A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (5 page)

“No,” I say. There is no sense in starting. I could ask her now the name of that pub at Highgate, the coach stop, Judith would remember. But: no.

The King’s Head is empty now: four o’clock. By seven, every English starlet on the coast will be in here. “Judith. Hey. Don’t cry.” I push her glass across so it just touches her elbow. “Judith. Here. Drink this. How about the turkey sandwich?”

She nods, her head in her hands.

“Don’t cry,” I say. “It’s possible to write a good movie. It’s a livable country. Judith, you are the most clever woman I ever met. But, you were right about that little guy. He doesn’t want the girl. He wants to run back and forth. He wants to jump the barrels and not get burned.”

OLYMPUS HILLS

I
LEFT
THE
party early, finding my coat on the bed, surprising Karen and Darrel, who stood when I entered. “It’s funny,” I said, trying to ease their embarrassment, “but I know every coat in this pile.” I lifted Cindy’s rabbit fur jacket. “For five points. Careful: she does not wear this thing to work.”

“Cindy,” Karen said, her voice husky.

I had just left Cindy in the kitchen. She and Tom were sitting on the counter drinking tequila and having a heart to heart. Whenever people drink tequila, they always talk about it, the worm, a war story or two, and then maybe mushroom experience and it’s a heart to heart. Cindy was wearing a white silk dress, sprayed with little red dots which turned out to be strawberries. I have been in these kitchens before and when Cindy hoists her bottom onto the kitchen counter and, nursing a tequila and lemon between her knees, starts telling drug experiences, it’s just enough. Even Tom sitting up there by her looked a little spent. He’s too big a guy to sit on a kitchen counter and look natural anyway.

Karen and Darrel had forgotten to let go of each other’s hands and their faces were smashed red from all the kissing. They looked like the two healthiest people at the party. I was surprised, because I’d seen Karen with another guy from the firm, a programmer named Chuck who does our board overlays, at a dozen lunches in the last month. And I admired Darrel’s ability to struggle in there with Karen, while we could all hear his wife, Ellen, singing along with Tommy James and the Shondells in the other room. It was a small house for Olympus Hills.

“Victor, Ted, Sharon, Tom, Ellen,” I said, laying the coats aside, until I found the tan raincoat. “Lisa,” I said, looking at it. The bed was a little archaeology of the party: all those layers of beautiful coats. Victor and his new leather flight jacket. Tom and his bright swollen parka. And Lisa’s classy raincoat second from the bottom. She must have arrived early.

“My coat,” I looked up and said to Darrel, and when I saw how embarrassed he still was, leaning there against the wall as if I was going to scold them, I added, “I’m leaving early. No problem.” I patted my coat. “I’d say you’ve got an hour before another coat is touched. I’ll close the door. Happy Valentines.”

I didn’t put my coat on in the hall, because I didn’t want Ted or Sharon to make a fuss, to cry out, “Hal, you’re leaving! Before charades! You can’t leave before charades!”

I wanted to leave before charades. I’d played charades with this group before and it was worse than college. Victor, Ted, and about five others played solely to humiliate everyone. They would select unproduced plays from Gilbert and Sullivan, and then explode when people would claim to have not heard of them. “You ignorami!” I’d heard Victor scream. “You aborigines! Swinesnouts! This is incredible.”

My wife, Lisa, could be wicked too. She would always write the sexiest titles she could, knowing that some woman on the other team, in the drunken spirit of camaraderie that sometimes waved over the group, would embarrass herself fully doing
How to Make Love to a Man
and be the talk of the office for a week. I remember in detail the vision of Cindy writhing before the group one night, clutching both her breasts with her hands, thrusting her pelvis at her team as if to drive them back on the couch. I don’t remember the name of the literary work she was describing.

I wanted to slip through the living room as if I were getting some fresh air and then be gone. Lisa had come from work tonight and she had her own car; I’d see her at home later. There was a time when we had one car, and we used to go places together. It was a used silver Tempest, the car I had in graduate school. The original owner had applied zodiac stickers in circles on all the doors.

Lisa always claims to hate these parties. We’ll be dressing at home and she’ll wave the hairdrier at me, making predictions. “Karen will wear that blue mini and go after Lou. They’ll have a clam dip diluted with sour cream. Generic sour cream. Did I say generic sour cream? Wayne will move in on me when I sit on the couch and tell me about his kids for two hours. He thinks that’s the way you flirt. Ted will bring his oldies tape. Ellen will be the first one to sing. Tom will be the first one drunk. You’ll get drunk too and come on to Cindy, and we’ll have our little quarrel on the way home. Are you ready? Let’s go.”

And she used to be right. I would get drunk. I’d end up singing with Ellen and, later, making my three point five crass comments to some of the women. Wayne would do his sincerity routine for Lisa on the couch. He was no dummy; she was always the loveliest woman in the whole house. I’d end up in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with Cindy, sometimes leaning against Cindy and then the counter. It was a party, wasn’t it?

