Falling in Place

Twenty-Three

IT WAS NOT the vacation he thought they would be having. They were in a borrowed house on the bay in Nantucket. Mary was not with them. She was at Angela’s. John Joel was still at his grandmother’s, and three times a week she and Brandt and the cook went with him into New York and waited while he talked to a psychiatrist. Louise, sitting in a chair beside the pool in the backyard, wrote them letters every day. Not post cards — letters. Post cards to Brandt. When she wrote the letters and post cards, she cupped her left hand over what she was writing, so he wouldn’t see.

She liked the pool better than the ocean. There was a chair that floated in the pool, and early in the morning when he got up, he would go to the bedroom window and peer out through the shelves of gloxinias, the purple and pink bells of flowers, and Louise would be below, with orange juice, floating in the pool. He would go downstairs and sit on the rim of the pool, his legs in the water halfway to his knees. When the sun got stronger, after an hour or so, he would push himself forward and sink down, go all the way under, exhaling, and then pop up again. Then swim. Then try to get her to go to the beach. When she wouldn’t, he would open the gate at the back of the pool and go down the fifteen steps to the sandy path, and follow it until it widened onto the beach.

Everyone had forgotten about John Joel’s braces.

Tiffy called every morning, and every evening Louise called Tiffy. Tiffy had left her husband and found an apartment on Central Park West. A famous painter whose name he had forgotten lived in the building, and Tiffy was going to take painting lessons. Tiffy this, Tiffy that. Tiffy said that Parker’s mother was in bed, trying not to have a miscarriage. Parker’s grandmother was there, taking care of things. When John had dropped Mary off at Angela’s, Angela’s father had had a lot to say about Parker’s mother. Very stupid, he said. Knew nothing about law. Parker’s father was out of town on business. The police had gone to the house several times to question Parker. Angela’s father reported that Parker’s mother had told him, with pride, what Parker said to the police: “If I told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

He waded out into the water. A woman in a bikini kept throwing a plastic baseball bat into the water for a big golden retriever. He stood there, far enough away so as not to distract them, and watched the bat sail out into the water, time and again. The woman threw like a man, not like a woman. In other ways, she was obviously a woman. The bikini was cut right to the edge of her nipples, but tight, so that no matter how she moved, you couldn’t see anything.

“Isn’t he great?” the woman said, as he passed by.

“Yes. Has he always loved the water?”

“Oh yes. When he was eight weeks old, my husband waded out into a pond with him and released him, and he stayed there, perfectly still, and then he started paddling. He made it to shore and barked at my husband and threw himself in the dirt and rolled in it, but then he got tired of being mad and inched back in. We can hardly drive past water without him leaping out of the car. He’ll jump off bridges. He’s been off a diving board. He loves it.” The woman was shaking her head, beaming. The dog crouched, eyes wide, waiting for the bat. She turned and threw it. The dog was running before it had left her hand.

Parker had told his son to jump off a bridge, and he had done it.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” he said. “Can he judge what’s deep enough water to dive into?”

The woman’s expression changed. “I never thought about that,” she said. “I don’t know if he has a sense of that or not.”

He walked on, feeling like a cloud that had darkened the beach.

Every little thing that happened was getting blown out of proportion in his head. The night before, they had made shish-kebabs and cooked them on the hibachi by the pool, and he had burned his tongue, biting into a chunk of beef too soon. He had wanted to cry, to spit out the hot meat and cry. He had sucked air into his mouth instead, said nothing; but after dinner he had taken it out on her, undressing and diving into the pool, not speaking. She carried the plates into the house and didn’t come out again. From the water, he watched the coals, still glowing. Shivering in the water, he looked back at the house and saw the light on in the bedroom. The light went off. She had gone to bed at nine-thirty.

