Luminous Airplanes (23 page)
On the way home from Hudson, I stopped for lunch at a diner. I was still angry at my mothers, but as I replayed our conversations in my memory, and came up with even more devastating things that I might have said, I found myself thinking of the story Celeste had told me on Saturday, and its conclusion:
I became more cautious.
And soon I found myself thinking about Yesim.
We’re all creatures of more or less the same species dancing around on this planet for only an eyeblink and then forever gone,
Richard Ente had written. What was the point of being cautious? I borrowed a phone book from the cashier and called Snowbird. The secretary said Yesim was out of the office for a few days, and I said, OK, I’ll try her at home. The secretary must have recognized my voice, because she said, “Actually, she’s gone away for a rest, but I’m not supposed to say that. Do you want to leave a message?”
I became more cautious.
And soon I found myself thinking about Yesim.
We’re all creatures of more or less the same species dancing around on this planet for only an eyeblink and then forever gone,
Richard Ente had written. What was the point of being cautious? I borrowed a phone book from the cashier and called Snowbird. The secretary said Yesim was out of the office for a few days, and I said, OK, I’ll try her at home. The secretary must have recognized my voice, because she said, “Actually, she’s gone away for a rest, but I’m not supposed to say that. Do you want to leave a message?”
“No message,” I said. I guessed where Yesim was.
The Pines sat on a hill about fifteen minutes northwest of Albany, in a place where the suburbs began to give way to forest. A double row of pine trees stood alongside the driveway, as if to demonstrate that this at least was a place where words and things corresponded. I parked by what looked like the gatehouse, a pink cottage with lace curtains in the windows. It was unseasonably warm, and the last cicadas of the second millennium C.E. were clicking away in the tall grass. The feeling of the place was secluded but not confined: there was no fence, no gate, no signs warning unauthorized persons to keep out. In fact, I thought, the Pines didn’t look all that different from Summerland. Put in a big swimming pool and an ornamental garden and the two places could have been siblings. I talked to an attendant in the pink cottage, who made a phone call and directed me onward to the main house. “Wait on the patio,” he said, “she’ll meet you there.” I walked up a crunching gravel path and found myself facing a big gabled Victorian which could have belonged to an Albany industrialist a century ago. Some outbuildings stood farther away, former sheds and stables, probably. I sat at a white metal table strewn with pine needles and closed my eyes. The low sun sent light slantwise through the trees; a bird called out softly and got no answer. This was the kind of place you’d want to go after you died, I thought: not heaven with its harps and clouds and cherubic whatnot, but a quiet hill in the middle of nowhere, with some cabins, some grass, a fireplace to keep you warm in the winter. Then I opened my eyes; Yesim was coming out of the main house, dressed in a long gray sweater and jeans and a baseball cap. She looked gaunt and tired.
I remembered where I was, and what Yesim was doing here, and I opened my arms and mouth to express my dismay, but before I could speak there was a terrible howling overhead. A passenger jet was falling out of the sky; as I watched, it dropped rapidly toward us and disappeared behind the trees at the top of the hill. I must have looked terrified; Yesim laughed and, when the howl faded to a rumble, said, “The airport’s just over there.”
“This is a hell of a place for a sanatorium,” I said.
“It takes getting used to,” Yesim agreed, “but one of the things about being crazy is, you have to put up with a lot of interruption.” She told me that the Pines once belonged to an Albany banker—so my guess was more or less right—but when the airport was built his grandchildren had donated the house and land to a hospital. The property had lost so much value, there was no point trying to sell it. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s not a very busy airport.”
“How are you feeling?” I asked after a moment.
“I don’t entirely know,” Yesim said. “I’ve only been here a couple of days.”
“Yesim,” I began, but she interrupted: “If you’ve come to tell me that you’re sorry about what happened, forget it. I should come with a warning label.”
“You did come with a warning label,” I said.
“But I didn’t push you away, did I?”
“You didn’t push me away.”
“That’s my problem,” Yesim said.
She told me that after Summerland, it was as if she’d slipped backward in time, toward some earlier and more dangerous self. She’d tried to hold on to the Yesim who ran Snowbird and generally kept things going, but it was no use; that Yesim now seemed to her like a character in a play, a role she’d studied without ever really understanding its motivations. Why shouldn’t she fuck whoever she liked? What was the use of restraint? She came up to Albany and slept with a friend of Mark’s. “Then Mark left me and I realized I was in serious trouble again. So here I am,” Yesim said, spreading her palms upward on the white table. “Did you just come to say hello, or is there something you want?”
