Authors: Francine Prose
“How
are
you?” Norma says. Vera wishes she wouldn’t stress the “are” like that. Though mostly what Vera’s irritated at is herself for having come here. She knows what she’s doing: passing her worry along so they can comfort her. She thinks of that girl in the Chinese restaurant telling her date about the guy who believed he could get rid of herpes by giving it to someone else.
Meanwhile, on
General Hospital
, stills of Hong Kong harbor set the stage for Laura, bound and gagged, to squirm and whimper in some TV-studio opium den. Dave’s so engrossed he doesn’t know Vera’s come in.
Vera’s relieved when Norma comes up behind them and says, “Look who’s here,” then worried when Dave doesn’t turn, then shocked when Norma strides over and switches off the TV. Dave’s gripping the armrests, and Vera can’t blame him. Still, she can see Norma’s side: imagine if she and Lowell were approaching their golden years, and Lowell seemed likely to spend them watching TV. Imagine that? Imagine anything else. What did Vera think she was moving toward? Two little gray heads in front of the nineteen-inch screen—what more has Lowell ever promised her?
“Well,” Dave says at last. “My unemployed daughter.”
“That’s me,” says Vera. “Buddy, can you spare a dime?”
“Don’t take it so hard,” he says.
“I’m not. That’s the least of it.” Vera’s shocked by the stridency in her voice; she must want her bad news to hurt Dave as much it hurts her. “Rosie’s gone to L.A. with Lowell.”
“California!” says Norma. “The state’s full of nuts. Freeway killers, Zodiac killers, Mansons, Symbionese Liberation. And knowing Lowell, they’re probably all his best friends.”
“Don’t be silly,” says Vera. “Lowell’s not out to get killed.” Though, even as she says this, it’s occurring to her that Rosie may right at this moment be with a bona fide Mafioso with God-knows-how-many ex-friends who don’t want to see that autobiography written. Better she should ride the subway alone with her Walkman all night. “It’s okay,” Vera says, as much to herself as to them. “Anyhow, I can use the time. I want to get started on a story.”
“Story?” says Dave. “What story?”
Describing the cryptobiologists, Vera’s practically giving their resumés, emphasizing the fact that they’re mainly retired teachers, engineers. In other words: respectable scientists, not your garden-variety crackpots. Dave and Norma aren’t fooled. Their looks of disbelief turn to puzzlement, then back to disbelief and concern. You’d think she was going to look for Bigfoot instead of writing about people who have.
“Way the hell out to Arizona for
that
?” Dave says. “You can get better stories for a subway token.”
Vera knows what kind of stories he means: South Bronx squatters banding together to do something about their block. Feisty old union maids organizing their nursing homes. Ex-Wobblies and Lincoln Brigaders still fighting the good fight. The problem is, they’re not
her
stories. If she took the subway to find them, she’d only wind up writing about the screamers she met on the way.
She’s glad she doesn’t say this, doesn’t get a chance to. Dave can’t wait to get back to his TV. Norma is worrying a cinnamon Red Hot between her fingers. Now more than ever, Vera wishes she could get a glass of water from the Greens and that it would really work. She’d bring it to her parents. Here, she’d say. The Spanish Civil War wasn’t lost, and Dave came home victorious. Here, she’d say. Live forever in a workers’ paradise complete with olive trees and geysers of Spanish red wine. Here, she’d say. Everything’s different. I’ll never leave you, and Rosie will never leave me. Here. Drink this. Be young.
The film on the New York–Seattle flight stars Clint Eastwood and a monkey. Vera doesn’t buy headphones. Watching, not having to listen, lulled by the hum of the engines, the unchanging white-blue sky, she’s feeling extremely pleased with herself. She likes how being on her way somewhere gives her a sense of accomplishment without her having to do anything but sit. She also likes feeling cut-off and unreachable, even if her life isn’t exactly jammed with people struggling to reach her. Just having gotten this far—having passed through the metal detectors without emptying her pockets, then finding her gate and shuffling forward in an orderly fashion when her flight was called—seems like an achievement.
Only once did she falter: just after take-off, when she noticed how she and the other passengers in her section stared at the No Smoking sign and lit up the second it went off. And why? Because take-off was completed and they were still alive. She’d thought of old cigarette ads on TV, that couple by the waterfall, all joy in life made manifest in smoke. Now everything’s changed. Cigarettes are the skull on St. Jerome’s desk, coffin nails, twenty memento mori per pack.
