Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  “I just—where would I live?”

  “That’s not your concern yet.”

  “I’d miss Dave.”

  “And,” Grace said, “what else…”

  “And I feel like I’d be letting myself down. Or something. Doing a job that didn’t require this place.”

  “Thank you. I just wanted to hear you say it. But again, sweetie, this is not a lifetime. It’s a thing to do while you’re young and pretty, when you have time to see things, to buy yourself a little gap to figure it out.”

  Suzy didn’t respond, tuned into the guitar solo instead. Grace hadn’t called her pretty since they shared a roof. The discrepancy between the two (“She’s a nine and you’re a seven,” their mother had told Suzy her junior year of high school) had always irritated her, and the fact of her irritation only irritated her more. Grace wouldn’t acknowledge it outright, but she’d know the use of the p word was a clever appeal.

  “Just do this for me,” Grace said, picking up again. “As a contingency. The best possible contingency. Something you and I could have in common. A thing for us to share…”

  Still nothing—the same solo.

  “It’s the most important decision I’ve made in my life,” Grace said. “Do it for a year. It’s a year in a lifetime.”

  “I’m just gonna race cars,” Suzy said finally.

  “And you’ll be bitchin’ at it,” Grace said, content to finally drop it.

  Grace left town early the next morning and didn’t mention it again. But she smiled at Suzy on her way out the door—a smile that summed up the entirety of the previous night’s conversation: Whatever the fuck, just don’t relinquish momentum.

  Four weeks later the experiment was over. Suzy turned in her thesis and squeaked through her other courses, and then, overnight, the Old Campus quad was transformed into an amphitheater for a ceremony. Suzy would, of course, not be graduating with Yale’s Class of ’72, but after drinking all morning with Dave and his family—and after bumping into Camille, who’d been encouraging a stunt like this for weeks—Suzy decided to borrow a gown and sit with Dave in the last row. “Every act is political,” Camille had said, “and every occasion like this one is an opportunity to act.”

  The politics of her generation were complicated for Suzy. She wanted things—race wins, entrance into the locked rooms of Yale—not for the benefit of womankind but for the benefit of herself. For Suzy. She suspected some of the women her age would ride the language of their cultural moment all their lives, fighting for liberation without ever reaping the sorts of benefits that were much more interesting to Suzy. She’d always been less into living as a liberated woman than just skipping the line and living as a man. There’s a difference. When she was the only girl racing, it was a novelty, news—until it wasn’t. She didn’t change, and yet they all gradually grew to unsee the ponytail. She transitioned from being a girl who’d been granted exception, to a driver with the birthright of boys.

  As she filed in to her seat next to Dave, an imposter among this new set of old boys, Suzy’s indignation heated all over again: Mom and Dad had jumped the gun, and on account, she’d been one year too early for this place, one year too early for the rest of her life.

  Parents ringed the seated graduates on Old Campus. With her hair pinned beneath her cap and her dress concealed by the androgynous gown, hardly anyone noticed that Suzy didn’t belong. Even those in their row dismissed her, she could tell, as merely a girlfriend who wanted in on the action. Dave had brought a flask with him and he passed it around their section. They’d already had several Bloody Marys and mimosas and Cups at Mory’s with Dave’s parents and brothers. Dave’s father had showed them where his name was engraved on the wall, from when he was a student. Suzy loved it—it aggravated her how much she’d grown to love this place—but she could tell Dave had seen the engraving a hundred times too many.

