Falling in Place

Eight

JOHN JOEL and Mary had an easy life. It was too easy, and now both of them were slipping and sliding. Mary had been a bright child, almost all A’s in elementary school, but when she got to junior high, she stopped trying. He could actually remember Louise’s saying that it was a phase. He noticed it in her friends, too — that nearly manic combing of the hair, the chewing gum and talk about music. They disparaged everything, and their talk was full of clichés and code words. He did not envy Mary’s summer school teacher. Mary and John Joel wanted only to avoid things. He had tried to find out what she thought of Vanity Fair. “I’ve been reading it,” Mary had said, sulkily. “I read the damn books. Don’t sweat it.” He had tried not to be antagonistic when he asked.

They had gone to the Chinese restaurant, and Louise tried to get them to order sautéed vegetables along with the rest of their food. He tried to care that it was a good idea, but finally he said, to keep peace, that there were a lot of vegetables in the dishes anyway. Louise stopped talking. He watched out of the corner of his eye as John Joel gnawed on one sparerib after another, thinking, all the time, what a pleasure it was to eat with Nina. He tried again: “Did you feel sorry for Dobbin, did you feel happy that he became a hero?” “I don’t know,” Mary said. “He’s like something out of a soap opera. John Wayne probably would have liked him. If he’d been bloodthirsty on top of being such a goody-goody.” So he switched the conversation to John Wayne, wondering if one other family in America could possibly be having such a Saturday night discussion. He said that he didn’t forgive John Wayne for his position on the Vietnam war, sure that Mary would agree with that. She shrugged. “He’s dead,” she said. As they ate in silence, he noticed that the Muzak was playing “Eleanor Rigby,” followed by “You’re So Vain.”

“Do you like Carly Simon?” he asked Mary.

“God,” Mary sighed. “I feel like I’m at dinner at Angela’s house. Her father is always trying to find out what everybody’s thinking, like we’re all plotting or something. He says that at dinner you ought to fill your head with ideas the way you fill your stomach with food. He actually said that.”

“I just asked if you liked a singer.”

“James Taylor looks really wasted,” Mary said, picking up a sparerib. “I don’t know.”

“If you don’t like eating at Angela’s, why don’t you eat home more often?” Louise said.

“What is this?” Mary said. “You want me to talk, I talked. I said something, and everybody’s jumping on me.” She turned to John. “How was work this week? You say something.”

He hadn’t known what to say. Perhaps: I’ve got to tell you about my lover’s dope-dealer friend who’s got a tongue as fast as a race car at the Indianapolis 500. That’s because he’s on speed, of course. The grass she bought was from Cuernavaca. Very good stuff. I got stoned before I drove out to Rye, and what do you think I saw there? Grandma, drunk as a skunk, out on the lounge all wrapped in mosquito netting. So I went into the house and called Nina — that’s my lover — and I was half laughing and half crying, and I kept saying to her that she had to help me, but she was stoned and sad that I was gone, and it wasn’t a very good call.

“Why do you always have something sarcastic to say about my going to work? Who do you think supports you? It’s not that unusual to have a father who goes to work, Mary.”

“Angela sleeps with people,” John Joel said.

“What did you say?” Louise said.

John Joel lowered his eyes, but he said it again.

“I don’t even believe this,” Mary said. “Like, she’s my best friend, and I’m supposed to sit here and listen to this from the ten-year-old? I don’t even believe that he lies the way he does.”

“Why did you say that?” John said.

“Because we were talking,” John Joel said.

“You and Angela were talking?”

“No. The four of us. She said something about Angela’s father, didn’t she? So I just said something.”

“You are so out of it,” Mary said.

“Oh yeah? Parker’s cousin works at the garage and he’s got a car behind his shed he’s restoring, and the door was unlocked, and Angela and Toddie was in there.”

“Were in there,” John said.

“I don’t know if she does or she doesn’t,” Louise said, “but this isn’t what I want to discuss at dinner on Saturday night. Please.”

“Everybody has to talk about just what you want to talk about,” John Joel said.

“You should be nice to us and not speak that way,” John said to John Joel. “Your braces are going to set us back two thousand bucks.”

“I don’t even want them.”

