Luminous Airplanes: A Novel

by Paul La Farge

  I had trouble understanding how this fit with what I remembered of the Regenzeit home. “There was Kerem’s punk phase,” I said, “and …”

  “Yes,” Yesim said, “that was when things got bad.”

  She and Kerem, as natives, had understood how the spirit of Thebes, and maybe of America in general, loves failure as much as or more than it does success. They started to make mistakes on purpose, to let their grades slip, to change the way they dressed. As they fell fluently into this new language of truancy and misdemeanor, Joe Regenzeit’s anger grew. There was more shouting, more shaking, things Yesim didn’t like to think about, even now.

  “He must have hated me,” I said.

  “You? You were his great hope. The child of the oldest family in town, playing soldiers with Kerem! You were the promise that somehow things would work out, that we would be accepted here. Why do you think my parents let the two of us be friends?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “You had it easy,” Yesim said. “You never had to think about anything.”

  Then came the night of the dress. We had finished the parlor and moved on to my grandparents’ bedroom; I was taking bird books out of my grandfather’s nightstand when Yesim held up a long blue dress with a low neckline and a fringed skirt, it must have been one of the dresses my grandmother wore to Summerland. “What do you think of this,” she asked. “Isn’t it elegant?” She held it to her shoulders. I don’t know what I said, but Yesim carried the dress into the bathroom and closed the door. I asked what she was doing, and she said, “What do you think? I’m trying it on.”

  A couple of minutes later she came out wearing the dress, her breasts pushing their way out of its décolletage as though she were an allegory for something, Victory, or Liberty, or America. She spun around the bedroom in tiny steps, because the dress had been sewn for a woman half her size and fit her like a manacle. She stretched the seams and caused the tiny seed pearls sewn into the hem to tremble, shuffled back into the bathroom to look at herself and came out again, toward me, slowly, her lip curled in expectation of something terrible or wonderful, which, I realized, I was expecting too. Then Yesim slipped on the bare floor. The dress tore from knee to waist and she sat down heavily. “Whoops,” she said. She retreated to the bathroom, tugging the ruined dress down over her white schoolgirl underpants. When she came out, she promised she would have the dress repaired, and asked, did I mind that she’d tried it on? I said honestly that I didn’t mind, but maybe it would be a good idea if she didn’t try on any more of my grandmother’s clothes. Yesim said obviously she wasn’t going to, she had just been curious.

  That night, as if we’d crossed some frontier beyond which we no longer had anything to hide from each other, we stayed up late drinking tea and talking in my grandfather’s kitchen. Yesim told me she’d often wondered what her life would have been like if she’d been born fifty or even a hundred years earlier. Would she have been more at home in Istanbul, where her mother’s parents were from? She wouldn’t have had as much freedom, but on the other hand she wondered whether freedom was really what she wanted. “There’s something to be said for rules,” she said. “Just look at poetry. Of course everyone writes free verse now but you can do some beautiful things with the old forms. Desperate hearts: this ship is not the last to go, nor the last arrow of a life of sorrow. The lover and beloved wait in vain … That’s Beyatlı; do you know him?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Actually, he’s kind of corny. But it doesn’t matter, all I mean is that form counts for something.”

  “Just as long as you don’t choke on it,” I said.

  Yesim nodded. “I’m not going to let anything do that to me. Not again. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Would you have wanted to live a hundred years ago?”

  “I used to be a historian. For me, the past is work.”

  “When were you a historian?”

  “At Stanford,” I said. “Before I became a programmer.”

  “Huh,” Yesim said. “But studying the past isn’t the same as living in it. You really wouldn’t want to go back?”

  “No.”

  “Not even to find out if you were right about whatever it was you studied?”

  “It wouldn’t be that easy. In some ways, it’s easier to know now what was happening then. Anyway, my subject was a cult, I guess you’d say, who believed the world would end in 1844. I don’t have to travel in time to know they were wrong.”

  “Why did you give it up?”

  “I couldn’t write my dissertation.”

  “I understand. It must be very hard.”

