Luminous Airplanes: A Novel

by Paul La Farge

  I went to the bar and ordered us two more beers. I put a dollar in the jukebox, because I thought we needed music to take us away from ourselves. Soon Robert Plant was singing, Good times, bad times, you know I’ve had my share, which fit the moment, even though I hadn’t chosen it for that reason, I didn’t know Led Zeppelin at all, I had chosen these songs because they were the only recognizable noncountry tunes on the jukebox, with the exception of a Best of Frank Sinatra album that I knew we needed to avoid. Charles’s big gray head rose and fell to the music. In the orange light of the jukebox he looked at once older and younger: younger, because I could see how he had looked when he was twenty. His hair was restored to shoulder-length luxury; his mustache grew black and sleek; in his eyes the certainty that he was at the center of the room, wherever he happened to be sitting, that he, Charles Rowland, was an event, a sensation, shone like a stage light. Older because I knew how many years had passed since that moment, and because I could see how badly those years had used him. He had been fixed too many times already, and when the next thing broke, whatever it was, his hip, his lungs, he would be beyond repair. Richard might have broken him first, or it might have been Oliver, who had ruined even his girls. With his only son he must have been a terror. Always tinkering with the last male Rowland in history, always making improvements. Now look. Charles doesn’t see that I’m looking at him. His thick gray fingers drum on the table and his lips move to the song. Good times, bad times. His eyes are lost in a past he will not share with me. Maybe he’s back in Vietnam. Maybe he has gone to California at last. I bring the beers back to our table and he grins at me.

  “Fucking music,” he says.

  He salutes me with his mug and I salute him back. Charles sets the mug down and belches. End of story. Or not quite the end. When he’s finished with his beer, Charles looks up at me with a sly, almost evil happiness that makes him look like the uncle I remember from childhood. “You know what we ought to do right now?” he says. “We ought to go see some girls.”

  This is going to be a mistake, I thought, as I got into Charles’s truck. We drove north on Route 296, away from Maplecrest. Charles had the radio on, and we listened to Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House,” and Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer,” a strange combination, as though, as these songs grow older, all their actual, musical qualities are forgotten and the only thing that anyone remembers about them is that they’re from the past.

  “You like this stuff?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Charles said, “but there’s no radio for men like me.”

  He stopped the truck in an unpaved parking lot outside a concrete pillbox with a yellow sign atop it that read SPHINX CLUB.

  “I used to go to a place like this in San Francisco,” I said.

  “No shit?” Charles said. “I bet that was sweet.”

  It wasn’t. In the gloomy winter of 1997, I’d gone a few times to a club where you got to sit in a dark cubicle and look at naked women through an almost soundproof sheet of glass. I went in the afternoon, mostly, though the word mostly makes it sound like more of a habit than it was. At first I was charmed by the collegial atmosphere that existed on the other side of the window; the women were all in one big, bright room and as they gyrated they talked to one another. It was impossible to eavesdrop on them through the glass, but it looked like they were having pleasant conversations. As I watched them dance I found myself wondering what they were talking about. I imagined that they were acquaintances who used their time together to catch up on one another’s lives, the way women in other casual settings might do the same thing. Johnny’s fine, I imagined one of them saying to another as she twirled lazily around the silver pole in the middle of the room, he’s going out for the soccer team, and he’s decided this year, no more Spanish.—Is that so? the woman who was leaning against the window right over my head replied. Marcia didn’t take Spanish either after the seventh grade. I wonder what it is, do they have a bad teacher?—They think it isn’t cool, said the pole girl. Oops! Looks like you dropped something! —Thanks! said the other woman, and she got down on all fours to look for it. I found this fantasy strangely erotic. I wanted to be idle with the women in the big bright room, where sex was as simple and harmless as a conversation in a supermarket.

