actress. Works at a Xerox place on Third Avenue, around the corner from Victor’s apartment.”

“Who’s Victor?” she said.

She was stalling. Had he just asked her to come live with him? After spending one night on her floor? She tried to remember what color eyes Bobby had. Instead, she got a picture of Spangle. Could it really be true that Spangle was back, but he hadn’t come back to her? Not even a call, a letter?

“Victor runs the lights in a place that does sex shows. He flashes blue lights on people butt-fucking. He was studying to be a bartender, but now he’s on welfare. They don’t know about the part-time work at the sex show. He paid to have the two chapters of my book Xeroxed, and he’s hardly got money to eat. That’s Victor.”

“So Victor knows Muriel and Muriel knows Spangle?”

Stalling.

“Marielle,” he said. “Cynthia, I can’t get you out of my head. I had no intention of saying all of this on the phone.”

She couldn’t think of what to say.

“I bought a dozen bagels,” he said. “Assorted. We can just eat bagels if you want.”

“I think I’d rather have a meal.”

“I don’t have any money, though. Except for gas to get back to New Hampshire. I gave Victor what I had. He’s sold half of his record collection.”

“I have money,” she said.

“The disadvantage of teaching is that you don’t get paid in the summer,” he said.

“You do if you teach summer school.”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “It’s the only way I keep my sanity, getting out of there.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I have money.”

“I’ve upset you.”

“You’ve surprised me. I wonder if somebody made a mistake? Is that woman sure that it was Spangle with Jonathan?”

“There’s no mistake,” he said. “Oh — I’m so upset. I’m so upset because Victor doesn’t realize what he’s doing, selling off his records. I would have gotten money together for him, he wouldn’t have had to do it. He’ll never be able to find those records again. He told me that one night he was working the lights and he kept thinking there was something familiar about one of the men on the stage, and finally he stopped the strobes and flooded the stage with bright-yellow light, and he saw it was his father’s accountant. His father’s accountant was belly-down with a Chinaman in a motorcycle helmet, butt fucking him. Jesus. Victor has got to get out of there. I think I can find him a job tending bar in New Hampshire. I know a girl who knows the owner of a restaurant.”

“I don’t even know Victor,” she said.

“You’ll like Victor. He doesn’t have any interest in what he’s doing. He just fell into doing it, answering an ad in the SoHo News. He thought they were looking for somebody to drive an ice-cream truck.”

She laughed. The first laugh all day.

“I know it,” he said. “Poor Victor. Victor had such an amazing record collection, and he just put them in boxes and carried the boxes out to the street and started selling them. I can’t believe it. He has to move to New Hampshire.”

The operator broke in: “It is now three minutes. Signal when through.”

Bobby seemed not to have heard. “He thought the ad was worded so vaguely because it was a job driving an ice-cream truck, and he thought it would be fun to drive an ice-cream truck. He didn’t mind. He tried to find the ad to show me, but he’d thrown it away. I wrote a poem about it. He’s very upset. I have to get Victor out of New York.” She heard trucks roaring by. “He had ‘Please Crawl Out Your Window,’ ” he said. “He had these records of Sherpas playing wind whistles. At least he got some money for ‘Please Crawl Out Your Window.’ He’s very upset because there was an item in Rolling Stone about the new Dylan record being religious. That upsets Victor very much. Oh — it’s not that, it’s the place he’s working. You won’t believe what an injustice has been done, when you meet Victor.”

“I don’t want to meet Victor,” she said.

“I’ve told you the story all wrong. I did everything that I intended not to do. I spilled the beans about Spangle and I told you that I wanted you to live with me and I didn’t give you a balanced picture of Victor. Believe me, you’d like Victor.”

“Why don’t you hang up, and we can talk about this when I see you?”

More traffic, Bobby shouting something into the phone about bagels.

“That’s nice,” she said, guessing at what he was saying. “But if you want me to live with you, you can hardly object that I’m taking you to dinner.”

“Will you?” Bobby said.

“Live with you? Of course not. I’m going back to Yale in the fall.”

“We can commute,” Bobby said. “The Mazda is totally reliable. In the snow we can take the train. This is the wrong time to ask you. It must have been terrible, going into the classroom and thinking of what to say to them about that girl that got shot.”

“They seemed more human,” she said.

