Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “What does it look like?”

  “Like smoke.”

  The city sparkled and revolved like a galaxy.

  They call it the City of Angels, he said, but the name actually just means The Angels. And, like, what angels?

  All of them, I said. I guess.

  It’s really exciting, he said. We’re making something out of nothing.

  I thought he was talking about us. I wanted to say, that’s what all relationships are, but then he said, well, not nothing. Marian was real, obviously, but people’s lives don’t get preserved like fossils. The best you can hope for is that time will have hardened around someone’s memory, preserving a void in their shape.

  Or he said something like that, and I realized he was talking about the movie, not us.

  You might find out some things, he said, but it’ll never be enough, never be anything like the Whole Truth. You’re better off just deciding what kind of story you want to tell and telling it.

  I think that’s sort of what he said.

  I said, But where do we begin? Where’s the beginning?

  * * *

  —

  He forgot to answer, or maybe I’d only asked inside my head, and for some unmeasurable period of time we sat there looking at the view, thinking about whatever, and then he was like, what is this place?

  It’s The Angels, I told him.

  I know, he said, but what is it?

  I could hear wind chimes coming from a neighbor’s house, so I was like, it’s wind chimes.

  What else?

  A helicopter went blinking by.

  It’s helicopters.

  What else?

  It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it’s muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone’s bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It’s coyotes yipping like delinquents who’ve just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox, and it’s mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. It’s the thrum of hummingbird wings and the silent gliding gyres of vultures and the long-legged stepping of white egrets through shallow green water in the concrete channel that’s the river. It’s dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere. It’s gongs and oms and whale songs soothing in the dim inner sancta of spas. It’s a Norteño song bouncing out of a passing El Camino and schoolkids singing o beautiful for spacious skies in a classroom with the windows open and the rasp of a beat from somebody’s earbuds you pass on the sidewalk. It’s pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles snoozing on terra-cotta tiles. It’s blenders and grinders and juicers and hissing steel espresso machines the size of submarines and waiters who talk too much—Any special plans for the weekend? Do anything special over the weekend?—and water, so precious, splashing into fountains and pools and hot tubs and tall glasses on shaded patios, burbling from hoses and geysering from broken pipes. And underneath, there’s the hum of traffic, always there, like the ocean that lives in seashells, like the cosmic whoosh of the expanding universe.

  At least that’s what I tried to tell him. I don’t know what I actually said.

  Then he said something about how L.A. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it’s towering clouds of smoke, and it’s sunshine that won’t let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It’s a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It’s the Big One that’s coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars.

  At least that’s what I heard him saying.

  And I was like, you know what? It’s mostly just houses. And when you think about houses, really think, aren’t they so weird? They’re boxes where we keep ourselves and our stuff, boxes shaped like Tudor manors and chic cement warlord bunkers like this one and glassy mod spaceships and geodesic domes and sleek vitrines. L.A. is mysterious crumbling old hilltop piles, and it’s haciendas wrapped in bougainvillea and Craftsman bungalows neat as a pin and little flat-roofed adobe things with bars on the windows, and it’s surf shacks and drug shacks and grumpy-old-man-no-solicitors shacks and patchouli shacks strung with prayer flags, windows glowing red through printed Indian cotton as though inside is the beating heart of everything. It’s the tents of the homeless crowded under an overpass; it’s the spherical mud nests of swallows high up under an overpass; it’s vines hanging from an overpass like a beaded curtain. It’s trash blowing around in the hot, dry wind, nesting in ice plant by the freeway. It’s the teasing, skipping, arcing fan dance of lawn sprinklers. It’s the snip snip of pruning shears and the plunk of lemons falling from laden branches to split open and rot on the sidewalk under hovering bees, and it’s the placid blue gliding pool net maneuvered by a gardener in a broad straw hat, graceful as a gondolier.

  It’s grass dying of thirst and tall berms of oleander running down the middle of the freeway, blooming and poisonous and hardy as fuck, dividing northbound from southbound, lava from champagne, and it’s cacti and yuccas and aloes and agaves and water-hoarding succulents with names like blue chalk fingers and blue horizon and queen of the night and burro’s tail and purple emperor and firesticks and cobweb houseleek and zebra haworthia and campfire jade and ghost plant and flamingo glow and string of pearls and painted lady. I want Redwood to know all this. (Seriously, though, he said again, like all the angels?) I want him to know that L.A. is a desert wind blowing through the garden of paradise. I need him to understand that I am a purple emperor, and I am a painted lady, and it is: all. so. succulent.

  I told him, and he said yes. Yes, exactly. And I thought I saw a cold point of light, like a star but not a star, coming from him, coming from nowhere.

