by Daniel Riley
“At least,” Suzy says, finally, “I think they’ve enjoyed the last few days more than if we’d been at home, you and me bitching about visiting, you know?”
“They didn’t say it was the last Christmas,” Grace says.
“Yeah, they’ve stopped that ’cause you asked them to. No more suggesting it’s the end.”
“I like that.”
“Me too,” Suzy says.
They hang there, straddling their bikes—dark silence, draining hours of Christmas. And then without signaling, Suzy swings her leg over the frame and drops the bike in a tangled clatter. She closes the space between them and wraps her sister up like a blanket, one arm around her shoulders, the other arm across her stomach, squeezing as hard as she can. Grace doesn’t say anything but finds Suzy’s hands and threads Suzy’s fingers with her own.
“C’mon, let’s go back,” Suzy says.
As they pedal beneath the first light, Suzy catches a glimpse of Grace’s bike.
“Are you barefoot?”
“Yeah,” Grace says, serious, before laughing through wet eyes, which makes Suzy laugh, too. And then Grace says: “The beach at night.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s numero uno. There’s a lot of things to love, but if you made me pick.”
“I’ll never make you pick.”
“It’s cool you came out here.”
“All right, no more mush, let’s just get goin’.”
“Last time I say anything,” Grace says, and they ride home across the endless chessboard.
Grace is gone when it’s time for Wayne and Edith to head to the airport. It’s been a strange few days. The anticlimax of the week after Christmas. The newspapers and magazines—all piling up on the coffee table at Mike and Grace’s place—running their tributes to those who died in 1972. Suzy watched the papers for new deaths, those who’d died after the deadlines for the year-end specials. Suzy has a pang of special interest in making sure Wayne gets to 1973. The only tragedy greater than death, she reasons, would be to die in that last week of ’72, to be practically forgotten, to have the date after the dash on the headstone suggest that you hadn’t lived those extra hundreds of days. Like poor Harry Truman: dead the day after Christmas.
That one gets Wayne. He’s worse than he was with Apollo 17. All these endings all at once. It’s not something Suzy takes seriously, but she listens to him theorize about America cleaving into a new era, a worse moment, Vietnam and Watergate becoming the norm, the afterglow of his war formally extinguished with the death of moon missions and Truman. Wayne was always more titillated than frightened by the transformation of the ’60s, but this isn’t social change, this isn’t hippies and headbands, this is the end of things that mattered.
On their way to the airport there is an announcement on the radio: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 has crashed into the Everglades, death toll unknown. This is the fifty-fifth commercial airliner crash of the year. They listen in silence. Nothing new needs to be said. But when they get to the curb, and Suzy helps them carry their bags to check-in, Edith kisses her firmly on the cheek—a long hold, longer than Suzy can remember ever—and a “Thank you” possessing just the right number of multiple meanings.
Wayne holds Suzy at her shoulders like he would before a race. He leans in toward her face and says, “You can’t fly anymore.”
It’s straightforward enough. Suzy doesn’t nod in consent or shake her head defiantly. She looks into her dying father’s eyes and says, “I’m not going anywhere.”
He doesn’t know what this means and she doesn’t really, either, but he decides she probably hasn’t heard him right.
“Please: tell me you’ll at least start looking for something else.”
She doesn’t say anything again and just moves in for a hug.
“I promised you I’d try,” he says. “You promise me you’ll try.”
“I’m not afraid of flying,” Suzy says instead.
“I know you’re brave, I know you’re not afraid of anything,” he says. “But you should be.”
“You’re not afraid,” Suzy says, “I’m not afraid.”
Suzy still hasn’t mentioned anything to Wayne and Edith about flight school and chooses not to tell them now, as proof of her fearlessness, that she’s just thirty hours short of certification. But the fact that she considers it—the bald inappropriateness of it—makes her laugh.
Her father’s hands are still on her shoulders and he watches her laugh without emotion.