“People talk about people having hearts on their sleeves. I think that people always have their emotions outside of them — pieces of their soul in a sneeze, even. They have eyes like a deer that’s been shot. Nobody can cover up. You should have known Victor before, and then see Victor now. And he’s a genius. He can point to the one wrong word in a thousand. It’s like perfect pitch, but he has it with words.”

“Why don’t you come back to New Haven, if you’re coming,” she said.

“Because I can’t hang up this way. I have to know that you’ll let me have another chance. That if I can calm down, you’ll let me try to talk to you about all this again.”

“I really don’t want to hear any more about Victor,” she said.

“What have I done?” Bobby said. “I’ve distorted everything. You think Victor is just another crazy. If you knew him, you’d see that he’s absolutely innocent, that he falls into these things because of some honest misunderstanding. He would enjoy driving an ice-cream truck. That’s really the truth. If something really bad hadn’t happened to his head, he never would have boxed up his records and gone out to sell them. He told me he was having nightmares of flying saucers, and he figured out that it was the records — his lost records. Do you think you could meet Victor and forget what I’ve told you and just see if you like him or not?”

“Bobby,” she said.

A truck went by. A blur of noise. Bobby shouting over the truck, all of it indistinguishable.

“Will you be there?” he shouted.

“Why not?” she said.

“How does something like this happen?” he said. “What do you think?”

“How does what happen?”

“What I’ve been saying to you. My stopping there by chance, and just when I was deciding that I had to have you, Victor sees Marielle, and she says that Spangle’s in New York.”

“I’m not a piece of pie,” she said.

“I know you’re not pie. I’m expressing myself all wrong. Will you be there, so we can talk about this calmly?”

“We have to talk calmly,” she said. “I’ve had about all I can take today.”

“Be there,” Bobby said. “I promise — totally calm. Any way you want it.”

“Jesus. I just want to forget this summer and go back to school in the fall.”

“You don’t mean that. At least come to the waterfall party and think about it. You have to give things a chance. I’m already writing something about the waterfall party. Did you know that Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage without having been to war?”

“Please,” she said. “Can you tell literary anecdotes later? It’s very hard to hear you. Could you just hang up?”

A truck went by. She was sure that he hadn’t heard the last part of what she’d said. “Please?” she said.

“… fact,” he said. “A fact, not an anecdote.”

She hung up and started to cry. She cried the way she had been tempted to cry when she walked into the classroom and the air was different, the faces were different, the game wasn’t the same. She walked in as a teacher, and they wanted answers. They didn’t know how to ask for them, but by the way they looked at her, she could tell they wanted to know what had happened. And she had wanted to cry: not to analyze, not to begin to plow through some explanation, just to join them, and cry. Instead, she had begun to talk about The Old Man and the Sea, and they had stared at her like the young boy staring at Santiago. They were too old for her to get them busy making get-well cards. Finally she had told them that things just happen. She had just said it, tried it on like some article of clothing that wasn’t hers. But for a while she could parade around in cynicism.

Actually she fell into things because she wasn’t cynical enough. Spangle had tricked her when he had offered to drive her back East, from Berkeley, years ago. What he wanted was for her to be in Berkeley with him, not in school. He really had no respect for what she was doing, but he liked her, or needed her, or whatever it was, and he pretended to be doing something nice for her, but actually he had done it as a ploy: In return for being so nice about escorting her back, he was expecting her not to stay. When he stopped holding her hand, she knew what it meant, but she paid no attention to it: like paying no attention to a shadow on the wall at night because the lock is secure. Paying no attention, really, out of absolute fear. She had been terrified of losing him, because so much of her life was tied up with him. They weren’t just her experiences, they were theirs; and if he went off with a piece of them, it would be like a lock without a key, a ring without a stone. He had wanted them to get married, and when she said no, he had never asked again. He had stopped almost everything, except teasing her in a way that was more cruel than affectionate. Embarrassing her by drawing her face on the ditto master, tickling her until she screamed, making sex into a joke, sending her post cards to shock her, like a dirty little boy, instead of the letter she wanted. Even a lying letter would have sufficed. And if he wasn’t coming back, a note, a brief call, at least, about that too. She had been so willing to believe him. She cried, because she had been so willing to believe him. She had even thought that his not understanding irony in literature proved what an honest, trusting person he was: If it was printed on the page, it was to be taken straight. If he was what he said he was, not what he appeared to be, then you had to believe him, didn’t you? No. You didn’t have to do anything. Not even stay with him because he had said, once, that what he wanted was always to have you. She remembered that she had given him a kite, and after flying it once he had pinned it to the wall, for fear of damaging it. She had thought that she understood him perfectly, and obviously she had not. The kite might stay safely on the wall, but he would fly off himself, fly off and be gone, no word. He would protect an inanimate thing, and hurt her. Hold hands with her all day, because inside he was free, floating, nothing was restricting him.

