Villa America (21 page)

In the center of it all, dominating everything around it, was the airplane: about twenty feet long and twenty-five feet wide with a royal blue body and white wings and tail.
That Girl
was painted in stark block letters along the fuselage. She looked like the sea, Gerald thought.

Owen put out his cigarette without a word, as if their arrival had been expected.

“Hello,” Zelda said, dropping a curtsy and then turning in a pirouette. All that determination was still etched on her features. It made the move look practiced instead of graceful, and Gerald felt a little sorry for her suddenly.

“Good afternoon,” Gerald said.

Owen smiled at him. “Hello. Do you know Edouard Jozan?” he asked, indicating the flesh-and-blood statue. “We share a mechanic.”

The dark-haired man stepped forward and shook Gerald’s hand vigorously. Then he turned his attention to Zelda. “It’s always the greatest pleasure,” he said, kissing her fingers.

“Yes. Isn’t it,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. She turned away quickly. “Owen, I went to Agay looking for you. At your rooms. But my car broke down, and Gerald and Sara had to come rescue me.”

“That car isn’t safe,” Owen said.

“That’s what we told her,” Gerald said. “I’ve come to ask a favor. Do you think you’ll be making a trip to London anytime soon?”

“Oh, business,” Jozan said. He clapped his hands. “You Americans.”

“I
am
running a business here,” Owen said. “Or trying to.”

“But business without a drink?” Jozan’s muscular face wore an expression of mock agony.

“It’s Jozan’s day off,” Owen explained. “He wants a playmate.”

“But now I don’t have to bother with you anymore,” the Frenchman said. “Madame Fitzgerald can be my victim. Shall we leave them to it?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked at Gerald, then Owen. “It was really Owen I came to see…”

“He’s being too boring,” Jozan said. “He can join us when he’s finished.”

“Oh.” She looked at Gerald. “Shall I?”

“Do as you like,” he said. Her girlishness could be tiresome sometimes and he’d had enough babysitting for one day.

“As long as you promise to come find us,” she said.

Jozan offered her his arm, which she took. “
À bientôt, messieurs.
Look for the gay people at the café.”

Owen didn’t say anything, just lit another cigarette and watched them go before turning his gaze back to Gerald.

“His English is very good,” Gerald said, because at a loss, alone with Owen, and it was the first thing that came into his head.

“It’s for Zelda’s benefit,” Owen said. “You had a favor?”

“Well, of course we’d pay you for it.” Gerald shifted uncomfortably. “But Sara wanted some records from London. Clara Smith and Al Jolson.”

“I’m going next week,” Owen said. “A pickup from Harrods for an English couple in Cannes. I can get them then. Just tell me where to look.”

“Do you have a pen?”

Owen pulled a pen and a sheet of paper from a drawer and set them on the desk. Gerald bent down to write out the address of the music shop. He could feel Owen’s body next to his. He and Sara had met Owen two or three times since last summer, but he’d never been alone with him, or this near; Owen’s thigh brushed slightly against his own as he wrote. It surprised him how tall and broad he was up close. Gerald himself was a tall man, but Owen had a kind of mass he lacked.

“There,” he said, screwing the cap back on the pen. He moved away a bit and surveyed the airplane. “She’s beautiful. May I look at the engine?”

“You can’t really see much of it,” Owen said. “You see the nose?”

Gerald nodded.

“That’s covering the engine underneath.”

“Do you mind if I…?”

Owen picked up a stepladder that was leaning against the wall. He carried it over and set it up under the propeller.

“I almost became a pilot myself, during the war,” Gerald said. He smiled ruefully. “But I ended up on desk duty.”

He climbed up, placed his hands on the sides of the metal nose. It was smooth and globelike beneath his palms. He peered over the lip. “I can see a bit,” he said, turning back to Owen, who was holding the ladder very carefully, as one might for a child or an old lady. “Below the nose.”

Owen nodded.

“Is that copper?”

“It’s a Rhône Nine C. They have those copper induction pipes. That’s how you recognize them.”

“They’re lovely,” Gerald said.

“I suppose.” Owen furrowed his brow slightly. In the semi-shade of the hangar, Gerald could make out the color of his eyes, a gray like pewter. “I’ve never really thought about them that way.”

Gerald climbed down. “An instrument of precision,” he said.