That was then. Lisa wouldn’t be right tonight, about me. February. It had been a long winter already: five, six parties since New Year’s. No wonder Karen had been able to spot Cindy’s coat. Too much snow, too much fog; by Friday night, no one wanted to go home. Everybody was kind of surprised suddenly to have money, but no one knew what to do about it. Most of us had Ted’s oldies tape memorized the way you come to know an album; when a song ends, you know what’s coming next. We knew what brand everyone smoked and who would lend you a cigarette gladly. We knew that Ted smoked Kools because he’d learned in college that no one would borrow them. We knew what everyone drank and how much. We knew where people would be sitting by eleven o’clock. I knew it all and I just wanted to go home. I was trying.

I eased by a group standing by the kitchen door, and edged around the two couples dancing to the Supremes. Ellen waved at me from across the buffet table with the breadstick she was using as a microphone. Baby Love. I could see Lisa sitting on the couch. She was smiling at Wayne who sat on the carpet by her knees. I know all her smiles and this was a real one. I had to thread between Victor and his new girlfriend to reach the door and then I was out in the snow.

Pulling on my coat, I walked down the trail in the falling snow, right into the deer. I didn’t actually hit him, but by the time we both looked up we were at most three feet apart. It was a young male. He had a fine pair of forked antlers and a broad black nose, wet and shiny in the light from the yard lamp. I immediately backed up four or five steps to give him room, but he stood there, casually, looking at me. There were deer all over the city because of the snowfall, but I had never, ever, seen one this close.

I backed to the door, slowly, thinking to show someone. I forgot myself. I wanted Lisa to come out and see this guy. I wanted Lisa to come out and see this deer and come home with me. She could say, “We’ll pick up my car tomorrow or the day after that,” and steam up the dark with her laugh. I hadn’t realized how lonely I was until I saw his face, his moist eyes, the bone grain of his antlers.

I pushed the door inward and said, “Hey, come see this deer.” Cindy’s face appeared in the opening. Behind her the party seemed to rage; Ellen was singing “Satisfaction,” and the din of conversation was loud and raw and alien.

“What?”

“Look at this deer.”

“What are you talking about?”

I let the door close and stepped back out. She followed me. “What are you talking about?”

“This deer.” I turned and he was gone. I stepped to the corner of the house and was able to glimpse his gray back pass under a yard lamp two houses up.

“Right,” Cindy said, taking my arm. “The deer.” She lobbed her drink, glass and all, into the snowbank, and turned fully to me. Her mouth was warm with tequila, and I could feel the flesh of her back perfectly through the cold silk of her dress. She rose against me, ignoring the cold, or frantic against it, I couldn’t tell which. It was funny there outside the party. When she went for me, I did nothing to stop her. I had made it outside, leaving early, but that was all I could do.

LIFE BEFORE SCIENCE

“Yeah, I know about babies.”

—J
OHN
W
AYNE

in
The Sands of Iwo Jima

I
N FEBRUARY
, I drove Story to New Haven for the post-coital. It was Sunday, and if you want a definition of sterility, try downtown New Haven on the second Sunday in February. The clouds were frozen like old newspapers into the sky, and the small parking lot of the clinic was blasted with frozen litter too. I remember there were a pair of old work gloves in the ice. Looked like somebody trying to get out.

Dr. Binderwitz was meeting us on Sunday because Story had been keeping the basal charts for three months and we had to do the post-coital before Binderwitz, the most prominent fertility expert in the known world, flew off to Houston, Rio, Paris, and Frankfurt to deliver papers at conventions. It was a dark day and the doctor had all the lights in the clinic turned on. The doctor himself is one of the least healthy human beings I have ever met. He is a person who has literally spent years indoors, not grooming. When we shook hands, I was surprised at how soft his hand was, and up close, I could see that his hair was sprinkled with dandruff and larger particles I took to be bits of paper and pillow feather. So there we were with this force-ten genius, anxious to hear what he’d say.

The doctor took Story into the examination room, and I sat with a copy of
Sports Afield,
for a moment angry with the cover artist for making his rearing grizzly so predictable. He’d used all his light in the mouth, even spraying some white points of saliva, and that, coupled with the point of view (from below, as a victim) cancelled any real life or sympathy from the work. It was a cheap shot done in half a day by some ad illustrator. There was no setting for the portrait, except a single pine, and that had been drawn melodramatically small. It looked like a folded umbrella.

I was daydreaming. It was still early in the morning. Story had moved to me long before dawn and we’d made lost, unconscious love. It wasn’t until after I’d rolled out of bed and stood under the shower that I realized we were participating in an experiment.