That was when I realized something that has probably been obvious for a long time: the Yesim I’d wanted to fall in love with ever since I saw her at the Kountry Kitchen was the one who was ten years old and still playing at
Man and Woman.
But that Yesim was no longer anywhere to be found—if she had ever been anything other than a creation of my memory. The Yesim who was waiting for me to speak was the only Yesim in existence, and, for the first time, I saw her. Before my eyes the duck changed back into a rabbit. It was a very strange moment.
Man and Woman.
But that Yesim was no longer anywhere to be found—if she had ever been anything other than a creation of my memory. The Yesim who was waiting for me to speak was the only Yesim in existence, and, for the first time, I saw her. Before my eyes the duck changed back into a rabbit. It was a very strange moment.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Another airplane roared by, coming in for a landing.
“Forget it,” Yesim said. “Do you want the tour?”
She led me across the lawn to the mansion, and into a marble-floored hall, where a stone cherub perched on the edge of a stone bowl, his mouth open, as though to vomit. “This is the dining hall,” she said, opening a door and showing me in to a big room with a polished wooden floor, long tables, heavy-looking chairs. “The food is better than you’d think. The other night we had lobster rolls! Really, I don’t know why anyone lives out there.” Yesim gestured toward a mullioned window through which we could see only grass and trees. “Except, I guess, that no one can afford to stay here forever. Come on, I’ll show you the library.”
She showed it to me—it wasn’t so much a library as a comfortable room in which to read, or sleep, or write letters, which, she told me, people here still did. The Pines was probably one of the last places in America to make use of the U.S. Mail for personal correspondence. “In twenty years the only people who write letters at all will probably be in mental institutions,” she said. “Just imagine, the postal system will exist only to carry letters from one nuthouse to another.” I asked where the other people were, and she said, “Mostly in their rooms. In the morning we all get up early for Group, and after that there are classes and individual therapy, so by lunch we’re pretty worn out.” Yesim led me out the back door and down a gentle grass slope to the vegetable garden, where some yellow-orange pumpkins were pushing their way out of a tangle of vines, like moons emerging from behind stringy clouds.
“There’s a pond, do you want to see it?” Yesim asked.
“Is it OK if I pass?”
“It’s better. Let’s sit down and have a cigarette.” I took one from her and we sat on a bench by the garden, our feet pushing against the plastic fence that kept the deer away. “How’s the packing?” Yesim asked.
I told her what had happened with my mothers, and about Richard Ente’s letter. “I guess he was crazy,” I said, “but at the same time, I can’t help wondering whether my mothers could have saved him. Even if Marie didn’t run away to Denver she might have been able to do something.”
“It sounds like a terrible situation for everyone,” Yesim said. “Your mother was so young, and Richard was sort of taking advantage of her. And maybe your grandparents didn’t know what was going on. Kids that age don’t usually confide in their parents, at least not about sex. I certainly didn’t.”
“But they could have saved him! If Marie had just gone there, he might still be alive.” But it occurred to me that Richard Ente had been the same age as my grandfather. Even if Marie had saved him, by now he would probably be dead. I began to cry. I was crying for Richard Ente, who died alone in Colorado, but also for Swan, wherever he was, if he was still alive at all; I was crying for my grandfather, who’d died alone in his cluttered study. I was crying for all the people it was too late to help, even if there had never been a way to help them, even if they had died before I was born. I was crying because there was nothing else I could do.
Yesim touched my arm. “One thing they tell us here is that the only person you can ever really save is yourself.”
“Thanks.”
“Although maybe you don’t want to take advice from a person in a mental institution?”
“At this point,” I said, “I’ll take any advice I can get.”