“So what,” Mary said. “You have to have them.” She smirked at John Joel.

Louise turned to John. “Don’t speak to him kiddingly about showing respect for his parents. He should speak to us nicely, damn it, braces or no braces.”

“Everything’s fucked,” he said. “What does it matter the way things should be?”

Louise put her napkin on the table. She refolded it in its original triangle shape. He did not know that Louise knew how to make a napkin cone-shaped. She fitted the napkin into her full water glass, got her purse from the floor and walked out of the restaurant.

“Jesus,” Mary muttered.

“You started it,” John Joel said.

There were little dishes on the table: mustard, duck sauce, dim sum dishes with bits of rice cake, an empty dish where the spareribs had been. And leftover food: a little pork ball in a dark brown sauce, chopped shrimp on lettuce, and the stuffed duck’s foot, which he had ordered out of curiosity. It had indeed been a duck’s foot, with a small ball of something in the claw. The industrious, frugal Chinese. No Chinese would ever be having such a dinner. And this had been an attempt to do something right, instead of taking them on a picnic.

“What do you want to talk about now, brilliant?” Mary said to John Joel.

“Pissball,” John Joel said.

“Maybe if this is the way things are going I should get a polyester leisure suit and be an asshole,” John said. “I feel, when I am with my loving family, that everybody is conspiring to beat me down.”

Mary sighed. John Joel reached for the last pork ball.

“No one is going to see where Louise went,” John said. He was not asking a question, just stating a fact.

“So what could I do?” Mary said.

“No one cares,” John said.

“So?” Mary said. “What about you?”

“I care,” he said, “but I have to pay the bill. I don’t work all week — that unusual pastime of mine — for nothing. I am here to pay the bill. One book I remember very well from college has a character in it who behaves well. A novel by Ernest Hemingway, which I’m sure you’ll never read. The Sun Also Rises. A woman runs away with some other man, but the hero pays the bills. That’s what I do: I work, and I pay the bill. I also care about where my wife is. Not as much as I would have cared years ago, but enough so that I will summon the waiter and go out and try futilely to find her. Don’t let me interrupt your meal. If I do find her, I can stand outside with her while she screams until you’re done.”

The Muzak was playing a medley of songs from Oklahoma. It was all high-pitched and too fast.

“In French, it’s Le Soleil se lève aussi. I read it my freshman year at Princeton. That was considered very avant-garde then — to go to the Cape in the summer and take novels written in French. You saw L’étranger all over the Cape. You know who was President? Eisenhower. And all these rich kids were wandering around Provincetown reading L’étranger. I was not as rich as my classmates, but still rich enough. The real wealth came when my father died, and his attorney could finally make the investments he wanted to make. I don’t think he even embezzles money.”

“Like the suntan lotion,” John Joel said.

“What?” John said.

“Whatever word you just said.”

“Soleil,” John said. He took a drink of beer, then a sip of tea. His appetite was coming back, and that was inconvenient, because he should be running after Louise. Would be running after her. Any second. “So that’s what you have to say about my fine story. That soleil is both a suntan lotion and a word in the title of a novel by Ernest Hemingway.”

“That’s the thing about Angela’s father,” Mary said. “When you do say something, it’s never intelligent enough. If you don’t have a graph, or Newsweek, right at the table, what you’re saying doesn’t mean anything.”

“Mary,” John said. “Mary, Mary. Is this actually a defense of your brother?”

“She’s right,” Mary said. “You are sarcastic.”

“What do you say?” John said to John Joel. “A defense of your old daddy? Mary defends John Joel, John Joel leaps to Daddy’s defense, and like the three bears, they march off to find Mommy.”

“Go ahead and put us down,” Mary said.

“What?” he said.

“No matter what I say now, you’ll just send it back to me. If I open my mouth, you’ll say something nasty.”

“It’s because it’s all too much for me. Do you know how much your crack on the phone about Superman hurt? Don’t you think I might already realize that my existence is a little silly? Do you think I had visions of working at an ad agency dancing in my head like sugarplums? Everybody I work with, with maybe the exception of Nick, is stoned on Valium all day. I think of preposterous ways to sell preposterous products. And I think back to college all the time, Princeton didn’t just come to mind tonight. I thought I was going to be a bright boy. Well… I am that. You don’t want to go to Princeton. I don’t know.”

