Luminous Airplanes: A Novel

by Paul La Farge

  REGENZEIT

  When I woke up again, Yesim was in the living room, drinking coffee and watching the news. “I’m engaged,” she said. “Did you know that? I’m supposed to get married next June.”

  “Congratulations,” I mumbled.

  She told me that her fiancé was someone she had worked with in Albany, at an employment agency that staffed construction jobs. They had gone out for years, on and off, and had just become engaged when her father got sick and she returned to Thebes. Since then they had put off the wedding twice. Her fiancé, Mark, was very patient.

  “Yesim,” I began.

  “I know. It’s a little late to be telling you this, but Mark isn’t the most important thing about me. He’s not always the first thing I talk about. But I owe him a lot. I can’t tell you what a mess I was when I met him.”

  “You can tell me. I complained to you last night, didn’t I?”

  “This is worse,” Yesim said. She told me that she had gone through a hard time after she graduated from college, a very hard time. It began when she moved to Cambridge to work as the personal assistant to a famous poet whom she’d call Professor X. Yesim herself was writing poems, which was something she’d always done, though it was only in college, when she won a prize offered by a real literary journal with nationwide distribution, that she began to think of writing as something she might do instead of other things, rather than along with them. Anyway, she was living in Cambridge, and spending most of her time in the car, because Professor X suffered from chronic weakness in her legs, which was almost certainly psychosomatic, but nonetheless prevented her from driving or walking any distance, so that the work of being her assistant turned out mostly to involve driving Professor X around and waiting for her to emerge from buildings that Yesim wasn’t invited to enter. After a few months of this vehicle-bound life, Yesim abruptly and stormily left Professor X. She got a job waiting tables at a restaurant called Casablanca, where her Middle Eastern looks compensated for her lack of experience, and sat up late in her studio apartment on Mt. Auburn Street, writing poems that came slowly and turned out to be ill formed. One night, while she was writing, she had the sensation that a hand was closing on her throat. The feeling went away, then returned; it got so bad that black stars with green coronas appeared in her field of vision, as though she were asphyxiating.

  Yesim thought it might be strep throat, or asthma, or maybe the city air had found some latent flaw in her lungs. She went to a doctor; the doctor found nothing. She thought that if only she knew whose hand was grabbing her by the throat, she might be able to do something about it, which was, she admitted, a ridiculous way of thinking, but at the time it really was as though someone had cast a spell on her, as though someone’s hand were seizing the throat of a doll as someone’s voice muttered a spell. Whose hand was it, whose voice? Yesim suspected the jilted Professor X, who was witchy, if not literally a witch. Her condition worsened. She quit her job, and she wanted to leave Cambridge but couldn’t think of anywhere she wanted to go, or what she would do once she got there. It was as though the crooked streets, the plan of which she had never been able to master, were keeping her in, like the walls of a maze. She left her apartment on Mt. Auburn Street less and less often, only to get food, then not even to get food. If her father hadn’t come for her, she didn’t know what would have happened, but he did come. She weighed ninety-eight pounds. Her father, not a large man, carried her downstairs and drove her out of Cambridge, although, she noted with satisfaction, he got lost on his way to the Mass Pike. The city’s evil influence affected everyone.

  Joe Regenzeit took her to the Pines, a clinic near Albany. She wouldn’t say too much about it, except that it wasn’t a malign place, just quiet. It was so quiet, sometimes she imagined that she had died and no sound that came from the world could reach her any longer, as though the hand had let go of her throat too late; now she could speak but there was no one left to listen. Eventually, Yesim moved to an apartment that she shared with other women who had graduated from the Pines, and in time she took a job at the staffing agency. The work was not demanding and she enjoyed the compactness of the lives that passed through her hands, file-sized lives, on their way to file-sized jobs. They were almost like poems, but with the advantage that they never had to be revised or read aloud. She met Mark, a large, competent person, who had been a construction worker in an earlier life. He was a decade older than she was; his first question, after they kissed for the first time, was whether she wanted children, and her answer was yes, of course. If only her father hadn’t got sick, they would have gone ahead with all the plans they’d made with natural, heartening quickness: to marry, to buy a house that Mark would fix up, to have a child, children. Yesim really did want children, she’d always wanted them. She could have been happy forever after. Only Joe Regenzeit did get sick, and because he had saved Yesim’s life—seriously, she was certain she would have died on Mt. Auburn Street, that Cambridge would have let her die—she owed him the effort to save his life in return. There wasn’t much more to tell, Yesim said. Her father got better and left for Akbez, while she stayed on in Thebes.

  As I listened to her story, I thought about how much Yesim and I had in common. We had both fucked up, or maybe we were both fucked up, and we’d both come to Thebes to start over. What if we could start over together? Of course I didn’t say anything about that. I nodded and tried to look grave. But inside, I was thinking about the future.

  Meanwhile, Yesim was talking about Mark again. “He used to come up here,” she said, “but the visits went so badly, he said he’d wait in Albany until I’m through figuring out what I need to figure out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whether I’m going back.”

