Flight (23 page)

Bryan taught her favorite class. Cross-listed in sociology and literature, it was called “The Utopian Impulse.” They were assigned a variety of books about utopian communities, starting with the Book of Genesis. They read Thomas More’s
Utopia
and works by other people Carol had never heard of: Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Fourier and Edward Bellamy. She found it fascinating, far better than the European-film class she had to sit through before it.

Bryan was young and didn’t act like Carol expected professors to act. He was always late, hurrying into the classroom at five past
nine, a disorganized sheaf of papers under one arm. He was tall and lanky in his blue jeans, with brown eyes and curly brown hair that just touched his shoulders. He had a habit of pushing his hair behind one ear, revealing full brown sideburns. Will would have called him a hippie. Bryan never sat at his desk or lectured. Instead, he made them pull their chairs into a circle and “rap.” He listened patiently to everyone’s ideas about what they’d read. If anyone interrupted another student, he’d hold up his hand gently. “Everyone is owed equal time to express his or her opinion fully,” he would say.

It was near the end of the semester when Will came home with the Riviera. That night he went to his study after dinner. Carol put the girls to bed and went to his door. He was at his desk, drawing.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do first,” he said. “I thought I’d build us a deck.” He held up a drawing of a small deck extending from the kitchen’s sliding glass doors. That wasn’t what she’d meant. In the window behind him, she could see his hand, holding up the notebook, an offering.

They had always known furlough was a possibility. When the first round of layoffs came, they talked about what Will might do. The farm didn’t make enough money for them to live on. But neither of them could imagine Will doing anything other than flying. It was all he had ever wanted. Carol suspected Will was happiest in the air. It was the only time he was moving forward as fast as he wanted to go.

“Are you sure we need a deck?” she asked. “Won’t it cost a lot of money?”

Will waved a hand, dismissing what he didn’t want to consider. “Wood is cheaper than laying concrete. Besides, won’t it be nice in the summer?”

The word “utopia” had always given Carol a particular feeling. She imagined a world in the clouds, or a gleaming city like Oz in the
movie. She imagined girls in frilled dresses drinking root-beer floats, children singing in the streets. Utopia was an imagined place, an ideal existing only in books. She was amazed to learn how many people had actually tried to create one.

In class, Bryan would point out the flaws in the utopian schemes they read about: the repression of individuality, the assumption of physical perfection, the failure to allow dissent. With him as their guide, they dissected one beautiful dream after another, until Carol began to suspect that his point might be that the very notion of utopia was dangerous and wrongheaded.

The Tuesday after Will was laid off was when it all started. Bryan gave them their final paper assignment. They were supposed to analyze a contemporary instance of utopian thinking.

“I’m not necessarily talking about a cult or a special school,” he told them. “The utopian impulse is everywhere. We talked about how advertisers try to sell you a utopia. Look around you. Find the same urge somewhere else in your world and take a good hard look at it.”

Carol was agitated as she packed her things. Something about the assignment appealed to her. She wanted to do it well. She imagined writing a brilliant paper, Bryan handing it back to her slowly, reluctant to give it up.

Bryan leaned against his desk as the class clattered toward the door, joking and chatting with them as he always did. When Carol passed, he put his hand on her arm.

“Do you have any idea what you’ll write about, Carol?” he asked. Flustered, she shook her head. “Bring in some ideas on Thursday,” he said. “We can look them over after class.”

Will started on the deck. He went to the lumberyard and came back with what seemed like more wood than he could possibly need for the little deck in his drawing. He started hammering things outside. Carol would come home from class, and there he’d be, at work in back. On Thursday she told him she had a research project to do, and she needed him to watch the girls.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “They can help me block out the flooring.”

After class, Bryan was waiting for her. “Do you like falafel?” He had a way of looking at her that made her feel self-conscious.

“Do I like what?”

“Falafel. It’s a Middle Eastern sandwich. I think you’d like it. I know a place in Kalamazoo.”

“Oh.” Carol hesitated.

“I mean, wouldn’t it be nicer to discuss your ideas over lunch? I’m starving.”

