Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “But,” I said, “maybe other people could have been more understanding, too. I feel like people might have been impulsive and might have refused to see the big picture.”

  He smiled, his cheeks shining blue. “Maybe.”

  I sipped from my drink. “Seems possible.”

  “Maybe also some feelings have lingered more than one individual expected,” he said.

  “That might sound familiar,” I said.

  From there we kept on with our looping, harmless, catching-up talk, but the shields had been lowered. It’s easy sometimes to feel like audacity is its own form of protection, like recklessness somehow neutralizes danger. Sitting in our purple velvet booth, I didn’t ask him about the state of his marriage or what, specifically, his feelings about me were or anything I really wanted to know. I talked about Sir Hugo and Marian Graves, and I turned Redwood back into a dupe we were all bleeding dry before he was washed out of town on a wave of bewildered disappointment.

  “Is it going to be good?” he said. “The film?”

  I’d only ever asked myself that question and never answered it. Usually I was surrounded by people insisting it would be good, not letting in any doubt. “I don’t know,” I said. Suddenly everything felt as precarious as when I’d taken the Cessna’s yoke. Alexei rested his hand on my knee, steadying me.

  In my room, he peeled off my dais-appropriate jeans and blazer, put his face impatiently between my legs. When we were fucking, he turned me onto my stomach, and he murmured my name in my ear while my face was in hot pillow darkness, and I found I was crying. Outside, the desert faded purple and then black while someone turned up the dial on the city, lit up that tangerine net, ready to catch some unseen circus performer falling from the sky.

  * * *

  —

  When Alexei left, I stood in the doorway in a hotel bathrobe and kissed him beneath the glossy black bubble that hung from the ceiling like an egg laid by a sea creature, the glossy black bubble meant to make sure no intruders reached the vestibule between the elevator and the door to my suite, the glossy black bubble that concealed a camera that recorded our kiss, a camera that sent silent, time-stamped, colorless footage of our kiss to some hotel security guy who probably hated his job and hated the assholes who stayed in these suites and maybe already knew I was a scandalous little whore and wanted everyone to know the extent of my sluttiness. Anyway, that guy saw a chance to make a buck, and he took it.

  The War

  Valdez, Alaska

  October 1941

  Two years and nine months after Marian and Jamie met in Vancouver

  Marian had hoped the war would not find its way to Alaska, would not bother with such a place, but in 1940, someone somewhere had finally considered the strategic advantages of that gigantic cold fist of Pacific territory and the growing likelihood that any and all strategic advantages would soon be needed. Anchorage filled with soldiers. Frantic construction began on bases there and in Fairbanks and on a string of a dozen airfields running east-west from Whitehorse, in the Canadian Yukon, to Nome on the Bering Sea. Supplies and materials and people flooded in on ships, seeped north into the interior by truck, train, riverboat, airplane.

  No one was going to give a government contract for supply hauling to a woman, but the pilots who did get contracts had more work than they could handle and, for once, a customer who could be trusted to pay up. Some threw jobs Marian’s way. With her share of the money from Wallace’s house she’d bought a battered twin-engine Beechcraft off a guy who was giving up and heading back to Arizona, and she rented a proper frame cottage in Fairbanks. She was known for her spooky ability to fly in bad weather, landing exactly where she intended even when the whole Territory was under one big impenetrable cloud. Some of the other pilots called her a witch. She didn’t mind. She’d told Barclay she was one because she wished she were.

  Finished bases sprang up among the mountains and out on the tundra, with hangars and control towers and houses with all the modern conveniences, tidy settlements made from bits and pieces she’d helped haul up, everyone as industrious as ants. The wilderness was still mostly wilderness, but Marian felt possessive of the land, worried for it. The new military pilots coming in thought they were hot shit, but they didn’t have to learn the country. They’d only just learned to fly. They flew from one beacon to another, landed on actual runways, not in the bush. Yes, storms still came in like holy hell. Yes, planes still disappeared and were never recovered, but a pilot didn’t have to earn Alaska like before, not in her opinion.

