Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  Suzy wakes up the next morning to the sound of the airline phone, a call in predawn darkness. She’d passed out on the couch at Grace and Mike’s after getting home late, and she lifts herself foggily to cut the alarm. She catches it on the fourth ring, and the man on the line is speaking with such distance that she wonders if his message is prerecorded.

  “Whitman,” he says.

  “Yes, Suzy Whitman,” she says.

  “Grace Whitman.”

  “This is Suzy Whitman.”

  “Oh, Yahtzee, you’re on my list, too. Two Pan Am girls got in a fender bender and landed in the hospital this morning, so we’re short a stew on a double to London and Paris. Thing is, they’re taking off soon and would need you at LAX in an hour. I understand you live close, which is why you’re on my list. Whatdya say?”

  “France.”

  “Need an answer in five, four, three—”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “I can be there in an hour. But I’m supposed to fly to Denver this afternoon.”

  “You’ll be covered.”

  “Okay, yes, then.”

  “They’ll give you a uniform when you arrive. But bring your own in case nothing fits.”

  Suzy calls a cab to meet her at her apartment in half an hour.

  “What’s going on?” Grace says. She’s in a red-and-white checked nightgown that cuts off in the middle of her thigh like a tailored picnic blanket. “Who was that?”

  “Grand Pacific. They were looking for a last-minute sub to do a Pan Am flight to London and then to Paris.”

  “London and Paris.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “We don’t go to Europe.”

  “Apparently, they’re helping out Pan Am, like I said. Two Pan Am girls got in an accident and they just found out, and they’re looking around for subs who are close.”

  “So you’re going?”

  “I’m going.”

  “How long are you gonna be there?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “He started counting down from five. A day? I don’t know.”

  Grace uses her fingers to brush some tangles out of her hair and then pulls a shock of it to her nose.

  “What are you supposed to do about your uniform?”

  “They said just to bring it. I guess they have extras of theirs, but bring mine just in case.”

  “Is this even real?”

  “I’m gonna show up,” Suzy says.

  “Why were they calling for you here?”

  “They must’ve had the old number.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t for me? What happened to seniority?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “How ’bout I go instead and you take my St. Louis.”

  “Don’t think you’d make it in time.”

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  “I’ll put some coffee on for you.”

  Grace pauses. “Do you even have a passport?”

  “As of just last week! In training they asked us to fill out the form if we didn’t have one already. Said they’d cover the fee.”

  “This is weird, dude.”

  “But thank you for reminding me. I would’ve left it in my sock drawer.”

  “This is so totally weird.” Grace disappears slowly. “Maybe you’ll still be here when I wake up.”

  “I’ll bring back some macarons.”

  Suzy arrives under the gun and they find a uniform that’s her size. It’s blue and white, a five-button jacket and a wide-spread collar that rests like sleeping wings. The skirt falls to her knees. Suzy is giggling as she fastens the fifth of five buttons all the way to the top, but she falls into full peals of laughter as she places the hat on her head. She considers it from several angles: a horse saddle, a fortune cookie, an inner ear. In any case, it’s very foldy and it’s the color of the constant California sky. By comparison, Grand Pacific uniforms are disarmingly casual. Shorter, slimmer, fewer components. Suzy is dressed like her mother dressing up like Suzy dressing up like her mother.

  The girls on board are as amused by the pinch-hitting as Suzy is. Stewardesses aren’t traded to other airlines. You come up training and playing for one team and stay put till you’re married, pregnant, or dead. They have a fun time comparing notes, sharing secret lingo. Pan Am, it turns out, draws a more conservative line for booze cutoffs than Grand Pacific, even though the beer is free. While they’re a little keyed up, the other stews are also concerned about the girls in the hospital. Apparently, one was driving and both were drunk. That’s grounds for at least the driver to be laid off and possibly even the passenger. That’s assuming their faces aren’t roughed up too bad and their return is even up for debate. Nobody knows much, but there’s plenty of gossip, dressed-up facts in a hat.