The phone rang again. She let it ring six times before picking it up. It was the operator, asking if she would pay the overtime charges on Bobby’s call.

She went into the kitchen, and looked at the picture she had taken of him in Provincetown: his look of surprise, thinking himself alone. She had felt bad about interrupting him, spoiling even a moment of his fun as he flew the kite, absorbed in what he was doing. She had captured the moment in time, and yet she hadn’t, because she wasn’t in the picture. He liked the picture, but wished that it had never been taken. He wanted both things: He wanted to be private, and he wanted to be accessible. The kite, high up, had looked like some prehistoric bird, and when he began to bring it down, when the air currents changed, it had swooped and dipped, crashing on its nose. It had tried to destroy itself. It had not. She was anthropomorphizing the kite. She had a tendency to see inanimate things as living, and he had a tendency to see living things as inanimate. He thought the tickling would not really hurt, that she could stand to be exhausted, that he could go on and on with it.

She wiped her eyes on a handkerchief Bobby had left behind. If all the men she met were crazy, then she must be looking for crazy men, right? Wrong. They came to her. She had never even heard of Bobby until his phone call, and then he had showed up, gone away, then called and said that he wanted her to live with him. What she wanted — and this time she was going to get her way — was to have somebody to go to dinner with, because she had had a bad day and needed company, and she needed protection from the crazy magician who would probably be hanging around outside.

She talked to Spangle’s picture. She asked him how he could have done it. She accused him of being a coward. He looked astonished.

She pulled her hair back in a rubber band and took off her clothes and got into the shower. She put her face under the water, and felt the difference between the wetness of water and the wetness of her tears, as the shower spray washed them away. Her cheeks felt puffy, and her eyes felt hot. She had just lost, and someone she hardly knew had had to tell her that. She had suspected, but she hadn’t known. She smiled, remembering a game of cards she had played with Spangle years before in a motel room, the two of them on a trip to see his grandmother in Idaho. She had won the first game, and then in the middle of the second, she had had to ask, “What are the rules again?” A blind person crossing the street, then climbing onto the sidewalk and forgetting what a sidewalk was. One night she had helped a blind woman across Chapel Street, and when they were safely on the sidewalk, the woman had stood there, looking more baffled than she had standing on the curb at the opposite side, hesitating about crossing. Cynthia had gone back to her. “You know where you are now?” she had said, and the woman, sounding baffled, had reeled off the names of streets to the left and streets to the right. She knew where she was. Cynthia looked back at her once, and she was still standing there. Why should it be odd that a blind person was baffled? Because you assume that when they can find their way, they are all right. What if they can find their way but don’t want to, or are just tired of it? She turned her face into the stream of water from the showerhead again. She had the feeling that the blind woman might still be standing where she had left her. And the feeling, at the same time, that she might be misjudging Spangle. It just didn’t make sense. At least he would want his clothes. All his sweaters were full of holes — maybe he meant to take the holes and leave the sweaters. He did not like donuts, and sometimes when he went with her to the all-night donut shop he would have just a glass of milk, telling the waitress to bring him three donut holes. That joke went bad the night the store started baking what they called “donut holes”—round pieces of dough cut from the inside of the donut.

She tried to hate him, to convince herself that what was behind all his kidding was a lack of respect for other people. Some days he could hardly do anything without turning it into a joke. He would joke at the dry cleaner’s (handing over his sports jacket, saying, “No starch”), he would pull pranks on tired waitresses, demand a free glass at a gas station that wasn’t giving anything away. He told Johnny Carson better jokes, talking to the television, than Johnny was telling late-night America. She put a big towel around herself and stood there, in the tub, thinking. These were not good things to hate him for. At the very least, they showed that he was alive, that he didn’t just go through life like a zombie, intimidated at the dry cleaner’s, oblivious to waitresses. He didn’t mind letting people in gas stations know, subtly, that he realized they were getting the best of him, that the days of free glasses were over.

