Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “They might not be important.”

  “Or they could be really important. Shit. Would you be willing to ask her if I could read them? I mean, I can’t help but feel a little hurt she didn’t show them to my mom. What if there’s some huge revelation in them, and she lets the cat out of the bag after the movie’s finished? Would she do that? Could we ask her not to do that?”

  “You can ask her whatever you want,” I said.

  “But she’s chosen you to confide in. Apparently.”

  I shouldn’t have told him anything. His keenness was making me turn away from him, clutching my little nugget of knowledge. Mine, not yours.

  I’d figured out how to be Marian—and being Marian mattered to me—but every day we filmed I cared less about the movie. It didn’t matter much to me anymore if it was good. I’d stopped imagining myself and my Oscar. This little flicker of truth, that Marian Graves had met her niece before she disappeared, had undermined everything, cracked through the artifice, like how in cartoons a building’s whole facade might collapse forward, crushing everything except the hero, who is spared by a perfectly aligned window. I felt foolish but liberated, standing there amid the rubble.

  “You know the movie’s not true, right?” I said to Redwood.

  “People will want it to be true,” he said.

  “I don’t know if anyone will really care. People wanted Archangel to be true because they knew it wasn’t. But this is already like a game of telephone. There’s Marian’s real life, and then there’s her book, and then there’s your mom’s book, and then there’s this movie. And so on, and so on.”

  “I just want less chaos,” he said. He tapped his temple. “In here. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I get that.”

  * * *

  —

  “I’m not sure love is something you find,” I’d told the Vanity Fair reporter after she asked me if I was searching for love. “I think love is something you believe.”

  “Are you saying love is an illusion?”

  “I had a shrink once,” I said, “who told me to imagine a glowing tiger that ate all my doubts. The crazy thing is that it works if you believe it will. But does that mean the tiger is real? Or does it mean my doubts aren’t?”

  Then I told her how once I’d been in a cave and hadn’t been able to tell glowworms from stars, and as far as a hatchling fly is concerned, the thing that devours it is a star.

  Far out, she said, and I could tell she was going to make me sound like a huge flake.

  I said that if you didn’t believe you loved someone, then you didn’t love them.

  “Should we just sleep together and see what it’s like?” Redwood said in the hotel bar, still rankled by Adelaide and her letters. His irritation with me was emboldening him; he wanted a sense of order, and he thought sleeping with me might get him that.

  “What a delicate dance of seduction,” I said.

  “I’m being direct,” he said. “I value directness. I like you. I’m attracted to you. I know you well enough now to feel like I wouldn’t be going to bed with a stranger. Is it wrong to admit I’m also nervous?”

  “You mean ambivalent.”

  “Are you not ambivalent about me?” he asked. “We both have reasons to be cautious. Neither of us claims to be a romantic. What if we entered into this deliberately, with radical honesty, following an experimental procedure?”

  “You’re right. That’s not romantic.”

  “But it could yield romantic results. The big-leap thing hasn’t worked for me. I want to try something else.”

  The sunset had turned Denali’s summit the pink of strawberry ice cream. Some people at the bar were pretending to take a selfie but really taking a picture of us. I imagined inviting Redwood downstairs with me, going to bed in the fading light, our armor clanking together.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But not tonight.” I pointed out the window. “I have Saturday free. Do you want to go see that mountain?”

  * * *

  —

  “Makes you feel pretty small, doesn’t it?” said the pilot through our headsets, talking in his clipped pilot voice over the engines.

  The plane was red, with two propellers and two skis. Redwood and I were sitting behind the pilot. Beside him, a second yoke moved with his steering as though maneuvered by a phantom copilot. We’d passed over a braided river and flats of pine forest and clumps of autumnal cottonwoods turned such a bright, sweet tangerine it hurt my teeth to look at them. We’d entered a world of snow and rock. My eyes couldn’t make sense of anything because everything was too big and also too simple, only ice, only snow, only rock, and we were dwarfed by the cliffs and ridges, the glacier’s cracks and wrinkles, the sheer granite faces. Denali’s summit was in cloud. There was no life in any of it.

  “Do you know who Marian Graves was?” Redwood said into his headset.

  “Can’t say I do,” said the pilot.

  “She was a pilot in Alaska,” I said. “Before the war.”

  “Best job there is,” he said.

  “My dad used to fly,” I said. “As a hobby. He had a Cessna.”

  “Oh, yeah?” the pilot said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He doesn’t fly anymore?”

  “No.” I said, “I took a flying lesson once. I didn’t like it.”

  “What didn’t you like?”

  “The feeling, I guess?”

  “Best feeling there is.”

  “That’s what the other pilot said.”

  He laughed.

  I said, “I felt like I would fuck it up.”

  “Nah,” the pilot said. “You’ve got to trust the plane. The plane wants to fly.”

  He landed on a glacier in a bowl of ice and peaks, a frozen amphitheater he said was bigger than Anchorage. He shut off the engines, and we got out into the silence. The landscape was huge and beautiful in the way the concept of death is huge and beautiful—its beauty doesn’t really apply to you. Stepping in the snow, I had a suspended, tentative feeling, like I might plunge through. This, I wanted to tell the pilot, this is how it felt. But he would just tell me to trust the glacier.

