Losing It (5 page)

“Uh, no,” he said, finally.

She asked something else, too quickly to catch, and again Bob had to ask her to repeat herself.

“Could you open your briefcase please?”

“Oh, I, uh, I just have the one piece of luggage,” Bob said, turning to gesture to his suitcase behind him. She was staring at him so hard he finally looked – clown-like, he thought – down at the briefcase tucked under his arm. He’d been clutching it so hard he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh gosh, yes!” he said, smiling and blustering. He almost started to explain about absent-minded professors, how he could be walking down the street completely absorbed in some thought or other …

“Your briefcase, sir,” she said, rather harshly. “Could you open it?”

“Oh, this!” Bob said, still clutching it.

Sienna was waiting for him now beyond the customs line. People of all stripes were turning to look at her as they filed past.

“Here it is,” Bob said softly, and placed the briefcase on the inspection table, fiddled self-consciously with the lock. Finally, after too much effort, it fell open.

Rebecca Williams flicked through several things. “What’s this?” she asked. She held up the special package.

“That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I just threw it in there. It came in the mail today.”

“What is it?” she asked slowly, enunciating every syllable, as if talking to a second-language learner.

“It’s a tape of a famous lecture on Poe’s view of poetics and transcendence, in light of his struggles with the Transcendentalists,” Bob said. Then, meeting her blank expression, he added, “It’s an academic cassette.”

“Value?” she asked finally.

“I’m sorry?”

“What’s the value?”

“Oh, uh, it’s completely useless to almost anyone. But to me -” And then he stopped himself. She was looking at him with near-malice. “Twenty-five dollars,” Bob said.

There was a terrible moment in which it looked as if she was going to open the package anyway. She’d hooked her sharp thumbnail under an edge, and at the same time was eyeing his suitcase. Bob willed himself to appear absolutely calm and innocent, despite his rising panic.

“Could you open your other bag?” she asked, and closed the lid of the briefcase, leaving the special package unopened inside.

Bob hoisted the suitcase onto the table. Sienna gave him a bright smile when he looked up, terror-stricken.

The customs officer unzipped Bob’s bag and rummaged through his things: spare shirts, trousers, and socks, the Silverman biography of Poe, and an old copy of the complete tales and poems too bulky for his briefcase. Then she got to the padded black lace bra and panties, the nylons and purple silk slip and red satin corset at the bottom of the bag. She didn’t hold them up but simply fingered through them, pausing with each new discovery.

“Those are, uh, some of my wife’s things,” he said, feebly. His face was flushed crimson and he was aware that his breath rattled in shallow, rapid little wheezes. He tried to calm himself but couldn’t.

“Your wife?” Williams asked, deadpan.

“She’s uh, she’s waiting for me. Over there,” Bob said. He pointed slightly in Sienna’s direction.

Rebecca Williams – small, pasty-faced Rebecca Williams with the limp brown hair and washed-out eyes – looked at the
stunning Sienna for what seemed to Bob like thirty or forty years. Finally she turned back to him.

“All right. You can go,” she said. Not a flicker of light behind those eyes.
“Have a good stay.”

Bob zipped up his bag, collected his briefcase, and wandered, dazed, to where Sienna was waiting.

“Boy, she really put you through it,” Sienna said.

“I need a drink,” he said.

Bob had a moment of nausea right before liftoff. He let Sienna have the window seat and tried to study his hands and breathe deeply. A video screen two seats in front of them showed calm, responsible people in life jackets sliding down an inflated rescue chute into … what? An angry ocean below? A sea of flames and death? Into the abyss off the screen.

“I just … I am so moved by this,” Sienna said. “It’s a miracle, the earth so still below. Whenever I’m taking off I have a sense of how large the planet is. It seems smaller when we’re on the ground.”

She was trying to be sophisticated and Bob felt more sophisticated just knowing that. She had also, some weeks before, given him a sheaf of poems to read. They were in his briefcase and he planned to discuss them with her on this trip. They were extraordinary. Everything about her, in fact, was extraordinary, but for the moment Bob had to concentrate on mentally pulling the plane away from the ground, to grease the connections and hoist up the wheels and ensure the electronic system didn’t catch fire, to clear the pilot’s neural pathways to allow for correct decisions.

It was an odd thing, this flight anxiety, a minor case he’d developed only after the break-up with Stephanie, although his
near-disaster at customs was now contributing as well. It was as if he were being reminded that the end –
death –
was not just a theoretical, logical outcome, but inescapable and, quite possibly, imminent. Little mistakes erased entire lives. Valves gave out. Veins blew up to the size of balloons then burst. An argument in the morning with an ex-lover and a drink too many, a finger on the wrong switch, someone asleep at the air-control tower because the union failed to negotiate rest time and management squeezed an extra dollar …

In large part the feeling went away after they levelled off. His breathing eased, heart rate subsided. It wasn’t so bad, after all, as far as anxiety could go.

