Airships (20 page)

Patient: Oh, I'm so sorry! Christ! I didn't want to.

Lardner: I think you did.

Patient: I . . . yes! I did! We've produced a cure together. You work so fast. (
Sounds of slipped-off panties
.) Have me, have! Let me make up for the hand!

And the only other one I recall:

Patient: It's the end of the world. It's the Big Fight. I read the
Times
on the subway, and think about my people, the Jews. I think of my good job and prosperity. The oil issue is going to wipe Israel out in ten years. There won't be an Israel. My people will be raped and burned over. And I want to fight. I want to
leave Westchester County and fight. I want to bear arms and defend Israel. How can I stand walking around the streets of this town, this loud confusing city, when there are issues so clear-cut?

Lardner: Shit, I don't know. Why don't you fly out tomorrow morning?

When Lardner came back home to the South, he invited me over for a drink in his backyard at Baton Rouge. There'd been a storm in the afternoon and it had made June seem like October all of a sudden when it left. Here he was asking me whether he should go on and finish med school or not, and then he played me the tape recordings.

“The only thing we're sure about anymore is how much money we need,” said I. “That's about as profound as I ever get. I've got a wife and two kids. Me and the wife drink a great deal in the evenings of Baton Rouge. We're happy. The great questions seemed to have passed us by. I'm a radiologist. All day long I look for shadows. We've got two Chinese elm trees in our backyard and a fat calico named Sidney. Our children are beautiful and I've got stock in Shell.”

“You're right,” said Lardner.

“Every man can be a king if he wants to,” I said. “That's what my father said. He had harder times than me or you.”

“That's true,” Lardner said.

The last thing I heard about Lardner, he was on a boat out of New Orleans headed for Rio. From there he took ship to Spain.

I don't know another thing about him.

Carlos, please put me on the Significant Persons list, she said. We didn't know you had any faith. You never acted like a Catholic. You swore and whored and were petty like the rest of us. Please, please let me and Robinson on your ship. Robinson is
always
religious when he has a hangover. I myself had a suspicion there were some old verities. We used to go down to the pond and throw bread at the ducks. They always reminded me of the old verities, so white and natural. Robinson even at his worst claimed he was wandering toward the ancient basics, but he was scared numb that he might have found them already. The point is, we always meant well, Carlos.

We loved kikes and niggers, she continued softly.

Perhaps we just had too much confidence, she sighed. The rest was almost inaudible.

We were a handsome couple and knew it, besides—she gasped—talented.

She had thick blond hair and soft-set eyes and had once been a female polo player of some note on the greenest and wealthiest fields of the Carolinas and New York State. Furthermore, she had a style of being stylish that was the envy of thousands of the envious. Carlos was one of those who had coveted her in years past. He quivered in his garage that she was here at last.

Tell me the story of your life, Carlos said sternly.

At heart he was jealous and nosy, and he bit himself inwardly for his poor motives. In her automobile's windshield
he caught a reflection of himself in shorts, bald head, hairy Catholic titties.

Carlos and this woman were the same age, had gone to the same prep school in Boston, both rubes together there. He was from Santa Fe and she was from Alaska. But she got rid of Alaska very early, homed in Florida for seven years, was fourteen and bored in Pennsylvania; over to Boston, thence to college and New York, where she found Robinson among the hundreds of New Yorkers who managed to make a great amount of money for doing almost nothing at all but was pretty as a god and possessed of a voice like a French horn, so that at crucial parties he could say practically nothing and leave the impression among the more musically eared that profundity of the eternal sort had passed near. She was caught.

Her dad was filthy rich from a corrupt deal on the Alaskan pipeline. Everything was guaranteed for a blast of manna and romance. So they married. Robinson was a very clean man and shocked by the filth of the assault she made on him. He developed hobbies to escape her. But when he got ready and had grown to her needs and pressed her, she turned into a sort of brilliant nag who deserted him and had developed her own expensive hobbies. So that one day a helicopter landed on the roof of the club and took her off to the Caribbean. He went to the bar and, among the kind, garrulous blacks in their livery, he became a dreamer on alcohol.

