Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  They pulped me pretty grimly—I had to get stitches in two places and both my eyes were blackened—but the rest of the bar's occupants, excepting B. B. Mike who was winded from laughing so hard, mounted a riotous counteroffensive that resulted in one of the lawyers (the paralegal-knocker-upper) getting his jaw broken and face lacerated by—you guessed it—a fifth of Cluny's. (Felix the Fat never served Cluny's again, calling it "cursed.") It was an unusual barfight in that it took place almost entirely behind the bar, the spatial equivalent of a heavyweight boxing title being fought in a shower stall, which also meant there was lots of damage. Dead Fred's urn got knocked from its sacred upper shelf and his ashes were strewn everywhere. I heard later that Felix made the sign of the cross nonstop while hosing Dead Fred off the floor mats.

  I got suspended for two weeks but that wasn't nearly the worst of it. The Times-Picayune got wind of the brawl and an overambitious reporter framed it as a repercussion of the neighborhood's tensions—the junkies/hippies/freaks rising up against the suited gentrifiers. The reporter even referenced Hunter S. Thompson's old Freak Power campaign in Aspen and made ironic hay about the bar being named the Turf Exchange. It would have been nice to be a folk hero but the story also noted that the cause of the initial fight was "a conflict over a woman," a not entirely incorrect misconception that must (I've always presumed) have stemmed from B. B. Mike who'd been eavesdropping on the lawyers like me. Probably he said, in classical Mike-speak, that the lawyers had been "talking shit about some broad," and that was enough for the reporter who, ambition notwithstanding, never gave me the courtesy of a call.

  Imagine Stella's reaction. Then square it, and square it again, then multiply it by crazy. She'd been suspicious when I came home from the emergency room, all stitched-up and black-eyed, because I couldn't really explain the cause of the quarrel. "Babe, they were jackass lawyers," I said, as if that resolved everything. But she knew my conciliatory, hippie-poet ways—not to mention the high tolerance I had, owing to my grandfather, for New Orleans lawyers—well enough to sense missing pieces. But what could I say? We'd never talked about what happened at the clinic—she flatly refused—and there seemed no exculpatory defense, in her eyes, for my reaction to Buy-Ten's smarmy boast. "What?" I imagined her screaming. "Were you envious?" Or perhaps taking the opposite position and accusing me of secretly hating her because she'd chosen, on her own, to abort Speck—nevermind that she didn't follow through with it, and that I was the one who drove her to Gentilly. (By this time I'd been theorizing that her taut overprotectiveness with Stella Jr. might derive from that turnabout.) Frankly I didn't want to reintroduce the word "abortion" into our vocabulary; the psychic wounds still oozed. And what's worse: I couldn't honestly explain what had happened—why I'd poured that cement mixer—because to do that would expose the great black hole that I was feeling in my life, the loneliness and constriction and sense of dreams irredeemably deferred, the dankness I felt mixing myself my seventh vodka-tonic on the couch at night, and I didn't see how I could confess all this to Stella without her concluding that I didn't love Speck, her, or the both of them. So I stonewalled.

  I kept stonewalling even after the paper arrived two mornings later, which in retrospect was resoundingly stupid. As the old saw counsels: If you're trapped in a hole, stop digging. That morning we had a terrible fight made even more terrible by Speck's relentless bawling. When Stella demanded to know who the "whore" was, I broke into mirthless but uproarious laughter because the word "whore" was so ludicrous and un-Stella-like. The laughter enraged her enough that she ordered me to move out and, to help me start the process, in a frenzy she swept shelves' worth of my books off the bookcase, letting them crash to the floor. Of course it didn't help that a half-dozen empty Smirnoff bottles rolled after them. Clink, clink. Clinkclinkclink.