“Not all the time,” Owen said. “In fact, they can be pretty damn imprecise.”

“No, I mean engines in general,” Gerald said. “They work just as they should. Precisely; each piece fits another piece that puts the whole thing in motion. Well, that is, until they stop working. Then you have to build them all over again.”

Owen shrugged, but Gerald saw him looking up towards the nose, quickly.

“Sorry,” Gerald said. “It’s just what I’ve been spending much of my time thinking about. Engines, the inner workings of things. My paintings, I mean.” He stopped, slightly embarrassed. “Perhaps that sounds a little pompous.”

“No,” Owen said, folding up the stepladder.

Gerald watched him lift it over the desk with one hand, as if it weighed nothing at all.

“Well…” he said.

“Zelda showed me a picture of your painting. In a magazine.” Owen turned. “
Boatdeck,
right?”

“Right,” he said.

“I liked it. It was like…arithmetic. Clean, I guess.” Owen looked up at him. Now he was the one who seemed uncomfortable. “I don’t know.”

“No, no,” Gerald said. “You’re right. But on a grand scale. Like an airplane, I suppose.”

Owen held his gaze. “Look, I was going to take her up. Just to run her engine. Late afternoon is a good time for it, warm, but not too warm.”

“Oh,” Gerald said.

“Do you want to come along?”

“Go up in the plane?”

“Have you ever flown before?”

Gerald shook his head. “No. I never actually made it up.”

“Will you be afraid?” Owen was leaning against the machine now.

“I…I don’t know. I don’t want to be afraid. But I might be.”

“An honest answer,” Owen said. “Don’t, if you don’t feel like it.”

“No, I do,” Gerald said. “Feel like it, I mean.”

“Good,” Owen said. “We just have to wait for my mechanic. He’ll be along soon.”

Vladimir sipped his coffee on the Place Formigé in Fréjus, across from the old cathedral. From his spot on the terrace of the Café des Julii he could see Jozan and Zelda drinking cocktails on the other side of the square. They were sitting at another café, closer to the Hôtel de Ville, its orange stucco front washed pink in the late-afternoon light.

He was not surprised to see the young dashing naval aviator with the young reckless Madame Fitzgerald. Nothing could be more natural, really. However, he was surprised when, sometime later, he saw Gerald and Owen Chambers walking towards them down the rue de Fleury.

It wasn’t the fact that they were together that he found strange; it was
the way
they were together.

Walking in step, side by side, their heads leaning in towards each other’s; Gerald was listening and nodding as Owen talked. One of the things that Vladimir liked about his blond American friend was that he rarely talked much. He just seemed to let things wash over him, good, bad, indifferent. But here he was, obviously expressing some train of thought as if that were the most natural state in the world for him.

He knew some of the story of Owen’s life, although, admittedly, few of the details; he’d surmised the bigger picture from small comments and deductions: a romantic scandal when he was young, followed by a flight from home; work in a factory; dangerous and heroic acts during the war; the loss of someone close to him; an injury that ended in his staying on in France here on the Riviera.

It was the kind of story that Vladimir understood, the reason, he believed, that they’d become friends; his own past was also writ in large and dramatic terms. His father, banker to the czarina, was shot in front of his own eyes by Cheka during the Red Terror. After his father’s murder, he and his mother had been forced to leave everything—wealth, status, and what connections they had—and flee to Paris, where she now worked as a cleaner and he as a sort of attaché to the Murphys, who had become like family to him.

He thought of his own story as a quintessentially Russian one, in the tradition of their great poets and the drama of their novelists. Likewise, he thought Owen’s story belonged to the American fables of loss and expansion, tales of how the West was won and such. And now they both sat comfortably on the sidelines like two old men watching the world go by. They fit together, he and his friend, two parts of the same idea.

Yet, seeing him talk with such determination to Gerald, so out of character, Vladimir wondered if he truly understood his friend’s ambitions.

Owen and Gerald spotted Zelda and Jozan; their postures changed in recognition, and then they looked around, as if searching for a way to avoid them. When they saw Vladimir, they walked to his table.

“May we join you?” Gerald asked, always polite, an attribute Vladimir appreciated.

“Please.” Vladimir spread his hand across the small iron table.

“I didn’t expect to find you in Fréjus,” Gerald said, sitting down.

