A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (6 page)

Because of the headaches, we abandoned Clomid, that wonderdrug, and we drove back down to New Haven on a windy, tree-tearing day in late March for the histogram. The air was thick with rushing grit as we crossed the clinic parking lot, and a copy of the
Yale News
blew against my leg, the headline, as always:
STRIKE
!

Again I scanned the covers of
Sports Afield
in the waiting room, while the dye was injected through Story’s uterus and up into her fallopian tubes. Each of the magazines I had selected bore covers of large fish (two trout and one bass) standing on their tails in a raw white splash. The bass was trying to spit out a salamander plug and each of the trout had an oversized Royal Coachman hooked in the corner of his mouth. I was surprised by how vital, kinetic, and primary each was, and they evoked in me sentiments usually tapped only by top forty hits from the fifties. I love art. Each painter had captured the look of death on a game fish face, and yet he left the viewer one small bright hope: the fish might get away.

Then the nurse came and took me to Story, dressed by now, and we watched the television monitor and the X-ray scan of Story’s secret chambers. It was, by far, the best program I’ve ever seen on television. Story’s tubes were clear and symmetrical, the shadow swelling at the end of each tube a bit like an antler in what the technician called the
fibrililium,
a word I had him spell.

We drove halfway home, up Route 8, before we understood that we felt bad. It was one of those half raw March days, the wind warm where it came around the sunny corner of a building and cold everywhere else. It blew Story’s hair in her face as we came out of DeRusso’s after a late lunch of hot Italian sausage for which they are famous. When she pulled her hair back, I could see that she was crying. In the car she said: “There’s nothing wrong with us.” She was right. She’d done the progesterone count twice and hers was
slightly
low, but nothing was wrong. My sperm count was
slightly
low, but still there were millions. Story’s uterus was
slightly
tipped, but it shouldn’t, in the doctor’s words, present a problem.
Science,
I thought. Now there’s a word.
Science.
We stopped at Outskirts, the little package store on the edge of Winstead for a roadkit of cold Piels light.

“Here,” I said, handing Story a beer. “No ice, no twist of lemon, but a woman who is thirsty has nothing for tears.” It was an old joke of ours and she smiled. But the rest of the way home, we felt bad. There was nothing wrong with us and we felt bad.

FOUR

I HAD
class the day Story went down to New Haven for her cervical biopsy. I told her I’d cancel, but she insisted on driving down alone. It was the final day of watercolors, before we went on to Life Class with pencils and acrylics, and I had to put up with Mary Ann Buxton gushing about how much she had loved the medium and ya-da, ya-da about her plans to explore it further on her own this summer at her parents’ place in Maine, the light there was so delicate and terrific, and la-di-da. I had to walk three easels away to get her to let up. I had to admit, however, she had done a fair job on the four birches that grew beside the Dean’s garden. I see the four birches that grow beside the Dean’s garden almost twenty times in a year in every possible medium, especially watercolor, and they have almost cancelled my ability to enjoy trees at all. Simply: I hate them. If I stay at Bigville, there will certainly come an evil night when I make their final rendering with a chainsaw.

By the end of class, I’d grown glum, worrying about Story, and I sulked through the easels like a panhandler. It makes you feel funny sometimes as a teaching artist to see your students march through their paces, their work not great, not bad, but
work
anyway: finished paintings. I went back to the four birches. I helped Mary Ann Buxton add a little more light to the upside of a dozen leaves, but I felt like a phony anyway. I needed to paint.

I was home by two and my funk had me nailed to a chair in the dark living room, unable to blink. Luckily, Billy Wellner came by. He’d been to lunch with Ruth and had three beers and didn’t want to write any more policies that afternoon. We took off our shirts and played the World Series of one on one in my driveway: best of seven. For an insurance agent, Billy has a good jumpshot, but he rarely drives for the basket and he’s all right hand. I beat him four straight and walked him to his car.

Across the street, Mudd Miller himself came onto his porch and began bellowing the names of his children. There were long pauses followed frequently by a name he’d already called.

Billy threatened a rematch and said, “Let us know how Story is.”

