Flying Hero Class (4 page)

He was pleased when the plane leveled back so that he could see nothing but the soothing darkness. Reaching up from the windows to the limits of space's infinite parabola.

He'd brought with him to New York—a justifiable mix of business with business—his short stories in a paperback edition with a terrible cover and his unpublished novel. The novel had consumed three years—he'd gone free-lance to finish the thing, becoming a part-time tour administrator rather than the full-time one he had been, getting more work that way than he would have liked to but still not enough to add up to an economic existence of his own.

Pauline was therefore his true patron. She went on working all throughout. She founded her own small company and became what he, by writing his book, forfeited becoming—a serious, known-in-the-trade tour administrator. She was wonderful at it. She could fly a youth orchestra and its instruments from Melbourne to Leningrad, she could ensure they all got through customs and onto the bus and into their beds at the hotel, and determine that coffee and pastries awaited them off stage during rehearsal breaks. She was impeccable at that sort of thing and in heavy demand. The truth was that this tour of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe was seen as too small in scope to waste her time with, and so her dilettante husband had been approached to manage it.

Her dilettante husband had then proposed to her that the Barramatjara tour would be painless, a journey she could come on to spend time with her spouse away from the complications which beset the big tours she handled.

The idea behind his being a dilettante arts administrator was that his sacrifice of career and time would be returned to the McClouds by the end of the American tour, when publishers would compete to reward him for his great antipodean tale.

In the writing, he had used—looting and consecrating at the one time—their childhoods, his and Pauline's, and the pattern of their parents' marriages as the material of the story. This was the most serious ancestor worship he had ever committed himself to. He had spent a larger part of the three years in a state of exaltation over the book, the peculiar permanence it would give to his memories and his parents and even—by extension—to the brisk, reliable, pretty woman he had married.

While the extraordinary Barramatjara Dance Troupe were being photographed by
Vogue
or
Harper's Bazaar
, he had been in the office of an agent far downtown whose name had been given to him. The agent was intelligent to the point of scaring him, but her cramped little office in Hudson Street had a “little magazine” atmosphere to it, as if she represented many of the worthy, a few of the famous, and none of the rich.

She had received a copy of his novel weeks before, and McCloud had hoped that the gimcrack bookshelves, the yellowing stacks of
New York Review of Books
, the old-fashioned desk, the battered steel door with its obsolescent steel bar—the sort of out-of-date security device which stated most directly and most brutally that this office sat, and this woman breathed, in a besieged city—that all
that
would be transmuted to a sort of glamour by her literary enthusiasm for his book.

She had certainly
approved
of his book. But no one abandons a career, strains forth, and weighs sentences for three years for the sake of approval. Instead of declaring it unique, she mentioned a dozen obscure American books of which it reminded her. She implied that it was already treading water in a flooded market. But that she might be able to find a place for it.

She had sent copies to nine publishers, she said, three of whom had, while Wappitji and Bluey exercised their casual dominance over the American media, rejected it. The agent did not say
reject
. She used the term
passed on it
. An imprint, as they called it, a section of a large publisher but with its own line of books, generally worthy ones, had made an offer—$10,000, which the agent thought she could up to $12,000.

“Four thousand dollars per year, that means,” said McCloud. “Because it took three years to write.”

“It's rotten,” the agent agreed. “It's normal. But God knows, there
are
possibilities. Books
do
get found and taken up. They attract paperback and movie deals.…”

But he didn't really want wealth, he tried to explain. It was that he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, and some instinct of his told him that in this commercial republic publishers took writers seriously with money.

He hadn't had the nervous strength yet to confront Pauline with this offer conveyed to him, without promises of certain acclaim, by the agent. Just the same he knew Pauline would take it better than he had. She might actually be proud of him for finding a New York publisher; it wasn't in any case the major question of her life. She would forgive all too easily a failed literary husband. If he wanted it, she would make all-too-generous room for him in her company.

He didn't know what to do in this matter of the imprint's offer. As the agent had said, it was very likely better to cast your bread upon the waters.

Making his way aft, he was half hoping that the aisles would be full of cocktail trolleys so that he could have a pensive few minutes dawdling behind them. But the way to the back of the plane was totally clear. All the passengers wore a locked-in, dazed look under the needlessly severe lighting.

He stopped by her seat. She was jammed in between a plump man determinedly taking up space to one flank. To the other was a freckled and rawboned young mother holding a sleeping baby, and a scholarly-looking young Pakistani or Arab reading
U.S. News and World Report
. She should not try to haul herself over the fat man, he indicated by gesture. She should essay the mother and child and the Pakistani/Arab and meet him at the back.

This was not easily performed without crushing and waking the baby. But the young student of international affairs made things easy by standing in the aisle. Pauline thanked him with a nice, sad-eyed smile.

Before meeting the Hudson Street agent, McCloud had of course envisioned a time when they would both fly ceaselessly together, gusted across oceans by weather fronts of literary applause.

When Pauline and McCloud reached the toilets at the back, he poured two cups of water and handed one to her. She didn't refuse to take it—thank God, she didn't play such heavy-handed symbolic games. But she
did
refuse to take it without question.

“What's this for?”

“To stop our brains from drying out. At this altitude, I mean.” He drank his in front of her, as if he were displaying to a child the lack of tartness in a given medicine. She began to sip hers.

She was brown-haired and had fine features. A small woman who cocked her head. She carried on each hip a small rich wedge of flesh. In fifteen years' time, of course, she might consider such congenital baggage a curse. At the moment it made her a symmetric little woman, and McCloud wished that both for the sake of the disorder between them and the joy it would be, they could sit for a time spaciously with each other and even try a few caresses. The deregulation of the aircraft industry had so cramped the interior of planes, however, that no broad gestures were possible.

