Luminous Airplanes (19 page)

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Authors: Paul La Farge

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Satire

BOOK: Luminous Airplanes
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Peace,
Dick
 
I wanted badly to know what Richard had written to my mother, but the second letter wasn’t in the envelope. My grandfather must have done as my father asked. Which was big of him, under the circumstances: his lawyer run off, his case lost. I credited Oliver’s gentle heart, but actually I didn’t see how he could have refused Richard. Even I was moved by the letter, and I’d never known Richard Ente. More than ever it felt like a shame that I hadn’t met my father: compared with Oliver, Richard was completely unreserved; compared with my mothers he was scintillatingly honest. He alone among everyone I was related to had an idea of what life was actually about, what it was
for
. But even as I missed this dead father whom I would never know, I mistrusted myself. Was Richard’s letter one of the ploys Charles had told me about? Was
in the last three months I have walked through hell on foot
real contrition, or just my father telling Oliver what he wanted to hear?
I read the letter again and again, as if by memorizing it I could learn Richard Ente’s heart. But his heart was not there to be found; all that happened was that my new affection for him was joined, more and more, by doubt. Who was Richard Ente, what had he meant, what had he wanted? The pain and guilt and
life
I’d felt when I read the letter for the first time gave way to a scholarly distance, as though Richard were becoming, before my eyes, a historical character. Soon, I thought, sadly, I’d be tracking down his references,
people have hated me
, even
the whole system of socialization that came over in the Puritan ships
. I called my mothers but no one was home. I phoned Charles at the shop and asked him about the letter. “I never saw it,” he said, “and I have no idea what Richard was thinking, but I’ll tell you, it doesn’t surprise me. He liked to keep us guessing, and you know what? We’re still guessing. God damn Richard Ente.”
After a brilliant cold night when the stars seemed to part as I looked at them, as if the planet were moving deeper into space, a fog settled in the valley. The mornings were white and the days ragged and soft. I spent a lot of time watching TV, and trying not to look over at the Regenzeits’ house to see if Yesim was there or not. It must have been around this time that I got an e-mail from Dave, the owner of Cetacean, informing me that my two weeks’ leave, which had by now stretched to four and a half weeks, was never officially approved, and that I was fired. I didn’t care. Honestly, it was hard for me to believe I had worked there at all.
 
Now I am coming to the hard part my story, but I don’t want to tell it, not today. Let’s talk about something else: history, for example. If I
were
to travel back in time, to check the accuracy of my guesses about the Millerites, one question I’d surely want to settle concerns their
ascension robes
, the white gowns they supposedly put on in order to go up to Heaven. Did the Millerites really wear them, or not? On the one hand you have a host of eyewitnesses who say yes, the Millerites wore white robes: a New Hampshire seamstress who made robes for her neighbors; a cloth merchant who ran out of white fabric as the final day approached; and so on. On the other hand you have the historians who say the Millerites never wore robes of any kind; they planned to go up to Heaven in whatever they happened to be wearing.
Just about everyone who writes about the Millerites weighs in on the ascension-robe question. You have to wonder, why was it such a big deal? When I was working on my dissertation, I thought about this a fair amount. The conclusion I reached was that the ascension robes, if they were real, were a sign that the Millerites’ fundamentalism—their belief that the world would
really
end after however many years and days it said in the Bible—was just as petty and materialistic as the world to which it was opposed. If you believed in Jesus, what did it matter if you wore a robe or not? The robes made the Millerites ridiculous in the public imagination, but I couldn’t help thinking that they also united the Millerites to a noble tradition of people whose actions respond, in the end, not to the real world but to some kind of dream. From the so-called pioneers of flight to the explorers who set off in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific, or even the timid people who sit down at their desks to write books, how much of what human beings undertake is based, not on a calculation of possibilities, but on the blind belief that if we just
act
on our desires, the world will somehow make them possible? Everyone believes what they want to believe, everyone sees what they want to see, if they want it badly enough, and all I can say is, the Millerites must have wanted the world to end very badly if they did dress up in white robes, but on the other hand I can understand them, I can understand wanting something badly enough that you are willing to make yourself ridiculous. If there’s anything I can understand now, it’s that.
I don’t think you are reading these pages, Yesim, I don’t see how you could be reading them, but if you are: I’m sorry!
 
