Separate Flights (26 page)

On days when she got home before Holly, she put on music and spent every moment waiting for Holly. Sometimes, waiting, she drank wine or smoked a pipe, and the waiting was not so bad; although sometimes with wine it was worse, the wine seemed to relax her in the wrong way, so that her memory and dread and predictions were even sharper, more cruel. With dope the waiting was always easier. She was worried about drinking alone, smoking alone; but she was finally only vaguely worried. The trouble she was in was too deep for her to worry about its surfaces. When Holly came home, short of breath from climbing the stairs, her fair cheeks reddened from the cold and her blonde hair damp with snow like drops of dew, Miranda talked and talked while they cooked, and she ate heartily, and felt that eating was helping her, as though she were recovering from an illness of the flesh.

Her parents and Michaelis wanted her to fly home at Thanksgiving but she went to Maine with Diane, a friend from school. Holly told her parents she was going too, and she went to Rhode Island with Tom. Diane's parents lived in a large brick house overlooking the sea. They were cheerful and affluent, and they were tall and slender like Diane, who had freckles that were fading as winter came. There was a younger brother who was tall and quiet and did not shave yet, and his cheeks were smooth as a girl's. Around him Miranda felt old.

She had never seen the Atlantic in winter. On Thanksgiving morning she woke before Diane and sat at the window. The sky was gray, a wind was blowing, the lawn sloping down to the sea was snow, and the wind blew gusts of it like powder toward the house. The lawn ended at the beach, at dark rocks; the rocks went out into the sea, into the gray, cold waves. Beyond the rocks she saw a seal swimming. She watched it, sleek and brown and purposeful, going under, coming up. She quickly dressed in corduroy pants and sweater and boots and coat and went downstairs; she heard Diane's parents having coffee in the kitchen, and quietly went outside and down the slippery lawn to the narrow strip of sand and the rocks. But the seal was gone. She stood looking out at the sea. Once she realized she had been daydreaming, though she could not recall what it was she dreamed; but for a minute or longer she had not known where she was, and when she turned from her dreaming to look at the house, to locate herself, there was a moment when she did not know the names of the people inside. Then she began walking back and forth in front of the house, looking into the wind at the sea. Before long a light snow came blowing in on the salt wind. She turned her face to it. I suppose I don't love Diane, she told herself. For a moment I forgot her name.

Then it was December, a long Saturday afternoon that was gray without snow, and Holly was gone for the weekend. In late afternoon Miranda left the lighted apartment and a paper she was writing and walked up Beacon Street. The street and sidewalks were wet and the gutters held gray, dirty snow. She walked to the Public Garden where there were trees and clean snow, and on a bridge over a frozen pond she stopped and watched children skating. Then she walked through the Garden and across the street to the Common; the sidewalks around it were crowded, the Hare Krishna people were out too, with their shaved heads and pigtails and their robes in the cold, chanting their prayer. She did not see any winos. In warm weather they slept on the grass or sat staring from benches, wearing old, dark suits and sometimes a soiled hat. But now they were gone, and where, she wondered, did they go when the sky turns cold? She walked across the Common to the State House; against the gray sky its gold dome looked odd, like something imported from another country. Then she walked home. Already dusk was coming, and she didn't want to be alone. When she got home Brian was ringing the doorbell.

‘Holly's not here,' she said.

‘I know. Are you here?'

‘Sometimes. Come on up.'

He was tall and he wore a fatigue jacket. She looked away from his face, reached in her pocket for the key; she felt him wanting her, it was like a current from his body, and she felt it as she opened the door and as they climbed the stairs. In the apartment she gave him a beer.

‘Are you hungry?' she said.

‘No.'

‘I am. If I cook something, will you eat it?'

‘Sure.'

‘There's chicken. Is chicken all right? Broiled?'

‘Chicken? Why not?'

