Out of the Blue (14 page)

“They’re wonderful, Joe. Thank you.”

“Merry Christmas,” he said, and leaned over for a kiss. “They’re a work in progress,” he murmured against my mouth. Then when he held me away from him, I could tell he was looking straight through my clothing, imagining how the texture of my skin would photograph in the soft light from the Christmas tree. He ran his hands down my shoulders and across my breasts. I closed my eyes. I would just feel, that’s all. No thought. I could do this. But then, to my surprise, it was painful when he came inside, as if I were being seared by a hot poker. Joe felt me pull back.

“What is it? Your fall?” he asked. He had seen the bruises.

“Nothing. No, it’s okay.” I couldn’t tell him that my insides were on fire. I wrapped my legs around his back and let the tears run into my hair.

“What happened, Anna?” he asked me afterward. He knew that I hadn’t come.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was a little uncomfortable inside.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t ever want to hurt you.”

I was silent. The words
IT’S OVER
were hovering above the bed, so bright that they dulled the Christmas lights.

“Where have you gone, Anna?”

My heart was thumping. I didn’t feel ready to get into this. “Oh, Joe.” That’s all I could think of to say.

He raised himself up on his elbow and stared down into my face. “You’d better tell me.”

I gazed back into those jeweled eyes, which were dark now, chips of midnight-blue. “I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

There was a moment of disbelieving silence, then, “How can it not work out?” As if he was asking how the sun wasn’t going to come up in the morning. As if it were some kind of natural law, the two of us together.

“I can’t do it.”

“What is there to do, Anna? There’s nothing to do.”

I sat up against the cold wall and was grateful for the pain the movement caused me. I was hurting him and I wanted to be hurt back. “I don’t know if I can make you understand.”

“Try me,” he said. There was more than a little anger in his voice. It helped to keep me from crying.

“It’s my illness.”

“I don’t care about your illness,” he said.

“But I do. It’s going to get worse and I don’t want you in it with me.”

“Isn’t that for me to decide?”

“No,” I said.

“You mind telling me what brought this on?”

“When I fell. Maybe it shook some sense into me, except I think it’s been brewing for a while.”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re going to trash what we’ve got so you can walk off into the sunset, just you and your fucking MS? How cozy.”

“Tripping all the way,” I said. I was getting pissed now, too. But then he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. With his back turned to me, I could see the way his hair curled at the back of his neck, and it broke my heart. I loved him so much it was like a taste in my mouth. He was in my veins—red corpuscles, white corpuscles, Joe corpuscles.

“How am I supposed to get you out of me?” he asked. “You’re in my blood.” The prickles stood up on the back of my neck. “We always knew you were sick,” he went on. “We came to grips with it.”

When was that?
I wanted to ask him. But it seemed irrelevant now. “I wasn’t thinking ahead. Today I finally did and I see I can’t do it. Not with you, not with anybody.” I wondered how long I’d been leaning all my weight against that closet door in my head, trying to keep the monster from jumping out. Maybe all the way back to my Halloween nosedive.

“You think it might be wise to sleep on it?” he asked.

“It won’t change anything.”

He dropped his head into his hands.

“I want to ask you a favor,” he said after I’d sat for a while listening to somebody’s heartbeats thundering in my ears. “Come upstate with me.” I took a breath in preparation to saying no, but Joe shoved in ahead of me. “I need you to share that part of my life,” he went on, “even if it’s just for a few days.”

“I guess I don’t understand,” I said.

“Well, I don’t understand
you.”

“I don’t expect you to. You’re not the sick one.”

“It’s like MS is some exclusive club you belong to,” he said.

“In a way.” I hunkered over to sit beside him, careful not to intrude by touching him. The pillows were heaped on the floor at our feet. When Joe was in the throes of lovemaking, he always jettisoned them, as if he couldn’t bear to have anything else in the bed except us. The Christmas lights reflected off our bodies, little piercing pinpricks. I half expected to see blood.

“I love you, Anna,” he said. It was the first time he’d actually said it straight out, unadorned and direct.

I should have responded in kind, even given my decision, which in no way altered my feelings for him. But did I tell him how much he meant to me, what a rare and incredible human being he was? How grateful I felt that he tread the same planet?

“Yes, but would you love me if I didn’t have MS?” That’s what I said.