  Marriage

  North Atlantic

  October 1931

  Two months after Jamie came home from Seattle

  Marian Macqueen, seventeen years old and newly married, stood at the stern of an ocean liner, the chill of the railing seeping through her gloves as light drained from the murky sky. Barclay was bringing her to Scotland for a honeymoon. She’d been told she would meet his father’s people and his acquaintances from school and see castles and highlands. They’d gone by train from Missoula to New York City. “I don’t know what you’re looking at,” Barclay had said somewhere in the plains while Marian stared hungrily out the window. “There’s nothing out there.”

  The gust of the train washed through golden prairie grass, tossed blackbirds into flight. “I want to see it anyway,” she said.

  After a week in New York, they had boarded this ship (Cunard, not L&O) bound for Liverpool, from where they would take another train north. The first three days had been stormy enough that the decks were closed to passengers except for the glassed-in parts of the promenade, and Marian had roamed impatiently, peering out the rain-streaked windows at the shifting, whitecapped water. Barclay was seasick, but she was untouched. Quickly she’d developed the knack for inclining her body with the roll
of the ship, penduluming from side to side as she walked down the corridors. Other passengers staggered drunkenly or clung to the railings while she only grazed her fingertips along the walls.

  “Very good, madam!” said a passing steward. “You have your sea legs.”

  She imagined her father would be proud to see how unaffected she was. She imagined explaining to Addison that she was accustomed to motion, describing her aerobatics, how the plane felt like an extension of her own body, except more responsive, more coordinated than her limbs ever would be. She could spin and loop and always know exactly where she was. He would be proud of that, too, she thought. An undertow of self-pity caught her. It would be nice if somebody were proud of her. Wallace wasn’t capable. She and Jamie were barely speaking, and who could ever tell what Caleb thought. Barclay was proud of having married her, but he saw her flying as a rival.

  On deck, damp blew around her, scouring her cheeks. As best she could figure, at some point during this night they would pass not far from where the Josephina had gone down, where she, Marian, had been set on a course that had taken turn after turn until returning her to this patch of ocean as a rich man’s bride, the wife of a criminal.

  She was wearing clothes selected for her by women at Henri Bendel in New York to replace the clothes that, after their engagement, had been selected for her by women at the Missoula Mercantile to replace her shirts and trousers: a silk dress and stockings, T-strap shoes, onyx-and-diamond danglers clamped to her ears, a rope of pearls slung twice around her neck, a mink coat and a navy cloche. She had three trunks full of such things. Barclay had insisted on all of it. The responsibility of owning so many fine and delicate possessions, so many sparkling bits and bobs that served no real purpose but must not be forgotten or lost or broken, worked on her like a kind of drag, slowing her. She was unused to shoes that should not be gotten wet and gossamer fabrics that snagged or stretched unless she remembered to move cautiously at all times. If the three trunks had gone up in a bonfire, she would have felt only relief, but since Barclay knew far more about how women should look than she did, she deferred.

  Her hair had been cut in the Plaza Hotel salon by a woman whose own hair was a miracle of sharp angles and avian sleekness, like Mercury’s helmet. “It’s so short already I don’t know if I can do much with it,” the woman had said, fingering Marian’s pale crop, but somehow she had snipped it into something that might be taken as daring and gamine.

  Another woman had taught her how to make up her face, sold her an assortment of mirrored compacts and a fistful of brushes and pencils. Her skin had been powdered and rouged until her freckles vanished; her eyes were ringed in black, her lips painted red. When she caught sight of her reflection, she had the same uncanny feeling she’d had at Miss Dolly’s, of glimpsing a stranger who turned out to be herself.

  What would have happened if, when they’d first met, Barclay had simply set his mind on seducing her? She would have gone willingly enough. Why all the fuss? He’d needed to break the feral pull between them, tame and subdue it. Since the wedding, though, she had sensed some buried, unacknowledgeable regret in him. He could neither tolerate wildness nor reconcile himself to its loss.

  In the salon, a girl getting her hair set had told Marian about a party she was going to—“Well, it’s the kind of party that happens every night”—with her brother and his friends in midtown. In a certain alley, she explained, there was a certain steel door that was plain except for a small plaque that read no entry. “That’s what they call the club, see? No Entry. So it has a sign out front after all. Inside it’s classy as anything—you just need to say the password. Even now there’s always a big cheery crowd. And there’s a full band playing, and dancing and cocktails and all of it. I’ll give you the address. The password this week”—she lowered her voice—“is ‘rodent.’ Don’t ask me why, and don’t worry, there aren’t any. I’m telling you honestly, it’s as swank a place as you’ve ever been.”

  Marian did not let on that, indeed, such a place was guaranteed to be far more swank than anywhere she had ever been.

  “I like your dress,” the girl added. “Where are you from?”

  “I was born in New York,” Marian said.

  “Were you?” The other’s round, benign face was full of interest. For a terrible moment, Marian thought the girl was about to unleash a cascade of follow-up questions. All she knew was the address of the house in which she had been born, given to her by Wallace. Barclay had promised they would go by it in a taxi if there was time. But the girl only said, in a confiding voice, “Lucky you. I’m from Pittsburgh. Could you tell?”

