A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (4 page)

Jimmy pays for the tree, and his girl—and this is the truth—jumps on him, wrestles him to the ground in gratitude and smothers him for nearly a minute. There have never been people happier about a Christmas tree. We pay quickly and head out before Jimmy or his girlfriend can think to begin thanking us.

On the way home in the truck, I say to Elise, “Santa says keep your watch, eh?”

“Yes, he does,” she smiles.

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Eight.”

It’s an old joke, and Drew finishes it for me: “When he was your age, he was seven.”

We will go home and while the two women begin decorating the tree with the artifacts of our many Christmases together, I will thread popcorn onto a long string. It is a ritual I prefer for its uniqueness; the fact that once a year I get to sit and watch the two girls I am related to move about a tree inside our home, while I sit nearby and sew food.

ON THE
morning of the twenty-fourth of December, Elise comes into our bedroom, already dressed for sledding. “Good news,” she says. “We’ve got a shot at the record.”

Drew rises from the pillow and peeks out the blind. “It’s snowing,” she says.

Christmas Eve, we drive back along the snowy Avenues, and park on Fifth, as always. “I know,” Elise says, hopping out of the car. “You two used to live right over there before you had me and it was a swell place and only cost seventy-two fifty a month, honest.”

Drew looks at me and smiles.

“How old are you?” I ask Elise, but she is busy towing the sled away, around the corner, up toward Eleventh Avenue. It is still snowing, petal flakes, teeming by the streetlamps, trying to carry the world away. I take Drew’s hand and we walk up the middle of H Street behind our daughter. There is no traffic, but the few cars have packed the tender snow perfectly. It
could
be a record. On Ninth Avenue, Drew stops me in the intersection, the world still as snow, and kisses me. “I love you,” she says.

“What a planet,” I whisper. “To allow such a thing.”

By the time we climb to Eleventh Avenue, Elise is seated on the sled, ready to go. “What are you guys waiting for, Christmas?” she says and then laughs at her own joke. Then she becomes all business: “Listen, Dad, I figure if you stay just a little to the left of the tire tracks we could go all the way. And no wobbling!” She’s referring to last year’s record attempt, which was extinguished in the Eighth Avenue block when we laughed ourselves into a fatal wobble and ended in a slush heap.

We arrange ourselves on the sled, as we have each Christmas Eve for eight years. As I reach my long legs around these two women, I sense their excitement. “It’s going to be a record!” Elise whispers into the whispering snow.

“Do you think so?” Drew asks. She also feels this could be the night.

“Oh yeah!” Elise says. “The conditions are perfect!”

“What do you think?” Drew turns to me.

“Well, the conditions are perfect.”

When I say
conditions,
Drew leans back and kisses me. So I press: “There’s still room on the sled,” I say, pointing to the “F” in Flexible Flyer that is visible between Elise’s legs. “There’s still room for another person.”

“Who?” Elise asks.

“Your little brother,” Drew says, squeezing my knees.

And that’s about all that was said, sitting up there on Eleventh Avenue on Christmas Eve on a sled which is as old as my marriage with a brake that is as old as my daughter. Later tonight I will stand in my yard and throw this year’s reindeer droppings on my very own home. I love Christmas.

Now the snow spirals around us softly. I put my arms around my family and lift my feet onto the steering bar. We begin to slip down H Street. We are trying for the record. The conditions, as you know by now, are perfect.

SANTA MONICA

I
’M IN
the King’s Head at the end of Santa Monica Boulevard drinking my fourth pint of bitter wondering if maybe I should eat something and just go home. I’m sitting under the window watching one guy play darts against himself, and he’s not very good. Judith called and said to meet, so I’ll stay. The bitter is good; I haven’t been here for a couple of months, so I might as well wait it out. If she doesn’t show, maybe she’s not in trouble after all.

I’m trying to make a catalogue in my head of all the pubs in Hampstead. It’s been two years, but I remember the Three Horseshoes at the High Street, where we’d go and watch the teenagers pick each other up. Monday nights they had poetry readings upstairs. I remember one guy read poems with a dummy; he was a ventriloquist. And there was Sir Something who was ninety-six years old. He read from a book he had published at twenty and talked ironically between the poems about what a stupid young man he had been. It was hilarious, but at the end, he said something like he was glad they had asked him to read, but it was the saddest thing he could remember doing. He had to be helped to a chair. Late that spring they invited Judith to read, but we were packing by then for the return.