  I stopped going to the club when I found out, by looking in the mirror at the back of their room, that the women could see me almost as well as I could see them. They knew my face; they might remember me from previous visits; they might, and this was the clincher, they might make me a topic of conversation. The guy in booth three is a serious masturbator, I imagined the pole girl saying to her friend. You can tell by the way he holds his dick. Her friend looked down at me. He’s not touching himself!—Make him start, said the pole girl. Her friend made a face at me as though we were having sex. I see what you mean, she called over her shoulder. What is it, something in the wrist?—It’s his concentration, said the pole girl. Do you see how he’s frowning?—Oh, my god, you’re right, said her friend. That’s so intense! Hey, have you ever been to the Zen Center?

  I sat in the darkness, holding my penis as though to protect it from the cold, and I thought I saw the women look at me, and there was no companionship in their eyes, nor any compassion. That was unpleasant, but it was clear as soon as we stepped inside the Sphinx Club that this was a much worse place. The loudspeakers played Nirvana for a skinny girl on a stage that stuck into the room like a wooden tongue. The girl looked too young to be there, and really was too thin; her torso rested on her hips like a puzzle piece that didn’t fit the piece below. There was a red spotlight on her, but even so you could see the blue tracery of her veins.

  Charles was saying something, but the music echoed so loudly off the concrete walls that I couldn’t understand him. He motioned for me to stoop so he could shout in my ear. “You know what I call this place? The Kountry Kunt. With two Ks, like the Kountry Kitchen and the …”

  “I get it,” I shouted.

  We sat next to an old Latino in a blue-checked shirt and a younger man who could have been his son. As we watched, the girl took off her top, exposing small white breasts which she took by the nipples and tugged in one direction then another, as if to show off their mobility. She looked like a salesclerk showing us how to use a new household object. The old man seated next to us put a five-dollar bill on the stage and the girl knelt and did the breast demonstration again. Up close, she looked older, twenty-five or even thirty, in the red light it was difficult to tell. The song ended and the woman paused, then the Guess Who’s “American Woman” came on, and she stood up, turned her back to us and dropped her underwear. Next to me, Charles was rocking back and forth to the beat of the song.

  “You like this?” I shouted in his ear.

  “It’s better in the wintertime,” he shouted back. “This is the off season.”

  His breath steamed and I realized that it was cold in the Sphinx Club, not as cold as it was outside but much colder than you’d expect a man-made structure to be at the end of the twentieth century. I didn’t like to think how it felt to the woman onstage, although maybe she was used to it. Or maybe the Sphinx Club was having trouble getting heating oil, maybe their tanker was delayed because of the hurricane also.

  “Wait till you see Barb, though,” Charles said. “She comes on later.”

  The woman spun around a metal pole that pierced the tongue stage at its widest point. She climbed the pole, embraced it with her legs and let her torso fall backward so her hair brushed the floor. I shivered. How could anyone want this, I wondered, but I couldn’t look away. I was ashamed of what I’d done at Summerland. How could I have forgotten everything Yesim had told me? Why hadn’t I been able to stop myself? The woman doubled over and looked at us from between her legs. Yes, she seemed to say, that’s the riddle.—Do you know the answer? I asked. Do I know, she said, do I know? I’m the country cunt, I know everything.—OK, I said, what is it?—Guess, said the country cunt. Love? I said. Love, sh
e repeated, don’t make me laugh. You want love, take a look at this. She reached back and grabbed her goosefleshed thighs and pulled the lips of her vulva apart for the benefit of the man beside us, whose hand lay paralyzed on top of the five-dollar bill he’d set on the stage. You feel that? the country cunt said. Brr.—Give me a hint, I said. It starts with the letter h, said the country cunt. Hope? I said. Not even close, said the country cunt. Guess again. But I didn’t want to play her game anymore.

  “I don’t feel well,” I shouted at Charles.

  “You want to leave now?” Charles asked, surprised. “But we only just got here.”

  “Yes, now.”

  I left the Sphinx Club. A moment later Charles came out and we stood beside his truck.

