Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  * * *

  —

  The day Barclay was due home, she returned to Bannockburn. She’d stayed three nights in Missoula.

  From the bedroom, she watched Barclay emerge from the car and Sadler go around to pull suitcases from the trunk. Barclay stared up at her in the window, and she knew he already knew she had flown the plane.

  It was late afternoon. She sat with a book but did not turn any pages. He burst through the bedroom door like a hot wind. He said, “Enjoy your trip?”

  She thought she might brazen it out. “Yes,” she said. “I went to see my brother. You?”

  Earlier she had inserted her diaphragm in anticipation of his return, armored herself at least in that one way, and when he took her by the arm and jerked her off the window seat, put her on the bed, she was glad she had. He got her trousers down around her ankles, turned her onto her stomach. Face to the quilt, she waited, but he leaned a knee into the small of her back, grabbing her wrists with one hand. He pushed the fingers of the other between her legs, digging and scraping—purposefully, as though in an effort to unclog a drain. He was trying to pull out her diaphragm. “Don’t,” she said. Inadequate, but what else to say? His knee pressed harder into her back. He seemed calm and intent, as though subduing an animal. His nails scratched inside her; there was a feeling of suction when he finally pulled the cap free. He shifted so he was straddling her, his knees clamping her arms to her sides. He held the diaphragm in front of her eyes and with his thumb pushed the rubber out into an obscene protrusion, stretching it until it tore. Tossing the ruined object to the floor, he undid his belt.

  When she was a child and had wrestled with Jamie and Caleb, she had fought with her whole body, all her limbs, everything down to her fingers and toes. She’d writhed like a serpent even after she’d been pinned.

  Under Barclay’s weight, she lay still as a corpse. She stared at a pile of logs stacked in the fireplace, noticed how the bark curled up like scraped skin, how the pale, splintery split sides had a faint sheen. She was conscious of fear, but the stronger sensation was of humiliation. To be bare-buttocked and immobilized was excruciating, but the worst of her shame was that she had not foreseen this.

  There was pain, but it seemed distant, just over some horizon of herself. Barclay didn’t take long. He made intermittent gasping sounds, and she absorbed without interest that he was crying, or almost. She was waiting; that was all.

  When he was done, he lay heavily on her. Eventually he climbed off, and she heard him dressing and sniffling but saw only the unburned logs in the grate. She did not move, nor did she shift after the door closed behind him. Some notion of washing twitched in her mind, but the effort seemed impossible. Where she was, her lungs continued to fill with air and her heart to beat, and so her situation was apparently endurable.

  At night in bed she often imagined flying. She would choose a landscape to pass beneath her: mountains with lakes and rivers, perhaps rolling sand dunes if she was feeling adventurous, or tropical islands in a turquoise sea. Lying there with her trousers still around her ankles, she took off from the ranch, flew west over the mountains, flew until she was over the sea, fell asleep over a sheet of blue.

  Her second day home in Missoula, she had driven Jamie and Caleb in her old Ford up the Bitterroot, stopped at a broad, flat stretch with no ice. Caleb had been first to plunge into the water. The cold had wrapped around Marian’s ribs when she followed, squeezed her malaise from her like spent breath. She and Jamie, in their underclothes, had only jumped in once and run right out again, but Caleb, naked, had splashed and whooped.

  The third night, she had woken in the cottage to Caleb crouching beside her narrow bed. His face close to hers, his hand resting on her wrist, he had said in a low voice, “What do you think?”

  “I can’t,” she’d whispered, and he’d waited in silence for a moment and then gone away.

  As the darkness faded, she’d gotten up and walked to the airfield without saying goodbye to Jamie.

  Now Caleb was beside her again, but he wasn’t kissing her. He was shaking her by the shoulder. Except, as she opened her eyes, it wasn’t Caleb but Kate. Marian reached to cover herself, but a blanket had already been pulled over her naked backside. Out the window, bands of pink blazed among gray clouds.

