Dogfight

by Michael Knight

  “No and no,” he continues, loudly, “I’m just over here doing some work. Sorry, but I sent Holly on an errand. Boundless energy that girl.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I understand.”

  He says, “Everything’s great here. A little business and a lot of pleasure, if you know what I mean. She’s a terrific girl.”

  Pancho gets to his feet and watches me. Behind him is a bookcase filled with my work. A decorative bowl with a mosaiced daisy in the center. A pitcher done in black and red with a slender handle. It took patient hours to cut glass small enough for that handle. Clay candlesticks in Christmas colors. All the things that I have made.

  “Hello?” Alexander says.

  “I’m here,” I say.

  “Holly said the strangest thing to me today,” he says. “We were coming back from a lunch meeting and there was one of those daytime moons. You know the kind I’m talking about?”

  “Un-hunh.” I can see it. The moon white and false-looking in the light. Its surface scarred with dry blue lakes, its edges blurring into the pale sky.

  “And she looks me right in the eye and says she wishes she could walk on the moon,” he says. “That someday they’re going to colonize it up there. Isn’t that strange?”

  That sounds like something Holly would say. I picture her—I can’t help seeing her with him—scanning the sky for an uncommon moon, one hand raised to shade her eyes, drawing a perfect line of shadow across the bridge of her nose.

  “Yes,” I say, “very.”

  “Well,” he says.

  The static evaporates. His voice, saying good-bye, is clear but distant from the mouthpiece. There is a long moment before he hangs up, when I imagine I can just barely hear someone moving in the background.

  I call Mason and tell him that I want to get drunk. He takes me to a Western bar that he likes, where they make me take off my baseball cap, even though fully half of the men inside are wearing Stetsons. I wore the hat because I haven’t showered since Holly left, and my hair is slick and dirty and stays close to my head.

  Mason guides me to a seat at the bar and we watch the dancers, lined up, moving stiffly in unison. They all know the steps. It is an unfortunate combination, the seventies disco lighting, blinking pink and turquoise, and the awkward line dance, a cotillion version of someone’s idea of country western dancing.

  “You look like shit,” Mason says.

  “Thank you very much,” I say.

  “If it’s driving you this crazy put an end to it,” he says. “I always tell people, if you’re worried, you’ve probably got good reason to be worried. Simple as that.”

  He knows that I know what he means.

  I had the idea that I would have an affair tonight, sleep with someone completely different than Holly. I would find a tall and skinny country girl, all angles to Holly’s athletic curves. But what would I do if I found her? I wouldn’t know how to begin, wouldn’t have anything to say to her or know how to kiss her. Holly has taken all of that from me.

  “You’ve spoiled that dog absolutely rotten,” Holly says to me. She is sitting on the couch twisted around to watch me feed Pancho leftover cake and ice cream. The two of us, the dog and I, had a party last night, when I came in drunk, and ate ourselves silly. Holly folds her arms on the back of the couch and rests her chin on them. To the dog she says, “You’re ruined, Pancho. I mean it.”

  He raises his eyes but keeps eating. I made certain to pick up Holly at the airport this time but couldn’t think of anything to say in the car. It was the longest hour of my life, but Holly didn’t seem to notice and filled my silence easily, it seemed, with stories of Los Angeles. Alex is going to carry Donna Karan this season. They saw Michael Bolton on the sidewalk in West Hollywood. She met a group of ten phenomenally—her word—handsome gay men, handsome as statues, she said. She couldn’t understand why they were gay, looking like that. I said maybe they had never seen anything as beautiful as each other. She laughed.

  Now she says, “Where have you been the last two nights? I tried to call. I let it ring and ring.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I was in the shower. Or outside with the dog.”

  “It was like midnight when I called,” she says. “You two are unnaturally attached.”

  She smiles and pats the couch next to her for me to sit down. Last night, when she called, I was sitting right where she is sitting. I knew it was her but let the phone keep ringing, twenty, thirty earsplitting rings. It was all I could do not to answer. I wanted to vomit. I wanted her to wonder.