  “It’s too bad,” he said, “I would have liked for you to meet Barb.”

  Just then a blue Toyota raced into the parking lot and stopped, and a chubby black woman climbed out, wearing black leggings and a fur-collared bomber jacket.

  “And here she is,” Charles said. “Barb, hey! Come over here and meet my nephew.”

  Barb shook my hand. “He’s a lot bigger than you.”

  “Aah,” said Charles, “I just shrunk.”

  Barb asked if we were on our way in, and Charles said no, in fact he was taking me home. “He was in a car accident this morning.”

  “Well, then,” Barb said, “you get him home, all right? You got to take care of him.” She jogged around to the back of the Sphinx Club and vanished.

  “She’s a nice girl,” Charles said as we climbed into his truck. “I don’t know where she comes from, but I told her I’d take care of her, if she wanted. You know what she said? She told me she was waiting for a rich man to come along. A rich man! God bless her, but I don’t think she’s going to meet one in that place.”

  “It doesn’t look promising.”

  “On the other hand, maybe I’ll get rich,” my uncle said.

  It occurred to me that you could never know other people, and that no matter how much you learned about them, they would always have another side that was hidden from your view, a dark bulk that made them complete but that you would never understand. By then we were back in Thebes.

  “Where’s your car?” Charles asked.

  “At the grocery store, but I don’t think I can drive. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

  “You forget that we have a tow truck.”

  “No,” I said, but it was too late, he was already pulling into the parking lot. He climbed down and hooked tow chains to the front fender of Norman Mailer’s car, which was strangely unscathed by everything that had happened. With a grinding sound, the car rose to its rear wheels, like a begging animal. We drove back to Thebes with it rolling behind us, and when we got to my grandparents’ house Charles backed the truck deftly into the driveway and lowered Norman Mailer’s car to the ground. Then: “Hey,” I said, pointing. The lights in the kitchen and one of the upstairs bedrooms were on.

  “Uh-oh,” said Charles.

  I knew without being told that Kerem was inside, waiting for me. Or else he was vandalizing the house, ruining it, as I had—so I thought—ruined his sister. As if to confirm my fears, Charles opened the glove compartment and took out a .45 automatic. Holding it with its muzzle pointed at the sky, he slipped from the cab of the tow truck and motioned for me to wait. I sat helplessly in the passenger seat, sick with guilt and fear, imagining my uncle surprising Kerem in the living room. Kerem had a short temper; my uncle hated the Regenzeits. I was sure one of them was about to kill the other, or that they would both be killed, and that it was going to be my fault, and when, a moment later, a woman screamed, I thought, Yesim! and came running out of the truck to see what terrible thing had happened.

  Charles stood on the porch, the pistol dangling at the end of his limp arm. He turned to me, his face pale, and grinned irritably. “It’s your mothers,” he said.

  LOW-FLYING STARS

  When I left Stanford, with only the most confused of explanations, four years into my doctorate, the Celestes said they loved me as much as ever, and wanted me to be happy as much as they always had, but they became noticeably remote, as though my decision had revealed something about me that they did not understand and could not embrace. We talked every week, but their questions about my job at Cetacean were pro forma; the days of Celeste’s puzzled interest in computer programming were long gone. I tried to understand their disapproval. They wanted me to be poor but noble, like them, I thought. They didn’t like the idea that I was making money in the business world or, worse, that I might, by some ordinary standard, be more successful than they were. My Christmastime visits to New York became strained, then stopped completely.

  But when I saw the Celestes sitting side by side on my grandparents’ sofa, their lower bodies covered by an afghan, their faces still animated by the shock of nearly being shot by their own brother, I realized that this had all been illusion. My mothers weren’t poor. Marie wore a deep-gray cashmere turtleneck set off with a wide gold necklace; austere Celeste wore a blue denim shirt and fleece vest specked with white paint. Four brand-new hiking boots stood in a line by the kitchen door. My mothers must have bought them for this trip, as though they were going into the wilderness, and not back to their childhood home.