He stopped talking because Mary was staring at him, and as he looked at her looking at him, he thought: What if Angela really sleeps with people? What if she does? What if I’m not the only one keeping quiet? At any rate — whether it was the way he looked, or what he had said, she felt sorry for him. She even did a very grown-up thing: She changed the subject. “I haven’t finished the book,” she said, “but that’s what Vanity Fair is like. Things just fall into place.”

When they left the restaurant, Louise was outside. He was surprised. He imagined that he would have to go on a wild goose chase to find her, that she would be deliberately hiding from him, to frighten him and punish him. There she was, on the hood of the car, reading a magazine. The car was parked in front of a drugstore, and she had gone into the drugstore — who knew what she was thinking? — and she had bought a magazine. There was something sad and childish about Louise, sitting on her old Chevy, locked out because she hadn’t brought her keys, her long, tanned, bare legs hanging down, sandals on her feet, legs parted enough that you could see up her skirt. It wasn’t even a self-consciously casual pose; she had really gotten involved in the magazine and forgotten to keep her knees together.

“Apologize” was all she said.

He apologized. He was so relieved to see her, so happy that it was not going to be a night of crazy driving around and calling people she might be with, that he simply apologized. John Joel hung back and didn’t look at her. Mary looked at her and looked away. He got behind the wheel and unlocked the car on their side. Mary and John Joel got in the back seat. Louise leaned into the car. “Take them home,” she said. “When you’ve done that, come back for me. I’m going into the drugstore for a milkshake. That’s what I want — a chocolate milkshake. I’ll be outside when you get back.”

Driving home, he no longer felt relieved. He put the radio on and heard two people discussing a recipe for bleu cheeseburgers. When the woman gave the direction “add two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce,” the announcer said, “Worcestershire sauce.” He echoed everything she said, and when he did, the woman said “Uh-huh” and continued. At the end, the man said, “Doesn’t that sound good?” and the woman said, “Oh, it is.” The man thanked her. She said he was welcome. Another voice broke in, apologized for interrupting, then started again, saying that tomorrow there would be more suggestions for summer barbecues. “You know,” the announcer said, “a lot of people out there don’t like bleu cheese. I think these can be made just as well with your favorite cheese — cheddar or jack or whatever.” A song from Saturday Night Fever came on. He had gone to that movie with Nina, and when John Travolta gave away the first-prize trophy he and his date had won to the couple who should have won the dance contest, Nina had leaned over and whispered: “That’s you.” It was a little irritating that she pretended he had such good impulses, that his guilt was so great. She asked him, when they first met, if he was a Catholic. She kept up the joke, too: Late one night, after he had made love to her, before he went back to Rye, she had come into the bathroom when he was showering, pushed back the shower curtain a few inches and said: “I will hear your confession.” Cold air had come into the shower and something about the tone of her voice and the rush of air had actually frightened him; he had never been in a confessional, but he sympathized for the first time with people who had. It was easy to make her stop teasing, though. All he had to do was reach out and touch her fingertips. He took very hot showers — so hot she wouldn’t get in with him unless he agreed to let her regulate the water — and that night, one of the first nights he was with her, he could remember the steam escaping, how quickly she became foggy, her smile through the fog, their fingers touching. He had had to stare to see her, and only partly because of the steam. For a second he had thought she was unreal, that she had always been an apparition. He knew that he had to look at her, and keep looking. If he had not reached out to touch her, it might have gone on forever. Nina’s smile, through the steam. The smile that was worth suffering a blast of cold for.

“You ran a stop sign,” John Joel said.

“Leave him alone,” Mary said.

John said nothing. He slowed down. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw John Joel, pressed against one side of the back seat, and Mary, all the way to the other side. He wondered if they might really hate each other, if when they were adults they would live on different coasts and exchange Christmas cards. What was it like, so early in your life, not to love someone you were supposed to love?

