Emperor of the Air (4 page)

He looked at me. I put some things down, tried to make a little bustle. I could see Anne standing in the hall just beyond the door.

“Are you comfortable, Dad?”

“What do you mean, ‘comfortable’? My heart’s full of holes, leaking all over the place. Am I comfortable? No, I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying,” I said, and I sat down next to him. “You’ll be swinging the five iron in two weeks.”

I touched one of the tubes in his arm. Where it entered the vein, the needle disappeared under a piece of tape. I hated the sight of this. I moved the bedsheets a little bit, tucked them in. Anne had wanted me to be alone with him. She was in the hall, waiting to head off Lorraine.

“What’s the matter with her?” he asked, pointing at Anne.

“She thought we might want to talk.”

“What’s so urgent?”

Anne and I had discussed it the night before. “Tell him what you feel,” she said. “Tell him you love him.” We were eating dinner in a fish restaurant. “Or if you don’t love him, tell him you don’t.”

“Look, Pop,” I said now.

“What?”

I was forty-two years old. We were in a hospital and he had tubes in his arms. All kinds of everything: needles, air, tape. I said it again.

“Look, Pop.”

Anne and I have seen a counselor, who told me that I had to learn to accept kindness from people. He saw Anne and me together, then Anne alone, then me. Children’s toys were scattered on the floor of his office. “You sound as if you don’t want to let people near you,” he said. “Right?”

“I’m a reasonably happy man,” I answered.

I hadn’t wanted to see the counselor. Anne and I have been married seven years, and sometimes I think the history of marriage can be written like this: People Want Too Much. Anne and I have suffered no plague; we sleep late two mornings a week; we laugh at most of the same things; we have a decent house in a suburb of Boston, where, after the commuter traffic has eased, a quiet descends and the world is at peace. She writes for a newspaper, and I teach the children of lawyers and insurance men. At times I’m alone, and need to be alone; at times she does too. But I can always count on a moment, sometimes once in a day, sometimes more, when I see her patting down the sheets on the bed, or watering the front window violets, and I am struck by the good fortune of my life.

Still, Anne says I don’t feel things.

It comes up at dinner, outside in the yard, in airports as we wait for planes. You don’t let yourself feel, she tells me; and I tell her that I think it’s a crazy thing, all this talk about feeling. What do the African Bushmen say? They say, Will we eat tomorrow? Will there be rain?

When I was sixteen, sitting in the back seat of a squad car, the policeman stopped in front of our house on Huron Avenue, turned around against the headrest, and asked me if I was sure this was where I lived.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He spoke through a metal grate. “Your daddy owns this house?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But for some reason you don’t like windows.”

He got out and opened my door, and we walked up the porch steps. The swirling lights on the squad car were making crazy patterns in the French panes of the living room bays. He knocked. “What’s your daddy do?”

I heard lights snapping on, my mother moving through the house. “He’s in business,” I said. “But he won’t be home now.” The policeman wrote something on his notepad. I saw my mother’s eye through the glass in the door, and then the locks were being unlatched, one by one, from the top.

When Anne and I came to California to visit, we stayed at my mother’s for three days. On her refrigerator door was a calendar with men’s names marked on it—dinner dates, theater—and I knew this was done for our benefit. My mother has been alone for fifteen years. She’s still thin, and her eyes still water, and I noticed that books were lying open all through the house. Thick paperbacks—
Doctor Zhivago, The Thorn Birds—
in the bathroom and the studio and the bedroom. We never mentioned my father, but at the end of our stay, when we had packed the car for our drive north along the coast, after she’d hugged us both and we’d backed out of the driveway, she came down off the lawn into the street, her arms crossed over her chest, leaned into the window, and said, “You might say hello to your father for me.”

We made the drive north on Highway 1. We passed mission towns, fields of butter lettuce, long stretches of pumpkin farms south of San Francisco. It was the first time we were going to see my father with Lorraine. She was a hairdresser. He’d met her a few years after coming north, and one of the first things they’d done together was take a trip around the world. We got postcards from the Nile delta and Bangkok. When I was young, my father had never taken us out of California.

