Falling in Place by Ann Beattie Read Free Book Online Page A

John as “a ghost from the past.” “Are you saying I’m a spook?” Horton had asked. It was very odd, Horton’s smile. He had false teeth, and they were shiny white and perfectly even. Horton smiled a lot. If what people were saying to him didn’t make him smile, he told a joke or just muttered to himself. Horton would only go a few minutes without smiling.
    They left the restaurant and walked back to Columbus Avenue. Horton was already there, on the front step, white hat pulled low over his eyes, looking—except that he was tall and thin—like a Mexican taking a siesta. A white puff went up from below his hat. Horton was smoking a cigarette.
    “There I was on Park Avenue,” Horton said, pushing back the brim of his hat. “Martini cocktail. Nice shiny Steinway piano I could play. Not that the lady would have liked any song I might have selected to play, but I could have gone ahead and played it anyway while she, you know, pretended to really rock to it. No, I said to myself: Horton, a man has got to honor his commitments. Turns out I was a little early—might have banged out a tune ortwo before I left. ‘Course, she was itchy for me to leave. Bad enough her husband knows she smokes. Man doesn’t want to come home and see some spook banging out songs on his piano. Business is business, of course, but no reason for the man to see the business. All he’s got to see is a neat little box left behind, joints all in a row.” They went into the building, and the landlady opened her door and looked at them. Horton grabbed Nina on the stairs, laughing.
    “With high-paying business deals like this one, who needs enemies?” Horton said, as Nina put the key in the door and opened it. “Nice lady has no habit at all, doesn’t even drink martini cocktails. But you’ve got to do a thing just for old times’ sake. Plus which I have to pass down this street on the way to my dear old mother’s anyway. Got to visit her at her bedside. ‘Oh, Mother, what big
eyes
you have!’ and Mama’s gonna say, ‘I’m stoned.’ ” Horton gulped down a glass of water. “Humid night,” he said. “What I have is Cuernavaca grown, and quite tasty. Seventy an ounce.” Horton smiled. “Moving on up the line to beautiful Annandale-on-Hudson, for a weekend in the country. I’ve got a bicycle chained to a tree there. Guess I’ll do a little business and take a spin on my bicycle. I was such a misfit when I was a boy that I had training wheels on my bicycle for a full year. Took me to become a pothead and then give it up to have my brain get stable enough to have the balance I have today. When I was a child I had no power of balance. Don’t things come upon you as you get old, though. This morning I was looking in the mirror and I saw a little cluster of white, up by the temple. Have to get my hair bleached and dyed lavender like some faggot, so I don’t get bothered by noticing that.”
    He took a small bag of grass out of the back pocket of his pants and went into her bedroom and put it in a suitcase she kept pushed under her bed.
    “Believe I might move on down the line,” he said, smiling.
    “Can I fix you a sandwich? There’s vodka, if you’ll drink anything besides martinis.”
    “I believe not. I think I’ll just take my new-found riches and hide them away, so if some leprechaun is walking down Columbus Av, there’s not going to be any temptation—I mean, so’s theleprechaun’s not attracted to my green stuff. Bad enough the riffraff you’ve got to fight off these days.” He smiled at Nina. “Seventy even,” he said.
    He sat down and rolled up his pants leg and pushed down the sock. Underneath the sock was an ankle strap that had a small zipper in it. Horton rolled the four bills she had given him into tight tubes and flattened them with his thumb. He put them in the band, pulled up his socks and stood up. “I hear that at midnight tonight New York City goes on odd-even gas rationing. What times we live in.