  I shrugged. “The problem was more that I lost interest.”

  “In the end of the world?” Yesim smiled.

  “In the past generally.”

  After a moment, Yesim asked, “Did something happen? To you, I mean?”

  “Yes and no. I mean, a lot of things happened. But nothing really happened to me.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “I’m not in a hurry.” Yesim smiled into her teacup. “Besides, I showed you mine.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”

  SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

  Victor and Alex and I moved to San Francisco together at the end of our first year at Stanford. We needed to be in the city, we decided, because living in Palo Alto was like being dead, it was like moving into your own tomb before your death, breathing in the eucalyptus-scented embalming oils, waking up every morning to the same light, encountering, every day, the same lifelike faces, which asked you the same question, “Isn’t this heaven?” We looked at many unsuitable apartments, as well as a few that two of us liked but not the third. Alex wanted to live in the Castro, I wanted period charm, and Victor wanted a backyard where he could grill. Somewhere between Moscow and California he had picked up a love of barbecue; it had become indissociably linked to happiness in his mind, to the point where he would linger at even the most unbearable graduate-student parties as long as someone was cooking meat outdoors. We talked about splitting up, but none of us could afford to live alone, and finally we found the place on Sixteenth Street, which wasn’t what we wanted—the apartment was dark, the street ugly and loud, there was no yard—but there was room for all of us to work, and a back porch where the landlady said it would be all right to put a grill. And there was something else, a Murphy bed that unfolded from the back of a cabinet door in the front parlor. I loved the old-fashionedness of it, and I joked that, like the Murphy bed, I wanted to live in the apartment until someone dismantled me and carried me off. A month later we packed up our incompatible belongings and drove them to San Francisco.

  The city was even better than I had expected. It wasn’t just like coming back to life, it was like coming to life, to a life I’d never lived before. Alex had friends in the city already, people he’d known in college, who had discovered a bar on Valencia Street, the Blue Study, which had a room in the back where no one went, with weather-beaten sofas, a patio table and a gray cat called Felix who glared at us from the corner. Alex invited me to drink with his group, and in this way I met Erin, who had been in a band in college and still dressed like a lounge singer, in low-cut dresses that set off her white skin, and a bobbed black wig, and sang, sometimes, when she was drunk, songs she had written, about people she’d loved so much she could kill them, and how she could kill them, exactly.

  I fell in love with her. She didn’t love me back, but that didn’t stop us from spending hours sitting side by side on a sofa at the Blue Study, our arms around each other, talking about the countries we would like to visit, and when we would visit them together. Morocco, Argentina, Australia, Japan, the world, which had, until then, been made up of places that I would never see, became as close as a conversation, as close as the word yes, at least until Erin attracted Star, a short woman with a crew cut and red high-t
op Keds, and Star drew Erin into her orbit, never, alas, to return to my arms. It didn’t matter. Love meant something different in the back room of the Blue Study than it did elsewhere; it was like a vibration in the air, which, although you directed it at one particular person, spread outward from you in an expanding bubble, until it was absorbed by the walls, the bar, the strangers at the bar who you would never meet, Valencia Street, the red light blinking at the top of Sutro Tower. My love for Erin flew out of me painlessly, and when it had gone as far as it could, it came back to me as taste. Suddenly I preferred the super vegetarian burrito at El Toro to its equivalent at the Taqueria Maya, I frequented the used-book store with the cat, and not the one run by the barely ambulatory depressive outpatient; I shopped at Rainbow Market and not Safeway, which Erin called Slaveway. I had been naturalized. My monochrome East Coast clothes made way for a rainbow of Thrift Town shirts and permanently creased polyester slacks. My hair became unruly; I grew a beard, which made me look like a rabbi, Victor said, not the effect I had been aiming at, but maybe not entirely wrong, my father had been a Jew, and now, who knew, in San Francisco I might become a Jew too. I started smoking and purchased a record player. I had no idea how close I was to him, my father, how much I had come to resemble him, but if Charles had seen me slouching from my house to Java Man, from Java Man to the Blue Study, in my green Arnel shirt and crackled leather three-quarters coat, the outfit in which, I thought, I was finally free from the past and all possible constraint, I think he would have told me, You look just like a young Richard Ente.