His house in Sausalito was on a cliff above a finger of San Francisco Bay. A new Lincoln stood in the carport. In his bedroom was a teak-framed king-size waterbed, and on the walls were bits of African artwork—opium pipes, metal figurines. Lorraine looked the same age as Anne. One wall of the living room was glass, and after the first night’s dinner, while we sat on the leather sofa watching tankers and yachts move under the Golden Gate Bridge, my father put down his Scotch and water, touched his jaw, and said, “Lenny, call Dr. Farmer.”

It was his second one. The first had been two years earlier, on the golf course in Monterey, where he’d had to kneel, then sit, then lie down on the fairway.

At dinner the night after I was arrested, my mother introduced her idea. “We’re going to try something,” she said. She had brought out a chicken casserole, and it was steaming in front of her. “That’s what we’re going to do. Max, are you listening? This next year, starting tonight, is going to be the year of getting to know us better.” She stopped speaking and dished my father some chicken.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean it will be to a small extent a theme year. Nothing that’s going to change every day of our lives, but in this next year I thought we’d all make an attempt to get to know each other better. Especially you, Leonard. Dad and I are going to make a better effort to know you.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” said my father.

“All kinds of things, Max. We’ll go to movies together, and Lenny can throw a party here at the house. And I personally would like to take a trip, all of us together, to the American Southwest.”

“Sounds all right to me,” I said.

“And Max,” she said, “you can take Lenny with you to play golf. For example.” She looked at my father.

“Neither of us would like it,” he said.

“Lenny never sees you.”

I looked out the window. The trees were turning, dropping their leaves onto the putting green. I didn’t care what he said, one way or the other. My mother spooned a chicken thigh onto my plate and covered it with sauce. “All right,” my father said. “He can caddie.”

“And as preparation for our trip,” my mother said, “can you take him on your Sunday rides?”

My father took off his glasses. “The Southwest,” he said, wiping the lenses with a napkin, “is exactly like any other part of the country.”

Anne had an affair once with a man she met on an assignment. He was young, much younger than either of us—in his late twenties, I would say from the one time I saw him. I saw them because one day on the road home I passed Anne’s car in the lot of a Denny’s restaurant. I parked around the block and went in to surprise her. I took a table at the back, but from my seat in the corner I didn’t realize for several minutes that the youngish-looking woman leaning forward and whispering to the man with a beard was my wife.

I didn’t get up and pull the man out with me into the parking lot, or even join them at the table, as I have since thought might have been a good idea. Instead I sat and watched them. I could see that under the table they were holding hands. His back was to me, and I noticed that it was broad, as mine is not. I remember thinking that she probably liked this broadness. Other than that, though, I didn’t feel very much. I ordered another cup of coffee just to hear myself talk, but my voice wasn’t quavering or fearful. When the waitress left, I took out a napkin and wrote on it, “You are a forty-year-old man with no children and your wife is having an affair.” Then I put some money on the table and left the restaurant.

“I think we should see somebody,” Anne said to me a few weeks later. It was a Sunday morning, and we were eating breakfast on the porch.

“About what?” I asked.

On a Sunday afternoon when I was sixteen I went out to the garage with a plan my mother had given me. That morning my father had washed the Lincoln. He had detergent-scrubbed the finish and then sun-dried it on Huron Avenue, so that in the workshop light of the garage its highlights shone. The windshield molding, the grille, the chrome side markers, had been cloth-dried to erase water spots. The keys hung from their magnetic sling near the door to the kitchen. I took them out and opened the trunk. Then I hung them up again and sat on the rear quarter panel to consider what to do. It was almost four o’clock. The trunk of my father’s car was large enough for a half-dozen suitcases and had been upholstered in a gray medium-pile carpet that was cut to hug the wheel wells and the spare-tire berth. In one corner, fastened down by straps, was his toolbox, and along the back lay the golf bag. In the shadows the yellow dingos of the club socks looked like baby chicks. He was going to come out in a few minutes. I reached in, took off four of the club socks, and made a pillow for my head. Then I stepped into the trunk. The shocks bounced once and stopped. I lay down with my head propped on the quarter panel and my feet resting in the taillight berth, and then I reached up, slammed down the trunk, and was in the dark.