Across the street, there was the Bird in Hand, which was full of worn-out working men, and down a block was the King of Bohemia, which was warm and cozy, always half full of older married couples. The women had learned to drink. We had lunch in there on Tuesday’s, back in the nook by the aquarium. Across the zebra from the Bohemia was King Henry the Fourth, which was gay and way too small, but they had a little garden. All the men in velvet drinking John Courage, everybody’s hands above the table, moving. And then down the street, below the fish-market and the newsstand and the doner-kabob shop, was the simplest pub of all, the Rosslyn Arms, which was where we drank, where we met all the American teachers, and where Gordon would get drunk and finger each new necklace Judith wore—the smashed penny, the Parcheesi tokens—pulling her as close as people get while talking to each other. He was as big as a bear and would always get drunk and offer to “bite her bottom,” but he was harmless. He wasn’t a writer. It was in the Rosslyn Arms where I learned to play real darts, in fact, where behind the bar, in one of the three cigar boxes, my best darts sit right now.

I order another bitter from the girl, and I notice she’s a pretty girl about twenty-six, and I tell myself again: I’ve got to begin noticing women, but by the time she returns with the pint, I’ve begun my catalogue again, going way to the top of the High Street, at the corner of the heath, and I’m starting with Jack Straw’s Castle. I’m trying to decide whether or not to include The Spaniards, where Judith and I walked only one day, but we were too late for lunch and the staff was all cranky. I feel a hand on my shoulder. Judith lifts my glass and drains the whole pint until I can see her eyes closed through the bottom of the glass.

“Hello, Douglas,” she says. “Let’s eat later.” She leads me outside.

If we were strangers, or acquaintances, or anything less than what we are, whatever that is, I would now ask
What’s up?
, but we don’t talk that way. There is going to be some theater first, I see, as Judith walks two steps ahead of me across the boulevard, through the park, and down the winding steps to the beach. She’s wearing a blue oxford shirt under the brown baggy cardigan I bought her in Hampstead. She always wears clothes from the old days when she meets me.

There aren’t many people out, since it’s a gray day in February, but there is a brighter band of light on the horizon and a warm breeze comes off the sea. I walk behind Judith and kind of enjoy it; the air feels good and I’m full of beer. The light over the ocean makes it seem as if there is a lot of the day left. It’s sunny for brunch in Hawaii. I swing my legs, stepping in every other of her footprints. It feels wonderful to move this way; she can take her time. I don’t really want to hear about Reichert or the studio.

Judith walks in a forced jaunt, bunched a little against the weather, her fingers in her sweater pockets.

“You kind of walk like David Niven,” I say to her back. I’m suddenly thinking this doesn’t have to be a terrible interview; the beer has made me careless. She walks on. I let her go a little farther ahead, and then I follow doing crazy steps: five-foot leaps and then micro-steps, inches apart. Backward steps, duck steps, and then a few real long side steps. She’ll see this stuff on the way back.

We approach a couple who have committed themselves to a full-scale beach picnic. They are both sitting on a real checked tablecloth and we hear the man say “Voila!” to the young woman as he pulls a bottle of red wine from a large basket. He is wearing a dark sweater which I see has a large crimson “H” on the front. I’ve seen him in the story department at Paramount.

Judith stops. “Where are we going?”

As she faces me, I see the new necklace, a silver doodah of some kind. When she first came out, she wore a half pence and a New York subway token. When she finally moved in with Reichert, she made a string with six of my cigarette filters, painted turquoise, to make it look like it was my fault. She wants to show me this new one and holds it out. Taking it in my hand, I am as close to her as I’ve been in ten months.

“Pretty, right?” I see it is a smashed .38 cartridge. “I found it last week at the bottom of the swimming pool.”

We start back, but I steer her higher along the beach. I don’t want to see those tracks in the sand after all. “You want to go up to the pier?” I say. “You always like the pier.”

“The guy back there, the Harvard guy,” Judith says, now walking beside me, “he’s at Paramount in the story department.”

On the pier I finally ask her why she has the day off. She says that a rat has died in the office and they can’t find it even though there are two carpenters taking all the video cabinets apart, and the smell is so bad that Reichert sent everybody home. “He’s taking meetings at the house, telling everybody that they’re so special he’s meeting them in private. Today, it’s Jamie Curtis. The smell is bad, but you get used to it. I just couldn’t take those two stoned carpenters taking the doors off everything and chuckling their heads off.”

We buy ten tokens and go into the arcade. She leads me down all three aisles of video games and then back to the booth where she says to the kid: “Don’t you have any of the old games? Where’s Space Invaders?”

All the games we’ve seen have “Mega” in the titles. The kid points out a Donkey Kong game in the corner which has seen a lot of use. Judith makes me go first and then she asks questions: “What do you think the point of this game is?” “Do you think the girl is even worth saving?” I’m trying to concentrate, but the little guy acts drunk. He can’t decide which ladder to take, and Judith is beside me doing her show: “Do you think the guy really wants the girl?” I never get him above the second tier. The flaming barrel drops right on our heads.

Then, while she plays, she makes statements. She moves him expertly up the levels and says, “The guy could care less about the girl. He wants to get near the ape. He’s just curious.” She jumps two barrels at once and says, “See this, the guy only likes the outing; he loves to jump the barrels.” He seems to run faster when she plays. Judith takes him all the way to the top three times, but when he reaches the girl, Judith steps back, hands off the controls, and lets the monkey grab them both and close the game. “It’s fate,” she says. “I’m not getting in the way.”