One morning in early October I was in the grocery, telling Carrie about the summers I’d spent in Thebes, and I was just coming to the story of Kerem and Shelley and Shelley’s brother’s party when Yesim came in, dressed not in her secret-agent outfit but in a long blue coat that I had never seen before. Her hair was all askew, her blouse wrinkled and untucked.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
Yesim looked surprised by my question. “If you have a minute, I’ll show you.”
In the parking lot she took my hand. “I’ve been up all night,” she said, “so don’t hold me responsible for what I do or say, OK?” She squeezed my fingers. It was as though a Morse message passed through her arm to mine, a secret pulse to let me know we were on again.
Yesim drove us out Route 56, past Snowbird, where mowers were clearing the slopes of the summer’s grass in preparation for the first snowfall. She took the road up which I’d followed her a couple of weeks earlier, and where she had turned left before, this time she took the right fork. The road became a path, the path became a track. Branches scratched the sides of the Outback. Then we were in a clearing. Before us stood a wooden ruin, painted white and green but nearly worn of its colors by weather and neglect. The siding sagged, the windows were blinded by boards, the porch had collapsed and only joists remained, the space between them full of earth and dead leaves, a red-and-yellow carpet that led to the front door. We got out of the car.
“Do you know what this is?” Yesim asked. “It’s
 
