Luminous Airplanes: A Novel

by Paul La Farge

  Beat. “Maybe we are.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wish you were here.”

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  “And what’s going to happen then?” Alice asked.

  “I guess we’ll find out then.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Make sure you drink some water before you go to bed.”

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  Beat. Beat.

  LOST THINGS

  My uncle was back early the next morning, making things move in the kitchen like an angry ghost. I groaned and wrapped the quilt around my head. He asked what had happened to me, and I said I’d been hit by a car.

  Charles laughed. “I know that car.”

  He made coffee, and when it was ready he shook my shoulder. Instant. Charles pointed at me with his mug. “So, you were just drinking by yourself, or what?”

  “I was at the Regenzeits’.”

  “Ah, our enemies,” my uncle said.

  I felt dull and sick to my stomach. I wished Charles would leave so I could go back to sleep, and in fact I didn’t know what he was doing, coming over when the sky was still green with presunrise light. Did he think that the world was full of people like him, angry men who drank bad coffee at dawn?

  “Why are they our enemies?” I asked.

  “Because they’re Turks, that’s why. The Turks are an Oriental people. They’ve hated us ever since the beginning.”

  “Turkey is a Westernized democracy. It’s even a member of NATO.”

  “Believe what you like, the history speaks for itself. Think about the Ottoman Empire.”

  “The Ottoman Empire ended just after the First World War. Anyway, Kerem and Yesim were born in America.”

  “But they remember,” Charles said, “they all remember that we won. The Americans and the Western Europeans.”

  “That’s not true, the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. That, and the rebellion of the so-called assimilated peoples.” I couldn’t believe I was discussing the fall of the Ottoman Empire at dawn in Thebes with a bad hangover.

  “Assimilated peoples, my ass, it was us. We won, on account of our superior military technology.”

  “You must be thinking of the Cold War, although even there—”

  “You don’t get it,” Charles interrupted. “Snowbird is their revenge.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Snowbird is a ski resort, and this is the late twentieth century. You aren’t going to convince me that Joe Regenzeit and his family have been holding a grudge ever since Mustafa Pasha’s defeat at the gates of Vienna, or, even if they did, that they would take their revenge here, in Thebes.”

  Charles growled at me that I didn’t understand a damn thing about Thebes, and I said I understood enough, Thebes was just a small town in the mountains that no one cared about, and there were more important things happening in the big world, and wasn’t it time to think about something else, and he said, what something else did I mean, which something else did I want him to think about, when every day they ruined Thebes a little more, and the old families were dying out, and people were tearing the old houses down and building Swiss chalets, and a barn sold for two hundred thousand dollars, a barn, and I said, you wanted to move to California anyway, don’t tell me that you love Thebes, and he said, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want this place to die, and I said, it wasn’t dying, and he said, you don’t know what dying is, then he started coughing in a way that left little doubt that on this subject at least his knowledge was vastly greater than mine.

  “Do you want some water?” I asked.

  He waved me away, stood up and went into the kitchen. I heard him washing his coffee cup. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he shouted.

  “Packing up the house,” I said.

  “Then pack up the house, and don’t get mixed up with people who hate us.”

  The screen door banged shut. I sat in the living room, hurt by my uncle’s words. Was he really so confused, I wondered, that he thought the Regenzeits were out to get us? It was ridiculous. People like Charles were the problem, I thought, intolerant people who can’t let go of the past.

  After a while, I went up to my mothers’ room and opened one of Celeste’s trunks. It was full of magazines and newspapers heaped up roughly according to size, the raw materials of her work. What the Rowlands had accumulated, Celeste cut up: worn back numbers of Scribner’s Magazine, McClure’s, Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, mixed in with issues of Life and Vogue and Look. I used to look in the trunks when I came to visit in the summer, each time stealthily, as though I were breaking a rule; in fact no one said anything to me about the trunks and I don’t think my grandparents would have minded if they’d known. I liked the way the holes Celeste had cut in the pages of the old magazines acted as windows onto the pages behind, so that where the head of, say, a Bohemian fortune-teller was supposed to be, you’d see words or parts of words:

  little known epis

  the remarkable discover

  ich it directly and indirectly

  properly be regarded as m

  the progress of thought

  The central figur

  young woman

  ome scoundrel

  oor of her cot

  Now that I was looking at them again, the effect was completely different. The magazines seemed to me typical of Celeste’s angry way of dealing with the world: she took what she needed with no regard for anyone else.

