Airships (11 page)

“Whose voice was that?” asked French.

“Just a voice,” said Levaster.

“Whose? Don't I know it? It makes me sick.” French
turned back to Cecilia, covered with a black veil, her handkerchief pressed to lips. Her child had been born with dysfunction of the involuntary muscles. Her eyes rose toward the hot null blue of the sky. French supported her. His gaze was angrier. It penetrated the careless heart of nature, right in there to its sullen root.

On the other side of the cemetery, Dr. Word closed the door of the car. Wilbur drove. Loyal to his brother to the end, almost deaf from the pitch of his voice, Wilbur wheeled the car with veteran patience. Dr. Word wiped his head and held the beret to his chest.

“Ah, Wilbur! They were so unlucky! Nowhere could there be a handsomer couple! They had every right to expect a little Odysseus! Ah, to see doubt and sorrow cloud the faces of those young lovers! Bereft of hope, philosophy!”

Wilbur reached under the seat for the pint of philosophy he had developed since his tour of Korea. It was cognac. The brotherly high music came, tasting of burnt plums, revealing the faces of old officer friends to him.

“James,” he said. “I think after this . . . that this is the moment, now, to break it off with Olive—forever. Unless you want to see more doubt and sorrow cloud the face of your young friend.”

Word's reply was curiously quiet.

“We cannot do what we cannot do. If she will not end it—and she will not—I cannot. Too deep a sense of joy, Wilbur. The whole quality of my life determined by it.”

“Ah, Jimmy,” Wilbur said, “you were just too long a queer. The first piece you found had to be permanent. She ain't Cleopatra. If you'd just've started early, nailing the odd twat like the rest of us . . .”

“I don't want old soldier's reason! No reason! I will not suffer that contamination! Though I love you!”

Dr. Word was hollering again. Wilbur drove them back to Vicksburg.

Cecilia was too frightened to have another child after she lost the first one. Her body would not carry one longer than a month. She was constantly pregnant for a while, and then she stopped conceiving. She began doing watercolors, the faintest violets and greens. French Edward took up the clarinet. Baby Levaster saw it: they were attempting to become art people. Cecilia was pitiful. French went beyond that into dreadfulness; ruesome honks poured from his horn. How wrong and unfortunate that they should have taken their grief into art, thought Levaster. It made them fools who were cut from glory's cloth, who were charmed darlings of the sun.

“What do you think?” asked French, after he'd hacked a little ditty from Mozart into a hundred froggish leavings.

“Yes,” Dr. Levaster said. “I think I'll look through some of Cissy's pictures now.”

“You didn't like it,” French said, downcast, even angry.

“When are you going to get into another tournament? Why sit around here revealing your scabs to me and the neighbors? You need to get out and hit the ball.”

French left, walked out, smoldering and spiteful. Baby Levaster remained there. He knocked on Cecilia's door. She was at her spattered art desk working over a watercolor, her bare back to Levaster, her hair lying thick to the small of it, and below, her naked heels. Her efforts were thumbtacked around from ceiling to molding, arresting one with their meek, awkward redundancies, things so demure they resisted making an image against the retina. They were not even clouds; rather, the pale ghosts of clouds: the advent of stains, hardly noticeable against paper.

“I can't turn around, but hello,” said Cecilia.

“What are all these about?”

“What do you think?”

“I don't know . . . smudges? The vagueness of all things?”

“They aren't things. They're emotions.”

“You mean hate, fear, desire, envy?”

“Yes. And triumph and despair.” She pointed.

“This is subtle. They look the same,” Levaster said.

“I know. I'm a nihilist.”

“You aren't any such thing.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because you've combed your hair. You wanted me to come in here and discover that you're a nihilist,” Levaster said.

“Nihilists can comb their hair.” She bit her lip, pouting.

“I'd like to see your chest. That's art.”

“You toilet. Leave us alone.”

“Maybe if you
are
art, Cissy, you shouldn't try to
do
art.”

“You want me to be just a decoration?”

“Yes,” Levaster said. “A decoration of the air. Decoration is more important than art.”

