Thanksgiving (11 page)

We never did have children, but what I didn’t understand at the time was that we were creating a past together. It wasn’t in any sense a glamorous or interesting past, but it existed, and as soon as we broke up it started to undermine the present. The second time is never the same as the first, even when it’s identical. Think of double bars in music.

The past can’t take on the present on its own terms. Anyone who’s ever revisited a childhood home or school friend knows that. But in this apparent defeat lies its abiding victory, because absence is so much more insidiously powerful than presence. Those places and people have nothing to say to us now, but they did then. We’ve lost something, and our very vagueness about precisely what that something is makes the brash, shallow immediacy of the present look like fast food compared to a real meal.

I knew all this already. I’d learned it the year after Sally dumped me and hooked up with her future husband and the father of her children. I’d tortured myself with images of the happy times we’d spent together, even when in truth they hadn’t been particularly happy. But I was twenty then, and as soon as I could I headed up to London and made myself an alternative life. It was Leah who’d saved me, I realized now, looking at her picture with new affection. She’d taken me in, and for all the problems that came with her, she’d exorcized the power of Sally to get at me. That had been then, this was now.

What I hadn’t understood at the time was the obvious fact that every now becomes a then in its turn. Leah too had slipped into past mode, with all the power that gave her to manipulate me even more thoroughly than she had when we’d been together. To rid myself of her, I’d fallen in love with Judy from Fulham. There she was, a sulky and adorable ‘bird’ of a period too recent for her hair and clothes and posture to look anything other than quaintly retro. As of course did I, in my embroidered shirts, bell-bottoms and facial hair just about everywhere you can grow it without a surgical implant. Determined not to smile and to impress the camera, I came across now as callow and insecure.

Lucy and I had talked about having children early on, and agreed that we were too old. Neither of us wanted to propagate another spoiled orphan whose parents, once it reached puberty, would seem to its peers like exhausted relics from another era. ‘Middle-aged parents are like recent converts,’ she’d said once. ‘Too much, too late.’ But I’d thought a lot about the child we were not going to have, and looking at the pictures of myself when young I seemed to recognize him. I felt paternal towards him, a mixture of patronization and pity. I could have been him, I thought, had things turned out differently.

I knocked the photographs roughly together, stuffed them into the ‘Motion Sickness’ bag in the flap on the back of the seat in front of me, then shoved them back. I knew I’d forget to retrieve them when we arrived. A year earlier, I’d wanted to have them, so much so that I’d even risked an appeal to Anne. Now they filled me with disgust. They represented the incontrovertible evidence that I’d always sold my soul to the past. The difference was that then I could hope to find another woman to redeem me. After Lucy, I didn’t believe that any more. The only person who could redeem me now was Lucy, and Lucy was dead.

I fell into a shallow sleep for an indeterminate period, occasionally surfacing for a painful moment to rearrange a limb which had gone numb. These waves came closer together, and finally I wakened altogether and looked out of the window. There was nothing to be seen but the usual congregation of stars overhead, and a lumpy layer of cloud below that needed only a few trailer homes dotted about to look exactly like the desert I had driven across to meet the late Darryl Bob.

Then the hand appeared.

It was next to my right elbow, with something clasped between two of its fingers. A woman’s hand, I thought instinctively, and not in her first youth. I glanced at Madame Dupont, but she was still absorbed in the movie. Besides, this hand, I now realized, was coming from the row of seats behind me, and what it was holding was a photograph. It took me another moment to realize that it must be one of the ones I’d dropped earlier.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

There was no answer. I tried to turn to see who was there, but no one was visible in the gap between the seats. I inspected the photo. It showed me in my early twenties, leaning with studied nonchalance against a telephone pole covered in posters for rock concerts and anti-war demos. This time I had allowed myself a slight smile. There was a brick wall behind, no one else visible. I was in my full mutton-chops, no-beard period, but there was no other clue to where or when it had been taken, still less why and by whom.

I turned it over. On the back, in a rather stylish cursive hand, was written a telephone number and an address. Finally I remembered. The date was 1971 and I’d been in my post-graduate year studying journalism at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. My best friend Pete, a History major, had come out there from the West Coast, and at some point his girl-friend from San Francisco had come to visit him.

