Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

When she returned to the Red Cross Club, it seemed like divine providence that instructions were waiting for her. She was not to go back to Luton but straight on to White Waltham to upgrade to Class II airplanes. She would not have to face Ruth, not right away.

  * * *

  —

  White Waltham was in a pleasant market town called Maidenhead (“Lord, that name,” Ruth had said), with timbered houses along a sedate stretch of the Thames. Marian found a room in a small hotel not far from the airfield that was only a bit more expensive than a billet. Back to the ATA classroom she went to learn about superchargers and carburetors and on and on. After two weeks of lectures, she was in the air again, in Harvards like the one she’d checked out on in Montreal, startling in their power after all her puttering cross-country flights in Tigers and Magisters.

  There was a new American Club nearby, with a pool (closed for the winter) and a terrace and snack bar. She went sometimes for cocktails with other pilots but said little. No one tried to draw her out as Ruth had. Had she always been so uncertain about how to talk to people? She couldn’t remember how she had been before Barclay, before Alaska.

  She bought a motorbike and rode around the countryside when she had free time and enough gas coupons. She went to Henley and watched people rowing on the river. She rode past Eton College, where boys played rugby in the fields and loitered in tailcoats outside crenellated brick buildings. She rode past villages where you’d never know there was a war, past others that were little more than bomb craters, past the wreckage of a B-17 among a stand of beech trees. Mostly she rode past grass and trees, stone walls, sheep.

  One afternoon, after flying circuits and bumps in a Harvard, she came into the flight office and there was Ruth, blue-uniformed and grinning. “Howdy, stranger,” she said.

  Marian’s first response was joy, then terrified dismay, and Ruth, who had stepped forward for a hug, noticed the shift and faltered. Their hug was off-kilter, as stiff as an embrace between two mannequins.

  “I was going to write and tell you I got my wings—and my togs,” Ruth said. She struck a fashion model pose in her uniform. “I got seconded to Ratcliffe for a bit. Mostly I’m the taxi service.” She pointed out the window at a Fairchild 24. “That’s me. But then I got sent down here, and I thought I might run into you and save the postage.”

  “Congratulations.” Marian turned to study the big map of Britain on the wall, updated daily with locations of barrage balloons and no-fly zones.

  “You went off to London and then not a peep,” Ruth said.

  “It’s been busy.”

  Ruth waited for more. When none came, she said, “You’ve probably missed me, though. Even though you haven’t written.”

  Stricken, Marian looked from the map to her boots. Ruth stepped closer. “You’re acting so peculiar. Has something happened? Did I do something wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m not feeling right. That’s all.” Marian swung her parachute onto her shoulder. “I have to go.”

  Ruth didn’t call after her, didn’t follow. Marian, riding her motorbike back to her hotel, saw the Fairchild take off and disappear.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, on a rare clear-skied day in mid-December, Marian got her first Spit. She’d delivered a Hurricane to Salisbury, and, without fanfare, the ops officer there pushed the new chit across the counter.

  The plane was waiting, its long, perforated cowling angled up at the sky. It had been camouflaged for photo reconnaissance, and, except for its black prop and its roundels and tricolor, the whole of it was cornflower blue, as though the sky had stuck to it. It had no armor and no guns so it would be light and fast, able to reach its ceiling quickly, over forty thousand feet, and carry enough fuel to get to Germany and back.

  The female members of the ATA were unanimous that the Spitfire, hero of the Battle of Britain and symbol of RAF pluckiness aloft, was in fact a woman’s plane. The cockpit was petite; a woman slid into it like a finger into a glove. The controls responded to the softest touch. Men, they all agreed, tried to muscle the thing too much, wanted to dominate it out of its most essential grace. One of the English girls had lost her pilot fiancé when he tried to take off in a Spit with an air traffic controller on his lap, larkily giving him a lift somewhere, and couldn’t pull the stick back far enough because the cockpit was too full of male bodies. Both had been killed.