the old hotel, or what’s left of it. I wanted you to see it before it changed.”
“Changed?”
“Can’t you guess?” Yesim said. “We’re going to fix it up. You can’t tell Kerem I told you, or he’ll never forgive either of us.”
She pushed the door open and we looked together into the dim rotten house. Here and there a gap in the boards over the windows let in a slice of gray light, showing us a section of floor, a bit of mantel, a door. Yesim took a flashlight from her pocket and swept the beam over an old parquet floor twisted by damp. “As you can see,” she said, “it’s going to take a lot of fixing.”
The hotel smelled like wet towels gone bad a very long time ago, a breath-stopping mildew smell that had itself decayed almost to nothing. The room we were in had been a lounge, from the look of it: a big fieldstone fireplace yawned across the room at what had been a bar. There was an indistinct area to the right that might have been a restaurant. Yesim said they were going to restore all the original details: the bar, the stage, the fireplace, the leather armchairs, even the deer heads on the walls. They were going to renovate the swimming pool, and reopen the gardens, and maybe put in some cottages in the woods. Oh, yes, and they were going to have music, just like in the old days. “What was the name of the band you played for me?”
“Gil Gideon and the Two-Time Tunesters.”
“We’re going to have music like that. We’re going to advertise on billboards all the way down the Thruway. Summerland, the good old days are back, something like that. My brother wants me to write the ads because I’m a poet.” Yesim laughed. “Do you want to see the upstairs?”
The air on the second floor was closer, harder to breathe. I covered my mouth with my hand. We walked down a long hallway, Yesim opened a door and there was light. We were in a bedroom that faced the upslope of the hill; beyond the window was a big tangle that might once have been Summerland’s famous garden. The room had never given up its old furniture, an iron-framed double bed, a sink, a rocking chair with a collapsed cane seat. A writing table, a chair. On the table, a stack of paper, and beside it a loose sheet that Yesim quickly turned over.
“This is my secret,” she said. “I’m writing again.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
“I don’t know if it’s wonderful, but it feels right, so for the time being I’m going to keep doing it.” Yesim looked bemused, as though she’d forgotten it was her birthday, and here were these presents to remind her.
“It looks like you have a lot of pages there,” I said. “Is it poems?”
“Not really.”
“A story?”
“Kind of.”
“Can I read it?”
“Maybe later,” Yesim said. After a while she went on, “It’s because of you that I’m writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about you, these last few days.”
“Me? Why?”
“Actually,” Yesim said, blushing, “I was thinking about your shirt. The one with the monkey on it? I was really surprised when I saw you in the Kountry Kitchen, wearing that shirt. It was so ugly and so cheerful at the same time. I didn’t think you would ever wear a shirt like that. If you had asked me, when we were kids, what you would turn out like, I would have said you were going to be kind of a nerd. You aren’t offended, are you? I don’t mean it in a bad way. I even think nerds are a little sexy. Anyway, when I saw you wearing that shirt, I thought, we don’t
have
to become anything. We can choose. Although now that I think about it, the shirt is a little nerdy, isn’t it?”
She looked so happy, it was impossible for me to be offended. “I’ll loan it to you, if you want.”
“I’m not sure it will fit me.”
She sat on the bed and I sat down beside her. If I had known what would happen because of what I did next, all the terrible consequences that would follow, I want to say that I wouldn’t have done it, but actually, when I think about that morning at Summerland, the dusty smell, the sunlight descending yellowly through a crack in the clouds, all I remember is how beautiful Yesim looked, even with dark circles under her eyes, and something in me was saying,
now, now, now!
I don’t remember what I said. Something about the cosmological constant—can that be right? And how the expansion of the universe is accelerating, how the stars we see in the sky are the only stars we will ever see, how the stars are retreating from us, in millions of years they’ll be out of sight, and cool, and turn to iron, and the sky will be entirely black, I don’t know, my mind, to change metaphors, was like a forest on fire, and thoughts were leaving it like animals, running away in packs toward a faraway river, but I remember how Yesim looked at me, perplexed, and moved to the far end of the bed. I swung my legs onto the bed and crawled toward her, because it wasn’t fair that I should be such a poor persuader; it wasn’t fair that Richard Ente had done so much harm without passing on to me the power to get what I wanted most in the world.
“No,” Yesim said. “What did I tell you, I can’t do this.”
I kissed the hollow of her collarbone.
“Stop,” she said, but I didn’t stop, and a moment later she encircled my head with her arm, drawing me closer. I worked my fingers through the gap between the buttons of her blouse, and circled her navel with my finger.
“Fuck,” Yesim said.
I took it as an imperative. We sank together; a puff of dust rose from the bed, composed of spores of mold, insect feces, particles of skin left behind by guests who were now in their graves, powdered wallpaper glue, all the dusts that fill a house when it has begun to die. I pulled Yesim’s blouse up and kissed the stiff cup of her bra. “So good,” Yesim said. I sprang her from her hooks and snaps, she slipped my buttons through their slits, our clothes came off, we lay together on the old poisonous mattress, pushing out clouds of dust. The bed’s frame groaned happily, the springs yawned, it was as though the room were waking up, with each thrust a little life came back to the building. Soon hot water would be running in the pipes, maids would do their dusting, bellhops would buff their shoes and set their caps on straight, then come to attention as the grumble of the first car echoed up the road, the fire would be lit, the registry clerk would uncap his pen and prepare himself to write on the first page of his new book, the first new name.
“Yes,” Yesim said, “yes yes yes!”
We lay there, just breathing, then Yesim felt the wet spot on the mattress and cried out, “What did you do?” She jumped up and gathered her clothes in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but Yesim was already running. I ran after her, barefoot, naked, down the stairs, but she wouldn’t stop; then I heard another voice say, “Yesh?” Kerem and a man who was probably his architect stood in the lobby, and now Yesim was in Kerem’s arms.
“Yesh, what happened?” Kerem asked, then he saw me. His face changed, and a look appeared on it that I had never seen before, but that I understood at once. Fury. I’d seen the black eye he got in Philadelphia; I’d seen him at fifteen, kicking rocks and throwing beer cans, but I never figured out, never bothered to figure out, what he was feeling. Fury. I think he must have had it all along: fury at his parents drove him from Thebes and fury at the world brought him back, fury at the world that had fucked his sister up. Maybe that was the reason for the restoration, the secret project, maybe it was intended to keep Yesim interested, to keep her in Thebes. I was intended to help her too; it was as if Kerem had brought me in to help her, and now look what I’d done. Fury! Kerem lunged at me and I ran. I don’t know how I got past him; I guess my desire to disappear was greater than his desire to catch me. I ran through the grass to Yesim’s car and got in the car and locked the door. Kerem was shouting. He banged on the windshield with his fists. I noticed that I was sitting on something sharp, I reached under my buttock and felt the plastic haft of an automobile key.
“Sorry,” I mouthed to Kerem, and I started the car.
He followed me, still shouting, as I backed up until the road was wide enough to turn around, beating the roof, the side windows, the hatchback, shouting words at me that I couldn’t make out through the solid car. I drove back down the rutted road and after maybe a quarter of a mile the black Explorer appeared in the rearview mirror. I drove faster; the Outback bounced down the hill and skidded onto Route 23. I drove west, away from Thebes, too fast in the middle of the road. My teeth were chattering. Maybe I can go now, I thought. Maybe I can just keep going, take 23 to 88, 88 to 86, 86 to 90, and cross the country that way. I wasn’t wearing any clothes, I didn’t have any money, but maybe that was the only way I would ever leave Thebes. I fumbled on the unfamiliar dashboard for the heat and the radio came on. Gautier del Hum was bringing us the greatest hits of the 1980s and today. I wanted to turn the radio off but I couldn’t find the control again, or the switch for the heat, and it was too much, I had to get my bearings, to figure out how the car worked. I stopped in the middle of the road and I’d just found the button for the radio when there was a sound.
The Explorer ran into the Outback; the Outback gave way before the Explorer. In another century, in another country, it might have been a tragedy, but these cars weren’t built for tragedy. These were family cars; they crumpled where they could; beyond that they stood firm. There was a crunch, a curse, a hiss as the air bag let out its air. Then Kerem was standing beside the Outback, looking in through the window. He asked if I was all right.
“I think so,” I said.
Kerem tugged at the driver’s door but it wouldn’t open. He walked around the wreck and tried the passenger door. “I think we’re going to have to cut you out,” he said. He went to the Explorer for his phone, then came back. “Why did you stop, anyway?”
“I couldn’t find the heat.”
“You what?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” Kerem said, “
you’re
sorry? You asshole, these aren’t even your cars.”
In a quarter of an hour the tow truck came, its yellow lights flashing. Charles climbed down with his cane and limped over to us. He saw me naked and looked away, embarrassed. “Man,” he said, “this brings back memories,” and it was only then that I realized my father had done much the same thing thirty-one years earlier.

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