He thought: I’m not John Travolta. I’m Father Frank Junior, in a disco for the first time, caught up in it and put off by it. At first, he had been uneasy with her friends — all young, a lot of them spacey, one or two more heavily into drugs than he could be comfortable with. He had accused her of liking him because he was safe and sane, a father-figure. “That’s a lot of easy bullshit,” she said. “But I like it that you think you’re sane.”

He pulled into the driveway — imagine her thinking, even for a second, that there would be columns at the base of his driveway — and the car sideswiped bushes weighted down by the rain the day before. Big white flowers brushed against the side of the car. He turned off the ignition and got out and stretched. He looked at the sky. It was still light, but the moon was already out. By the car was John Joel’s tree, the tree where the robin had built its nest. He wished that he had something to concentrate on other than what was coming: that he could be holding the delicate piece of egg, blue like no other blue, and that he could feel its lightness and fragility. The blue egg, in the little dish in Nina’s apartment.

On the way back to pick up Louise, he stopped at a phone. He asked the operator to charge the call to his home phone. “Is there anyone there to verify?” she said. “No,” he said, without any hesitation. A butterfly — late in the day for a butterfly — hovered by the phone for a minute. He looked again at the moon, more visible now that the sky was a little darker. He shook his head at the absurdity of what he was doing: standing at a phone on a country road, as though no one was at home, no one was waiting, as though Nina would pick up the phone in her apartment on Columbus Avenue and suddenly his heart would stop pounding and he would feel the breeze that was blowing. The butterfly flew away. The phone rang ten times, and then he hung up and went back to the car. He sat there for a minute before starting it. Then he put the radio on. The same song from Saturday Night Fever was playing, as though the last twenty minutes — half hour? — had never happened. Things just fall into place. If Mary knew that, from reading the book or from what she knew of life, she could not deserve to flunk any course, let alone English. Of course, if that was what she thought, then there wasn’t much point in her trying to organize her life or in any of the things he had believed about getting ahead, the necessity of getting ahead, when he was her age. Maybe a few years older. He got out of the car and got the operator again, and billed another call to his home phone. He called Nick. Nick picked it up on the first ring. “Goddamn Metcalf,” Nick said. “Called me twice today with the same joke. I keep telling him that I don’t like jokes. He tries to joke with me about not liking jokes. Metcalf.”

“What was Metcalf’s joke?”

“Same old joke,” Nick said. “Jesus Christ. What’s up with you?”

“I tried to call Nina and couldn’t get her. I just wanted to talk to somebody.”

“You should have been around today. The whole city left town. I went with Laurie to the Metropolitan and we sprawled in the grass in Central Park. Nice. Going to Hopper’s tonight. The bad news is that my wife called to say that Martin has to have his tonsils out. I told her to find a more progressive doctor — they don’t yank tonsils the way they used to.” Nick sighed. “I went over there early in the morning and talked to Martin. I asked him if he wanted to come along with us, but he didn’t. He was going roller-skating. A fever almost a hundred, and she lets him go roller-skating.” Nick sighed.

“I’d tell you what I’m in the middle of, but I don’t know myself. I’ll have a good story for you Monday morning. Want to meet me at the Brasserie early for coffee?”

“Sure. Eight?”

“Eight.”

“Nina all right?”

“I guess so. There wasn’t any answer.”

“I almost didn’t answer it. I thought it was Metcalf again. How he stays sober as a judge Monday through Friday, I’ll never know.”

“Valium. That’s not really sober.”

“He doesn’t take that much. Beats me.”

“What was his joke?”

“You know the joke. I’m sure you know it. Stop me, so I don’t have to tell the whole thing: What’s the difference between a Polish woman and a bowling ball?”

“What?” John said.

“Come on. You’ve heard it.”

“I haven’t heard it.”

“Why would anybody laugh at a sexist Polish joke anyway?”

“Okay. Forget it. See you Monday morning.”

“The other thing Metcalf does — Metcalf doesn’t call you on the weekends, does he?”

“No. He doesn’t bother me at work, either.”

“He’s afraid of you. He’s not afraid of me, and he calls me. You know how he starts conversations: ‘Hey, gork—’ Not even hello.”

“Gork?”