  I opened the second trunk, where she kept her collages. Each white sheet was kept safe in a big black sheet of paper folded in half. I unfolded the top sheet and picked up the collage beneath. It had a woodcut of a feather, angled as if drifting toward the bottom of the page; above it a slender hand in a lace cuff reached down, either to let it go or to pick it up again. Below the feather, at the center of the page, set between quotation marks that had been pasted down separately, was part of a typewritten phrase: “ollow me.” Follow me, it must have been, or, just possibly, hollow me. The date was penciled in the bottom right corner, in neat, small letters, July 1970. I was about to be born. I had seen the collage before, but something passed through me as I sat on the floor, looking at the paper, a cool dark something like the shadow of a cloud. It was as if Celeste were about to tell me something. I opened the second folder. This collage was from April of the same year; it showed a pair of hands on the keys of an enormous typewriter, and, emerging from the top of the machine, the prow of an airship. Cherubs beckoned to the airship from above, while from the bottom of the page a Chinese dragon rolled its eyes angrily. The references to birth, to my birth, were easier to spot than in the other: the cherubs, the round head of the zeppelin poking out of the typewriter’s slot. The dragon might have been my grandfather. Still, I was disappointed. Ollow me, the first picture said, and I wanted to ollow, to follow, but how could I follow when I didn’t know where it went? The collages led backward, further into the past, away from me and my time. Celeste’s style devolved, words and blocks of text appeared, floral borders, dancers, neckties and the heads of famous people. The collages retained their formal elegance but became, unmistakably, the work of a young person. Ollow me, ollow me. If only there had been another collage to show me where to go, but there was nothing, because, in May 1970, probably no more than a few days after she made this collage, Celeste and her sister left Thebes. They were seventeen and a half years old, and they took with them nothing, or almost nothing: a warm protrusion that would in a few months become a child.

  LOW-FLYING STARS

  It was for my sake that my mothers ran away from Thebes. They didn’t want to have their child in a little town in the Catskills where things happened so slowly that people were still speaking French six generati
ons after the first settlers arrived. By Thebes standards, my mothers were more like weather than like people: they changed fast, and they moved on. They took me to New York, where they were going to be famous artists, only they had no idea about money and knew how to do nothing, nothing. For a few scary years in the 1970s my mothers barely scraped by, she, waitressing, and she, clerking in a photo lab; she, selling ladies’ clothes, and she, waitressing; she, answering telephones for a Senegalese clairvoyant, and she, answering telephones for an Israeli dentist. The three of us, she, she, and me, lived in an apartment on West Ninety-eighth Street, with two tiny bedrooms and a view, if you leaned dangerously far out the living-room window, of a blue-gray shard that was alleged to be the Hudson River.

  Later, when they had real jobs and even health insurance, my mothers liked to tell stories about those years, to prove how tough we had all been and how close we’d come to not making it. There was the time, Celeste said, when she lit a fire in the ornamental fireplace, because the heat in the apartment was broken, and how was she supposed to know the chimney had been sealed since the nineteenth century? The apartment filled with smoke and the three of us were nearly evicted and if you lifted the living-room rug you could still see the burned boards where the fire had spread before the super put it out, using a blanket from my mothers’ bed, which was a technique for fire prevention that Celeste had never seen before. And the worst of it was, she said, that afterward the blanket was ruined, and she and her sister had to sleep in their coats.

  “You slept in my coat,” Marie said, if she was present. “Your coat had those big horn buttons, remember? You said they dug into you?”

  Celeste pretended to be perplexed. “But if I slept in your coat, what did you sleep in?”

  “Sweaters, I guess.”

  “Those were difficult times.”

  There was something in Celeste’s voice, though, that made me think she missed those years, that in retrospect they seemed less difficult than the ones that came later. My mothers went to Hunter College; after they graduated Celeste got a job teaching art to middle-school students in the Bronx. Marie worked in the offices of semilegitimate publications with names like California Lifestyle and Platonic Caves, typing, making copies, answering the telephone, always in a short skirt, which Celeste didn’t approve of, but Marie rebutted that she couldn’t type to save her life, and without the skirts she’d be back to working for the clairvoyant, who could, presumably, see up her skirt no matter how long it was.

  In the evenings my mothers sat at their worktables in the living room, making their art. They knitted sweaters for monsters with wrong arms and extra heads; they stamped papier-mâché medallions of modern saints of their own invention; they mixed brightly colored fluids in the sink and bottled them in glass phials on which they pasted labels, Potion of Temporary Resistance to Temptation, Elixir of Getting That Opportunity Back, Low-Flying Potion, Potion for Those Afraid to Drink the Other Potions in This Collection. Celeste painted miniature landscapes in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, in which the Upper West Side revealed its true, hellish character; Marie applied a Ouija board to a subway map and took photographs of the places the spirits told her to go. I loved the things they made, which was fortunate, because our apartment was becoming a museum of their work. The potions took up residence in the medicine cabinet; the demons capered over the nonworking fireplace. I found a three-armed sweater in my dresser, a joke, I think, but maybe not; the apartment wasn’t big and my mothers were always making.