As she starts another session, I slip away, out onto the pier and around to the restrooms. The bumper cars are empty. The kid in his booth sits hunched on the high chair, reading a hunting magazine. Reichert brought us out here when we had first moved. He had pointed at the kid in there and told me not to worry, there was plenty of work in California. Judith had laughed.

Later, after he’d hired Judith at the studio, she and I sometimes came out alone and stood at the end of the pier. It was like being on a great ferry headed west; she’d said that. She had liked California then. A lot of things were happening for her. We’d stand and let the waves break under us.

On the one trip we made to France from London, we’d gone out on the ferry deck in a gray drizzle, and she had said that the first thing she was going to do in St. Tropez was take her shirt off and sunburn her key onto her left breast. And, after a quick check that we were alone, she had opened her shirt, her nipples tight in the cold channel air, and placed the necklace in the spot. Two days later, she did just that, creating a little white shape that looked like that key for a long time. On the ferry that day, she had looked for a minute like a short blond figurehead; she’d said that too.

When I return, Judith is out on the pier rail. She holds up the last token and tells me that I’m not getting my last turn. I know that it will soon be another necklace. She has one like it with a Chuck E. Cheese token on it which reads, “In Pizza We Trust.”

She puts the token in her pocket and turns to the sea. The day here is shot, the sun gone, the cloud cover a bald dusk, but in the far west that fuzzy line of light persists on the sea’s edge.

“They’re having brunch on the veranda in Waikiki.”

“I’m as far West as I go.” Judith says into the wind. “This is it for me.”

I don’t want to argue with her. It is a relief not wanting to argue. It is not my fault she came to California. I don’t want to say that again. I don’t want to attack Reichert or defend him or any of the dozen other people we both still see, all of them bright, well-educated, charming people, mostly young, and every one of them integrally involved in film projects that are hideous or silly. I won’t argue. It is a relief. All I want is a beer. I want to push off this rail and walk back, swinging my legs, feeling my knees as we climb the steps, and go back across the street and have another beer.

“You think it’s possible to write a good movie?” Judith says, turning to me.

“I think it’s less possible than a year ago.”

“Oh good, I can’t wait until tomorrow.”

I nearly say
Neither can I,
but that is exactly how we used to talk. I say: “Judith, let me buy you a pint of bitter and a sandwich.”

“You think this is a good country? You think this is a livable country?”

I am not going to do this. “Judith, I can’t go on without a pint,” I say, stepping away from the rail. It is an old joke from London. I walk back to the first silver owl, as Judith calls the coin-operated binoculars on the pier.

Way out there I can see the guy from Paramount leaning back on one elbow drinking wine in the gray wind. Where do they learn that stuff? I close my eyes. I try to remember the name of the pub in Highgate across from Coleridge’s grave. I can’t get it. We walked there once on Easter, up through the cemetery where we stood before Marx’s tomb, and now I’m trying to remember Marx’s tomb: “Workers of the World Unite, ours is not to something something, but to change something.” There was a green-headed mallard on every stone crucifer. Judith and I sat on a green bench in the park and argued about something. The ducks were all mating, walking in circles around us, and then we walked up to the pub which had been a real coach stop in the old days, and it’s name was. I can’t remember.

I can remember Judith, after she started writing for Reichert, coming home late in the car. She wouldn’t come in the house. I would go out after a while and find her sitting in the Rabbit, listening to the end of a Jackson Browne tape. I should have known. It was Reichert’s tape:
Hold Out.
It was the Era of Maximum Smiling; she called it that. She’d look up from the car and smile. “This is the Era of Maximum Smiling,” she’d say.

I wanted then to remind her that the Era of Quality Smiling was when we could watch the kites on Parliament Hill on the heath, when we could see all of London grumbling beneath us, when we would smile at the idea of writing in California. But it was too late. When a woman sits in the car listening to tapes, it’s too late.

I walk almost to the second silver owl when Judith catches up. We step back onto the continent, cross the beach, and by the time we’re at the top of the stairs, she’s taken my arm. She doesn’t speak except to say, “David Niven’s dead,” as we cross the street and go into the King’s Head.

At the table, it starts. Her face, and I see again that it is a good face, the only face, falls. When she leans forward to take her face in her hands, I can see the silver cartridge again and all the little red marks above her breasts where her jewelry has nicked her over the years. I remember that after she’d shower it looked like a light coral necklace there. “God, Doug,” she says. “I don’t know whether to go forward or backward anymore.” She’s about to cry.

I feel the old numbness rise in my neck, the old bad confusion. I’m glad the girl has brought the wonderful brown beer, and I lift my glass in my hand. The beer is cool and sweet.

“Judith,” I say.

“Doug, remember that bitch at the Spaniards who wouldn’t serve us because we were five minutes late for pub hours?”