“I don’t know. His twin brother’s a neurosurgeon, and he gets these medical acronyms from him. It’s something insulting. I think his brother’s being a famous neurosurgeon fucked him up royal. I was out at his house in Sneden’s Landing last summer when his brother was there, and Metcalf was running around chasing his brother with a bread knife, saying he was going to do a vasectomy.”

When they hung up, John tried Nina again. No answer. He got in the car and drove, fast, to the drugstore. Before he got there, he could see that the lights were out. He pulled into one of the empty places in front of the drugstore and looked around, without getting out of the car. It was getting darker. In half an hour, on the ride home, it would be dark. He didn’t see her. If she had meant to run off, why wouldn’t she have done it when she left the restaurant? He got out of the car and peered into the dark drugstore. He stood with his back to the door, looking to the left and right. A man on a motorcycle pulled into the next space, turned off the ignition and kicked the kickstand down. He had on a helmet, gold and silver flecked, and mirrored sunglasses you could see out of, but not into. “Have change for a quarter?” he asked.

John reached in his pocket. He sorted through a palmful of change, and gave the man two dimes and a nickel.

“Thanks,” the man said. “I was going to buy a Hershey bar, but the drugstore’s closed. Suck-ass motherfucking town.” He walked around the corner.

“Louise!” John hollered. “If you’re here, this is your chance for a ride.”

The man jerked his head around the corner. “What’d you say?” he said.

“I came to pick up my wife,” John said. “You said it about this motherfucking town.” He looked at the motorcycle rider, who looked half interested, half put off. “What’s the difference between a bowling ball and a Polish woman?” John said to him.

The motorcycle rider didn’t miss a beat. “If you were really hungry, you could eat a bowling ball,” he said. He smiled. He was missing a bottom tooth. “Good joke,” the motorcycle rider said, and walked around the side of the drugstore.

John followed him around the corner. The man came to a stop in back of Louise, who was talking on the phone. The man put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and bounced on his toes, as Louise talked on the telephone. The phone booth was against the side of the drugstore. Louise had her hand cupped over the receiver. She was standing with her feet crossed at the ankles, talking quietly. She looked up and saw him.

“I guess you didn’t hear me,” he said, coming up next to her.

“See you tomorrow,” Louise said. “The hero has returned.” Her eyes were red. Her hair was pushed behind her ears, and she looked about twelve years old. Her face was freckled from the sun. She hung up and walked past John without speaking, on her way to the car.

“What was that, a conference call to Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller?”

“Very funny. Feminists as a class are very funny. We all know that.”

“I apologized,” he said. “But you had to get the upper hand, didn’t you?”

“I don’t want to argue,” she said. “What I’d like to do is take a drive out to the water. If you don’t want to do that, I’ll drop you at home.”

He thought about it. It would be nice to see the moon over the water, particularly if she didn’t want to argue.

“All right.”

“In fact, I’d like to drive, unless you would consider that getting the upper hand.”

“You want to drive?”

She nodded yes. He thought about it. When they got to the car, he opened the door on the driver’s side and closed it when she sat down. As he moved away, the headache hit. When he got to the other side of the car, he was glad to sit down.

“I’m sick,” he said. “I’ve got a headache. Let’s just go sit by the water.”

“That was where I was going.”

The air changed when they went around the next bend. He reached out and turned off the radio; in his pain, he had been conscious of, and not conscious of, the way to stop the quiet rumble of the man’s voice. Leaning forward to turn off the radio sent a jab of pain through the top of his head. He rubbed it. He closed his eyes and kept rubbing.

“You know what I’d like?” she said. “Even if you hate me. Hate all of us. I’d like to go to Nantucket before the summer is over.”

“I thought you didn’t like it there.”

“I’ve been having dreams about it. There were things I did like. I’d like it if we could rent a boat.”

“You made me sell the boat,” he said.

“You did nothing but complain and worry all summer. And all winter, whenever anybody mentioned the boat, you’d roll your eyes and talk about how many problems it had and how much it cost. Remember on Christmas Eve when you started going through July and August’s checks, and adding up the cost of keeping up the boat?”

“Christmas makes me nervous. I was acting funny because it was Christmas Eve.”

“That’s a lie,” she said. “When you don’t want to talk straight, you don’t talk straight.”

