by John Welter
“How come,” she asked, pointing her finger at the letters, “some of these is big, and some of these is little?”
“The big ones are for adults. You have to be at least eighteen to use those. I’m kidding you, Keesta. The big ones are called capital letters, and the little ones are just called little ones.”
“Like babies?”
“Like babies. But you don’t have to feed them, and they don’t cry.”
It was hard for me to speak on the same level as Keesta, since I had no idea what that level was, but even if I’d confused her, she at least smiled at me.
“You a strange one,” she said in a mildly amused way. “You sure you know English?”
“Frontwards and behindwards. I studied political science and English in college. By the time I’m through teaching you everything, you’ll be able to write speeches for the president, since he has no idea how to write his own.”
And then I began the maddeningly slow process of showing an adult how to memorize the alphabet, draw the letters, and tediously arrange them from meaningless chaos into the simplest of words. This was supposed to make me feel good, and it did, a little, but not very much.
“Now I want you to practice drawing all the letters. What for? Well, you have to memorize them. What for? You can’t have words without letters. So you have to draw each letter over and over until you memorize them, and then I’ll teach you some words.”
“Which letter do I draw first?” she said.
“I recommend the A.”
“Which one is that?”
“The first one.”
I think we were moving as rapidly as possible, which was pretty slow, and even though I wanted to feel nothing but kindness for this woman, she was already getting on my nerves, which I disguised completely, of course, but she stared with almost somber perplexity at the alphabet chart and then spent nearly five seconds just drawing an A.
“What does that spell?” she asked.
“It spells A,” I said. “That’s the shortest word in the English language. Pretty soon, we’ll work our way up to B.”
Making the world better sure was slow. You couldn’t even tell it was happening.
20
One night at home when I was sad and anxious because I hadn’t seen Natelle in a week and I didn’t know what she was doing and I needed her—and, for the anesthetic and psychic effect, I had mixed my emotions with about four or five beers—there was a news report on TV about the Stealth bomber, with a videotape showing one of the bombers gliding high up over some puffy clouds, which reminded me of flying a kite. It occurred to me that I should build a Stealth kite. And I did.
I wondered if Natelle would like it, if the aching of my heart would stop if I got to look in her eyes again, if whatever sadness she felt in these days of her ruined life could be eased a little if she looked in my eyes. This was always my project, to see if she’d be in love with me. So I called her to ask if she wanted to go with me to the Mall near Capitol Hill and fly my Stealth kite with me.
“Stealth kite?” she said, sounding skeptical and amused.
“We shouldn’t talk about it over the phone. This isn’t a secure line,” I said.
“What’re you talking about? What’s a Stealth kite?”
“It’s a kite you can’t see. At least I don’t think you can. I haven’t tested it yet. I just thought of it today when I saw a Stealth bomber on TV, and I decided to make a Stealth kite. It costs less than a Stealth bomber. It’s made out of a clear plastic frame and Saran Wrap. You should see it. I mean, you shouldn’t see it. I think if you get it high enough in the sky, no one’ll have any idea there’s a kite up there.”
We decided to launch the Stealth kite in the Mall, between the National Gallery of Art and the National Air and Space Museum.
“Some day this kite will be in the Smithsonian,” I said. “Or maybe on the Smithsonian, if it crashes.”
Natelle went into a fit of giggling, wagging her head like a girl and sort of stooping over as she giggled, letting the Stealth kite droop down toward the grass.
“You have to hold it up,” I said, holding the spool of transparent nylon fishing line that was attached to the kite.
“I’m trying, I’m trying.”
“It’s drooping. I didn’t design it to be launched from a droop position.”
“All right, all right,” she said, taking a big breath and standing up straight with the kite held above her head in the wind. The transparent plastic Stealth tail, made from an old couch cover, slapped at Natelle’s legs and stomach, and I was envious of the kite, which got to touch her.
“Are we ready?” she said.
“Not until I say ‘Red Alert.’”
“Why would you say ‘Red Alert’?”
“It’s what I thought of.”
“It sounds too militaristic.”
“All right. What color alert do you want?”
“I don’t think we should have an alert. Kites aren’t dangerous.”
“One thing I could say is ‘Go.’”
“All right. That’s fine,” she said, stepping back a few feet to get the line taut as the kite wiggled and fluttered in her hand, and I announced the crucial command.
“Go!”
I started running and letting the line spin out as the wind caught the kite and lifted it into the sky above Natelle’s head.
“It’s working!” she shouted, staring straight up at the kite as it slowly gained altitude, and I realized I could stop running and the wind would pull the kite up. I stood still and let more line spin off the spool, and already the kite was maybe thirty feet up and rising in a pretty strong wind. More importantly, it was hard to see the kite. Only a tiny amount of sunlight reflected off of its transparency. Natelle ran up to me laughing, staring at my eyes with exuberance, then staring back up at the kite, saying, “Look! You can hardly see it!”
“I know! Isn’t it neat?” I said, gleeful that the Stealth kite was working, but looking with wonderment and affection at Natelle, who’d been hurting so much, and now she was happy to be with me and my dumbass little toy.