  “He sent me to check on you,” Kate said. “He said he lost his temper.”

  Marian turned her head away, looked at the logs again. She couldn’t summon the energy to be embarrassed that Kate had found her lying exposed.

  “Did he do this?” Kate said.

  “Of course he did.”

  “No, this.”

  Marian looked. Kate was holding the mangled diaphragm on a handkerchief.

  She nodded.

  “I know what it is, you know.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’m sure you think I’m just an old maid.”

  Ordinarily, she would have been interested in whether Kate was implying experience or just knowledge, but not now. She said, “I don’t think about you.” As an experiment, she rolled onto her side and curled her knees in, holding her breath to keep from gasping at the rawness between her legs. She hadn’t moved in hours. She had the sensation of cracking out of a thin pane of ice.

  “You don’t want a baby?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Marian had not considered the question in practical terms. She had so far avoided considering anything. Again some thought of washing came to her. She imagined walking into the hottest pool of the Lolo Hot Springs, sanitizing herself like Berit boiling jam jars on the stove.

  “Nothing. I can’t do anything.”

  “Aren’t there…rinses and things? Can’t you drink something?”

  “Do you have those things here? Because otherwise I don’t know how I’m supposed to get them.” Throwing bitterness at Kate like clumps of mud.

  Another long silence. “I might be able to get you another one.” Kate held up the diaphragm. “If that’s what you want.”

  Marian had already refrozen in place, but she made herself crack loose again, lift up on her elbow. “You could?” This small piece of kindness, suspect as it was, nudged her out of her stupor, toward a precipice over which could only lie the full brunt of misery. With effort, she sat up. A painful pressure came into her head; a different one settled in her groin, raw and hot.

  Kate wrapped the handkerchief around the torn rubber disk, put the bundle back in her pocket. “But if I get you one, you can’t let him catch you with it.”

  “He might feel it.”

  Kate looked toward the door. “Maybe it’s better not even to try. It might make things worse.”

  “No. Please get me one—please. From where, though?”

  “I have friends in England. They’re legal there, but it’ll take a while, so you’ll have to fend him off, or just keep him from—” Averting her eyes, she made a small flicking gesture with her fingers. “I’m going to light the fire, and then I’ll run you a bath.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “If you have his baby, we’ll never be rid of you.” She crouched beside the fireplace, struck a match. The logs flared and caught.

  * * *

  —

  She decided, lying in the bath, that if she simply willed herself not to be pregnant, she wouldn’t be. Her body was only a vessel for her will, so why not? Other women simply hadn’t been strict and forceful enough within themselves. She could seal her womb against him. She slid deeper into the tub, lay unmoving in the water. Thin rafts of bubbles drifted and broke apart like clouds.

  * * *

  —

  And since it turned out she wasn’t pregnant, she concluded her will had succeeded. She knew this was not true; she believed it anyway.

  She resumed her aimless movem
ents around the house and ranch.

  In April, as a late snow fell, she encountered a bear in the forest, thin after the winter, humped and shaggy, its back dusted with white. The animal lifted its head. The black nose throbbed, nostrils pinching closed as it sniffed the air, examining her scent. She carried a rifle across her back but did not draw it, kept still. With its heavy shoulders the bear shoved the earth away, stood on its hind legs. Small, assessing amber eyes. Something humble in its posture to balance the immoderacy of its size, the extravagant length of its curved pale claws.

  It thumped back down, sending up a cloud of fresh snow, and shuffled off into the trees. She was not worth the trouble.

  She watched it go. She thought it might have been Trout, come to remind her she was still alive.

  Barclay was sorry. After her bath she had returned to bed, remained there through the night and into the next day. When he came to her, he drew her out of bed and knelt at her feet, pressing his forehead to her belly, the womb she believed she had locked against him. She stood with her arms at her sides and looked down on his bent head and the upturned soles of his shoes like an indifferent god.