  The phone rings now, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

  “Is Willy home?” The voice says. A woman’s voice.

  I tell her she has the wrong number but she doesn’t believe me. She reels off my number and I say, “Yes, that’s right but there’s no Willy here.”

  “Just put him on, Arthur,” she says. “This is Arthur, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I say.

  Holly smiles and shakes her head. She says, “Hang up on ’em.” She makes a phone with her hand, thumb as earpiece, pinky mouthpiece, and slams it on an imaginary receiver.

  I don’t hang up. I can hear music playing softly in the background. Jazz. The woman sounds a little drunk.

  “Look, Arthur,” she says, “I haven’t talked to him in a week.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I say.

  “Just tell him that I called. Please, Arthur. Make sure he knows that I called,” she says.

  “I’ll tell him,” I say. “I promise.”

  I hang up and cross the room to Holly. She drapes her arm over my shoulders and sags against me. We watch the fire play.

  “You’ve been sleeping with Alexander,” I say.

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. I expected a reaction, but there is nothing. She is still soft and warm against me, relaxed, innocent, fingertips brushing the back of my neck. The dog circles, then curls up in front of us, between the coffee table and our feet. This could be so right. It could be.

  “Let’s go to bed,” Holly says.

  “I’m not tired,” I say. “You go on.”

  “I’ll put up with this forever,” she says. “If you want me to.”

  Pancho scrambles to his feet, suddenly, and rushes to the window barking. He has the deep, booming bark of a dog twice his size. Its sound fills the room, like a gunshot, and its force causes him to bounce and hop with each report.

  Holly puts a hand on my cheek and turns my face toward her. She kisses me, but I don’t open my mouth. The dog stops barking but doesn’t leave the window. Holly takes her shoes off, pushing each one loose with the toes of the other foot. She stands and pads gently to the bedroom. For a while, I pretend that Holly will come back and stand in the doorway and smile the way she did at the Laundromat, as if everything, all of this, were perfectly natural. But I don’t believe that it is.

  I go over and crouch next to the dog, shading my eyes so I can see past our reflections, trying to see what spooked him. There isn’t anything out there that I can see, just night. In the faint moonlight, I can make out the drowned cypress trees looming up from the water. I try to remember if I have made Holly any promises. Or she me. I can’t remember.

  Amelia Earhart’s Coat

  When she was in the fourth grade, Hettie saw her father kissing Amelia Earhart. Hettie wasn’t supposed to be at home, was supposed to be down the beach swimming with her mother and the Fitzgeralds, but she wasn’t. She was cutting through the dining room on her way to the wide balcony that faced the ocean. She was angry at her mother for embarrassing her and had a sketchy plan to rest her elbows on the stone railing, her chin in her hand, and stare wistfully out at the ocean, like a prisoner in a story musing of home. But this was better. Both sets of French doors were open and the sail-white curtains were billowing back into the room, and beyond the doors, in dreamy flashes because of the waving curtains, she saw Amelia Earhart in her father’s arms.

  Not fifteen minutes before, Hettie had be
en wading in the shore-break with Baker Fitzgerald. She couldn’t actually swim, because she had a cast on her arm. Baker was a year older, and they went to the same school in the city. He had jabbed a finger over Hettie’s shoulder. “Ahoy,” he said, “a white whale.” Hettie had turned to look and seen her mother in a bathing cap, floating on her back in the water. Her arms were spread like flabby wings and her skin was pale and doughy-looking, bunched beneath her swimsuit. Her lips were blue with cold. She was as bloated as a drowned man. Hettie threw a fistful of sand at him and stalked off down the beach. Her mother hadn’t seen her leave.

  Hettie took an apple, now, from the crystal bowl on the dining table and sat in her father’s place. Her father was the most handsome man she knew. A Panama hat was perched on his head, cocked back to show his dark widow’s peak, and he had snappy little creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He was so tall that he had to stoop to kiss Amelia Earhart and she had to lift herself on tiptoe, her round, bare heels coming out of her shoes, to reach his lips.

