Falling Through Space (23 page)

The young man's family was probably equally unhappy about the love affair, but I never knew the details of that. If they spoke to him about it, he never told me what they said. As much as we could we stayed away from both our families. We tried to protect each other from their intrusions and I think we did a good job of that. Once, after we had known each other for many years, I took the young man to Jackson, Mississippi to meet my parents. They called me up two nights later. They were eighty-two at the time. I was fifty-seven. “That won't do,” my father said, when he got me on the phone. “This business with the young man has got to stop.”

My mother got on the other phone. “You will have to get rid of him,” she added. “I'm sure your children are embarrassed to death by this.”

“Nothing I could do to them could be as bad as the things they have done to me,” I answered, in the nasty tone I reserve for talking to my mother. “I am fifty-seven years old, Mother. I am hanging up.”

The young man and I were always hanging up on the world. When we were together nothing the outside world did seemed to be able to harm what went on between us. We made each other happy and we made each other laugh and we made each other strong. When we were together love was its own protection, a barrier against reality.

Of course it had to end. I always knew it had to end. I told him in the beginning I would be his girl until I was fifty years old. I was almost sixty when it finally really ended. We had broken up and made up many times during those years but always without rancor or ill-will. The truth was we couldn't stay away from each other. We had created a paradise when we first met and when we were apart we would long to have it back. He would call me or I would call him and within an hour we would be in bed. We would lie in each other's arms and tell the story of how we met and fell in love and told the world to go to hell. We shared a fabulous story of who we had been together, of what we had dared and what we had created.

I have been in psychotherapy for many years. I know that the young man was a surrogate for my sons who had grown up and gone off to have lives of their own. I know that for him I was the mother all men dream of having. The mother who is their sole property. The mother who adores them without question. I know these psychological realities were the ground for our disagreements and the reason the relationship could never last. I knew this while it was going on but it did not change a thing.

Love is a goddess. It is the honey to end all honeys. No one turns down Aphrodite when she comes to call. The old Greeks knew how to create a metaphor. The goddess of love with her satisfied, enigmatic smile. Her little son beside her with his quiver of arrows. He lifts his bow, he takes aim, he shoots, and a man or woman falls into a spell from which there is no escape.

Perhaps I loved him because he was different from other men I had known. He never turned on a television set. He was a small-town boy and read the local newspaper and liked knowing what was going on in the place where he lived. He didn't care what was happening in New York City or Washington, D.C. He wanted to know who was running for sheriff and what was on at the movies and who won the high school football games.

I learned from him to love the place where we were, at that moment, on any given day. I had moved around a great deal as a child, and I had never learned to give my allegiance to a place.

He taught me love. Not just romantic love, and God knows it was romantic, but love of place. He would drive me around and show me places that he loved. An old oak tree that had been split in two by lightning half a century before. Two trees grew from the split trunk with a view of the distant mountains in the space between them.

He took me to the Confederate cemetery on a fall day with the maple trees golden above the graves. A few weeks later, he took me back to see the golden carpet the leaves had become. He never told me where we were going on these expeditions. We would just get into the car, and he would turn on the radio and drive slowly and carefully to something he wanted me to see. He took me out in the country to see his childhood swimming holes. He took me to see the place where his mother taught him to swim. He was very sentimental about that small, weed-bordered lake. He always spoke of his mother with love and praise and because of that I knew I was safe to believe he loved me. A man who loves his mother can love other women. A man who resents his mother will sooner or later resent you if he loves you.

None of that had much to do with young and old. Love is liking to be with another person, having a good time in their presence, thinking you are good and valuable when you are with them.

I remember the first time he saw my forty-four year old body in a bathing suit. He was taking me swimming in a beautiful clear lake formed by the dammed-up waters of the White River. As usual he did not tell me where we were going. We took bathing suits and a lunch and got in the car and started driving. We drove for more than an hour, going north and west from home, going deep into the Ozark Mountains. We turned finally into a park and drove around and up to an overhang and parked the car and got out and started walking.

We walked down wide granite steps that had once been the top of a mountain. I have always loved to swim in lakes and rivers. I learned to swim in a bayou in the Mississippi Delta, and I love the taste and feel of brown river water. We changed into our bathing suits in a grove of shrub trees. “This is the body of a forty-four year old woman in a bathing suit,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I think you look wonderful,” he said. “Hold my hand.”

Then we walked down the granite steps to the water, and he watched as I slid into the lake and started swimming. No man giving a woman diamonds ever had more pleasure or self-assurance in their gifts than he did in giving me that blessed lake.

Am I romanticizing all of this? Perhaps. I have had two great love affairs in my life. I don't think either of them need romanticizing.