This didn’t frighten me. When I was very young, I liked to sleep with the shades drawn and the door closed so that no light entered my room. I used to hold my hand in front of my eyes and see if I could imagine its presence. It was too dark to see anything. I was blind then, lying in my bed, listening for every sound. I used to move my hand back and forth, close to my eyes, until I had the sensation that it was there but had in some way been amputated. I had heard of soldiers who had lost limbs but still felt them attached. Now I held my open hand before my eyes. It was dense black inside the trunk, colorless, without light.

When my father started the car, all the sounds were huge, magnified as if they were inside my own skull. The metal scratched, creaked, slammed when he got in; the bolt of the starter shook all the way through to the trunk; the idle rose and leveled; then the gears changed and the car lurched. I heard the garage door glide up. Then it curled into its housing, bumped once, began descending again. The seams of the trunk lid lightened in the sun. We were in the street now, heading downhill. I lay back and felt the road, listened to the gravel pocking in the wheel wells.

I followed our route in my mind. Left off Huron onto Telscher, where the car bottomed in the rain gulley as we turned, then up the hill to Santa Ana. As we waited for the light, the idle made its change, shifting down, so that below my head I heard the individual piston blasts in the exhaust pipe. Left on Santa Ana, counting the flat stretches where I felt my father tap the brakes, numbering the intersections as we headed west toward the ocean. I heard cars pull up next to us, accelerate, slow down, make turns. Bits of gravel echoed inside the quarter panels. I pulled off more club socks and enlarged my pillow. We slowed down, stopped, and then we accelerated, the soft piston explosions becoming a hiss as we turned onto the Pasadena freeway.

“Dad’s rides,” my mother had said to me the night before, as I lay in bed, “would be a good way for him to get to know you.” It was the first week of the year of getting to know us better. She was sitting at my desk.

“But he won’t let me go,” I said.

“You’re right.” She moved some things around on a shelf. The room wasn’t quite dark, and I could see the outline of her white blouse. “I talked to Mr. Goldman,” she said.

“Mr. Goldman doesn’t know me.”

“He says you’re angry.” My mother stood up, and I watched her white blouse move to the window. She pulled back the shade until a triangle of light from the streetlamp fell on my sheets. “Are you angry?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so either.” She replaced the shade, came over and kissed me on the forehead, and then went out into the hall. In the dark I looked for my hand.

A few minutes later the door opened again. She put her head in. “If he won’t let you come,” she said, “sneak along.”

On the freeway the thermal seams whizzed and popped in my ears. The ride had smoothed out now, as the shocks settled into the high speed, hardly dipping on curves, muffling everything as if we were under water. As far as I could tell, we were still driving west, toward the ocean. I sat halfway up and rested my back against the golf bag. I could see shapes now inside the trunk. When we slowed down and the blinker went on, I attempted bearings, but the sun was the same in all directions and the trunk lid was without shadow. We braked hard. I felt the car leave the freeway. We made turns. We went straight. Then more turns, and as we slowed down and I was stretching out, uncurling my body along the diagonal, we made a sharp right onto gravel and pulled over and stopped.

My father opened the door. The car dipped and rocked, shuddered. The engine clicked. Then the passenger door opened. I waited.

If I heard her voice today, twenty-six years later, I would recognize it.

“Angel,” she said.

I heard the weight of their bodies sliding across the back seat, first hers, then his. They weren’t three feet away. I curled up, crouched into the low space between the golf bag and the back of the passenger compartment. There were two firm points in the cushion where it was displaced. As I lay there, I went over the voice again in my head: it was nobody I knew. I heard a laugh from her, and then something low from him. I felt the shift of the trunk’s false rear, and then, as I lay behind them, I heard the contact: the crinkle of clothing, arms wrapping, and the half-delicate, muscular sounds. It was like hearing a television in the next room. His voice once more, and then the rising of their breath, slow; a minute of this, maybe another; then shifting again, the friction of cloth on the leather seat and the car’s soft rocking. “Dad,” I whispered. Then rocking again; my father’s sudden panting, harder and harder, his half-words. The car shook violently. “Dad,” I whispered. I shouted, “Dad!”