“Sure.”
“Bravest of brave. Not like you Eighth Air Force cowards bombin' from twenty thousand feet.”
“We had some worries at twenty thousand feet. Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts,” Dick said.
“That's why this other guy broke my heart. He was a strafer pilot too. I guess I thought I was sort of touching Joe. Then I found out all he wanted to do was fuck me silly. Jesus.”
Dick held her a little tighter, trying to say he was sorry.
“You don't give a damn about all this. Why're you listenin'?”
“I like you.”
“You mean you like to fuck me.”
“I like to do that too. But I like you for other reasons.”
“What are they?”
“You're honest. You say what you think.”
“I don't, most of the time. Tonight it all came out.”
“That's still worth a decoration. People aren't brave all the time.”
“I like you too, Dick.”
“Why?”
“Because you listened tonight.”
Cassie began kissing him. Sad, gentle kisses at first, her tongue just touching his lips. Her hands roved his body with the same melancholy tempo. He let her make all the moves, sensing that she wanted to offer herself without immediate response from him. Soon her lips and her tongue began following her hands. She licked him like a cat, sighing, occasionally weeping.
He began to swell. Desire throbbed in his chest. But it had a different timbre. There was an ambiguity in the center of it. Part of Cassie's soul was reaching out to his soul in the California darkness. From simple screwing they had come to that perilous word,
like
. It was an unknown in the magical freedom of the
air fraternity. Were there unknown unknowns waiting over the horizon, hidden in words like love?
“Oh. Oh,” Cassie sighed as he entered her. “Oh Dick.”
It was the first time she had used that name. Until tonight she called him Stone or when she was feeling wry, Mr. Stone. He liked it. He liked the tenderness, the sadness that was intertwined with the pleasure. He liked the sense of entering a new dimension with this woman. Was it another stage of California freedom or the beginning of its loss?
“Oh now, Dick, now, come now,” Cassie whispered.
It was the first time she had spoken to him about her desire. It was the first time he had thought about coming as something more than a physical release, a nice climax to the athletic performance. He came and came and Cassie melted in his arms. She cried out with a wild compound of pleasure and sadness and triumph. Had he somehow helped her to escape the hollow in which she had been trapped by war and grief? Dick did not know. He only felt a kind of awe at the unknown through which they were both moving.
For a long time Cassie lay in his arms, silent except for deep, slow sighs. Then she said: “I don't want to see the Big Shot anymore.”
“So? Tell him. Isn't that the way the Honeycomb works? You're free to say no.
“He won't like it. Especially if I stay with you. He'll hold it against you.”
“Maybe you ought to get the hell out of that club,” Dick said.
“Why?”
“Because you're too smart. You can't not think about it.”
Cassie chewed on that for a while. “Yes I can,” she said.
Was he disappointed? Dick wondered. Or relieved? “Tell Cliff. I can handle him if he gets sore,” Dick said.
“Good luck. Do you want to see me again, in spite of my persistence in whoriness?”
Dick sensed he was being tested. “Yes,” he said. “If you feel the same way.”
“Call me when you're ready,” Cassie said.
The next morning, after Cassie departed for her own apartment a few blocks from the Villa Hermosa, Dick wrote a memo for Dr. Kirk Willoughby.
The first time I went to the Honeycomb Club I felt like some rich boys had invited me into their secret tree house. It was full of expensive toys you could not find anywhere else. They told me I could do anything I wanted with these toys. After all, a toy can't feel anything. The other day a surprising thing happened. One of my toys started to cry. Now I'm not so sure I want to play at the Honeycomb Club any more.
Sarah Morris went through the routine of mothering her two daughters, assisted by fat, earnest Maria, her Mexican maid. But Maria, the children, the house, the sunbaked streets of south Los Angeles, remained unreal. Again and again she was with Billy McCall at 81,000 feet, on the edge of the unknowable.
Perhaps the most curious thing was the disappearance of her rage against her husband. Was it some kind of ultimate sexual contentment? Or was it the satisfaction of revenge?
She did not know the answer. She only knew she alternated between being curiously happy and desperately unhappy. The happiness seemed to seize her spasmodically, when she least expected itâwhen she was giving the baby a bath or reading a book to her older daughter.
Happy
. A voice seemed to whisper it from a distance, almost mockinglyâbut not quite. Billy?
After lunch, the sleepless night caught up to her. She toppled into bed and found herself wide awake. She went over and over the scene in the airport parking lot until she convinced herself Billy was going to call her again. She told herself she did not want him to do it. The next moment, the thought of his voice on the telephone made her body dissolve. If it wasn't love, what was it? Lust? She had been taught that lust was vile, ugly, brutal. What she had felt with Billy had been none of those things.