“I don’t want to talk,” he said. He had also just realized that the window on his side was rolled up. He put it down and put his elbow out the window. He tried to rest his head on his arm, but that made his head pound worse.

“I’d sympathize if I thought this had to do with your emotions,” she said, “but at the risk of making you mad, I’ll say it anyway: You should tell them to hold the MSG. MSG gives you headaches.”

The air was almost cold. He waited for her to tell him to put up the window, but she didn’t. He opened his eyes and looked at her, finally. Her short hair was lifted by the breeze, but it just fluttered in place; there was no way for it to tangle, no strand long enough to blow forward and obscure her face. She had on lipstick. She had had an argument with him, and eaten, and talked on the phone, and through it all, her lips were not their real color. They were pinker. A color pink he didn’t see women wear anymore, but he thought it was preferable to the red-black lipstick women in the office wore. Their nails were always painted the color of a bruise.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t see any reason why we can’t go to Nantucket.”

“Agreeable of you,” she said. “I’m surprised. Should I press my luck?”

“Why not? Go ahead.”

“It’s either you or me, and I would rather that you do it. Someone has to speak to Mary’s teacher. She won’t get credit for the course if she gets a D, and all of her papers but one are D’s.”

“What’s the matter with her?” he said.

“Ask her teacher.”

“Okay,” he said. “When?”

“Call and make an appointment.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Remember when she was born and you used to blow on the fuzz on top of her head and she liked it so well she’d close her eyes?”

She stopped on the hill above the marina and got out. He sat there while she climbed on the hood of the car again and looked at the boats bobbing. A man and a woman were dancing on the deck of one, in their bathing suits, to “Heart of Glass” on a portable radio. Down the road, he could see the cluster of cars at the soft ice-cream stand. A big black dog, the sort of dog a boy would run away with, knapsack on his back, in a Norman Rockwell painting, bounded down the middle of the street. No cars came by. He made it to the ice-cream stand, a boy about eight years old trailing behind him with a leash. It was almost dark, and he worried for both the boy and the dog. Louise was watching them, too. Probably she was thinking about her dog that had died. Years ago, before she decided that fishing was cruel, she used to fish at the marina, from the base of the hill, or from the Pendergasts’ boat. The dog went with her and sat, quiet and panting, and leaped with joy when she pulled up a fish. Then he would lick it and guard it as it flopped. The dog had immense respect for Louise, and Louise for the dog.

He got out and sat beside her. The people on the boat were summer people. The Pendergasts’ boat was there, but they weren’t on it. He was glad, because he did not want to have a drink with anybody. He thought that an ice cream would taste good. He asked Louise if she wanted to walk down.

“In a minute,” she said.

He watched her watching the boats. Her eyes were still red, and she didn’t seem to care what she looked like. She had brushed up against something and gotten dirt on her leg. She ignored him as he looked at her. Finally he looked away, into the water, almost still, inky and still, lit up by the three-quarter moon.

After a while they walked to the ice-cream stand. The big black dog was there, hanging around, begging for ice cream. The boy with the leash was nowhere around. John asked a little boy in line ahead of him if he knew where the dog’s owner was. “Nope,” the boy said. The dog was staring at John. If the dog was still there when he got to the window, he was going to buy it a dish of ice cream.

The dog was still there. He got it a large dish of vanilla, and he and Louise got vanilla cones. The dog almost dove into the dish. “Hey! Lookit the stupid dog!” one boy said, and John almost exploded. “Leave the dog alone,” he managed to say, calmly. He stood there while the boy and his friend backed off. They had been about to grab the dog’s dish. John half wished that he had let them, and that the dog had bitten them. The dog slurped and slurped. Melted ice cream ran down John’s wrist, because he forgot to keep turning the cone and licking.