She’d checked out her fellow smokers to see how they dealt with this knowledge but couldn’t find an inch of common ground. They all looked so pale and prairie-American, long Nordic faces out of Sandburg and Willa Cather. She could be traveling with a planeload of the dead. She’d thought of Mark Rothko, Theodore Roethke, thought, Seattle’s where you go to live without seeing the sun for six months and kill yourself. Though she reminded herself she was going there to visit Louise and not to stay, she was starting to get gloomy when the stewardess rolled in the drink cart. Remembering that airplane Bloody Marys never work, she ordered two bourbons and in no time was happily watching Clint Eastwood.
The best thing about drinking on a plane is how slowed-down everything feels as you cruise thirty thousand feet up, flying six hundred miles per hour in the face of every law of nature and of God. Normally, she’d never get through a magazine article on how to tell if your boyfriend’s getting tired of you. Up here, she reads every word and even takes the test at the end. Adding the points up seems to take hours, but at the end she’s relieved to discover that her and Lowell’s score is nowhere near the Red Alert category or even the Danger Zone. They’re well in the Smooth Sailing range, and yet they’ve split up ten times.
Vera would meditate on this all the way to Seattle, but dinner’s arriving, and she puts down the magazine to give it her full attention. Given the care she lavishes on finishing every bite—the dense cube of beef, even the soggy bread square beneath it—the voice of the stewardess asking if she’s done could be the cries of starving children or the clarion call of the angel who guards your garbage to make sure nothing’s thrown out. “I’m done,” Vera says. To do any better, she’d have to eat the styrofoam tray. The fact that she’s polished off every crumb of the rock-hard amaretto cookies is making her think critically and with a certain drunken self-righteousness of Solomon. She’d thought that chicken-salad incident would shame her all her life, but now it no longer bothers her. People can eat anything. If he couldn’t swallow a few strings of celery, the hell with him.
By now the aisle’s full—a line for the bathrooms. As Vera gets up and joins in, the light of the bourbon shines even on this. She feels she’s taking part in a communal activity, like the members of some African tribe going at dawn to perform their bodily functions at the edge of the sea.
Approaching Seattle, the pilot and the stewardess repeat the local time till it even gets through to Vera. It’s three hours earlier than her watch says. She’s trying to recall the reason you can’t keep traveling from east to west forever and never get any older, but the effort’s confusing her. As the plane lands, she’s beginning to wish she’d gotten less drunk or that the landing were rougher. There’s not even a bump to run the adrenaline that might have helped sober her up. She waits for the rush of joy in having survived, the happiness that used to come when she and Louise would crawl weak-kneed out of the cramped front car of the Cyclone. Instead, depression settles over her, thick and cottony as the gray Seattle sky, as she remembers that the only thing that equals her love of making travel plans and being on her way is the inevitable letdown of getting there.
A
PPROACHING THE RECEPTION AREA,
Vera’s afraid to look. She feels as if she’s at a horror film, watching the screen through her fingers. All she can think of is the last time Louise met her at an airport, tricked out like some giant white cauliflower in a turban and nursey dress. She’s also afraid that Louise won’t have come and Vera will start signaling the mute, universal language of the stood-up to perfect strangers, who’ll cease their own anxious search for familiar faces and focus on her. Then she sees Louise, so radiant Vera thinks she could find her, like the sun, with her eyes shut.
Vera’s first impression is that living among the forests of Douglas fir has rubbed off on her. Tall and straight and dressed in pale browns and greens, Louise looks like a tree. Vera remembers that girl in the Chinese restaurant saying how her first best friend had better not be more successful or perfect. Vera and Louise used to feel that way, first when Louise was publishing poems and Vera was just a college student, then when Vera was publishing articles and Louise was just a towelhead. Now all that’s passed. They’ve realized that the world is wide and generous enough for them both to be successful and perfect and that they will probably never be either.
Lowell’s accusing her of not seeing him has made Vera self-conscious. Drunk and excited as she is, she’s careful to hold Louise at arm’s length and check for crow’s feet. She won’t make
that
mistake twice. Louise has them, all right, but she’s one of those women whose eyes look brighter with wrinkles around them, whose dark hair looks thicker set off by few strands of gray.
“You look beautiful!” cries Louise. Vera says, “So do you,” and then, “How could I look beautiful? I’m drunk.” Louise tucks Vera’s arm through hers and steers her off in what Vera hopes is the direction of the baggage claim. On the way, they pass a father holding his son by the shoulders and shaking him. The son, about Rosie’s age, is crying; the father’s fighting tears. Vera wonders if she should call Lowell from Louise’s; she doesn’t want Rosie to call home and worry. Let them worry, she thinks. Let them imagine the worst.