It was Friday, and Nick and Laurie, who were going to be on Martha’s Vineyard to visit friends, were going to stop at the house that night. He had asked Louise if that was all right, or if she would prefer to be alone. She had not said that she preferred to be alone, and after a few seconds she had said that it was all right. He had the feeling that she thought it was an odd request, but nothing harmful — like someone asking if he can brush his teeth in front of you. He hated it that even on vacation she had brought the little plastic key, and was rolling the toothpaste up, from the bottom. He had removed the key, flushed it down the toilet, and squeezed the tube hard, in the middle. She had not said anything about it. He had been embarrassed after he had done it. He had been embarrassed after he questioned the woman in the bikini. Embarrassed, the night before, when he had thrown off his clothes and a breeze had come up and she had seen him shiver before he jumped. Embarrassed that she had picked up the plates and washed them. Embarrassed that she had gone to bed. To cheer himself up, he kept thinking about what Nick told him — that not all of it was his fault. His mother said so, too. Only Louise did not say so. The female psychiatrist, whom he seemed always to talk to, had granted that it was true, but seemed to think that it was unimportant to notice in what ways he wasn’t responsible. He wanted to think that it was over, but actually very little of it was over. Nobody knew yet what damage had really been done to all of them. In the evening, he liked to walk on the beach and watch the sun go down. It was so simple to see that the day was over, that the blackness would spread out, intensify. When he was alone, he lost all sense of time: He might sit for an hour, two hours, three. He sat alone in the den downstairs, while upstairs Louise slept. He went over and over it in his mind, gaining no ground. All the facts were so simple: that it wasn’t a good marriage, that he loved Nina, that his son had shot his daughter. Louise would not watch the sunset with him because the sun was huge and deep-pink above the water, and when she looked at it, all she could think of was blood. The blood swirling in Nina’s sink: a little cut, a small tragedy. The blood on the ground: the cops had blasted it away with the garden hose. They had cleaned up as though someone had made a faux pas. They had taken pictures of the bloody ground, and then they had washed the area with a hose: the polite host, passing no comment, silently mopping up spilled wine.

Nina felt responsible. “You talk as though you were a magnet,” he said to her, “as though I had to be pulled along. You’re not being fair to either of us. You aren’t acknowledging that this is still the right place for me to be. That you want me here.” She had kept crying. “Look,” he had said, “isn’t this where I belong?”

“I was a magnet,” Nina had said. “I had advantages she didn’t have. I did pull you along.”

“What advantages?”

“Because I’m young, and she’s not. Because I have this small, quiet place for you to be, and at home it’s the way you always tell me it is when you have a barbecue or something awful like that. You like it here because you’re left alone.”

“I could be in a cave and be left alone.”

“It is a cave,” she had shouted. “It’s cramped, it’s not cozy. I hate it that you love it so much, that you have so much and you want so little.”

“What do I have?” he had said, and she had been completely exasperated. “Pillars at the end of my driveway,” he had smiled. “What else?”

“Acres of land. Children. A big house. Try to realize what you have.”

“You’re what I want.”

“Do you know what I did?” she had said. “I got a friend of mine to drive me to your house. Do you believe that I did that? Do you know why I did it? Because if there were pillars, I was never going to speak to you again. Because you pretend your house is nothing, that all of it is nothing, and I know it isn’t true. That house is beautiful. I looked up the driveway and saw a huge tree. I can’t understand what you want with this — with this tiny apartment, with me. Because I’m pretty? Why do you like me? I can’t remember.”

“It’s not as though I want to burrow into this apartment and never leave,” he said.

“You’re not answering the question.”

“God almighty. I show you how I love you, don’t I? I’ve told you why I love you. Because we have good times together, because there’s no such thing as time when I’m with you.”

“You always look at your watch and leave,” she had said.