“You know what?” he says. “I don’t give a damn. Do what you want—I mean that. I mean that without animosity. If you like the work and you’re good at it, or whatever it is that makes you happy, then that’s all a father can ask for, and I know I can’t stop you anyway.”
Suzy smiles, proud of her father’s pride.
“You put me behind the wheel,” she says.
“And you were good,” he says.
Edith hurries Wayne up to check-in. Suzy watches through the glass as he hands his suitcase to the attendant and it disappears along the conveyor belt. She wrapped up another couple grand in leftover Christmas paper and placed it in his suitcase before they left her apartment. She hadn’t wanted to make the Christmas run, but she might as well funnel the spoils toward its primary target—it was all for this purpose, anyway. Two thousand dollars in cash, a card with a snowman, and a little red bow. “Happy New Year,” she wrote. “Just another year of many to come.” She placed it in his suitcase without him knowing, without him even thinking to look, a move she’d picked up along the way. And that’s pretty much it, they’re gone, and it’s back to the beach, to that life she lives here.
Grace says she’s been booked last-minute to Hawaii on New Year’s Eve. She’s gonna have to stay two nights—the thirty-first and the first. It throws some plans.
Suzy’s left to her own designs on New Year’s. With Billy busy making house calls, and an afternoon with Billy planned for tomorrow, she gives Mike a ring and they decide to go out for dinner. They meet at El Guincho, which shows no sign of cutting hours for the holiday. They order margaritas, and the first round is gone before they order food. Suzy asks about the magazine story and Mike grimaces. He can’t find Reverend Jones anywhere. And since there’s been a lot written about him recently without access, his failure to land him is a potential deal breaker.
“The thing about these stories is they’re not real until they are, ya know? I could work on this for four months and turn in a bunch of string with no center—it’ll just unravel into a mess, and they can cut it for the other hundred stories they have waiting in reserve. It’s my deal to fuck up.”
“Is there any lead you think could potentially work out?”
“I’m going to Ukiah next week—I’ve been talking to a couple people who think he’s there. I’m just gonna knock on the door and hope somebody doesn’t kidnap me. Even if he lets me in and makes me coffee or whatever, it still doesn’t matter if he doesn’t agree to let me run tape, ya know? That’s one of the last things I can try.”
“Do you still get paid?”
Mike closes his eyes and seems to be searching the backs of his eyelids for a line.
“I get some money, but not enough to do anything with,” he says.
“Could you go back to trying the magazine?”
“You’re hittin’ all the sore spots, huh?”
Suzy smiles. “Just asking the questions my parents avoided over Christmas.”
“I love that thing about people like them—that maintenance of other folks’ dignity in the face of obvious failure. It’s nice.”
“And a little unfeeling.”
“Guess it wasn’t necessarily passed down.”
“Grace lost it when she moved out. It was like, ‘Now I feel free to say whatever enters my brain.’”
“Which is one of the first things that attracted me to her,” Mike says.
“Despite what I just said, I think it’s maybe rubbed off on my parents a l
ittle, too. Because of all that’s going on. They’re learning how to ask questions. My mom knows how my dad’s really feeling. Probably for the first time ever.”
The burritos come wet on porcelain plates, and Billy’s buddy Pablo refills the plastic basket with hot chips from the chip drawer. They order a third round of margaritas.
“The answer to your question is there’s a new clock on the magazine,” Mike says. “I was talking to a friend in New York a couple days ago, and he mentioned that the folks at Esquire and the editor of New York have been batting around ideas for a California magazine. If it’s gonna happen, I’ve gotta at least try to be first—sell off some of the groundwork to them or something.”
“So it is still on the table?” Suzy says, chasing her own directness. “It’s still something you have time for, I mean.”
“If I had the funding, it’d still be the number one plan.”
“You could work for their magazine.”
“A few months ago I would’ve dismissed the idea, but I’m a little fucked here. I just need money. I’m ready to answer the bartender ad at Howlers.”
“You’ve never bartended.”
“See, not good enough for that, even.”
“I mean, you could learn. But why don’t you finally write a book or something?”