“Is that what you learned in med school? That's dumb.” She turned around. “A boob is a boob is a boob.”

Dr. Levaster fainted.

At the River Oaks Club in Houston, French played again. The old happiness came back to him, a delight that seemed to feed off his grace. The sunburned Levaster held French's towel for him, rosined French's racket handles, and coached him on the weaknesses of the opponents, which is unsportsmanly, untennislike, and all but illegal. A Spaniard Edward was creaming complained, and they threw Levaster off the court and back to the stands. He watched French work the court, roving back and forth, touching the ball with a deft chip, knocking the cooties off it, serving as if firing a curved musket across the net, the Spaniard falling distraught. And throughout, French's smile, widening and widening until it was just this side of loony. Here was a man truly at play, thought Levaster, at one with the pleasant rectangle of the court, at home, in his own field, something
peaceful
in the violent sweep of his racket. A certain slow anomalous serenity invested French Edward's motion. The thought of this parched Levaster.

“Christ, for a drink!” he said out loud.

“Here, son. Cold brandy.” The man Levaster sat next to brought out a pint from the ice in a Styrofoam box. Levaster chugged it—exquisite!—then almost spat up the boon as he noticed the fellow on the far side of the brandy man. It was Dr. Word. The man beside Levaster was Wilbur. Word's noble cranium glinted under the sun. His voice had modulated.

“Ah, ah, my boy! An arc of genius,” Word whispered as they saw French lay a disguised lob thirty feet from the Spaniard. “He's learned the lob, Wilbur! Our boy has it all now!” Word's voice went on in soft screaming. He seemed to be seeing keenly out of the left eye. The right was covered by eyelid, the muscles there having finally surrendered. So, Levaster thought, this is what the stroke finally left him.

“How's Vicksburg?” Levaster asked Wilbur.

“Nothing explosive, Doctor. Kudzu and the usual erosion.”

“What say you try to keep Professor Word away from French until he does his bit in the tournament. A lot depends on his making the finals here.”

“I'm afraid the professor's carrying a letter on him from Olive to French. That's why he's not hollering. He's got the letter. It's supposed to say everything.”

“But don't let French see him till it's over. And could I hit the brandy again?” Levaster said.

“Of course,” said Wilbur. “One man can't drink the amount I brought over. Tennis bores the shit out of me.”

In the finals, Edward met Whitney Humble, a tall man from South Africa whose image and manner refuted the usual notion of the tennis star. He was pale, spindly, hairy, with the posture of a derelict. He spat phlegm on the court and picked his nose between serves. Humble appeared to be splitting the contest between one against his opponent and another against the excrescence of his own person. Some in the gallery suspected he served a wet ball. Playing as if with exasperated distaste for the next movement this game had dragged him to, Humble was nevertheless there when the ball came and knocked everything back with either speed or a snarling spin.
The voice of Dr. Word came cheering, bellowing for French. Humble identified the bald head in the audience that had hurrahed his error at the net. He served a line drive into the gallery that hit Word square in his good eye.

“Fault!” cried the judge. The crowd was horrified.

Humble placed his high-crawling second serve to French.

Levaster saw little of the remaining match. Under the bleachers, where they had dragged Word, Levaster and Wilbur attended to the great black peach that was growing around Word's good eye. With ice and a handkerchief, they abated the swelling, and then all three men returned to their seats. Dr. Word could see out of a black slit of his optic cavity, see French win in a sequel of preposterous dives at the net. Levaster's body fled away from his bones and gathered on the muscles of French Edward. The crowd was screaming over the victory. Nowhere, nowhere, would they ever see again such a clear win of beauty over smut.

Fat Tim, Cecilia's father, would be happy and put five thousand in French's bank if French won this tournament, and Fat Tim would pay Levaster one thousand, as promised, for getting French back on the track of fame. Fat Tim Emile, thumbing those greasy accounts of his concessions, saw French as the family knight, a jouster among grandees, a champion in the whitest sport of all, a game Fat Tim viewed as a species of cunning highbrowism under glass. So he paid French simply for being himself, for wearing white, for symbolizing the pedigree Fat Tim was without, being himself a sweaty dago, a tubby with smudged shirt cuffs and phlebitis. “Get our boy back winning. I want to read his name in the paper,” said Fat Tim. “I will,” said Levaster.

