I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Mendelsohn, Jane

  She knows that she wanted this to happen. She made it happen. But she never expected it to happen. She has nothing with her but a change of clothes, the dictionary of pidgin English she bought in Lae, and her silver powder compact. She left behind a parachute, a life raft, her good-luck elephant’s foot bracelet, and in order to make the plane as light as possible, they had unloaded anything else deemed unessential on the runway in New Guinea. She hadn’t even wanted Noonan to take the pearl-handled knife he had bought in a street market in Dakar, but now she is grateful for it because it enables her to hack through the otherwise impenetrable jungle.

  The first night, she and Noonan sleep next to each other on the beach. The sky is clear, the sea is calm, the wide night stretches out like an enormous tent, but still she is troubled by the sound of his breathing, by his nocturnal mutterings, and by the feeling that on this loneliest of islands she is unfortunately not alone.

  She reveals herself to him in her despair. In the middle of the night she gets up from their makeshift camp and in her ravaged sleep she climbs into the Electra. She climbs into the plane, which sits on the reef flat like an embodiment of their grounded longings. She sits, her hands lightly skimming the controls, her eyes focused past the darkness over the sea. She sits in a meditation so intense that for a moment even he believes that she is flying through a supernatural element.

  The plane doesn’t move. A seagull perches on top of it, mocking its directionless, stationary flight.

  Already, in the sky, she was preparing for these mysterious, internal flights.

  The sky, now I know, is endless.

  •

  Very soon, fortunately, it rains. After the rain she sits by the lagoon and watches the giant frogs relaxing on sun-baked stones, their mouths popping open to catch bugs. She watches flocks of migrating birds rise like plumes of lavender smoke across the ocean at twilight. She admires the sharks, their punctual appointments with death, the leisurely circles they make in the sea. In one day she sees them devour three exotic birds which dip down to the water for dinner. First the purple one was pulled under by a sudden force, and then the other two disappeared in a clean swipe, and then all that was left were a few iridescent feathers swirling gently in a bloody whirlpool.

  The streamlined precision of the sharks makes her long for the fluid engineering of her plane.

  These are very good, he says.

  We don’t talk much, but then one day he asks me if I like coconut. I tell him, somewhat formally, because I haven’t been speaking much, that I have never been introduced to coconut.

  I never met one I didn’t like, he says.

  He hands me a coconut, teases me. I look at it. I turn it around and around, the liquid splashing inside. I wonder how to get at it. It’s like a human head, maddening, inaccessible.

  You have to shell a coconut to get at its fruit, and for that you need a machete. I don’t know that, so I try to break it on a tree. I hit the tree with it, but nothing happens. When I throw the coconut at the tree again, we both start to laugh. Then I throw the coconut at him, and he catches it, and he falls backward, still laughing. He takes his knife out from his pocket and starts to shell the fruit. When he splits open the white skull, the milk drips over, and I realize how hungry I am. We’ve been eating fish and drinking the water we collected, but I realize that I’m hungry for something sweet.

  I notice that for the first time I’m noticing him.

  He says he feels sorry for me because I’ve never eaten a coconut before. Never had the experience, he says. I say I don’t need his pity and anyway here I am, about to taste a coconut. He hands me half the coconut to drink from, and I take it, the liquid almost painful it’s so sugary. I feel it travel from my mouth all over my body. He asks me if I like it. But I don’t hear him at first; I’m just looking at him and listening to the sea. He asks me again and before I can answer he hands me another piece. I feel something deepen inside me, very gently, like the sand soaking up the water after a wave. I feel that I’ve absorbed something.

  Sometimes the sound of the ocean is almost deafening. It’s like the roar of the Electra’s engine. I remember some things so vividly: the light was bright, but now it’s falling, the beach is empty, we don’t speak, we’re surrounded by the continuous roar of the ocean, we’re swept up in it, borne along. There are no obstacles between us and the water, just the sand, and then the reef, and then the sea. Out on the water you can see the shadows of the clouds going by under the slanting sunlight. Great masses of clouds sometimes. They look like the undersides of vast ships. Their shadows look like ships on the water. The wind can be as deafening as the water, and the sound of trees in the wind is frightening. Palm leaves can make a noise more portentous than anything I’ve ever heard. It’s a sound of rage, full of heat.

