Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  But the moment Suzy said it, those eyes did this pitying narrowing. His forehead creased. It was a face practiced in patronizing women.

  “All right, good luck,” she said, and started back toward the walkway beside Mory’s.

  “Hold up,” he said. “Do you know magic or something?”

  It took Suzy sixty seconds to start the car and she hit it on the first turn of the key.

  “What the hell was that?” he said.

  “Foreplay,” she said. He was in the passenger seat now. “Five pumps on the accelerator. Wait fifteen seconds. Five more pumps. Wait. Five. Wait. Gold. Gotta get the juices flowing.”

  “Foreplay,” he said.

  “I’m gonna drive myself home,” Suzy said. And before he responded, she pulled off the curb and down York toward Grove.

  “Your dad fix cars or something?”

  In the steering wheel she could feel the gale whipping off the cemetery.

  “He can fix cars, I can fix cars,” she said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Graduation gift.”

  “You’re not a grad student, are you?”

  “Nah, ’72, senior.”

  “Isn’t that bad luck to get your gift before May?”

  “It was, uh, high school graduation.”

  “Ah.”

  “My parents can be generous.”

  “And this is a…’68? Which would’ve made it a brand-new one?”

  “Very generous, kind to their kids.”

  He had forty-fived in his seat and shaded his body toward her. She could feel his eyes.

  “What?” Suzy said.

  “What what?” he said.

  “You’re staring at me.”

  “Just looking at your face. I recognize you from something.”

  “I go to the same school as you.” She tried it out.

  “You’re a singer.”

  “Not a singer.”

  “Not choral—I mean I saw you sing somewhere some night.”

  “I don’t think so, I’m pretty new here.”

  “I remember—you were at a table with friends near mine. You were hammered and you were singing some fancy melody to an Allman Brothers song.”

  Suzy was silent. This was possible. There was one night. She had come over to pick up some books and ended up getting drunk with Camille, too drunk to drive home. They’d made a night of it—pizza, music, harmonizing in public, evidently.

  “Ha, I knew it!” he said, slapping her thigh. He had overlarge hands, and now that she locked that idea into place, it was clear that the handsomeness came from the scale: a big face, big hair. He didn’t seem any taller than tall men, but it was a head for television. All the features clear and defined, glowing before a blue screen.

  “My sister just saw them in Philadelphia,” she said. “Her honeymoon to herself, pretty much.”

  “You see them here last April?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “At the Palace. So good. You should try out your pipes onstage there.”

  “Bars only, thanks.”

  “Well, at least let’s maybe go to a show there, then. I work all the events.”

  “Oh yeah? At the Palace?”

  “Pick a show. Or come over to my place and we can jam.”

  “Ha.” She said the word like she does. “Are you in a band?”

  “Nobody can really cut it here. When I move to the city this summer, things’ll be different.”

  “What do you play?”

  “Rhythm. Wanna come?”

  “That sorta thing works better on my sister.”

  “Never too late to develop a new taste. Sure you don’t want to come along?”

  “Yeah…I dunno,” she said, pulling up to her apartment building. “Welp, here’s my place.”

  “Think I can get your number?”

  “What for?”

  He smiled, big as his face. “Least you can do since I drove you home,” he said.

  “To set the record straight for all time,” Suzy said, “I drove you home; you owe me your number.” And so Dave wrote it on the library card on the inside cover of the Yeats.

  As more students returned to school, Suzy enrolled in her final courses. The thesis was what mattered most, the reason she was here. And rather than write it with one of the white-haired eminences caught up in the “Yale school” thing, she devised a project with Camille.

  Camille had this breaking wave of dyed-gray hair—like a surfer could shoot the tube off her forehead—and she was interested in weird sex in Western art and lit. All Suzy heard from people who knew was how good Camille was at weird sex in Western art and lit. Suzy saw her out at bars with men but wasn’t really that surprised when she propositioned Suzy in her office one afternoon. “Don’t take this any way but how I mean it,” she said. “I’d like to have you over for dinner at my apartment. If you’re interested, let’s set a date. If you’re not, I take no offense, and I hope you don’t make the mistake of letting this affect our relationship.”