She was faithful to him except for one night with drugs in her, given to her by a friend she trusted in Rio. Oh, Rio, Rio, Rio. Women are patient and men are not. Women are softer and carouse like feathers against each other. She allowed herself to be taken by the featherly Vera and, as she recalled, reciprocated somewhat. Some days she blamed it on the drug and some days she blamed her past, other days she blamed her glands, and on horrible bright days she blamed herself entire.

While in the meantime Robinson drove a lonely, horny and faithful course around the main cities of the nation,
sometimes visiting a library or an observatory, making money hand over fist. He did it with the only talent he had never cultivated, his honesty. They bought snowmobiles from his company in Kentucky, because by that time the weather had turned very weird. All the upper South was white and frigid.

She did not tell Carlos much of this. Her story was full of modest lies that proved she had not had an interesting life at all. The taste of Vera came into her mouth as she thinned her tale. She censored one after another the scenes of bliss that she had passed, sometimes in the company of Robinson and sometimes when not, feeling like a lone released atom of rapture in Key West, in Charleston, in New York, in the sky over Ontario in Winston's glider: oh, the quiet, oh, the blue, Winston at the stick, handsome but not a lover, just the best
friend
she ever had. Oh, the thick green forest, the fierce rocks below, the eagle who sailed tandem six feet from their window and turned to look directly at her face, as much as saying he was their friend; she had never imagined birds smiled when they flew.

Say, she said, if I'm going on with this, could I see the ship in the silo? Wouldn't you let me?

Tell about your intimate life with Robinson, said Carlos, leading her around the garage.

The silo was about a hundred and fifty feet tall, about sixty feet around, bricks bright red from the rain and sleet, and there was something venerable about the thing even though it had been thrown up hastily around the ship only six months ago.

Perhaps because I want inside so much, she told herself. But there are limits to that too. Some things are worth perishing with as secrets.

I mean, the way you
are
together, this Carlos said, your spoiled little definition of love. It's all been frightfully easy for you, hasn't it? You copied my exam answers in prep school. I let you. You traded your beauty so openly I could kick myself, as if every one of your smiles were worth a dollar and a great deal of trouble. You used me as fodder
for the ongoing of your beauty. But now we're both forty-two, aren't we?

Yes, Carlos. Would you let me see the ship?

Nobody
can see the ship except the pilot and me. That is, of course, until we all get in it Saturday. But go on with your story. I'm amused by the trifling episodes you consider important. About your relationship with Robinson?

Wait. I'm not going to empty out myself for anybody about Robinson. That's our secret, she said. If you want me to lower myself so I can get on the ship this way, I'm not going to. I'll stay here and die with Robinson. Maybe we'll screw each other to death on our bed. It has a brass bedstead and there's a . . . the whole ceiling's a mirror, Carlos. It's like looking at your own happiness. There's nothing sick about it. Robinson always said the only sure thing the gods gave us was each other, all our faces and armpits and little skin rashes, she said.

