Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  “Well, let me know if you change your mind. I really do need a partner.”

  Suzy expects him to move on but finds herself faintly buoyant from the first beer and searching for a reason to keep him here.

  “What about you? What do you do?” she says.

  “Uh,” he says, distracted by a pair of men walking through the sand wearing polyester suits and shoes. “I’m a pawn in a multinational outfit that specializes in drug running.”

  He says it so straight she has no choice but to mirror the affect.

  “That sounds exhausting.”

  “It’s a cool summer job, I guess.”

  “‘America’s public enemy number one’—that’s the president’s line, right?” she says.

  “The real war,” he says.

  “Any chance of getting promoted?”

  “Only if the guy above me gets arrested. Or killed.”

  “Not the most reliable pathway in the space of a summer, then.”

  “Maybe they’ll let me stick around through the fall.”

  The dampness in her hair again, the heat and cool—it turns the strap of her bathing suit into a steel blade against the skin and bones and tubes in her neck.

  “So, Su-zy—do people ever call you Z?” he says.

  “Not once ever.”

  “I had a basketball coach who called me Z.”

  “We would’ve had that in common, then, if anyone had ever called me Z.”

  “I knew there was something.”

  “Zach? Zoro? Zurich?” she says.

  “Billy.”

  “Ah.”

  “Billy Zar.”

  Billy squats down to about her level. “Smoke?”

  “Nah.”

  He caves his hand around a match to shield the breeze and strikes the tip with his thumbnail.

  “That was pretty fancy,” she says. He shrugs and pulls a joint out of his trunks pocket. “You’re full of surprises.”

  He smiles with the paper between his lips. “’At’s pro’lly true.” He draws without making it a thing. Someone lifts a beach towel and shakes the sand into the air. The shadow passes across Billy’s face.

  “You know many other people here?” he says.

  “Some, I guess,” she lies.

  “Want to meet the rest?”

  “Maybe sometime. But seriously, I don’t mind just waiting for—”

  “See that couple over there?” He means the ones warming up—a heavy guy, not fat, just a lot of pounds, with long arms and a hairline pushed way back on his head; and then a petite brunette whose Tinker Bell cut is flush with the bottom of the net. “I’ve gotta tell you one about them from yesterday.”

  “All right.”

  “Stop me if you’ve heard it. Fifteen or twenty people were there firsthand, so ya know…maybe it’s gotten around. Maybe you were even there.”

  “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t.”

  “So that’s Marty. Marty lives in the spot he grew up in. Nice place, small, supercool. His parents died in a car crash last year. The worst.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Right? So he has this great place all to himself. Marty’s wife’s name is Kim. They got married a month ago. Might be because she’s pregnant, but it’s hard to say.”

  “I don’t see a baby.”

  “Hang on to that thought for a sec. So they got married all of a sudden. A month after he asked her. Did it in front of everyone at Howlers. Got up on the bar instead of down on his knee. Put a calamari ring on her finger, and whatever band it was started playing ‘The End.’ Funny dudes. So, righteous: they’re married, newlyweds. Last night Marty has some people over for a little pre-Fourth thing. He lives on a corner. People ride by, stop in. That’s how it’s always gone. Things get going a little bit. Opens the windows, brings the record player out into the yard, fills up the kiddie pool with a couple inches of water. You know the scene.”

  “I don’t totally, but you’re painting a nice picture.”

  “So Marty’s got this new neighbor. Just moved in. A few years older than you—I’m guessing you’re, what, twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two, so more than a few years, twenty-six or twenty-seven, works a real job, makes some scratch, rents this place. She comes over to the fence, asks Marty to turn the music down, she’s got some work, whatever. On Fourth of July Eve? Doubtful. But they kinda keep going. He’s full on pressing it. Tells her to hold tight and comes back from the house in a couple ticks with a fucking mai tai. Little umbrella and everything. Skip the needle forward an hour and she’s grooving, dancing holes into her heels on the patio. People are lighting up. Someone finds some of Marty’s dad’s old rum locked in a cabinet, which makes Marty sad for a sec. But not too sad, ya know? He starts making drinks with it, communing, dancing, twirling the neighbor chick around. Before you know it, they disappear. Nowhere in sight, but doesn’t take many guesses, right? Someone sneaks next door and peeks in the window. Just full on at it in her place. But guess who’s coming home?”

