Mysteries of Motion (23 page)

The sidekick answered for them. “He said, ‘With those sleeves,
she
should fly.’” He doubled up on the grass, then got up and scampered; his bridgework must be leaking again—he was high.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” she said. Nimbly, so that she could withdraw the joke if need be. “Castro.”

“Naw, he has a stand-in,” the sidekick said, blowing on a grass blade he’d plucked. “They switch shifts at the barbershop.”

“Come on, both of you,” Marcy said. Then he did make them run, but only for fun, when they went back to steal Jimmy Odgers’s truck. Locked, but the sidekick had a ploy for it.

They drove leisurely after that. “Fifteen miles,” Marcy said. “No hurry. They’ll telephone ahead.”

“Telephone?” she said. “How?” None for miles. The crowd had grumbled. One scared kid had left. Needed his wiring.

Marcy, who was driving, tapped her chin with his free hand. “Walkie-talkie.”

This time she was too proud to ask to whom.

The airfield was ragged with plants, like small airports one still saw on Long Island in those days. Out here it contained itself in its own hard gray air. “This isn’t Havana,” Marcy said to her. “Plane’s an oldie. You game?”

Three smallish planes were on the runway, each of a different shape. They’re planes in a dream, she thought. I won’t have any trouble. “Where’s it going?”

“Honduras. You can make New York from there.”

She smiled. In dreams they didn’t tell you.

Getting on the plane, while Marcy was in with the pilot making sure, the sidekick slipped her a packet she got rid of her first trip to the lav; it was hash. “Guy sitting next to you’s going to New York,” Marcy said, returning. She hadn’t had to pay. “Compliments of the management.” Neither had the rest of the scanty passenger list. It was a government plane. “So, toodle on, Sister ’Ronica.” Acid-yellow irises, set in his lanky skeleton, gave him a dandy’s look, or as if a painter had arranged him. “Keep up on all points.” He hopped off.

The plane had been ancient, with velvet couch seats that seated three and braided blinds that pulled down. Her only seatmate, who was Tom Gilpin, caught her noting them. “From the old Tempelhof-Moscow run, the pilot says. New engines. He swears.” She had no idea how far back that dated the plane, or under what circumstances, but was flattered her seatmate took for granted she did. She would later find that the world’s hip travelers had a common fund of round-the-globe information, extending even to certain “in” acquaintances—journalists, photographers and other media people for whom travel remained as much ego as business—and especially so among Americans, who even yet seemed not to “have” their travel as nonchalantly as other nations. Living and working among them, she would acquire some of that ferment. Meanwhile seeing how this same sophistication, adopted in one’s greenhorn years, could emerge in the successful of her trade, often still technically young, as a royally deadened innocence that kept them from those very “sources”—strange roots and sailors’ warnings—which best fed their profession.

That day, knowing none of this, she’d accepted Tom’s courtesy to the young for what it was, not suspecting in him deeper agonies of kindness. He’d seemed to blend untroubledly with the era of the plane—if he’d had a homburg, as perhaps one of those gentleman philosophers of Karl Marx’s London, dapper with intellect, whose photos were in Lievering’s office at the college. Or like one of D. H. Lawrence’s Laborite-socialite co-weekenders in an English country cottage—on Lievering’s other wall—if he’d had a cap. Later she would know that he always blended. He never wore the homburg. Or the cap.

When the middied stewardess came by, he’d said quietly, “Note, she has real cartridges in that silly belt, poor girl.” And in a minute Veronica and he were talking, laughing. She told him about the group she’d just left. “They don’t want a revolution,” he said. “That kind just wants to be intimate with one. The way some romantics want to be, with crime. They’re political—prurients.” He wasn’t surprised she knew the word, only charmed when he heard from where—a Sunday-school tract “against lewd and prurient practices,” hung behind the bar at Miss Lacey’s. He was the kind told you true things; you had to be reciprocal. She told him a good many, omitting Lievering. She’d go back to finish at the university later, she said. But for a while, she’d work; she didn’t yet know at what.

“I was an escapee once, from Harvard.” She was awed. “From there? I don’t see why.” He’d chortled. “You’re right. I’ve always said it that way. But it is pretentious.”

