Falling in Place by Ann Beattie Page B

go to lie in the grass and read in one of the small parks. The first week she was there, a couple had appeared with a cocker spaniel, a doberman and a goat. The goat had taken an interest in Cynthia. Spangle, playing with a Frisbee, had sailed it close to her, and the goat had bolted in terror, almost knocking her flat. Everyone ran to see if she was hurt: the goat’s owners, Spangle, the man Spangle was throwing the Frisbee with. And she couldn’t stop crying—not because of being frightened by the goat, but because it had occurred to her that she was in Berkeley, California, where she knew no one but Spangle, and that she had been in danger, even if it was just a silly sort of danger. Of course Spangle began to talk to the goat’s owner. It was an African Pygmy goat, and it was trained to pee outside; for the other, the woman said, they just picked up the pellets. The woman was a chef; the man had gotten his Ph.D. from Berkeley, writing his dissertation on Turgenev. He was unemployed. They looked familiar to Spangle, but he did not look familiar to them. Squatting beside Cynthia, Spangle had kept saying what a coincidence it was that the book Cynthia was reading was
On the Eve
. The four of them had gone to a coffee shop on Telegraph Avenue and left the two dogs and the goat tied outside. She and Spangle had been about to go to the movies to see
Grand Hotel
when he took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and saw that it was playing the next afternoon, not that afternoon. So they had stayed in the coffee shop for another cup, while Spangle and the man traded lines from
Grand Hotel
. They exchanged phone numbers, writing them down on napkins. They never called each other. A month later, Cynthia ran into the woman walking near the university, and they went for coffee. She gave the woman their phone number again, and the woman gave her theirs; she and Spangle meant to call, but never got around to it. Then, two days before they were leaving Berkeley, the woman called and asked them for dinner. Dinner had been three kinds of cold soup. They were serenaded by a scratchy Miles Davis record coming through one speaker, and later by a fight downstairs which ended with some woman going outside and picking upa rock from the tiny rock garden and banging it against the door, shouting through the open window to the man inside, who had long since stopped making any noise.
    At the end of the summer Spangle thought it would be a good idea to drive her back East. They took turns driving, and she made it back to school two days before classes started. In those two days, he worked on her constantly to forget about college and come back to the West Coast with him. She wouldn’t. Finally he moved in with her. Their only disagreements were about the West Coast versus the East Coast. That, and Spangle’s childishness: He would hide behind doors and jump out at her, or come to the door naked when she had a friend with her. When he was out of the apartment, he would call her and pretend, always convincingly, to be a librarian demanding an overdue book, or someone at the garage saying they had made a mistake fixing her car and under no circumstances to drive it, or someone from one of her classes asking her for a date.
    Her family didn’t like him. At Thanksgiving dinner he announced his switch to vegetarianism; he wouldn’t laugh at their jokes; he was seven years older than she was. She lost touch with him in 1977, when he left for nine months to get his head straight. He became a lifeguard at a country club pool in Hyannis and, in the winter, a copy editor in Boston. Then he came back as though he had hardly been gone, gradually easing himself out of Valium and back to grass. All of this—even Berkeley—was after the time when he had money. They had been together again for two years, and if he came back from Spain, they would still be together.
    She looked in her wallet and saw that she had more money than she had thought. She got a cab