  Suzy is mesmerized by the plane. Grand Pacific runs a fleet of 707s from the early ’60s, so this is her first flight on a 747. She finds herself checking the window to make sure this place exists in real space and not on a soundstage. The preflight time has been less crunched than the man on the phone led on—they needed her when they needed her, but that’s because of the full hour it takes to board the plane. Four hundred and fifty passengers, three-by-four-by-three in the body, and spread out like a hotel lobby bar up on the second floor. Burnt-orange and goldenrod seats borrowing from van der Rohe’s Barcelona chairs; knockoffs of Saarinen’s tulip tables; service stations that humble Grace and Mike’s home kitchen. Four hundred tons of skeletons and steel and blood and fuel. Everyone boarding seems to vibrate in face of the boldness—boldness of color, boldness of design, boldness of furry stairs to the upper deck. Even the business-class passengers, who have surely flown the route to London before, seem to regard their clubroom-in-transport with an innocence of spirit.

  The Pan Am international service runs like a Grand Pacific bicoastal, only with scheduled naps (the girls have the sort of reclining leather chairs each of their fathers occupies in the evenings) and just enough differences to trip Suzy up. The brands of soda. The temperature at which the desserts are heated. The generous commitment to replacing broken headsets and keeping the cabin smelling like orange groves. Suzy sleeps for all of thirty minutes; otherwise, she’s pacing the dimly lit midnight aisles checking on passengers, replacing one headset and then another.

  After eleven hours she can hardly account for, they arrive in London in the darkness of a new morning. When they exit the plane, the girls lead Suzy through the terminal to the Pan Am service lounge. It’s close by, and in the short walking distance Suzy is on high alert for evidence of non-American signals—the cheese sandwiches for sale, the holes in the outlets in the walls, the shapeliness of the pound sign. The next one’s an early flight to Paris that’ll arrive around eleven. It turns out she’ll have the day and the night, and then it’s back the following morning, retracing the bread crumbs.

  She eats with the other stewardesses—four of whom will be joining her on to Paris—and they get word about the accident. The girls were driving a dune buggy on the beach in Laguna. Middle of the night, bonfire. Got up to speed, hit the ramp of a lifeguard shack and spun like a bullet. Somehow, though, both girls are being released from the hospital. The one riding shotgun wasn’t wearing her seat belt, got ejected, landed in a tumbling ball. (She was, someone tells the group, a gymnast at SMU.) The driver was buckled in but got knocked out. They weren’t going fast enough to get too beat up, turns out, but they brutalized the lifeguard shack and rode in an ambulance anyway.

  Suzy reads for a while in a corner near the window as the sky brightens. It is her first look at Europe. She strains to detect an accent in the line and color of the trees at the edge of the tarmac. When she feels herself flagging, she pours herself some tea, but it fails to cool to drinking temp by the time the intercom requests her presence at the gate.

  On board, the pilot introduces himself over the PA: Thibaux, a Shreveport fighter pilot who sounds li
ke Beemans and Lucky Strike and Levon Helm’s singing voice. Everything in English first, followed by a thirty-second ribbon of indecipherable French. Everything but “Pan Am” and “Paris” is round-edged noise to Suzy. Upon takeoff Suzy leans over her seat partner to get a look at the countryside. It is Europe. She’s imagined this moment—not clearly, but consistently—since she started racing, since the possibility of Europe presented itself even faintly. And all she sees is the green. The endless Jane Austen of growing up, and here it is looking just as she said it would. How has this scenery failed, in this modern moment, to defy the centuries of played-out description? How could it really look so much like itself?

  The green is socked in by a fat, ailing gray that has no intention of lifting—not like it does in Sela. Boundless Sela! So pleased with its one great trick. Dumb to literature, deaf to history, unconvinced of its unexceptional existence in the greater context of civilization. These are Suzy’s thoughts as they rise—much too quickly, as the ceiling is so low—above the clouds: What power can Sela possibly hold over her compared with the place she’s headed now? Where everything that could have been spoken and imagined, built and broken, won and lost, has been accounted for already. What, in contrast, is there for Sela to live for in its time?