  She took a break and flew herself down to see Jamie, who was living in a drafty clapboard house overlooking a drizzly, melancholy Oregon beach. He’d stopped working for the WPA because he didn’t feel right taking employment meant as relief. Collectors had started buying his paintings; three landscapes had gone in a traveling exhibition as far as Boston and New York, one had been bought by a museum in St. Louis. He’d parted ways with Flavian—been seduced away, really, by a prominent dealer in San Francisco.

  “I don’t know why I think Alaska should stay as empty and difficult as it’s always been,” she told him as they walked on the broad, empty beach. The waves left behind gleaming skins of water on the sand, silver with reflected fog. “It’s ungenerous of me, and less for the sake of the place than for my own vanity.”

  “You went there because you needed a place to hide,” Jamie said. “It makes sense your instinct would be to keep people out.”

  “Maybe. I do have an idea of it as a fortress.” She picked up a shell, tossed it out into the water. “You should come see it. You should paint it.”

  “I’d like to. I will.”

  His new paintings pulsed with an eerie, internal light. They retained some of the warp of the first landscapes he’d made after leaving Vancouver, and although the ocean, which has no angles, was his most common subject, the work still conveyed a sense of folding, a compacting that, paradoxically, suggested expansive openness. One large canvas was propped up across from the narrow iron-frame bed where Marian slept, as wide as the wall and nearly as tall. Looking at it, she had the feeling of flying toward the horizon.

  After a few days, she left without saying goodbye, flew on to Missoula over a landscape rusted with fall. A real airport had opened west of town. Some of the same pilots were still around, incredulous at the sight of her. They told her they’d been sure she was dead, one way or another.

  A history professor from the U and his family had bought Wallace’s house, and when she walked past it on her way to Caleb’s cabin, she saw the paint was bright and new, the roof mended, the windows clean. The barn appeared unoccupied, but the cottage had been spruced up, with fresh paint and flowers in window boxes. A little girl in a blue dress playing with a doll on the porch stopped to watch Marian. Another woman might have paused to say hello, explained that she and her brother had slept on this very porch when they were small. Another woman might have been wistful for a childhood lived in a well-kept house, in apparent safety and security, but Marian’s wistfulness was only for the particular simple wildness of the years when her only concern had been how to enlarge her world. She went on her way, along the trail into the trees.

  * * *

  —

  “I have a girl,” Caleb said. “I thought I should mention it.”

  Marian felt an unpleasant jolt. They were sitting on the back step of his cabin, drinking whiskey from tin cups. “Good for you.”

  “I thought if I wrote and told you, you might not come.”

  “I would have come,” she said, not knowing if that was true. She had been enjoying the nearness of his body, the cool air and the orange leaves, the pleasant anticipation of sex. But now she felt hot and furious and, to her horror, near tears. She cleared her throat. “You should have told me, though, so I could have figured out somewhere else to stay.”

  “Stay here. I’ll
sleep on the floor.”

  “Would your girl like that?” He didn’t reply. She said, “Who is she?”

  “She teaches English at the high school. She came here all alone from Kansas. You’d like her—she’s gutsy. Brave, actually.”

  “Yes, so brave, being a schoolteacher.”

  He was very still. In a low voice, staring into his cup, he said, “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

  “But you let me come here anyway. Were you testing me?”

  “If I had been, now I’d know that you don’t care about seeing me unless we’re—” He broke off. “I don’t know what to call it. I don’t even know what we do. Do we fuck? Make love?”

  She’d never had a word, either. “What do you call it with her?”

  “We don’t do that.”

  “You don’t?”

  “She’s not like that.”

  She seethed. “Not like me.”

  He stood up. “No, not like you, because with her I know where I stand. I know what she wants from me.”

