The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (42 page)

There were seven other people in the class. Four fatties, one beauty who seemed to keep her eyes closed the whole time, and a gay couple that were as limber as rubber bands and appeared to be there for the sheer love of movement.

Chris was an excellent instructor. He spoke quietly, never scolded and laughed a lot. He constantly circled the room giving encouragement and plopping down next to you on the floor to demonstrate how to do the exercise correctly. When you had it right he gave you a big smile and said “Yesssssssss!”

Besides the two gay guys, the others in the class were as awkward and out of shape as Harvey. None of the exercises were easy. The ninety minutes definitely did not fly by but at the end, he was smiling and proud of himself. It was the first place he had felt really comfortable in months, and that included his own home. He couldn’t wait for the next class.

The next time he went, Harvey was very surprised to see only three other people in the room—the gay couple and the beautiful woman. Why weren’t there more? Chris was such a nice man and the exercises made you feel like you were really accomplishing something. He felt sad looking around that big empty room and seeing so few people waiting for things to begin.

“Excellent!” Chris came bounding in like he owned all of the energy in the world. “I love a small class. We can really get things done today. Let’s go.” He led them through the warm up exercises—the stretches, the bends and twists, the deep ins and outs of proper breathing. “Wake it up and then make it work for you!”

Harvey’s mind said yes! He pushed his fat body to wake up from all the years of sitting. All the years of eating. Wake up, body! Wake up and smell the new sneakers!

“Today we will be starting with a new exercise. It is called gravity thief. Watch me now.” Chris stood up straight and then opened his legs in an inverted “V.” He put both hands on his lower stomach and bent at the waist. Down down until his head almost touched his knees.

Harvey thought forget it—I won’t even be able to bend
half
that much.

“Now when you are like this, or as far down as you can go, breathe out as hard and fast as you can—” Chris gave a big whoosh of breath and slowly spread his arms out to the sides.

With that, his legs rose off the floor about twelve inches. The instructor floated a foot off the ground, arms and legs spread.

“Now everyone try it.”

Astounded, Harvey looked from Chris to the other people in the room. None of their faces showed the least surprise. One of the gay men looked at his partner, quietly said something and moved his arms in a way that said he was checking to see what the right procedure was for this position. His partner nodded. Other than that, nothing. Chris was hovering in the air like a helicopter,
flying,
and no one but Harvey was going crazy about it.

For the second time in a month, he could not contain his reaction. “It’s not possible!” He blurted out.

Chris slowly brought his arms to his sides and his legs lowered gently to the ground. Straightening up, he looked at Harvey and smiled. “Sure it is. And you’re going to do it now.” He walked over and put his hand on Greg’s shoulder. “Stand up straight. Spread your legs. Hands on your belly. Like this.”

“But it’s not possible!”

“Just do what I do. Let it surprise you.”

A minute and a half later Greg Harvey was flying. And the most incredible part of it was he hadn’t done anything special. Chris said do this and this and he did it. Bend at the waist, legs open a little bit more, bend down farther—yessssss.

And up he went!

He knew about the gurus and holy men who flew or walked on water. But they had spent a whole lifetime learning the secret ways and rituals. If one believed in reincarnation, then it was likely that they had spent several
lifetimes
learning these things. But here was fatso Greg Harvey with less than ten minutes of rudimentary instruction, flying.

When all of the students had flown and all had just as easily returned to earth, Chris continued with the class. The rest of the exercises they did were this and that, nothing special.

When it was over and the others had left the room, Harvey shyly went up and asked, “How did I do that?”

Chris, his face flushed and aglow, smiled at Harvey and poked him in the chest with one finger. “You like that, huh? It’s not so hard. Inside everyone is a gravity thief. You just have to know how to call him.”

“But how? I mean, I don’t know what I did.”

“Come next time and maybe you’ll find out.” He poked Harvey again, grinned and left the room.

When he was gone, Greg waited a while to be sure no one was around and then tried it again. Legs spread, hands on the stomach, bend over, arms out—lift off!

It worked.