  Hettie was reading a book that summer in which spies had lived with deaf people for a year to learn how to read lips. Hettie was practicing. She watched her father’s mouth moving, then Amelia Earhart’s. She shifted the hard apple from hand to hand, thumping it against her cast, and concentrated on their lips. Unless she was mistaken, Amelia Earhart said to her father, “Peter Saxacorn, I love you more than anything in the world.”

  This was Rye, New York, March 1937. A line of magnificent houses stretched along the beach like gracious actors preparing for a bow. The air was still wintry, but that didn’t stop summer residents from reclaiming their houses, bringing servants out from the city to open the windows, clean the linens, scrub the bitter salt smell from the floors. Everyone in Rye knew that Amelia Earhart was preparing to leave soon on another flight, this one around the world. Hettie knew everything about her. Born in Atchison, Kansas. College at Columbia. Summer school at Harvard, where she became friends with Hettie’s mother. She had already flown with Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon across the Atlantic, across the very ocean that stretched grayly away from the beach where Hettie’s mother had humiliated her. She had piloted a plane all on her own along the same route, setting a new speed record for the crossing: 13 hours, 30 minutes. And again, two years later, she had flown nonstop from Mexico City to New York—14 hours, 19 minutes—another record. She wasn’t just the fastest woman; she was the fastest anybody.

  One thing Hettie could say in her mother’s favor was that she had brought Amelia Earhart into their lives. They were friends before Hettie was born, when her mother was still beautiful. Hettie had seen pictures of them together. Boston, against a plain brick wall. Their hair bobbed short, like schoolboys, their slender calves and narrow ankles below knee-length dresses.

  When Miss Amelia—that’s what Hettie called her—would come to dinner, she would say, “Your mother was a wild one, Hettie. Every boy from Annapolis to Princeton was after her.” She would flash a wide, tipsy smile and laugh out loud like a man. “But Peter was the lucky one.” Here, she would touch the backs of Mr. Saxacorn’s fingers. “They were the most beautiful couple. The envy of the known world.”

  He’d say, “I’m a lucky man,” and draw his hand away.

  “Poor Peter,” Hettie’s mother would say. “I’m sorry I can’t be beautiful for you anymore. I never bounced back from carrying you, Hettie. I gave you all my beauty in that delivery room.”

  Hettie’s mother was English and her voice squeaked when she was drunk. She’d try to catch Hettie and pull her into her lap, but Hettie was too old for that and besides, the thought of being born made her cringe. Hettie would skip away, stay just out of her reach. Her mother was too heavy and too drunk to catch her.

  “You’re still the most beautiful woman I know,” her father would say and his dishonest kindness made Hettie love him more.

  Now, lying in her bed, the dampness from her bathing suit soaking into the sheet beneath her, Hettie remembered Amelia Earhart’s hand on her father’s. She was glad for him. Maybe they had always been in love. Her mother would be angry when she discovered the wet sheets, sandy from her feet, but Hettie didn’t care. She closed her eyes and she was in a Lockheed Vega with her father and Amelia Earhart. They were flying above Rye on a mad dash for Mexico City. Amelia was at the stick. The massive houses scrolled by beneath them one by one until they came to the house of Charles Putnam, Amelia’s husband, where they swooped down for a closer look. He was standing on his own balcony looking up at them, smiling sadly. He raised his drink; he was sorry to see Amelia go but he, unlike Hettie’s mother, understood that you can’t stand in the way of true love. They dipped a wing in salute, then looped away from him into the sky. A voice behind Hettie said, “Ahoy, a white whale.” She turned around and her father was gone. In his place sat Baker Fitzgerald, his skin already beginning to tan, his hair the color of a wedding ring. He was pointing out the window and she followed his finger with her eyes until she saw a surfacing whale, massive and sickly white with red-rimmed eyes and algae growing on its back, water rushing from its exposed flanks. Amelia said, “Hold on tight, Hettie,” and they dove again. The engines howled. Baker’s arms slipped around her waist. Gunfire broke the water like raindrops.