He was quiet for a long time while I sat there wondering if it was possible to drown oneself in a glass of eggnog like the one sitting on the bedside table. If you were determined, that is, and inhaled the entire contents into your lungs with one cosmic snort.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” I said. “I love you, too.” But he didn’t appear to hear me. I’d only told him once before, but God knows I’d said it in my head a hundred times and, to my embarrassment, had once even written it down the way schoolgirls do:
I love Joe. Anna Bolles Malone. Mrs. Joseph DeLand Malone.

I had always prided myself on not having told any man that I loved him, not even Bobby Zaklow. Well, with two exceptions. The first was my fifth grade math teacher, and I didn’t say it, I wrote it in an anonymous letter which turned up on that same Cameron bulletin board, the dirty rat fink. No wonder I wasn’t so quick to make that particular declaration again in a hurry. And the second time I was drunk at a fraternity party, and I think I said it to a gorgeous, narcissistic theater major. But I didn’t mean it and I never saw him again so that didn’t count. My pledge was that I would go to my grave without saying it to anyone unless I was truly sincere. But it had crept up on me with Joe … crept up with enormous thundering Godzilla feet. I loved him, that’s all. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, especially now, but it was a bald fact. What a fiasco. Meanwhile, he hadn’t said anything at all for a very long time. Neither of us had moved, two statues with goose bumps at the edge of the bed. “Joe?”

“I’m thinking.”

“What about?”

“You asked me a question.”

“You mean you’ve never fantasized about me being well?”

“Do I hope they find a cure? Of course. I don’t want you to suffer.”

“Picture me as a healthy individual, no wheelchair, no tumbling over, no aches and pains.” Like lovely Lola, I thought. “Would you love her, too?”

“How would I know? You’re not that person and it’s not your disease I’m in love with.” He got up, tossed me my clothes and pulled on his pants. “I can fly you up for New Year’s.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

He leaned down to the bed, a hand at either side of me on the mattress, his face three inches from mine. “I don’t give a shit if it’s a good idea or not,” he said. “I want your imprint on my life up there. I want you to meet the people close to me so you’re not just a phantom when I mention your name.”

“Won’t that make it harder?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I feel that you owe me this.”

I thought about that. It seemed like the truth. “All right.”

“Thanks.”

He rose, lifted me up and took me in his arms. Both of us were breathing in that unnatural way that signifies tears. “Do you hate me, Joe?” I asked with my head against his chest. Stupid, selfish girl, I thought.

“I’m working on it,” he said. “It’s snowing. Shall I cab you across town?”

“No,” I said.

So he released me. I grabbed my clothes and fled.

In the taxi, I had this bleak sensation of freedom. I wondered if prisoners facing execution felt something similar: The decision has been made, it’s all out of your hands and absolutely nothing matters anymore. I went straight to my room when I got home, and the next morning Ma gave me one of those looks that she shoots the VCR when it misbehaves, as in: something’s wrong with you and you’d damn well better tell me what it is or I’ll make you wish you had. She tends to get physical with the VCR, and I half wondered if she was going to give me a swift kick. I ignored her, and my muffin, and sipped coffee in silence.

“Can I tell you something, Anna?” she said.

“No,” I answered, realizing it was fruitless.

“You’ve been acting weird ever since you saw your father.”

“How so?”

“Not talking enough.”

“Or thinking more,” I said. Maybe that would be the end of it.

“All men are not assholes, you know.”

“I fail to follow,” I said. “And please, don’t elucidate. It’s too early in the morning.”

“Everything all right with you and Joe?”

“Depends on what you mean by all right,” I said.

“Don’t be coy.” She slid the muffin a couple of inches closer to me.

“I’m just not ready to talk about it.” One of Ma’s more surprising qualities is that despite her bulldozer style, she can be exquisitely sensitive. She’s like those ballet dancers, the hippopotamuses in
Fantasia.
All that hulking power poised delicately on one toe. She backed off instantly, and I knew she would not say a word about it again unless I raised the issue myself.

“You never told me what you and Duncan Reese talked about yesterday,” I said.

“What do you mean?” I took minor satisfaction in so easily diverting her from my state of mind.

“I saw him go into the bakery,” I said.

I don’t know what I expected, but not what I saw on her face, the sadness.