Slow time. Slow motion. It had been a hard climb to get to her, in more senses than one. It had been hard to face his feelings for her, when he thought he had all his feelings arranged, under control. It was as if somebody had stood up in the middle of a familiar song and played a brilliant solo: Was it worth being amazed, when things got disturbed so that they would always seem odd if you put them back together the way they were? He had debated. He had not slept with her. And then he had slept with her and pretended it did not matter. It was so difficult, and he was so slow in coming around to what he had to do. She was right that he hid in her apartment. He was hiding from himself, or at best playing peek-a-boo, pretending it was a safe game and that there were only little surprises: the infant seeing that it’s still a friend behind the fingers. Rules of the game: The peek-a-boo is always gentle, never shouted. You disappear, but can still be seen. The house in Rye. The house in Connecticut. The apartment on Columbus Avenue. She had joked that he would come back reincarnated as confetti. His son had shot his daughter, and little blood vessels, little pieces of tissue, had torn apart, frayed.

Nina was away in the Berkshires, and he couldn’t call her for two more nights. She had taken a week off and gone away to think. For two of those days, at least, Peter Spangle, on his way to see an old friend in New Hampshire, would be with her. He could really see how you killed somebody over love, but he could not see how you shot someone out of hatred. Maybe that was what it appeared to be, too — that John Joel hated Mary. For the millionth time, the billionth time, he thought: My son shot my daughter.

It was late afternoon. He headed back toward the house. He could feel the heat rising from his collarbones and his shoulders, and he knew that he had gotten too much sun, that his shoulders were going to hurt. He touched the skin with his fingertips and he could feel the soreness, like pressing on a bruise. When John Joel and Mary were little children and they had splinters, bug bites, cuts, he used to examine them before he rubbed medicine on the area or carefully pinched up the skin to draw out a splinter. He hated it when they cringed from him. He was being so gentle. He could remember, one time, yelling at Mary, “You’re not being fair. I put my finger an inch away from the cut to steady your arm so I could see if you got glass in it. I couldn’t possibly be hurting you. You’re just afraid because I’ve got big hands.” Louise had thought that that was hilarious. She had started laughing, and that had started Mary crying, and he had been so angry that he had stalked off, his hands at his sides feeling like they were encased in catcher’s mitts. As Nick said, it was not all his fault.

He watched a child playing in the wet sand at the water’s edge, pressing what looked like a gigantic cookie cutter into the sand, standing back and looking approvingly at what she was creating: a chain of big ducks, beaks to tails, stretching and stretching until a wave washed over them, and the child began again, a little farther back.

The woman with the dog was gone. About where she had stood was a woman in a white sailor’s hat, sitting in a lawn chair pulled a little way into the water, her big legs stretched in front of her. “Hawaii is better,” she said as he passed.

He went back to the path and climbed the steps, feeling how smooth the sand had worn the soles of his feet.

Louise had brought a radio outside. It was playing softly, sitting on the metal top of a table that had a hole, but no umbrella they could find.

“They’re putting the former manager of the Beatles in jail for tax evasion,” she said. She did not look up. She was reading a paperback.

“Did you plan to go to the store for food, or shall we just go out for dinner when Nick and his friend come?” she said.

“Laurie,” he said.

“Laurie,” she said. “Which?”

“You’re mad that I asked them,” he said. “They were coming here anyway. I couldn’t very well not invite them to stop by.”

“Nick and Laurie,” she said. She moved her leg, and the chair swirled a little in the pool. She was almost facing him, but still she hadn’t looked up.

“We’ll go out to eat,” he said. “We’ll go to that restaurant you like.”

“So that you can keep Nick posted,” she said, “you can tell him that I’ve asked for a divorce.”

“What?” he said. “Who have you asked for a divorce?”

She looked up. “You,” she said. There was a report on the radio about which traveler’s checks to buy. A reporter had bought traveler’s checks and left them home on purpose. American Express had come through for her. The people at the Holiday Inn where she had gone to fill out a form and get new checks had been very polite.

“If that’s what you want,” he said. He thought to himself: coward.

“Nick and Laurie,” she said, and moved her leg again. The chair twirled.

“You don’t want to see Nick and Laurie,” he said.

“I’ll see Nick and Laurie,” she said. “I’ll stay the rest of the week, too. You can go, if you want to.”

“Do you want to take a walk?” he said.