He talked a lot, and she was a quiet person. That had always been a problem. She liked to be quiet, and he got edgy when there wasn’t noise. Standing in the kitchen, he would idly tap with a fork on the top of the stove as he waited for something to come to a boil; he would shave in the morning with the bathroom door open, so he could talk to her. She had actually managed, after a long time, to understand what he was saying while he was shaving: He spoke in fragments and words that didn’t come out right, because of the way he was twisting his face. And he had gotten a pair of earphones so that if he woke up at night and couldn’t sleep, he could listen to music without disturbing her.

She was getting sentimental. She was not succeeding in hating him. She stepped out of the tub, dried off, and took her clothes from the hook on the back of the door. She went into the bedroom, where it would be less damp, to dress. When she dressed, she looked at herself in the mirror. It was a mirror that had once been on a carousel, with a scalloped top and curved bottom and a heavy gilded border with raised cherubs and flowers, from which the gilt paint was falling away. He had bought it for a hundred dollars and brought it back to the apartment and put it on the bedroom wall. The silver had started to deteriorate, too, so that great areas of the glass were scratchy and cloudy, nothing to be seen in them. You could still see very well in the right-hand side of the mirror, though. She stood in front of it and looked at herself: prettier than average, but hardly the type a man would ask to come live with him after one meeting. Was it her mind? She always ended up with men who talked faster than she did, even if they didn’t think faster. What, then? She had asked Spangle, and he had admitted that it was something he had a hard time explaining. It was that she had self-confidence, he said. She pointed out that she was shy about meeting people. It was that she was smart. A lot of people were smart. It was that he had hung the huge carousel mirror in the bedroom and he had done it knowing it was right, that she would like it, that he wouldn’t have to consult her about it. It made her nervous, she said. It was just too big — the way it mirrored the room made the room look like something in a fun house. He admitted then that he couldn’t put his finger on it, but he tried again anyway: not exactly self-confidence, but the impression she gave of being at peace — no nightmares about fireballs. Maybe she was too oblivious, she said. It was hardly flattering to be praised for something she did or didn’t do in her sleep.

When he was a child, he told her, he had been a sleepwalker. They used to find him curled up by the kitchen stove, like a cat. Now all he did was thrash in his sleep, dream occasionally. She wondered what would happen if she didn’t awaken him — if the fireball would get him, if then there would be silence. She never had the heart. She jumped on him like a crazed mugger, a mugger wanting to bring him down and quiet him. He had scared her to death the first time he had done it. He had thrashed as though he were having a seizure, hand thrown over his face, his back arching up off the bed. “I have nightmares,” he had explained. Sometimes he was funnier when he stated facts than when he concocted elaborate stories. He would tell her that he really liked hamburgers, as he was eating a fourth hamburger. She liked it that he said the obvious and didn’t realize that he was doing it, or that there was anything funny about doing it. She supposed that she could tie that in with his underestimating people’s intelligence, but that wouldn’t really be true — he did it more out of innocence than anything else. He often said things after the fact. So maybe he was going to call, still. If he called, she wondered if he would concoct a story, or simply tell her that he was back. He had no way of knowing that she would meet Bobby, who would go to visit Victor, who would run into… His world — his world full of his crazy friends — no wonder he thought that she was calm and self-assured. She had never run into such a collection of people. They expressed doubt so easily. They didn’t hesitate to reveal personal things, self-doubts, failings, any longer than a person with hot toast will wait before buttering it.

She was hungry. She wanted Bobby to come.

What a surprise it would be for Spangle if he did call, or did come back, and she was with Bobby. He would never expect it of her.

Of course he would call, or come back. One or the other.

She brushed her hair and tucked it in back of her ears. She went into the living room, to wait.

He got there not long after she had started flipping through the copy of American Photographer he had left behind. He knocked on the door, holding a bouquet of daisies, snapdragons and marigolds.

“How are you this evening?” he said.

“Come off it,” she said, sighing. “I’m hungry. Let’s just go out and eat, all right? How did it go in New York, with the agents?”

