Falling in Place by Ann Beattie Read Free Book Online

said. “I’ve been in a bad mood all day.”
    “What’s the matter?” he said.
    “I didn’t have a very good weekend either. I got a letter from an old boyfriend who’s over in Europe, and all he talked about was how he’d blown all his money. I’m not very sympathetic to people who have a lot of money to piss away. I was thinking about you out on your three acres of land, and I was feeling very cooped up in that tiny apartment. How can you like that apartment so much? Just because it’s so different from what you have?”
    “It is small. One of the pillars at the end of my driveway is as wide as your bedroom.”
    “Are you kidding?”
    “Yes. There aren’t any pillars at the end of the driveway.”
    A man was standing beside Nina’s chair. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but your little boy wandered into the kitchen, and we’ll have to ask you to keep him at the table. He could get hurt in the kitchen.”
    “What?” Nina said.
    “He isn’t our child,” John said.
    The maître d’ looked puzzled. He turned and looked at a couple sitting at a table in the opposite corner. John looked, too. The woman was talking drunkenly, and the man was paying no attention to her; he was laughing silently and pointing at the maître d’ in a parody of the way someone would ridicule another person.
    “Very amusing,” the maître d’ said, without apologizing to John. He went to the corner table and began to argue with the man, who now also looked drunk. The little boy stood with his back to the kitchen door, staring at them. The next person who came through the door was going to trip over him. John sighed and didn’t watch. He broke off another piece of salmon and put it in his mouth.
    “God,” Nina said. “Those people must be crazy. Look at the poor little boy—he’s not even going up to his parents’ table.”
    “I hope you don’t want kids,” he said. “I’m a rotten father.”
    “I don’t think you’d be a rotten father.”
    “As I said: I hope you don’t want kids.”
    “I’m not the only one in a bad mood,” Nina said. She ate a leaf of lettuce with her fingers. “I wish I could see your house,” she said. “I’d like to see the pillars that don’t exist at the end of the driveway.”
    “The driveway isn’t even paved. It’s gravel.”
    “Ah,” Nina said. “You also want me to feel sorry for you. Next you’ll give me the line my mother always gives me: that there are great jobs for college graduates, if only they will go out and find them. You know what my mother’s done her whole life? Played bridge and gone to the track in the summer.”
    “How come you were an only child?” he said.
    “My father says it’s because my shoes were so expensive. He was shocked. They had to be Stride-Rites, with a quarter-inch built-up arch. I was flat-footed.” She took a drink of wine. “My mother says it’s because my father said my shoes were too expensive.”
    One of the two men who had just been seated at a table adjacent to theirs was looking appreciatively at Nina. He didn’t stop until John caught his eye. The man had long hair and a T-shirt that said “Chicken Little Was Right”; the man sitting with him had on a business suit and a black band tied high on his arm. The fedora on the table belonged to one of them. When John stopped looking, the little boy was walking toward their table, eyeing the hat that rested slightly over the edge.
    “My youngest son has the measles,” he said. “Have you had the measles?”
    “This is very romantic talk,” she said, running her foot up his leg.
    “Have you?”
    “Measles,” she said. “Yes. I have had measles.”
    She really was not in a very good mood. Ordering a bottle of wine instead of a glass had been her idea. If she continued to drink the wine as quickly as she had been, there was no doubt that they would make it back to her apartment with time to spare before Horton Watson got there.
    Nina had first introduced Horton to