Good Things I Wish You (11 page)

“You must have a license to fly.”

“I mean, why do they need to fly?”

Hart shot me a puzzled look. “Why do you need to write books?”

On the other side of the mobile home stood a large metal hangar and, in front of it, a scattering of tethered gliders, each protected by a snug canvas cover. Beyond them, set on a concrete slab and sheltered by a wooden roof, were slim, rectangular trailers that, Hart explained, held disassembled gliders. His own, an ASW 27, was already assembled in the hangar; I was relieved to see it seated only one. Even a glance at the narrow cockpit made me feel short of breath.

“Want to help?” Hart asked.

“If I can do it from the ground.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I have flown over two hundred hours.”

“Life’s too short,” I said, pleased to deliver Ellen’s smug line, “to get killed falling out of the sky.”

Hart was not impressed. “People die all the time for many reasons. You would rather slip and fall in the bathtub?”

“I would rather live a long and healthy life.”

“You do not have that choice.”

“Yes and no.”

He shook his head. “A significant answer. Pick up the wing, do you mind?”

He showed me how to hold it, and together we rolled the ship out of the hangar and pushed it across the sun-scorched grass. Fire-ant nests were scattered everywhere; I was glad I’d worn functional shoes. The end of the airstrip was a good quarter mile away, capped by a stand of pines, the ground rutted and scarred by wild pigs.

“I can take you up later in the Blanik,” Hart said. “It seats two. They use it for training.”

“Thank you, no.”

“If you don’t like it, I’ll bring you right back down.”

I sighed. “Which one is the Blanik?”

He pointed with his chin. The glider we’d seen earlier was descending now, skimming just over the surface of the airstrip to land in a hiss on the grass. A Japanese girl climbed out of the front, looking all of twelve years old. “Midori!” Hart called and she waved to us both, beaming,
so beautiful I could not look away. Together we watched as she circled the Blanik, still hopped up from her flight. Already, she was visualizing her next takeoff. Already, she was resenting the lost time on the ground.

“I admire her passion,” Hart said. “I used to be such a person.”

“About flying?”

“About everything.” Chuck, still in his cowboy hat, had sped from the house on a golf cart, and now he and Midori rolled the Blanik to the side, making room for us to pivot the ASW into position. Hart pressed his car keys into my hand, his own hand surprising me, cool despite the heat. “Here. In case you want something to eat. Bottled water. You are welcome to whatever you find.”

“I’ll probably grab my computer and write.”

“Your book is going well?”

The question took me by surprise. Perhaps this is why I answered it honestly. “Not really. No.”

“What is the problem?” His face was close to mine.

“The relationship was so contradictory. The facts just don’t add up. Not that I’m trying to write a nonfiction book, but when a novel is working, all of it becomes true somehow, whether it is or not. A really great novel gets at the truth the way nonfiction can’t.”

He smelled, very lightly, of shampoo and sweat. Unabsorbed sunscreen clung to the stubble along his jaw. “Do not be offended,” he said. “But why are you so opposed to the idea that their relationship was sexual?”

“It’s not that I’m opposed,” I replied, startled by his
frankness. My heat-flushed face stared back at me, bugeyed, from the lenses of his sunglasses. “But we have so few documented examples of straightforward friendship between great men and great women.”

“You love the idea of such a friendship, I see,” Hart said. “But perhaps your belief in such an idea says more about you than the people in your book.” He touched my cheekbone; I flinched, then felt silly when he showed me the eyelash stuck to his finger. “Of course, that could also be part of the story. I would be interested to read such a book.”

Before I could reply, Chuck pulled up in the golf cart, Miriam riding shotgun. “Ready to go?” she said.

I stood back to watch as she taxied the towplane into position. A long rope trailed behind it, which Chuck attached somewhere beneath the nose of the ASW. Hart was already in the cockpit, going through his preflight. At his signal, Chuck raised one of the wings, so both paralleled the ground. The rudder waggled from side to side, this time a signal to Miriam, and now both ships were in motion, gradually picking up speed. Chuck ran with the wing for five paces or so until the ASW was balanced, rising. The towplane, too, lifted into the air, the exacting distance between them an act of pure choreography. I watched until I couldn’t see them anymore, shielding my eyes against the heat and the light.