“Beautiful agent. Simply beautiful. Everything is all set. Wonderful lunch. Wonderful wine. I love it. I just love it. New York has advantages. Waterfalls don’t gush free wine.”

“Did you propose to her?”

She was putting the flowers in a jar. She put her nose in the bouquet to check and realized that the marigolds did smell like cat pee.

“I bit my tongue. She had on a wedding band that must have been an inch wide, studded with diamonds. Spike-heel shoes. Oh, I love them. The most beautiful women in the world are in New York. Imagine what hell it would be to live in New York in the summer. I love her. She’s going to be a wonderful agent. We had Vouvray.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Jesus. They wear shorts on Park Avenue. All those shapely behinds, those perfectly tanned legs, those painted fingernails and toenails, sandals with ankle straps. I just can’t stand it. I found at least ten women today that I would have been perfectly happy to live with for the rest of my life.”

“Where did you get the flowers?” she said.

“They were thrown outside the door.”

“What?” she said.

“My guess is that a cat got into them. There was some pink yarn that had been tied around them, lying a little ways away. They were still piled in a bunch.”

“Do you think Spangle’s back? That he’s doing this?”

“Spangle? I don’t think it’s his style.”

She put the flowers on top of American Photographer. The squatting model, with red eyes, looked up at them.

“Any place you want,” Bobby said. “You’re paying.”

“You make me nervous. I can’t tell when you’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding about any of it. Did I insult you by saying that I saw ten women I wanted? I didn’t go up to any of them. I kept thinking about you. The minute that I heard Spangle was back, and that you didn’t know it, I knew it was bad news for you, but it was such good news for me — I just had to call you and tell you. But I’m going to play it cool now. I’m not going to say anything more about your coming to live with me. You wouldn’t have to go to any of the horrible faculty parties. You could cross-country ski — that’s wonderful — you could, we could move into a house. I’m not going to talk about it. Do you want a bagel?” He produced a white paper bag. “Victor doesn’t even have to visit,” he said. “I can go to New York, sometimes, to see Victor. I just feel so sorry for Victor. If you knew what a good person he was, you’d feel the same way. I’m not going to talk about Victor,” Bobby said. He sprawled on the sofa. “What if we had never met?” Bobby said. “I can’t imagine it — what if you were always in New Haven, and I was in New Hampshire and we never ran into each other?”

“Let’s go to dinner,” she said.

“I’m obsessed, I know it,” Bobby said. “I know it, but it’s not just me. It’s our whole culture, isn’t it? What do you think? I was reading an article about the Shah, and do you know what the Shah’s son does all day? He sits in his room listening to Rod Stewart singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” Bobby bit into a bagel. “I’m so hungry. Don’t worry — this won’t spoil my appetite. I’m blowing it, I know I’m blowing it. I guess it would be unfair to you to pretend I’m not an excitable person. I was hyperactive when I was a kid. I think that’s why I lost my hair.” He swallowed, smiled at her. “Let me start over,” he said. “I’ll stand outside the door and knock, and you open it. Okay?”

“No. Look — I like you, Bobby, but I’m not really as amused by all this as I might seem. While you were hyperactive, I was in finishing school. I like you, and I think you’re interesting, but if you’re serious about my coming to live with you, it’s out of the question.”

“It’s my mother’s fault that I lost my hair,” he said, running his hand through the ropes of curls that hung at the sides of his head. “I can remember demanding candy and more candy, all day long, and she’d give it to me. Worst thing you can do for a hyperactive kid. Well — God rest her soul. I don’t want to start complaining about my mother. She was bicycling in Maine and a car wiped her out from behind. Victor came to the funeral. He hitched all the way from New York to Maine, and he made it with half an hour to spare. He and my mother always liked each other. He was crying so hard out on the highway that he couldn’t get rides. He wanted to be there hours before the funeral so he could take a shower.”

“Bobby,” she said, “would you like it if I went out and brought something back for dinner?”

He took out a blue index card and jotted down a few words, holding her off with the first finger of his left hand raised. “Okay,” he said, shoving the card in his pocket. “Ready to go. All ready. This is very nice of you. I can’t remember the last time I had two meals out in one day, let alone meals I didn’t have to pay for. This is very nice of you. I love you.”

“Stop,” she said.