“Grace may not have mentioned it to you, but we’re really, truly in a pinch. She knows she’s not gonna fly forever, maybe another year or something—if they don’t find out about us. But I need something else. I’m burning through my inheritance. I’m not as comfortable with hanging out and doing nothing as it sometimes seems. I just need to sit at a desk in an office and rot away for a little while.”
“Carpets without sand,” Suzy says.
“Not even—I just need something fast or else I’m afraid she’s gonna get a little pushy.”
“Pushy how?”
“We’ve been fine lately, but you know how it is, things change and you want to change together.”
“What are you actually saying?”
“I mean, it’s no shock to you that we’re not always a hundred percent. It can be fine for little runs, but still. And so we’re thinking about maybe starting a family, patch some of it back together.”
“Thinking about it?”
“Well, yeah, I mean, we think it could be a good idea. Or at least we’re beginning to all of a sudden.”
“Is she pregnant again or something?”
Mike is chewing and chasing his burrito with a swig of his drink, so it comes out a little delayed: “Pregnant again?”
It’s not until Mike says it that Suzy recognizes her mistake. “Pregnant, pregnant again, whatever, I just mean is she actually pregnant?”
Mike squints. “What was that?”
“That wasn’t anything, I was thinking about something else and my mouth’s full.”
Mike is silent, then says, “Not that I know of.”
“Well, whenever it happens, I’m sure it’ll work out.”
There’s a crack now between them, and Suzy tries not to acknowledge that it’s lengthening. The physical context of their situation is the same as it was a minute ago—the plastic palm fronds, the surf stickers on the fryer, the four-month countdown calendar to Cinco de Mayo—but new information, the way the camera has swung around, has changed the way all of it looks.
“You could write newspaper stories,” she says, “you could write grants, you could write art catalogs or technical manuals for one of the defense companies, Hughes or whatever.” She lists more jobs like the woman had in the story in the New Yorker. “You get in somewhere, and then you can get me a job.”
“All that stuff you said, that’s the stuff you do before you get to where I am. Or at least before you get to where I was. Where I was in New York, that’s the level when you get to stop writing crap in order to pursue the real thing.”
“Well, I’ll take the crap.”
“If I find anything, it’s all yours.”
“Thanks for looking out,” Suzy says.
“Before I forget, I have a belated Christmas present. I didn’t really think of it till it was too late, so I can’t take full credit, but whatever, we’re still within the twelve days, right?”
He reaches for his jacket, which is hung on a hook beneath the counter, and pulls a paperback from an inside pocket. The Hunters, by James Salter. It’s yellow and it’s read.
“Is this your copy?”
“No, no. But I couldn’t find it new. They didn’t print a ton. I like this writer, though. Liked the most recent book he did, too—this American and this woman driving around France having sex. But this one’s about fighter pilots in Korea. People say he’s the best writing pilot—or pilot-writer, guess it depends—since Saint-Ex. I read it a few years ago but was flipping through yesterday in the bookstore, skimming the first few pages.”
He thumbs to the dog-ear and begins to read: “‘Friends on the outside were always asking why he stayed in’—in the air force, after his duty is up—‘or telling him he was wasting himself. He had never been able to give an answer. With the fresh shirt on his shoulders still cold as ice, chilled from an hour in an unheated radar compartment at forty thousand feet between Long Beach and Albuquerque, the marks from the oxygen mask still on his face, and on his hands the microscopic grit of a thousand-mile journey, he had tried to find an answer sitting alone at dinner in the club filled with administrative majors and mothers talking about their children, but he never could. In his mind he carried Saturdays of flying, with the autumnal roar of crowds on the radio compass and the important stadiums thirty minutes apart and button-small, the wingmen like metallic arrows poised in the air above a continent, the last sunlight slanting through the ground haze, and cities of concrete moss;…’” She watches his finger skim to the last line of the paragraph. “‘It was all a secret life, lived alone.’”
He looks up from the book and raises his eyebrows.
“Whoa,” Suzy says.
“Consider it a Christmas-slash-congrats-on-flight-school sort of thing.”