Such an idea says more about you.

I didn’t want to know what he meant. And yet I already knew.

Chuck and Midori picked me up in the golf cart as I headed back toward the office. “Sweet takeoff,” Midori said, smiling. “You are pilot, too?”

“Not me.”

“You fly with Hart?”

“Later. If I don’t chicken out.”

“I’d be afraid to fly with him, too.” Chuck waved his hat at a persistent buzzing fly. “These big guys, they’re all the same. Risk takers. Buzz junkies.”

“Hart’s a big guy?” I said.

Chuck gave me a look of surprise. “Eye man. Surgeon. Figured out some kind of prosthetic eye. Damn thing works with the brain somehow, actually senses light.”

“He developed idea in Japan,” Midori said with evident pride.

“Company went public in the nineties,” Chuck said. He gave a little whistle. “Beaucoup bucks.”

“I guess I don’t know much about him,” I said.

“Tell you what,” Chuck said, settling his hat back onto his head. “You got a nail sticking out of one eye? That’s the guy you want to see out of the other.”

Date: Saturday, May 27 12:16 AM

To: [email protected]

Dear L—,

You know the one about the old man whose grandson is getting married? Just before the wedding, he calls the boy in for a chat. “My child,” he says, “I want you to know that all marriages go through phases. At first, you and you wife will make love all the time. But then, as the children come along, you will find that you are having sex less and less. And by the time they are grown and gone, you’ll be just like your grandmother and me. All you’ll ever have is oral sex. I just wanted you to know how things will go.”

The boy looks at him, incredulous. “You and Grandma have oral sex?”

“Every single night,” the old man says, “and it’s a perfectly natural thing. She goes into her bedroom and calls, ‘Fuck you!’ And I go into my bedroom and call back to her, ‘No, fuck you!’”

You are wondering when I got cynical? I am wondering when you got so fucking serious.

Jeanette

Date: Saturday, May 27 12:19 AM

To: [email protected]

Easy, Jeanie. I’m finding it hard to laugh at anything right now. Sally and I are separated. You get divorced once, okay, but twice?

L—

23.

I
GOT MY COMPUTER
out of Hart’s car, grabbed muffins and fruit and two bottles of water, then set myself up at the end of the conference table, directly in front of the largest fan. Two hours later, I’d hacked my 230-page manuscript down to 50-odd pages. Gone: all the precious, meticulous details about German life in the 1850s. Gone: the clever subplots involving Clara’s musical contemporaries. Gone: the carefully researched nuances of individual performances. Food preferences and wardrobe descriptions. The exacting layout of the Dresden house. All of it—procrastination, literary filler. Beautifully written ivy disguising a crumbling structure, empty rooms.

Facts that had nothing to do with the truth.

There are things about men and women that do not change.

What was left: Clara’s backstory. Robert’s, too. The first meeting of Brahms and the Schumanns. The moment when Clara finally understands her marriage cannot continue.
I am not worthy of your love.
And then—an indulgence, a pure waste of time—I wrote the same moment as it
occurred between Calvin and me. As soon as I finished, I deleted it. There are things that don’t belong on any page. I wrote, instead, a new scene in which a woman stands at the corner of Ponce and Dixie, unable to step forward, unable to turn back. There were the vultures I’d just seen, the clear sky overhead. There was my university, the corner where I cross the street to work, just blocks from the corner where a student was actually killed. Concrete, crosswalks, modern-day traffic. Nothing I was writing could possibly appear in a novel set in the mid-nineteenth century—

But wasn’t this something I’d learned again and again? You went where the writing took you. You followed a serendipitous path. Perhaps what was missing from what I’d written was exactly this bridge between present and past. What could I take from the life of Clara Schumann as a working artist, living in the world today? As a mother? As somebody’s former wife? As somebody standing on the edge of what must be a whole new life? Perhaps what was most remarkable, relevant, about the lasting friendship between Clara and Brahms was not that the two were never lovers, but that, indeed, they had been.