He followed her to the kitchen. While she cooked they talked and he had another beer and she drank wine. She wasn't hungry anymore. She knew something would happen and she was waiting for it, waiting to see what she would do. She cooked and they ate and then went to the living room and smoked a pipe on the couch. When he took off her sweater she nearly said let's go to bed, but she didn't. She closed her eyes and waited and when he was undressed she kissed his bearded face. Her eyes were closed. She felt wicked and that excited her; he was very thin; her body was quick and wanton; but her heart was a stone; her heart was a clock; her heart was a watching eye. Then he shuddered and his weight rested on her and she said: ‘You bastard.'

He left her. He sat at the end of the couch, at her feet; he took a swallow of beer and leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

‘I saw it downstairs,' he said. ‘You wanted to ball.'

‘Don't call it that.'

He looked at her; then he leaned over and picked up his socks.

‘No,' she said. ‘Call it that.' He put on his socks. ‘Say it again.'

‘What are you playing?'

‘I'm not. I don't play anymore. It's all—What are you doing?'

‘I'm putting on my pants.' He was standing, buckling his belt. He picked up his sweater from the floor.

‘No,' she said. ‘I'm cold.'

‘Get dressed.'

‘I don't want you to go. Let's get in bed.'

‘That'll be the second time tonight I do something you want me to. Will I be a bastard again?'

‘No. I'm just screwed up, Brian, that's all.'

‘Who isn't?'

In bed he was ribs and hip bone against her side and she liked resting her head on his long hard arm.

‘What's the matter?' he said. ‘You worried about that guy in California?'

‘He's not there anymore.'

‘Where'd he go?'

‘He's still there. Things happened.'

‘Have you had many guys?'

‘Just him and you. You won't tell Holly, will you?'

‘Why should I?'

‘How long have you been in school?'

‘Six years, on and off.'

‘What will you do?'

‘They haven't told me yet.'

‘Michaelis is going to be a lawyer.'

‘Good for him.'

‘I used to love him.'

‘Figures.'

‘He's going to work with Chicanos. I won't be with him now. For a whole year I thought about that. I was going to marry him and have a baby and carry it like a papoose on the picket lines. We wouldn't have much money. That was it for a whole year and I was feeling all that when I made love with him, it was my first time and I hurt and I bled and I probably wasn't any good, but my God I felt wonderful. I felt like I was going to heaven.'

‘You better cheer up, man. There's other guys.'

‘Oh yes, I know: there are other guys. Miranda will have other guys.'

Her heart did not change: not that night when they made love again, nor Sunday morning waking to his hands. Late Sunday night Holly came home and Miranda woke up but until Holly was undressed and in bed she pretended she was asleep so Holly wouldn't turn on the lights. Then she pretended to wake up because she wanted to talk to Holly before, in the morning, she saw her face.

‘How was your weekend?'

‘Fine. What did you do?'

‘Stayed in the apartment and studied.'

She lit a cigarette. Holly came over and took one from the pack. Miranda did not look at her: she closed her eyes and smoked and felt the sour cold of the lie. Holly was back in bed, talking into the distance of the lie, and Miranda listened and answered and lay tense in bed, for she was so many different Mirandas: the one with Holly now and the one who made love with Brian (balled; balled; she was sore) and the one who didn't want to make love with Brian (b—); and beneath or among those there were perhaps two other Mirandas, and suddenly she almost cried, remembering September and October when she was afraid but she was one Miranda Jones. She sat up quickly, too quickly, so that Holly stopped talking and then said: ‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing. I just want another cigarette.'

‘You should get out next weekend.'

‘Probably.'

‘Come to Providence with me.'

‘What would I do?'

‘I don't know. Whatever you do here. And we can get you a date.'

‘Maybe I will. Probably I won't, though.'

Tuesday after dinner Brian came over. He sat on the couch with Holly, and Miranda faced them from a chair. She tried not to look directly at him but she could not help herself: she drank too much beer and she watched him. He kept talking. Her nakedness was not in his face. She felt it was in hers, though, when Holly's hand dropped to his thigh and rested there. She was not jealous; she did not love Brian; she felt as though something were spilled in the room, something foul and shameful, and no one dared look at it, and no one would clean it up. I'm supposed to be cool, she told herself as she went to the refrigerator and opened three cans of beer. She opened Brian's last. It was his because it was on the left and she would carry it in her left hand and she remembered his hands. I am not for this world, she thought. Or it isn't for me. It's not because I'm eighteen either. Michaelis is twenty-two; he will get brown in the sun talking to Chicanos, he will smell of beer and onions, but his spirit won't rise; Michaelis is of the world, he will be a lawyer.

