Falling in Place Read online

  Ann Beattie’s

  FALLING IN PLACE

  “[With] her absolute ear and her masterly deadpan humor, the results are dazzling. Beattie is a natural writer. Her prose never preens or tires or obstructs.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Beattie writes with quiet and subdued sympathy and exhibits a casual grace and knowing moves.”

  —Time

  “[An] acute comedy of manners.”

  —Harper’s

  “A witty and incisive book.”

  —Ms.

  “True and important… Beattie is immensely talented.”

  —The New York Times

  “A mesmerizing portrait of a family coming undone… [Beatties] great gift is a deadly accurate ear for the nuances of ephemeral desire.”

  —Atlantic Monthly

  ALSO BY ANN BEATTIE

  Chilly Scenes of Winter

  Distortions

  Secrets and Surprises

  The Burning House

  Love Always

  Where You’ll Find Me

  Picturing Will

  Copyright (c) 1980 by Ann Beattie

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1980.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Cherio Corporation: Lyrics from Never on Sunday by Billy Towne and Manos Hadjidakis. Copyright (c) 1960 Esteem Music Corp. and Llee Corporation. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. The Hudson Bay Music Company: Lyric from She’s a Lady by John Sebastian. Copyright (c) 1968 by

  Alley Music Corp. and Trio Music Company, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. MCA Music: Lyric from Tammy, Words and Music by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. (c) Copyright 1956 by Northern Music Company, New York, New York. Used by permission. All Rights Reserved. Stafree Publishing Company: Lyric from Disco Duck is reprinted by permission of Stafree Publishing Company.

  The author wishes to express her thanks to the Guggenheim

  Foundation for its support.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beattie, Ann.

  Falling in place : a novel / Ann Beattie.

  p. cm. —(Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76572-7

  I. Title.

  [PS3552.E177F35 1991]

  813’.54—dc20 90-55707

  v3.1

  FOR

  J. D. O’Hara

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About the Author

  One

  JOHN JOEL WAS high up in the tree, the one tall tree in the backyard. Forget the stick-y lilacs and the diseased peach tree with branches that splayed like umbrella spokes. The tree he was in was a great tree. The robins had left their nest early in the week, so John Joel had his favorite resting place back: the tenth branch up, the one that he could crawl out on, high above his mother’s Chevy and the small kidney-shaped pool, now empty, that in previous summers had held goldfish, tadpoles and water lilies, and that now was filled with sticks and leaves no one had cleared out when winter ended.

  “Frog face,” his sister Mary said. She crossed her eyes and puffed her cheeks in and out. She was coming home from her friend Angela’s house, and she had cut through the empty lot between their houses, even though she had been told not to because of poison ivy.

  “I hope you get poison ivy,” John Joel said.

  Mary was going to summer school because she had flunked English. Every morning from nine to twelve she went to school. Then she went to Angela’s and listened to the new Peter Frampton album. Angela’s mother worked, so no one was home to object.

  She had her book bag with her, filled with books. The bag had “Peter Frampton” imprinted on it and there were hearts instead of the “a” and “o” of Frampton. Mary was swinging the book bag. Behind her was the field of poison ivy and wild strawberries, daisies and phlox.

  “Blaaaaaaaa,” John Joel retched, and spit out a glob of saliva.

  Mary watched it fall. It landed at the side of the kidney-shaped pool.

  “Save the rest to grease your cock in case a skunk comes by you want to screw,” Mary said.

  She went into the house. She dropped her bag by the door and went upstairs to her room. She looked out the window and saw her brother lying on his stomach along the tree branch. She was glad that he had decided to stay there instead of coming into the house to bother her. She opened the window and pushed her hair back and clutched it in one hand, in a ponytail, as if there were a breeze; then she went to the bureau and got a brush and began to brush her hair. Her hair was damp. It was July. She was wearing powdered eye shadow instead of stick, because her face got so damp. On days when her mother drove her to school, she wore stick. Her mother’s car was air conditioned, and Mary didn’t care what she looked like getting out of school—just what she looked like going in. She hated summer school and thought it was as bad as jail. It would have been jail, except that Angela had also flunked English, and they sat together. Their teacher was named Cynthia Forrest, and Mary loathed her about as much as she loathed John Joel and a little more than she loathed Lloyd Bergman, who had given Angela a hickey on her tit.

  Cynthia Forrest had graduated from Bryn Mawr and she was studying for her Ph.D. at Yale. She had sent around a notice with a drawing of herself at the top and that information, and she had made all the summer school students take the notice home to their parents and bring it back signed, so she could be sure that they had seen it. She really thought she was hot shit. All those mimeographed handouts with the drawings of her turned-up nose and her credentials coming back with names signed at the bottom: Art and Alice Dwyer (“Keep up the good work!”), Marge Pendergast, J.D.O. (“I’m a Harvard grad myself”), Cici Auerberg (“Mrs. Charlie Auerberg”). Shit. Let her have her fancy credentials. She was still stuck in summer school like the rest of them.