  Yesim said she had to go; as she climbed into the Outback I took her hand. She left her hand in mine for just a second, then took it back. She attached no importance to the gesture; it was as though she were about to leave her hand behind then remembered that she would need it after all.

  LOST THINGS

  Charles came over that afternoon to help with the packing. “Goddamn, this place is an icebox,” he said. “Don’t you want to turn on the heat?” I explained about the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Charles snorted. He took his cane and limped down to the basement. He studied the furnace, sniffed, lit a match and stuck it into a hole near the base of the big cylinder. With an explosive whumph the heat came on, grumbling and grinding its way back into the house. I said we didn’t have central heating in San Francisco, I’d never needed to know how it worked before. “OK, Mr. California.” Charles laughed. “Let it go.” I wanted to tell him not to call me that, but I was afraid we’d start to fight again. We went upstairs and sat in the kitchen, looking awkwardly past each other. For days I’d been thinking of how to apologize to Charles, but now he was here the words wouldn’t come, and it was my uncle who spoke first.

  “I’ve been thinking about you. How it must have been hard for you to grow up without a father. And with the twins, jeezus.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never grew up any other way.”

  “Still, I guess you have the right to be angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Come on,” Charles said. “Even I’m angry at him.”

  “At my father?”

  “Sure. At what he did.”

  “Because he killed himself, you mean?”

  My uncle shook his head. “I’m talking about when he was alive. Richard Ente was the biggest hippie bastard that ever lived.”

  “A hippie?” Goodbye, Sean Connery, I thought. “But he was my grandfather’s age.”

  “He was. He was an old hippie. Or maybe just an old man who wanted to be young again. I don’t pretend I ever understood him. I’m just telling you, he did things that no one should ever have done, definitely not someone his age. I’m not offending you, am I?”

  “Go on.”

  As Charles spoke, the father I’d built from a few
sentences, a word here and there, a shrug, a frown, was drowned under the mass of his words—it was, to change metaphors, as though the currency father was devalued, and my savings were worth nothing. If that was all the father I had, I might as well have had none at all. And here, striding up out of nowhere, came the new, high-denomination Richard Ente, a fifty-year-old hippie who smoked pot and inclined his head to get a better view every time one of the Celestes bent forward.

  “He didn’t even try to hide what he was doing,” Charles said. “Oliver, he said, you have two lovely daughters, I’ll buy them from you for a dozen camels. Like he was some tribal Jew in the desert, which is really what he should have been. I bet he would have done all right in the desert.” Richard Ente told bad jokes at the dinner table and got food in his salt-and-pepper beard. He came to Thebes by bus because he barely knew how to drive a car. He didn’t wear deodorant, he didn’t cut his nails, he didn’t wear socks. He ended sentences with the word dig. And from the first he was after the Celestes. “You know how he got away with it? I’ll tell you. Richard was very shrewd, and one of his talents was to guess what you were dreaming, not like in your sleep, but what you wanted, and then he’d say that thing out loud, and be, like, that is certainly going to happen. And since you heard it coming from another person, who didn’t know you’d been dreaming of it, you thought maybe that meant it would happen. He got us all that way.”

  Richard Ente made promises to everyone. To Oliver he promised victory, and not just that: he said that if the lawsuit went the way he thought it would, Joe Regenzeit would pack up and leave. To Mary, my grandmother, he promised the world. “She’d always wanted to travel,” Charles said, “but she’d never been able to, on account of Oliver not having enough money, and being generally tied to Thebes.” To the Celestes he promised fame. “He was, like, you girls are geniuses, and you aren’t getting what you deserve here, and I know some people in New York who would really be into what you’re doing. Why don’t you let me introduce you? He told them he was friends with Andy Warhol!” There was, apparently, no lie of which my father was not capable. And the Celestes, who were smart, and should have known better, believed him. “He said he’d get them a loft in New York. He told them they could model. Like, part-time, for good money, right? You tell me if that happened.”

  It didn’t, I said, but I was still thinking about what my uncle had said earlier. “He smoked pot?”

  “All the time.”

  “And he had long hair?”

  “A ponytail.”

  “What kind of music did he like?”

  “Joan Buy-yez, that kind of thing. He even had a bead necklace. Can you imagine that, a fifty-year-old man in a bead necklace? He was ridiculous!”

  “Wow.” I felt giddy: the child who had been saving all his life was suddenly rich. I had more father than I knew what to do with. And yet the new Richard Ente that I had received from my uncle didn’t fit either with the story I had told myself as a child or with the fact of his suicide. My uncle and my mothers and I were like witnesses identifying different people in a lineup; and like a stubborn eyewitness I continued to believe that the Richard I saw (even if I had never seen him) was the one who had done it. Charles must have got him wrong. Maybe he had misinterpreted Richard’s behavior, although what he could have misinterpreted to come up with his Richard Ente, I had no idea.

  “Anyway,” my uncle said, “I’m here if there’s anything you want to get off your chest.”