Pauline said, “I've been thinking. I have work backing up in the office. Deborah's trying to handle the Kirov tour of Australia and New Zealand on her own, and I don't know if she can really do that. I should really go home early from Frankfurt.”

“No,” he said. “We all need you. The boys and I.”

“Oh, I'm aware I'm handy. I know how to order a limo or charter a bus. But to be handy isn't enough. I'm an unpaid supernumerary, and it's infallible in this business that that's the person who always ruins things. Especially if she's a wife or a girlfriend.”

He took her hands and said something plain about her being more than handy to him.

But she went on talking—not like the harridans of old, for whom he had been trained by his father's generation and by received male folk wisdom—but levelly, a modern woman, if you like; a woman afloat in her own water. She said, “You certainly needed time away from me. After the book, and all that dependence. My God, you needed a break. And that's okay by me. You know I don't go for the deathless-love idea, or perpetual joy-in-each-other's-company.

“But what's offensive about you, Frank, is that no sooner do you decide it would be really good to be away from your old woman than you get guilty, and you go to her and say, ‘Please, please, come on the American and European tour. I'll feel ashamed of myself if you don't come.' And so I spend some thousands of dollars of my own money so that you won't feel uncomfortable about leaving me behind. I can't believe I did it! I'd like to think I'm not as stupid as that. I could have spent two weeks reading and diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Instead I'm unpaid labor and a fifth wheel.”

He tried to make the standard reassurances, but she held up her hand.

“And then there's the other side of the equation, mate!” she told him. “Because you've gone to the trouble of talking the old girl into coming along, even against your own profoundest desires, you all at once feel worthy enough to unload some of your tasks on me. You become entertainment-and-booze officer for your dancers, for example, and leave the hard-edged stuff to me. And you feel entitled too to charge down on other women in my presence. If I weren't here you'd be too busy, too professional, for any of that. But you know that with me here you can be a fool and neglect things and I'll tidy up after you. Because, after all, I do entire dramatic and dance companies. While everyone knows you're a novelist, and no one distracts you with more than a chamber orchestra or a dance ensemble.”

The termagants he had somehow been raised to expect left their men with moral room in which to maneuver. They overstated the treachery and foulness of their target. Each declared her man the worst who ever breathed, and on good evidence he knew he probably wasn't; was too lacking in strength of purpose and in pathology to be the worst bastard alive! Pauline went in for accuracy, though, and left you with nothing, no grounds, no headroom for balancing and weighing with yourself, no saving and absolving rage.

Instead of a gracious anger, therefore, McCloud felt melancholy and the genuine weight of his pitiable wrongdoings.

“And the other thing I did which was utter stupidity,” said Pauline, “was to go looking for you and that Slavic blonde. You're downstairs at the reception, and the speeches are still going on. And she says in your ear that there are some paintings on the second floor she wants to show you—the best acrylics are up there, little Miss Hotblood says. Barely three years out of Lodz and she knows about the best American Indian paintings. A fast learner, this little Miss Poland!”

“The speeches had ended,” McCloud found himself gently insisting.

“Oh, good! Had the applause? You surely aren't telling me the best thing to do as soon as the speeches have ended is to run upstairs to a remote corner of a gallery? If so, it's a convention no one else in the gallery last night followed.”

There
was
an explanation for both mysteries, the mystery of insisting Pauline travel with him, the mystery of the Polish aficionado. And Pauline—he knew—would accept the explanation in both cases and be reconciled. But the sad thing was he could not utter it. First, of course, the story of his literary failure, or a success so meager to be worse than failure. Perhaps it had made him susceptible to the attentions of a Pole, to that heroic, that solemn, that spacious accent, to that farthest East of Europe pronouncing so piquantly on the farthest West of America.

And then there was jealousy. Pauline had mentioned the Kirov. Who was bringing the Kirov to eastern Australia, to the plush, balletomaniac cities of Sydney and Melbourne? An impresario named Peter Drury, who had been divorced at forty and had since grazed sensitively and with a sense of droit du seigneur among the handsome women of Sydney; who kept on telling feature writers that mere girls, popsies, sheilas, mere heartiness and animal generosity, weren't enough for him and never would be; who drank like a sailor and looked like an athlete; and who kept sending work to Pauline's company and would tell powerful people at cocktail parties that she was the best there was.

Sometimes, after much booze and even in the bed he shared with Pauline, he dreamed of Drury and Pauline together—the dreams arose like revelations—and it all caused him a curious and unique pain and brought an unspeakable sense of nullity.

The nullity had been assuaged by the Slav's attentions.

If he therefore confessed something as ancient and unfashionable as jealousy, he would be forgiven. He
knew
it was a coherent explanation, too, but he could not humble himself to make it.

So he fell back on impotent and conventional pleadings.

“I think you have to make allowances for honest impulse,” he said. “The girl is an acknowledged expert in Navajo acrylics. I think that what you saw up there … We stumbled into each other.” In fact, he could have told Pauline, he was so drunk with California wine and with spirits that, admiring one of the Navajo sand paintings, he had toppled into the girl, and she had held him and then, with greater grace, opened her moist mouth. And he had thought how ignorant this woman was of his literary paltriness and how attractive that made her. Whereas Pauline would in the end sniff it all infallibly on his breath.

Beyond everything, the fantasy which attaches to women who do not know you, cannot read you, attached to this Solidarity refugee who had an interest in Navajo acrylics!

“But you're right, of course,” he hurried to say; since Pauline
was
right and nothing could come from a merciless reiteration of his New York behavior. “I was totally pissed. I behaved like an adolescent.…”

That, at least, was an easy version to pronounce.