“He’s firing me, isn’t he?” A justifiable conclusion, given her expression.

“I don’t think so,” Ma said. She got up, went to the sink and began washing dishes much too thoroughly before dropping them into the dishwasher. “He didn’t say.”

“Then what was he doing in your store?”

“He told me that you’d fallen on the street and that you were all right, that I shouldn’t worry.”

I couldn’t read her voice, the one thing I felt I could always count on.

“What is it you’re not telling me?” But the fact was, I barely cared.

Dear Anna,

This is the way I want to play this out. I figure I’ll have plenty of time to be pissed and miserable and I’d rather not waste our last days together in that state of mind. I can see that you mean what you say and I’m going to try to honor your decision and focus my attention on the good stuff. I want you to meet my family and Steve, the speck in the photograph. I want to make love and laugh (impossible maybe) so that when it’s over I’ll have that much more to remember. I realize it’s a tall order but we’re going to pull it off.

Yours,

Joe

“Yours,” not “Your.” What a difference an s makes. I e-mailed him back that I agreed it was worth a try. We spoke several times by telephone after that and adopted this kind of wartime mentality of cheer in the face of impending catastrophe. I was just so grateful that he wasn’t trying to dissuade me, which would have been more painful than I could bear.

I had agonized over clothes, not having a clue what people wore in the hinterlands over the holidays. Given the size of my suitcase, you’d think I was going for three months.

“Will there be parties?” I had asked him over the phone. He was snowed in up in Bangor, Maine, waiting for a blizzard to peter out so he could fly down and fetch me.

“New Year’s Eve at the club, probably. That’s it.”

“Ah, the club,” I echoed casually. There was a time when I would have approached a black-tie affair at the White House with total confidence, and relished the job of officiating. But when you wonder if you can pronounce the name of the President of the United States, or suspect you might splash cabernet down the front of the First Lady’s dress, the fantasy dims.

I hadn’t had a serious relapse in a while, and had asked Joe to not tell his family that I had MS. I could see no reason to and I just wanted to be a regular person for the few days of my visit. Then my MS and I could slink off together just as Joe had said. Real cozy. I still had only the haziest concept of what life would be like after parting from Joe other than the fact that despite the terrible loss, I was acting out of some basic and critical need.

I threw every medication I had on hand into my suitcase, including some that produced pretty heinous side effects. I wanted the widest array of choices. For my swan song, I didn’t want to be waddling like a guinea hen.

Joe picked me up wearing an open topcoat with a dark navy uniform underneath. There was a name tag on his lapel that said:
JOSEPH MALONE, AIRMALONE.

“What’s this?” I asked him. “Some promotional thing?”

He reached for my bag. “Passengers like their pilots to wear uniforms. It makes them feel more confident.”

“What?” I said.

“Marty’s stuck in Pittsburgh with equipment trouble so I’m filling in.” Joe had his pilot’s license but I thought that was merely a formality. It had never occurred to me that he actually flew anything.

“We’ll take a cab to the Marine Terminal,” he said. “It costs a fortune to leave the car.”

Big Bob was profoundly impressed by Joe’s getup and even saluted when we pulled away from the building. The fact was, he looked very sexy. What is that anyway? Why should a pilot’s uniform be so much more dashing than, say, a state trooper’s? I had a boyfriend in high school who once showed up at my apartment in his Eagle Scout attire. It was the beginning of the end, but back in those days I had my superficial side.

“I wish you’d tell me something about your family before we get up there,” I said.

“Just ordinary,” he said. “Nothing special. Not like yours.”

“I only have Ma.”

He gave me a wistful smile. I could see his point. “But there must be stories. Every family has some, specific moments…”

“Okay, here’s one,” he said. “My brother pushed me out of a tree when I was seven. You must have noticed the scar?”

“No,” I said, vaguely remembering something about a broken ankle. But I’d thought I knew every detail of his body. It seemed a failing on my part that I had missed it.

“We climbed the oak in the backyard so we could jump into a leaf pile we’d made underneath. The branch was really high. I got scared and couldn’t get myself to jump. So Frank pushed me. I cracked a bone and they had to operate on it.”

I was silent for a moment, thinking that Frank would have been fourteen at the time, old enough to know better. “I think I hate Frank,” I said.