He ordered a Scotch for himself and Sienna took a brandy and sipped it competently, her lips leaving a small red mark on the edge of the glass. Bob took her hand and squeezed it gently, then let it go. “You are an astonishing poet,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I am just … well, I was amazed by many of the poems. Really
striking
work. We’ll go over it in detail, if you want. But I just meant to tell you …”

Oh, how she blushed! There is nothing a poet would rather hear more and Bob knew it, but he meant what he said, and his words made him feel even more deeply.

“You have a
talent
, Sienna, and it’s something that can’t be taught. I mean, one can get people to think more deeply and carefully about how they use words. But there’s a
sensibility
that simply is there or it isn’t. A lot of students show their work to me, I can’t tell you. I’m happy to look at it. But most student writing is, well, dross. But
your
writing …”

How she hung on his words. He could feel her heat rising. It was heady and he had a sense that he had to be careful, for himself as well as for her.

“Well, I don’t want to go on about it,” he said. “But you have
a resonance, a sense of complexity of life and spirit.” He fumbled under the seat to pull up his briefcase, fought again with the combination before freeing the lid. There was the special package, still, thank God, wrapped in its thick brown envelope, and there were his conference papers, and there on the bottom was Sienna’s poetry. The first poem was “Night-time in Cellophane,” which Bob read quietly out loud:

“It’s very … evocative,” he said, fighting for a proper word. “I’m having a hard time describing it. You know, when a brain gets older it calcifies. That’s why it usually takes young people with nimble, unconventional minds to string together words like this. ‘Thunderslips and aphids.’ Wonderful! It’s nonsense, on one plane, and yet it has a resonance of received wisdom. Do you know what I mean?” She nodded but looked at the poem, not him. “ ‘There are no confectioneries here.’ It’s Joycean. I don’t mean to puff you up, but it took him years to string together words like this, the layers of different meanings. ‘Cumulonimbus nipplewort.’ Beautifully playful. And then: ‘kites / cut by the wind.’ Extraordinary!”

“I like doing things with reality,” she said. “I like cracked lenses. Throwing words, the way they go together.”

“Precisely! You’ve taken the words and put them together. And nobody else on earth would have done it the same way. It’s authentic, completely unique. Mystifying, and yet -” And yet what? He took a breath, then said, “Poe was also one of the few people in his day to realize that in poetry the words, the sounds, are far more important than their mere meaning.” He paused, then began reciting: “ ‘Once upon a midnight dreary, While I pondered weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -’ You see, the sound
is
the beauty of it. ‘While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, / As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door -’ ”

Her smile was the sun blessing the earth as seen from an airplane miles above the ground and Bob was acutely conscious of
his good fortune, to be with her, to be him, in his skin, his privileged position. It must have been something like what Poe felt at those private parties in his honour when he would stand in the middle of the drawing room holding a glass of wine and recite the entire eighteen verses of “The Raven,” the words spilling so felicitously one to the next, the eyes of all riveted upon him, every female wondering what it would be like to be married to a famous poet, a sensitive,
suffering
soul, a genius mind, wayward boy.

They talked easily, comfortably, with an energy that did strange things to time, made Bob unsure, at one point, whether the flight had just begun or had lasted weeks and weeks. It was an unsettling state because he felt as if he had no control. He gave in to it, and then was ripped awake, back to the old reality.

“I’m sorry,” Bob said, closing the briefcase and standing abruptly. “Back in a minute.” He didn’t want to appear flustered, but his digestion was delicate and there was usually little warning. He was halfway down the aisle when he realized he’d brought his briefcase with him, and had an idle thought that he should return it, but decided to keep going. Bob struggled into the little cubicle, locked it, then lowered his trousers and backside in one efficient movement that almost ended in disaster since the toilet seat had been left up. But he caught himself in time using the handrail on the right side, managed to reach behind and drop the seat, then settled down … to an expulsion of gas, that was all. Still, it would’ve been embarrassing enough.

He stayed to coax his bowels, idly opened his briefcase and took out the special package. It felt insubstantial, not something for which one would pay $149.95. Bob opened it gently. The object was encased in plastic bubble wrap and, once freed, looked at first glance like a woggly sea creature not meant to be
exposed to the light of day. There were three long dangly straps, like tentacles, and in the middle puffed-out balls of pubic hair – too light; they didn’t quite get the colour – and an ancient, irregular … 
mouth
.

This isn’t the right time and place, he thought, and refolded it in its bubble wrap. He then tried returning the bubble wrap to the envelope but it didn’t want to go. It had been tight to begin with and now the bubble wrap and purchase had somehow become too big to fit back in the envelope. The more he tried the more the envelope ripped.