So I did, thought Levaster. French won.

Dr. Levaster saw Dr. Word crowding up, getting swarmed out to the side by all the little club bitches and fuzzchins with programs for autographing in hand. Word fought back in, however, approaching French from the back. Levaster saw Word pinch French and heard Word bellow something hearty.
By the time Levaster reached the court, the altercation had spread through the crowd. A letter lay in the clay dust, and Word, holding up his hand to ameliorate, was backing out of sight, his good eye but a glint in a cracked bruise, the lid falling gruesome.

“Baby! Baby!” called French, the voice baffled. Levaster reached him. “He pinched me!” French screamed. “He got me right there, really hard!”

Levaster picked up the letter and collected the rackets, then led French straight to the car. No shower, no street clothes.

My Dearest French,

This is your mother Olive writing in case you have forgotten what my handwriting looks like. You have lost your baby son and I have thought of you these months. Now I ask you to think of me. I lost my grown son years ago. You know when, and you know the sin which is old history. I do not want to lose you, my darling. You are such a strange handsomely made boy I would forget you were mine until I remembered you fed at my breast and I changed your diapers. When I saw you wearing new glasses at your wedding if I looked funny it was because I wanted to touch your eyes under them they changed you even more. But I knew you didn't want me anywhere near you. Your bride Cissy was charming as well as stunning and I'm deeply glad her father is well-off and you don't have to work for a living if you don't want to. Your father tried to play for a living or get near where there was athletics but it didn't work as smoothly for him. It drove him crazy, to be truthful. He was lost for a week in February until James Word, the bearer of this letter, found him at the college baseball field throwing an old wet football at home plate. He had been sleeping in the dugout and eating nothing but these dextrose and salt tablets. I didn't write you this before because you were being an expectant father and then the loss of your child. Maybe you get all your sports drive from your father. But you see how awfully difficult it was to live with him? Certain other things have happened before, I never told you about. He refereed a high-school football game between Natchez and Vicksburg and when it was tight at the end he threw a block
on a Natchez player. We love him, French, but he has been away from us a long time.

So I fell in love with James Word. Don't worry, your father still knows nothing. That is sort of proof where his mind is, in a way. Your father has not even wanted “relations” with me in years. He said he was saving himself up. He was in a poker game with some coaches at the college but they threw him out for cheating. James tried to arrange a tennis doubles game with me and your father against another couple, but your father tried to hit it so hard when it came to him that he knocked them over into the service station and etc. so we had no more balls.

The reason I sent this by James is because I thought if it was right from his hand you would see that it was not just a nasty slipping-around thing between us but a thing of the heart. His stroke has left him blind in one eye and without sure control of his voice. But he loves you. And he loves me. I believe God is with us too. Please take us all together and let's smile again. I am crying as I write this. But maybe that's not fair to mention that. James has mentioned taking us all, your father included, on a vacation to Padre Island in Texas, him paying all the expenses. Can't you please say yes and make everything happy?

Love,
Mother

“It was his fingers pinching me,” whined French. “He pinched me all the time when he was coaching me.”

Levaster said, “And if he hadn't coached you, you wouldn't be anything at all, would you? You'd be selling storm fencing in Vicksburg, wouldn't you? You'd never have pumped that snatch or had the swimming pool.”

Back at his clinic, Levaster slept on a plastic couch in the waiting room. The nurse woke him up. He was so lonely and horny that he proposed to her, though he'd never had a clear picture of her face. Months ago he'd called her into his office. He'd had an erection for four days without rest.

“Can you make anything of this, Louise? Get the
Merck Manual
. Severe hardship even to walk.” She had been charming. But when he moved to her leg, clasping on it like a spaniel
on the hot, she denied him, and he had since considered her a woman of principle.