How many times did I visit Yesim? It can’t have been more than four but it seems in retrospect like hundreds. Therapy must have put her in the habit of confessing; she told me about sexual fantasies she’d had as a girl, involving classmates, teachers, friends of her brother,
sex movies
, she called them, which she watched with closed eyes as she waited to fall asleep. “Just fantasies, but fantasy has a way of becoming reality,” she said, “or rather, it has a way of making life just part of fantasy.” But turning life into a
sex movie
in a town as small as Thebes was dangerous, to say the least. By the time she was fifteen, Yesim was struggling to keep her sexual escapades secret. She found herself lying so much and about so many things, it was like she was a fictional character, or really like several fictional characters, none of whom could know anything about the others. It was a miracle that her parents didn’t find out what,
who
, she was doing; sometimes Yesim suspected they were doing their utmost not to know. The end of that period of her life came when she drove to her math teacher’s house to have the next installment of what was already a fairly useless and unpleasant sexual relationship, and found his seventy-year-old father waiting for her in his wheelchair. He threatened to expose her, so she fucked him in the wheelchair, which creaked back and forth, straining against its brakes. At that point Yesim realized she had to get out of Thebes. Mercifully, she had worked almost as hard in school as she had at covering her tracks; before she turned seventeen she was off to college, where she met a wise poet, W, who taught her to love her desire and forgive her past. All might have been well if she hadn’t moved to Cambridge and fallen in love with Professor X, who took cold, jealous possession of her body, leaving her choked—literally—and starved—literally! Yesim slept with so many people, trying to get over what Professor X had done to her, you would need a whole different kind of alphabet just to keep track of them. That was when she realized there could be no peace between her and unappeasable want, this thing of darkness she’d acknowledged hers, but which refused to be owned, this desire that sucked the world into the vortex of its tight, hopeless little dream. Mark was a truce that Yesim had allowed herself to mistake for an armistice. Now he was gone, Yesim realized that making peace wasn’t enough: she needed to change her life. Here she was, thirty years old, and she hadn’t
done
anything but fuck. She wanted to make something she could be proud of. “The social worker who runs Group says I have all the insights,” she said. “It’s just a matter of putting them together. As if my life were a jigsaw puzzle. Which,” Yesim added after a moment, “is how I’ve been treating it. Trying to stick all those little knobs into those little sockets.” She grimaced. “I guess I’m not cured yet.”
sex movies
, she called them, which she watched with closed eyes as she waited to fall asleep. “Just fantasies, but fantasy has a way of becoming reality,” she said, “or rather, it has a way of making life just part of fantasy.” But turning life into a
sex movie
in a town as small as Thebes was dangerous, to say the least. By the time she was fifteen, Yesim was struggling to keep her sexual escapades secret. She found herself lying so much and about so many things, it was like she was a fictional character, or really like several fictional characters, none of whom could know anything about the others. It was a miracle that her parents didn’t find out what,
who
, she was doing; sometimes Yesim suspected they were doing their utmost not to know. The end of that period of her life came when she drove to her math teacher’s house to have the next installment of what was already a fairly useless and unpleasant sexual relationship, and found his seventy-year-old father waiting for her in his wheelchair. He threatened to expose her, so she fucked him in the wheelchair, which creaked back and forth, straining against its brakes. At that point Yesim realized she had to get out of Thebes. Mercifully, she had worked almost as hard in school as she had at covering her tracks; before she turned seventeen she was off to college, where she met a wise poet, W, who taught her to love her desire and forgive her past. All might have been well if she hadn’t moved to Cambridge and fallen in love with Professor X, who took cold, jealous possession of her body, leaving her choked—literally—and starved—literally! Yesim slept with so many people, trying to get over what Professor X had done to her, you would need a whole different kind of alphabet just to keep track of them. That was when she realized there could be no peace between her and unappeasable want, this thing of darkness she’d acknowledged hers, but which refused to be owned, this desire that sucked the world into the vortex of its tight, hopeless little dream. Mark was a truce that Yesim had allowed herself to mistake for an armistice. Now he was gone, Yesim realized that making peace wasn’t enough: she needed to change her life. Here she was, thirty years old, and she hadn’t
done
anything but fuck. She wanted to make something she could be proud of. “The social worker who runs Group says I have all the insights,” she said. “It’s just a matter of putting them together. As if my life were a jigsaw puzzle. Which,” Yesim added after a moment, “is how I’ve been treating it. Trying to stick all those little knobs into those little sockets.” She grimaced. “I guess I’m not cured yet.”
Maybe she was right, but every time I came to visit there was a little more of her: her eyes brighter, her voice fuller, her hair thicker. She talked about what she’d do when she left the Pines. Maybe she’d apply to graduate school in poetry, or maybe she’d work for a foundation and put her managerial skills to good use. One thing was for sure: she was leaving Thebes. “Too much history here,” she said. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit about winter sports.”
