Flight (16 page)

In the kitchen, Margaret is ladling out bowls of gumbo. Carol notes with disappointment that she has chosen some heavy ceramic bowls from the kitchen cabinet, not the fancy china from the dining room hutch. It’s almost as if she’s refusing to make things nice for Kit. But it’s too late to change without a fuss.

Carol goes to the sink. “Trevor, did you wash your hands?” she asks. “Come here so Grandma can help you get them clean.” Reluctant but not willing to disobey, he pads over. She takes hold of his hand and he pulls back slightly but doesn’t dare yank it away. “Smells like fresh chicken!” Will says.

“It’s gumbo,” Carol corrects him, handing Trevor a towel.

At the table, Kit and Leanne are sitting in silence. Leanne looks tired.
Wedding nerves,
Carol thinks. Or maybe the hemming is turning out to be harder than she thought. Kit nods politely and murmurs his thanks as Margaret serves him first.

Carol sits down between Trevor and Leanne. “I can’t tell you all how happy I am!” she says. She beams at Margaret, who’s handing out the bowls of gumbo, and even when she looks down and sees, floating on top, a whole shrimp, unpeeled, head and feelers still attached, the flame of her enthusiasm flickers a bit but doesn’t go out.

“I’m so happy,” she says again. “I’ve been looking forward to this for months: sitting down to dinner with my whole family!” She beams around the table. Leanne and Margaret glance at each other before returning the smile.

“Of course, it’s sad that David can’t be here,” Carol adds quickly. “But I have all the rest of you!”

“We’re happy to be here, Mom,” Margaret says, and Leanne nods.

“Thank you so much for all your help with this, too,” Kit says. “With all this wedding stuff. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Oh,” Carol says happily, pushing the shrimp to one side with her spoon and digging into the gumbo beneath. “It’s only just begun.”

A DROPPING SENSATION WAKES LEANNE. IT HAS
something to do with a dream, but she can’t remember how. She stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it’s startling. From the character of the light—gray and flat, the way it is before the sun clears the horizon—she guesses it’s between four and five AM. But Michigan light can fool her after living out east. Here, at the western edge of the time zone, everything is shifted back. The sun rises later and sets later; twilight drags on until ten PM at this time of year. Now, even in this half-light, it could be as late as six.

She can sense Kit next to her. His body is solid and turned away from her, a ridge on the horizon, inscrutable pathways in the darkness of its near side. Is there an approach on that sheer wall? She could reach a hand out and touch him. Even in his sleep, he responds to her touch, gravitating gently toward it, the way a magnet moves. If he stayed turned away from her that would make it easier to talk. But where should she start?
I can’t go to Mexico with you.

Kit is the talker in their relationship, the one who tries not to let things go unsaid. Leanne is willing to let pain go untended or sorrows unvoiced in order to avoid scenes. Her mother was always a big scene-maker. Leanne still cringes when she hears her mother’s voice take the tone that means she’s spoiling for a fight, looking for an action or statement on which to hang her sense of injustice. When she gets like that, nothing Will says can appease her. Even though Leanne always automatically took her mother’s side, she would end up feeling bad for her father. For all his energy, he could make no headway with Carol.

That’s the danger of talking. Too often it descends into pointless recrimination or complaint. That was the beauty of Hoyt. When Leanne and Hoyt were together, they hardly ever talked, and when they did, it was never like that.

Of course, she and Hoyt weren’t actually together; they couldn’t even be said to be seeing each other, really. Looking back, Leanne knows she didn’t love Hoyt, not the way she loves Kit. Eating breakfast, she sometimes watches Kit dip his toast into the yolks of his fried eggs and she loves the gesture, simple as it is, because it’s his. She never loved Hoyt like that. She loved his blankness. He wasn’t a love object so much as an escape, a place to lose herself.

She met Hoyt while she was tending bar at the Dingo, a grubbily hip bar on the Lower East Side. She’d been in New York a year, most of which she had spent waitressing. Bartending seemed cooler and more grown up, especially at a place like the Dingo. Leanne had been there about a month when Hoyt came in, settled himself on the bar stool, and parked his arms in a neat circle, marking off territory.

“So,” Hoyt said to Leanne. “What are you doing with your life?”

