Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1)

by Noel J. Hadley

  I choked on my beer again. Catapulting against every gravity impulse as a man that the creator gave me, I shook her hand away from my inner-thigh.

  “Sure, sex is wonderful.” I admitted the fact. “Even the worst of it is bewildering. Really, don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt you’re likely the best nighttime fantasy a man could hope for. But when it’s with your lifelong lover, and not someone you only just met at a bar, it’s not just bewildering, it’s immaculate.”

  She scooted herself from out of the bar, stood up, frowned, and waved both hands over the curvature frame of her body like Vanna White showing what prize I could have won.

  “I was never very good at game shows either.”

  “You’re missing out on the greatest thing that ever happened to you,” she said.

  “You maybe right.” I took another pull from of Sam Adams as she walked away for her next pick of the litter. “But probably not,” I told my bottle of beer.

  At least I didn’t choke on it this time.

  13

  Bed boards pulsated against my skull, again. And just think. It could have been me on the other side of that wall. It was nights like this, fighting off sexual temptation, when I hated life on the road. Why couldn’t wedding day vows be easy?

  And another thing, I’d just written what may have been my worst poem ever. I blamed the vibrating wall on my sloppy handwriting. Then again, it could have been because I never wrote any poems that rhymed. Maybe that’s what the world needed more of, poems that rhymed. And love. I ripped it from my notebooks binding, crumbled it up and threw it in the trash feeling somewhat haunted inside, despite the fact that it was a perfect rim shot.

  In the grooms own words, Saint Eleanor was inhabited by hospitalized Confederates on the colder than ice sixth floor hall, a creepy little boy who asked to play with guests, a Mardi Grass streaker wearing only a feathery mask, and then perhaps most famously, Madame Maryse, who once ran a top-notch brothel and still wandered the halls knocking on doors to let gentleman customers know they’re allotted time was almost up. Some reports claimed she sometimes even peaked her head in. There never were any complaints however of ghosts banging headboards from one room to the other. Such was my lot in life.

  I recalled hearing a story involving Prime Minister Winston Churchill taking a bath in Roosevelt’s White House during the Second World War, whiskey and cigar in each hand when he noted the ghost of Abraham Lincoln gunning him down with an otherworldly stare. I’m afraid, he told the president, stark naked, you have me at a disadvantage, sir. Powerful words from one government leader to another, my entire point being, if Madame Maryse knuckled my door and peeked her eternal eyes through, by example I’d know what to do. Inspiration struck and I wrote a poem about that. This time I kept it, despite the fact that it didn’t rhyme.

  I quoted Oscar Wilde. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. I said it to whoever would listen.

  Marcia answered with the most awful yet disturbingly enticing poetry I’d ever heard. She yowled like a cat, cross-dressing pleasurable groans with a disturbing cluster of painful tears. I figured her companion must have been plugging it away in her pie hole or something. The strange man with the EMINOR tattoo had said chivalrous men rarely get pussy. How very right he was. I wondered if non-chivalrous men felt just as miserable.

  14

  I woke up with no ghosts to report, and the view from my balcony spoke of a beautiful morning. God had plucked his cosmic orange from the aurora tree and shelved it back over the French Quarter of New Orleans, and unlike the haunting desires that tugged and pulled at my soul into the night, I felt great. Really, there’s hardly a better feeling than when temptation is conquered. I probably could have done cartwheels on a tight rope across the Grand Canyon right there and then.

  It was roughly around 9am when I exited the shower, only a bath towel hung around my waist, which meant it was 7am back home in Long Beach.

  I called Elise on the phone.

  “You won’t believe this,” I told her. “I can’t exactly see the sun behind the next building, but from the looks of it, I think this must have been the most stunning sunrise ever known to man.”

  “I wish I could be there to see it with you,” she said.

  “Me too.” I peaked outside my iron balcony at a monogamous couple strolling the street hand-in-hand and a celibate woman walking her giant black schnauzer, whiskered head held high. “I’ve seen so many mornings in passing from shore to distant shore, but this one,” I told her, staring at another monogamous couple, “unlike so many others… how do I say it? It’s immaculate.”

  Someone knocked on my door.

  “I can’t believe it, it’s Madame Maryse!” I said, and dropped not only my cell phone but bath towel from the excitement of it all.

  “Who?” Elise asked from the floor.

  “Excuse me, Madame,” I begun to say, “you have me at a….” the door shuttered and opened. It wasn’t Madame Maryse at all. It was only the cleaning lady. “Disadvantage.” I finished my thought, cupping ten fingers over my intimacies instead of holding whiskey and a cigar at each side as I’d fantasized and written a poem about only hours before.

  “Yes,” she smiled ear to ear, white of her eyes scrolling from my face to lower thigh to my face back to my lower thigh then making another complete trip up and down to my thigh, “I think you do.”

  She closed the door.

  “Who was that?” Elise said from the floor.

  “Well, for one thing,” I sighed, “it wasn’t an appraisal from the ghost of Madame Maryse.”

  “Have you been drinking again?” She said.