Story returned, calling me back to the doctor’s office, and then Dr. Binderwitz himself shuffled in, carrying the small prepared slide. He had taken a smear from Story’s cervix, and we watched as he positioned the slide under the microscope. Dr. Binderwitz studied the slide for a minute or two and then asked Story if she wanted to have a look. He told her what knob to rotate for focus.

Then it was my turn. By slowly rotating the control, I was suddenly able to see dozens, maybe hundreds of sperm swimming around. I could see the problem right away. “They’re not all going the same way,” I said. “Which is the right direction?”

It was a little joke, but the doctor said, “They’re not supposed to. Do you see the ones with two tails?”

I bent to the eyepiece again and, after a moment I did see a couple of two-tailed sperm whipping around.

“Is that normal?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” I said, when the doctor was silent, “How does it look?”

“Normal. The sperm are alive. The medium is hospitable.” To Story he said, “Call my office Monday and schedule a histogram early next month. I’ll be back then.”

TWO

SINCE IT
was Sunday, there were Township Cocktails that night, this time at Annette and Hugo Ballowell’s place on the big lake, Mugacook, right across from the college. It had been a long day, but Story was mayor of the town and there would be some skating on the lake later, so we went down.

It was at Township Cocktails at the Ballowells that February night that I first had a glimpse of what the next four months would hold for us. It was that night that I first saw the solution, the radical answers to this baby thing, though I didn’t know it at the time, and it was that night when I came to understand there was a little more to the world than Dr. Binderwitz, even from his intellectual stratosphere, could see.

I don’t really know how it happened, the specific point where I left my senses for . . . my senses. I was in a mild funk that had been solidifying over the last year or so as my painting dried up. McOrson was still selling a few every month in New York, but they were old paintings, some of them over two years and they were the skies, the landscapes at which I had become facile, and which I had come to loathe. The reality was simple: I wasn’t painting and it hurt. So I wasn’t really in a party mood, especially with all the driving, two hours to New Haven, two hours back, and now: cocktails.

Story dressed and drove us down and we ran into Gil Manwaring, the constable, on Foundry Road along the fish pond and he and his two men were parking cars. Story said no thanks and we parked it ourselves and walked four hundred yards in the icy brown dusk, carrying our skates.

The Ballowells’ house is the biggest on Mugacook, the kind of place mistaken for an inn by forty cars every summer. Story and I immediately ran into Ruth Wellner, the county attorney, who had been a classmate of Story’s in Boston and who was now Story’s best friend in Bigville. Ruth and Billy were our age, and were in the first stages of chasing a baby down themselves. Ruth wanted children almost as much as we did, but she couldn’t admit it. She played devil’s advocate. Ruth used to challenge me: “You want children;
you
have them.” She’d go on: “Why do we want kids? What are we going to do with children? Every time we want kids, we ought to get in the car and drive down to K Mart in Torrington. Stay half an hour and we’ll get more parenthood than we bargained for.”

Billy, whom I liked a lot and who is living proof that insurance agents are human beings too, sat on the arm of the couch wearing an expression the most prominent feature of which was its profound sperm-loss pallor. I winked at Billy and he nodded back stiffly, a gesture he’d seen a battle-weary soldier make in some World War II movie. I admired his courage and Ruth’s. The feature of Clomid we all found most unique was the headache each dosage inspired, making intercourse impossible, an irony lost on the chemists.

There is something about women on fertility drugs, something I admire, I suppose, something that gives them an aura: larger than life. It’s hard to explain, but it would be easy to paint. I stood to the side a little as Story and Ruth fell to rapt conversation, their voices the rich female timbre that by its very sound says: hey, we’re calm here; something mature is transpiring. They could have been talking about the township or about the mysteries of estrogen; it was all music to me. I grabbed Billy’s arm. “Let the wives talk, Billy,” I said. “I’ll buy you a cocktail.”

Annette had a buffet that would have run twelve pages in
Ladies’ Home Journal.
It started with a salmon the size of a dog and ended forty feet later with champagne and hot buttered rum. Luckily, Hugo was down at that end of the table sipping his scotch, and when I nodded at it he took us in the kitchen and poured us coffee cups full of Chivas, saying, “I never drank a party drink in my life. It’s February and this,” he held up his glass, “is scotch. Are you two going skating?”

And we did go skating, Hugo, Bill, and I. We had another cup of scotch and then clambered down with Hugo’s hockey equipment, sticks and pucks. The moon had come out full and throwing down a couple of sweaters on one side and two hats on the other, we had a rink. For some reason we had constructed it such that the bonfire was at center ice, and the game was full of wonderful breathers while some hero stickhandled the puck back out of the embers. Then, finally, Bill himself skated full bore into the flames. He rolled out unhurt, but he had lost the puck fully in the fire and we stood around consoling him while it melted somewhere in the inferno.