  Redwood had walked away, but he came back, offered his hand. I took it. The landscape was the opposite of Adelaide Scott’s sculpture. Here you could only see the whole thing. You couldn’t pull it down to a scale that made sense. The silence felt as huge as the sky, and we were so tiny it couldn’t possibly matter what we did. So we finally kissed there in the snow, and I closed my eyes and hid from what surrounded us.

  D-Day

  England

  June 1944

  Six months after the torpedo

  May 15, 1944

  Hi Kid

  I bet you’re surprised to hear from me, the way we left things. I promise I’m not writing to mope or scold, even if returning your letters seems like an act of aggression. I just thought you’d want them. I’m in ████████ towing targets for gunnery trainees, if you hadn’t already heard. Cochran pretended like this job was some big top-secret special deal, but it’s about as much fun as being a clay pigeon and half as glamorous. The flight line is shit city. Red-lined █████ as far as the eye can see and no spare parts or time to fix them. █████████████████████████████████████████████

  I don’t know what the gunnery boys think about us being girls (seems like they’re mostly confused about whether to aim at the target or the plane), but the pilots are pretty frosty. Here they are, bunch of hotshots fresh out of flight school, thinking they’re on their way to combat and instead they got sent to tin can alley. Bad enough before we showed up and started doing the same job. Boo hoo is how I see it.
>
  The girls say it’s better than it was at the beginning, especially since the boys have realized that with us flying they can spend more time playing cards and less time getting shot at. We’re always volunteering anyway because we’ve got something to prove. I’ve tried to make friends with the mechanics because, as I see it, having them on my side is my best chance for not packing it in. A girl named Mabel crashed before I got here. She would have made it, but her canopy wouldn’t open and she burned up alive. The sticky latch had been marked on the form, but no one did anything about it.

  There was another crash that killed a girl—the form said throttle problem, but ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ Jackie herself came down to investigate but kept her trap shut about whatever she found. She worked pretty hard to get us this gig, and if anyone important gets the idea we’re causing trouble, they’d be happy to get rid of us.

  Some of the fellas have warmed up a little too much. I’ve got an admirer. A persistent one. I keep telling him I’m married, that my husband’s a POW, and he says, you know it’s wartime, don’t you? Like because there’s a war I’m obliged to lust after someone with a face like a rotten mushroom.

  Maybe you mind that kind of attention less than I do. I guess you did miss men, after all. Funny story—a crew of our girls moving bombers landed because of weather at some hick town and got thrown into the local lockup because women aren’t allowed out in slacks after dark there. The sheriff wouldn’t believe they were pilots. Guess it’s not a funny story. You push on men and eventually you get to the bedrock of it all, which is that they think they’re better than us. And they’re the ones who made this war. I’ve been thinking about that. We get angry and nothing happens. Men get angry, and the whole world burns up. Then when we want to do our part, they’re always trying to keep us out of danger. Because heaven forbid we should be allowed to decide for ourselves. Their worst fear is that one day we’ll end up owning our lives same as they do.

  I’m ranting—sorry—partly because I’m trying to work myself up to say you hurt me awfully even though I know you were in a terrible state. I wanted to be the one you turned to, and when you went to him instead, scraps weren’t going to be enough. Seems unfair I’d be the one to feel bad about leaving, but I do. Do you feel bad? It would mean a lot to me to know that you do. But, either way, I wanted to say this: In case anything happens to either of us, you should know that from my end anyway, we’re okay. I don’t know if I can say all’s forgiven, but most is. I couldn’t have stayed after what happened, but I still miss you and send my love.

  Yours always,

  Ruth

  * * *

  —

  Marian hadn’t seen Ruth again after that night in the Polygon, after she’d chosen Caleb, hadn’t heard from her until the letter.

  Thousands of ships clung to the south coast like a bloom of gray algae, choking the harbors. For weeks, Marian had watched the buildup. All of it seemed to push and strain against the Channel, threatening to overflow.

  Caleb’s camp had been sealed in preparation for the invasion.

  At Hamble, she was given a Vultee Vengeance to take to Hawarden. From there she was to deliver a Wellington bomber to Melton Mowbray, but a gale came up before she could leave.

  She found a room above a pub. In the morning, the rain still lashing down, she called Hamble and was told to stay put. The second evening, after a desultory day spent at the movies, she and another stranded ATA pilot, an Englishman too old for the RAF, had a drink. “I heard,” he said, “that the invasion fleet set out this morning but turned back because of this.” He cast an incriminating glance at the windows, the splattering rain. “I don’t envy the poor sod responsible for forecasting.”

  Marian nodded. She could summon little interest in the invasion, though she knew it must be done if the war was ever going to end. She could not fear for Caleb. Jamie’s death had muffled everything. Only in bed with Caleb had she felt any stirrings of life, and occasionally in the air, too, when she gazed on inanimate splendor: clouds furred on their bottoms by rain, a fat slug of pink light that thickened and yellowed on the horizon and became the moon, distant clouds full of lightning, things that would happen regardless of the war, would happen even if humans didn’t exist. Of all the suffering in the past, the best she could say was that it was already over. At some point, the invasion would be, too.