Half an hour later, I heard the car in the driveway, but Story didn’t come in. I found her sitting in the driver’s seat, washed out and pale. She made a grim little smile. “I should have had you come,” she said. “It’s the only thing so far that’s hurt. I could hardly use the clutch on the way home.”

I took her in and put her to bed. “You’re all slimy,” she said.

“Sweaty. I’m all sweaty. Since I can’t paint, I’m putting my energies into basketball. Does it hurt now?”

“Just a small fire. I think they used a fingernail clippers.”

I called the Wellners. Ruth answered and I told her about Story and asked her to handle the Township tomorrow. Before hanging up I gave her the accurate score of this afternoon’s basketball massacre. “Why is the world all women and
boys?
” she said. “You take good care of Story; I’ll handle the office.”

Later still, Dr. Binderwitz’s secretary-assistant Michelle called and said that the biopsy showed nothing, that Story was all right. It was a great spring twilight, I could hear the one nightingale calling from Mugacook, and the voices of children playing tag on the edge of the campus, but when I looked in on my sleeping wife, a powerlessness so profound swept over me that I felt my back knotting up. I wanted to shake her shoulder and whisper: “I’ll solve this problem,” the way a husband should about an incorrect billing or a loose window or a gummy carburetor. I leaned against the doorway that spring night, and I knew the truth:
I couldn’t do anything about this.
I couldn’t paint or make us have a baby. I could throw a jump shot in from the corner, but as Ruth said, that is a matter for boys.

Story slept. The examination had told us again: she was all right. I folded my arms and felt them tingle with a tension that was new to me; I know now it was the blood sense that I was getting closer.

FIVE

BIGVILLE
HAS
, just as it has a Volunteer Fire Department, a volunteer baseball team, which is one of the oldest institutions in the township. And one of the customs that has grown up with our team is that the mayor throws out the ball for the opening game, which is always played at home against New Hartford.

At one in the afternoon on the day after her laparoscopy, Story stood up on the first row of the silly little bleachers in Bigville Park and threw a brand new Bradley baseball to Mudd Miller, who plays catcher for the ball team. He was standing inside the baseline, so it was a fine toss by a woman who had just twenty-four hours prior had a laparoscopy. In fact, when Mudd came over ceremoniously to hand Story back the baseball, he commented that she had more on the ball than any mayor in his fifteen years catching.

Ruth sat with us, being solicitous of her friend Story; she let me know just with her posture that Story’s discomfort was somehow all my fault and that she, Ruth, was fundamentally alarmed that a person of my caliber would even try to impose his twisted gene pool onto another generation. Besides her motto about all the kids at K Mart, she always said to Story, while I was in the room; “Why would you want a child, when you’re married to one?” However, there was a look of genuine concern on the county attorney’s face today, so I could take her cheap heat and watch the ballgame.

During a laparoscopy, a probe is inserted near the navel and searches the fallopian tubes for obstructive material, primarily known as endometriosis. Dr. Binderwitz had been able to tell us that the search had shown nothing, no obstruction. Story’s tubes were clear. The operation left a tiny wrinkled scar under her navel, as if to underline it, an emphatic italic of her beauty.

The field was full of townspeople, tradesmen, and friends. Billy was straightaway in right field. Mr. Cummings from the food center was at second base, and one of the deans from the college was on the mound.

The baseball game was tight until the top of the ninth when a bearded man who works in the Sinclair in New Hartford hit a change-up over the old railroad trestle scoring three runs. Bigville couldn’t match that, and after the game, Story and I walked the mile home.

“What are we going to do?” Story asked.

“Find a better pitcher; move the dean to the outfield.”

She grabbed me around the neck in a mock wrestling hold. I tried to duck out, restrain her arms.

“Careful, one of us just had an operation.” I took her hand and we walked on. “Is that the last test?”

“Yes,” she said. “And there’s nothing wrong with us.” The two of us kicked stones along the old road, like two teenagers walking home from school. It was full May, two weeks past even the last cold rain, and the blossoming trees drooped into our path. I could see four men dragging the diving raft toward the lake down at the Grove. Tomorrow, Sunday, some lucky ten-year-old would climb the twenty red rungs on that wooden platform and commit the first cannonball into Mugacook for the summer season.

“What do we do?” Story whispered.