The next class was three days later. The same people attended. That time, Chris began by teaching everyone to run upside down. While Harvey and the others watched, the teacher demonstrated the necessary steps. His body rose about four feet straight up in the air, rotated until his head was pointed toward the floor, and then he began jogging gracefully around the room upside down.

A few minutes later so did everyone else. If someone had happened to look in the room they would have seen five adults upside down in the air about halfway between floor and ceiling jogging slowly around and around the room. Because none of their feet touched ground, the only sounds were those of heavy breathing and the instructor shouting out encouragement every once in a while.

“Come on, a couple more laps! You’ve got it in you. Let’s go!”

They jogged for a good ten minutes before stopping.

Amazing as the experience was, Harvey was very unhappy. He knew something now that he didn’t last time. Outside this room, he could not fly. Forty or fifty times over the last days he had tried to do the gravity thief but was never successful. As soon as he got home the other night he tried it in his small living room but nothing happened. At first he thought he was just tired. So he sat in a chair and savored what had happened earlier and thought I can do this. I just have to do it right. But he could never find that “right” and no matter how or where he tried it—in his living room, bedroom, wherever—he stayed very much on the earth.

And now this. Chris had taught them how to lift into the air and run upside down today. But Greg knew it wouldn’t work away from Beat Street. After class that’s what he told Chris when it was just the two of them again.

This time the expression on the instructor’s face was not friendly. “Why do you
want
to do it outside of class? Huh? Do you have someone you want to impress? Perform for some girl you’re after?” He stepped in closer. Harvey suddenly smelled the other man’s lemony cologne. “This class is for you, Mr. Harvey. What you learn here is not circus tricks. Only fools see it like that. This is a discipline.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Be quiet! Do you remember what the first exercise was called? Gravity thief. A thief is never seen. The only way you know he has been in your house is when you realize something is missing. Have you ever been in love?”

Harvey, taken off guard, frowned. “In love? Well yes—”

“And did she break your heart?”

Tight lipped, Greg could only nod thinking of Laura.

“When it was over didn’t it feel like she had stolen something from you? Something she didn’t own, but she took it anyway?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s right!”

Chris smiled for the first time. “Then I’ll tell you something that will make you feel better: Tonight and the other night you took something away from that woman that belonged to
her.

“Picture this: Maybe she was sitting alone in her apartment watching television. Or she was on a big date with a man in a fine restaurant. It doesn’t matter. Because the moment you lifted off the ground doing gravity thief, so did she. Right in the middle of her television show or expensive shrimp cocktail, suddenly she was rising rising rising up to the ceiling. And there was no way to stop it.

“First she panicked as she felt the first lift, her knees banging into the table as she rose. Terrified, she thought
what’s happening to me
? She thought maybe there’s an earthquake. But as she kept rising she realized this was no earthquake, it was madness. Breaking all the rules she had ever known and lived by, life had pulled everything out from under her. She just kept rising and rising and there was no way to stop it or explain it.” Chris paused to let the image sink in then said, “What’s worse, just rising up like that, or the fact there’s no explanation for it?”

Harvey laughed. He couldn’t help it. The picture of that bitch Laura all dolled up in an expensive dress floating above a table in a ritzy restaurant, a big pretty starfish with her arms and legs all stretched out like one, her date staring at her, amazed, appalled, his mouth open. “And tonight? Running upside down? Did that happen to her too?”

“Of course. A thief doesn’t only take, he leaves things. In most cases it’s loss, a black hole. The emptiness that fills you when you know something wonderful and valuable is gone forever.”

As if thinking out loud, Harvey said, “She’ll never trust gravity again.”

Chris poked him in the chest. “Exactly.”

“Whenever she thinks about tonight and the last time, she’ll wonder will it happen again? When will I suddenly fly again?”

“Or run upside down.”

This time Harvey really laughed hard. “I love it. It’s crazy. But ...”

“But what?”

“What if she forgets? I mean, like six months or three years from now? We forget things, even the worst experience gets covered over by time in our minds.”

“Not if you remind her.” To demonstrate, Chris stepped back. Opening his legs, he put his hands on his stomach. Beginning position for ‘gravity thief.’ “One day if you’re very good and keep practicing this, you’ll learn how to do this on your own. Then you can remind her whenever you want.”