  Now the day is ending. You can tell by the water, the tide’s coming back in again. It’s coming home at the end of the day, reaching closer and closer.

  The beach is separated from the sea by the coral reef flat, which the water is beginning to cover. There’s nothing separating us from the ocean. It doesn’t know that we exist, although we watch it all day. It surrounds us, rules our lives, cuts us off, brings us together, holds us.

  The smell of the lagoon drifts by in the late air, and the smells of salty water, coconut flesh, birds, sweat, flowers, strange spices, fire, the fire always burning on the lonely stretch of beach. The smell of the island is the smell of the sea and the desert and the jungle mixed into one.

  I find him sitting in the back of the plane. He’s drinking rum, smoking one of his last cigarettes.

  He says what took me so long, he’s been waiting for me. I’ve been listening to the sea. He is lit on one side by moonlight streaming in through the window.

  He’s a very predictable man, for a drunk. I bet he comes here often. This must already be part of his routine, I think. He’s an addict. He’s addicted to his habits, to his drink, to his cigarettes. He was addicted to women. He must still be addicted to women.

  We look at each other in the blue light. The air is an eerie, nightclub blue. It lends everything a sordid drama. He smells strongly of good rum, cheap tobacco, burning wood, salt—he smells wonderful. He’s drunk and he asks me to stay awhile. Pull up a chair, he says.

  He tells me that he thinks we’re going to be saved, and then he tells me we are going to die here. He talks to me, tells me he knew from the beginning this would happen, that he knew when we were crossing the ocean, crossing the desert, he knew that I would take him to this place. Now, he says, I’ll probably leave him to die here alone, I’ll betray him somehow. He says the fortune-teller told him he would live a long, happy life. I told him she said that to me too. We laugh and then he becomes quiet, brooding. I close my eyes and smell his smell. He’s used to it, I know, the effect he has on women. But I don’t believe this is the usual effect.

  Later, we make love very easily, half asleep. It’s understood that it doesn’t mean anything.

  •

  The sound of the water is so intimate, so close, you can hear it lapping underneath the Electra. It feels as if we’re on a ship anchored at sea. I touch his hair in the darkness. The moon is obscured. The clouds pass over it in black, lacy veils.

  I wake him up and tell him I need to talk to him. I need to talk so that I don’t lose my mind. Tell me a story, I say. Tell me what we’ll say to the reporters when they bring us back to New York.

  He felt for the bottle of rum and gave it to me. Very softly, right in my hair, he spoke to me.

  He told me what we would say when we got back to New York.

  Because I want to be close to him but don’t know how, I say something I don’t entirely mean. I want to tell him something nice so I say to him, Thank you, that was a good story.

  It’s the middle of the night. He says they’ll never believe us if we tell them the truth. He says maybe we should keep it a secret. We’ll tell them that we were taken by pirates, or by the Japanese, and captu
red as spies. He tells me that he’s never been anywhere like this, and I say, I know, neither have I.

  •

  I still remember his story. I remember the way he told it, just what words he used. It was a story about spying on the Japanese and being captured and tortured and executed. But he told it in a very funny way, using fake voices and giving characters silly names. At one point he used an expression I’d never heard: “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” It seemed at once too silly and too sophisticated for him, but I realize he is actually a very sophisticated, very rough, contradictory man.

  It was a sad story, but it ended with a happy twist. I thanked him for it, told him it was a good story, and then he asked me what I was really thinking.

  At night I dream about my plane. I see myself sinking to the bottom of the ocean in my once magnificent Electra, my eyes focused blankly on the perpetual blue, my silk scarf floating in an eternal wave. Later, a man with a hat appears to me. He’s standing on the coral reef flat in the dawn, his tie lifting in the wind, a silver Cord Phaeton parked behind him, waiting to take me away. The first dream calms me. It seems perfectly natural. The second one wakes me up. It’s a nightmare.