As they were walking away, a girl got out of a car giggling. A boy jumped out the other side, and then another boy. It was the two Bergman boys. Andy with his long mane of nearly white hair, cowboy shirt unbuttoned except for one button above his cowboy belt. The buckle was enormous, shaped like Texas, mother-of-pearl, surrounded by a thick silver rim. Andy was the errant son— the last John had heard, Andy had flunked out of his second college and was doing lights for a band in New York. Lloyd was almost as tall as his brother, but without the mane of hair. He had on yellow aviator glasses, and he had caught up with the laughing girl and was pretending to be about to grab her, lunging and zigzagging from side to side like a basketball player blocking a shot. She had something she wasn’t giving him, and John might have found out what it was if Andy Bergman hadn’t recognized him and said hello. Then the game stopped. Angela pushed her hair out of her face and said hello very properly. She had on canvas shoes with high heels, shorts, and a tight T-shirt.

“What do you think?” Louise said, walking away, licking her cone. “Is what John Joel said true? Can you really tell by looking at them?”

They walked to the car in the dark. With his tongue cold from the ice cream, his headache felt better. He leaned against the car for a minute before he got in. He would have thought no about Nina, when actually she had been attracted to him and had been waiting for him to ask. So the fact that he thought yes about Angela probably meant no. He got in the car, chewing the last of the cone.

“What you did for the dog was nice,” she said. “You didn’t really dislike Mr. Blue, did you? Why did you act like you didn’t like my dog?”

“It just got to be a standing joke. I don’t know why.”

“But you liked him.”

“Yeah. Of course I liked him.”

“I am not going to cry,” Louise said. “I am going to drive, and if I did not cry in the restaurant I am not going to cry now.”

When they were home, in the bedroom, she lay on her side, leafing through the magazine on the floor. He looked down and saw a picture of a woman standing beside a car with its door open, her hand on the door, her foot raised, resting on the doorsill, a gold buckle on her shoe. The woman was looking off to the left. She wore a scarf, long and white, the sort Isadora Duncan must have had hundreds of. The scarf dangled down the front of a maroon velvet jacket, and beneath the jacket was a long pleated skirt, as silvery as tinsel. Behind the woman was a string of fuzzy lights. A person with cataracts would have seen the lights that way, all aura and haze. The scarf was so white you couldn’t see the texture. The woman’s fingers held the edge of the scarf, as she stood with one foot in the door, one foot on the pavement, looking away.

“Vogue,” Louise said. “Care to make a comment?”

“I like the scarf,” he said.

He went into the bathroom. Through the wall he could hear, very faintly, the radio playing in Mary’s bedroom. She did not seem to be worried about flunking English in summer school. He supposed that it was his obligation to Mary to confront her teacher and say: She told me that Vanity Fair was about how things just fall into place. She’s fifteen years old and she knows that. Why is she failing English? He would imply, of course, that the teacher was not attuned to Mary. Not stimulating her. He tried to imagine Mary stimulated. She was always lethargic, resigned, sarcastic — though she had been right about his sarcasm. She had been the one to end that game, at dinner: Mary grew weary of things. He wondered if she might be weary of her weariness. If yes meant no in Angela’s case, then no might mean yes in Mary’s. He shook the thought away. He took a shower, blasting himself with hot water. He took four Excedrin before he got into the shower. It felt as if they had lodged about six inches down his chest and were there, still and heavy, like pebbles in a pond. He soaped himself briskly. The suds came up fast. Just as fast, he rinsed them off. He cupped his hands and splashed water on his face, then held his breath and turned his face up into the spray. When he took his face out, he thought he heard “Heart of Glass,” but when he turned the water off, he realized that what he had been hearing had been a man’s voice on the radio. It was not “Heart of Glass” for the second time that day, the millionth time this summer, after all. Nick had told him that once in Boston, years ago, he had been out of money and out of food, and the woman he lived with had left to keep bees with a sixty-year-old ex-professor of Slavic languages, and his eighteen-year-old sister had just put her baby up for adoption, and the girl he had hoped would be his new girl had called to say she had drawn night duty for the rest of the week. He had been sprawled in the hot Boston apartment he shared with four other people, the window in his room jammed so that it would open only a couple of inches, wearing the same clothes he had worn for four days, with a slow, drumming toothache coming on and no money, late at night. The people in the apartment next door had come home and they had been laughing, and he knew that pretty soon he was going to have to listen to them, having more fun on their mattress than he was having on his, and the most he had been able to do was roll to the far side of his mattress. And then two amazing things had happened. A breeze had started, as strong as the low speed of a fan, a breeze after days of nothing but still air; and at the same time, from the apartment next door, a song so beautiful that he had wept but decided to stay alive: Diana Ross singing “Everything’s Good About You.” Nick credited the breeze and the song with saving his life. Nick was only five years younger than he was, but when Nick told stories like that, it broke his heart, as much as his heart broke when something terrible happened to one of his children. Actually, nothing really terrible had ever happened. A couple of frightening runs to the emergency room with infants whose fevers rose and rose and wouldn’t break, but lately — summer school? The crisis was that Mary was not doing well in summer school. He would take care of it.