Once I would have said that Cal and I were friends.

Pilots came and went, some spreading charts beside me. The Japanese students appeared in pairs, studying for the written portion of their test. It felt right to be sitting among them, working in the company of others who shared—if not my passion,
a
passion. In the end, wasn’t all of it the same? When Midori sat down with a notepad and pen, eager to practice her English, I stopped working
to answer her questions. She asked me what I was writing, and when I told her, she giggled and covered her mouth with her hand.

“You write about me,” she said.

“Maybe I will,” I said. “You have such an obvious passion for flying.”

Puzzle lines creased her smooth forehead. I tried to rephrase.

“Why do you love to fly so much?”

“Ah! First glider, then plane. My dream is earn commercial license, be pilot. Big plane.”

“What I mean,” I said, “is why do you love
flying
and not, say, ice skating or soccer or playing the piano?”

She shook her head, confused. “I play piano. Maybe I am very good at.”

“But is the piano also your passion?”

Another puzzled look.

“Okay. If you had to choose between playing the piano and flying, which would you choose?”

“I practice every day. I made promise to parents,” she said. “What is meaning passion?”

“Love,” I said, “but stronger. Better.”

“Please write down.” She extended a little notepad.

I wrote the word
passion.

I wrote,
What makes you passionate about flying? What if something happened so you couldn’t fly anymore?

I wrote,
What do you think makes some people want to do what you’re doing and other people, like me, afraid to do it?

Midori received the notepad from me with both hands. “I will look up in dictionary,” she said. “I will answer all questions. For your book.”

She bounded away. I picked an old scene.

Began to revise.

24.

I
T IS NOT JUST
his face that Clara finds beautiful, though she recognizes, there, what others see. Recognizes, too, his awareness of that beauty, his assumption that others will respond to it and treat him accordingly. Robert, one hand held to his mouth, cannot stop touching Brahms with the other, rubbing Brahms’s smooth cheeks in greeting, clinging to him when he leaves. Of course the children cling to him too, the boys fleeing in mock terror from his kisses. And when he plays for them in the evening hours, she and Robert clasp hands as they did years ago, all they once felt for each other kindling, again, into shining flame. What genius. What passion. The mere thought of Brahms’s boyish face, those soft hands and slender shoulders, strikes like flint against the rich, shuddering sound.

The children lined up on the couches to listen. Passersby standing outside in the cold.

It is said they remove their caps and scarves so as to better catch each note.

His outbursts of arrogance startle everyone, of course. “Brahms is ego incarnate, without himself being aware
of it,” Joseph Joachim will write to a friend. “The way in which he wards off all the morbid emotions and imaginary troubles of others is really delightful. He is absolutely sound in that, just as his complete indifference to the means of existence is beautiful, indeed magnificent. He will not make the smallest sacrifice of his intellectual inclinations—he will not play in public because of his contempt for the public, and because it irks him—although he plays divinely. I have never heard piano playing (except perhaps Liszt’s) which gave me so much satisfaction—so light and clear, so cold and indifferent to passion.”
^*

Clara can’t deny that this is true. However, there is much one can forgive, must forgive, considering his father’s rough ambitions, those childhood nights in the
Animierlokale.
He has confided in her after Robert has gone to bed, after the maid has banked the coals, the two of them lingering at the piano. She, in turn, has shared her own confidences, mostly about Robert’s ill health which (she is convinced of this,
must
be convinced) is the result of persecution by those who refuse to understand that great minds cannot be bothered with all the little details of a mundane world.

Picture them there, priestess and protégé, Clara’s work skirt pressing lightly, innocently, against Brahms’s rough-stitched trouser seam as she speaks of her husband with a passion, a joy, she’d thought had been lost for good. Picture Brahms’s gaze on her animated face, breathless at
the thought of himself so close to a woman, this woman, who is untouchable in her genius, her motherhood, her position as Schumann’s wife. Picture Robert upstairs, blanketed in a sleep so deep that for once he cannot hear his own mounting madness: devilish, dissonant notes that tormented him nightly, unceasingly, during the weeks before Brahms’s arrival.