  She stood, too, facing him. “All right. Go on. What does she want from you?”

  “She wants…I don’t know. She wants to go on walks in the mountains and have picnics. She wants to have a nice time.”

  “How sweet, Caleb. Good for you finding such a nice girl, finally.”

  His gaze might as well have been an awl. “She wants me to love her.”

  Marian couldn’t catch her breath. She knew he was setting her up to ask if he had given this woman what she wanted. But she would not. She felt like a snarling dog. “Are you going to marry her?” He flinched. She said, “So you’re actually just as conventional as anyone. You’re going to live in a sweet little house with a sweet little woman and make a bunch of babies and read the newspaper every night with your slippers and pipe.”

  “I don’t know!” Nearly a shout. “What do you want me to do? Stay here and be ready in case you need a letter delivered? Not that you ever say thank you. Should I wait around in case you need someone to tell you how completely justified you are in doing exactly what you want, when you want, even when it’s the worst possible decision you could make? Or in case you want me to fuck you once every five years? And then you’ll just go off again without even saying goodbye.”

  He spun and walked rapidly away, then dropped into a squat, his head in his hands. She went to him, knelt in the dirt. He sat back, pulling her with him. His embrace was painfully tight. With one hand, she gripped the end of his braid, tugged it. “I’m sorry,” she said into his shoulder. “And thank you for delivering my letters.”

  He was quiet for a long time, his face buried in her neck, clinging to her. Finally he said, “Next you’re going to say goodbye.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “But you’re going to leave.”

  Against his chest, she nodded.

  Seattle

  December 1941

  Two months later

  As soon as Jamie stepped into the exhibition, wearing a borrowed, too-short tuxedo and holding a saucer of champagne, he looked for Sarah Fahey. For weeks, he had nursed a fearful hope she would attend.

  In the years since he’d come to Seattle for his purchase prize, he had avoided the city, largely for fear of running into Sarah or any of the Faheys. But fear of what? What could they do to him now? In better moments, he thought: Nothing. In low moments, he had cataloged four nagging yet irrational fears. First, he worried they might conclude his entire career had been an attempt to climb his way into their echelon. Second, he was afraid they would somehow make him realize his work was ridiculous and he was an impostor. Third, he feared he would still love Sarah, and, fourth, he feared he would not.

  But those last two were particularly silly because, he’d decided, really the only reason she persisted in his thoughts at all was that their separation had been so abrupt. She was like a book with the final pages torn out, leaving him at the mercy of his imagination. If he were to see her, she would no longer be an enticing mystery but a real woman, no longer a dream sylph his mind could turn to when things went awry with other women (as they always did) nor a magical solution to all the riddles and disappointments of his existence. Also, he theorized, he’d been so starved for love when he met her, so desperate for a life of his own, that he’d blown their youthful romance wildly out of proportion. It had been a summer of kisses, no more. If he could just see her, he would be cured of her.

  And quite probably she would be married, which would be a resolution in itself.

  In any event, enough was enough. To refuse this exhibition would have been lunacy. He’d arrived two days before the opening to supervise the installation and had spent his free hours wandering around the city, taking in a decade’s worth of change. On his walks, he’d gleaned a bittersweet enjoyment from remembering the boy he’d been in this place. Thinking about Sarah felt acceptably nostalgic in Seattle, not pathetic, as it did elsewhere. In his clapboard house on the Oregon shore, he sometimes looked at the old drawings he’d kept of her, her teenage likeness still stirring him, and afterward felt gloomy and ashamed.

  But then, there she was. Though they were separated by a noisy, spangled crowd, though her back was to him, he couldn’t have missed her. She was looking at an Emily Carr painting, her small head with its careful upward twist of glossy brown hair silhouetted against swarming brushstrokes, trees and sunlight swirled together in a euphoric vortex. A triangle of bare back showed above the lustrous emerald dip of her evening gown. These things—the twist of hair held by a pearl-studded comb, the delicate, exposed spine—had no obvious visual connection to the girl he had known, but still he’d recognized her without hesitation or doubt.