Alexis Levinger was Jewish, but liked to pass herself off as Hispanic, under the
nom de guerre
Alma Latina. She was lively and petite, and it soon became apparent that we quite fancied each other. We both loved Pete too much for anything to come of it during the visit, but I remembered now that, when she was leaving, Alexis had told me in a joky, insinuating way that I really should come out to the coast sometime. San Francisco was a great town, she’d said, and she’d be glad to show me around. About a week later, she’d sent me the photograph I was holding now, with her telephone number and address. There was no message, which made the message still more clear.

What struck me now, though, was the address itself: ‘567 Claymore Street, near the Free Clinic’. Darryl Bob Allen had told me that at that time Lucy was living on Haight, just round the block from the Free Clinic. I’d considered taking Alexis up on her offer, but never got around to it. Money was a problem, plus loyalty to Pete, and somehow it had never happened. But if I had, I now realized suddenly, I might have met Lucy. In fact I’d have been almost bound to at least see her in the street or at a party.

We could have met, I thought. We could have got together. We could have had children.

Until I met Lucy, I’d never thought much about children except as a disastrous scenario – a plane crash, say – which was unlikely but always possible in certain situations. Lucy thought about them all the time. Not just her own kids, but other people’s. I’d seen her eyeing babies in supermarkets in a way which could have got her arrested if there had been anything remotely sinister or suspicious about her.

There was no such risk. She’d had an unforced naturalness in this respect, as in every other. However she lay, sprawled out on a bed stripped by our love-making, she looked relaxed and beautiful, like sand formed by waves. I had never met a woman with whom I instinctively wanted to have a child, and when I did, it was too late. Now I was doubly haunted, by a past and a future, both unreal: the people we’d been then, and the children we’d never had.

‘I hate the past,’ Lucy had often said to me dismissively. I hated it too, but with the kind of hatred which, unlike hers, is itself a form of engagement.

I must have dozed off again. A voice awoke me, a voice I knew well. Lucy was asking me to hold her, muttering something about a bad dream. That was normal enough. She had used to sleep badly, often waking at odd hours with fears I could neither comprehend nor effectively dispel, as though they’d blown in from some previous existence where I had not been a player. The saving grace in these uncertainties was that I could feel her physical presence to my right. Couples always have their own place in the bed. I was window, she was aisle. I reached out sleepily and grasped her arm, then her breast.

My hand was abruptly pushed away. I opened my eyes and realized that I’d been groping my neighbour. I apologized profusely, first in English and then in French, and was given to understand that the matter was closed and that as long as it did not repeat itself no further action would be taken. Madame Dupont even managed to intimate that such approaches were a regular occurrence for her, the tax she had to pay on her devastating beauty, and that as long as they were not carried too far she was prepared to tolerate – in certain circumstances perhaps even welcome – them, but with her husband seated just a few rows back,
hélas
. . .

I apologized again, and reflected on the fact that if I’d made a similar mistake with a certain type of American woman I could now have been facing a million-dollar law-suit. I dared not go to sleep again. I dug out my Walkman and a tape, which I inserted. Shortly afterwards, an overhead sign lit up with a loud ping and the captain’s voice came on the PA system, informing us that he was expecting turbulence up ahead. Even before he had finished speaking, the first ripples of bad air kicked in, making the plane shudder and murmur.

Someone was making her way down the aisle towards me. The cabin lights had been dimmed to improve visibility on the movie screens, and at first I thought it was one of the suited attendants. Then I realized it was a passenger, a woman who had presumably been caught in the bathroom when the seat-belt sign went on. Despite the motion of the plane, she made her way quite serenely along, head lowered to check her progress. It was only after she had passed that I realized that Lucy was getting younger.

I unbuckled my seat belt and clambered clumsily over Madame Dupont’s legs. One of the attendants ran down the aisle and pushed me back.

‘I must ask you to remain seated until the fasten-seat-belt sign is turned off, sir, for your safety and that of the other passengers.’