  Morning streams in through the windows. The specially installed windows of the navigator’s cabin. They’ve spent the night in the Electra, almost by accident, and now it’s hot inside, a furnace.

  They leave the plane. She’s put on her silk scarf, knotted it loosely around her neck, and powdered her sunburnt nose. She knows she’s behaving with a comic degree of civility, but it’s the way she’s always responded to disaster. There’s a new lightness to her actions now, a desperate comedy.

  He sees it and he says, Your nose looks fine.

  The first couple of days have gone by and I’ve forgotten how angry I was at him. I’m still in shock. He’s very kind to me. He seems to feel he owes me his life because somehow I was able to land the Electra on a reef flat. I, on the other hand, I blame him for our situation. If not for him, I think, we would be home. But then when I think that, I’m not sure whether to blame him or to say, No, it’s you who saved my life. But I don’t feel that yet. I don’t thank him. I won’t feel that for quite a while.

  I ask him to tell me about his life. I don’t really know anything about him. He says he’s spent so many years trying to forget it, he’s not sure he can tell his story. It started when he went to sea, at fifteen; he was a kitchen boy. He went around the world in ships, many times. Once he was held in Madagascar for forty-five days. He grew up in those forty-five days, fell in love, had love, fell out of love. He learned about the stars in his years at sea, he knows how to read the stars.

  That’s all you really need to know about me, he says, I know how to read the stars.

  I ask about the stars, if he can tell us where we are. He has some idea, but his calculations don’t make sense. He was passed out for so much of our last leg that he lost track of where we were. He was drunk when we took off. He was certain we were going to die. When we left, the wind was blowing the wrong way. He says that on the airfield, when we unloaded the plane, my scarf dancing hysterically in the air, he says then he knew we were going to die. He says it as if he had been right, as if his fear were a legitimate excuse.

  You were afraid, I say, but you were wrong.

  I wasn’t wrong to be afraid, he says. It was the wind that did us in.

  Suddenly I feel sick. It’s a slight dizziness, a subtle unbalancing. It’s my heart, sinking, when I realize that I am alone. He’s so afraid, I remember, and all the anger returns. I don’t have time to feel compassionate. Here I am, alone again, alone but not completely by myself, alone without the freedom of not having to think about someone else. Suddenly all the anger that washed away in the trance of our landing reappears, and I wish that Noonan had died. I don’t hear what he’s saying, I just watch him talking, and instead of his dark beauty, I see his eyes: they’re filled with fear. He sees that I’m seeing him and he stops talking, but I recover, pretend I’m listening. He says he thinks maybe he can use the engine to charge up the radio and try to make contact with passing ships, or something like that. I say it wasn’t the wind that did us in. He doesn’t seem to have heard me.

  This is how we talk to each other now, in overlapping monologues. We’ve been separated by fear. Fear has set in, and memory, and blame. I’m awake most of the night, waiting for a ship to see our fire, hearing in the wind the voice of the radio operator, hearing the scratch of his breath in the shifting leaves, comforting myself in my anguish with memory traces, the agonizing moments before I lost contact with the world.

  Then I dream of my Electra and wake up shaking.

  It’s always this way: the worst times are when I’m reminded that I can no longer fly. When I wake up, when the tide is out, when Noonan is asleep, I go and sit in the cockpit whose every inch I know by heart. I sit under the light of a starry sky, illegible to me but sparkling so clearly it seems a different sky than the ones I’ve known before, written in an intricately beautiful foreign language, and the flights that I have made in the past retain their original magic when I reenact them in my mind.

  She sits, her fingers touching the familiar dials, her body shaking slightly in response to an imaginary motion, her mind projecting scenes of deserts and cities on the screen of her closed eyes.

  After these flights she’s overcome by an unbearable sadness. And then in the morning, her anger at Noonan returns.

