Some Things About Flying (12 page)

“You'll be reading, don't worry. Picture yourself curled up in the evening with a book. Do you have a big comfortable chair? A fireplace?” Lila is trying to create a vision, a future.

“No fireplace. I'd like one, though. And I've always said, once the kids are grown up and gone we're going to get whole new furniture, because everything we've got's torn and stained. Well, it's not that bad, but you know kids. You can't keep things nice, and there's no point getting new stuff as long as they're roaring around.”

It hurts to remember Lila's own house, where lamps lean over deep, soft chairs, and books can be cherished. Silence. Peace. Except for her heart floundering and flailing over matters to do with Tom; the past few years have been somewhat disruptive in that regard.

Still, just as in a book, the floundering and flailing contribute to plot. She and Tom may lack a common setting, and their characters may not, by some standards, bear very close scrutiny, but they do constitute a plot together.

How's he doing back there? She cannot, even arching on tiptoe, see past the bodies and heads in the way. “So,” she turns back to Sarah, “you're travelling all on your own?” That would be lonely, she thinks. Her own journey may be difficult, but at least she has someone besides herself to take into account.

“Yeah. That's another reason I had to get out of my seat. The guy next to me was making me nuts. Scared me, too.”

“Really? How?”

“Well, first he threw up, a couple of times. I hate that. I mean, I feel bad for people being sick, but I could hardly stand it with my own kids, never mind a complete stranger, and he didn't even say he was sorry or anything, just handed his barf bag to the flight attendant like he was returning a sandwich.” Sarah giggles. “I guess he was, sort of.

“Then he had one of those squirter things, you know, for your breath? So after he's done throwing up he squirts his mouth and then he turns to me and says, can you believe this, he says, ‘Well honey, I don't see much point in going down alone, do you? I think we could get to be good friends real quick, enjoy our last moments the best way we can. How about it?' No, wait, he said, ‘How about it, babe?' Real cool. Really tempting.” Sarah rolls her eyes.

“What did you say?” Lila understands how repulsive this must have been; but wouldn't it be nice if Tom had suggested enjoying his and Lila's last moments the best way they could?

“I told him to fuck off. He said, ‘Oh come on, don't be like that, honey,' and I said, ‘Christ, get a grip, don't be a total asshole; if you really think we're going to die, you want to die a total asshole?' And he got this real mean look. You know that squinty way guys get sometimes? I could kick myself, though, because that's when I decided to get up, and I went and said ‘Excuse me' when I was leaving. I can't believe I excused myself to him, what a jerk. So anyway, if you want to get ahead of me in line, feel free, I'm not in any hurry to get back. Maybe I'll look around for someplace else to sit. Yeah, I better.”

It's on the tip of Lila's tongue to suggest Sarah join her and Tom. The window seat is free, and it would be an act of kindness. How many acts of kindness could she rack up in her remaining moments? Enough so, in the event of there being a ledger somewhere, a last-minute rush of virtue could overwhelm her flaws and faults?

But. But there are some things, between her and Tom, and for herself. Some shifts to decipher. Sarah is lively and scared, and her presence would make it difficult to get very far. Wherever it is Lila desires to get. She'd like not to be angry, anyway.

Maybe later she can seek out Sarah and invite her to the window seat.

Later? What's the matter with her, is she an idiot?

She feels Sarah's hand on her arm. “You okay? You're not going to pass out or anything, are you?” She is looking at Lila anxiously. “You want to sit down?”

“Thanks, no, I'm fine.” Sort of fine. Fine under the circumstances.

A grey-faced man emerges from a washroom, and Sarah's now at the head of the line. “Geez,” she whispers, “seeing somebody that scared can make you more scared, don't you think?” Another door opens, and it's Sarah's turn. “Maybe I'll catch you later,” she says. “Anyhow, it was nice meeting you.” She laughs, shakes her head. “See? Just like we met over lunch or something. Isn't this weird?” And with a little wave, she is gone.

Lila immediately misses her.

She does actually need to pee now, and dodges quickly into the next free cubicle. What a relief! Also it's good, for a few minutes, to be alone, although in the absence of voices, the plane's engines are unnervingly loud. Should they sound so intrusive?

Sitting on the tiny toilet, manoeuvring around the tiny cubicle, washing her hands in the tiny sink, Lila wonders what it really might have been like, making love in this space. How uncomfortable and arousing it might have been, and what new positions might have been required.

Now she'll never know.

Oh. She'll never know.

She almost cracks her head on the sink, bending double. Sharp as knives, the shock of grief.

All the things she'll never know. She wants to put her arms around her brother, hang on tight. It's years since she has touched his skin, and they've known each other longer than anyone else in the world—they should at least have done that much. She should have had more lunches with Anne, and had Don and Anne's children, Lila's nieces and nephew, on more sleepovers and picnics and holidays. She has done some things, but never enough, and now there's so much that may be permanently undone.