At the time, he’d had a reddish mustache and beard later shaved—he’d been in the Middle East and acquired a skin infection. He’d been to China early on, also. And yes, this was a government plane. To Honduras, where she could pick up a plane to New York. He hadn’t asked how she had boarded; maybe he’d seen. “You a friend of Castro?” she’d asked. “I met him,” Tom had answered. “He’s easy to meet. No, I just came to observe.” He did that everywhere—“to complete my Harvard education,” he said, grinning. “Maybe my mind’s so open there’s nothing left in it but a draft. Shaw said that, I’ve heard. Probably bamboozling his audience into thinking it a bad thing.” He was like some of the British residents in Barbados, she thought, rich enough to eat cities like candy—and wasn’t startled to hear that before going to New York, where he lived, he was stopping off at Palm Beach. “To settle my mother’s estate while she’s still alive,” he’d said, smiling. “She wants to live in France.”

What was his regular work? “Settling my father’s.” He sobered. “Not quite the same. He left me an island—in a way. He was a fisherman.” But soon he was going to “gainfully employ” some “boys and girls” to refurbish a newspaper-magazine. “Leftist?” she’d said cannily. He took a pineapple juice from the tray the stewardess was holding out to them. “Left of what?” He pointed to the stewardess’ belt. “Her?” No, he’d said. “Can’t hack anything political anymore.” He voluntarily etymologized “hack” for her. “Afraid some of my vocabulary congealed at the prep-school level. Because I never went to one.”

Ailpen,
she thought he’d said his name was. His voice walked on New England stilts, finickily distant but polite. Telling her, as she sat there with her newly married thighs hugged tight so that their sated wet wouldn’t stain the socialist velvet she was being flown free of charge on, that the Age of Politics—“Capitalize that”—was over. “Outmoded. Gone. Political theory of any kind. Just packing the belly with diamonds real or fake. Can’t feed, can’t cure. Only kill us, throe by throe. No, just give me a news sheet to publish for a while. I don’t want a cause.”

She sensed he was talking to her the way one might to a person one would never see again. “What’ll you put in it, then?” she said, dazzled. The stewardess was offering them lunch. He waved it aside for both of them, producing delicious sandwiches with some native relish in them, fruit he said was a variety of loquat, and finally a flask, all from the sloping pockets of what she saw now was the softest approximation of an ordinary business suit, mulberry brown, fine-woven to appear coarse, made sloppy with special care. The flask held iced wine. She slid into luxury easily; Vivie’d always said she would. Though hanging onto his words as if to a shelf. Not everybody fed you them. “Now to your question.” He accepted coffee for both of them, smacking his lips over the deep bean flavor, looking at her grampa-thoughtful over his cup. His eyes were red-brown, fox-hazed like the rest of him—like maybe even his tongue. “We have the power,” he’d said. “Ideas will come.”

Later on she would know, as all the office did, that he talked like that—professionally—only to new recruits or other amateurs, being himself, as he said, the extreme of those. “Part of the open mind, to be that.” With the experts of anything he kept a polite distance. “They’re all old.” But that too was a pose. Or a ploy.

Originally, his money might have embarrassed him. There were times when he hopped athletically from one non-pose to another. But underneath, like an iceberg—whose chill his own could resemble—he had seemed to her to grow ever solider. Inside him, somewhere in that flickering underwater bulk drilled with light, there was concealed—she was sure of it—a cause.

“A good question, yours,” he’d said. “But I can see you don’t think mine a good answer.”

“It scares me.”

“As it should.” A forefinger smelling of orange rind tipped up her chin. “Run scared,” he said. “We all do. But
run.”

She froze. But only because the last man to touch her had been Lievering.

The stewardess came over to her, apprehensive.

“It’s all right,” he said to her, “I’m non-molesting. This is an interview. Cold.”

The attendant, a ripe girl, tall for these parts, with strained eyes, shook her head at them worriedly.

“Really not,” the reddish man said rapidly. “I like women. But they fit the anatomy so exclusively. While the males now, they want to own your mind—homosexually. And the world’s.” Ostensibly he was talking to the stewardess, picking up and reflecting over each bottle on her tray; of course he was talking through her at Veronica. He set down a juice bottle, shaking his head. “Mind you, I’m not cold. Just thoughtful.”