  We spent the rest of the day cleaning out the basement. I didn’t get anything off my chest, other than dozens of heavy boxes, the contents of my grandfather’s woodworking shop. If anything, it seemed to me that Charles was the one who still had something on his chest; now and then he looked at me as though he was about to say something, but he didn’t. I didn’t press him. It was only after he left, when I was in the kitchen, drinking the last of the beers I’d bought the day before, that I remembered something he had told me a long time ago that fit with his description of Richard Ente, something that made me wonder if my uncle had not, after all, been right.

  THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

  After the storm wiped Adventure from Kerem’s computer, I lived in a state of excited inaction, as though, like the Heathkit, I lacked instructions about what to do next. I avoided Kerem and didn’t go to town to look for his friends. It didn’t even occur to me to find Shelley again. I was consumed by the feeling that something was going to happen, something wonderful, but because I knew it was going to happen I wanted to put it off just a little longer.

  “Aren’t you getting behind in your studies?” my grandmother asked.

  “We’re taking a break,” I said.

  “Oh, a break,” she repeated, as though this were even less plausible than my studies had been in the first place. “Well, a few days away from the Regenzeit boy won’t do you any harm.”

  Then it turned out that I had waited too long, and the glorious something I’d been waiting for was no longer mine to enjoy. Mrs. Regenzeit telephoned my grandfather to inform him that Kerem had been arrested for smoking marijuana in the cemetery, that I might be involved too, because I’d been spending so much time with her son, and that she was peaced as hell. “All right,” my grandfather said stiffly, and hung up the phone while Mrs. Regenzeit was still talking. His dislike for the Regenzeits, his outrage at the implication that I could have been responsible for corrupting one of them, and his astonishment at Mrs. Regenzeit’s indelicacy in breaking a ten years’ silence just to tell him so, all together convinced my grandfather that the whole business was the fault of the perfidious Turks. He warned me about falling in with bad company, and told me how important it was to find out what people were really like before you put your trust in them. It was like choosing antiques, he said, some people looked good on the outside but when you opened them up you saw there was just nothing you could do, whereas other people, who didn’t look so good, could be fixed up, and would, with a little work, become solid, usable friends. He patted the arm of the chair on which he sat. It gave a solid, usable thump. It was all I could do not to remind him that he hadn’t fixed the chair; it had come into the house via my grandmother’s sister, who had donated it because there wasn’t a decent place in the whole house to sit. He forbade me to see Kerem again and that was all.

  My grandmother was less convinced of my innocence, and her reproaches were harder to endure. When I said something in her presence, even if it was the most innocent and matter-of-fact statement, for example, that I wasn’t going to the lake because the radio said it would rain, she seemed to break what I had said into its component parts to determine whether the statement was worthy of her trust. If the clouds overhead convinced her that I was justified in staying indoors, or if she happened to have heard the same weather report, she would nod hesitantly, as though she were taking a chance on me despite her better judgment. If, on the other hand, the weather looked fair from where she stood, my grandmother would only shrug, as though to say, who knows what you will do, you, who doesn’t tell us the truth?

  I began to understand certain things my mothers had said about my grandmother. Sometimes, at the end of their frequent though brief conversations, Celeste would grind the telephone receiver back into its cradle and cry out, “That unforgiving so-and-so!” Then it would be Marie’s job to tease from her an account of what had gone wrong, an account that always began the same way, “This time she’s really lost her mind!” I used to think this was just Celeste being her angry self, but that summer I wondered what it would have been like to have my grandmother for a mother, to be the object, again and again, of her shrug. It was no wonder my mothers ran away from Thebes, I realized, and in fact, my mothers’ hardness, their self-containedness, their unwillingness to give out information, especially with respect to Richard Ente, all made more sense to me now that I knew what doubt my grandmother was capable of. Her shrug explained my mothers, and it taught me everything I had left to learn about heredity. And heredity, natural
ly, made me think of Richard Ente. Was it possible that traces of him remained in the people—me—who he had left behind?

  One day, when the forecast was fair, and I had no reason in the world not to go to the lake with my uncle, I turned to Charles and asked, “Why did my father run away from Thebes?”

  Charles sighed as though he had been expecting the question for a long time. He rolled onto his stomach, baring the tattoo on his right shoulder, Je te frapperai sans colère. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but you have to keep it to yourself. Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just between you and me, then, your father told me he was going to discover America.”

  “America,” I repeated, amazed. We had studied the discovery of America in our history class the year before, and I knew that Christopher Columbus was an Italian, and that he had named the continent for another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, which, I thought, meant that really it should be called Vespuccia. I said so in class and got laughed at, and afterward Ronald Kaplan taunted me, Ve-spooge-ia, the land of spooge, and I’d been embarrassed. Then something about Leif Eriksson and the Vikings who had perhaps discovered another part of it. My father didn’t fit into either of these stories, so I guessed that Charles meant some other kind of discovery, or maybe some other America, a continent with the same name as ours that nobody had discovered yet, which was a thrilling idea but not probable, given the size of continents and the advanced state of geographical knowledge.