Separate Flights (12 page)

‘You don't?'

‘No. I don't know why. I just don't.'

The water was boiling, and I poured it into the cup.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I'm sure it was a fine afternoon with Edith.'

‘It was.' I looked at her. She was watching me with pity. ‘It was wonderful.'

I went upstairs. Going up, I could hear the rifles cracking. That night I went to see Edith and Hank. They were drinking coffee at the kitchen table; the dishes were still there from dinner, and the kitchen smelled of broiled fish. From outside the screen door I said hello and walked in.

‘Have some coffee,' Hank said.

I shook my head and sat at the table.

‘A drink?' he said.

‘Aye. Bourbon.'

Edith got up to pour it.

‘I think I'll take in a movie,' Hank said.

Edith was holding the bottle and watching me, and it was her face that told me how close I was to crying. I shook my head: ‘There's no need—'

But he was up and starting for the back door, squeezing my shoulder as he passed. I followed him out.

‘Hank—'

He turned at his car.

‘Listen, I ought to dedicate my novel to you.' He smiled and took my hand. ‘You helped get it done. It's so much easier to live with a woman who feels loved.'

We stood gripping hands.

‘Jack? You okay, Jack?'

‘I'm okay. I'll be laughing soon. I'm working on the philosophy of laughter. It is based on the belief that if you're drowning in shit, buoyancy is the only answer.'

When I got back to the kitchen, Edith was waiting with the drink. I took it from her and put it on the table and held her.

‘Hank said he'd guessed long ago,' she said. ‘He said he was happy for us and now he's sad for us. Which means he was happy you were taking care of me and now he's sorry you can't.'

I reached down for the drink and, still holding her, drank it fast over her shoulder and then quietly we went to the guest room. In the dark she folded back the spread and sheet; still silent and standing near each other we slowly undressed, folding clothes over the backs of chairs, and I felt my life was out of my hands, that I must now play at a ritual of mortality and goodbye, the goodbye not only to Edith but to love itself, for I would never again lie naked with a woman I loved, and in bed then I held her tightly and in the hard grip of her arms I began to shudder and almost wept but didn't, then I said: ‘I can't make love, I'm just too sad, I—' She nodded against my cheek and for a long while we quietly held each other and then I got up and dressed and left her naked under the sheet and went home.

Like a cat with corpses, Terry brings me gifts I don't want. When I come home at night she hands me a drink; she cooks better than any woman I know, and she watches me eat as though I were unwrapping a present that she spent three months finding. She never fails to ask about my day, and in bed she responds to my hesitant, ambivalent touch with a passion I can never match. These are the virtues she has always had and her failures, like my own, have not changed. Last summer it took the house about five weeks to beat her: she fought hard but without resilience; she lost a series of skirmishes, attacks from under beds, from closets, the stove, the vegetable bin, the laundry basket. Finally she had lost everything and since then she has waked each day in her old fashion which will be hers forever: she wakes passively, without a plan; she waits to see what the day will bring, and so it brings her its worst: pots and clothes and floors wait to be cleaned. We are your day, they tell her. She pushes them aside and waits for something better. We don't fight about that anymore, because I don't fight; there is no reason to. Except about Edith, she is more jealous than ever; perhaps she is too wise to push me about Edith; but often after parties she accuses me of flirting. I probably do, but it is meaningless, it is a jest. She isn't violent anymore. She approaches me with troubled eyes and says maybe she's wrong but it seemed to her that I was a long time in the kitchen with—I assure her that she's wrong, she apologizes, and we go to bed. I make love to her with a detachment that becomes lust.

Now that it is winter the children and I have put away our bicycles, oiled and standing side by side in the cellar, the three of them waiting, as Sean says, for spring and summer. We go sledding. The college has a hill where students learn to ski and on weekends it is ours; Natasha and Sean always beg Terry to come with us and she always says no, she has work to do, she will go another time. I know what it costs her to say this, I know how she wants to be with us, all of us going shrilly down the hill, and then at the top a thermos of chocolate for the children and a swallow of brandy for mama and papa. But she knows that with the children I'm happy, and she always says she will go another time. We sled and shout for a couple of hours until we're wet and cold, and when we come home with red cheeks Terry gives us hot chocolate.