“Keep our chins up.” I said. “Interact sexually . . . and . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something else. It’ll come to me. Something else.”

Story took my arm. “I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry we can’t have children, but I still and will always love you.”

WHEN
YOU
hold a woman you know quite well, press her softly into, say, a mattress, one hand under her neck, the other on the swelling of her hip, her skin so smooth as to seem forbidding and inviting at the same time, if she moves once, say to reach under your arm and to pull you forward, your mind will go right on by progesterone counts and histograms into a warm lyric zone where it will disappear in a dandy stinging swelter.

In such a swelter, my limbs lost in Story’s, one night in May, at a moment when my eyes were about to roll away, I again saw my three fingers come creeping over Story’s shoulder; and in the blurred proximity of the warm moment, they looked like the same three blank-faced old men arriving to witness our coupling. At the time I thought it was an odd vision for such a crucial time, but it was the beginning of an odd era, a time when cause–effect would take on new meaning, when order, sequence, science would whirl away.

That night when we rolled apart, I first dreamed of moons and geese and drowning, and then sometime late in the night I saw a perfect and vivid vision:

A man wearing a turquoise steerhead with jeweled horns does a low, steady hop around a campfire, swinging a stone phallus on a gold chain and singing with the insistent drums: HAH-MAH, LOH-LAH, HAH-MAH, LOH-LAH! He stops. He twists a glass vial of some thin red nectar onto the flames. They reach up in a hissing flash and light the area. In the new flare, the man thrusts his painted hand into the abdomen of a splayed chicken, tosses the entrails out in a splash, and begins—as the fire crawls back down to the logs—to read the throw, fingering the shiny organs apart as his shiny eyes begin to fill with the future.

I won’t say much about the next few days, except that I did not start painting. I spent all my free time between morning and afternoon classes in the library and the library annex. With the good weather, the buildings were empty, all the undergraduates gone outside to court, and my research was simple. After I exhausted the campus libraries, I went down to Bigville Memorial, built of hewn granite and given to the town by Hugo Ballowell’s great grandfather. I spent more than one day there, in fact, I used up the rest of May, not even looking up as the light changed at midday or in the evening, and I ended up in a corner of the basement. I found everything. The two volumes I selected had to be catalogued before I could take them home.
The Dark Arts
and
Life Before Science.
Together they weighed twelve pounds. Mrs. Torrey looked at me as if I was unhinged while I waited for her to write the library cards, but the heft of those books as I hauled them down to my studio seemed the first real thing in my quest. At last, I thought, I am finally doing something.

SIX

I ROWED
the boat into dark Mugacook. Okay. Okay. Okay. Now. I’ve done all my homework. The first sperm to reach the ovum is the only one to enter. Of the millions of sperm sent out, only hundreds reach the ovum, and only the first to touch it enters. Upon entering, he swells and bursts, spilling the twenty-three chromosomes he’s been carrying. That part is beyond me.

I rowed the old red rowboat and said aloud, “Okay, okay, okay.”

When I perceived I was in line with the lighted church spire in town and the dozen lights of the Ballowell main house, I rowed toward town another five pulls and shipped the oars. It
felt
like the middle of the lake, but I didn’t know; it was dark. I picked up the basketball, my old Voit. I’d scored layups on ten driveways in four states with this ball. I felt the ball in my hands. It was a little flat, but I mounted it on my fingertips for the shot, feeling the old worn nubble, and sent it up in a perfect arc, rocking the old wooden boat a bit more than I meant to. I grabbed the gunwales to keep from going in the dark water myself, and I heard the satisfying
bip!
of the ball’s splash.

The sperm’s journey is the equivalent of a three-and-a-half-mile swim, so I was going to have to swim from the town beach over to the boathouse and then head for the middle. I rowed back. I pulled the heavy boat up on the sand, dragging it well clear of the water, and I undressed, putting my clothing over the bow. Then I curled onto the cool sand and tried to grow quiet. I was too excited. I could feel, smell, sense the whole round lake lying beside me, and somewhere in the middle, the basketball. I squeezed my eyes shut in joy. This is it. I could feel a warmth in my shoulders and in the backs of my legs; this was really working.