  Suzy nods over to the warm-up session.

  “Again, hold that connection. But right, Kim’s coming home. Kim’s great. Likes to party. Gets down. But she’s kinda tough, too, ya know? From Bakersfield, or somewhere up 5. Just gives people the wrong vibes sometimes. So most of the gang at this thing, they’re in it for Marty. Kim comes walking up to the house, just off work, not a drink in her, looking a little haggard. And all these guys start blocking, running interference. Grabbing her hand for a dance. Bringing her shots they know she can’t take. Keeping the party outside. Word bounces around back to the neighbor’s bedroom, ya know? ‘Marty, get your shit together, Kim’s home.’ ’kay? And he climbs out the window, hops the fence in the back, and comes bounding out onto the patio as though he’s just been taking a dump. Kim’s pissed about the party. Someone has the wise idea to move on to the next place, hit a bar or whatever. I meet up with that crew. But the last thing people see is Kim bent over in close, sniffing his shirt. Like she just smelled it on him, man.”

  “But he got away with it.”

  “No, this is what I’m trying to say: that little baby over there isn’t Kim—it’s the neighbor.”

  Suzy’s lips crack and she takes her glasses off, all eye whites and pinpoint pupils dialing back into green.

  “Teammates in the tourney just like that,” Billy says. “But listen, I shouldn’t be spreading that. I know they’re not exactly hiding it, but just, you know, keep it tight.”

  “Guess we’re even with discretion.”

  “Exactly, partners who can keep secrets,” he says. “I’m gonna go say hey. Want me to introduce you?”

  “Ha,” she says it again. “I’m good. I’m so good. I’m just gonna hang here, I think.”

  “Cool, well, let me know if you change your mind about playing.”

  He seems to mean it, but his eyes have drifted back to those two suited men on the beach.

  “You betcha,” Suzy says.

  “Oh, and listen,” Billy says as he’s walking away. “Find me sometime later today. There’s something I want to give you.”

  “Something you want to give me?”

  “Super important. A little later. You’ll see me again.” And then that’s that. Billy Zar is gone and Suzy is alone. The five minutes of conversation only serve to highlight the fact that Mike and Grace have stranded her here. She rolled in late last night after a full day of flying, double up-and-backs to Seattle, went straight to bed, woke up to the note: “Nineteenth at noon.” Would they really no-show? She draws herself a second beer and then halves it. C’mon, Gracie. It was Grace all over again.

  Grace is three years older, three years earlier, the difference of a generation. In Schuyler Glen they shared a room. Straight through till Grace graduated and moved out. The changing faces on the walls were Grace’s selections—John and Paul, then Brian Jones, then, by ’65, her senior year, Dylan and Van Ronk. Grace would shut the door after school and
wear deep grooves into her vinyl, records on repeat. She had transitioned, in a short space, from dinners scored by Bandstand to late-night sessions restitching dresses at the Singer. She hitched her wagon to the music, and it was a simple thing to do.

  First from Schuyler to Ithaca, where the satellite folk scene welcomed all stray kindling. Weekends in the beginning, then weeknights in summer—Midwestern guitarists and professors her parents’ age and freshman lit students who talked just the right proportions about Russians she hadn’t read and records she knew intimately. Really, Grace probably had no business going to school in the first place. But a couple of generous letters from her prof friends and a handful of passing grades at the JC in Ithaca landed her a spot at the state university in Westchester. It was more useful for its Metro-North stop than it was for any consecrated erudition—four hours closer to the Village than Schuyler Glen. Grace’s first year at the university was her last.

  Though it was in evidence throughout high school and those fleeting years of college, Grace’s reputation for chronic tardiness was fixed in junior high when their mother, Edith, introduced Grace to makeup. Even today, alone on the beach, Suzy can readily transport herself to Schuyler and inhabit her ten-year-old body—slouching impatiently, plain-face freckled and ponytailed, while their father, Wayne, watched the long hand on the kitchen clock slip past the hour of their intended departure; Grace, pleading from the top of the stairs for just one more minute to work out her raccoon eyes and candy-coated mouth.