“To see if the woman in the bikini is still throwing sticks for her dog? That made me so nostalgic. My poor goddamn dog. Goddamn me, too, for not being able to get the dog out of my head.”

He wondered if it was orange juice in her cup. Seagulls were squawking.

“You saw me talking to her?” he said. “You came down to the beach?”

“I started to, but I saw you in the distance, talking to her. Do you realize that you’re only embarrassing yourself? I saw her at the drugstore, at the counter, in a tight white skirt, and the man sitting on the stool next to her wasn’t more than eighteen years old. Not her son, either. That woman must be forty-five.”

“So what makes you think that I was interested in her?”

“You’re interested in dogs?”

“I like dogs,” he said. “I didn’t worship Mr. Blue the way you did, but it was your dog.”

“Mary told me that she talked to you about getting a dog, and that you didn’t seem too keen on the idea.”

“Should I have? Is that what you want?”

“As you said to Mary, if I wanted a dog, I’d just go out and get a dog. I’m not like you, actually. If I decide I want something, I just act on that impulse.”

“Why not be specific with your insults?” he said.

“I’m not insulting you. Maybe by implication I am. Saying that you’re like me. To be fair to myself, what I said was that I was like you.” She kicked the water, turned. She was sunburned, too. Her face was shiny, her hair wet. She had been swimming. Drinking. It was not orange juice in the cup.

“Here’s something you haven’t thought about,” she said. “What if I told you to take care of the children? What if I moved with Tiffy to New York?”

It was something he hadn’t thought about. He was silent, trying to figure out if she was bluffing.

“Scare you?” she said. “Your mother wouldn’t take two more, would she?”

“They’re my children,” he said. “Do you think that I wouldn’t take them?”

“I don’t think they’d go,” she said. She spun again. “That’s just a guess,” she said. “You know when Brandt had the measles? He got them again — German measles. Your mother had never had German measles.” She laughed. “She called today. She’s peppered.”

“What are you drinking?” he said.

“If you stay,” she said, “I want to rent a boat.”

“I want you to take a walk with me on the beach and sober up.”

“I want it to stay summer,” she said. “I hate Connecticut in the winter. You know what I particularly hate? The birds still hopping around in the cold, the little seed bells you have to hang in the trees for them. Those brown and white seeds all over the leaves. Then the snow.”

“Where would you rather be?” he said.

She said, smiling, “Where would you?”

She made it come back to him: the rooms, the apartment on Columbus Avenue, the place he had been trying all day not to think about, staring at the ocean, the beach. Seagulls instead of pigeons. Salt air instead of the subway smell. His feet sinking into the sand. His feet so heavy he could hardly lift them, the slight creaking of the stairs. “Be quiet,” Nina had whispered, putting her finger to her lips. “The landlady!” He had turned to see a heavy woman in a black dress, her hair in pigtails, coming out the front door of Nina’s building, a big white patent-leather purse gleaming under the streetlight. It was the night they had come back to the apartment and Horton had been there, slumped like a Mexican taking a siesta. In front of the landlady, Horton had put his arms around Nina’s hips. The woman looked shocked and hurried past them down the steps. “She hates me,” Nina laughed. “She sticks her head out the door to see if I’ve brought anybody home with me. She has a daughter who’s the same way.”

He had said to John Joel, on the train, “Not your type, huh?” Condescending. He had been condescending to somebody who would pick up a gun and shoot somebody else. That was not something a child would do. His child had done it. If he had underestimated John Joel that much, maybe John Joel had known all along that Nina was his girl, not Nick’s. Maybe John Joel knew that while he was kidding him, saying that she wasn’t his type.

“I’m going to drive to the fish market,” he said. “You don’t want to go out to dinner.”

“I’ll be sober.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because you’ll watch over me.” She smiled. Turned the page of her book.