“Don’t you hate airports?” says Louise, a question that Vera finds cheering. In her high-minded, towelhead, everything-is-everything phase, Louise might have claimed to see the Godhead in the flight-insurance vending machines.
“I love hating them,” says Vera. “I’m always so proud of myself for not losing my mind in them.” Was this a tactless thing to say? Louise doesn’t appear to notice.
“I just hate them pure and simple,” she says. “I used to have this boyfriend who was obsessed with them. His idea of a date was to take the bus to San Francisco International and hallucinate spies reporting into their candy bars.”
“Fun fun fun,” says Vera.
“Loads,” Louise says. “But the worst part was when I figured out he wasn’t really obsessed with airports at all, only pretending because he knew it drove me crazy. Nothing can make you paranoid like someone trying to make you paranoid by acting more paranoid than you are.”
Vera’s forgotten how much of Louise’s conversation consists of war stories, old-boyfriend stories like the ones first dates in Chinese restaurants tell, only weirder. She thinks of the guy who showed up at dawn and announced that a weekend with Louise would drive him insane. Maybe he meant a weekend of hearing stories like that and knowing he’d wind up as one. Another thing he might have meant: Louise’s stories pull you into her world. Now Vera’s panicking, wondering how many times her luggage might already have glided past without her having noticed. In fact it’s Louise who spots it first, grabs it, and won’t let Vera carry it to the car.
“We’ve really come up in the world,” Louise says. “You’ve still got the same suitcase.”
“You’ve still got the same car,” says Vera.
“Yes and no,” Louise says. “Same color, same year. This is the fourth identical one I’ve had. The only thing that changes is what’s about to go. In this case, the water pump.”
Vera can’t remember Saabs being so small. Her legs must have got longer, or anyway, stiffer. Two inches less leg room, she’d be chewing on her knees. One thing that hasn’t changed is Louise’s driving style. She doesn’t look back—or forward, for that matter—but only at Vera. Swerving, honking, shaking her fist, she talks constantly, and the only way Vera can quiet her own anxiety is to keep up her end of the conversation.
“Where’s Rosie?” Louise asks.
“With Lowell,” Vera answers.
A horn blows and Louise gives someone the finger, then turns and stares hard at Vera. “This isn’t permanent or anything?”
“No,” Vera says. “Anyway, I hope not.” She takes out a cigarette and lights it.
“I thought you quit,” says Louise.
“I did,” says Vera.
“You’ll quit again,” Louise says, then reaches for a small square of two-by-four on the dashboard and hands it to Vera. “Here,” she says. “Knock on this.”
“I don’t think it’s permanent,” says Vera, knocking. “Just a two-week vacation on the floor of C.D.’s studio.”
“C.D.?” says Louise. “Still?” Meaning, still alive? Still Lowell’s friend? It’s hard to tell. Once, long ago, Louise lived with C.D. for a year, a very long time for Louise. Now Vera expects her to ask about him, but she doesn’t. For all the interest Louise shows, C.D. could be the guy with the airport paranoia or the one who backed out of going away for the weekend.
“Where are we headed?” it occurs to Vera to ask.
“Shopping,” Louise says. “There’s nothing in the fridge.” Moments later, she’s cut across two lanes of freeway traffic and, without slowing down, onto the city streets. The sun’s broken through, and it’s a glorious, clear afternoon, October in New York except without the edge; the dullest buildings glow. Louise pulls up to the curb and cuts the motor, giving Vera a funny look, as if daring her to point out that it’s a No Parking zone. Vera wouldn’t dare. She knows Louise isn’t just lazy, reluctant to look further for a legal space. Louise believes parking here is a kind of augury. If her luck’s running down, she’ll get ticketed and towed. If it’s in the ascendant, she won’t.
It’s a parking place, not a sign, Vera thinks. She wants to tell Louise about Kafka and the poodle, but to jump into those waters without testing them first would be to ignore history. You don’t tell someone who’s spent a year in the loony bin to start seeing every puppy as a possible omen. Especially when, as in this case, there
is
a sign:
NO PARKING
. But now, watching Louise rush ahead into the market, Vera thinks she could have told her. What seems to be in operation here is the other side of Louise: practical, commonsensical, the side that goes shopping for food.