  It is too young to know better. That’s basically it. An adolescent for whom all knowledge and experience is novel, original, singular. It conceives of itself as the first and only—and is quite relaxed about the fact. The very topography mimics a body in recline, a coastal hill range propped up on a beach towel, gazing at the water, back turned with stern indifference to the east. It is a place that behaves as though it’s living out all there is to experience with little regard for anything that is not there. Suzy recalls a sunset last Friday. An ordinary sunset on an evening like thirty others she’s seen in four-plus months. The sky went blue and orange and red and black, and then it was as though the sun had never existed—but for twenty minutes, right there on the edge, they stopped, up and down the Strand, on balconies, on bikes, surfers and stews and bassists and acolytes, they all stopped and looked and it was as though nobody had ever lived anytime or anywhere ever before.

  Over the Channel they serve bread and cheese and red wine. They are things that are meant to project Frenchness. And yet they are meant not just for the British and the Americans, but for the French fliers alike—they are the actual things that are actually consumed by the actual French. Though the ovens are a step down from those of the transatlantic suite Suzy worked on the way over, she’s happy to spend the jumper warming baguette after baguette, meeting an unceasing demand for hot bread.

  Soon they’re over land again: The Continent. In this case it’s not Madame Bovary or Candide or Gigi, but rather images of the countryside from ABC that file forward in her mind. When she was a teen, Wide World of Sports brought one or two Formula One races to television, but what she’s seeing out her window now is reminiscent of the steeples and farms and Alpine weigh stations of Eddy Merckx’s Tour de France. It possesses the quaint stillness of a budget establishing shot. The helicopter flybys of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The artificial earth tones of a model train set. It looks nothing like she doesn’t expect it to. It is the color of a continental European countryside. Not the golden grid of the US middle, not the overgrown forests of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, not the crag of the Rockies, nor the feverish cultivation of L.A.’s eastern, inverse frontier. Rather what she sees is a precise visual reproduction of the projector slides in school (they themselves reproductions of reproductions) that had primed all of them, anyone born in America after the war, for their first encounter with the Old Country. It is so familiar seeming that Suzy feels almost unaffected by the momentousness. How can she be so incapable of a fresh metaphor?

  The feeling only intensifies when she’s dropped off in the center of Paris, at the curb of their hotel at the base of the Second. On the way to London she studied a map in the in-flight magazine—prep work she felt good about at the time but finds useless now. Still, she senses some markers. Around the corner, the convergence of several streets and what looks to be an ornamental epaulet of l’Opéra. Down their street in the other direction, a plaza with an obelisk wrapped in oxidized copper. She retrieves her key, nods through the advisements of the concierge, and drops her bags in her room. There is a gilded telephone receiver cradled flat. The phone forces her to consider the distance traveled—not just milewise, but the nine hours she’s advanced the needle on the record of her life. She considers making a long-distance call home, to Grace or Mike, but gets consumed by the fantasy of Suzy picking up the phone on the other end instead. Suzy in the Parisian afternoon, from nine hours in the future, speaking to Suzy of the morning in Sela—Sela Suzy with a fresh day before her, all the time in the world to get it right.

  It is an afternoon of solitary roaming. It is an afternoon beneath the invisibility cloak. She speaks with no one, buys nothing, enters not a single shop, café, or boulangerie. And yet she suspects she has experienced very few things in her life so completely. Never has so little been required of her to feel so animated.

  She follows a well-worn route, perhaps the most well-worn route. Why, she reasons, with just eighteen hours, would you attempt to carve out a personal path in a place of such confident cliché? Just suck it up and surrender yourself to the spoked boulevards and grand city planning of the democratic despot. Connect the dots from one oversize monument to the next. Find ways into the breathless frames of Godard and Truffaut.