I looked at the seat behind me, from which the photograph taken by Alexis Levinger had appeared. It was vacant. The window seat was taken by one of those big, placid, corn-fed Midwest guys, wearing a check shirt and a bolo tie. His in-flight baggage was strewn all over the adjoining seat.

It was another ten minutes or so before the seat-belt sign pinged off again. There was no one in the seats behind who looked remotely like Lucy. At the very aft were another set of bathrooms, both of them occupied. It occurred to me that the person I had seen might have been going to rather than from the toilets, so I waited until the occupants vacated them. I smiled embarrassedly at an elderly Asian gentleman and a little boy who reminded me oddly of Daniel, Claire’s son, with his sturdy, capable demeanour.

I knew now, with utter and total conviction, what had happened to Darryl Bob. Lucy had appeared to him during the night after I left and he had shot himself. ‘Honey, I’m home!’ She had once half-jokingly termed our relationship a
folie à deux
. What happens in such a case when one of the two participants is dead? But no one except me would ever believe it. The Nye County police would come get me and strap me down in their big yellow chair. The past had won.

By now the first movie of the night had ended and there was a line of people waiting to enter the cubicles. I waved them ahead and went to stand by the emergency exit, with its window giving a view of the cloud cover below and the stars overhead, a chart of infinite yesterdays. Everything there is as it was millions of years ago, like a city in which the further you look from the centre, the further back in time you go. Is it any wonder we are obsessed with the past, when it sits on our heads like a Homburg?

On the flight to Reno, I’d been seated next to a pilot who worked for a firm which leased private jets. We’d got chatting, and I’d asked him about the accident which was then in the news where a flight from Los Angeles had gone down in the Pacific after the crew reported problems with the tail stabilizers. He was an agreeable Southerner, and I had felt able to pose questions I might have hesitated to bring up in another context. What would actually have happened? What would it have been like for the people aboard?

‘Did you know someone who was on the flight?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Just ghoulish curiosity.’

He nodded.

‘Only I thought I should ask, see, because some of this stuff you might not want to hear about if you’d known any of the victims.’

‘No problem. Go ahead.’

‘Well, it looks like they were at about thirty thousand feet when the thing started. “We’re inverted,” the crew told ATC at one point. Okay, inverted means flying upside down. At which point the floor becomes the ceiling and vice versa. So anyone who’s got their seat belt on would be hanging from it, strapped across their gut about ten feet off the ceiling which is now the floor. The pressure on their abdomens, plus of course sheer terror, would almost certainly cause a significant number of them to void their bladders and possibly bowels at around that moment in time.’

He was talking guy talk, reclaiming the uncontrollable with irony and toughness. He glanced at me, wanting to know if I wanted to know more. I did.

‘Okay, so that’s the ones who were strapped in correctly. But lots of people won’t have been, and they’d have fallen, incurring various injuries in the process. The cabin attendants, for a start-off, who are supposed to be the authority figures in a scenario like this. That will spread more panic. Plus a lot of babies and children, and some old people who didn’t understand the announcement or react fast enough. Also, some of the mothers probably deliberately released their belts to try and help their children as they fell.

‘So you’ve got all these people, many of them seriously injured, sloshing around in the various bodily fluids on the ceiling which is now the floor, and guess what happens next? The flight crew regain control and the aircraft rights itself. They dive from thirty thou down to around fifteen, then pull out of the dive and level off. The problem here is that the ceiling of the plane at some point must have become the ceiling once again, so all the people lying sprawled on it would be slammed down under several Gs to what is now once again the floor.

‘It’s good news and bad news time. The good news is that things are the right way up. The bad news is that a large number of the pax will be suffering from massive physical trauma in one form or another. This must have been a scene pretty much from hell, and the fact that the plane once again looked like a plane may well have kind of made it worse. I mean, here’s a normal boring “This-they-call-a-snack?” flight, except the place is filled with unrecognizable figures, some of whom might well be your nearest and dearest, covered in blood and piss and shit and vomit, and now screaming in agony and terror as the plane takes another lurch, then turns down into its final nosedive.