  Suzy politely declined and Camille convinced her to write her thesis on Led Zeppelin. An interrogation of the poetics. A “Sailing to Byzantium” = “Ramble On” sort of thing. In many ways English made better use of the auto mechanic’s toolbox than physics or engineering did. Especially with all the cool tricks passing through the department right then. The ways to take apart a sentence like a carburetor and build it back out into a box with better airflow. Camille helped Suzy with her writing. Told her to read Sontag before she wrote each day. “You want to get to the point where you can parody her,” she said. “To parody her at half skill will only have the effect of making your own writing twice as good.” Suzy had a surgeon’s confidence in her ability to write a term paper. Its order, its argument, its repeatability. How to say one novel thing, and say it clearly and convincingly—smothering and defensible. It had worked for her without exception.

  But the thesis was just one credit. In order to legitimize the experiment, Suzy had been asked to carry a full load. And in order to complete her degree, she’d have to enroll in the core roadblocks she’d put off for three and a half years. Suzy had done well at Vassar, exceptionally well. She’d competed with herself, chased personal records. She’d formulated this idea of her collective efforts there as this work of sculpture—built of stellar marks, superlative praise, girlfriends, professors, and useful lifelong advocates. A pristine record of high achievement that might suggest to whoever looked upon it that the person responsible could’ve cut it with the very best anywhere, even at a place with boys. In preserving that sleek academic record, though, she’d deferred some science. And during the week before spring break, she failed three exams in three days. Physics was the shock. Racing was physics, after all. She could visualize the lines, she could ride the language of acceleration and force. Physics wasn’t supposed to be an issue. The exam took the form of just one problem. Rudimentary components of a Saturn V rocket launch. She miscalculated the first derivative and it brought down the whole project. It was like pouring a crooked foundation for the pad at Cape Canaveral. It was a failed attempt for the moon.

  The results of the exams reached her the day she left for spring break. She was visiting Grace in Sela del Mar—Suzy’s first time west. The afternoon she arrived, Mike picked her up at the airport in his new blue Karmann Ghia and drove her along the water to the small house he and Grace rented on the back side of the hill at Nineteenth Street. Grace teased Suzy and wouldn’t let her in the door until she smiled. But Suzy wasn’t in the mood. She’d spent the duration of the flight reading and rereading and failing to register meaning in any article of the in-flight magazine. She found herself muttering dramatic fatalisms about “it” being over. She welled up and exploded in a single sob before gaining composure and cursing herself out. The stew brought her a free cocktail and then a couple others. Now Suzy was hungry and tired and just wanted to sleep.

  In an attempt to cheer her up, Grace forced Suzy to follow her through a neighb
or’s yard and down a path along the side of their house. A surfboard leaned against the wall, and wet sand was piled up near a coiled hose. Grace was wearing cowboy boots and hoop earrings, and when she came out from the shade of the yard’s palms, her ears cast round globes of gold like candle flames.

  The view west: sky, water, sand—three distinct pastels, stacked like an ice cream sandwich. On the way in from the airport, she’d caught glimpses of pretty-looking things, standing bright and alive as though it were already advanced spring. Everything had had a straightforward beauty—a dumb pretty. But Suzy had passed back into her problems at school and failed to be moved by the moment.

  She put on a good show, acting unimpressed and committed to her request just to go home and take a nap. Ignoring her, Grace narrated the markers—the peninsula to the left, the peninsula to the right, the island, the Strand, the pier, the volleyball courts. And then she held her arms wide above her head, as if to say it emphatically: All this!