  Dave joked loudly as the president spoke, and he stopped paying attention altogether while they awarded the honorary doctorates. Suzy reached for Dave’s hand and he quieted down. He unlocked his fingers from hers and let his hand fall off her lap. His fingers began to crawl up her leg, beneath her gown. He did it skillfully, without ruffling the gown. It felt nice to have a hand on her thigh. His hand slid up her leg, freshly shaved, to the hem of her dress, a cream-colored scoop-neck with green vines and petals of roses. His hand was concealed by the gown, and it slipped over the edge of her thigh between her legs. “Dave,” she said. He moved his hand farther up her dress. She pinched her legs shut, trapping his hand. “Dave,” she said as tersely as she could without drawing eyes. His hand was held in place by friction, but she felt the tip of his longest finger extend between her thighs and trace the edges of the elastic on both sides and the cotton in between. “I’m gonna fucking slap you,” she whispered. He traced his finger like he was writing something. “All evidence I’m experiencing suggests that you won’t,” he breathed back. The words from the stage registered as muffled thunder. She was going to hit him unless she tied her hands back with her mind. “Five, four…” She started counting down like a kindergarten teacher. And he snickered and let the clock meet the buzzer. He’d called her bluff. She started again, “Seriously this time: five, four…” His finger traced the cotton and she kept counting. The speech ended and there was applause and Suzy shifted. And seizing the opportunity, Dave’s finger lunged for the elastic, tugged at it, and she felt a cool, uncut fingernail crawl inside her. Her elbow flew from her lap in the upward arc of a backstroke. She caught him in the cheek with such force that it knocked him silently out of his seat and into the aisle. The applause had dissipated, but the sight lines were such that no one but the boys in immediate proximity noticed. All those boys who’d been handed everything she hadn’t. There was a decision to be made—the very kind of decision that had physically locked her in place all winter and spring. But by the time she’d processed the choice she’d made, her feet had already carried her up one of the grass aisles toward College Street, and stew school, and Sela del Mar—the picture, Grace would assure Suzy once she arrived in California, of momentum unrelinquished, of her advice seen through.

  The paralysis returned around the time she signed up for stew school. Suzy had missed the deadline, but Grace made a call, found a slot due to a dropout. They were happy to accommodate Suzy, to add her degree to their promo materials—a win-win. She packed up in New Haven, walked with the women in Poughkeepsie, stopped by home, and flew to Chicago in the space of a few days. Grand Pacific hadn’t developed its own training school in Los Angeles yet, and so shared facilities in Chicago with some other smaller airlines. Three weeks of instruction, then preferential placement in L.A. She’d been getting locked up with greater frequency ever since—and she’s stuck on the couch in the living room now.

  It is hot in the house. The ceiling fan is still. Silence fills the room like water. Her mind drifts into the same soup her body seems to be submerged in—a warm bath that obscures the line between awake and asleep, between an anxiety over inaction and a resignation toward surrender. She would not be much of a fighter on the edge of death. And yet, right now, it’s the same pairing of sight and sensation that has snapped her out of the stickiness lately. This strange recurring image: Suzy facing forward, a color field of rich light and simple lines, like a window looking out on an infinite sky. A force greater than jet propulsion at her back, a force greater than fear driving her forward. This wide-open window and the need beyond any other need to double-hand the wheel and steer toward it. That’s what gets the feeling back, that’s what lifts her to her feet.

  She feels the air rushing back into her body, as though a vent in her skin has been cracked. She feels her body tingling still, each surface, like a foot that’s coming out of sleep. She breathes. She swims her arms. She touches her toes and does jumping jacks. She is awake now, present, filled with a cleaner oxygen than she’s been all day—and she feels it in her head, a lightness, a sense of morning.

 
She pulls the chain on the ceiling fan and picks up the telephone. The 545 she remembers. Just like Mike and Grace’s. But why didn’t she write down the last four digits? She repeated it to herself on the Strand; why didn’t she jot it on a piece of paper when she got inside the house? It’s 10 something—545-1043. She dials, and an old woman picks up.

  “I’m sorry, wrong number. Sorry, sorry.”

  She hangs up and starts second-guessing herself. Is it even a 10? Is it 545-2043?

  She’s lost the number to the ocean of all numbers. But she has one other idea. On an evening like this one, now that the fireworks are wrapping up and the kids are heading home, how hard could it be to hear a party from a few blocks off? Even a small one? She has two hours before check-in.