He sighed, and sat on the edge of the pool, swinging his legs over the side. He did watch her. He watched her and tried to think of good things about her, because he was so inclined to dislike her. If she hadn’t wanted to come, she should have said so. If she hadn’t wanted to see Nick, or let him see Nick, she should have said that, too. Good things, he reminded himself. That she had gotten drunk, but didn’t seem to intend to get drunker; that she had been about to take a walk with him on the beach before, until she had misunderstood his exchanging a few pleasantries with a woman for flirtation. She had once drawn a hopscotch game on the kitchen floor, amazed that he didn’t know how to do it, and they had used as a stone a kumquat from a fruit basket her aunt had sent them for Christmas. Hopping through the kitchen. Christmas, when she always gave him presents he would like. Jumping into the pile of leaves he had raked in the backyard. Winter memories: Most of them were winter memories.

At five o’clock, when Nick and Laurie showed up, she was sitting on a lounge chair beside the pool, wearing a blue T-shirt and white cotton pants. A towel that had been on her wet hair was around her neck. She was polite.

“We’re just staying for a little while,” Nick said. “We got a late start. We’ve got to get to our friends’ house pretty soon.” He said it before he even sat down.

Laurie kicked off her shoes and sat on the rim of the pool. She had on the kind of mirrored sunglasses that you can’t see into: He looked and saw the red clouds reflected, and a large shadow that must have been him. You could only tell by her mouth that she was happy.

Nick had brought a horseshoe game. “I’ve wanted to play all summer,” he said. “Does anybody else want to play?”

He went down to the beach with Nick. Nick ground the stake into the sand, then handed him a horseshoe. “My grandmother had one of these over her back door,” he said. “For luck.”

“Did she have good luck?” John said.

“Not particularly. About average. She also pitched horseshoes. Come to think of it, she was very good at that.”

“Shit, what are you doing with a horseshoe game?”

“How’s it going?” Nick said to him. Nick threw a horseshoe. Missed. “What I’m doing with it is that it makes me nervous to be around the two of you and I thought it would give us something to do.”

“We could drink.”

“Okay,” Nick said.

“I was kidding. Louise is just sobering up.”

“How’s it going?” Nick said.

“All right,” he said. For some reason, he thought that it would be betraying Louise to say that she had asked for a divorce.

“If it’s going okay, then I’m supposed to tell you that Nina’s back, and she wants you to call her.”

The horseshoe went thump in the sand. Neither of them had hit the stake.

“When did you hear from her?” he said.

“She called me yesterday. I don’t know anything. I told it to you just the way she told it to me.”

“She wants me to be in a good mood if she’s giving me bad news,” he said. “That’s what it is.”

“You don’t know till you call,” Nick said.

“How did she sound?”

“She didn’t sound any way. All right. She sounded all right.”

“I’m going to go call her.”

“Don’t do that to me,” Nick said. “What if Louise walks in the house when you’re on the phone? I don’t want to be here if there’s going to be some fight. I just got done fighting with Laurie’s brother about how she’s black and I’m white.”

“Then we’ll go back to the house, and you ask for some liquor we don’t have, and I’ll go get it. There’s a phone at the liquor store.”

“Oh Christ. What if you get depressed and don’t come back? Then what?”

“I’m not that out of control.”

The horseshoe spun around the stake. “Proof,” John said.

“Dumb luck,” Nick said. “I’m not even saying it’s going to be bad news, but if it is, you’d better come back.”

They walked toward the horseshoe stake.

“What liquor don’t you have?” Nick said.

“We have just about everything. Ask for something weird.”

They went back to the house. Louise was sitting on the rim of the pool, dangling her legs alongside Laurie’s. They were sipping drinks.

“What have you got there?” Nick said.

“Gin and tonic,” Laurie said.

“You know what I’ve been wanting to try?” Nick said. “Have you seen those ads for that liqueur made from melons?”

“I’ve never seen you drink anything but Scotch or beer,” Laurie said.

“That sounds disgusting,” Louise said.

“It’s green,” Nick said. “I can’t think of the name of the stuff.”

“Go get yourself a bottle,” John said. “The liquor store is two minutes away.”

“Nah,” Nick said.