  It was around this time that I met Swan. He spent his mornings at Java Man, writing his leaflets, and because I was also a regular there, we talked sometimes, mostly about his program to get himself elected mayor of San Francisco, or Swan Francisco, as he called it. He possessed a great deal of information, most of it fictitious, about Saint Francis of Assisi, who had been, he said, a huge pothead, which was the reason he could understand what the birds were saying. Saint Francis began as an ordinary monk, Swan said, then he discovered marijuana, which was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, along with silk and the numeral zero. Weed unlocked the door to the animal world, Swan said, and Saint Francis went right on through. He discovered that animals deserve our love every bit as much as human beings do, more, in fact, because the patience of animals is limitless, whereas human beings get sick of you, which is the cause of war. Saint Francis became a Buddhist and a vegetarian, he preached a gospel of unfettered desire and kindness to animals, and if elected mayor, Swan promised to bring these teachings back to this, his city. It would be the beginning of a world revolution: pot would be legal, and money abolished; animals would be cherished and might, once the mass of humanity had reached a sufficiently advanced state, consent to serve as our teachers. Swan always kept a bird near him, a pigeon, usually, often one with a broken wing. As he spoke, he stroked the bird’s back; sometimes he raised the bird to his face and looked into its eye, and it seemed as though the two, Swan and bird, were really understanding each other, although no words passed between them. I liked listening to his unorthodox histories, and promised to vote for him as soon as he got himself on the ballot.

  When my work was going badly, and the career I’d chosen seemed like a dull dream, as unfulfillable as it was unwanted, I wondered what decisions had made Swan Swan, whether they could be counted, how many they had been. How thick was the line that separated us, how easily could it be crossed, and, once you had gone over it one way, could you go back in the other? To this last question, at least, I got an answer, or deduced an answer, no, it was not possible. Swan refused to talk about his past; when I asked him even the least personal questions, where he had grown up, how long he had lived in San Francisco, he stopped speaking and turned his attention to his writing or his bird. Peter, the owner of the Latin Quarter Bookshop, told me that Swan had come from the Midwest, but where in the Midwest, and what he had done there, and whether he had been born there or had come from somewhere else, no one knew. Swan was Swan.

  Once, on a rainy winter night, I felt a pang of concern for him. I heated a can of soup and poured it into a big plastic mug and took it downstairs to the doorway where Swan sat on his bedroll.

  “No, thanks,” Swan said.

  “Come on, it’s just soup. It’ll warm you up.”

  Swan didn’t answer. I couldn’t think of anything to say either, and after a minute my waiting there became absurd, as if I were in a Beckett play. Swan understood why I was there, though. He wanted me to know that he was all right. So he lit a cigarette and, blowing smoke through his clenched brown teeth, he said, “I think I’m going to run for president.”

  Gratefully I said it sounded like a good idea.

  “If animals could vote it’d be a sure thing.” He nodded impatiently. “You don’t know what it was like when the door was open. It wasn’t about drugs. Now people say, oh, you were a hippie, you took LSD, you’re crazy. But it wasn’t like that. We were getting hold of the truth. Why do you think they killed Dylan?”

  “They killed Dylan?”

  “They replaced him,” Swan said, “with a robot from Disneyland. I knew the guy who made his face. He died of a heart attack in nineteen seventy-six. He was forty-one years old. A heart attack. Everyone who knows is in trouble. Are you a poet?”

  “A historian,” I said.

  “Is that right? I’ll tell you what you have to do. You have to write down what’s happening in this place.”

  I tried to explain that the present wasn’t my period, I was more of a nineteenth-century person. Swan didn’t listen. “There are things happening right now that would blow your mind,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  He gave me a leaflet.