  15

  I was flying out from Louis Armstrong International, en route to John Wayne in Orange County (I had another layover in Denver), and the middle-aged woman seated next to me in 17B appeared confused by the entire situation.

  “So you just photographed a wedding in New Orleans.”

  I told her I did.

  “And you live in Long Beach, California.”

  “Guilty as charged.” I held both hands up.

  “And people actually pay you to fly all over the country?”

  I nodded.

  “For a wedding?”

  I nodded again.

  She twisted her face. “Why?”

  “People want quality in their memories, especially for something as important and valued as their wedding day, when they’re placing their vows in front of their friends and family. And they’re willing to pay, so….”

  “And how much do you charge for something like this?”

  I told her.

  She dropped her mouth open.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” she finally said, “are you a Christian?”

  “I am,” I grinned. “A pastor’s kid, born and raised.”

  The middle-aged woman brightened up like a bulb. “I could tell. I think it’s wonderful that you at least devote your efforts to capturing wholesome values. There’s so very little left of it in America these days. Let me tell you, America used to be a Christian country, and its not. America’s going to hell in a hand basket.”

  I smiled and gazed back into the pages of TIME Magazine. On its cover, Senator Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton wielded both faces together, dated May 5, with a caption that read: THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.

  “You know what I’m sick of?” She finally said.

  I decided to let her answer her own question.

  “All the unwholesomeness in the world. All you artsy-fartsy liberal types call it art. You take Peeping Tom photos of those topless tribal women for ETIQUETTE Magazine. But you know what I call it?”

  I waited for her to answer.

  “I call it PORNIQUETTE.”

  “That’s very clever,” I said, despite the fact that I’d heard that term coined by fundamental types countless times before, and almost always used as though they had altogether invented the phrase. “As a journalistic inspired photographer I’m not so concerned ab
out morality as capturing the story laid out before me.”

  “Oh?” She leaned in with an air of superiority.

  “Everywhere I go in the world I see destruction, not just on physical playing fields, but far more importantly, in the soul, which then in turn will materialize, and so the vicious cycle continues. To document otherwise would fail to acknowledge the world that God has expected each of us to live in. As a Christian, recognizing my own struggles and desperate need for a savior, I also understand that there’s a tension as individuals, a tug of war between what we believe is true and what our nature as humans begs us to do.”

  The middle-aged woman crossed her arms. “The only world God has asked me to live in is my church and its environment of family friendly, not topless tribes. Art should be appropriated for all ages. If the entire family can’t view or read it, then I want nothing to do with it.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, there are some levels of intellectual thought and moral debate that a child simply cannot understand. An adult who spends all of his or her time watering down their own thought patterns to childlike entertainment becomes, in my opinion, almost less intellectual than the people God intended us to be.”

  “It seems like all there is in movies and books anymore is violence and sex and new age talk. What’s wholesome about that?”

  “I obviously can’t defend every single book or movie or photograph ever taken, but I think we would both support the Bible. Isn’t there a book in the Old Testament devoted to sex?”

  “Certainly not!” She reeled in her seat, covering her breasts with both arms. “The Song of Solomon is about God’s love for the church. Don’t get perverted about it.”

  “And doesn’t God instruct Joshua to eliminate the entire population of Israel? It seems to me like there are a lot of theological issues to work out. I really struggle with some of the things that I read in there, which is also precisely how I like it. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  “It’s only complicated because you make it complicated. And besides, it’s different if it comes from the Bible.”

  “Yes, perhaps you’re right,” I smiled, lowering my head back into the pages of TIME Magazine.

  “Well, I think it’s horrible,” she said after a time, “horrible, how much money people spend on wedding photographers.”

  I lifted my head from the magazine.

  “I sort of feel that someone should be paid for the quality and value of their work.”

  “Exactly. We’re talking about values. I think you have your priorities and your values confused. What we need is more family friendly. As a Christian, and as one of those artsy-fartsy fellows, I hope you’ll think about that long and hard.”

  I smiled at her and told her I would. This time she didn’t interrupt me from the pages of TIME Magazine.

  16

  Ethel was eighty years old, with thin wrinkled skin of paper frailty sagging from her bones, and bent over working in the rose patch when my taxi dropped me off at the curb of my grandfathers apartment complex.

  “Are you going upstairs to see Ira Chamberlain?” She said. She extended both hands, much as she had many times for my grandfather on his return trips home.

  “Yes Ethel.” I patted them in return. “Something like that.”

  “Are you an acquaintance of his?”

  “I’m his grandson, Ethel.” I smiled. She wouldn’t let go of my hands. “We’ve met before.”

  “Ira was a good man.” She shook her head. “A good, good, man.”

  “Yes.” I held my smile. “He was.”

  I made my way up the staircase leading to the two upper apartments, just as my grandfather had with his own camera equipment so many times before, and pronounced myself at the door. Aristotle’s tail beat my thigh and the wet of his tongue attacked my hand. Elise was on the leather couch. I told her I love you. I entered the room but she barely looked at me. She just sat there, mouth parched. Every time I repeated those three words she tightened her eyes.