  Imagine: She was having them read Great Books. They weren’t reading the entire book, though, because there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time, and, as Lloyd Bergman said, they were so stupid that they wouldn’t understand what was going on anyway, so they were reading parts of books. They had already read “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Act One of She Stoops to Conquer and Chapter One of Vanity Fair. Next week they had to read more of Vanity Fair and Chapter One of A Tale of Two Cities. And Pride and Prejudice: They were to open Pride and Prejudice at random, and whatever page they opened to, they were to read the whole chapter that page appeared in. The end of the course, the most up-to-date the course got, was—get ready for this—The Old Man and the Sea.

  Mitch Auerberg had hit a squirrel on his mo
torcycle and had brought it to school in a plastic bag inside a paper bag, and while Billy Fields distracted Cynthia by clutching his stomach and stumbling away from his desk pretending to be about to throw up in the hall, Auerberg switched the bag with her lunch bag and crammed her sprout salad sandwich—that was really what she ate—into his desk. The day before that he had opened a bottle of ink and poured it in his desk. Not for any reason, just to see what would happen. The ink was still there, and it looked like the same size puddle. As he lowered the top of the desk, the lunch bag began to turn black.

  “Is this all a joke, Billy?” Lost in the Forest said to Billy in the hallway. He was heaving with laughter as well as faked nausea.

  Mary put on a Peter Frampton T-shirt and went into the bathroom to throw her other shirt into the laundry hamper. There was a quarter on top of the hamper, so she pocketed it. As her father would say, it was important to have money, because if you had money, you could buy the Brooklyn Bridge. She braced her arm on the bathroom sink and leaned forward to look at her blue eyes in the bathroom mirror. They were her best feature. The eye shadow had stayed on pretty well. She went downstairs and got a Tab out of the refrigerator and went upstairs and slipped the curl of metal from the can under John Joel’s sheet. On second thought, she pulled the sheet back and put it farther down in the bed, where his feet might get cut by it. Then she tangled the sheets again. He was a pig; he never made his bed. A breeze was blowing through his window. His room got more air than hers. She closed his window. Downstairs, she collapsed in a kitchen chair. It was Wednesday. Her mother was being a do-gooder at the hospital and wouldn’t be home for another hour. She went into the den and put Linda Ronstadt on the stereo. She shook her head at how good Linda Ronstadt was.

  Lost in the Forest was probably home at her condo—Billy Fields had followed her home and found out that was where she lived, in a yucky condo—and she was probably having—what would she have?—an iced tea, and listening to Vivaldi. She was probably conducting Vivaldi with the tail end of her braid, ordering the musicians around. Certain books were like Vivaldi, Lost in the Forest thought. When she had said this, she had cupped her hand and curved her four fingers toward her thumb, making a little crab-claw. And she had stared at it. It was one of her intense gestures. The other one she used a lot was putting her thumb and first finger between her eyes and pressing the sides of her nose. She had done that after she read the first two lines of “The Pardoner’s Tale.”

  The other thing Billy and Auerberg had thought to do, which was so funny, was to get hold of Anthony O’Dell—he had had to start summer school late because his father died and he had to ride the train with his mother to bury his father in Chicago—and convince him it would be funny if he lisped and stuttered. O’Dell did it, and very well—he raised his hand all the time and did it so convincingly that by the time a few days had gone by, they just wanted him to snap out of it.

  The telephone rang, and she took a final swallow of Tab before she got up to answer it.

  “Hello, Sunbeam,” her father said. “How was school?”

  “Suck-o,” she said.

  “You could at least say something pleasant before you’re foul-mouthed. If you have to be foul-mouthed.”

  “You’d be too, if you had to sit there and listen to her giving a dramatic reading of Vanity Fair.”

  “Never read that one.”

  “She probably didn’t either, and that’s why she was reading it out loud.”

  “If you’re so smart, how come you flunked English?”

  “Because you can only be smart in so many things. Like, I’m really good at knowing how many rows of beans Jack can plant in his garden if his garden is in the shape of a parallelogram and I know the lengths of two sides.”

  “The reason I called,” he said, “is because when your mother called the house during her break there was no answer. She wanted me to ask you to put the hamburger meat out to thaw.”

  “The retard’s up in the tree, doing his tree frog number. He tried to spit on me and missed.”

  “Did he really try to spit on you?”

  “Yeah. What are you gonna do—tear off your gray business suit and glasses in the nearest phone booth and fly in from the Big Apple to deck him?”

  “I don’t own a gray business suit, and you should try to find a phone booth on a New York street that has a door that closes.”

  “Navy blue? What color do you own?”