“Anything,” he said, hands up in surrender. “Anything. I don’t mean to be disagreeable. I’m just wound up. I’m fine.”

She picked up her keys, got her purse, stopped and considered what to do about the ringing phone.

“You answer it,” she said to Bobby. “Say I’m not here, if it’s for me. Unless it’s Spangle.”

“If it’s him, I’d hang up on him.”

“No you wouldn’t. Answer the phone.”

“I would. I have to be honest with you.”

She sighed and headed for the phone.

“All right, okay, I’ll get it,” he said. He picked it up the second before her hand reached it.

“Garden of the Fallen Lotus,” he said, in a surprisingly good imitation of a Chinese.

“Oh Christ,” Tess Spangle said. “I dialed wrong. The last thing I need is some fried won-ton.” She hung up.

“A woman,” he said. “She said, ‘Oh Christ. I dialed wrong. The last thing I need is some fried won-ton.’ ”

“His mother,” she said.

“Let’s go,” Bobby said. The phone was ringing again.

Love was one thing, survival another. The magician was going to have to leave the East Coast, very soon, to do another private party in Ojai. Amazing how even living rent-free, your money just dribbled away. Movies were expensive, food cost a lot, sixty cents to wash your clothes. His money was almost gone, and he hadn’t made any good contacts around New Haven. He’d pulled a couple of rabbits out of hats at children’s birthday parties, but God — the cost of rabbit food. And living with his mother was impossible. He had to buy things for her. She wouldn’t pay for anything when he was around: All she wanted was to criticize and to get a free ride. She talked about how high her rent was, as though she paid any less when he wasn’t there. She was allergic to the rabbits, and he had to put them in cages out on the fire escape, and he couldn’t put them out there until that part of the building was in shade, so all morning and half the afternoon he was stuck sitting in the park with the rabbits.

It was unrequited love. Again. There was romance, and then there was the real world. He did not mean the real real world, but the world that he had to work in in order to survive. He knew that the real real world was the Pentagon, not a mansion in Ojai, and he was at least thankful that he was not involved in the real real world. Trying to talk himself out of her, trying to make going away seem bearable, he had been saying to himself that she was in the real world. She worked. Was married. Separated. He had a collection of pick-up sticks; she probably had stock. And there was something about her face, however beautiful, that was not spiritual.

At the very least, he had to say goodbye. Perhaps some energy would be exchanged, perhaps some cloud of romance would hover over her until she knew that she would have to go to him. Perhaps there would be some sudden epiphany, and her heart would flutter as fast as the wings of a hummingbird, and in time that movement would carry her to him. He would let her know his friend’s number in Ojai, because he didn’t have a phone himself, and the friend’s live-in maid was always around and would know how to get in touch with him. He would like to give her something miraculous: a hummingbird wing, beating; an opal, hot with real fire. He could think of nothing but flowers. Flowers scattered in a path to her car, the essence of beauty tempering her movement into the real world. He wished that the flowers in his mother’s yard were more aromatic. Marigolds smelled sour, like some liquor. They did not feel good against your face. He would like to stroke her face with a white iris. To stroke her with flowers, different flowers for different parts of the body, the way his friend in Ojai stroked women lying naked beside his pool. A rose petal on the forehead. Tickling the bottom of her feet, gently, with a camellia. Watching through his binoculars, he had seen some goddamn fat alley cat sniff the flowers and scratch the yarn away, tugging until he had it, dragging it off only to pounce at it once and then forget it.

Time was short, and he wanted, at least, to say his goodbye. He had gotten there late, because he had had a fight with his mother, and he had not seen if she had gone into the building. But perhaps she was inside, because he had seen her husband pick up the flowers and skip up the steps with them. At least she would have his flowers.

Watching from a distance was stupid. He would go and sit on the step, and when she came home, or if she came out, he would tell her that this was goodbye, and that he adored her and wished only good things for her. He would do a trick, if she wanted him to.

He sat and waited, and finally it happened. He was sitting on the bottom step when the door opened, and she was there. She was there with her husband; and seeing him, she suddenly reached out to grab her husband’s elbow, sucking in her breath.

“Freeze,” he said, trying to be casual, to joke, to save what was meaningful for a later moment.

The gun he pointed was a red water pistol. What he shot out of it was a plastic rose.