I wanted to marry her. That was all I could think right then. I wanted to marry her. It just came to me from looking at her face, from a swarm of emotion I didn’t understand and couldn’t name and didn’t care to, that I wanted to marry her. It wasn’t rational. I had no interest in being rational. I just wanted Natelle, and prayed, Please let us love each other, as if none of my other prayers had worked but maybe this one would. Why did you pray for something so seemingly good, and never have any idea if it worked?
“Look at it, Doyle! It’s getting harder and harder to see it!” she said.
I wanted to tell her what I’d just prayed, but it might have hurt her worse than she already was. And so the only person I could talk to was the one I had to hide from.
“It is getting harder to see,” I said, wondering if I was talking about love or the kite. Still, it was a wonderful, silly time, watching the transparent kite drift farther up into the pale summer sky, with Natelle and me standing together and squinting harder and harder until it didn’t matter anymore.
“I can’t see it,” Natelle announced. “I mean, I know it’s up there. You can feel it,” she said, pushing her hand down on the fishing line that curved way up into the sky and seemed connected to nothing. “This is really weird, flying an invisible kite.”
“It’s sort of stupid. I like it. Do you want to fly it?”
“Yes! Yes!” she said, carefully taking the spool from my hands and laughing when she felt the invisible kite tug against her. “This is incredible. It’s like magic or something. I can feel it pulling on me, but where is it?”
I could feel it pulling on me, too. Not the kite. Natelle. It was strange to be filled with such powerful emotions for someone who, even though she stood right next to me, had no idea this was happening. It seemed like I was radiating affection and sexual desire with the intensity of refined uranium. Natelle should
have been radioactive by then.
“This is wonderful,” she said. “I don’t know why, but it’s wonderful. Thank you for letting me be with you today.”
“Letting you? Goddamn it, Natelle, I always like to be with you. When will the obvious seem obvious to you?”
“All right,” she said, leaning over and kissing my cheek, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I tingled.
For a long time we took turns flying the kite and wondering where it was. It seemed to be about three hundred feet up, but who could say?
“I can assure you, the Russians don’t have a kite like this,” I said.
“Are you going to share this technology with the Pentagon?” Natelle asked.
“Aw, fuck those guys. Let them build their own goddamn kites.”
One time I decided to maneuver the kite and said, “I’m going to tug on the line and make it do acrobatic tricks.” Then I tugged rhythmically on the line.
“It just did a figure eight,” I said as we looked at the vacant blue sky where maybe the kite was.
“Make it do a figure nine,” Natelle said, laughing when I tugged on the line from side to side, saying, “Wait a minute. That was a seven.”
“Make it write my name,” she said.
“Okay.”
I began weaving my arm, raising it and lowering it, as if gesturing far into the sky, where I commanded the invisible kite.
“There. I wrote your name,” I said, staring into her eyes, which it almost hurt to do.
She began laughing, and stood behind me with one arm suddenly around my stomach and her other arm resting on my arm that was flying the kite, and her chin was on my shoulder as she pressed her body lightly against me, perhaps all in innocence and unknowing of her effect on me. It felt like she was floating into me. I started to cry a little bit, at the unexpected rapture of being held by her, as if she finally had me without realizing she did. She couldn’t see me crying because she was behind me, but she put her fingers on my cheek where it was wet, and I thought I’d get in trouble, that she’d know I was crying only because she held me, as if I were the lover she didn’t know she had, and it wasn’t a secret anymore. I thought she’d push away from me and grab onto the line as if all we were doing was flying a kite, and I pretended to be looking up at the kite that neither one of us could see, giving her time to let go of me and act like none of this was happening, the way adults do when the truth is too true. But she didn’t let me go. She rubbed her fingers along my cheek where it was wet and held onto me a little tighter. And we stood like that without saying anything, pressed together. I let the kite go. I didn’t even know if Natelle realized that. It didn’t matter anymore. I think we were flying each other.
21
Ecstasy doesn’t last very long. Two hours after Natelle held me to her, just silently holding me for several minutes in the grass as we breathed together and shared the joy of touching each other for no other reason than that we wanted to, she went to some restaurant to have dinner with her husband, her goddamn husband, who I had seen only a few times at dinners and parties and who I wished would be beamed up by the particle transformer on the U.S.S. Enterprise on “Star Trek” and transported several million light years away where he’d do me the favor of vanishing. I at least wanted to kick his ass, which was mean and inexcusable, but I wanted to kick his ass, because he represented the ruin of Natelle’s life and the single breathing obstacle between Natelle and me. She said she was having dinner with him to talk about the divorce and the remains of their marriage, and now I sat by myself in a bar, drinking Mexican beer and waiting for Yamato to show up and help depress me the way single men did when they hung out with each other morosely in the mateless, dateless night, idly getting drunk and staring wistfully at women they’d never meet. They talked about goddamn baseball games and other pointless distractions whose pleasures were real enough and yet far inferior to the inexpressibly wondrous warmth of being held by someone like Natelle.