Last week Hank sold his novel, and Saturday night he and Edith gave a party to celebrate. At noon that day Hank and I ran five miles; the sky was blue then; later in the afternoon clouds came and by night snow was falling. When I went up to his office he had finished writing (he has started another novel) and his girl was there; she is nineteen, a student, and she has long blonde hair and long suede boots and the office smelled of her cigarette smoke. Hank has not started smoking again. He is very discreet about his girl and I think only Terry and I know; we don't talk about it, Terry and I, because she can't. I know it bothers her that she can't, I know she wishes she were different, but she isn't. Edith knows too, about Hank and his girl; they don't lie to each other anymore.

‘It's not love,' she said that night at the party. We had gone to the front porch to breathe and watch the snow. ‘It's marriage. We have a good home for Sharon. We respect each other. There's affection. That's what I wish you could have: it's enough. It's sad, watching you two. She loves you and you never touch her, you don't look at her when you talk. Last summer, after we stopped seeing each other, I went to the zoo that week, I took Sharon to the zoo; and we went to see the gorilla: he was alone in his cage, and there were women with their children watching him. They're herbivores—did you know that? They're gentle herbivores. I don't like zoos anyway and I shouldn't have gone but it was such an awful week, finding out how to live this time, I'd been through that in May and then there was you and then in July there wasn't, so I took Sharon to the zoo. And I looked in the gorilla's eyes and he looked so human—you know?—as if he
knew
everything, how awfully and hopelessly and forever trapped he was. It's not like watching a flamingo. He was standing there looking at us looking at him, all the young mothers in their pants and skirts the colors of sherbet and the jabbering children. Then he reached down like this and shit in his hand. He was watching us. He held up the handful of shit—' and she held her hand up, shoulder-high, palm toward me ‘—and then he brought it to his mouth and licked it. His eyes were darting from side to side, watching us. They were merry and mischievous, his eyes. Then he licked it again. Around me the mothers were gasping and some of the children were laughing; then they all hurried away. Murmuring. Distracting their children. But I stayed, and he looked at me like he was smiling and then he showed me his shit again and then he licked it and then he showed it to me again; he almost looked inquisitive; but by then I was squeezing Sharon's hand and looking in his eyes and I was crying, standing there weeping on a sunny afternoon in front of a gorilla, and he watched me for a while, curious at first, and then he lowered his hand with the shit and we just stood looking at each other, he was looking into my eyes, and he knew that I knew and I knew that he knew, and if he could have cried he would have too. Then I left. And after a few weeks when I was able to see someone besides myself I'd see you and I'd think of that trapped gorilla, standing in his cage and licking his own shit. And I wanted to cry for you too—not just me, because I love you and can't touch you, can't be alone with you, but I wanted to cry for you. And I did. And I still do. Or at least I feel like it, I cry down in my soul. Oh Jack—are you trying at all?'

‘There's nothing to try with.'

I could not look at her eyes, for I wanted to hold her and there was no use in that now. I moved to the window and looked in; from the couch Terry looked up and smiled; she held the smile when Edith moved into her vision and stood beside me. I turned from the window. Around the streetlight the falling snow was lovely. Terry had stopped watching us after the smile; she was talking ardently with Hank and Roger, and I thought poised like that—a little high on bourbon, talking, being listened to, being talked to—she was probably happy. I raised my glass to the snow and the night.

‘Here's to the soul of Jack Linhart: it has grown chicken wings and flaps near the ground.' I drank. ‘I shall grow old and meek and faithful beside her, and when the long winter comes—' I drank ‘—and her hair is white as snow I shall lay my bent old fingers on her powdered cheek and—'

‘I love you.'

‘Do you still?'

‘Always.'

‘And live with Hank.'

‘He's my husband and the father of my child.'

‘And he's got a Goddamn—All right: I'm sorry. It's bitterness, that's all; it's—'

‘I don't care if he has a girl.'