  They weren’t famous yet, but they had friends, and those friends had friends who had taken steps in that direction. My mothers talked about them all the time, enthusiastically but not uncritically, as though they, my mothers, were commenting on a sport from which they themselves had retired some years before. From their conversation I got the impression that it wasn’t hard to become famous. One day a gallery owner came to visit, and the next you had a show; the critic from the Times praised your work even if he didn’t understand what it was about. Then collectors sought you out, and you had to be careful; it was important to turn away from the collectors and their vulgar need, to encapsulate yourself in solitude and silence, so that you could emerge a few years later with your mature work, which was extremely difficult and cut no deals with anybody. That’s when the museums took you on, and afterward things happened without you, international exhibitions, retrospectives, scholarly monographs; the secret nominators spoke your name in secret and you got the MacArthur genius grant and as to what happened after that, why, you could imagine it yourself. With a mixture of excitement and dread—I wanted them to get their wish, but I didn’t know what would happen to me when they did—I pictured my mothers rising into the sky like two unwinking stars, possessed, finally, of all the solitude and silence they could ask for. Mostly it was a matter of not making mistakes along the way. Not like Leonora Kurtz, who worked with Marie, and had talent but listened to her boyfriend too much; not like Donatello DelAmbrosio, Celeste’s friend of the wonderful name, who needed to get out of the shadow of Fluxus. Not like Katy Gladwin, whose paintings were too theoretical, or Hugh Heap, whose string sculptures were cute but not really about anything, or Guy Anstine, whose white boxes were just white boxes, you’ve seen one you’ve seen a thousand. Not like Javier Provo, whose murals were in a Warhol movie and who was becoming actually famous, but was nonetheless completely preoccupied with his own body image. My mothers would not make these mistakes. They were ready to go up; they were waiting in our apartment, waiting and making.

  Maybe their potions weren’t strong enough, maybe the demons they compacted with turned out not to have the powers they, the demons, had promised, maybe their saints were spurious; the ascension my mothers were waiting for did not arrive. Of course we were still waiting for it. We would always be waiting for it, but by the time I was nine or ten years old, my mothers had begun to glance backward to those first years in New York when food was scarce and success certain.

  “You remember the time we saw that rat?” Celeste asked Marie wistfully. “It was about four feet long, sitting on the kitchen windowsill?”

  “I saw the rat,” Marie said. “I told you about it. You wouldn’t come and look.”

  “There were a lot of rats on the Upper West Side back then. Do you remember?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I remember bugs, but no rats.”

  “Ah, bugs,” said Celeste. “Those enormous roaches. I remember when I was taking a bath, and this roach fell into the tub. I’d never seen such an enormous cockroach.”

  “I remember your scream,” Marie said. “I’d never heard such an enormous scream.”

  “Those were difficult times,” Celeste said.

  Celeste Marie, Marie Celeste. My low-flying stars.

  REGENZEIT

  I spent the rest of the day on the sofa, reading Progress in Flying Machines. When it got dark I thought about going over to the Regenzeits’. I had promised Kerem I would visit soon, that I would consider myself a part of the family, just like I had been in the old days, but no one was home. They must be working late, I thought, getting Snowbird ready for the winter. I imagined Yesim at her desk, a pencil stuck in her hair. I imagined a brilliant blue day, the ground crackling with golden leaves, Yesim and me sitting on the Regenzeits’ porch, wearing bulky sweaters, holding mugs of hot cider. Then, in my imagination, one of my hands unpeeled itself from the side of the cup and settled on Yesim’s shoulder. In no time my tongue was in her mouth, my hands were in her black hair. In my imagination.

  It was raining in gray sheets when I woke up the next morning, and with the rain came the autumn cold. I didn’t know how to turn on the heat; finally I went to the basement and looked at the furnace. It had gone out, and I couldn’t get it to start. I called the furnace company; they said they’d send someone as soon as they could. Looking out the kitchen window, I determined that Yesim drove a Subaru Outback, and Kerem a Ford Explorer. I went up to the attic bedroom and discovered that the bo
xes that filled the room were full of questionnaires left over from my grandfather’s lawsuit. Put a check next to every statement you agree with: 1. Morning is the time when I feel best. 2. My weight stays the same all year round. 3. I rarely cry for no reason. 4. I consider myself a “social person.” I sat on the bed and spent a long time thinking about I don’t know what. At five o’clock I called the furnace people again. A woman explained to me that they were waiting for a shipment of heating oil, which had not arrived because of a late-season hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. You want heat, talk to ExxonMobil, she said. I told her that I didn’t think ExxonMobil would take my call. Maybe not, she said, her voice weary and stiff.

  Around six-thirty, I drove to town and bought a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale and a box of chocolate donuts. Two teenage girls stood outside the gas station, in the shelter by the pumps, wearing more makeup than I would have expected girls at a gas station to wear.

  “Hey, mister,” one of them said as I passed, “will you get us some beer?” She was prettier than she looked at first; I wanted to tell her not to wear so much makeup. I said I’d give each of them a beer if they wanted, but I didn’t feel comfortable buying them more than that.

  The girl said they needed it for a party, it wasn’t like they were going to drink it all. I said no, really, I couldn’t, and the girl sighed and said, “OK, give us each a beer.”

  I wondered whose daughter she was, where she lived, whether she had grown up in Thebes. For a moment I thought of asking if I could go to the party, if only so that I would have something to do on Saturday night. But the thought of being at a party, any party, was unpleasant, and in any case I doubted the girls would agree to take me. I pulled two beers out of the six-pack and handed them to the girls, with a warning not to drink in public. They rolled their eyes and made complicated hand gestures, as if communicating how uptight I was to a deaf observer.