  As the light begins to slip off the edge of Paris and the city joins the darkness of its neighbors to the east—those places where she’d gladly surrender her cool, as she has here, in order to see things with the full heart of a transient—she acknowledges a sensation she’s been ignoring for hours. She is hungry and she will be forced to speak with someone. She leaves the Musée Rodin—where she spent half an hour reading the labels, as she imagined Camille might—and makes her way to her hotel’s side of the river. At the markets men and women buy food for this evening only and pack it into bags brought from home. Even this! Just like they said it’d be. Suzy picks up enough for a picnic for one—a baguette, a starfish of Camembert, a carton of raspberries, a bottle of Bordeaux—and doesn’t come close to spending the hundred francs the airline gave her as a per diem.

  She passes over the Seine again and sits to sip straight from the bottle of wine. She notices the riverbank filling up with couples. Could they really all be tourists? Or could this be a legit ritual of third- and fourth-generation Parisians? She flashes again on the sunset in Sela last week—the locals in awe. Even here Sela slips into the frame. The way sand gets into Suzy’s carpeting. Not a day gone and she can’t help but wonder what’s happening there.

  Billy—the new zipper for Suzy, the thought that opens her up to all those raw, unasked-for feelings. What would Billy be doing on a night like this one, anyway? Lurking, surely, somewhere right around the corner from wherever Suzy was, ready to pinch her elbow and involve her in the evening’s game. But just look at that river and those bridges and those bell towers of Notre Dame. Here she is, physically in this place she’s long desired to be. And yet mentally she’s in another. Fully possessed in neither. Content to exist in no place all at once. It’s impossible, Suzy reasons, to determine whether she’s more concerned about leaving behind what she knows or missing out on what she doesn’t know, what’s just over the edge. Is it a life meant to be lived in Schuyler Glen and Sela del Mar, or should she pack up her bag in the morning and thumb her way across the rest of the Continent? It’s an even simpler question than that, though. It’s fundamental, binary: does Suzy Whitman head home or keep on going?

  Her stomach makes an audible sound, as if to remind her that the little mental things will always pale in comparison with the physical ones. Suzy is bored by the nuzzlings of the couples down below and wanders her way into the lawns deviating the Louvre from the Tuileries. Unleashed dogs scatter into the hedges and emerge at
new entry points. She dumps her spread in the shadow of a small bronze sculpture of a naked woman fleeing something off-pedestal. Think, Suzy reasons, about how this thing—judged against its contemporaries to be not even good enough to be inside the museum—would be lauded were it unveiled from a sculptor’s workshop today. How the average of one era is better than the best of another. Is there a single person alive who can make something this indelible? While tucking into her dinner and inspecting the other sculptures, Suzy comes to realize that the fleeing woman possesses one of the most frightening poses in the garden. Suzy pulls directly from her wine bottle and an unexpected burst of light files beneath a nearby arch. The head of the sculpture catches the light, and in the new weird shadows it suddenly shows more of her face to Suzy and appears to smile. It’s just a game we’re playing, the look seems to assure her. Running for your life is nothing, it says, even if it lasts forever.

  From there it’s a series of windings down. Suzy’s hungry, so she eats; she’s thirsty, so she drinks; she’s drunk and full and running on practically no sleep in twenty-seven hours, and so she leans back and collapses on the grass, and in the instant before her brain shuts, she acts the wiser, picks herself up, and wanders home, half-conscious—moving in a line that’s just more jagged than straight, through the dark gardens of the museum and the streets lit like memories of sleep.

  After returning home and running Grand Pacific routes to Seattle, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco, she finally has a day off, a wet day, which she spends inside listening to the early radio broadcast of Game 7 of the World Series. It’s an afternoon game, a Sunday matinee at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, a game that started at 10:00 Sela Standard Time. The sound of the game is so sticky in its suggestion of the garage in Schuyler Glen, of summer and early fall with Wayne, that she moves to the phone, lifts the receiver, and dials. She should’ve called days ago, but she hasn’t wanted to welcome bad news.