  His own painting, a six-by-ten-foot rectangle of Oregon shoreline, had a wall to itself, off to Sarah’s left. She studied the Carr for another minute before stepping sideways to the next canvas. After another period of contemplation, she moved on again, drawing closer to Jamie’s painting while keeping her gaze averted. Deliberately, he thought. Everything about her seemed deliberate. Lanky elegance had replaced her timid adolescent gawkiness.

  He began to maneuver through the people, seeking a better vantage for when she finally looked at his painting, though part of him also wanted to leap between her and the canvas, to forestall her judgment by assuring her that he already knew it was inadequate, a failure, like all his work.

  Someone grasped him by the shoulder, stopping him. “Marvelous,” said a man Jamie remembered vaguely as having something to do with the museum, small and pink and curly-forelocked as a cherub. Was he a board member? The man pumped Jamie’s hand. “Absolutely marvelous. My congratulations.”

  Jamie thanked him distractedly. Sarah was on the last canvas before his.

  “I must ask you,” the man said, straining onto his tiptoes, trying to catch Jamie’s eye, “how did you develop this technique—style, I suppose—of creating angles? The sense of folding? Its effect is so original—you’ve intrigued me! Did you simply stumble upon it?”

  “Origami,” Jamie said shortly. He downed the last of his champagne, set the glass on a tray held aloft by a passing waiter.

  “What?”

  “Origami. Japanese paper folding.”

  “Really? Really. The little birds and frogs? Fascinating. I would never have made the connection, but I see. I see! Tell me—have you spent time in the Orient?”

  Sarah squared her shoulders, pivoted left, and stepped in front of Jamie’s painting.

  Sea and sky were gray, barely differentiated except through the brushstrokes, subtle angles suggesting the billows of clouds and the rhythmic geometry of swells and currents. In the foreground loomed the huge haystack shape of the famous basalt formation on Cannon Beach. This he had rendered, in contrast to the sky and ocean, as flatly monolithic, a black void. Sarah was very still against its darkness.

 
“Mr. Graves?” said the cherub.

  Jamie’s body was dissolving into anxious effervescence. His mouth was dry. “Excuse me,” he whispered, brushing past the man just as Sarah turned from the canvas.

  What was her expression? He tried to fix it in his memory for later examination: cheeks flushed, eyes wide and liquid and active, neither recognizably appreciative nor obviously displeased but clearly provoked.

  When she caught sight of Jamie, she startled and froze. Her flush deepened, spreading rapidly down her throat to her décolletage. Pressing a hand to her sternum, she smiled sheepishly, tremulously.

  In a fluster, he hurried toward her, tugging at his cuffs, cursing himself for being too proud to buy his own tuxedo. He’d told himself he didn’t care how he looked, that he had no wish to pretend to be a fat cat (though Jamie was no longer by any means poor), and now his comeuppance was to resemble a scarecrow. He darted to kiss her cheek. “Sarah.” He didn’t dare say anything else. When he’d imagined their meeting, he’d failed to account for adrenaline, for shaking knees, trembling fingers. He jammed his hands into his pockets.

  “I wondered if you would be here,” she said. She touched her throat. “I’m so nervous. Why am I nervous? We’re old friends.”

  Gratified by her admission, nettled by the word friends, he said, “Old sweethearts, actually.”

  “We were children,” she declared, laughingly but with a note of insistence, and chattered on before he could reply, saying, “I can hardly believe it. I see your name attached to these really truly extraordinary—really, Jamie—these paintings, not just this one but others, too, and I still picture a boy.” The crowd pressed in densely, and she was pushed closer, almost against his chest. All of him was alive to her. She clasped his forearm quickly, almost covertly. “I tried to imagine you grown up and couldn’t, but now that I see you, you make perfect sense.”