“Oh, Frank’s all right,” he assured me. “You’ll see.”

At the AirMalone gate most of the preflight routine had been accomplished. But there was another pilot poring over some computer printouts.

“‘Morning, Sam. Sam Barney,” Joe said by way of introduction. Joe took a pair of earphones out of his canvas bag. I later learned that pilots carry their own personal headset. They have microphones in them for listening to the tower.

“‘Morning, Joe,” Sam said. “Whoa, she
is
gorgeous. Hi, Anna.” He held out his hand.

This was interesting. Up until this moment I had never met anyone acquainted with Joe. Other than the two women who had spoken to him on the street last summer, it was as if he existed in a vacuum. All the fragments of his life had been outside my experience. It produced a little frisson of jealousy that Sam Barney had a past with Joe, too, and I suddenly realized that I was about to be jettisoned from the protected cocoon we’d inhabited together. Good, I told myself. This would be a halfway station for the ultimate letting go.

“What’ve we got?” Joe asked, leaning over Sam’s shoulder.

“Not bad. A few flurries just north of the Coate intersection.”

“How many on board?”

“Six. We picked up a couple of casino guys.”

“We’re twenty miles from the largest casino in the state,” Joe explained to me. “The management are good customers of ours.”

“Thanks to Joe here,” Sam said. “He worked hard on that one.”

I was intrigued, but Joe said, “Later. We’d better boogie.”

AirMalone had the best safety and on-time record of any charter its size. This proclamation, straight from the radio ads, was a line I repeated to anybody who asked me what my boyfriend did for a living. When Joe and Sam ushered me through the gate and out onto the tarmac, I began thinking about the safety part of that slogan. It was a nice-looking airplane as toys go, but I had never flown in anything smaller than a Boeing 737 in my life. Joe looked at my face.

“What were you expecting, the Concorde?”

“What is that?” I shouted. There was a lot of noise.

“Kingair.”

Joe went off somewhere while Sam preceded me up the aluminum stairway into the cockpit. I didn’t like the rickety way it swayed with each step. Then Sam stashed my luggage and installed me in a seat directly behind him. He began doing undecipherable things with the instrument panel, and since he’d put his headset on there was no point asking him any questions. I craned my neck around the cabin to see if there was a special rack that held the parachutes.

Pretty soon Joe showed up with the casino executives, who turned out to be Native Americans from the Oneida tribe—a fellow named Roy and his nephew. Roy and Joe seemed quite chummy and had a brief but technical conversation about airport expansion. Joe slipped into the right-hand seat beside Sam, put his headset on, and within a few minutes we were taxiing out onto the runway. I looked at the back of Joe’s head and remembered that I had in fact been in bed with this man not long ago. I wanted to touch him, to make a physical connection while I still could. But in the meantime we were careening across the ground, bobbing a little from side to side. When we lifted off, the roaring sound relented with a sigh and we were soaring up over the bay with Manhattan spread out in splendor to the west. It was thrilling, far more intimate than the gigantic impersonality of the planes I was accustomed to. Joe turned around and raised his eyebrows at me in that look he had that said,
Is this cool or what? Am
I
cool or what?

I liked it up there where the air felt muscular and solid, flexing for sixteen thousand feet beneath us as the earth fell away. I also found out how much Joe loved to fly. When he turned to talk to Sam, there was an expression I’d never seen on his face before, a kind of rapture. It surprised me and produced an ache in my chest. There was so much about this man that I would never learn.

About an hour later the plane came to a stop in the middle of the sky, or at least it felt that way. We hung in the air for a long moment and then began to drop down, down, to the snow-covered patches of Andrew Wyeth winter below.

I had imagined some sweet little log cabin of an airport alongside a single landing strip, maybe with a wind sock at the end. I was certainly not prepared for a hotel-sized facility crowned with a glass control tower. There were eight runways and two more under construction. Signs outside the terminal warned against smuggling. That seemed romantic, but it turned out that what people smuggled were not stolen jewels but drugs, particularly into smaller airports that had loose security. You could hop out of the plane with a couple of kilos of heroin in your bags, get picked up by the local dealer in his SUV, and you were in business.

