Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  “Aren’t you a little expert,” Edith says, watching the locals close by.

  “I guess I’m still smitten,” Suzy says. “Same as everyone else here.”

  “Well,” Wayne says, “I get it.”

  And then they scheme about what they’ll do now that they’re finally here, the trip having been a node of the future they never seemed to have fully projected themselves into.

  A couple days before Christmas, Suzy’s flying to New York, there and back, and she’s planning to go empty-handed. But before she leaves for the airport in the morning, Billy surprises her with the prospect of a package. Suzy resists. It’ll be no problem, he says, same routine as ever. But she’s trying her hardest to cut back to zero, to at least attempt to keep her pact with Wayne. Billy says he’ll give her part of his cut.

  She doesn’t quite know how, but she leaves his house with a heavier bag.

  The psychic pulse that cased the freight, in Suzy’s mind, those first several trips is reduced to a weak quiver now, ordinary, just another bag among the bags. The conversation and activity—the regular work of serving a planeful of passengers—that she encountered during the first runs no longer rearrange themselves into the searing colors and shapes of memory-making associations. Just the feel of the aisle carpeting beneath her feet, the calm pitch of the heavy plane, the sense that as she moves back and forth through the cabin, she is moving with a moving thing.

  It goes just as it should, except Cassidy isn’t even covered. They’ve grown as used to Suzy as she has to them. It makes her uncomfortable, that comfort. She and Cassidy are alone in the bathroom, and Cassidy looks a little beat, like she hasn’t slept much. Suzy asks if she’d like to get refreshed in the stew lounge. Cassidy seems turned up, as if by a dial, at the suggestion.

  “Can you do that?” she says.

  “They finally gave me a guest pass,” Suzy lies.

  Together they pick out croissants and pour coffees and sit in plush chairs by the window. She’s alone today, Cassidy says, because the two guys—Frank and Paul, their names for the first time—had to buy gifts for their kids. Suzy asks about Cassidy—where she lives (Forest Hills), where she grew up (Elmhurst), where she’s been and where she’s going: “Home after this.”

  “But I mean, how long have you been doing this?”

  “A couple years.”

  “And what do you think you’ll do after that?”

  “I don’t know—save money, buy a house, get another job.”

  “Are you married? Do you have any kids?”

  “Not yet.” Cassidy begins to curl in on herself, quills out.

  “I don’t mean anything by it—I’m single, too. I guess I just meant: Is this good for a while? Or are you, I dunno, trying to do something else?”

  “I don’t have a date, if that’s what you mean. I probably won’t do this for the rest of my life. How ’bout you, what’s the deal?”

  “No plans, either,” Suzy lies again. “Just keeping on with this until I stop stewing, I guess.”

  Cassidy seems not to believe her.

  “It don’t matter to me either way,” Cassidy says, Queens in her voice.

  “But I really don’t have plans to quit,” Suzy says. “Not now.”

  “Well, all right, then.”

  “So, no husband, no kids,” Suzy says. “Do you have a boyfriend?” Cassidy smiles at Suzy’s persistence—stuffed lips that stay weighted and red even when they’re stretched wide. Cassidy rewards her with the story of the married man she’s been seeing, the man from Glen Cove, with the Thunderbird and the chain of Laundromats. Who doesn’t know anything about any of this, who thinks he’s doing her favors by giving her money for groceries and wheelbarrowing quarters up to her door. Which she’s perfectly happy to let him keep believing, she can certainly still use the thousands of quarters. She lets him believe she’s just the barely paid travel agent–in–training everyone else thinks she is.

  “Travel agent–in–training?” Suzy says. “So there’s something.”

  “Sure, I guess. Three months I’ll be full-time,” she says.

  “That’s a good job.”

  “Too short to stew, right?”

  “It’s a dumb rule.”

  Cassidy has a large, light croissant flake hanging off the corner of her mouth. And Suzy, piggybacking on a force greater than self-control, finds her hand drifting across the space between them, plucking the flake from Cassidy’s face, and grazing her lower lip.