  For years Suzy felt like Grace was playing a game no one else—in the family, at school, in town—knew they were consigned to. Playing toward a scoreboard Suzy couldn’t see. And yet Grace had the ability, too, to erase the pencil lines of her efforts, to beat back the impatience of her parents, teachers, and friends, with a smart joke and a low laugh. When Grace finally shows at the beach today—if Grace finally shows—Suzy’s sure it’ll play out the same as ever: Grace will float in on a pink Glinda bubble, pass out hugs, kisses, and chewing gum, and break up whatever knots of resentment have taken to materializing on account of the lateness, the too-chillness, the casual cool. Everything important so unimportant to Grace.

  It was different for Suzy. In Schuyler, Suzy learned about speed.

  Blame it on Wayne. Wayne blew glass at the Schuyler Glen Glassworks for ten hours a day and fixed up European sports cars at a specialist body shop in his downtime. Alfa Romeos. Austin-Healeys. Triumphs and Bugattis. When Wayne’s brother, an Albany prosecutor, died of a heart attack at forty-five, Wayne inherited his Fiat 8V, a silver roadster with curves like Wayne’s glass and a grill like gritted teeth. He tweaked it toward improvement until he got an offer in the post office parking lot one day to swap it for two cars Wayne regarded as being of greater value. A new hobby was born. Wayne started volunteering at the local shop, began proliferating an arsenal from Italian and German catalogs. Whether with engines or glass, Wayne scratched two itches with one paw—what he was doing was both essential and artistic.

  Wayne brought new glassworks home each week. The vase for Edith’s summer tulips. The living room table for a fanned-out season of Saturday Evening Posts. Highballs for the G and Ts Wayne and Edith would drink in August as the lightning bugs flipped their switches. Wayne was a sculptor. That most of what he made had utilitarian value, his girls knew, diminished his art zero. But the cars were different—the cars were not rested upon or sipped from. The cars were made to go.

  Both girls were trained in the garage. They play-baked with tire irons and ratchets. They raced across the cool concrete on dollies. As they got older, Grace peeled off but Suzy stuck it out as first mate. She ruled over the tool bins. On bored weekends she’d empty the drawers into a pile on the workbench and restock them from the bottom up. As she grew more comfortable in the garage she made greater claims to her place there. At eight, she pinned a handmade sign to the wall: I AM SUZY! At ten, she helped build her first go-kart. By twelve, thanks to a tractor license, she was racing on the upstate junior circuit. It was no surprise, then, that by noon on her sixteenth birthday she was halfway through her first lap at the Watkins Glen racetrack, running full-tilt.

  Despite his interest in sports cars, Wayne had never raced. He liked tuning cars like a piano, not thrashing them like a drum set. Suzy felt differently. At Watkins Glen, Suzy chased personal records. She accelerated with ease through the stages of karting, competing up, and counting down the summers till she could race open wheel. Wayne coached her in driving and he coached her in cars. He loved her love, loved nothing more.

  That first summer at the Glen—summer of ’66—there was a bird’s nest of paranoia tangling up Suzy’s head at the track. She’d never thought twice about her own shortcomings, but as the speeds increased and the cars grew to be powerful extensions of one’s reflexes, she grew concerned about the twitchiness of other drivers. She didn’t like to race against boys her age. She was frantic about their mistakes. But at seven in the morning or eight at night, when the track was all but empty, she carved seconds off her lap times, alone in the sounds of acceleration and upshifting. Come November they’d clean the engine and suspend the go-kart from the rafters in the garage, using sailing ropes and a simple system of pulleys, and Suzy would slow down and take care of school. As had been the case for years, she glided by on her big brain—prolific reading, precise writing, fastidious test taking. She approached her language arts and history courses as though they were mechanical. Concepts were things to be understood not by memorization, but by interrogating the way they worked. School was something to master with efficiency. There were always ways to shave off tenths.

  The summer before senior year, summer of ’67, she broke her personal record nine times. Now that they were a little older, in possession of at least some self-control, she ran with the boys. Every once in a while she’d get out front from pole and complete entire races clear of the pack—at least until she started lapping the stragglers. She wasn’t where you needed to be to race the big ones in Virginia and North Carolina, but she won a bunch upstate, and in Pennsylvania and western Mass, which for Suzy constituted the whole world anyway. Not much in her life had suggested borders extending beyond the Northeast—no exotic family travel, no transfer students into school from Oregon or Louisiana, no built-in family mythmaking about lives lived in a different place. Just Wayne and Edith and two sets of grandparents, all of whom seemed to regard the claw marks of the Finger Lakes and the tightly sealed slate lid of winter to be preordained conditions of life as all and any knew it.