  “When can I fly again?” she’d said.

  He gazed up at her, beseeching. “Do you forgive me?”

  She thought of Jamie begging her to take him away from Missoula. Still, she shook her head.

  “You can fly when you forgive me,” he said.

  Red Herrings

  Thirteen

  The assistant director shushed everyone—the whole cast sitting at the big U-shaped table with our scripts and our sharp new pencils like kids on the first day of school, the surrounding scrum of bagel-eating, coffee-drinking production people and studio people and investors—and then Bart Olofsson stood up and peered down into his first-edition hardback copy of Marian’s book (not Carol’s, which he clearly disdained) and read the opening aloud in his faint Icelandic accent.

  “ ‘Where to begin?’ ” he intoned. “ ‘At the beginning, of course. But where is the beginning? I don’t know where in the past to insert a marker that says: here. Here is where the flight began. Because the beginning is in memory, not on a map.’ ”

  He looked up and stared into our faces with grave intensity, almost accusingly, like a priest reminding us that we were sinners. I glanced at Redwood in the scrum. He looked solemn, earnest. It had been a week since the night of the ’shrooms, and I hadn’t heard from him except for when I’d sent him a GIF of two sloths floating in outer space with the text Us on shrooms talking about LA.

  He’d responded, Ha!

  “Here we find ourselves at a beginning, too,” Bart told us. “We are about to make a movie. But this is not a big bang out of nothing. That moment Marian can’t identify, when her flight began its trajectory toward reality? That was our beginning, too. In life, beginnings are not fixed but ambient. They are happening all the time, without us noticing.” He tapped the book. “In here, Marian wrote, ‘I am already lost to my future.’ Strange words, yes?”

  The first line of Carol Feiffer’s novel is, I don’t know it, but I am about to be swallowed by either fire or water. It’s supposed to be Marian narrating as a baby on the sinking ship. Then the story runs straight forward in time until she crashes into the ocean. The cold brings the darkness, and I am lost. But I am not afraid. That last sentence felt tacked-on to me, a wishful, spluttering little protest. After Redwood told me his mother always wanted things to be fine, it made sense. She was trying to reassure herself.

  The movie, though, starts at the end, in the airplane, when they’re running out of fuel and there’s nowhere to go. Then it jumps back to the shipwreck and runs forward, with the round-the-world flight broken into parts and slotted in every once in a while, so finally we wind up back in the plane again at the end, when they crash.

  “I think about it like this,” Bart said. “We are confined to the present, but this moment we’re living now has, for all of history, been the future. And now, forever more, it will be past. Everything we do sets off unforeseeable, irreversible chain reactions. We are acting within the constraints of an impossibly complex system.” He paused and stared around again. “That system is the past,” he said.

  I caught Sir Hugo’s eye. He winked.

  Bart says everything like it’s the aha moment of a TED talk, I’d said to Hugo once. It hypnotizes people into thinking he’s a genius.

  But his grandiosity lends everything a lovely sense of occasion, don’t you think? Hugo said.

  “But,” Bart said, “sometimes, beginnings can be simple. In a film, for example, the beginning is a single frame. Today, let us give ourselves the relief of containment, of limits. Let us begin on page one.”

  He gestured to the assistant director, who had clearly been waiting for this cue and leaned into his microphone. “Exterior. Day,” he read from the script. “A two-engine silver plane is flying over whitecapped ocean, no land in sight. A faint trail of leaking fuel streams from under its wing. Marian, voiceover.”

  “I was born to be a wanderer,” I said, the amplified twin of my voice following a millisecond behind. “I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave.”