  She scoots to the bathroom, pulls off her dress, and steps out of her bikini for the first time since morning. She touches up her makeup in the mirror. But before she flips off the light and moves to put on clothes, she shuts the door. She considers her body in the mirror. A freckled stomach and shoulders and arms. Some burn lines, like she’s never encountered, framing her breasts high on her chest. Some elastic impressions strung hip to hip like a rope bridge, above which her stomach swells from the burrito. She pulls her neck high off her shoulders into the posture of the exemplary stew. She turns sideways and her eyes trace the line from her neck, down her back, around the S of her pigment-free ass and upper legs. She zooms farther into the mirror and begins to objectify her body, so much so that she starts to get turned on by her own nudity. Nobody has seen her like this since graduation. The shared bunks during training and the immediate dissolve to sharing a wall with her sister and her husband. Seven weeks without sex, after four months without a break. And yet even as she tries to focus on Dave, the concreteness of the physical is difficult to conjure. The memory is like something that happened to someone else, to two other people. Images in playback, bodies on a screen. Linda Lovelace in a white baby doll.

  She holds her hand out and blocks her face at the surface of the mirror. A body and no head. She imagines herself being seen this way. She bends at her waist and through a veil of hair watches her breasts commit to staying pointed forward. She stands tall again, spreads her legs slightly, and feels her sunburn on her thighs and chest and back. She shifts the weight from foot to foot until she’s evenly distributed and her knees are bent, like when she skates.…

  Holy shit, she left her board at Flipper’s. Goddammit. No chance she sees it again. No way she can afford a replacement. It’s just another end to going fast.

  She’s lost the line on whatever she was seeing in the mirror. She must still be a little high. She smells her cover-up and rolls it and her bathing suit into a dense ball of pretty fabric. She moves to Mike’s office, where she pulls on a pair of tight, faded bell-bottoms and a silky white blouse Grace bought her for graduation. She combs her hair in the office and gathers her things to leave. She checks the contents of her carry-on and zips it up, to save her the extra moment should she need it later. She’ll be in New York in the morning—where she’ll be even closer to all those things the magazine told her she couldn’t miss this summer. She finds her keys and some cash and steps outside. On her way back down toward the Strand, she hears Mike and Grace’s voices approaching from close by. But instead of stalling to bump into them, she slips into the dark of the alley and pushes north, aimlessly toward where Billy Zar might be.

  Suzy glides across the sand slicks of the Strand, ears trained as if on a hunt. She’ll feel so foolish if after thirty minutes she turns right back around and joins Mike and Grace for their dinner. Stragglers from the fireworks pass her on their way back home. She moves past the narrow three-story houses on the beachfront, railed balconies at each level. On one a couple share a cigarette and watch the darkness together. How unexceptional the western view is at night—nothing to distinguish it from a cornfield or a latticed backwoods. All black. She can make out a single oil rig on the water, an ugly sight during the day, but at night the only light, a proleptic sign.

  Farther on, Suzy hears a mellow big-band standard, Duke Ellington, maybe—the stuff of Sunday-evening scotch. A couple blocks later, a conversation and cigarettes; competing opinions about the Rams and their new running back. It was a bad idea, she decides. She loops up off the Strand, taking the grade of the incline in little pickax steps, and crosses Ocean Drive, whose name suggests a boulevard with an unobstructed panorama, but that is in fact a narrow alley, cracked at its center by seasonal storms and poor drainage. She turns back toward Mike and Grace’s and makes peace with the benefits of an evening stroll just for nothing.

  And that is, of course, when she hears it: the unmistakable tin of drunk bunnies speaking over one another. Bass from a record player, and laughter. Just east up the hill. It is a geometrically depressing split-level—half the house plugged atop a squat garage, the other half built on a foundation that meets the garage at shoulder height. The siding has been painted once before, but not so recently, and the heavy blue door is open an inch. Suzy digs her nails into her part and combs her hair to her shoulders. She knocks twice and then throws some weight behind it so that the door creeps open. A couple girls are drinking red cocktails near what appears to be the kitchen. Suzy enters and moves her hand in a long wave that announces her presence as inoffensive.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Suzy says.