  Suzy noticed the temperature only in its absence. No discernible register of hot or cold. In a moment without breeze she felt without weight and without time. Like a child on a swing at the height of its arc. This was an option, Suzy thought. This was proof that there was an alternative. That no matter the corners she might paint herself into at school, there could be a reasonable thing like this, the way it felt on your skin. But then a breeze washed up the hill on the back of a wave. The ocean presented itself as a frozen body of water, and the enormity of the beach seemed suddenly desolate. That sort of easy made her restless, like the anxiety of deserts or the silence of space. All the jangly stresses of the semester surged through her body at once. “I’m cold,” Suzy said, shivering. Grace dropped her arms and frowned. They watched the sun go behind a cloud and, before long, the lights went out.

  The rest of that week Suzy did a lot of apologizing. Sorries and sorries. Grace said she understood—that bad grades on tests could do that to you. Only, Suzy knew Grace didn’t understand. Grace was a stewardess. Suzy sometimes wondered if she’d studied for an exam even once in her life, stew school included. Grace didn’t comprehend the stakes. Not just that good grades might lead to a fulfilling job and life. But that there was something that needed to be proven. Suzy had been kept out—the wrong side of history by a year, born one spring too soon. She might not have even known to care if the opportunity had presented itself to her in high school, if she’d been a year younger. But it hadn’t and she wasn’t. She’d been fatefully passed over, the last class of women tied to the old way.

  “Give me a fucking break,” Grace said when Suzy tried to explain. “That’s the most self-important bullshit I’ve ever heard. Get a job. Get any job. Better: get a job stewing.”

  Suzy knew Grace was right. She’d been coasting along, playing to her strengths, working to prove something and steeping in the indignation of being lumped together with the girls. And yet, when confronted with a little big-boy math and science, the only thing she’d proven was that she couldn’t hang.

  “I don’t think I’m going to get a job stewing,” Suzy said anyway.

  “Well, we’d be happy to have you if you ever sink so low.”

  “Hey! You guys! Come here!” Suzy and Mike smirk at each other, caught. Though there are fewer lines at the party dividing lifelong friends and first-time guests, they’ve been standing together at the edge of the patio anyway. They move toward Grace and are introduced to a new wave of acquaintances. They drink more. Mostly beer, but every once in a while this one friendly, red-faced phantom—the host, Flipper—comes by and demands, “This is my palace, every last one of you girlies must take a pull.” Suzy is granted exemption when she invokes the loosely enforced twenty-four-hour booze ban for stews.

  Important conversations are tracking out, about movies and cars and sandwiches, but mostly about music. There’s only one record player, but the speakers fill the small house—about the size of Grace and Mike’s—so that each new song precipitates a new conversation. “Holloway Jail” opens wide.

  The recording features a corroded guitar. It throws its sound into the corners of the house, and Suzy gets rushed up into a good memory. She dances slowly with her head down and her eyes closed, and starts giggling to herself. Mike elbows her and she opens her eyes sleepily. “I’ve always wondered whether you were capable of some Graceness,” he says. Suzy flushes and bends way over, head to the floor, before popping up, hair fallen in front like drapes.

  A new boy Suzy finds herself talking to says no way, he saw them this spring, too, at the Troubadour—if she ever needs a lift, ever needs someone to go to shows with, he’d be happy, she seems like a cool chick, knows her music, where does she come from, anyway?

  And while she’s explaining, this sensation of dread bowls through the house and out onto the patio. The second keg is finished and the refrigerator has blown out. There’s disbelief. How could it have happened on this of all days, in the goodness of this place? To Suzy’s surprise, Mike crosses the room to discuss something with Flipper. Flipper seems to welcome any prospect of salvation and tilts his ear, a full-bodied gesture, toward Mike’s mouth.

  Suzy watches Flipper’s face change, a blank field of rapt attention that suddenly comprehends what Mike has said, what he’s offered. Flipper kisses Mike on the forehead and pulls a loose ten from his pocket—and before Mike knows it, there’s change springing from swimsuit pockets in all corners of the room.

  Grace is at Suzy’s side: “What the hell is going on?”

