In Hovering Flight

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  She didn’t finish “Sick with Certainty” for a year and a half—not until after her sweet, bearded boyfriend, strong and sensitive Kevin, announced one day that he would be moving into the bedroom two doors down from theirs, in the drafty old Vermont farmhouse they were sharing with six other recent college graduates. To share a bed with Gianna, into whose room he’d apparently been sneaking, after lulling Scarlet to sleep with his sweet lullabies, for the past three months.

  For a while Scarlet worried that real poems—good ones, not the countless discardable ones she kept tinkering with in her notebook—were only going to come to her when her heart was broken. But her experience after moving out of the farmhouse and, in the fall of 1992, enrolling in a graduate program in writing, suggested otherwise. During those three essentially celibate years of graduate school, she wrote the rest of the poems in her book. It all came to her in a rush: her life with Addie and Tom, Cider Cove, Richard, Cora—and many of those poems came to rest, somehow, in the body, or the song, of a particular bird. She hadn’t realized how much of Tom and Addie’s great passion she’d absorbed.

  She actually thought of titling her book Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, in a kind of tribute to Tom. But also as her own private joke, her way of asserting that we all become our parents eventually—though this wasn’t, of course, what Ernst Haeckel was saying at all.

  “Don’t call your book that, whatever you do, my love,” Tom said when she ran the idea by him. “You’re still not really understanding Haeckel, I’m afraid.”

  They were sitting in a café on Greene Street in Soho at the time; around the corner, in a gallery on West Broadway, Addie was busy with the mounting of a show of her work. It was the winter of 1996, and Scarlet had moved to New York the summer before, into a small but comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side that she rented for a song. This was yet another perk of being the child of Addie and Tom Kavanagh: The apartment was owned by one more bird-crazed admirer of her parents. Her book was to be published the following fall.

  Scarlet chose not to be insulted by Tom’s reaction to her idea for a title. He hated New York, she knew; something about the city always made him short-tempered.

  Even Addie seemed exhausted, during that week of mounting her show, by all the fuss and attention that had followed her since the Senator Swenson brouhaha two years before. Tom and Scarlet were both worried about her health, though neither was saying anything; it was a relief when, once the show was up, Addie announced that she wanted to get out of New York, even to skip the opening. “Lou can play gracious hostess,” she said; “she’ll do a far better job than I would.” She also proposed to Tom that he apply for that long-deferred sabbatical for the following year. “Let’s hide out someplace far away from all this for a while,” she said, “and let Scarlet bask in her new life and her book, without us breathing down her neck.”

  It was Addie’s fame that Alex, her editor, wanted to capitalize on, Scarlet felt, when he suggested she try for a title having to do with birds. “It’s part of your work, after all, this whole bird thing,” he said. Alex had actually been a good, and sensitive, editor of Scarlet’s work. They’d been working together since Scarlet’s prize for the book had been announced, in the spring of 1995. And they’d been sleeping together since the summer that followed, when Scarlet moved to New York and he took her out to dinner, two days after she arrived.

  In the end, they settled on All the Bilge and Ruin as the title, with a Morris Graves painting called Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye on the cover. Alex agreed with Scarlet that anything by Kollwitz, or by Addie, for that matter, would be too obvious. In fact he seduced her by finding the Graves painting and showing her a picture of it that night he took her to dinner.

  Alex’s marriage hadn’t held much energy or passion for a long time, he told her at that first dinner; he and his wife stayed together, he said, out of some sort of loyalty, as much to their families as to each other. She was in publishing as well, a high-level executive at another house, and at one time she’d been his editor; he’d published a couple books of poems himself. By the time Scarlet met him, though, he and his wife rarely saw one another; she worked around the clock, and traveled constantly, without him. They’d each had a series of affairs, and they seemed to find that a workable arrangement.

  Like others in that series, presumably, Scarlet imagined, for quite a while, that she would be the one to make him change his loyalties at last.