She may never read another book, or enter another classroom or another argument. There may be no more belly laughter, or warm skin, or hot desire.

Patsy and Nell—every year they spend a week together, someplace with sunshine and water. They cook and drink and laugh and read, and sit with their bare feet propped on deck railings, talking over events and ideas, comparing the aging of throats and thighs, happily gluing their lives. And now Lila has blithely, thoughtlessly, flown out of their range.

She has so few places where she belongs; so few hearts with large spaces for her.

On a whim, she and Patsy once climbed a dim flight of stairs over a storefront to visit a palm reader. “You will be happy in love,” the woman told Patsy, which cheered her although it turned out to be only temporarily true. She was happy until she and her husband Archie separated, more, it seemed, out of inadvertence than any bad act. “We forgot to pay attention,” Patsy said. “I swear I wouldn't let that happen again.” But another opportunity for love has not yet arisen for her.

“You will have a long life,” the palm reader told Lila.

And love?

“Ah, there your hand is interesting. The line of affection disappears early. Very unusual,” as if it were a matter for pride.

Perhaps the palm reader confused Patsy's hand with Lila's. Or muddled Lila's own life and love lines. In its various forms she has not felt deprived of love, or desperate, until now. But her life may not be long.

It's hard to stand up. Her fingers are white on the edge of the sink.

And out there in the cabin sits a man appalled that he's with her. She never imagined love was easy, but she didn't dream of this, either.

Oh no, that's her own voice whimpering. She is not a whimperer. She is not.

There is heart trouble in her family. Could she, like first her father, then years later her mother, be quietly, privately, having a heart attack? It hurts that much.

There is also heart trouble in her family in the form of oddly placed, or misplaced, affections. She may have fallen heir to that affliction, as well.

Lifting her eyes to the plain little mirror bolted over the sink, she sees her face, with all its middle-aged sags and lines and exaggerations, stiff and still with desire.

I want, she thinks.

She would have liked to see barrenness. Emptiness. A desert flat beyond horizons. She has an idea that she could see clearly there, and circumstances, desires and decisions would have perfectly pure, sharp edges.

This is perhaps where she is standing now: on the verge of extremes.

But everyone on this plane must be watching dreams flicker in the light of the fire; missed destinations. They all must have this much in common, much more than shared fate.

She stands quite still, now stopped not by grief, but by surprise: the dumbfounding sensation of her flawed heart growing large, inflating with astounding affection. Desire. A weird kind of happiness. What is this? A feeling, anyway, she would like to hold on to; one she could possibly bear to go down with.

seven

Radiant, she steps out of the washroom and back into chaos. Was she in there a very long time? Some people regard her impatiently, as if she's been holding them up. Elsewhere, others continue to cry out, in a range of tones, variations on, “Oh, God, please.” To Lila, the words now do not sound as much like begging as like promising. “Let me try, give me a chance,” they plead, and then pledge, “I swear I'll do better, and more.”

Radiant, Lila has also stepped into the arms of the old woman who was behind her in the line when she was talking to Sarah. What's she doing, still waiting? “My dear,” she says, laying plump fingers on Lila's arm. What happened to the shaken Sikh? In his place there's a balding, blond, muscled man, whom the old woman gestures ahead. “You go on, I'd like a word with this young woman.” Nice, being called young; as if everything remains possible.

The old woman holding Lila's arm may be small and white-haired, and she may be wearing the sort of innocent, flowery print dress Lila's grandmother would have worn for, say, visiting June, but she also gleams with intention. She has made herself visible the way Lila can make herself large: with intensity, not size.

She has one of those old-lady bodies that slope downwards; a knoll of a body, a little foothill of a frame. She has the kind of body Lila could be heading towards, if Lila were heading towards any kind of old body. But what a glittering in the bright old-lady eyes.

“I couldn't help overhearing your conversation with the other young woman, and I've been waiting to speak with you. I'm very concerned for your soul.”

Oh dear.

Still, how interesting fanaticism is. As well as tedious.

“My name's Adele Simpson, and I feel I simply must talk to you about how vital it is, the state of your soul. Especially now, when there may only be moments left for seeking redemption. Forgiveness for your sins. I don't suppose you want to hear, but today! All this! I cannot stay silent.” Passion overtakes proper behaviour—fine. But why Lila and not the Sikh man who was surely, from Adele's point of view, even more distant from redemption?

Perhaps he was so distant he wasn't even on Adele's horizon.

Did she try this with Sarah? That would have been something to see. “The state of my soul,” Lila says gently enough, “is my own concern, you know, not yours.”

“Oh, no, it must be mine, too, do you see? I feel this day as a test and a judgment, I feel the Lord calling to our souls, and we must listen. We must!”

What if, as her last act, Lila believed she absolutely had to make some dim, uninterested student comprehend a poem, be enlightened by a phrase or saved by a particular sentence—might she not also be grasping at arms?

Something like that, anyway.