  Cassidy’s eyes drift to the armrest.

  “I got it…,” Suzy says.

  “So, travel agent’s the next-best thing,” Cassidy says, doubling back and lifting her eyes again. “I still get to do something related to flying. Still get to look at the map. We’ve got a great big one with every city in the world on it, runs floor to ceiling right along the main wall of the office. I like looking at the map.”

  “Me too,” Suzy says.

  When the coffee’s gone, Cassidy says she’s gotta make her drop-off, that she doesn’t want to overstay her guest pass. They say “Merry Christmas” and hug uncertainly, and then on her way out Cassidy offers a little sack of quarters she’s been hauling around, maybe ten bucks, that she has an idea about.

  “Christmas bonus,” she says.

  Suzy smiles and takes the sack, weighing it in her palm like they’re jewels.

  “See you next year,” Suzy says.

  Suzy’s back to Sela for Christmas Eve—home by lunch to stuff the cash beneath the sink. Wayne and Edith have gotten comfortable at her apartment, but when Suzy asks what they’ve been up to, she learns they haven’t been doing all that much, exactly. They ate breakfast at Huevos. They saw The Poseidon Adventure. Mostly, though, they’ve passed hours standing on the Strand and staring at the water.

  The days have this ordinary extraordinariness. That’s what Wayne and Edith keep getting at.

  Wayne says reading the New York Times here is like reading an international edition. Everything is distant, belonging to a different world. Nixon feels as far away as Brezhnev. Schuyler Glen seems buffered in gauze. Things there just don’t seem as important, as urgent, as they usually do. They don’t ring clearly.

  “Get used to it,” Suzy says. “The longer you’re here, the stronger that feeling grows. Wait till the end of your first week.”

  Mike is at the Peoples Temple downtown again, so Wayne, Edith, and the girls pile into a rental car. They drive the length of the bay, south, up onto the Peninsula, where Suzy passes, she’s certain, the estate where she and Billy dropped the pig on the Fourth. She can’t see much, but she makes out the heads of horses bobbing above the hedges. And somewhere on the property, Suzy imagines, there’s a lion and a pig, an island of misfit pets.

  The views from the Peninsula dwarf those in Sela. There is height, a look back at the entire stained basin of the Southland, all the way out on this clear winter afternoon, to the skyscrapers—and Mike’s temple—downtown, straight across the bay to Malibu, and out toward the eastern flatlands that Suzy’s never really conceived of as anything but an extension of her runway. The sky is swept clean of clouds. It is, Wayne says, the sort of thing he’s failed all his life to recognize as an alternative—a winter sky limitless in height, the whole Christmas thing outdoors. After he says it, Grace points out that you can see the airplanes filing in for miles. Suzy says that pilots claim to see the lights at night stretching east for three states.

  Wayne likes it up here. He says this might be the perfect place for post-op recovery, the consummate site for convalescence.

  “You hear that, girls?” Wayne says to his three. “This is where I start the next chapter.”

  Christmas is warm, so warm, so clear, so blue. During the gift exchange Suzy and Grace surprise each other with strand cruisers. Mike knew what was coming and successfully held off tipping either’s hand. Wayne and Edith find the whole thing beyond terrific, and while they urge the girls to get out and ride right away so that they can snap som
e photos, Suzy and Grace push another idea.

  They convince Wayne and Edith to spend an hour on the sand. Mike stays home to read, but both girls and Mom and Dad get dressed for the beach. Wayne vomited up coffee cake most of the morning, but by noon he’s changed into an aloha shirt he’s kept buried in his closet for decades. Suzy and Grace lead him slowly down the hill, through the intersection, and across the busy Strand, where skateboarders, bike riders, and even recreational runners speed up the standard strolling flow. The courts are filled with volleyball games, and the palm trees are tall and frozen without even the flinch of a breeze. The water collects the sunlight and looks, in its bright flicker, the way a TV does when it’s turned on but not hooked up to the cable. They spot a surfing Santa Claus—the surfing Santa, Grace specifies—paddling out.

