Falling in Place Read Online Free

a pizza, and she had been so taken aback—the woman was nicely dressed, they both were rosy-cheeked—that she had given the woman three dollars. The woman had kissed the back of her hand as she held out the money. And of course there were always the usual crazies: Moonies, or whatever they were, who in exchange for money wanted to give her a paper flag on a toothpick; a drunk who went up to the dryer where her clothes were spinning and began waving his arm in a wild circle, imitating the motion of the machine. It would figure that Spangle would like living in New Haven. Before she knew him he had money and a nice house (anything with more than three rooms was by definition nice), but by the time he met her he had lost the house and the money. He had put up bail money for a friend who skipped the country. He had smoked it up and given parties in restaurants with Peking Duck for twenty. He had bought a Martin D-28 for a musician friend who was broke and who had smashed his own guitar against a cigar-store Indian he used as a coatrack when he broke a high ? string for the third time that day. He had paid an ex-girlfriend’s thousand-dollar telephone bill so she could calm down and get her head straight. He had given money to the dog pound, bought a sports car and crashed it up, paid high insurance rates when his broken leg healed and he could drive again. Money just disappeared. It went. It was nothing like a handful of pink sponge. Money did not respond to pressure. Squeeze it as hard as you could, and when you opened your hand, there would be less of it. A psychiatrist had taken two thousand dollars of the money to tell Spangle—in part—that he was afraid of money, so he had gotten rid of it. Spangle believed this, but also believed that he and his money were psychically attuned: It had not wanted to stay with him, either. His money had itched to escape into the drawers of cash registers, into the deep pockets of maître d’s.
    Her sister had introduced her to Spangle when she was eighteen. Her sister worked for the phone company in New Haven, beforeshe met a rich older man who took her on vacations; the price she paid was having her lingerie drawer sprayed with Chant d’Arômes, and their dinner napkins with Norell. She could never wipe away the smell of flowers and ferns because their bath towels were sprayed with Wind Song. Her sister had been behind the counter when Spangle came in, ex-girlfriend in hand, to slap down the phone company’s latest threatening letter and to pay, in quarters, the one-thousand-dollar-plus phone bill the ex-girlfriend had run up. They had brought the rolls of quarters in the girl’s Save-A-Tree bag. Cynthia’s sister had been counting quarters into piles when Cynthia came in to meet her for dinner after work. There were piles of silver all over the counter, and her sister had looked up at her sadly and she had said: “Here’s somebody who thinks I’m to blame for the phraseology of the phone company’s dunning letters, and that I deserve some shit.” Then her sister had stopped counting and said to Spangle, “What did you say your name was? So I can always remember you?”
    “Peter Spangle,” he had said.
    “Cynthia, meet Peter Spangle—a man who knows how to treat a girl who makes three-twenty an hour.”
    It had ended with all of them cursing the phone company and hunching over the desk to count quarters together. Then they had gone out for a drink. Spangle’s ex-girlfriend had left the table after she had two gin and tonics and had tried to call Budapest, but during the ten minutes it was going to take for the call to go through, Spangle caught wise, realized what was happening, and managed to stop her. He had not seen the ex-girlfriend after that night, and the next day he had called Cynthia. Cynthia’s fingers were still sore from counting money, and once the effects of the alcohol had worn off, she was not sure that she wanted to see Spangle again. But finally she had