  Hettie opened her eyes, walked over to the full-length mirror. She studied herself close up. Her hair sticky from the salt in the wind, the constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She stepped back and turned sideways, hiding her cast against her body. She had no figure yet, was lean and tall like her father, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t ever have one. There was hope for her yet. She would just be sure not to have children.

  Her parents were having a party tonight and everyone would be there. The Blackfords and the Duponts, the Marchands and the Ex-leys. Neville what’s-his-name—the diplomat who had served with Hettie’s grandfather in the foreign service—he would be there, too. Amelia Earhart would come with her husband. Hettie wondered what it was like for her father and Amelia Earhart, having to hide their love. Having to be nice to her mother and Mr. Putnam, having to kiss each other on the cheek, when what they wanted to do, Hettie imagined, was go running up the stairs and fall into each other’s arms. She ached for them.

  Tonight, her mother would dress her up in one of the frilly, little-girl dresses with a low waist. She would put a bow in her hair and parade her around the house a few times to greet the guests, before banishing her to her room for the duration of the party. Everyone would ask about her cast, and her mother would tell the story for her, would get it all wrong. Hettie was running from her awful parents, her mother would say. She’d been sent to her room and was trying to escape. She would tell the story dozens of times, maybe changing it a bit once in a while, and everyone would laugh. But that wasn’t it at all. Hettie always obeyed her father. She wouldn’t have run from him. She had been standing at her open window on the second floor looking at the smaller houses across the cockleshell road, white as bones, and had suddenly realized that she could jump. She could ease out onto the sill and hurl herself off, give herself up to the air. And that’s exactly what she did. It was as if she couldn’t stop herself. It had been the most thrilling thing she had ever done, worth all the pain, when she pitched forward on the grass and snapped her wrist, worth the miserable, persistent itching. Only Amelia Earhart could understand something like that.

  Hettie’s mother had big plans for her cast. Just that morning, sprawled on a beach chair, like something washed up from the sea, she had said, “Hettie, how does this sound? We’ll paint your name with nail polish on your cast. I’ll do it in calligraphy. I learned calligraphy in school and I haven’t tried it in years—It’ll be smashing—and we’ll tie a bow around it, a blue one like your dress. What do you say?”

  Calligraphy. What a useless talent. Nothing at all like lip-reading or disguise. Nothing at all like flying a plane. Even now, Hettie heard the servants downstairs moving furniture to make a dance floor, the
caterers setting up. From her window, she could see sofas and end tables being carried across the neat lawn and loaded into trucks to be carted away. They would be stored for the night and returned in the morning. Hettie stripped out of her bathing suit and changed into dry clothes. She crept to the head of the stairs and listened for her mother. She could hear her voice, directing the caterers, drifting in from the beach. Her mother wouldn’t want her wandering off so close to the party.

  “Hettie, what are you up to?” Her father’s voice behind her.

  She turned to find him leaning out of the bathroom, just head and shoulders, hair slicked back with water. The left side of his face was smeared with shaving cream, the right smooth and clean. He had a cigarette between his lips. She stepped over to him on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. She wanted to smell him, that lime and soap smell with the smoke all mixed in. She stepped back, winked, and pressed a finger to her lips. He said, “I get it. Secret mission. Mum’s the word. Aye, aye, captain.” Her father had been a navy man.

  “Close your eyes,” she whispered and he did as she asked.

  “Don’t hurt me,” he said, eyes squinched shut, a pencil line of smoke drifting up from between his lips.

  Hettie nicked a cigarette from the pack on the ledge of the sink and trotted back to the landing, waited until two workmen passed carrying a long striped sofa, then dashed down the stairs and threw herself into the cushions, pressed herself flat. They wobbled, a moment, under her weight but didn’t stop. She got off at the back of the truck, thanked them for the ride, and headed off down the road toward the Fitzgeralds’. Maybe Baker would want to share her cigarette.

  She knocked on the kitchen door and was met by a colored woman who sat her down at the kitchen table and asked her to wait while she went to fetch Baker. The kitchen was immaculate, smelled of bleach. Baker came in without the colored woman and stood in the middle of the room. He said, “Whaddaya want?”