He got out of the shower and threw his sweaty clothes into the hamper, but not before removing the small package, wrapped in paper napkins, from his shirt pocket. He put it on the back of the sink, and reached in the medicine cabinet for adhesive tape and scissors. He cut off the right-size piece and taped it to the dry edge of the sink, then dried himself well and unfolded the napkins. Inside was the duck foot from the Chinese restaurant, gray and curved. He taped the duck foot securely to his penis, then put on his pajamas and went into the bedroom. If she didn’t laugh, it was really all over. It was even more all over than he had thought it could be. He got into bed and she closed the magazine and dropped it on the floor.

“Hot night,” he said.

She was lying on her back, with her eyes closed. She had combed her hair, and her lipstick was gone.

He struggled out of his pajama top. Then the bottoms. She didn’t look. He pulled the sheet over them and took her hand.

He got up on one elbow and kissed her on the forehead. She had no expression on her face, before or after.

“Hey,” he said, moving her hand down his stomach.

“Not on your life,” she said.

He kept moving her hand, until her fingers were touching the duck foot. She yanked her hand away, turned toward him, pulled back the sheet. He held his breath, trying to choke back his laughter. She looked into his eyes.

“Is this what you and the New York girls are into?” she said.

The grotesquely funny was obviously much in vogue. Women wore purple pedal pushers and hacked off their hair with a razor. A put-on. To be ugly is to be funny. To be funny is, maybe, to get through. But did he even realize that the horrible duck foot was a joke directed at himself and his own sexuality? He had changed so much. He would do things more childish than what the children did, and although he didn’t actually harm himself, there was something self-destructive in his shock tactics. A month before — three weeks before, five weeks, it didn’t matter — when there had been so much sun and the blackberry bush bore fruit so early in the summer, he had been picking up sticks in the grass before he mowed it, and she had been planting seeds in the garden. She had looked up to see him clasping his heart in mock-horror, a circular smear of red on his forehead. She had watched him lurch toward her, eyes big, the ugly red smear like a child’s finger-painting, then collapse without a word. He had mashed the blackberries and pretended to be wounded. He had been playing a game with her, but she could not imagine what part he had expected her to take. She had almost wanted to rush toward him — not because she was fooled, but just that if she grabbed him, if she got that close, she might find out something. Or break the tension. Or even laugh with him. But what he had done hadn’t really been that funny. The strangeness of it, the impetuousness with which he had acted, had convinced her that he really did have another life: not the life in Rye, but another life, a real life, a life she didn’t understand anymore. When he finally got up — slowly, like an exhausted person doing a final push-up — he had cocked his head and looked at her, and not wanting to look fazed, she had smiled at him. Just smiled. And then she had gone on sprinkling seeds, evenly, looking to see where they hit the dirt. They were so tiny that of course she couldn’t see. She would see when they came up. She would find out what was going on with John when he left her.

But Mary: What she had done, plucking her eyebrows, hadn’t been done as a joke at all. That was pathetic because it wasn’t an imitation of a joke, like pedal pushers spoofing what had been a genuinely ugly fashion; it was an imitation of what Mary really thought was beauty.

Louise rolled over in bed. She had been so upset because with her eyebrows plucked, Mary’s eyes had looked so large. They had looked so innocent. It had been an innocent gesture to pluck her eyebrows, and harmless, really. Yet when Louise saw Mary’s eyes, it had made her sadder than she had been in a long time. Sadder than she had been when John went through his crazy charade on the lawn. As much as John wanted to be a child, Mary had wanted to be a grownup, and that was even more pathetic.