  Marian climbed into the cockpit, consulted the Ferry Notes, began her checks. She had flown plenty of Hurricanes, which she liked and weren’t so different from the Spit, but there was something newly thrilling about this plane, the close hug of its cockpit, how the controls seemed to press up eagerly under her hands and feet. The engine started with a harsh rattle, settled into a steady popping, a textured drone. Marian wasted no time taxiing since Spits were prone to overheating on the ground. She swung the nose from side to side, peering around to see where she was going. In no time at all the cockpit was warm enough to make her sweat. This was a plane meant to be in the air. On the runway she throttled up. The muddy field rushed alongside. A bounce over a rut, and the ground released her.

  The Spit was needed in Colerne, in Wiltshire, not far. She dawdled on the way, turning a forbidden roll, a loop, carving and slicing the sky with the thin, elliptical wings, the earth swinging up and over. Under the Perspex dome, she was the hinge of it all, the swivel point. She went into a steep climb, leveled off. Ten thousand feet. Higher already than she was supposed to fly. There was a pressurization system, but the notes said to keep it off, as low-flying ferry pilots should have no call for it. She didn’t know how to turn it on anyway.

  She would just go a little higher. Another nudge to the throttle. Three hundred miles per hour. She wanted to smear the plane into the sky, blue on blue. Up. Fifteen thousand feet. She needed to be careful not to get carried away, but she felt well in control. Below, Britain was molded to the earth’s curvature; fields and hedges slid over it like iridescence over the surface of a soap bubble. Up. Seventeen thousand feet. She must pay attention, come down soon. The air was meager in her lungs. She remembered the skipping of the Travel Air’s engine when she’d flown too high over Missoula. Why did she have this impulse to throw herself at boundaries, be flung back by them? She felt the beginnings of fear, like frostbite beginning in the warm core of her instead of on her skin.

  In the thin air, the plane traveled faster, nearly four hundred miles per hour. She couldn’t stay long. Up, though. She needed to find out what was up there, to be away from what was below. Away from Ruth. Away from the world where Jamie was in the war. Cold now. Much too high, but only a little bit farther and she would know what she wanted to know. She was sure of it. The engine seemed to grow quiet, but still the altimeter’s arrow swept to the right. The sky turned midnight blue at the edges of her vision, darkness bleeding up and inward as though she were sinking into something.

  * * *

  —

  After she landed and taxied in and switched off the engine, Marian sat in the cockpit, quite still. Cold lingered in her; her head ached. Her hand trembled when she finally opened the canopy. She walked to the ops office, handed over her chit, received a new one, a Miles Master needing transport to Wrexham.

  “Everything all right?” said the officer who took her chit. “You’re a bit green around the gills.”

  “Fine. I’ll just have a coffee before I go.”

  She made her way to the canteen, and there sitting at a table reading a newspaper was Ruth. The world narrowed to Ruth as it had to that last point of light, flickering through the propeller, before she’d fallen unconscious.

  Ruth looked up blankly at the sound of Marian’s footsteps, then she was standing and coming toward her. “Are you all right?” she said. “You look completely wrung out.” Only two pilots were in the canteen, both men, absorbed in their newspapers.

  “Just a head
ache.”

  “When did you get so fragile? Next you’ll be telling me you have the vapors.”

  Marian glanced at the pilots. “I thought a coffee would help.”

  “I’ll get it,” Ruth said. “Go outside. Get some fresh air. I’ll meet you.”

  The brick of the building was cold against Marian’s back, but the sun warmed her face, hurt her eyes. Squinting, she took the mug Ruth brought her. The coffee was abrasively bitter but very hot. “What’s going on with you?” Ruth said. “You’re acting so strange.”

  “What are you doing here?” Marian asked.

  Ruth seemed to decide against pressing her, said, “Taxi service, what else? They must think I’m all right at it since it’s all I do. Once in a blue moon I ferry a Moth—yippee. Where would the war effort be without one more decrepit biplane? But next week I’m finally going back to White Waltham. We’ll be reunited.” This last with forced cheer.