“Showboat,” Hugo said, smiling. He looked at me and said, “Remember the night Billy skated into the bonfire?” and he laughed, so sure and so happy to be on the spot as a memory was created, his party a success.

“And he did it showing off!” I said.

“And then he wanted more scotch,” Billy said, getting up. “He lost the puck and then wanted more scotch. And none of your party drinks!”

Back at the mansion, the party had more than half fallen apart, but Annette and Story and Ruth were in the study grinding something over, so Hugo did pour us some more scotch. We stood around the kitchen like prep school kids when Hugo said, “Let me show you something.”

Now, it’s here, I guess, where I started to see again. We were all red-faced from the cold and warm from the scotch, and when Hugo ushered me in front of the telescope, it was time to see. He had lined it up so that the full moon filled the lens, and for a moment I was flooded with vertigo, my depth perception thrown away. Then it all twisted into a focus so sharp I winced. The moon, the ocher plains, the pale blue seas, and then like something scratching across my very eyeball, the geese. Canadian geese were flying across the moon. Four clipped the bottom. Two more, sliding. Silence. My heart in my neck. And then two full tiers, a double-winged vee of geese raking the moon, swimming into the heat which rose into my eye and blurred.

I stood away from the telescope.

“Did you see them? They must be three miles high!” Hugo took my arm. It was dark in his study. Billy bent to the eyepiece. I could hear the women murmuring below us in the den. “Do you know how far, how many miles they’ll go tonight?”

And it was later, late into that Sunday night—Monday morning—that the seeing began in earnest. Story drove me home, and though it took a few minutes to rid her mind of township business, I achieved it, and we moved into the postures of lovemaking, and I saw her face, her eyes, her navel, and then just before my eyes rolled up into my head, I saw my three fingers coming over Story’s shoulder, like three old men witnessing giants at play. Story kissed me and rolled into sleep. My eyes would not quit.

I walked through my house naked for a while, as is the right of any homeowner, ending up on the small brick porch onto the backyard with my father’s Navy binoculars in my hand. The air was still and frigid, but I stood with the glasses on the moon. It was wonderfully clear to me there as the bricks froze my feet and my genitals shrank and numbed in the frosty night: sperm were swimming across the moon, and on the round world I had a lot to do.

THREE

FOR THREE
months Story had been keeping the basal charts. When the alarm would sound, I would stumble to the bureau, shake down the thermometer and offer it to Story’s sleeping face. She slept on her stomach with no pillow and for eighty days at least, that thermometer was the first thing she saw every day. She’d lie there while I said, “Okay, now, don’t move. Two minutes and forty seconds to go. I’m watching you. You’re moving. Please. Can you please lie still for two and a half minutes! Okay. I’m telling Doctor Binderwitz that your chart is a fabrication. Two minutes. Fine, fine, squirm around; do your calisthenics; see if I care.” It would get down to 10–9–8–7–6–5 and I’d move around and find the glass tube snug in her sleeping mouth. I’d sit on her and announce: “Ninety-eight point nine. We’re talking impending ovulation. We’re moving into a period of massive fertility!”

She’d groan and say, “Get off me.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Then, every other day, as part of our program, I’d throw my feet up in her side of the bed and she would pull me to her, moving from a warm sleep to the warm, insistent dreamarama lovemaking. She was always a morning person as far as sex was concerned, and it was a smooth, slow swimming which left us both wet eyed, awash, and stunned.

BIGVILLE IS
a small college really, and they are glad to have me because they consider me not just an art teacher, but a
real
painter, that is, one who has two paintings in national collections and one who from time to time has a show on some second floor in New York and a carload of deans gets to go down and drink wine for an afternoon. No one knows I’m not painting, except Story, and as always, she treats me as if I’ve simply taken some well-earned time off for coffee.

I threw myself into my teaching with an organized enthusiasm that cautioned me. I made progress charts for each of my students, making notes on approaches, even encouraging the oppressive Mary Ann Buxton, who tried too hard to make Bigville into the finishing school she never attended. Her approach to painting was simple: it was something you owned, the way rich people own France during those cocktail parties on campus in the fall. They bought the experience, as if it were a stereo system or a fine meal. I noted happily that Mary Ann was doing less copying and more “emulation” of her neighboring easels. What I am saying is that I did what I could to make the spring into a positive sojourn for myself, despite the fact that my eyes were on fire, seeing things, and I knew that meant something would come of it. But as of March, I was not painting.

The ice on Mugacook began to rot, and sometime mid-month Fudgie Miller fell entirely through a section by the town wharf, ending the skating season for good. Fudgie, twelve, was one of the eight Miller kids who lived right across the road from us, and when Constable Manwaring drove Fudgie home wrapped in a blanket and shivering, he was received with the general joy and jumping up and down usually reserved for only children. I witnessed the crowd scene from my front porch, and I thought: that’s it. That’s what we’re after right there. All right. Now all I need is eight kids.