  For one thing, he told her, often, that he truly wanted children. He and his wife had considered it for a while, but when she didn’t become pregnant after a year of infertility treatments, she decided her heart really did belong to her work. For the first few years, Scarlet continued to harbor the fantasy of having several little poetry-loving babies with Alex. It was easy enough to replace the highly paid lawyer with a house on Nantucket from her college years with a well-enough-paid editor who had a number of friends in the Hamptons.

  Perhaps he was a father figure as well. This was the argument of some of her friends, Lou among them—less because of his age (he was only ten years older than Scarlet) than because of his appearance: He bore a striking resemblance to Tom. He could have been a “black Irishman,” as Tom liked to call himself, with his dark eyes and curly dark hair, though in fact he was Jewish. He also had the most sensuous mouth Scarlet had ever seen—far fuller in the lips than Tom, as she pointed out to Lou on several occasions. That first night he took her to dinner, she couldn’t take her eyes off his mouth, this mouth that was talking, in hushed, nearly reverent tones, about how powerfully her poems had affected him.

  He could seem arrogant, Scarlet knew, even cold. Lou was quick to point this out as well. “Since when do you find arrogance unappealing in a man?” Scarlet finally asked her, and that silenced her for a while. Cora, of course, was more understanding, as Cora would be. “You’ll figure out what to do,” was all she said to Scarlet during her many tearful visits to Cider Cove after she became involved with Alex. Scarlet knew what Cora meant by this was that she’d eventually figure out a way to leave him. Cora was considerably more confident about that than she was.

  Addie and Tom stayed out of it—their way always. For the first year or so, Scarlet hid her involvement with Alex from them; she feared their disapproval, which seemed strange to her later. Eventually hiding the affair seemed pointless—it was such a large part of her life by then—and so one evening when Addie and Tom came to see her in New York, she invited Alex to join them for dinner. He was charming, of course; she could see that Tom liked him, though Addie was (as always, when it came to the men in Scarlet’s life) a bit more reserved. When Scarlet told them, the next time she saw them, that Alex was married, Tom was visibly shaken by the news. Addie only nodded and said, “I thought so.”

  A few months after that, Alex spent a weekend with Scarlet at Cora’s; there was probably no safer place to go with her than a quiet, nondescript town on the Jersey shore, after all. Lou was there that weekend too, as were Addie and Tom. Everyone treated Alex cordially. Before long, everyone seemed to think of him as Scarlet’s boyfriend, plain and simple. Even she could forget, sometimes, that he was not fully available to her. Sometimes it seemed to Scarlet that life simply conspired to make her stay with him. There was the time, for instance, not long after her book was published, when she came home one day to find a hauntingly familiar voice on her answering machine. It was Bobby, and he sounded surprisingly like he had that summer before she’d left for college. She’d seen him on a few occasions after that, when they both happened to be visiting Cora in Cider Cove. He’d gone on to college in Albany, as he’d planned, and a year after he’d graduated had married his college girlfriend, a pretty, dark-haired girl named Cynthia, from Long Island; Scarlet had gone to their wedding at Cynthia’s father’s house in Patchogue.

  Over the years Cora had worried, Scarlet knew, about Bobby’s drinking. She didn’t know if Cora knew about his drug use; she imagined, knowing Cora, that she had wil
led herself not to know. But Bobby seemed to be doing all right during those years after college; he had a good job as an investment adviser, and he and Cynthia had bought a house outside Princeton. They had one young daughter, and when Bobby called Scarlet that day in December 1996, Cynthia was pregnant with their second child.

  They met for a drink a few days later, at a bar near his office in the World Trade Center. Scarlet hardly recognized him when he walked through the door; he could have been just one more of the clean-cut, gray-suited, postwork crowd. But then she saw his face—the same dark, brooding eyes, so unlikely above the carefully tuned smile he gave her.

  They hugged each other, a little awkwardly, and then he said, “I’m sorry I haven’t read your book yet, Scarlet. I’m going to—it’s just tough right now, you know, with work and the family and whatnot. I’ll get to it, though. It must be pretty exciting for you, having a book out.”