  “I flew in the Great War,” her companion said. “I never would have imagined I’d live to see a greater one.”

  The description—great, greater—irritated Marian, though she knew he was only trying to say something about magnitude.

  “I must seem terribly old to you,” he said. Both forlorn and flirtatious. She glanced at his wedding ring.

  “No,” she said. Age had ceased to matter. The young lived nearer death than the old.

  He turned his pint glass around and around on its cardboard coaster, and she thought he was working up his nerve to ask her up to his room. It was the war; they might as well. Maybe the sensation of life could be drawn from his body. “Do you want to come upstairs with me?” she said.

  He looked up sharply. “I suppose I ought to? Something to mark the occasion?”

  Already she felt weary, regretful of her invitation, but going to an empty room would be worse.

  * * *

  —

  The following afternoon, the cloud ceiling lifted. After she finally delivered the Wellington, she caught a taxi Fairchild back to Hamble. Heading south, at every airfield they passed over, planes were lined up, rows and rows of them, their wings freshly painted with black-and-white stripes.

  At the coast, lines of ships stretched into the Channel, their wakes drawing arrows toward France. Tanks and trucks and jeeps filled the roads, went over gangways and were swallowed by ships.

  In the night, for hours, came the droning of engines. In the morning, everything was gone.

  Constellations

  Nineteen

  Adelaide Scott lived in Malibu, not in an aggressively beach house-y way but in a shabby-fancy country-living way, north up the Pacific Coast Highway, past the fishing pier and that restaurant Moonshadows where Mel Gibson had gotten drunk before he went off on a Nazi rant to the cop who pulled him over, past Nobu, past all the popular beaches, way uphill from the highway, above the hazy blue plain of ocean. The air smelled like sagebrush and dust and salt. Adelaide’s three mottled mutt dogs came running out of her house when she opened the door and barked at me before sniffing around the bushes. “How was the drive?” Adelaide asked.

  Commence ritual Los Angeles chitchat about routes and traffic.

  “I used to have my studio in Santa Monica,” she said. “But the commute became unbearable, so I moved it to Oxnard, which has the advantage of being much cheaper and perfectly convenient from here. My assistants will never forgive me, but I have an entire warehouse now.”

  Inside, the house was all dark green tile and red-gold wood and many-paned windows looking out onto hillsides covered in the paper-dry California brush that wants nothing more than to burst into flame. “I’ll make tea,” she said, leading the way, the dogs following. “Wait here. I can’t bear to have anyone watch me putter.” She waved me into a big living room under red-gold beams.

  Above the fireplace, a strange sort of spiraling horn was mounted diagonally, very sharp at one end and about seven feet long.

  * * *

  —

  Adelaide reclined in an Eames chair, her feet up on the footstool. She’d hung some reading glasses around her neck, and there was a document box on the floor beside her that I assumed had Marian’s letters in it. I sat on a leather couch facing the green tile fireplace, the spiraling horn. A dog jumped up
beside me and immediately fell asleep with its butt against my thigh, apparently unaware I was a major motion picture star, an icon of the silver screen.

  “What is that thing?” I said about the horn.

  “A narwhal tusk,” she said.

  “What’s a narwhal tusk?”

  “If you don’t know, it’s better just to show a picture.” She got up and pulled out a book of wildlife photography, flipped through to an image of what were apparently narwhals surfacing in a patch of open water surrounded by ice. “They’re a kind of whale,” she said. Their blunt heads were speckled brown and gray and smoothly featureless except for the insanely long single tusks that stuck up like jousting lances. They looked like unicorns crossbred with dirty thumbs.

  “My understanding,” Adelaide said about the tusk, “is that Addison Graves, Marian’s father, acquired the tusk somewhere on his travels. I have other things, too—exotic souvenirs I think were his. The old books over there as well. And that painting”—she pointed to an oil of hazy dockyards—“was by Marian’s uncle Wallace. I wound up with quite a few paintings by both Jamie and Wallace. Most of Jamie’s better ones are in museums. Carol Feiffer was very interested in the tchotchkes, though I don’t know any of the stories behind them.”

  She took a small sketchbook from the document box and handed it to me. “This might be of interest.”

  A piece of paper was folded inside the front cover. I opened it. Technically this belongs to the United States Navy…

  Adelaide said, “That note is from Jamie to my mother.” I kept reading.

  …really the reason I’ll come back is because I love you, and what I’ve left of myself can never be reclaimed.

  I refolded the paper and flipped through the book. The pages were yellowed and crumbly and full of sketches in charcoal and pencil and occasionally watercolor. Mountains and ocean. Airplanes and ships. Soldiers’ hands. Tents in a snowy valley. Then the drawings turned abstract: chaotic lines and blotches and scribbles. Maybe a dozen pages like that. The rest of the book was empty.