  A girl with daisies strung into her braid turns and says: “For what! Happy Fourth!”

  “Happy Fourth to you. I just…am looking for someone: do you know Billy Zar?”

  She puckers her face and turns over her shoulder to her friends. “Billy Zar?”

  A guy behind them approaches the cluster and says: “Billy?”

  “You know him?” the girl says.

  “Yeah, he was just here.”

  “Oh, Billy!” the girl says.

  Suzy isn’t sure what this means. “Any idea where he went?”

  “Actually, yeah,” the guy says. “Paul Miller’s house. You lookin’ for him?”

  “Yeah, he’s a friend. He said he might be here.”

  “Miller’s house is on Thirtieth and Mirabell.”

  “Thirtieth and Mirabell. Thanks. Really, thanks.”

  The girls smile at her, and the guy makes a show of jogging to the kitchen counter to offer her a drink.

  “No, no thanks, I should try to catch up with Billy.”

  “Right on, right on.”

  Suzy hits the street and orients herself again without trouble—it really is getting easier. She isn’t sure where Mirabell is, but she figures once she bumps into Thirtieth on Ocean and starts walking east, it will find her. And sure enough, within ten minutes she’s trudging across the yard of a deliberate little bungalow down in the hollow beneath the sand dune. It sounds the way she imagined—the fading wails of Joe Walsh trailing off into harmonica and cymbals and dancing fingers way up the fretboard.

  As she finds herself facing another party door, it springs open and out pops Billy. It’s stupidly straightforward. A new song, the slow, lyricless funk of something she’s never heard before, maybe Earth, Wind & Fire because of the brass. Billy’s back is turned toward the entryway, and he sort of dances his way across the threshold, shutting the door slowly until the lock clicks, attempting, it seems, to leave without jangling the entry bells. He is still wearing his sunglasses, but he’s changed out of his tank and into a wide-collared maroon-and-gold shirt, dark-brown cords, and a pair of worn-to-holes sky-blue Vans. The backpack is slung over his shoulder.

  He spins suddenly, a little one-eighty twirl on the ball of his foot in time with the music, and nearly slams into Suzy. She squeaks and throws her hands up.

  “Jesus!” Billy says. He doubles over with a honk that owes its origin to somewhere beneath his lungs. Once he catches his breath, he says: “This is really good.”

  “I found you.”

  “Seriously. After you didn’t call me at home…”

  “I couldn’t remember your nu
mber, so I just started walking around down by the Strand and found the last party you were at.”

  “Max’s?”

  “I guess? Busted little split-level?”

  “Get out.”

  “And they told me you might be here.”

  “And they were right!” he says. He’s lit up. Suzy isn’t familiar enough with Billy to know which substances manifest themselves which ways, but this is different from the afternoon. This is grass, pills, maybe mescaline. “You have no idea how huge this is.”

  “I can’t believe it worked,” Suzy says, smiling with the full realization. “But you’re leaving.”

  “I am. Done here. One more stop. We can hang out there if you’d like to come along.”

  “Sure, yeah. How far?”

  “Ten minutes that way,” he says.

  “You don’t ever drive?”

  “They let you off for just about everything in Sela. Everyone’s a friend of a brother of a cop, you know? But I used up the last bit of my juju a couple weeks ago.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Too much fun, dude!”

  “Now you walk.”

  “I usually skate. But…I broke my rear truck on my way to Flipper’s.”

  “Ah, right.”

  “Yeah, you knew that. I mentioned it three times at his house, huh?”

  “No, no—only once. But it seems…debilitating.”

  “Unsettling,” he adds. “To rely so heavily on something, to take it for granted.”

  “I think I left my board at Flipper’s.”

  “No shit. I was wondering where it went. Why you didn’t have it when we got food.”

  “I can’t lose that thing.”

  “How’s stew insurance?”

  “Only good when it comes to plane crashes,” she says.

  During the walk Billy pulls up short at a hedge planted on a property line.

  “Here, hold this, I’m gonna go take a leak.”

  He presses the backpack into her arms and disappears into the shadows.