  Scarlet waved his praise and apologies away; she was used to this sort of greeting by then.

  Then he pulled a copy of the book out of his coat pocket and placed it on the table between them. “Will you sign it for me anyway, before we go?”

  She was used to this as well. “Sure,” she said, trying to smile as gratefully as she could. “It was really sweet of you to buy it.” Thinking, all the while, And what do I write on the title page of this copy? “To the love of my lonely teenage years; thanks for deflowering me”?

  They made polite small talk for an hour or so—about his family, Scarlet’s time in New England, Cora and her business at the bed-and-breakfast, Addie’s sudden fame.

  “Now she just seems to want to hide out in Burnham, with Tom,” Scarlet said. “I think all that attention wore them both out. I’ll go there to see them in a couple weeks,” she said, “for Christmas.”

  Bobby nodded, then flagged the waitress for a third drink. Scarlet was still on her first beer.

  “Will you go to Cora’s for Christmas?” she asked, grasping at straws. What were you supposed to talk about with an investment adviser?

  He took a sip and nodded. “Yeah, well, actually we’ll just be there on Christmas Eve. Then we’ll go to Cynthia’s family on the Island for Christmas day. Mom says that’s fine, that she likes her solitude on those big family holidays.” He shrugged. “Who knows if she really means it? You know my mom.”

  That sounded more like the Bobby Scarlet used to know, she thought—too aware for his own good, and cynical in the face of all that awareness. They bumbled on then, laughing as they recalled the Christmas eleven years before, when they’d returned from the mall with their newly purchased music to find their parents mysteriously silent, locked in some sort of miserable tableau, both their mothers wiping away tears.

  She was struck by the fact that despite having polished off four vodka tonics in the hour they’d spent in the bar, Bobby showed no signs of being drunk. It seemed there was something he wanted to say to her but for some reason couldn’t.

  When the check came he whipped out a credit card, pushing away the five-dollar bill Scarlet proffered. While he signed the slip she pulled on her coat and gloves, eager to escape into the cold air of the Manhattan evening. If this is what married life and a house in the suburbs look like, she was thinking—the drinking, the gray suit, nothing interesting to talk about—she wanted nothing to do with it.

  She was standing to go when he reached over to take her hand. “Wait,” he said. “You haven’t signed my book yet.”

  “Oh, right!” She laughed nervously and sat back down. “I completely forgot.” In fact she hadn’t forgotten, but she’d been hoping he had. She pictured the book on Bobby and Cynthia’s spotless coffee table in their spotless living room, unopened and unread. Then, while she fumbled in her purse for a pen, racking her brain for something innocuous, but friendly enough, to write, Bobby reached for her hand again. When she looked up at him, his eyes looked haunted.

  “Do you ever think about Richard?” he asked.

  Scarlet stared at him, shocked, for the moment, into silence. “Yes,” she answered honestly, when she finally found her voice. “Yes, Bobby, I do. Not as often as I did for a while.” And not in such horrific detail, she thought but didn’t say. “But I still think of him, and of you, and of our summers together.”

  He let go of her hand then, but he continued to stare into her eyes, as if he were searching for something. She had no idea what he was thinking. His breathing suddenly seemed inordinately loud—loud and fast.

  “There’s a poem in here that’s sort of about Richard,” she said at last, looking away and opening the book to sign it. “The one called ‘American Bittern.’”

  “To Bobby,” she wrote inside his copy of her book then. “Remembering Cider Cove, and Richard, and our midnight rides through the cemetery.”

  “I will read it,” he said when she handed the book back to him. “I know you don’t believe me, but I will.”

  She stood up and kissed him quickly on the cheek. “I believe you,” she said, even though she didn’t.