“Well, yes.” Carol knew she didn’t sound like she meant it.

“Not if you’re in a hurry, of course.”

“No, no, that’s okay.” She watched the buttons on his coat as he did them up. The coat looked at least two sizes too big for him. “I’d like to try that,” she said. “Something new.”

He smiled. “Which of us should drive?”

They decided to take Carol’s car, hurrying across the parking lot to avoid the cold wind that had started to blow.

“Nice vehicle,” Bryan said as they settled into the Riviera’s white seats.

“Thank you,” she answered.

“I’ll bet your husband is a doctor.” His tone was overly casual, as if he were making her into a sociological specimen.

“He’s an airline pilot,” she said. She had always liked saying that. But with Bryan, it fell flat somehow. They were silent as Carol drove.

“Do you have a tape deck?” Bryan asked. “Ah, you do.”

“What?” Carol looked to where he was pointing. “No, that’s just the radio.”

“It’s a tape deck, too.” With an index finger, he pressed the station-selector panel, and it gave way, swinging back to reveal a tiny rectangular cavern. “You see? For eight tracks. It’s hidden so the thieves can’t see it.” He said “thieves” with an ironic tone, as if he disapproved of hiding things, or of keeping them for yourself at all.

“What do you know!” she said with false enthusiasm. “A tape deck!”

“Now all you need are some tapes,” Bryan said. Carol looked at the sneaky radio and suddenly hated their car. She hated its flashy white upholstery and its funny humped-up rear. She wished Will had never bought it. Looking through Bryan’s eyes, she saw it for what it was: a striver’s car. A car for the man who was going somewhere. Never mind that you couldn’t see much out the rear window. This was a car for someone who never looked back.

It was late afternoon when Carol got home. The girls were outside with Will, wearing hooded coats and mittens over their school clothes. It was like that when he watched them—he let them play in their school clothes, gave them peanut-butter crackers and fruit cocktail straight from the can for lunch. Whenever she came home after leaving them, Carol would find herself wishing she hadn’t gone. She missed their rituals, felt the loss of an afternoon with them as if it were a year.

The deck was beginning to take shape. A skeletal foundation was extending out from the wall. It reached into the yard twice as far as the drawing had. Will was inside it when she got there, pounding a nail into a corner. Carol collected the girls and thanked him for watching them.

“I have to do some more research on Tuesday,” she told him. “If you can watch them again, that would be great.”

“Yeah, all right,” he said, pounding. When he looked up, she got the feeling that he wasn’t really seeing her; he was seeing his future deck, gleaming and perfect.

After that, Will just assumed that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he would pick up the girls with his truck. Between Carol and Bryan, there was an unspoken agreement that they’d go for lunch after class. They’d talk about all kinds of things—politics, movies, ecology, Bryan’s career as a professor.

“Sociology isn’t an easy discipline,” he told her once. They were
at the falafel place, where they always went. Carol had decided she liked falafel a lot.

“You have to let go of the old narratives,” he said. “The old tele-ologies. Question common sense. That means taking ego out of the equation entirely. Buddhism gets that right. You have to let go of the self and everything it has learned.”

Carol was never sure she understood what Bryan was saying, but she liked the sound of it. She liked the focused way he sat there, caught up in his words, having forgotten the food in his hand. He wasn’t always thinking about the next thing. He wasn’t driving at anything.

Sometimes she would watch him surreptitiously while he ate. When he focused on his lunch, he became as caught up in that as he had been in what he was saying. He was a man who lived in the moment, she told herself. That was why he was against utopias.

Watch out for the future,
he told them in class.
It can hang you up just like the past.

Once he looked up and caught her staring. He pushed the sandwich basket aside and leaned forward. “You have an astonishingly open face,” he said.

Carol looked down at her hands, resting on the table. Bryan’s hand came across and rested on one of them. She looked at the two hands sitting there, one nearly covering the other, as if they belonged to total strangers.

“I’m embarrassing you,” he said. He took his hand away. “Why don’t we get our check and go?”