“Go ahead,” John said.

“You come with me,” Nick said. “I don’t know where it is.”

“Are you serious?” Laurie said. “Melon liqueur?”

“I’ll get it,” John said. “If they have it.”

“He’d do anything for you,” Louise said. She sipped her drink. “Melon liqueur is a favor?” Laurie said.

Louise shrugged. Nick sat beside them, kicked off his sandals.

“Be right back,” John said. “Anybody want anything else?”

They didn’t. He went into the house, picked up the car keys and his wallet, went out the front door and jumped in his car. At the liquor store, he bought a bottle of Midori, surprised at how expensive it was. Then he waited while an old man shouted into the phone about what the doctor had said was causing his high blood pressure. “I will too buy beer,” the old man said. “I call to give you good news, and you start nagging. I told you it was all heredity.” He had on a California Angels baseball cap, a white Lacoste shirt, madras bermudas and white knee socks. He wore red running shoes. He hung up and stood staring at the phone, fuming, his face nearly as red as the shoes, while John stood politely in back of him, waiting for him to move away. Finally he did. As John talked to the operator, the old man began to lift six-packs of beer out of the cooler and pile them on the counter.

“I knew you’d call,” she said. “Hi. I came home.”

He could tell that it wasn’t going to be bad. It wasn’t going to be something horrible. It was going to be all right.

“We’re getting divorced,” he said.

“You and me?” she said.

“Never,” he said.

“I came home.”

“Don’t hang up,” he said.

“Why would I hang up?”

“Don’t say something I don’t want to hear.”

“There’s nothing to say that you wouldn’t want to hear. I went to Stockbridge. I rode up that far with Spangle, and it would have been so easy to keep driving, to just keep going. We got stoned and smooched. That was all.”

“Take it back,” he said.

“Take what back?”

“That you smooched.”

“We did. In bed. In a motel in Stockbridge. With our clothes on. Maybe it was for old times’ sake. Maybe the other would have been, too.”

“Don’t tell me any more,” he said.

“There’s nothing more to tell.”

“I’m red in the face because of heredity,” the old man shouted at the clerk behind the counter. “Give me some bags of those salted peanuts.”

“Don’t hang up,” he said.

“I won’t. I wanted to tell you something. I thought you might be amused. It’s not funny, really. It’s just so strange.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“I miss you,” she said.

“You’re not going to say something I don’t want to hear?”

“I can’t imagine that it would bother you. It’s just so strange. I guess the truth is that it bothers me, but I don’t understand it.” She was smoking grass. He could hear her drawing in, waiting. Nina, in the apartment on Columbus Avenue. He could really understand how someone would shoot because of love.

“You remember your dream?” she said. “That depressing dream that didn’t make any sense? Well, I dreamed an answer to it in Stockbridge. The air conditioning was blowing on high and we couldn’t turn it down, and it was too hot without it and too cold with it, so we were huddled in bed together, but I was still freezing, and that night I had a dream that picked up where your dream left off.”

She laughed. He was listening to Nina laugh on the phone. They would invite the landlady to the wedding. Mary had told him to be where he wanted to be, and he was going to take her at her word. The psychiatrist was in the business of fixing people up, and he could fix John Joel. Louise did not love him. She was paranoid about things that were not happening and she didn’t care about things that were. The night he had stood looking at the shooting star, she had said to him that she didn’t know everything, and she didn’t want to.

Nina’s dream: She was on a trip — she didn’t know where. She got cold, and went into a store to buy a coat. She bought it — a long black coat with a collar she turned up against the wind. She had not been upset that she was in a strange country, but when she left the store she was suddenly confused: Everything looked strange, and people came by talking in an unfamiliar language. The coincidence of having a dream, she said, that overlapped his dream: It was like walking down a street, thinking of a song, and suddenly the person you pass starts to whistle it. She had dreamed this: That standing on the sidewalk outside the store she had reached into the pocket of the coat, and she had been surprised to discover that there were mittens inside.