I treasure the memory of that love affair, and I am always glad it happened. It made me understand my sons. It reminded me, at a time when many women are leaving such things behind, what passion is and does and causes, how it takes over and calls the shots and creates its own reality. It is a memory “never to be bartered against the hungry days.”

I never cook anything, and I don't like to cook things or clean up the mess it makes. I do, however, know how to cook several things. I know how to cook rare roast beef. You go to the grocery store and buy the most expensive rump roast you can find. You take it out of the paper and rinse it off and then put it in an old black skillet and cook it at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for twenty minutes per pound. Don't drink martinis while you are doing this or you will forget to take it out, and then you will have brisket instead of rare roast beef. While it is cooking, make some grits and stir in a pound of Kraft Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese and half a stick of butter. Put this in a casserole, and cook it in a different oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about twenty or thirty minutes. Cut up some lettuce and tomatoes if they are in season but not in the winter when you have to get those little sour hothouse tomatoes that are probably poison. Set the table. Use all the good silver and light some candles. Put some Bach on the stereo. Call the drugstore and tell them to send out the Sunday
New York Times
and a quart of chocolate ice cream in case no one wants any rare roast beef.

Make some coffee. Bon Appetit!

At the risk of bragging, I must begin this story with a piece of personal history. In 1984 I won the National Book Award for Fiction. In the light of this unexpected and dazzling event, I went to live in New York City for the winter. I rented a furnished apartment on the Upper East Side, certain I would soon be rich and famous and able to afford such luxuries. I spent the award money as though it would last forever. I have a strong imagination, but even I could not have imagined that all this would lead up to supersonic flight.

The year before, I had been on an elevator at the Algonquin Hotel with Eudora Welty, her friend Jane Petty, and the owner of the hotel. I was there to see Ms. Welty and Ms. Petty off on the
Queen Elizabeth
to visit Ms. Welty's European writing friends. As the elevator rose, the hotel owner was talking about her recent trip to London on the Concorde. “It was the single most luxurious thing I have ever done,” she said. “We were there in three hours. No jet lag and the food was marvelous.

“Weren't you scared?” I asked.

“Of course not, Silly,” she answered and fixed me with a haughty stare.

I had been in New York a month when my British publisher called and asked me to come to London to meet the British press and tour the building that houses Faber and Faber. Being published in England by Faber and Faber was another dream come true, and I accepted the invitation with alacrity. “Go on the Concorde,” my agent advised. “It's a once in a lifetime experience.” I thought it over. I remembered the elevator conversation and the hotel owner's haughty stare. I'll do it, I decided. Damn the torpedoes and all that.

A week later, on a beautiful clear Wednesday morning, I took a taxi to JFK and went into the elegant Concorde lounge to await the flight. I was dressed up in my best tweed jacket, my lucky yellow scarf, and a pair of high-heeled leather boots. The flight was scheduled to leave at nine. We would be in London at six in the evening, a flight of three hours given the time difference.

The flight was announced, and I boarded the airplane and found myself sitting across the aisle from the president of Lloyd's of London, the company which insures the plane. Aside from us, there were only ten or eleven other passengers. We had the Concorde to ourselves.

It was a beautiful cabin. The plane was still relatively new, and the seats were twice as wide as they are now and covered with hand-tooled pale gray leather. Two stewardesses served coffee in china cups and gave us the first of many small gifts of candy and mementos. I have forgotten what they were except for one very small cut-glass battery-operated clock. But the thing that interested me most was a clock-size meter at the end of the aisle leading to the cockpit. “It records the speed,” the president told me. “Keep your eye on it. You'll see it hit Mach 1 and then Mach 2.”

The Concorde takes off vertically at six hundred miles an hour. When it has reached its altitude, which is high above commercial airline routes, it levels off, the nose cone realigns itself, and you can look out the windows and see the curvature of the earth. Then the real fun begins. Within fifteen minutes, the meter recorded that we had reached Mach 1. As that happened the plane seemed to stretch out, and I seemed to stretch out too. We were going faster than the speed of sound. In another fifteen minutes we passed Mach 2. The stewardesses moved up and down the aisle serving an elegant meal in five courses. The excitement was so thick you could taste it. I ate lunch, felt like an explorer, and chatted with the president of Lloyd's of London.

About two hours out from JFK, he asked if I had ever been to England. “No,” I answered. “Although my ancestors all came from the British Isles.”

“Then come along,” he said. “I think you should go up to the cockpit.”

A minute later, I was being ushered down the aisle and into the cockpit. Inside were the pilot, the co-pilot, and the first officer. They offered me a fourth seat across from the first officer. In front of me was a wide curving window. Out of it, I could see the British Isles just coming into view through the evening mist. We were breaking the Concorde record and arriving in London in less than three hours. “I can't tell you how much I appreciate your letting me come in here,” I said. “I promise not to touch anything.”