We had to stop at the terminal office for debriefing. When Joe disappeared with Sam into the back, I looked around. First of all, there was country music playing. It seemed exotic to my urban ears and reminded me of backpacking trips I used to take along the Appalachian trail. There was a wall full of what looked like shreds of old T-shirts. Each piece had a name, a date, and
“First Solo Flight”
scribbled on it with Magic Marker. I knew that AirMalone ran a flight-training school, and supposed that these were the students’ graduation certificates.

Joe emerged a few minutes later. He had in tow a large dour-looking man whose features were Joe’s, inflated with a bicycle pump; same idea but bloated into the giant economy size.

“Anna, this is my brother, Frank. Franklin, this is Anna Bolles.” We gripped hands and tried not to stare too rudely at one another. Frank had dark thinning hair, I saw now, and his eyes were not as complex as Joe’s, just ordinary blue.

“Brave of you to risk your life with little brother at the controls,” he said.

“That’s pretty hostile, first thing out of your mouth,” I said. Well, no, I didn’t. I only thought it and gave Frank my most deceitful smile. I wasn’t forgetting that he had shoved Joe out of that oak tree.

“I’ll be back as soon as I get Anna settled in,” Joe said. I’d known that he would be spending a lot of time working, but it hadn’t occurred to me that without Joe I would be pretty much stranded. As we walked away, Joe had me by the arm, for which I was grateful since I felt Frank’s eyes on us. I knew I was favoring my left leg.

Outside, the air was frigid but crisp, without the damp cruelty of a Manhattan winter. We were in snowbelt country. A recent blizzard had left waist-high drifts beside the parking lot, and there was that clean bite with every breath, which made me yearn for a pair of skis. We stopped beside a pickup truck that was buried under eight inches of new snow. The door handle had iced over so it took a minute for Joe to release it.

“Can you manage with your suitcase under your feet for a few minutes?” he asked, helping me in. Actually, it was easier for me to step up into the truck than to back into his low-slung BMW in New York.

“Sure.” Joe had to coax the engine a little but eventually it burst into life with a throaty rumble.

“We’ll let her warm up a minute.” He pushed a button, and a spurt of heat wheezed out from under the dashboard. We sat there with the windshield frosted over, back in the cocoon again, just Joe and me. He leaned over and gave me a kiss. I suppose it created the same confusing response of pain and pleasure for him as it did for me because he backed off with eyes averted. I felt like asking him if he was sorry he insisted on this trip. Maybe he was beginning to realize how excruciating it might be. On the other hand, I could imagine us frozen here together, the truck sealed by a thick layer of ice. They’d find us in the spring, entwined in one another’s arms, solid as a couple of Popsicles. There was a certain appeal.

“You like to fly, don’t you, Joe?” I asked, grasping for a distraction.

“I’d forgotten, but yes,” he said.

“Why?”

“When I was a kid, it was the freedom,” he said. “I liked escaping from the ground and everything on it.”

Maybe every
one,
I was thinking, but let him go on.

“Now, it’s more complicated. The release when the wheels leave the ground, but there’s also a visual element. The sky is never the same. Did you ever see the film,
The English Patient?”

“The opening sequence, that little plane over the desert.”

“It’s probably my favorite image from any movie.” He looked like he wanted to kiss me again, but instead he put the truck in gear. As we started off, the chains on the tires slapped musically against the road.

“I’ve never been in one of these before,” I said. Riding so high off the road rendered an altered perspective on the passing scene and the vast open sky. There was a physical sensation to escaping the urban warren, a stretching of muscles and expansion of organs. It was also scary. There’s something comforting in containment, particularly if you don’t trust your own body.

It was a fifteen-minute drive from the airport to North Lockville. “They were supposed to build an offshoot of the Erie Canal up this way,” Joe explained. “With a lock on account of the rapids. We got the name, but not the canal.”

I guess I had been expecting terrain similar to the landscape around Brighton University, but these sweeping hills made that part of Connecticut seem lumpy. We drove up a winding road past farms with their fields buried under snow. As we slowed around a bend, I could see into a barn where the dairy cows stood in long rows, breathing steam. We turned at the top of the rise and drove along a ridge with a view across the valley to the Adirondack Mountains.

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“I took the scenic route,” he confessed. He pulled over and helped me down onto the icy road. “These hills were scooped out by the glacier. All across upstate New York. See down there? That’s the airport.”