  Suzy and Grace walk with Wayne the way nonparents do with a toddler. Out in front, uncertain of speed and safety. As they crash into place on the wide acreage—still vast and empty-ish, in spite of heavier numbers, each plot of sand personal seeming—Grace leans into Suzy and says: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dad’s legs before.”

  They laugh about the skin and hair beneath his knees, white as the tube socks he’s insisted on wearing over his feet. “Guess that’s where I get it, huh?” Suzy says.

  They read on the beach—books and magazines and newspapers. The wind picks up some, in the wrong direction. It’s offshore, blowing the tops of the waves back out toward Asia, creating a light frosting of salt spray every time a new set breaks into the beach. Grace and Edith work on the crossword puzzle together. Suzy dives into the Christmas fiction issue of the New Yorker, a thing Edith picked up at Kennedy for the impression it might give. There are stories by writers Suzy’s heard of, but the one that catches her attention is by someone she hasn’t, a woman named Renata Adler.

  There are icy scenes from that bar, Elaine’s, and descriptions she reads and rereads of things she’s never seen in person, like the Broadway Junction subway station: “It seems to me one of the world’s true wonders: nine crisscrossing, overlapping elevated tracks, high in the air, with subway cars screeching, despite uncanny slowness, over thick rusted girders, to distant, sordid places. It might have been created by an architect with an Erector Set and recurrent amnesia, and city ordinances and graft, this senseless ruined monster of all subways, in the air.” She loves the sound of it in her brain, the picture made there. There are allusions to stealing “a washcloth once from a motel in Angkor Wat.” There are sentences that are just, “A few days after that, there was the war.” There are whole sections that comprise fifty words: “Alone in the sports car, speeding through the countryside, I sang along with the radio station, tuned way up. Not the happiest of songs, Janis Joplin, not in any terms; but one of the nicest lines. ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ In a way, I guess.”

  Amidst it all, there is one passage in particular that cuts her open: “I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”

  Suzy feels a thing on her arms and at her throat. There is a hot branding of recognition. Not of a life or of an eye or of a mind, but of a disposition. A regard for things she’s never encountered herself, a regard that feels familiar, like it might be hers, were she in another place, in another name or line of work. It reminds her of stretches during school. That heat of likeness she felt among certain people she admired. She could read stuff like it forever.

  This is a voice. This is a voice that widens the frame. That drives her to want to do something she’s never done before—to do, maybe even, the sort of thing Mike’s trying to do. It’s like Camille would say: the reading before writing is a pitch pipe, not to be copied identically but to harmonize with. She wants to do something in this key. Write or fly, et cetera. This is a voice she’s never heard, but one that sounds so familiar, like when an adopted child is reacquainted with a mother tongue. She moves through the story with a closing off, with blinders, but no explicit comprehension of those blinders, not until she’s through thinking back on where she’s just been. Suzy can’t typically read without acknowledging that she’s reading—considering the length of the sentences, the size of the font, the rate at which she’s flipping pages, and, of course, the inescapable calculation of opportunity costs. Everything that could be happening instead of reading. Every bit of life she’s missing by pausing her own to slip into someone else’s.

  But this story—or whatever this thing is in the magazine—doesn’t so much show her the opportunity cost of its consumption, but rather articulates one of the possible lives she’s missing. Not the life of Cassidy in Queens. Not the life of the Grand Pacific girls who live in the stew zoos of the upper East Eighties. But the life of a woman she could’ve been, had she maybe, just possibly, stayed the course and followed a boyfriend to New York. “A part-time grant writer, a part-time librarian, a part-time journalist,” the story has it—some woman of varied occupation who has “been lucky, in my work, at getting visas to closed places.” A journaler, a describer of things, a drinker who “quite often now has a drink before eleven.” A professional noticer. It’s the thing, she realizes now, she’s been reading all her life to find. A new summit with a vista.