She brought Holly and Brian their beer. I'm supposed to be cool, she told herself as she watched Holly's hand on his leg, watched his talking face where she didn't live. And where did she live? Whose eyes will hold me, whose eyes will know me when my own eyes look back at me in the morning and I am not in them? I'm supposed to be cool, she told herself as she went to her room and felt the room move as she settled heavily under the blankets; she was bloated with beer, she knew in the morning her mouth would be dry, her stomach heavy and liquid. From the living room the sounds came. It's not me. She was drunk and for a moment she thought she had said it aloud. It's not me they're doing it to. I don't love him. She remembered his hard, thin legs between hers and she saw him with Holly and wary as a thief her hand slid down and she moved against it. It's not me they're doing it to. She listened to the sounds from the other room and moved within them against her hand.

In his bed in his apartment Michaelis held her and his large, dark eyes were wet, and she spoke to him and kissed and dried his tears, though she felt nothing for them; she gave them her lips as she might have given coins to a beggar. She could feel nothing except that it was strange for him to cry; she did not believe she would ever cry again; not for love. It was her first night home, they had left her house three hours earlier, left her mother's voice whose gaiety could not veil her fear and its warning: ‘Don't be late,' she said, meaning don't spend the night, don't drive our own nails through our hands; already her mother's eyes (and, yes, her father's too) were hesitant, vulpine. How can we get our daughter back? the eyes said. We have saved her. But now how do we get her back? Her parents' hands and arms were loving; they held her tightly; they drew her to their hearts. The arms and eyes told her not to go to Acapulco after Christmas; not to want to go. No matter. She did not want to go. Michaelis's arms were tight and loving too, he lay on his side, his body spent from loving her, and now she was spending his soul too, watching it drip on his cheeks: ‘—It didn't mean anything. Don't cry. We won't go to Acapulco. I don't think I'll sleep with Brian again, but we won't go to Acapulco. I want to do other things. I don't know what they'll be yet. You'll have a good life, Michaelis. Don't worry: you will. It'll be a fine life. Don't be sad. Things end, that's all. But you'll be fine. Do you want to take me home now? Or do you want me to stay a while. I'll stay the night if you want—'

She propped on an elbow and looked at him. He had stopped crying, his cheeks glistened still, and he lay on his back now, staring at the ceiling. She could see in his face that he would not make love with her again or, for some time, with anyone else. She watched him until she didn't need to anymore. Then she called a taxi and put on her clothes. When she heard the taxi's horn she left Michaelis lying naked in the dark.

Separate Flights

The whales, whose periodic suicide instinct has never been explained by scientists, started grounding themselves yesterday afternoon on the Florida Bay side of Grassy Key, about seven miles north of Marathon, in the Florida Keys
.

—New York Times

for Lynn

1

O
N THE SHORT AFTERNOONS
of winter Beth Harrison turned on the lights early and started a fire in the living room; when her daughter Peggy came home from high school they sat in chairs facing the fire, Peggy drinking hot chocolate, Beth drinking a bourbon-and-water which she always thought of as her second, though sometimes it was her third. She was forty-nine years old. She did not know—or did not try to know, since there was no reason to—exactly when her before-dinner drinking had slipped into an earlier part of the afternoon. In winter she drank when she turned on the lights and started a fire. But now in May she drank gin and tonic while the sun angled through the kitchen windows, and Mrs. Lester on the corner played golf, and the Crenshaw boys across the street yelled and smacked a whiffle ball. She was usually alone, for Peggy and Bucky ate ice cream cones after school and went driving and Peggy came home in time for dinner, her cheeks warm, her eyes bright as though with images of trees turning green and sunlit farmers plowing their fields.