  “I think Mike volunteered to go buy more beer.”

  Grace’s mouth is a squiggle. “Really…”

  Mike shouts from across the patio: “I’m gonna take one of their strand cruisers—the one with the basket—and bring a few cases back.”

  “Can you really ride with that much?” Grace says.

  “They assured me I could.”

  “What market are you going to?”

  “Just down the block, and then over a few…”

  “Just remember the water’s always west,” Grace says.

  “Yes,” Mike says.

  As Mike pulls the strand cruiser from the side of the house, Grace and Flipper and the cluster of friends smoking grass in the yard wave at him, as though he’s departing on a steamer. Mike is wobbly at first push, but he levels out and floats toward the ocean.

  “So weird,” Grace says.

  “He’s trying!” Suzy says.

  “I’m just already pretty beat. Drank too much at brunch. Before he pulled that move, I was gonna see if you two wanted to get out of here.”

  “If you can’t wait till Mike gets back, I could go with you—”

  “Hey, I know you,” a voice says over the cackling in the yard.

  Billy is shirtless, with a backpack double-strapped on his shoulders. He has a gob of zinc covering his nose, and it looks like he’s combed his hair in the interim, maybe even showered.

  “Mrs. Riddlehoover’s class,” Suzy says.

  “Riiighht,” Billy says. Grace has a waxy, fixed grin as she watches Suzy slip into rhythm with this stranger.

  “Uh?” Grace says.

  “This is my sister, Grace—that I told you about.”

  “Right. Pleased to meet you,” he says. “Billy Zar.”

  Grace squints. “I’ve heard about you.”

  “All good things?” he says as Grace turns her narrowing eyes to Suzy. “I dig your street, by the way,” he says. “How high up are you?”

  “Hmm?” Grace says, turning back. “Uh, 400 block.”

  “Back side of the hill.”

  “You grew up here.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says, and scans the crowd, “like a lot of these.”

  “And when did you two meet?”

  “Suzy was gonna be my Drunk ’n’ Draw partner.”

  “Is that right?” Grace says. “She’s not much of a setter.”

  “That’s what I hear,” he says.

  Billy lifts a hand and offers Grace what’s le
ft of a lit joint Suzy hasn’t noticed till now. Grace flips her lower lip out as a pass.

  Suzy hasn’t smoked since school and didn’t come close to considering it during training. But she’s just taken her final drug test, received the all clear. And Billy does this thing, this Please, no pressure shrug-and-wink that makes certain she knows it’s totally cool if she isn’t cool with it—which only convinces Suzy it’s the right thing to do. And so she plucks the paper from his fingers, grazing his knuckle fuzz, and pulls it to her lips. Not too much, no coughing, she thinks—and so she inhales as slowly as her lungs allow, those swim-team lungs stretched for the first time in months. She lets it swirl inside her before she slips the smoke from her nostrils, her eyes fixed on a hedge. Hardly any smoke, but she’s done it without embarrassment, and now it’s in his mouth, drawn deeply, his lips pressed smack flush to the pale lipstick she’s left behind. Now there’s hardly anything remaining, and Billy asks if she and Grace want to sit in the shade of a tangerine tree.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Grace says, uncrossing her arms. But Suzy collapses in a cheap mesh beach chair next to his, her legs crossed extra tightly as the cotton dress rides up in the strange angle of the seat.

  “She’s kinda dressed up,” Billy says.

  “Well, brunch.”

  Billy opens his eyes big, as if this were a call-back to some joke he already made.

  Billy hums something she can’t quite place. He saw the Eagles the night before at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, says he’s been oooing “Witchy Woman” all day. He’s fixed in his seat, but everyone seems to acknowledge him. They nod his way, swing by for quick hellos and brief updates about mutual friends. His value to the network seems to have been acquired by never not being around.

  “See that guy over there?”

  “Sure,” Suzy says.

  “He started a bumper sticker business.”