  Six

  OUR DAILY LIFE revolved around the dinners on the beach. When he tells me that he started off as a kitchen boy on a ship, I tell him that he has to cook me dinner, and he does, every night, on the beach.

  The evenings are long and empty. He prepares fish when he can catch them, but he hasn’t found the best spots yet, the fertile inlets, and so some nights he comes up with nothing, not even a crab, and we’re so hungry in our desperation that he cooks what he can find. One night it’s a rat. The meat is thin and stringy, tasteless, and he waits awhile to tell me that it’s a rat, as if I haven’t noticed it isn’t a fish. He tries to make conversation with me, but I’m furious. Not about the rat, but about the flight, about his fear. I think that I’m angry at him because he’s afraid, as if that’s something to be angry about. I blame everything on him and it makes it worse for me. He can’t hold all my anger. After dinner, I clear away the bones, the ashes, in a silent and inexplicable rage. He seems wounded, not surprisingly, and he tries to tell the story of his adventures at sea, or on the Mississippi as a riverboat captain. I’m inconsolable. I treat him more brutally than I’ve ever treated anyone.

  Later, he keeps talking to me, trying to make conversation.

  You know your husband, he says.

  G.P.? I say.

  Yes, well, him. You know I never liked him, he says.

  Oh really, why not?

  I thought he was silly, he says. I thought that he didn’t understand you.

  Well he didn’t, I say to the ocean. But you don’t either.

  He drinks. He rations his liquor. He pours it out into a coconut shell. I watch him. The first time, I remember, he measured and measured, and then he filled the shell up to the top. I almost started laughing, after his careful measurements.

  How did you get to be such a stinking drunk? I ask.

  Two ways, he says. Gradually and then suddenly.

  •

  He drinks it all. He doesn’t offer me any. I don’t thank him for dinner, he doesn’t thank me for cleaning up. We are like prisoners, convicts.

  Eventually, I stop saying anything about his drinking. I don’t feel that I can; I’ve maintained some obscure sense of etiquette, because my life no longer depends on his ability to keep sober and do his job. Although now, in a sense, it matters more. We have to keep the fires burning and stay on the lookout for passing ships, always the dream of passing ships. We are still expecting to be rescued. We don’t say anything about it to each other, but it is the religion that gives our days direc
tion. It’s taken for granted that we will survive this, that we’ll be home one day, away from each other, released, that we have separate futures, that we can treat each other however we please, it doesn’t matter, we don’t matter to each other. This is because we are still dreaming, still falling. We haven’t yet landed. We barely speak to each other anymore, except to exchange factual information. One night after dinner, when he’s drinking, by now he’s already drunk, he tells me that he’s seen a plane. At first I pretend I haven’t heard. He doesn’t repeat what he’s said, and I don’t ask. These are the rules of our bloodless warfare. We’re silent for a while, long enough for me to forget what he’s said, and then, once I’ve written it off as a drunken slur and forgotten it completely, only then, only then do I hear something terrifying. It’s a faint, unnatural, mechanical hum. It’s a painfully familiar yet utterly foreign sound. After I hear it, there’s a second of silence. Everything seems to stop. I remember what Noonan said. I hate him more than ever. We put more wood on the fire. We wait on the beach. It’s dark, and we don’t see anything.

  In the middle of the night I go to the Electra for one of my midnight voyages. But by the time I get there, I’ve woken up completely, I’m no longer in a trance. I’m awake and I walk into the navigator’s cabin. In my bare feet I walk on our charts, our maps, scraps of paper covered with calculations. Noonan’s shoes are lying in a corner. I open up one of the drawers in his table and I find that it is filled with bottles of rum. I don’t even try to stop myself. I take out the bottles, I leave the Electra. I walk down to the beach. It’s very dark, the moon is dim, and I walk to the edge of the water. I look out into the darkness. I’m looking for a plane, a sign, a glimmer, anything. It’s completely dark. The air is heavy, and hot, it won’t rain yet. I open the bottles. I take a sip from one of them. Then I turn them upside down, one by one, and I pour them into the ocean.