  I asked her what the matter was.

  “Nothing,” the therapist in training said.

  She walked into the bedroom and shut the door. It was the first of any number of sound effects that would compliment the uneasy silence in our home. I wondered if this sort of thing ever happened to my grandfather.

  THE PSYCHIATRIST (IN TRAINING)

  1

  I broke four organic eggs and bled their yoke over sizzling butter while Miles Davis crackled Kind of Blue on the turntable and Elise yawned in bed, stretching her fingertips. She’d been slapping the alarm despite the psychic powers of Aristotle. Black as midnight from head-to-tail and practically the size of a pony, he stood by the edge of our mattress for the last twenty minutes eerily staring at her.

  When she finally made the epic journey from the bed to our kitchen, the French girl with a gold head of hair poured the boiling kettle over a tea bag spooned with honey and sipped it scrunched up into a ball of sorts by her morning window in a spaghetti-strap shirt and G-string panties, like one of the most reluctant poets I’ve ever seen in this world. Two slices of bread popped up out of the toaster, blackened around its edges as usual, nothing that a little butter and jam couldn’t fix.

  I poured Aristotle his helping of breakfast in the bowl and joined my wife with a cup of coffee and burnt toast. The very second each clanging pebble beckoned his name he charged through the dog door and slid clumsy paws across the kitchen to get at them despite the fact that the naughty squirrel, who flagged the broadside of its tail from the telephone wire outside, was tormenting him. Famine followed. It was the school preacher in the sad eyes of an enormous hound running for office every single morning the moment after breakfast was chewed. It’s how he glared at us, as though famished from lunch box injustices. Disgusted, he crinkled his mouth in a manner that said, who do you think I am, China?

  Elise rubbed the dark spot under her eyes. They spoke of late night anxiety. By morning, it was sinking depression, symptoms more universal than most people realize among therapists, except she hadn’t even received her doctorate yet, not nearly enough time to drown under the rising tide of a therapist’s self-inflicted flogging. She considered the days appointments, the heaping of class work, and the tens of thousands of hours still on the horizon before she could complete her internship, bit into an egg, soaked its run-off with burnt toast, and sipped on her tea in an apparent state of misery.

  “Why are you a Catholic?” She finally said.

  I was stunned by the question. “Because I fell in love with a Catholic. Women have a way of changing a man’s theology like that.” I stroked her hair.

  Elise just stared at me, seemingly unsatisfied with my answer. Something else was troubling her. “Why are you really?”

  “We’ve been over this before. I didn’t think we should have two denominational beliefs in our marriage, and since I couldn’t run far enough away from my upbringing in the Baptist church, I thought, why not a few Hail Mary’s and the crucifix while I’m at it?”

  “You said yourself the Gospel is difficult to find in Catholicism, like snorkeling in muddy water.”

  “But it’s there.”

  “You feel that you’re intellectually superior to Catholics.”

  “No, I don’t. You’ve heard me defend the Church to my family a number of times. Catholicism is a smart tradition, I tell them. Though I do feel that I received a deep theological understanding in Evangelicalism which serves me well sorting through the oral and papal traditions of the Church.”

  Elise tightened the skin on her face as she considered the matter. “But you have a hard time accepting some of it.”

  “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

  “The Eucharist. You don’t accept the Eucharist.”

  “Does the communion bread and cup really become the body and blood of Christ? I don’t know.” I thought about it. “I have faith that it does.” I thought about it some more. “Elise, when I joined the Catholic Church, I went all in. The f
aith came first, and the logic has often followed.”

  “But not all of it.”

  “I still have a number of issues to work out.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “No. It doesn’t. I like the mystery.”

  Elise stared down at her tea.

  “You don’t like going to confessions.”

  “I don’t mind. I guess Evangelical thought dictates my actions on that issue most of the time, but I still go. I just think a man can and should repent of his sins directly to God. When was the last time that you went?”

  She considered not answering. “It’s been a while.”

  “Something else is bothering you.”

  Elise stared down at her tea a while longer.

  “I’m a horrible counselor,” she finally said.

  “You’re not a horrible counselor.” I cut her off. “You can’t let other people’s problems effect you. You haven’t been doing this long enough. You’ll learn.”

  Aristotle settled by the window with a view of the private courtyard below to wait on the naughty squirrel’s imminent return.

  “Thanks.” She routinely patted my leg and forced a smile. There was something else, deeper and darker hidden underneath it all. “Until I get my Doctorate, all sessions are videotaped for review. I guess I just can’t take the criticism well.”

  “She’s not a horrible counselor, is she Aristotle?” I caught his attention. He looked up at me.

  Mommy’s not stupid, I spoke for him. It’s those people who see her that need all the help. They’re the stupid ones.

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” she said kindly to Aristotle then turned to me, speaking slower and with a hint of alarm. “You do realize that he doesn’t actually talk, right?”

  “Of course.” I sipped from my Charlie Brown t-shirt mug. I decided not to tell her about the homeless man.

  “Good.” She patted my leg again. “Then I don’t need to make an appointment for you in my office today.”