  Overwhelmed, she collapsed to the floor in a puddle of sobs and let me hold her there for a time and even let me fetch her a glass of water which I thought spelled progress. Very calmly she asked again who the "whore" was, and this time I didn't laugh but told her, with proper gravitas, that there was no whore and never had been. "Oh, Bennie," she said, wagging her head. "Bennie, Bennie, goddamnit Bennie." She studied the water glass for a long silent while, sitting amidst the empty fifths and the splayed books, before smashing it into my face. Yep: surprised me too. Blood and glass exploded everywhere and I was instantly blind in one of my blackened eyes. Dumbfounded, all I could say was "You know that was our only glass." I held a reddening t-shirt to my face while Stella drove me to the hospital with poor Speck wailing in the carseat. When they asked me what had happened, in the emergency room, I proclaimed myself a "revolutionary" and said the nurses needed only to check the day's Picayune for proof. That brought the attention of the cop on duty whom I satisfied with a story about colliding with a water glass in my wife's hand when I bent down to pick up the (fictional) cat. "Must be some pussy," he said, whether referring to the wife or the cat I wasn't sure.

  We lasted another eight months, some of them better than others. Because we were low on cash, Stella removed my stitches rather than paying a doctor to do it. It was a weirdly placid night, almost beautiful in its way, or rather belle laide as the French would say: beautiful-ugly. I sat in a ladderback chair beneath the gothic chandelier in our living room, lightly sipping a vodka-tonic, as she pulled out the stitches with tweezers while Speck rolled on the floor giggling and saying dur-dur-dur. Maybe it was the vodka but that night as we made love for the first time in weeks I found myself weeping and unable to stop. I was crying so badly that we had to pause midway through. With her head against my rising, falling chest Stella asked, softly, if I was crying from joy or sadness and I responded, "Both." There in the dark she sponged away my tears with her lips. We finished with gorged screams, more than a rarity for us, and Stella fell into a contented-looking sleep, a quarter-smile on her face. Since childbirth she'd developed a snore —a gentle chordal exhale, like someone sighing through the low holes of a harmonica—and that night I lay awake listening to the music of her breathing and wondering what the hell love was and if this was it. After a while I gingerly lifted her arm off me and made myself a vodka-tonic which I drank sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her sleep. There was no moon but the streetlamp outside the bedroom window cast a white glow upon her that seemed nothing short of sacred. In these moments it was easy to believe that she loved me and I loved her and that everything was as it should be, in an alternate galaxy for which that streetlamp was the sun.

  Yet such nights were uncommon and perhaps it's unduly sentimental to dwell upon them. Near the end I was trying to write again and it wasn't going well. Post-Speck, Stella had abandoned poetry and I felt I was expected to do the same. "You're a father," she said, as if drawing an impenetrable line between poet and parent. "So was William Carlos Williams," I said. "You're not Williams," came her accurate if deflating rejoinder. Charles and I patched things up and I took to drinking with him on my nights off, first occasionally and then regularly. Charles cultivated a posse of art-minded coeds and there always seemed to be some fresh and earthily alluring girl with an apparent Eeyore fetish telling me I looked "sad," brushing the hair out of my eyes until I'd swat her hand away. One night, in the alley beside the Exchange where I'd led a member of Charles's coterie longing to share a joint, I found myself kissing a twenty-one-year-old from a place called Hot Coffee, Mississippi, whose humid accent was like sorghum to my addled mind. This brief interlude might have tipped further had she not whispered, "I'll do the things she won't." I'm not sure why I was so offended but when Charles tried to stop me from storming out of the bar I pushed his arm away and told him to stay the fuck away from me blah blah fuck you blah. Once at home I lay on the couch, as always, and drank myself to sleep in front of the salt-colored static on the TV. Maybe I even talked to the static, blah blah fuck you blah, I don't know. That night I hated everyone, particularly myself. This feeling only deepened the next morning when I awoke to the sight of Stella sit
ting a foot away from me atop the coffee table, crying. It was a mellow, defeated cry. "Look at you," she said to me. I didn't protest, or ask what to look for. Frankly I didn't even try to look.

  When the end finally came, we were having—to my mind—another one of those frail good nights. Stella cooked her famous spaghetti & meatballs ("If I shut my eyes almost but not quite all the way, when you're cooking this," I used to tell her, "I see you as an old fat Italian mama with a dark mustache"; she hated this though I meant it with vast affection), and Fantasy Island was on the TV set. Stella's adorably snobbish contempt for TV popped like a soap bubble after Speck was born. Sometimes I'd find her and the baby curled on the couch, watching gameshows—hypnotized by Wink Martindale. The downstairs neighbors were out of town so I entertained Speck with some cloddish tapdancing on the old wood floor and even Stella—I think—was laughing. Or maybe I just imagined she was laughing—desire painting perception. In any case, this was the scene: the three of us on the couch, awash in the television's bluesy glow though mostly ignoring Fantasy Island because it turned out to be a repeat, Stella and me trading our child back and forth, rubbing our noses against hers, tickling her lips to make her grin. To me the evening looked and felt like peace—not domestic détente, but the real thing. A field of lavender, a northern lake at dawn. Or whatever air-freshener imagery best evokes peace.