“Who are you, my mother?” At the time, Carol was telling everyone that Leanne was taking some time off, as if life were a nice job with benefits and Leanne was on vacation from it.

Hoyt regarded her intently. His eyes were large and slightly droopy; in fact, his entire face looked like it was migrating downward. Leanne made him to be in his midforties, not bad-looking but not as well preserved as he might be.
Probably a painter,
she thought. Only three kinds of people strayed east of Avenue A: artists, drug addicts, and tough Latino kids. Occasionally, those categories overlapped.

“Jim Beam, neat,” Hoyt said, raising two fingers like a blessing. “I’m Hoyt.”

Leanne was nineteen. When she applied for the job at the Dingo, she had said she was twenty-one, with experience tending bar.

She handed Hoyt his Jim Beam, and he stared morosely into the glass as if it disappointed him.

“Are you a painter?” she asked. Being friendly, they’d said, was part of her job.

“I don’t like the word ‘painter,’” he said. “ ‘Painter’ implies will and intent. One who paints takes action. I do not. Art is made through me, but I am only a passive medium for its creation.”

Leanne nodded. After three months of life in New York, she was used to people talking that way.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I think people are just fooling themselves. They think they do a lot of things when really things just get done to them.”

Hoyt raised his head. “How old are you?” he asked.

Leanne looked at his sad-sack eyes. He was taking her in the way a large man might eye a chair, wondering if it would hold him.

“Twenty-two,” she said. “I look young for my age.”

That was how it started.

Even then, after a year, Leanne wasn’t sure what she would eventually do in New York. Most people seemed to arrive in the city with big plans: go to school, act, get rich on Wall Street. Leanne thought she might do any of those things; she just had to figure out what she wanted. She thought that would be easier in New York, a world of strangers and new ideas, not driven by the desires of her family. At home, she sometimes felt caught in a slipstream, pulled forward in the wake of others. Her father’s dreams of farm life, her mother’s projects, Margaret’s ambition—each of them hauled Leanne along, heedless of her own desires.

And for the most part, she had none. Content to be pulled along, she drifted through life until high school graduation. The most self-directed, assertive thing she had ever done was move to New York. Even that was someone else’s suggestion: her high school friend Julie was going to NYU and driving out with a truckful of stuff. Leanne could go with her, she had said, take turns with the driving and help pay for the gas.

“What you should do,” Julie had told her as they pounded the highway, talking about the millions of possibilities awaiting them, “is open up a shop for arts and crafts. You are so
good
at all those things.”

Leanne had smiled. She might do that one day. She might do anything. For the first time in her life, the paths she could take seemed endless. She didn’t want to make any decisions. She wanted to enjoy the feeling of potential, the sense that as she went to work
or drank with friends or wandered down the crowded, grubby streets of the East Village, her real life was still out there somewhere, waiting for her.

Hoyt came back the next night. Leanne’s heart skipped a beat when she saw his face coming toward her. But he barely seemed to recognize her when he sat down at the bar.

“Hey,” he said flatly. “Jim Beam, please.”

“How are you tonight, Hoyt?” Leanne asked. He looked up, vaguely surprised, before settling back into a slump.

“I’m here,” he said glumly. As if to underscore the point, he pulled a book out of his backpack. The title spilled across the cover:
Be Here Now.

Leanne handed Hoyt his drink and noticed for the first time that his hair was bright red, or at least used to be. It was now the color of a dried-out scab.

“Have you ever read this?” he asked her. She shook her head. “You should.” He closed the book and examined it, nodding.

Leanne looked at the book. “I think my mother had that book on her shelves,” she told him. “But I doubt if she ever read it.”

“Why not?” Hoyt’s face looked younger when his attention was roused.

“I don’t know. My parents weren’t very good at being anywhere now. They were always chasing after the next thing.”

Hoyt shook his head. “That’s the problem,” he said. “The future—it’s just as oppressive as the past. You can’t get sucked in by either of them.”

Leanne studied Hoyt’s face. His presence felt light, indeterminate, as if he might fade away on his bar stool. She was drawn to him the way one is drawn to a perfectly flat green lake. The smoothness of the water is both what you want to be part of and what you disrupt if you try.

Hoyt drank steadily from ten PM to two AM. As Leanne was wiping down the counters and loading the last glasses into dishwasher
trays, he looked at her with that summing-up expression again. She spoke quickly. “How about a nightcap?”