Carlos winced. He wanted something gravely miserable. He had once married a girl from Grand Forks. They were both fat. She had hair on her back and her toes were black with fur. In fact, she was almost a man, seemed to have missed it by one flick of agitation of a gene. She dressed in cowboy fashion, jeans, boots, thirty-dollar hat now that she'd married a guy in the money. Carlos was a Presbyterian then, trying to be a preacher in Tucson, where Navajos started a fistfight during Carlos's sermons and the women simply fell dead asleep, this being their only period of rest in the week. His wife ate near five pounds of food a day. She was a wonderful cook, but mainly for herself. She ate directly out of the big iron pots while the food was still steaming, using a big ladle. There was just enough left for him, time it got to the table. Sunday afternoons she would come in, no regard for his weariness after his sermon and the meal. Food gave her an insufferable burst of energy, as if she'd swallowed a pound of drugs. Carlos would be thinking about God, about what a wretched nasty trip it was in this world of clumsy sorrow, about the holiness of the Law, about converting to
Catholicism because of its stubborn travel throughout history. She, who was dead now by heart attack in the act of fornication, would roll and swagger into his bedroom. “Get them trousers down, you little dude. Old Nancy needs some fun.” She outweighed him by fifty pounds. As she swelled to hard flab, her desires and etiquette became a miracle of irritation to him. She made him despise his own flesh, and drove him further into his meditations in the desert. Once he prayed the Lord to shorten his member and turn his testicles to ash. He viewed her as a sort of rabid hippopotamus cornering him in one bad dream after another. And she smoked five packs a day, often as not an ember between her lips as she rutted above him, spitting out fire all over him on the arrival of her moment. The last horror was when she thought she needed a child. She wanted to call it Buck or Francine, depending. She got melancholy and cried huge tears because nothing “took.” She had her heart attack trying again. Not only did she die on the spot, but he thought she was asleep, and suffered her weight until he smelled something odd.

When he knew she was dead, Carlos smiled. Then he walked out of the house in a rampage over the idiocy of this earthly toil.

Then he became a priest.

He got fatter and went without a shirt, proud of his fat because it proved how vile the flesh was. And in five years he became very important. The dead spirit of his wife entered him, and he was conscious of two souls in his single bosom. At strange moments he would smile and find himself in love with the memory of his old Nancy. I have been through so much, the very limit, Carlos told himself.

They had let him put five Significant Persons on the ship's roster. His hand had formed their names with his fountain pen. But two of them had killed themselves last Saturday night. There were two more places aboard, though she did not know it.

Please let me see the ship, she said.

I'm sorry, said Carlos. He hated her because she reminded him of the old world of small desires and petty nostalgia. He hated her also because she knew that he chased women, made gossip and was a sorry priest. In fact, she could ruin him if she wanted to.

We want to
live
, Carlos, she said. How can you kill us? I was your friend. It's murder.

There
is
one place, Carlos said.
One
place. But not two. Robinson can't go. . . . For auld lang syne, I can get you on. Provided.

Yes, all right. Robinson says he'll live or die by the seasons.

Look at the seasons, said Carlos. In August it's a hundred fifty degrees. In December it's minus twenty-five and three feet of snow in Mississippi. In April the big trees explode.

We know all that. Listen: why didn't you put us on the list? she said. We weren't bad.

I thought you lacked a basic seriousness about life.

But I've always been very serious.

You always gave me the sense that you were winking at everything. Nothing seemed deep to you.

What do I do? she said.

Lick me with your tongue all over my body. Suck the hair curls on my ankles, said Carlos.

She knelt down and pulled her hair back. She closed her eyes and her tongue appeared, red as a flame. Carlos saw the sweetly ordered blond hair, given a natural part by nature. She was beginning on his kneecap.

Are you serious? demanded Carlos.

She halted and picked a hair from her strawberry lips.

Oh, Carlos, I've always been serious, she said.

Robinson was out at his nice big house running the push mower over the grass the Sunday afternoon when the rocket went up in the air. The grass was growing a foot and a half overnight, and vines and cane took root and burst out of the soil if you went in to have a drink of water. The rocket made
a magnificent yellow and purple wash over the entire western sky. Robinson barely looked at it, though he knew his wife was aboard. He whistled for Oliver, a very old and decrepit Dalmatian, the same dog who had lived in the dorm with him at Yale. Last night Robinson had forgotten to let him in, and the poor dog had slept on a patch of cane shoots. Robinson remembered his dog at five in the morning, and went out in the backyard looking for him. Robinson heard all quiet except for the cracking sounds of growth in the hedge, which was thirty feet high. He heard whimpering sounds above him. The cane had grown under the dog and lifted him up eight feet in the air. The dog was looking down at him. Robinson met the dog's look. We love each other, Robinson said. Don't be afraid. He got his ladder and lifted Oliver down from the cane tops.