  Cradling Speck, I said some nonsensical things to her, or rather partly sensical: some sugary riffs about her future. "One day you'll be big, and wear dresses," things like that. I wasn't really paying attention to what I was saying—it was sweet-talk, lulling blather—until I said, "And one day I'm going to walk you down the aisle and hate every second of it," which caused Stella to abruptly stiffen. "Jesus," she murmured.

  I sat there bemused. "What?"

  She looked away, pursed her lips, then stood up and walked to the door to the gallery. Finally she called me an asshole.

  "Because I said I'd hate every second of it? It was a joke. Just a ... dumb daddy joke."

  She was clenching her eyes shut with the heel of her palm pressed against her forehead. "Stella," I said.

  "Because you're lying to her," she said finally. She peered up at the ceiling and I could see that she'd been clenching her eyes to stanch the flow of tears. Now they ran loose. "I can take you lying to me but hearing you lie to her ... Jesus, Bennie, we're not doing this anymore." "We" meant the Stellas. "We can't take you anymore."

  Back up, I told her. Whoa. We were having a good night. "No," she said. "You were having a good night. There are no fucking good nights for us. There's just us wondering if you're coming home and wondering why we should give a damn. If we give a damn." I told her that her saying "us" was a little over the top, that dragging Speck into it was unfai—

  "Fuck you! Do you hear me? Fuck you!" Screaming, pointing, rage as violent and unexpected as lightning shot down from a cloudless blue sky. "Do you have any fucking idea what you've done to me? You were just a goddamned summer fling, a way to pass the time, and now"—slapping her chest—"look. what. the. fuck. you've done to me."

  "Because you got pregnant? Is that what this is about?"

  A groaning sound. "You don't get it. You piece of shit, you don't get it. This has nothing to do with me getting pregnant and nothing to do with her—"

  You just said it was about her.

  "It's about you, Bennie. You don't care about us—not as people, anyway, not as your daughter and your daughter's mother, not as human beings, as flesh."

  That's—

  "No, listen. All you care about, and barely, is the idea of us and the idea of you sticking by us—you're here in this room right now because you're loyal to the idea of Bennie fucking Ford acting like a man and taking care of his family—no, actually I think it's something worse, sometimes I think we're your excuse for failure—but not because you want to be here, not because it matters to you that we're here together. We're just more of your props, Bennie. Just like your Lucky Strikes and your stupid loud Underwood typewriter and that stupid tweed cap that makes you look like an out-of-work caddie. We're all of us, cigarettes and child, just movable props in The Life of Benjamin Ford, little figments of your ego."

  —

  "Jesus, okay, fine. Let's call it your anti-ego. Every day you wake up and try to, to hew to some delusional idea, the same way your mother does though at least she's got a doctor's note, and by the middle of the day, when life isn't aligning with the idea, you start drinking. Why? Because drinking pushes the life and the idea of it closer together, makes them both so foggy that you can't tell them apart. So you keep drinking until, until they're one and the same but by that time it's all fog, and by that time nothing exists outside of your head at all. And then it's all idea, and no life. Have you ever even thought how the fuck that makes us feel? No. No. Because we're just employees of, of your imagination, and every day, Bennie, every day"—voice cracking—"we feel that imagination turning more and more away from us, or against us."