“Not one sheet?” I asked.
Yesim laughed. “I want to live someplace
warm.
”
warm.
”
Airplanes passed over us, carrying people to Albany from distant cities, or carrying them away to places neither of us had ever been, places we were unlikely ever to go, airplanes shining in the sunlight and moving darkly through the cloud. We were going to be all right, I thought. We had made mistakes, but we could still get off the ground.
The warm weather ended. The next time I went to the Pines Yesim met me in the library, and we weren’t alone: two residents shot pool on a magnificent, uneven table, and others sat by the fire, reading newspapers from days and weeks before. Yesim and I shared a pink sofa, tucked away in a corner, but we had trouble finding things to talk about. I thought we might be inhibited by the other people in the room, or maybe we were tired. I didn’t mind the awkwardness. It was as if, after everything that had happened, we were finally having our first date.
“So,” I said, “read any good books lately?”
Yesim bit her lip. “I’m pregnant.” She’d missed her period; she’d peed on the little stick. She was sure. After a while she asked, “What are we going to do?”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” I said.
Yesim burst into tears. She had been up all night thinking about it, she said, and on the one hand a child was the last thing she wanted, when her life was so uncertain. She was a resident at a
residential treatment facility
; she had to worry about her own future and not that of a hypothetical other person, a helpless innocent who had done nothing to deserve a mother like Yesim. “But on the other hand,” she said, “I wonder if this isn’t the change I was looking for?” A child might be what she needed to come out of her erotic tailspin, a creature whose need to be loved was even greater than her own. “Is that very selfish of me?” she asked.
residential treatment facility
; she had to worry about her own future and not that of a hypothetical other person, a helpless innocent who had done nothing to deserve a mother like Yesim. “But on the other hand,” she said, “I wonder if this isn’t the change I was looking for?” A child might be what she needed to come out of her erotic tailspin, a creature whose need to be loved was even greater than her own. “Is that very selfish of me?” she asked.
“People have had children for worse reasons,” I said.
We sat there, not talking, while, with terrible symbolic aptness, billiard balls shot by lunatics rolled over the hills and humps of the pool table and found their way softly to the pockets. The possibility of having a child, which hadn’t existed just a few moments ago, now floated in the air between us. It was something we could look at. And like other sudden revelations, like the sudden ones more than the gradual ones, probably, it had a kind of rightness. If we were floating, as Alice had put it, drifting through a weird time between childhood and adulthood, a child would anchor us. If we were wondering what would happen next, a child would answer that question. If we were frightened, a child would make us brave. Almost immediately, the possibility began to assume a kind of magnificence: a child, offspring of the Rowlands and the Regenzeits! A union of the feuding families, an end to the old fight, in Hegelian terms an
Aufhebung.
I’m sorry: I was trained as a historian and the words still rattle around in my head. A transformation that preserved us even as it carried us forward, into the future.
Aufhebung.
I’m sorry: I was trained as a historian and the words still rattle around in my head. A transformation that preserved us even as it carried us forward, into the future.
“I could do it,” I said.
Yesim looked at me, or seemed to be looking at me, sizing me up. In fact I think she was looking at the possibility of the child too. “You’re not the one who would have to give birth.”
“That’s true. And maybe you wouldn’t want to have me around.”
“If that was how I felt,” Yesim said, “I wouldn’t have told you.”
Time passed. We were still on the sofa. The sky had gone dark. Yesim and I were talking about the future, our words shining in the dimness of the room. Yesim wouldn’t leave Thebes right away: for the time being she would stay in her house, and I’d go on living in my grandparents’ house, at least until it was sold. I’d find someone to sublet my apartment in San Francisco but I wouldn’t give up the lease: we might move there one day. Yesim would finish her treatment program, which had only two weeks to run, then go back to work at Snowbird. Neither of us would say anything to Kerem yet. We wouldn’t talk to our parents, either, until we had made our plans. We would make plans. We wouldn’t commit to anything, but we were both excited about this idea, the idea of the child, and at some point we must both have realized that the possibility had become a decision. Then they called Yesim for dinner. I promised to come back the next day: we had so much to talk about. I drove home in the dark, humming along with the radio, and began, like a Millerite, to prepare for an impending change, the real nature of which I could barely imagine.
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