  For Suzy, though, there was one keyhole through which she could glimpse the wider universe: every October the big boys came to town to race.

  Wayne went by himself the first year Formula One brought the United States Grand Prix to Watkins Glen. It was the furthest extension of Wayne’s interest in cars, the sleekness of a body and the adeptness of an engine made manifest in speed, in competition. He caught the bug and brought Suzy along thereafter. He’d write Suzy a note for the Friday—not that she ever really needed it, her grades bought her space—and they’d hit practice, followed by Saturday’s qualifying and Sunday’s grand prix. The first time she went, Suzy was thirteen and midmorph, Picasso-proportioned facial features and a mouth full of wires. She sat quietly in the stands, silent in her shell, while Wayne narrated the biographies of each of the drivers—these were the best of Italy and Germany and England, of Japan and South Africa. Wayne summarized the season to that point, the lead changes, the chases for not just first- but fifth-place points, ninth-place points. The crashes, the team management tussles, the impossible expectations of Scuderia Ferrari. Wayne said the words of the racetracks, words satisfying in and of themselves—Monza, Zandvoort, Spa—but then transformed them into places Suzy felt she’d been, described the elevation changes, the famous turns, the colors the tunneling trees made when they blurred together in a straightaway. The drivers passed into the pits, one by one, year after year, and by the time she was racing herself, by the time she
was winning on that very track, they were her most fundamental bearings on the world beyond her world. Not just to the simpler locales of Italy and Germany and England, but to that big, borderless existence in the sky, that world of highest-class racing, in which all those racers had more in common with one another than anyone from their own countries anyway. Matching trailers, matching wives, matching turtlenecks and hair parts and crystal-faced watches. The extranational luxury of Formula One.

  Her senior year of high school, Suzy raced and Suzy read. She read history and literature and biology. She read novels about New England and Old England, books she’d seen on the shelves in the living room all her life, books she suspected had pages glued together, untouched as they were, perfect and rigid in their set. She cross-pollinated geraniums and she unlocked derivatives. She wrote a newspaper column and swam long-distance—hours on end with the lane line. She applied physics and calculus to the weekend runs at the track, learned the names for forces she’d intuited and internalized for years. She was friends with more boys than girls, boys from the neighborhood, boys from elementary school, boys from the swim team. She dated one of them for a while, a long, dumb sprinter, hair like Mick’s and eyes like a Jersey cow’s, kissed him ’cause she should, screwed him for the first time at Halloween when he got her drunk in a milkmaid costume. She made money working at the track, working the pits, staining her hands, hanging with the men. But she still went to dances and wore minis, showed her limbs in shorts and tank tops in the heat. It was a residual effect of her sister. Gracie had been girl concentrate, girl enough to leave a mark, her perfume still clinging to the walls of their room, her foundation still dusting the surfaces of their shared shelves and desk.

  That fall of her senior year, Suzy’s English teacher encouraged her to apply to her alma mater. Suzy had planned to race after graduation, to take classes at a JC, maybe transfer somewhere farther away like Grace had. But never somewhere private like Vassar. Mrs. Meyers considered this to be a preposterous plan. What did her parents think? Suzy and Grace had grown up in the comfortable chasm of having not nearly enough money but being ignorant of the fact. Their parents didn’t buy anything; Wayne only swapped cars. He was a lifer at the glassworks and Edith taught sixth-grade English. They read the paper and watched the news and traveled not at all. Suzy said they were fine with the prospect of junior college, that money from the track, from semipro races, would cover the costs, take the pressure off them financially. “Have you even taken the tests?” Mrs. Meyers said. Suzy hadn’t but still could, certainly planned to before Christmas. “You have all the things they want,” Mrs. Meyers said, “and in such abundance that they’ll likely pay for most of your tuition.” This was news to Suzy. “And I’ll help you with your applications,” Mrs. Meyers said—to Vassar, to Radcliffe, to Bryn Mawr. “They’re all girls,” Suzy said. And Mrs. Meyers mistook her meaning: “There are plenty of functions with the boys.” Vassar did things with Yale, for example. But Suzy had meant, So many fucking girls, so many girls and so little racing. Suzy took the tests, wrote her statements, and in the end she had her pick. Vassar was just four hours from the track, four hours from home. And they would pay for everything.