Hoyt laughed, slow and world-weary. “Where?”

“I was thinking your place,” she said.

He shook his head. “Bad idea.”

“No pressure,” Leanne said, concentrating on the last stretch of counter. “I just thought we might, you know, be there now.”

He leaned back and looked at her, and it was as if he were studying her through glass. He narrowed his eyes. “I hope you have cash. ’Cause we’ll have to get a bottle.”

Liquor stores were closed, so they went to a bodega where Hoyt nodded to the counter guy and waved Leanne’s twenty. They were ushered to a curtained doorway, and a small Indian man looked Leanne up and down with a dark stare. Then he disappeared behind the curtain and returned with a fifth of Beam.

Hoyt lived in a largish building on Ludlow Street. The staircases sagged in upon themselves, and the hallways were painted a lurid purple. His apartment, however, was surprisingly clean. In the kitchen, black-and-white linoleum squares gleamed as if no one ever walked on them, and the porcelain sink in the bathroom had been scoured to a suedelike nap. They sat on the living room floor, Leanne cross-legged, Hoyt leaning back against a pine green couch, his knees up, his head resting on the cushions. He smoked Winstons, ashing them into an incongruously delicate china teacup.

They drank Jim Beam and listened to music. Hoyt had hundreds of cassette tapes lined up in perfect rows across a set of built-in shelves. The tapes all appeared to be bootlegs, labeled in the same precise handwriting. Leanne didn’t recognize the music, but she liked its slow trancelike beat. Sometimes there were words, sometimes not. Hoyt closed his eyes, his jaw pulsing slightly. Leanne sat still and watched him for a long time. She had never done anything like this before. She’d had sex only a few times, each time with someone who seemed so bent on getting her into bed that giving in was the easiest path. This was entirely different. She watched Hoyt until he seemed to be asleep. Then she crawled over to where he sat,
and placed her palm, fingers spread, on his stomach. He opened his eyes but didn’t move. She slid her hand down his stomach to his belt buckle. Still he didn’t move or speak, just watched her. One hand on his buckle, she used the other to unbutton her own blouse.

“You’ll have to do everything,” he said. She nodded and kept going.

After that, Leanne and Hoyt saw each other regularly, but there was never a plan or an agreement. Hoyt came in two or three nights a week. On one of those nights, sometimes two, he would stay until closing time, and when he did, Leanne went home with him. He didn’t speak or acknowledge her in any way; he would just stand up, and Leanne would get her jacket and follow. At his place they drank, listened to music, talked, went to bed. Sometimes they had sex, and sometimes Hoyt would roll over and fall right asleep, his back to her. She would trace his tattoos with a finger. He had two, an American flag and a dead dove. When she saw them, Leanne wondered if he had fought in Vietnam. He seemed about the right age.

Leanne always left first thing in the morning. Sometimes Hoyt would go with her. They would meander in silence, roaming the streets of the East Village, where artists had adorned vacant lots with sculptures made from scrap metal or stuffed animals. Farther east, between Avenues C and D, there was a shantytown where chickens roamed among cardplaying groups of men. Occasionally, they walked through the East River Park, a grubby, forgotten strip of land between FDR Drive and the river. Autumn had set in, and they scuffed over leaves, lost socks, chicken bones, menus. On the park staircases, their shoes crunched the glass of empty crack vials, scattered there like tiny jewels.

Hoyt dealt drugs. There was no particular moment when Leanne realized it, just a series of small things that added up: cryptic late-night phone conversations, vagueness about his activities, the precise way he lived. When they left his apartment together, he
would open the door slightly, surveying the hall before stepping outside. Keys in hand, he’d turn and fasten the locks—two Medeco cylinders and a police bolt. Then he’d take Leanne’s hand and wordlessly lead the way to the building’s rear stairs.

She knew it should bother her, but it didn’t. Dealing didn’t seem like a vocation to Hoyt so much as a habit he had slipped into, casually and with no intent, the way he seemed to have fallen into the rest of his life. There was something admirable in that ability to move through the world rudderless, living entirely in the moment and taking things as they came. Leanne had never known anyone who could do that, but she recognized it immediately as a quality she had always harbored herself.