“Vladimir’s come to see about a girl.” Owen smiled slightly at him before taking the seat on his other side.

“A girl, you say? You’re full of mysteries,” Gerald teased.

Vladimir shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about Irene. That was his business, and maybe even then it was nothing at all.

“Owen’s taken me up in his airplane. It was marvelous…the most marvelous thing I think I’ve ever seen. I’m still not composed enough to speak of it,” Gerald said.

Sometimes Gerald had a way of overtalking things, a style that made it seem like he was trying to cover something up, his true feelings, perhaps. He’d wondered at first if this was an American trait, but he hadn’t seen it in the others he’d come to know. Of course, the Russian way could also be grandiose, but it was direct in its passion.

Owen ordered a Remplaçant, Gerald a sherry.

“You should try it,” Gerald said to Vladimir. “The feeling of ascending and the way you can see everything.”

“I’ve never had the pleasure of an invitation.” He glanced at Owen. “Anyway,” he went on, “I’m more for the sea than the air. A boat, that would be my vessel.”

When the drinks arrived, Gerald continued: “Like a bird, gliding through the air. Buffeted by the wind. The pulse of the motor…”

Vladimir couldn’t help but arch an eyebrow.

“And Owen in complete control. It was marvelous, wasn’t it?” Gerald looked at Owen.

Owen just looked into his drink.

“He was telling me how it all works,” Gerald said, turning to Vladimir. “All the little rituals you have to go through before you can actually take her into the sky.” He shook his head in what seemed like wonder. “Thank you,” Gerald said, putting his hand on Owen’s shoulder. “It was truly an experience.”

“Don’t mention it.” Owen downed his drink. “I have to go.”

“Oh?” Vladimir saw Gerald’s face cloud over.

“Mm-hmm.” Owen dropped some francs on the table before rising. “I’ll let you know about the records.”

“Oh, of course. Well, whenever you can. There’s no real rush.” Gerald was clearly pained.

Vladimir felt for Gerald, for his embarrassed confusion. But, really, it wasn’t in his nature to understand a man like Owen.

“Good-bye, my friend,” Vladimir said.

“Good-bye,” Owen said and started back across the square.

They watched him until he disappeared around the corner of the Hôtel de Ville.

“I said something.” There was no mistaking the misery in his tone. “I just don’t know what it was.”

Vladimir shrugged. “Who knows?”

“I only wanted him to know how much I enjoyed it.”

“Of course.” It wasn’t his place to explain how sometimes personal things needed to be kept personal. There was no telling a man that.

Gerald sipped his sherry and they were quiet for a while. Then Gerald said: “I shouldn’t have talked about it. I shouldn’t have asked questions. It was…” But he didn’t share the rest of his thought. Instead, he looked at Vladimir. “What do you make of him?”

“I think,” he said carefully, “he’s someone who lives very much in here.” He tapped his temple.

“Yes,” Gerald said. “That’s what I think too. We’ll have to help him with that.”

Vladimir shook his head, smiled a little.

“What?”

“It’s only that,
des fois,
help is not helpful at all.”

“Nonsense,” Gerald said, and finished his drink.

Jozan watched Zelda watch Owen walk across the square.

“You shouldn’t waste your time on that one,” he said. “He’s not for you.”

Zelda turned her face slowly to him. “Whatever do you mean?” she asked sweetly.

She was a strange one, this Madame Zelda Fitzgerald, a sort of woman-girl, with a slow violence operating underneath a sweet exterior. He found her exciting and nothing like the girls around here. But he’d have to be careful. He shrugged. “I’m not sure he likes girls.”

“You’re just being nasty,” Zelda said, but she continued to eye him over the rim of her glass.

“Maybe,” he agreed.

“Has he ever had a sweetheart?” she asked.

“None that I’ve seen,” Jozan said. “And plenty of women would have liked to be.”

“So he’s deliberate,” she said, satisfied. “He chooses carefully. Unlike some.”

“Now
you’re
just being nasty. To me.”

“Maybe,” she said and laughed.

“Instead of driving your car to Agay, you should just drive it here,” he said, putting his hand over hers.

“I think”—she picked the lemon out of her drink and nibbled on it—“I’d like that.”

“Yes?”

She nodded brightly even though, all at once, she seemed close to tears.