“Yes, okay.” Disappointment thudded in Carol’s heartbeat. Bryan got up and began shrugging into his coat, and for a minute she saw him not as a whole person but as a nearly overwhelming collection of parts. A torso, pulling his shirt taut. A belt buckle. Thighs wrapped in denim. A hand, emerging from the coat. An elbow. Knees.

Another time he gave her a book. “Have you read Ram Dass?” he asked, and Carol thought that must be the book’s title until he handed it to her.
Be Here Now.
Ram Dass was the author. “It will
change your life,” he said in a tone of warning she was clearly meant to ignore.

She took the book home and read it. It was disorienting and strange. Ram Dass, it seemed, used to be a professor named Richard Alpert. Then he took LSD and it opened his eyes. Carol disapproved of that. But it was exciting somehow that Bryan had given her such a wild book. And some of the things Ram Dass said were interesting. People shouldn’t be so attached to the future, he said. The idea of progress was harmful. Something about that bothered Carol. After all, the girls were her future. How could she not be attached to them?

Meanwhile, the deck just seemed to keep on growing. Will began to build what looked like a trellis on it. He showed her a sketch on a napkin, something he had copied from a hotel in Kansas City.

“They had a grape arbor that made a sunroof,” he told her excitedly. “You could sit on the patio underneath it, and it was shady, with grapes hanging down.” His eyes glowed. “You wouldn’t believe how many grapes there were on that one small plant! We could make our own wine.”

Carol looks down at the dishwasher. She has finished polishing the glasses. They’re lined up on the counter, a shiny battalion, eager to do their duty. She could put them on trays for the party. She goes toward the cupboard, where the large platters and trays are kept, but finds herself drifting to the sliding glass door instead. Outside, the deck is a deep, wet brown. Over the years it has cracked and split in places. The grape arbor is still there, but the plant is spindly and yellowing. For a while they tried to foster it, but it never yielded anything other than tiny, bitter clumps of grapes that would drop to the deck before they got ripe, leaving oily purple stains that Carol could never get off.

Beyond the deck the barn hulks, the cornfield sodden and dull behind it. A spindly tree line marks the field’s edge. On the other
side is Will’s parents’ farm. His ancestral home, except his ancestors never lived there. His father, a German immigrant, bought it from a pig farmer who went bankrupt in the Depression. Like their own eighty acres, it’s flat, hard clay skirted by a nameless, muddy creek.

Why did Will want to come back to this place? When people asked, Carol gave out various answers: he missed working the land. He couldn’t imagine the girls growing up in a city. You can take the boy out of the country … Privately, she thinks it has to do with his father. Will’s father didn’t want him to enlist in the Air Force, and he was even angrier when Will went to Vietnam. He refused to write to Will while he was on his tour. All he would say was that Will had left him with too much work, even though his farm was barely functional by then. Will’s brother, George, tended the fields, and the animals were long gone, except a small flock of chickens watched over by Will’s mother.

Will was sad about his father’s anger, but he wasn’t haunted by it until he came back from the war. Then it was as if he had acquired a sense of his own betrayal, and he felt compelled to make up for it.

The last book they read in Bryan’s class was H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine.
Their class discussion about it was heated.

“I didn’t like this book at all,” one student began.

“Why not?” Bryan always looked eager to hear what they thought.

“I guess it just seemed ridiculous,” the woman said, hesitating. “I just didn’t find this world believable.”

“I agree,” put in another student. “It was described in such a hokey way. Silver trees. Huge flowers.”

Carol raised a hand, although that wasn’t required. “I think I took it more symbolically,” she said. “I took the beauty of the world to be the way the narrator saw it at first. Before he realizes it’s all a lie.”

“It’s all a critique of capitalism,” the other woman insisted. “The Morlocks do all the work, and those little people live like gods.”

“Before we address that,” Bryan said, “let’s see if Carol can expand on her point. What exactly is a lie?”

“The future world,” Carol said. “The way the Time Traveler sees it.”

“And how does he see it?” Bryan was watching her intently.

Carol paused. “He thinks the future must be better. He believes in progress. He thinks the world is becoming a utopia, but it really isn’t changing at all.”