  “We took a cab from the train station,” Marie was saying. “We thought you’d gone out to dinner, so we let ourselves in. I didn’t know Thebes was so dangerous!”

  “We thought you were burglars,” I said.

  Celeste looked at me sternly and asked, “What happened to your head?”

  “Car accident,” I said. “I got rear-ended.”

  Charles said nothing.

  “Oh, dear,” said Marie. “Were you wearing your seat belt?”

  “Yes. I’m fine. It was a low-speed collision.”

  My mothers felt bad about having sent me off to Thebes to pack up the house on my own. For several weeks they’d wanted to come up, but New York was so busy in the early fall, they’d had to wait for the Columbus Day weekend. They’d called me to say they were coming, but got no answer. “We thought you might be camping,” Celeste said, a little maliciously.

  “We were just having a beer,” I said.

  “Before the accident, or after?” Celeste asked.

  “After.”

  “Just a nightcap,” my uncle said, as if this were the normal course of things: accident, drink.

  “Well, we’re glad you didn’t shoot us,” Marie said.

  Sure, now, that they would be staying, Celeste carried their bags upstairs. Marie made tea. Changing the subject, she told us she’d been promoted. Now she was the style editor at S. “It’s an almost meaningless distinction,” she said, “but I do get to travel. Milan in October, Paris in January. Celeste is jealous.”

  “She’s not coming with you?” I couldn’t imagine one of them going anywhere without the other.

  “She has a show. You should ask her about it, she’s been making the most incredible …”Then her phone rang. “Hello? Just a sec.” Marie went into the parlor.

  “Thanks,” I said to Charles.

  “Thanks for what?” asked Celeste, coming downstairs again. She poured herself a mug of tea, and when neither of us answered her question, she went on, her voice expressing surprise and possibly disapproval, “How nice of you to leave our room the way it was.”

  My mothers stayed for two days. It was the first time since I was in high school that we’d spent so many hours together, and I found them different than I remembered: gentler, less insistent on their own apartness.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t come to the funeral,” Celeste said, on Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in the parlor while Marie circled the house, her telephone pressed to her ear. “You would have heard some stories about your grandfather. Did you know, he went to visit Gabby Thule when she was in the hospital, and he brought her wildflowers? He was a generous spirit, that was the phrase one of his friends used.”

  I d
idn’t point out that generuz de son esprit meant something different. “It sounds like you miss him.”

  “Miss him?” Celeste said. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like he’s still here, and sometimes it’s like he was never here at all. Although I had a dream about him the other night. He had sent me a pair of wool socks, and I called to say thank you. Wool socks!” she repeated, smiling. “It’s very strange.”

  Celeste fell silent. I asked her about her show, and she said it wasn’t her show, it was a group show, organized by an arts council in Lower Manhattan. “You know who had a big show, though? Guy Anstine.”

  “The white box guy?”

  “That’s him. Only now he’s tied his boxes together with string, and people are saying they represent some kind of network, a hermetic system of historical reference, what bullshit. Of course, Guy is a man.” Celeste tapped her finger on her knee. Cautiously, as though she didn’t know how her words would be received, she began to indict the system that elevated guys like Guy to the heavens while she was left somewhere in between, not obscure but not brilliant, ascending with infinite slowness. As she spoke I understood that Celeste didn’t care whether I was an artist or an intellectual or a computer programmer: all she wanted from me was to know that I wasn’t part of the system she was constantly fighting against, the one that wanted her to be unfamous, unknown. If Celeste had seemed to withdraw from me, it was because she worried that I wouldn’t care so much about her.

  That evening at dinner I mentioned that Yesim and Kerem were back in Thebes. I didn’t say anything about having seen them, but Marie saw through my feigned casualness. “What a coincidence,” she said, “that you should all come back here at the same time! It must be nice for you not to be alone.”