  Swan was right: things were happening that would blow my mind. Even as I was becoming a native of the Mission, in the winter of 1993–94, the Mission was changing, in part because so many people like me had moved there, but also because our presence in the neighborhood was a signal to other people, unlike me, I thought, back then, that it was safe to move in. They came from the Marina, from Pacific Heights, from Redwood City and Palo Alto and Menlo Park, from Burlingame, they came from El Cerrito and Chicago and Texas and New York. They drove up the rent and the price of shoes; they occupied all the tables at the junkie breakfast restaurant, which served eggs Benedict now, and not to junkies, the lights were turned up too bright for them, and the manager put a lock on the bathroom door and gave the key only to paying customers.

  Money came to the Mission, leading women in high heels down Sixteenth Street on Saturday night. Money parked its car in the middle of Valencia Street and didn’t care if it got a ticket, there was nowhere else to park, even the garages were full. You might as well live in New York, money grumbled. Money waited for a cab, but all the cabs were taken. Money went into the new Temple of Faith Bar on Mission Street, which had replaced the old Templo de la Fé church in the same location, but preserved the mural on the rear wall, of Jesus reaching down from the clouds as though to pluck a bottle of pepper-infused vodka from the top shelf of the bar. Money came out at two in the morning and eyed the donut restaurant across the street, with a big sign over the counter expressly prohibiting the sale of stolen goods on the premises. Money wanted a donut but was afraid to go in. Money had intense conversations just below my window. I don’t want to go home with you, money said to money, I don’t care about your business model, just get me a cab; but the cabs were still scarce, and in the end money said, OK, but please don’t put the top down, it’s cold.

  Money was coming, like the wave in the postcard my grandfather sent me each year, threatening to drown us. Overnight my friends sloughed off their part-time jobs and like wastrel princes ascending to the monarchy they became professionals. Josh worked for a construction company, filing plans in AutoCAD; Erin got a job at a Web startup which proffered folk remedies to people who couldn’t afford health insurance. In six months she went from half-time to full-time, from full-time to ma
nagement, where she made a tacit policy of hiring only Wiccans. Even my housemate Victor, the medieval historian, started a company called MySky with some friends from Stanford. He wasn’t allowed to tell us what MySky did, but it carried him off six days a week at seven a.m. and returned him late at night, looking furious and pinched. A couple of years later I’d see billboards for MySky on Highway 101; I’d read about it in the Chronicle, in the Times, and I’d realize, with a kind of shock, that this was Victor’s company, that it belonged in part to the person who had lectured me about the hermeneutics of Saint Thomas Aquinas at our kitchen table. By then Victor was long gone from the apartment on Sixteenth Street. First he moved to Palo Alto; later, I heard, he bought a house in Sausalito, high on a bluff overlooking the bay.

  By the middle of 1996 it seemed as if Alex and I were the last people in the Mission not employed by the New Economy, and Alex was increasingly caught up in the purposiveness of academia. He flew off to conferences, proposed panels, worked on Stanford Historical Notes. I had passed my oral exams, but still hadn’t found a topic for my dissertation. In fact, I was coming to the depressing conclusion that nothing about nineteenth-century America excited me, apart from a few subjects which had been done to death. I told everyone I was working, but really I was drifting, and because I was drifting, I saw a lot of Swan.

  Those were great days for him. Not only were the poor being forced out of their rental apartments to make way for airy live/work condominiums; not only was Congress gutting the American welfare system and dropping bombs on Bosnia, but his car, a green VW Beetle that he had inhabited, literally, since the mid-eighties, had been towed, a consequence of too many unpaid parking tickets. Swan had never had so much to be angry about. When I saw him in the morning at Java Man, his fingers flew across the keyboard of the public computer, composing jeremiads in which he abandoned the doctrine of universal love and recruited the animals to go to war. He was so angry that he wouldn’t give his leaflets to human beings unless they begged him, sometimes not even then. He stood on the corner of Sixteenth and Valencia with a stack of them in his crooked arm, like a statue erected to commemorate an old battle. Generalissimo Swan, who fought the world to a standstill in the Battle of the Mission.