  “A fire-engine-red leisure suit, made of Dacron polyester. You think I’m a total ass or something? A gray business suit. Don’t tell me you’d like it if your dad was the sort who’d button himself into a vest and stick a pocket watch in one pocket and a Hershey’s Kiss for his little princess in the other.”

  “You’re so weird. So you wear a sports jacket. You think that’s so different from a suit.”

  “My Sunshine Girl,” he said. “Pretty as a berry, sweet as a dream. Suck-o yourself.”

  He hung up.

  The record ended. She flipped it to the other side. A tiny feather of dust rose off the record and settled on it again. She watched it spin. Too small to cause any problem. She decided not to bother to blow it away.

  June. A long time left in summer school, having Lost in the Forest read them things from books at the end of every class. She did it to kill time, probably. She said she was doing it because language was beautiful (crab-claw), and it was very rare that a person knew how to read aloud well. Presumably Lost in the Forest did: She read in whispers and sudden gasps, sometimes slowly, then fast, looking at the book as if there were real movement there, as if characters hardly larger than specks of dust were actually running and quarreling and jumping in the air, while Lost in the Forest stared down at them appreciatively, like God.

  There was going to be a true-false test about the first chapter of Tom Jones on Monday. There had already been a test on “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and there was going to be a test at the end of the week on Pride and Prejudice. The first test had been an essay, but Lost in the Forest said that they would not have to write more essays; for what she was being paid, she wouldn’t consider reading twenty of their ill-expressed opinions again. “I’d worry that you’d tell your parents what I said,” Lost in the Forest had told them, “but none of you can communicate clearly enough to get your message across.” She had sniffed. A self-righteous Mary Poppins sniff, but she had neither taken off nor landed. She had stood rooted to the spot, and then she had sighed deeply and fumbled in her book bag and read them a poem about somebody falling out of the sky while some other people worked. Then, gazing up at the globe-shaped light in the classroom ceiling, she had said that they could leave, ten minutes early. Auerberg had looked back at the schoolroom and had called their attention to Lost in the Forest, standing at the window, watching them walk away. The ones who saw her had waved dramatically; Billy had bent over as if he were mooning her; Claude Williams had made circles with his wrist, pretending to lasso her.

  She had done nothing in reply. She had just stood there, watching them, hating them, and feeling a little sorry for them, and sorrier for herself. She wished that the sidewalk would sink and they would disappear from her life as easily as when you wave goodbye to company, the elevator door closes and they’re gone. Oh, maybe a second of joking, when the slightly drunken guests push the “Door Open” button to say a final thank you, and the hostess is caught off-guard, looking blank-faced and exhausted. But then gone, taken away, all over. No: They’d be back the next day, and the next. They’d be there all of July, and so would she. And that lunch bag, thank God she had been able to tell by the weight of it that it was not a sandwich and her little bag of raw carrots. Thank God it wasn’t a bomb—that these children were not destructive, just stupid. She had no curiosity about what it was.

  “Lost in the Forest, you are such a drag,” Mary said to the empty house. She went upstairs. In her room, she took off the Peter Frampton T-shirt and put it on the bed, unzipped her jeans, took them off and
her satin underpants, too (a Christmas present from Angela: an upside-down strawberry ice cream cone painted on them, neon pink melting where her pubic hair began, spattering pink all the way to where the pants curved into her crotch).

  She went over to her wall. There were six posters of Peter Frampton, all the same. In the posters, he had his head tilted. His hair was very curly and his mouth was pale. His blue eyes were paler than her own. His skin looked as if it had been photographed through a screen. Up close to the poster, you could see the faint lines of the grid marks.

  Mary put her cheek to his, rolled her head until her mouth touched his lips. The paper was smooth and cool. She took her mouth away and said two words: “Peter Frampton.” “Peter” made her mouth open. “Frampton” made her pucker her lips so that ending the word was a kiss. This was Mary’s routine. She did it every day. And every day it was predictable that Peter Frampton would not come to life, that when she said “Peter” and her mouth opened, his tongue would not come into her mouth. No point in hoping against hope for the extraordinary: a small seed exploding into a giant beanstalk; a body falling from the sky. A body falling from the sky?

  She had forgotten to put out the hamburger meat.

  “Spangle,” Cynthia said. “Tell me that I am not actually seeing what I’m seeing.”

  “You’re blind,” he said. “You don’t see anything. Stumble into bed and let your other senses take over.”

  “Spangle,” she said, “I can understand that I might have deserved a put-down like this if sending this notice around had been my idea, but I only typed it because the vice-principal told me to. So do you think it was a good idea to draw a little picture of me on the ditto master? Do you think that was funny? Did you think I’d like that?”

  “It’s a good drawing. Besides, those money-up-the-ass parents will love it. They’ll think it establishes rapport. You watch: You’ll get yourself invited to a garden party.”

  “You’re a real shit. Now I’m going to have to do this thing over.”