  She stopped outside the door of the bar and took a few deep breaths. A light rain had begun to fall, and the narrow streets of the financial district were slick and gleaming with light, crowded with cabs and people huddled under umbrellas. She had written those poems, she told herself as she stood there breathing it all in, and she had put that time—Bobby’s daily rebuffs, Cora’s silent tears alone at night, Addie’s madness, her own nightmare visions of Richard’s death—behind her. She needed to go home now, to go home and forget about this whole evening.

  When she turned to walk to the subway entrance at the corner, she glanced in the window to her right to see that Bobby had taken a seat at the bar, another vodka tonic in his hand.

  It was years before she heard from him again. And Scarlet put that odd visit behind her and fell into a peaceful enough routine for those last years of the millennium. A routine that was punctuated, occasionally, by sudden bouts of loneliness—late nights when she’d suddenly be filled with despair at her situation (no poems written for months, nothing but droning freelance work and a strange sort of thrall to this man who seemed to love her, yet would not, or could not, make a move to be with her). Those were the nights she rented a car and drove to Cora’s, arriving at some ungodly hour. Every time Cora would answer her call, rising to let her in and make up her bed upstairs, greeting her with a cup of coffee in the morning, ready, once again, to listen, saying little or nothing, while Scarlet cried about her sorry state.

  From time to time she’d try dating again. It wasn’t that hard to meet men, really. New York offered ample opportunity: other runners in Central Park in the morning, readings at neighborhood bookstores, even, once, during a tour of jury duty, where she met a songwriter and a computer programmer, each of whom asked her out for coffee—that safest of all first dates—within five minutes of each other. There was also the occasional publishing-world party she went to with but not really with Alex; they’d arrive separately, and on the several occasions when his insistence on secrecy was particularly irksome to her, Scarlet got a nasty sort of pleasure from giving her phone number to another man, right under his nose.

  “You are missing a rollicking good time,” Lou said to her on New Year’s Eve, 1999. She and Scarlet were spending the night in Cider Cove; Addie and Tom, seemingly newly in love—with each other and, once again, with birds—were spending the holidays in Costa Rica. Scarlet had wanted to get out of New York, less out of a sense of end-of-the-millennium menace than a feeling that life was somehow passing her by.

  “Not to mention squandering the years of your sexual prime,” Lou added. Scarlet rolled her eyes. As if it wasn’t bad enough to hear her use terms like “sexual prime,” she had to deal with the rather embarrassing fact that Lou was slurring her words. But then, she was hardly sober herself. Hence, perhaps, her decision to fight back for a change.

  “Lou, I’ve tried dating, and sleeping around, and you know what?” she said. “I hate it. Okay? It’s
empty and soul-depleting, not to mention dangerous. You know, it’s a different world now than it was when you were my age.” (There were few things more effective, Scarlet knew, than bringing up Lou’s age when you wanted to silence her.) “Maybe you’ve heard of an inconvenient little illness known as AIDS?”

  Lou stared at her for a while then, saying nothing. Finally she shook her head. “Good Lord, Scarlet,” she said, “you sound like some puritanical old Republican. What in God’s name has happened to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Scarlet whispered back, and then she dissolved in tears. “I don’t know what’s happened to me.” The truth was, she had vowed, driving to Cider Cove that day, that this would be the year she would end things with Alex, and somehow move on. She hadn’t seen him since before Christmas, and she’d told him not to call her. Maybe, she thought as she drove south on the Garden State Parkway, she’d even leave New York. But that night, arguing with Lou, drinking too much champagne, she saw that it wasn’t going to happen. The next morning, dry-mouthed and queasy, she called him.

  Scarlet’s relationship with Alex might have continued, in that on-again, off-again way, if the new millennium hadn’t brought some surprises, some of them more personal than others, for both her and her parents. What triggered Addie’s restlessness again? A stolen presidential election? The threat of greater environmental losses than she and Tom would have even dreamed of, idealistically penning and illustrating A Prosody of Birds thirty years before? And eventually the unforeseen, and completely unimaginable, attack on the World Trade Center?