Harvey looked at the gleaming wooden floor and thought about Beat Street. About Greta the nice receptionist and beautiful Bess who taught Feldenkreis. He thought about the nothing-specials, purple-cheek’ing along on their treadmills and the middle aged women straining to do stomach crunches. It was a gym, nothing more and nothing less. Or? A chill dribbled down his back when the question came, but he knew he had to ask anyway. “Why me? Why am I here?”

“ ‘Fuck her!’ Do you remember saying that? Do you remember how angry you were?”

“Yes. In the movie theater.”

“That’s right. A good thief is always full of anger. Anger for what he doesn’t have. Anger for what they didn’t give him. Anger for what they took away. That anger led you here. It led all of you here. You’ve got to be really
really
angry to find this class. Don’t you like the people you’ve met here? Aren’t they easy to talk to and get along with? That’s why the class got so small—every one who remains at Beat Street has something they want to steal. You just didn’t know it before.”

Harvey had to say it again, just to taste the words on his tongue.
“Fuck her.”
They tasted delicious. Like a hot dog with all the trimmings.

I
THINK THIS IS
a simple story to tell but knowing Ettrich, it will probably end up complicated. Sometimes it seemed everything about him was complicated, often for no reason at all.

This happened when he was alive, a long time ago. I knew him when he lived in Europe, when he was a successful man. He had things then, he wore cashmere socks. People spoke well of him; his family was proud. He was at the height of his success then, a couple of years before he got sick.

I wasn’t in Europe long, but we met almost as soon as I arrived because we worked for the same company and were in the same division. From the start, I liked him very much and went out of my way to be with him whenever the opportunity arose. He was a businessman but had the kind of presence that would have made him a good politician or actor. Not only did Vincent speak well, he said things you remembered. One of those people who can hold a room whenever they want, who make others sit forward unconsciously in their chairs just to hear better and not miss a thing.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why whenever we traveled together, beautiful women met him at airports. Not always his wife either, though she was lovely too.

There were so many. Once a small English woman with Audrey Hepburn eyes lifted a manicured hand and waved merrily at us as we came through the gate in Heathrow. Once a dark and dramatic-looking Peruvian was there, but only because she was so angry at something he had done that she wanted to hit him. By the time her limo had reached our hotel, however, the two of them were laughing and exchanging secret looks.

They always seemed to be there for Ettrich—women and their secret looks. Some took us back to their cities in dark expensive cars that played quiet jazz through eight speakers. Other times the three of us got into battered, exhausted taxis—Ladas, once-yellow Fiats—and rode cramped together towards new lights. By then Vincent was usually talking fast with them, trying to catch up and make plans at the same time.

I have never known a man who appreciated women more. He was convinced he had been one in a past life because they did things he not only understood, but usually knew were coming long before they happened. One woman said to me over dinner “Vincent scares me sometimes. He even understands why you hate him.” When I asked why
she
hated him, she stared blankly at me a moment, then said “Isn’t it obvious?”

It’s easy to hate someone who knows our secrets, most especially when we don’t know theirs and never will. That’s not to say Vincent Ettrich was a secretive man. If you asked him a question he would answer it. More than once I heard him say the most painful or embarrassing things about himself without any hesitation. Perhaps that’s what made others nervous and sure he was not telling the truth: no one answers certain questions fully, particularly not when it’s too close for comfort.

One more snapshot of him and in many ways it is the most important. It was late spring and I had been staying at the Ungelt Hotel in Prague. The morning I checked out, I strolled onto the hotel’s beautiful terrace to have one last look around before leaving to the airport. It was early for lunch but such a great day that all of the tables were already full. I took a slow deep breath and sighed, feeling the deliciously bitter mixture of elation and sadness that comes when, alone in a foreign city, you see something marvelous you wish you had someone to share it with. The trees were in full bloom, sunlight cascading through their new leaves. People at the tables wore summery clothes that showed off women’s beautiful arms and more than that,
skin everywhere.
Skin that had spent so many months hibernating beneath heavy sweaters, leather coats, gloves.