  “I might have left by then.”

  Ruth dug in her pocket for cigarettes. When she’d lit one, she said, “We’ve gotten out of sync, haven’t we?”

  Marian indicated the plane parked by the hangar. “I’ll probably be posted soon. I’ve just done my first Spit.”

  “The blue one? How was it?”

  When she had come to, she had been in a spiraling dive, a pinwheel of fields and hedges spinning into a blur.

  “Like everyone says.”

  “Heaven?”

  “Just about.”

  “I’m dying of jealousy.” Neither said anything for a minute. The coffee and the oxygen-rich air were helping Marian’s headache, though Ruth’s smoke wasn’t. Ruth added, “If you’d written I would have told you Eddie’s here now, in a training unit at Bovingdon.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” She was growing cool, remembering Marian’s neglect.

  “I’m glad for you.” Marian knew she didn’t sound glad at all. She’d never known jealousy like this, the sting of it.

  A distant engine sang a single nasal note, crescendoed as it came closer. A Spitfire appeared, lined up, landed. “My passenger’s here,” Ruth said. “Time to go.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the brick wall, put the butt in her pocket. “See you, Graves.”

  She was walking away. Marian said, “Ruth.” Ruth turned. Everything Marian wanted to say was stuck in her throat. “See you.”

  Ruth seemed to droop. A sadness emanated from her that Marian didn’t understand. “Sure,” she said.

  Marian was posted to the No. 6 ferry pool at Ratcliffe before Ruth arrived at White Waltham, and again she was relieved, and still she did not write.

  Trust Your Lust

  Sixteen

  “Picture!” Bart shouted. “Lock it down! No talking, please! Settle in, please. Sound rolling. Camera. Swinging a lens, and we’ll go again. Hold the work, hold the talk. Last look. First team is in.”

  Life is full of sound, and film sets are full of silence. We were shooting in a retro music venue in downtown L.A., a big, balconied room made up to look like a wartime London nightclub. Extras were strategically distributed to make the place seem jammed, and they mimed chatter and laughter and moved noiselessly through the dance floor’s revolving spangles, sweating in their costumes because air-conditioning would make too much noise. They danced in silence while the white-jacketed swing band pretended to play, trombone slides going in and out while the bandleader conducted to music that only existed in the tiny buds in his ears.

  After the Alexei kiss hit the internet, I wasn’t allowed to talk. Siobhan and our emergency PR triage people said it was best to issue a statement saying I would not be commenting about my private life and let everyone scream into the void.

  Outside on the hot white sidewalk, guys in black T-shirts pushed around rattling dollies piled with utilitarian bric-a-brac: rolls of tape, coils of cable, tripods, racks of lights, big squares of rubber flooring. Trucks and trailers clogged the street. Hair and makeup girls bustled around, their belts heavy with brushes and clips and spray bottles and big nylon pockets like the ones animal trainers carry treats in.

  I swayed and turned with Actor Eddie in the middle of a crowd of other swaying, turning couples, who, if the real Marian Graves had danced in a club like this, would have been absorbed in their own lives but were now just props meant to plump up my world, make it look real. A camera orbited around me and a boom hung over my head like a fuzzy black moon, and I was supposed to be falling for my friend’s husband.

  “Ruth’s my friend,” I told Eddie.

  “Ruth’s not here,” he said. “And tomorrow I’m going to fly over Germany, and I might never come back. So what do you say?”

  * * *

  —

  If I ever had a real meltdown, if I ever well and truly lost my shit, at least inside my own head, it was that week after Vegas.

  Alexei didn’t return my texts or calls. He didn’t make any public statements. Finally he emailed me that he had a lot to sort out and needed to concentrate on his family and didn’t want to have any contact at least for a while.

  What I wanted was to scrape my whole life away, cast aside everyone I knew because everyone I knew had disappointed me, build a new existence from scratch. I wanted to escape the system of my past, all the chain reactions. I wanted to be the big bang.