  She feels crackling with a current but also inexplicably defeated. It’s almost like a glimpse of a life she’s forfeited already, unrecoverable at twenty-two, sacrificed for the look and sound of the very thing over the edge of the magazine page here: a plain of a billion crushed shells; a body of salt water; a sunny seventy-five that’s neutralized by the touch of offshore breezes, of Santa Ana winds, winds that may be frying her ions, charging her body in a manner she might be mistaking for the effect of good writing. She reaches for the brass loop on Grace’s purse and watches the blue bolt of microlightning jump from her finger to the metal.

  While lost in the turning of pages and the rapid breaks of short-story sections, Suzy doesn’t even notice that Wayne has stood and removed his socks. He’s walking, barefoot, and Edith calls out his name. He doesn’t seem to hear and keeps moving toward the water, and where the sand dips to the surf at a sharper grade, he removes his shirt, with its orange palm trees and orange-plus tropical birds, and leaves it in his wake, moving deeper down the decline, so that all the girls can see is the top of his bright new bald head. It disappears and Suzy stands, only to catch Wayne vanishing beneath the surface of the water—the only others in either direction surfers with full-body wet suits or a Santa costume.

  Edith and Grace stand, too, but nobody moves toward him.

  “His back,” Edith says, but still no movement forward, all but full certainty among the three that there is no threat. He treads out farther—his feet seemingly still touching sand—and lets a wave crash him hard in the chest and face. Once he’s past the break line, he flips onto his back and throws his arms wide and rests there like a bobbing gull, catching the blowback froth from the offshore, as though it’s the first of a Christmas snow and it’s no different for Wayne Whitman than ever.

  It is a good day for contrails. Suzy hosts everyone for dinner, and Wayne spends most of the hour leading to sunset sitting in the chair by the window with the view. From here it’s less looking out at the ocean than down on it. It’s not just the vacuum-cleaner suction of the jets taking off over the roof that makes him say it’s like looking out the window of a cockpit—it really does feel like a privileged height. Edith helps Suzy in the kitchen, easy stuff, some prime rib Mike picked up in the afternoon, some potatoes, some green beans, some pie. Before sitting down to official dinner at the tartan-draped card table in Suzy’s living room, Wayne surprises them with a treat he’s brought from Schuyler. Though they’d long lived in America, Wayne’s Whitmans maintained the English tradition of Christmas poppers and paper crowns. The girls put on an enthusiastic show about springing their poppers, wearing the crowns, playing wit
h the crap unplayable games housed in the poppers’ stock. The food goes quickly and Wayne and Edith are down early, Wayne worn thin, in spite of denying it to the teeth, by his afternoon polar bear swim.

  Mike’s ready to head home, too, but Suzy and Grace decide to go for a ride on the new cruisers. The bikes are at Mike and Grace’s, so the three walk back together, and the sisters head down to the Strand in darkness. Every block there’s a single cone lighting ten feet in each direction, and then it’s black, unassisted by a sliver moon and the dim reflection off the water. It’s like riding across an endless chessboard. They ride for a mile, then two, and reach a turnaround at the edge of town.

  Grace, to Suzy’s surprise, is crying.

  “What’s going on?” Suzy says.

  “What if this is it?” Grace says.

  “You mean Dad?”

  “What if that’s the last Christmas, just like that?”

  “I’d say it’s a good one, then.”

  “How can you say that so matter-of-factly?”

  “Grace, I’m feeling the exact same thing. It’s just—it’s out of our hands. And all we can do is do the most here and at home, and hope for the best with surgery.”

  “I just have this horrible sense that we’re in a position of things getting worse before they get better,” Grace says. “Like we’re going to look back on today as a relative high point, even though things seem so tough.”

  The light is low, but there’s enough for Suzy to see the shiver in Grace’s eyes, the trepidation. It’s like she’s already skipped over into the place beyond Wayne, speaking to Suzy from across the river.

  “That could happen,” Suzy says. “But today was good. This will always be a high point. Just, he’s not going anywhere—not for a while.”

  “What if the surgery doesn’t work?”

  Suzy shrugs. She lets Grace ask all the unanswerable questions.