  “No,” said Marian.

  Over dinner she suggested to Barclay they might investigate No Entry, just to see what it was like.

  “Those places are all the same. Lots of talk, lots of drinking.”

  She picked at a piece of fish. “It might be nice to hear some music.”

  “There’s not much to do in those places for us,” Barclay said, “since we don’t drink.”

  That Marian would turn teetotaler after their marriage was a decision he’d made without consulting her, a rule she’d awoken to find hammered into place. She would have liked to try a cocktail in a jazz club but didn’t wish to argue. She hadn’t anticipated how much of her behavior after marriage would be motivated by a wish not to argue.

  The night she’d gone to Caleb’s cabin and then to the green-and-white house, after she’d told Barclay she loved him, he’d confessed he had been carefully and quietly buying up Wallace’s debts, consolidating them. He’d grown tired of waiting for her, had been worn down by the prolonged uncertainty. He’d been maddened by jealousy when he learned she’d gone to Caleb’s cabin, he said. He told her he felt nothing but disgust for Wallace, for all debtors; he wished someone had punished his own father for his waste and foolishness. He believed he was serving justice when he sent his emissaries (his goons, Marian thought) to inform Wallace of what had come due. A huge sum, unpayable. Despair in a number.

  I’ve done a terrible thing, Barclay had said. But you made me wait too long.

  Seeing his confession detonate in her, he had become frantic, told her he could undo it. She must forgive him, she must forget he’d tried to ransom her uncle because everything was fine, he would make everything fine always. Wallace’s debts were forgotten! Forgiven! Pretend this never happened! Please!

  She had bolted from the green-and-white house.

  At Wallace’s, she had eased in through the dark kitchen, shushing the dogs. She was suddenly angry at Jamie for being off on his summer adventure, leaving her alone with this mess, even if she bore more than a little responsibility for it. Though the house was silent, she’d sensed Wallace’s presence somewhere, a cloud of suffering. She passed through the sitting room, turning on lamps, calling softly for her uncle until she found him upstairs in his dark studio, sitting in his armchair with a pistol on the small round table beside him. When she appeared in the doorway, he snatched up the gun and brandished it wildly, like a man trying to take aim at a bee. “Don’t come in here!” he cried.

  Light fell into the room from the hall, illuminating his gaunt praying mantis figure, his ragged bathrobe, his bright, frantic eyes. A mostly empty bottle stood beside the chair. She’d expected a scene like this, though not the gun, which she hadn’t known he owned. “It’s all right, Wallace,” she said. “Everything’s fixed now. What the men told you isn’t true. You don’t need to worry.”

  “You don’t understand.” His voice cracked. “It’s too much. It’s impossible.” He pressed the muzzle of the pistol to his temple and began gasping for breath like a drowning man.

  “Wallace,” Marian said. “Listen to me. Your debts are paid off. They’re gone. You don’t have to worry about them anymore. I’ve fixed it.”

  He didn’t seem to hear. He’d stopped gasping, maybe stopped breathing altogether.
His eyes were closed. His lips were moving soundlessly.

  “Wallace,” she said. “Wallace. I’m paying them off. I’ve paid them off.”

  He opened his eyes, seemed to focus on her.

  “They’re gone,” she said. “Wiped clean.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, all of them. Everything.”

  His arm slackened, fell into his lap. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to the weapon still in his hand. “How?”

  “Someone helped me. Put that aside now.”

  He set the gun on the table and curled sideways in the chair, a hand over his eyes. “Who?”

  She moved closer, took the gun. “Barclay.”

  He nodded. Tears caught in his beard. The thought came to her that if he had killed himself, she would have been free.

  She didn’t know if he could think clearly enough to realize that Barclay had also been the one to call in his debts in the first place.

  Barclay came looking for her later that night, found her in the cottage. She told him she couldn’t marry a man who would do such a thing. She couldn’t love such a man. She’d been about to come to him freely, but now she could not, could never feel anything for him. All she asked for was time to pay him back. She didn’t care if it took the rest of her life.

  He had tried to embrace her, had begged, claimed madness, blamed her for the madness. When she would not yield, he’d finally said, coldly, “What you don’t understand is that I’ve bought your uncle and he isn’t for sale. Not to you or anyone. It’s done.”

  In the Plaza dining room, Barclay said, “I wouldn’t have thought a nightclub would be your idea of a good time, the way you talk about wanting to see empty, unspoiled places.”

  “I don’t know what all I like,” she said. “I’ve never been anywhere.”

  In the morning, they took a taxi to the house where she’d been born, in a neighborhood that seemed quiet, a little grimy. The house’s flat brick face triggered no emotion in her, certainly no epiphany. A gaunt man in a cap and overcoat was sitting on the stoop next door. When Marian called to him, he hurried over, cap in hand, filling the window with his thin face and eager eyes. “Do you know who lives in this house?” she asked.