  But instead I took a bottle of Scotch over to Sir Hugo’s. M.G. drove me the hundred feet between our gates because the paparazzi were basically eating each other alive at the bottom of my driveway.

  “My dear, you are becoming a toxic asset,” Hugo said frostily. “You’re lucky we can’t fire you.” We were standing in his kitchen, and he was filling two glasses nearly to the brim.

  “Last time you said I’d made myself interesting.”

  “There are limits. We need women to see this movie, and women generally aren’t enamored of homewreckers. I know it’s unfair, I know it takes two to tango, but there you have it. We want people to look at you and see Marian Graves, not think about the chaotic tabloid strumpet who keeps getting caught shagging the wrong people.” He clinked his glass against mine. “Cin cin.”

  I took a swallow. “This thing with Alexei didn’t really feel optional.” Nothing as insignificant as the dignity of his wife or the prospect of total ruin would have stopped me. I saw a bumper sticker once in L.A.: Trust Your Lust. This is not prudent advice.

  “Is it over?”

  “I hope so, but I hope not.”

  Hugo pierced at me. “Are you in love with Alexei Young?”

  I set my glass down, covered my face with both hands, nodded.

  “But not just since Vegas.” Hugo was no fool.

  I uncovered my eyes. “No.”

  “Well, remind yourself that you’d probably love him much less if you were actually with him, because that’s the way it always plays out. Relish the pining and leave it at that. Spice of life.” He opened a cupboard. “I wouldn’t say no to something to nibble on, would you?” He came out with a box of water crackers and a jar of mustard. “What about young Mr. Feiffer? I thought there might be something there.”

  “I thought there was. Then I thought there wasn’t. Then I thought maybe, and now I think I ruined whatever might have been.”

  Hugo spread mustard on a cracker. “Well, that’s probably for the best. For the sake of the film.”

  I’d thought this movie would save me, elevate me, like Hugo had said, lift me up and carry me away. But I was too heavy for it. I was going to drag it down. “Do you think the movie’s going to be good?” I asked.

  “That depends on a lot of things, including you. But I hope so.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Unfortunately there’s not much you can do except act,” said Hugo, “ideally extremely well. And for god’s sake, don’t go to bed with any
one else. Not a soul.”

  “I have been acting.”

  “I’ve seen the dailies. They’re adequate. But I can still see you, and frankly you are the last person I want to see.”

  “Tell me how not to be seen. Please.”

  He waved a hand. “I can’t tell you. Anyway, I don’t believe for a minute that’s what you want. You want to be seen so very badly. You reek of it. You’re terrified of what happens if no one’s looking at you.”

  “No, I want to disappear,” I said. “Really. I want the ground to swallow me up.”

  “No.” He swallowed a mouthful of cracker. “You don’t. You want people to wonder where you went.”

  * * *

  —

  That night, after maybe a touch too much weed, I was sure my whole house was watching me. I knew there were cameras and listening devices hidden in every light fixture, every pen, every electronic gadget, and I went outside to get away from them. But being outside in the dark by the pool was terrifying, too. The Santa Anas were up, and everything was dry and rustling and rattling.

  I needed to know I wouldn’t always feel the way I did, so I called Redwood. I’d seen him on set but only fleetingly. We hadn’t mentioned Alexei. We hadn’t mentioned what I’d texted him from Vegas. We hadn’t really mentioned anything.

  He sounded wary when he answered.

  “I’m sorry to call so late,” I said, “or maybe at all, because I know things are weird, but I’m freaking out.” My words came out in a pathetic squeal. “I’m having a really hard time, and…” And what? What could I possibly ask of this person I barely knew? “And I don’t know what’s okay to say to you.”

  I heard him take a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth, the way they teach you in yoga. “I should have replied to your text,” he said. “I was going to—I just needed to think—but then the next day the Alexei story was everywhere, and I felt pretty confused. More confused. Because I was already quite confused.”