“Still got quite a bit left.”
“But this’ll be a motivator. Might stoke the fire. Not that you need the encouragement.”
It is a good gift, Suzy thinks. It’s nice that she and Mike can do stuff like this without a fuss. That they can spend time together with ease, but also that they can connect on the level they do. Share in a thing, share in thoughts.
Suzy suggests they take one more shot of tequila before they go. Mike cinches his lips into a tight purse and shakes his head. But Pablo overhears and insists. Tequila on the house, Happy New Year. “‘Sela Vie,’” Suzy says, biting her lip and pointing her eyebrow at the bumper sticker on the fryer, and they clink with him and it goes down badly. They beg with their hands for some lime wedges. It is as it always is, the hot roll down the throat and over the stomach lining, the image of a coated cartoon digestive track like in a magazine ad for antacid. Suzy is warm and Suzy smiles, holding up her book triumphantly. Mike Singer is handsome in the sticky light of El Guincho. An even match for Grace, as much as Grace likes to act like she’s the catch. An even match even though he chased her out here and into this predicament. Suzy is exceptionally warm, and she does something she’s never done—she reaches both hands toward Mike and touches his cheeks with her fingers and palms, lightly, just a little framing. And she says, “Thank you, seriously.” And then she drops her hands and he laughs and looks away so as not to embarrass her by acknowledging the embarrassing thing she’s done.
It’s a weird parting: neither has plans and each knows it, but Mike’s in a focused mood, wants to go home and sulk in the magazine pile even though he’s drunk. And so Suzy hops on her bike and goes for a ride in the opposite direction of home.
While coasting along the Strand, under another winter sky of edgeless darkness, she acknowledges a simple order that has arranged itself in front of her face—a clarity, a paring down of interests for the day and the year to come
. In this blank evening, with no one else really applying much pressure, there are two people she misses—two people she would feel a full swell of contentment to run into right now, to follow into more of the night. If she’s honest with herself, she’s never really felt that way about Grace at any point in her life. But now the prospect: passing hours talking about other girls at Grand Pacific, flight plans, bid sheets, hotels in Dallas and Denver and Honolulu, bands and books, family and money and babies. She looks forward to a lifetime of turning Grace on to the stuff she discovers, and being turned on in return. They are still separate spheres, but in recent months, really since that trip home together, there’s been this easy overlap, a tangent plane, that has aligned their whole program. Suzy loves her parents, but that love, made manifest in time together, always stresses an upper limit—two weeks over Christmas during college was that upper limit, the last ten days in Sela was, too. She’ll see them again soon, back to visit after the surgery, hopefully without a run to cloud things up. But there is no longer a constraint, really, with Grace. Suzy inadvertently spilled Grace’s secret to Mike, and though Suzy has convinced herself Mike let it go, Suzy feels like she owes her sister something for the slipup. More than owes. She wants to tell Grace about the runs. She wants to tell her the truth about Billy Zar, whatever that is. God, Suzy thinks, I need a true friend like I haven’t had in years, and maybe that’s my sister, maybe that’s happened.
She cuts off the thought train there—it’s life sustaining, propulsive, to know there’s plenty more to talk about with her sister tomorrow.
Tomorrow she’s going to the Rose Bowl with Billy. That USC team he’s been propping up all year rolled undefeated through the Pac-8, won the season-ending rivalry games with Notre Dame and UCLA, and cruised into a Rose Bowl tilt with Ohio State—a New Year’s national championship game. Billy’s parents had an extra pair of tickets, off on their own in the corner of the bowl, and Billy asked if she wanted to come along. She didn’t jump at first—they’d kept things pretty low-key, not much time in public together still. But he tried hard to be convincing. He went on about the quality of the football and the historical potential of the team—all of which was fine though not much of a deal sealer. But when he said that the Rose Bowl was the only place in L.A. he liked as much as Sela, she figured it was worth a few hours of her day off. Billy championed almost everyone and everything, but he didn’t deploy loose superlatives when it came to equating things to his hometown.