She’d held me like I shouldn’t go away, and now that was gone. I wrote on a white paper bar napkin, “Ecstasy doesn’t last very long.” It made me feel like Aristotle or Voltaire or Colette, writing some universal truth you wish you hadn’t thought of. Looking at my truth on the napkin made me think of the Bible, which said that in Heaven what you’d do is worship God for eternity. Maybe that was a practical arrangement for Heaven, but I had no interest in going there. I’d rather see Natelle. Maybe if Natelle and I died and we went to Heaven and everyone was standing around worshipping God, I’d take Natelle’s hand and go for a walk.
Mark Twain pointed out in some book that every description of Heaven in the Bible hinted that there’d be no sex there. Why would you want to be resurrected for a life of eternal celibacy? On my napkin I wrote, “Maybe there’s no sex in Heaven, but for some of us, there isn’t any here either.”
There was masturbation, one thing that nearly everyone did, then pretended that someone else did it. Masturbation was like having a date with yourself. And in the morning, you wouldn’t be embarrassed at who you woke up with. Just sad. I remembered vividly a time in high school when my health class teacher, this middle-aged woman, told us somberly that being by yourself and masturbating was wrong. I looked at the boy in the seat next to mine and whispered, “Does that mean you’re supposed to do it with someone else?”
Actually, a woman whose name I couldn’t remember anymore, maybe it was Eisell—my girlfriend for maybe five months when I was about 24—did that to me. For me. With me. She was afraid to have sex because of all the emotional complications, as if she was waiting for the perfect moment of undisputed love, although every other kind of sex was fine with her, as long as the penis didn’t actually go inside her. That was the rule, like Robert’s Rules of Sex. It was like parliamentary sex: I move that we have sex. Motion seconded, with the stipulation that your penis not actually go inside of me.
It was hard to make love that way.
And why did people make love anyway? The word “orgasm” wasn’t even in the Bible. Maybe the Greeks put it in there and the Christians took it out. Except for The Song of Solomon, the only references to sex in the Old Testament were always about some old man “spilling his seed.” It made them sound like clumsy farmers.
“Yoo-hoo. You spilled your seed.”
“Why, thank you. I hadn’t noticed.”
It produced the imagery of sex as agriculture. The man was the farmer and the woman was the field. On my napkin, I wrote:
Old MacDonald had a farm
Ee, yi, ee, yi, oh
And on his farm he spilled some seed
Uh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Thinking of farms made me think of bread, which made me think of making love with Natelle while she was in her kitchen making bread. She’d be kneading a big gooey mound of dough on the kitchen table, resting her left knee on the table, and I’d walk up behind her and begin massaging her through her orange sweatpants, and as she squeezed and folded the dough and hummed a childhood song, she’d put her other knee onto the table, with her legs apart, in front of me, and I’d slowly pull her sweatpants down and begin kissing and gently licking her as she hummed “The Farmer in the Dell.” And she’d say, “After you eat me, you can have bread.”
I wondered if this meant I was too sexual. Although, if I hadn’t made love in five years, how could I be too sexual?
And now I wanted bread. I had to stop thinking that. I ordered another beer and when I picked it up I felt my holster rubbing against my ribs. I wished it was Natelle’s hand rubbing against me, and I had to stop thinking that. It looked like I was going to have to completely stop thinking, and go into a religious, mystical daze where no thoughts entered or left my mind, which you could achieve by meditation or by drinking about nine or ten beers.
Alcohol was a strange thing. I looked around me at all the well-dressed, handsomely dressed, showily dressed middle-class people who would’ve found it horrifying, or at least indiscreet, if someone came up to them now
with a bag of cocaine or LSD or opium or Ecstasy and said, “Would you like to get high?”
“Get away from this goddamn table, you son of a bitch!” they’d say, and then take a big swallow of their white wine or bourbon or vodka. Americans were people who thought using most drugs was pathetic and destructive, and they’d tell you so over cocktails. We were at war with the Colombian drug lords, not because they were selling drugs, but because they were selling the wrong drugs. If the drug lords opened breweries in the United States, they’d be praised as level-headed capitalists. Probably in this crowd tonight I could find several men and women drinking wine who’d say they didn’t drink to get drunk. Lying was an honorable American tradition.
Suddenly I missed Natelle again. It must have been fifteen or twenty seconds since I’d last thought about her. Was that how you knew you were in love with someone—you were always thinking about them? And you always missed them? And the rest of the world seemed stupid? The rest of the world always seemed stupid. It seemed like a place to just wander through and be alone while you looked for someone to love. And when you finally found someone, there was no reason for that someone to want to be found. It was always possible to finally find the wrong person. I’d spent all of my adult life finally doing that. As if I should say, “At last! I’ve again found someone I wasn’t supposed to find!”
Oh, good. I’d depressed myself again.
Melinda, the bartender, walked up to me and said, “Are you all right, Doyle?”
I smiled at her and said, “Sure. I’m a healthy adult male in the prime of my life sitting here by myself in a bar surrounded by people with wives and husbands and dates who’ll go home with them, but not me. I’m fine.”
Melinda leaned on the bar in front of me and said, “I’m sorry. What happened to that woman I saw you with here last week?”
“Oh, she’s out having dinner with some jackass. Her husband.”
Melinda looked shocked.