What was it? She had to give it a name. She finally called it freedom. She had done something daringâmore daring than marrying Cliff Morris in war-torn England. There was more courage in her heart than she had suspected. Why did she like that idea? Was she a test pilot by temperament? A test pilot of the spirit?
For the first time she faced the truth about the night Cliff had been reported missing over Berlin. She had wept briefly in her mother's arms. But in her heart she had been secretly relieved, she had felt an awful shameful gratitude. Tama and Billy were right. Why not admit it to herself? She had married a war, not a man, and she had been glad she did not have to spend the rest of her life with him. What kind of a woman was she?
English pussy, Billy whispered mockingly. He was hateful. But fascinating. Who knew what ideas he would bring back from 90,000, 100,000 feet?
She got up without sleeping, put on lipstick and went shopping for groceries in one of the new supermarkets. More American freedom. A thousand choices and no one telling her what to buy. What had she bought in the desert? Infidelity as a way of life? Could she become Billy McCall's mistress?
She sensed something special had happened to him too. Perhaps that was
part of his anger. He hated the thought of a woman having power over him, even the power of giving him pleasure.
Pleasure.
Pleasure
. The word was inadequate. All the words in Shakespeare's language, her mother tongue, were inadequate to describe what she had found in the American desert. She was a
wanton
. She was a
bitch
. All the words she had read in books and never dreamt of possessing were suddenly part of Sarah Chapman Morris's American self.
What about love? What about that supreme value in every woman's life? Was it possible that Billy loved her? Was there a moment in a man's soul when pleasure crossed some boundary into love? She knew so little about how a man thought and felt. Cliff was still mostly a mystery to her.
Back in the house, she noticed an anxious look on Maria's face. “You hoos-ban', he call. Be late,” she said.
“Don't worry about it,” she said. She had not expected Cliff until tomorrow.
Maria hesitated. “He callâthis morning too. I no tell you.”
“That's all right,” Sarah said. Sometimes Maria was too conscientious. She was so anxious to do everything right. It was almost embarrassing, the way the Americans had made the Mexicans so humble. It reminded her of stories she had heard about native servants in Kenya and India.
She ate dinner and watched television for a while. It was all so stupidâgrinning game-show hosts and comedians telling fourth-rate jokes. She turned it off and read
Pride and Prejudice
for the third or fourth time. She adored Jane Austen's prose. It reflected the English world her characters inhabited, also so controlled and measured. While this American world seemed to have no visible boundaries, no signposts or rules.
At ten o'clock she turned on the television news. A handsome talking head told her about American plans to counter the threat of Russia's possession of the atomic bomb. Then came a commercial featuring dancing soup cans. Then the talking head again reporting “another tragedy in the Mojave.” A Buchanan Aircraft experimental plane had crashed, killing its three-man crew. A previous model of this top-secret bomber had plunged into the desert six months ago.
A half hour later, Cliff's keys jingled in the front door. The sour look on his face was predictable. “How are you?” she said, kissing him briefly on the mouth.
“Lousy,” he growled.
“I just heard the bad newsâanother crash.”
“Yeah.”
“Will they scrap the program?”
“I don't know. What've you been doing?”
“Baby tending. House running. A big market for my services.”
“Is that all?”
“What else do you think I might be doing?”
“Fucking someone!”
It was the first time he had ever used that word in front of her. The first
time she had ever heard it, except once, by accident during the war, when she had overheard two pilots using it.
“I really don't know what you're talking about,” she said.
“I got back from the Mojave this morning. I called the house. Maria gave me some bullshit story about you staying with friends.”
Maria had been trying to warn her.
“IâI had a call from an old school chum. She's in town doing a movie. We sat up so late talking I decided to stay with her rather than drive home half-asleep.”
She could not believe the intensity of her deceit. She launched it without a moment's hesitation. Why didn't she just tell him she was playing the infidelity game? Remind him it was the twentieth century.
“What's her name?”
“I don't ask you these questions.”
“What's her name?”
“None of your business!”
It was outrageous. She hated him. He was invading her desert idyll with his vulgar jealousy. “Let me rephrase the question. What's his name?”
“Billy McCall!”
She did not see the hand. It seemed to come from nowhere. He seemed to be standing too far away to hit her. But the hand came whirling to smash her in the face and send her hurtling across the living room. Her head struck the rug with a terrific thud and she lay there, unable to move, engulfed by a new emotion: shame.
She had known from the moment Billy propositioned her on the dance floor. She had known by the pool in the desert. This was the one man her husband could not tolerate as his rival. Cliff's choked raging words were superfluous. “Anybody elseâI wouldn't give a fuckâanyoneâanybody.”
He stood over her, berserk. She wondered if she was about to die. She felt strangely indifferent to that possibility. She almost welcomed it. Would it even the score for her unholy gratitude at the news of his death over Berlin?
That had been a sin. It was a sin to secretly rejoice over the death of a man she had promised to love. She had sinned again last night with Billy.