  * * *

  —

  That ’shroomy night by the pool, what chain reactions had Redwood and I set off? Not the ones I expected. I’d slept in his bed, but he never even kissed me. He’d said I should just crash here because we were too messed up to go anywhere and some company would be nice. He gave me the choice between his bed and a guest room, and I thought he was giving me the choice between hooking up or not, and I thought I was choosing to hook up. But when I emerged sexily from the bathroom in one of his T-shirts, he was already asleep. Around dawn, I think I woke up, and I think he was spooning me, but that might have been a dream because when I woke up for real, he was in the kitchen making breakfast tacos.

  “I think you’re great,” he told me when I left, and kissed me below my ear, and who the fuck knows what that’s supposed to mean.

  Maybe the problem was that we hadn’t actually been in a beginning, not starting a chain reaction but still riding out an old one. I was still trying to escape my feelings for Alexei, my guilt about Oliver, hoping Redwood would turn out to be the key that freed me. Maybe he was hoping I was something equally improbable. We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we’re just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination.

  After I’d gotten home from Redwood’s, I’d taken a green juice into the office, where Augustina was working on the computer. She always seemed to be getting jerked around by men, so I thought she might have some wisdom.

  “What does it mean,” I said, leaning in the doorway, “when you spend the night with a guy in the same bed but nothing happens, and as you’re leaving, he kisses you here”—I tapped my neck—“and says he thinks you’re great?”

  She grimaced—she couldn’t help herself—then rearranged her expression into thoughtful neutrality. “He probably thinks you’re great,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, thumping the doorframe twice, like I was dismissing a taxi. “Thanks.”

  “Remember your interview tomorrow,” she called after me.

  I got in bed and looked at Alexei’s Instagram, then Alexei’s wife’s, then Oliver’s, then Oliver’s ex-wife’s, then Jones Cohen’s, then basically everyone’s I’d ever slept with. I don’t know what I was looking for. Not the selfies or beaches or children or sandwiches I got. I was laboring away, pulling up a huge heavy net full of red herrings. Maybe I was looking for the answer to what I should be looking for.

  I already knew I was going to text this guy Mark by the time I g
ot around to his profile. I’d known him since my Katie McGee days. Once Santa Monica High School’s premier drug dealer, he’d become an entertainment lawyer, handsome and discreet, never romantically attached or possibly just never constrained by his attachments, not very interesting but nevertheless an absolute pillar of self-assurance. I’d turned to him in times of need before. People say fuck buddy like the concept is so edgy and clever, but I thought of Mark more as a human placebo. If I believed he would make me feel better, he did.

  No one was staking out my gate anymore. The paparazzi had lost interest. Abandonment stings, even when it means freedom. I sent Augustina home, and Mark glided up the driveway in his BMW and drank the fancy mezcal I poured for him and complimented my Marian haircut and took me to bed in his practiced, luxuriously confident way, and when he moved to leave, I asked him to spend the night.

  So, when the writer from Vanity Fair showed up the next morning, Mark was still there, sunning himself on a raft in the pool, as conspicuous as one of those huge flamingo-shaped inflatables I’d seen in everyone’s Instagrams.

  The article wouldn’t come out for a few months, but when I saw the writer’s gaze alight on him out the window, I could almost have dictated the eventual lede:

  There’s a man in Hadley Baxter’s pool. A gorgeous man, in sunglasses and itty-bitty trunks, floating on a raft. “Just a friend,” she says with a sly smile, leading the way through her Spanish-style home. “We’ve known each other since we were naughty little kids.” In other words, Hadley doesn’t need your pity. Hadley Baxter isn’t back. Hadley Baxter never left.

  Of course, though, what I wanted was for Redwood to read that right then, right now, not in a few months. I wanted him to know his rejection—if that’s even what it was—hadn’t hurt.

  “What would you say drew you to this role of Marian Graves?” the writer asked when we were ensconced in my living room with canned seltzers and half glasses of white wine (“Just a cheeky one, as my friend Hugo would say,” Hadley says, referring to Sir Hugo Woolsey, her neighbor and a producer of Peregrine). I splayed sideways in an armchair. She was perched on the couch, her recorder on the coffee table.