Falling in Place by Ann Beattie Page A

hesitating before making a right turn.
    She wandered through a store near the phone. Inside were pillows of various sizes, decorated with satin flamingoes and bits of rhinestone and lace. She particularly liked a blue satin pillow in the shape of a half moon, with a pretty lady’s face painted on it and curls of angel-white hair along the seam. A man was walking through the store, selling roses from a wicker basket. There was a tiny dog in his jacket pocket, all popping eyes and panting tongue. A woman trying on a pair of black gaucho pants bought a white rose and tapped the little dog on its nose before she stuck the long-stemmed rose through a braid that hung down the back of her head. The moon pillow was fifty dollars. She bought a gumball from the machine by the door on the way out and a parrot on a stand above the machine said “Thank you.” A salesgirl with wavy hair and red-black lipstick looked, with no expression, at Cynthia leaving. Her shirt said “God Is Coming and She Is Pissed.”
    It was actually nice to be in the city without Spangle, because he liked to talk to everybody, and it was hard to make any progress. Spangle would have talked to the man with the flowers about his dog. He would certainly have said something to the salesgirl. Hestopped to listen to street musicians and stayed for whole songs, even if the musicians were no good. Putting a quarter in the open instrument case, he would ask questions about their instruments, or just wonder how the day was going for them. Spangle noticed lush trees growing on the roofs of buildings, new editions of books he already owned in bookstore windows, pieces of paper advertising things he always thought would be interesting, six-toed people wearing sandals. He didn’t miss a thing. And he was always thinking that he saw someone he knew, most of them people he wouldn’t have stopped to speak to if they had been the right people: Mr. Binstock, the man who used to run the good fish restaurant oh the Cape; a friend of a friend from Cambridge, 1968, minus beard and long hair. But had that guy worn glasses? Spangle could keep it up all day. In a bar, he’d talk to the bartender, study the jukebox, read the menu even if he wasn’t eating. He would go home with a tacky rhinestone pin of a jet plane, what looked like a gnawed Tarot card found on Macdougal Street, a Lyndon Johnson key ring, a perfectly fine pen that had been lying on the sidewalk right in front of him, a record he had been looking for for ten years, an acorn that looked like a peanut, picked up in Washington Square Park. Then, at the end of the day, he would always say to her: “Do you have any idea where I parked the car?” The last time she had been in New York with Spangle he had bought a jacket in a secondhand store that fit him as well as one that had been custom-made. It was made of light-gray wool with nubs of white in it. (“It looks like a chicken picked the threads out of it! I’m going to be some lounge lizard in this one. Maybe I should get some Bryl-creem.”) Also a copy of
On the Road
, reissued with a new cover, a package of post cards of sporting events in China, a half-pound of chocolate cookies that looked like spun lace, and a roach clip with a little heart-shaped piece of mother-of-pearl inlaid in each side. They had had moussaka for lunch and homemade tortellini in Little Italy for dinner, and a drink in SoHo, and ice cream on Bleecker Street. “I love it,” Spangle always said, driving away, “but I don’t think I could live there. I mean: When would you
think?”
He would be munching on cookies from Miss Grimble’s as he shook his head and the car hit potholes, jumped up, came down again.
    She had had a long and very on-and-off-again relationship withSpangle. When they had not been together for very long, he had left and gone to Berkeley. That summer he wrote to her and she sold her bicycle and some books and bought a one-way ticket to California. Most days they would