His intelligence was reddish, too, the girl had said to herself. Open in manner as a moss rose, but flushed with its own secret pigment. Generous to the blush-point, but furtive on all its inner action, even the best. She had views on what pigment did to thought. (Since then altered some, but maybe not too wrong on Gilpin. He was still fond of the word “cold.”) He’d turned his modest, cool glance back to her. “Perhaps I’m nearest to a—paedophile.”

In those days, words she didn’t know could make her angry. But also, the trapped stewardess had been near tears. “We no ’ave.” She wailed it like an aria. “We no ’a-ave it. Coke.” Then had fled up the aisle.

“Listen—” Veronica had said to him. “I don’t care what you are. You know any Cuban Spanish? Whatever that girl speaks? Go up there, then. Apologize to her. Say something nice.” He’d gone and done that presumably; she’d seen him talking up there at the head of the aisle; had heard the stewardess’s Carmen-laugh. So he could speak—something. But when he returned, Veronica was sitting across the aisle instead of next to him.

“Want to know what I said to her?”

She shrugged.

“I said—” His eyes drooped inward. “Maybe I said—I’d kiss her, if she weren’t wearing those cartridges.”

She’d been sure from his expression that he hadn’t. In after years, once they’d been reunited, he’d continued the joke: “Want to know what I really said to that stewardess?” he’d say, leaning over her desk at the office (never at his home parties, where he was always formal and oddly circumspect). Then he’d manage something outrageous, or interesting.

On the plane she merely nodded, returning to her scrutiny of the woman on her right, a beautiful mixed-Asian, lithe in a Western black silk shift, on whose bared copper arms and neck yards of eely gold lifted like gills with each rise of the plane.

“You’re right—I’m rude,” he’d said, settling behind his newspaper, a British one.

The Eurasian was talking to the man on her other side, with whom she was traveling, but from time to time she and Veronica had covert female communication by glance, the woman eyeing Veronica’s blouse, the girl wide-eyed at the woman’s feet, whose rubied claw-toenails curved over her sandals, long as guitar picks, ending her body in two pronged, erotic paws. She would walk arching each foot, the hip following, Veronica thought—her own body power aroused—and according to the earth-matter beneath her would shuffle, scrape, or click. And saunter best down a staircase. She was no feminist’s riddle; she was any woman’s. For years after, striding a city pavement or lugging a flight bag, Veronica would remember her.

Furtively she had opened Lievering’s locket. It was empty. As it should be.

From behind the newspaper, Tom’s card had been dropped in her lap. “Interview successful. Want a job?” He ducked inside the newspaper before she could answer. In the moment that the plane had begun its descent on Honduras she saw by the card that his last name was Gilpin (assumed, she’d somehow thought, until the telephone book showed her many Gilpins), and she saw one brownish pupil mischievously regarding her through an eyehole poked in the air edition of the
Manchester Guardian,
above a column headlined:
Paedophile Society Civil Servant Loses Case.
Child-lover, the word must mean; the civil servant being revealed in the column as president of a society which advocated sex with children, for which reason attempts were being made to oust him from his job at the Post Office, though by due process of law. “Den of sin, the P.O.’s—” Tom said, lowering the newspaper. “Always a cover for the sinister. Pals who bury the mater alive on Sunday, sharpshooters who pick off lovers’ trysts.” The picture of the civil servant was nothing like Tom nor the news story either. Still, it would be three years on, and she almost a year out of college, before, picking up the odd, intransigent weekly which was becoming her favorite, she saw the name of its publisher, and got in touch.

At that time he lived with a woman called by the single name Purvis, a neutered beauty more like a pet swan than a companion, who had silvered hair and wore blackish lipstick, glided now and then into his parties and, like many “art” photographers, lived silently in a welter of recorded music while printing into reasonable life what the rest of the world saw humbly with the disjointed eye.

Meanwhile Tom, whose paper foretold the death of coherent personality and a coming world of freebooting and free-associating instincts, lived a life organized to the last soap bubble, receiving both at home and office the crisply moral service once accorded nineteenth-century overseers. As for children, she’d never seen him with a young child, but had once heard him call them “the ultimate amateurs,” and there was a column in
The Sheet
which was run by them. Otherwise—as he often asked the staff sardonically—wasn’t he living the lives they all were? Modernist men and women, eager to swap communication for meaning, shadow for substance; purposefully aberrant and uncohered, preferring to live in the small mental huts provided for by nothingness, on the grounds that these were always enlarging.