‘You really don't?'

‘Some women take up pottery, some do knitting.'

‘Oh.'

‘Yes.'

‘I guess I didn't want to know that.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ, I really didn't want to know that. Course there's no reason for you not to have someone, when I can't, when I—Jesus—'

I went inside and got drunk and lost track of Terry until two in the morning, when she brought my coat. I told her I was too drunk to drive. In the car I smelled her perfume, and I thought how sad that is, the scent of perfume on a rejected woman.

‘Edith has a lover,' I said.

‘I know. She told me a month ago.'

‘Do we know him?'

‘Do you want to?'

‘No.'

‘We don't anyway.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I didn't want to talk about it. I think it's sad.'

‘It makes her happy.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘Oh, you can't tell.'

‘Please don't,' she said. She was leaning forward, looking into the snow in the headlights. ‘I know you don't love me. Maybe someday you will again. I know you will. You'll see, Jack: you will. But please don't talk like that, okay? Please, because—' Her voice faltered, and she was quiet.

While she took the sitter home I sat in the dark living room, drinking an ale and looking out the window. In the falling snow I saw a lover for Terry. I went to bed before she got home and next morning I woke first. The sky had cleared and the snow was hard and bright under the sun. While I drank tomato juice in the kitchen Natasha and Sean came downstairs.

‘Get dressed,' I said. ‘We'll go buy a paper.'

‘We should go sledding,' Sean said.

‘All right.'

‘Before breakfast?' Natasha said.

‘Why not?'

‘We've never gone first thing in the morning,' Sean said. ‘It'll be neat.'

‘Okay,' Natasha said. ‘Is Mom awake?'

‘No.'

‘We'll write her a note.'

‘Okay. You write it. And be quiet going upstairs.'

‘We will,' Sean said, and he was gone up the stairs.

‘What should I write?'

‘That we're going sledding at nine and we'll be back about eleven, hungry as hell.'

‘I'll just say hungry.'

I got my coat and filled its pockets with oranges, then went outside and shoveled the driveway while they dressed warmly for the cold morning.

Over the Hill

1

H
ER HAND
was tiny. He held it gently, protectively, resting in her lap, the brocaded silk of her kimono against the back of his hand, the smooth flesh gentle and tender against his palm. He looked at her face, which seemed no larger than a child's and she smiled.

‘You buy me another drink?' she said.

‘Sure.'

He motioned to the bartender, who filled the girl's shot glass with what was supposedly whiskey, though Gale knew it was not and didn't care, then mixed bourbon and water for Gale, using the fifth of Old Crow that three hours earlier he had brought into the bar.

‘I'll be right back,' he said to the girl.

She nodded and he released her hand and slid from the stool.

‘You stay here,' he said.

‘Sure I stay.'

He walked unsteadily past booths where Japanese girls drank with sailors. In the smelly, closet-sized restroom he closed the door and urinated, reading the names of sailors and ships written on the walls, some of them followed by obscenities scrawled by a different, later hand. The ceiling was bare. He stepped onto the toilet and reaching up, his coat tightening at the armpits and bottom rib, he printed with a ballpoint pen, stopping often to shake ink down to the point again:
Gale Castete, Pvt. USMC, Marine Detachment, USS Vanguard Dec 1961
. He stood on the toilet with one hand against the door in front of him, reading his name. Then he thought of her face tilted back, the roots of her hair brown near the forehead when it was time for the Clairol again, the rest of it spreading pale blonde around her head, the eyes shut, the mouth half open, teeth visible, and the one who saw this now was not him—furiously he reached up to write an obscenity behind his name, then stopped; for reading it again, he felt a gentle stir of immortality, faint as a girl's whispering breath into his ear. He stepped down, was suddenly nauseated, and left the restroom, going outside into the alley behind the bar, where he leaned against the wall and loosened his tie and collar and raised his face to the cold air. Two Japanese girls entered the alley from a door to his left and walked past him as if he were not there, arms folded and hands in their kimono sleeves, their lowered heads jabbering strangely, like seagulls.