She wanted Cliff to hit her again. She would welcome a beating that would reduce her to a pleading blob. It would clean her slate, it would leave her empty and calm in another kind of freedom, the opposite of Billy's soaring. The inward calm of the penitent prisoner in her cell.
Something completely unexpected began to happen. Her husband was kneeling beside her, saying “Oh, Oh, Sarah. Oh Jesus, Sarah.” He picked her up and carried her to the couch.
Something even more amazing began to happen. Kneeling beside the couch, Cliff began blubbering. Tears and sobs. This six-foot-four hunk of masculinity was crying like a two-year-old.
The room was still spinning. A shrill telephone seemed to be ringing inside
Sarah's head. “Stop. Stop, please,” she said. “You hurt me so much I just wanted to hurt you back.”
He wiped his streaming eyes with his handkerchief. “My career's going down the tubes with that goddamn plane. Isn't that enough hurting? Were you going to tell me he's better than I am?”
A terrible understanding gathered force in Sarah Chapman Morris's soul. Part of it was guilt, part of it was painful wisdom. This tower of male muscle and bone, this Charles Atlas who could knock a woman twenty feet with a swing of his mighty arm, was a psychological ninety-seven pound weakling. In a world without a sense of sin, it was still possible to acquire a misshapen soul.
“He isn't as good,” Sarah said. “The whole thing only made me realize I love you. I was sorry I tried it.”
She was saying farewell to ascent, farewell to little deaths on the edge of the unknowable. Farewell to Billy McCall, who thoroughly deserved it. She hoped it would be a long time before he found someone able to climb as fast. She was accepting a substitute for loveâpity.
No. That was too brutal. She was going to create a different kind of love, a blend of sympathy and nostalgia and honor. Especially honor. That was the best part of it. She had made a pledge to this man in the country church outside Rackreath Air Base in 1943. She was honoring that pledge nowâwith this lie.
It was better than Billy's way, better than his uncaring freedom. Sarah had to believe that part of it. Billy did not care. If Billy cared she was forever undone. She was still enough of a romantic, enough of a Catholic, to disapprove of uncaring freedom, in spite of its enormous temptation.
Cliff was carrying her upstairs to their bedroom. It was a sad parody of Billy carrying her into the pool where she had been baptized in his new lonely faith. Her husband was pressing a cold washcloth on her face. “I didn't mean it,” he said. “I was out of my mind.”
It poured out, his fear and hatred of Billy, the certainty that he was going to resign from the Air Force eventually and join the company, where he would have Buzz McCall's backingâand Frank Buchanan's. Adrian Van Ness would die or retire and Billy would demolish his boyhood enemy. “All my life I've tried to be nice to the bastard. He goes right on despising me.”
Sarah tried to convince her husband he was allowing himself to be haunted by a myth. “You have more brains than he has, more personality. He can only do one thing. Fly a plane.”
“In the business we're in, nothing else matters.”
“He could get killed next week.”
“He won't. The bastard's got a charmed life.”
“So do you,” she said. “Forty-nine missions. Doesn't that prove something? You're lucky too.”
“You're not lying? He wasn't better?”
“I'm not lying. He wasn't better,” she said, the edge of mockery enabling her to tell the lie without a tremor. “I wouldn't have done it if you hadn't made me so angry about other women.”
Romantic in spite of everything, she was still yearning for fidelity. “You don't know what it's like in this businessâpeople think you're queer or henpecked if you walk away from it.”
He was his stepfather's son. Buzz McCall had put his mark on Cliff Morris as profoundly as if he had implanted him with his genes. Why wasn't Billy marked in the same way? Where did he get that incredible desire to explore the unknowable? Why was he so endowed with freedom and its corollary, courage?
While this man, her husband, chased women into bed because he did not dare to defy the conventions of the plane business. For a moment an awful sadness sucked at Sarah's soul. She was learning too much. She wanted to drown her mind in blankness. She resisted the impulse. She was not going to despair. She had proven to herself and Tama that she had willpower. Now she would prove she had another kind of power. If Tama could change herself from a Mexican washerwoman's daughter into Adrian Van Ness's mistress, maybe Sarah could change Tama's son from a spoiled playboy to a serious husband and a successful executive.
“I want you to walk away from it for my sake,” Sarah said. “I want you to promise me you'll try. If you want my love, you've got to make that promise.”
There was a long silence. Was he saying farewell to someone he cared about? Someone he loved more than this demanding English bitch? “I promise,” Cliff said.
She kissed him and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Do you want me?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said.
Were they crossing a boundary? Sarah wondered. One of those unmarked American zones just beyond the erogenous where love began? She could only hope so. “I want you most when you want me,” she whispered. “It's like music. Two instruments playing. You meant so much to me in England. Make me feel the same way here in America.”