  —

  "That's bullshit. My god, you and your bullshit. You couldn't even make it to her birth. And do you know why? Because the, the actuality of it didn't matter. It didn't matter to you! It was already complete in your head, it was finished. You were a father! You! It was all about you, your idea of you, the you preening inside your head, the word of it—father. So what did it matter that me and my mother and your new daughter were at the hospital? Do you have any fucking clue how that humiliated me? A cop dragging you off the elevator to see your child? The nurse asked me, asked me the next morning if I wanted to talk to a counselor. She wasn't even on duty when you came in—she'd heard about it from the other nurses. With my mother sitting there, twirling her goddamn pearls, she asked me if I needed a counselor. That was supposed to be the happiest day of my life and I spent it vomiting because of you, not looking my mother in the eye because of you—"

  —

  "Bennie, life is real. It's hard and it hurts and it's nothing like the world in our heads and at some point everyone grows up and realizes that and it doesn't mean they've given up or sold out or died inside, it just means they've learned that the ideas are just that, they're smoke rings, vapor, and that people have to live in the world as it is—"

  —

  "Give her to me. How dare you. Give her to me now."

  —

  "Coming from you that's meaningless. Maybe you love yourself loving me but I don't think you could feel the distinction—I don't think you're capable of feeling it—"

  —

  "Yes. Maybe. Maybe I did love you, for a time. But does it even matter anymore, Bennie? I mean, so what? And did it ever really matter to you if I did? Did it? How could it have?"

  —

  "We want you out of our lives. I don't know what else to say."

  —

  "Look at her. She's screaming. Do you see what you're doing to her? Get away from us, Bennie. Get away. I swear to Christ I'll kill you—"

  —

  Oh fuck this fuck this fuck this. What am I doing? Some twit wearing camper shorts and a WORLDWIDE MINISTRIES, INC. t-shirt just knelt beside my wheelchair and asked gently if I was okay. No, I take that back, he wasn't a twit. Enough, goodbye.

  ***

  On a bench by the sea Walenty lifted his left pantleg above his hinged knee and stared at the false limb, running his hand along its length the way a runner might massage away a cramp. The wood—English willow, the weeping tree—was lacquered, but already the lacquer had worn off in spots and it might be possible to get a splinter; he would have to re-lacquer it every so often, he thought, would have to repaint himself as a steam engine gets refinished, an oddly unnatural task. When the shell had hit he'd been scurrying uphill toward the jagged ruins of a stone house where several Nazi infantrymen were making an ill-considered stand. The Nazis were surrounded and the outcome was inevitable. There was no mystery to the ending, no suspense in the proceedings; all of them, the Nazis and Walenty's regiment and the British tr
oops flanking the north side, were numbers and symbols in an algebraic problem that had already been solved.

  When the shell hit, it threw him backwards down the hill. He felt his arm break on the loose remnants of a rock wall— even the muffled crack of the bone splitting registered— and when finally he was still he reached first for his arm, hoping to adjust it to somehow lessen the pain. It seemed like several minutes before he realized his leg was gone. There was no pain, only a sharp dullness like that of frostbite. Below his thigh the flesh resembled the dangling tentacles of a squid. His vision kept reddening which puzzled him until he brought a hand to his eyes and realized that it was blood, leaking from his head. Even his ears were filling with it. He lay back on the stones and let the blood flow out of him. He thought he should pray but couldn't bring himself to make the words. Instead he thought of the makowiec his mother used to make for dessert on rare special days when he was a boy. Expecting the end, he consoled himself with visions of poppyseed cake. Later, in the field hospital, his mind creamy with morphine, Walenty had been unsure what disturbed him more: his lost limb and the shrapnel holes in his forehead, or that the only crumbs of life that he found to cling to, when dying on the battlefield, were cake crumbs.

  It's nighttime now, and after a couple of trembly but fortifying cigarettes outside, and yet another joyous pat-down at the security checkpoint, I've moved to the bar at the Chili's Too across from G9. I had to wait in a line ten-deep for a barstool, and I can feel the hot stares from those still waiting, like poison darts thwacking my backside. Ouch! I suppose it is the height of rudeness to occupy this valuable stool with no set purpose in mind, other than blasting off page after page of this interminable letter while sipping $1.75 club sodas (no ice) and occasionally checking in on Walenty—all this while my fellow refugees stand in puckered silence, transferring their carry-on bags from one achy shoulder to the other, wanting only a cold Mi-chelob and the televised box scores. It crosses my mind to buy them all a beer but they're mostly devoid of free hands plus there's probably a Homeland Security rule against that. Sorry, chumps. No beer Samaritan for you.