Adele doesn't look scared; intensity of purpose, putting salvation into words, may be her brand of hope. Possibly by now she is even scenting heaven, praying for the plane to go down. Possibly Lila's resistance is all that's preventing such a prayer. Such an outcome.

Adele's voice rises. “Don't you see, you must not die unredeemed and in sin. How can I make you see? Oh Lord, help me to do your work.”

“Geez, lady.” This is a young man, a boy, really, in jeans and black T-shirt and four golden earrings and one golden nose ring, now next in the line and shuffling impatiently. “You're in the way and you're ragging on people. Why don't you mind your own business? Go to the john or go pray for yourself, but what're you ragging on people for?” Ridiculous, but Lila's impulse is to protect Adele. Maybe it's the housedress, or the fervent eyes. If nothing else, fanatics get points for sincerity.

Evidently Adele, crisply gesturing him ahead while keeping her gaze and grip on Lila, needs no help. “Please listen. You must know the great wrong you are doing, you must, but you don't look like a bad woman; I'm sure you want to be good.”

Extremities are one thing; simplicities quite another.

And what, exactly, do bad women look like? Odd, that some people still expect to see either evil or goodness as plainly as wrinkles or the colour of eyes.

“I thought if I spoke to you, that might be all you needed to change your life, that something must be waiting inside you for the word to be spoken. I'm sure, someone like you, you can't
want
to live in sin. Or die in sin. I couldn't pass by, do you see? I couldn't fail the Lord when it might be my last opportunity. How would I face Him at the gates of heaven, seeing you turned away and knowing a word from me might have made an eternal difference?”

Heavens, how eloquent the obsessed can be! It's a little worrying, that she almost makes sense. Well, not sense, but Lila can almost see that, from her point of view, Adele is doing exactly the right and necessary thing. “Thank you,” Lila says carefully. “For your concern. I do see what you mean.”

“Thank the Lord.” Adele's face brightens. She looks almost sweet, almost jolly, nearly normal and harmless. “Now we can pray.” The picture is comical, but Lila tries to swallow her laughter. “Don't worry, there's no need to get down on our knees, although of course that's always best. I find it harder myself these days, but the Lord doesn't mind. We can just hold hands and offer our prayers together. I know it's not easy to abandon pleasureful ways, or admit sins, or seek forgiveness. But I'm sure you also know that the greater the difficulty, the greater the reward. Oh, I'm so excited!” Indeed she must be.

“Now, hold my hand, dear, and we will pray.” Shall pray, Lila thinks. There are differences between will and shall, which few people know any more. Or maybe, in this case, the emphatic “will” is exactly what Adele intends.

It's a lovely, round, happy face now. What a shame. “I respect your intentions,” Lila says firmly, although respect is hardly the word, “and I know your belief is real to you, but if I prayed with you, I'd be lying, and of course you know how wrong that would be. Especially now.” Adele looks as if Lila has hit her. Her face even reddens, as if struck by an actual blow. But then, like the optimist she apparently is, she revives.

“Oh dear, of course. I forgot that testimony is how I came to the Lord, and how you can, too.”

This is like being in an unfamiliar country, or city, ignorant of local customs, having to pay close attention in order to catch rhythms of language and movement, to discern the unfamiliar and previously unknown. Interesting. Curious. On the other hand, Lila's been gone quite a while. Tom may be worried. She may be wasting extraordinarily precious time.

There is some small thing about Adele, though: not the business about salvation, repentance; more to do with virtue. A subject, no doubt, on Tom's mind, as well.

“You see, my dear, I was a sinner too, that's what I forgot for a moment, and I do apologize.”

“Perfectly all right.” Gosh, it's hard not to laugh. But that was a rather sharp glance Adele just shot Lila anyway.

The young man in the jeans, black T-shirt and golden rings here and there pauses briefly beside them, leaving the washroom. “She got to you, eh?” he says to Lila. He shakes his head, and all those rings, and edges past. He has, Lila notices this time, amazing eyes and cheekbones. How beautiful, despite garish camouflagings, some young men can be.

Adele also watches him, although with a different view. “I must find him later. I can see his longing, too.” She's going to be busy if she plans on converting passengers one at a time. And some of them will be a good deal more irritable about it than Lila.

“You see,” Adele resumes, “I couldn't understand for a very long time why so much went wrong in my life.” Uh-oh. So that's what “testimony” means. “I thought I was a good enough person, and I couldn't imagine I deserved some of the things that happened to me. But I was swept up by a physical desire when I was very young. How could I know?” Adele looks to Lila for understanding, or maybe for forgiveness, although that's ludicrous, all things considered.

“I married a good-looking man who drank and blackened my eyes and hurt me in many other ways as well. We had a son. I wanted so much that he not be like his father, and that he learn to be good and kind, as I believed I was. I gave him every morsel of love and attention I had, and I was so sure he would be different.

“When he grew up,” Adele has tears now in her cast-down eyes—but how many times, if this is her usual “testimony,” must she have told this story?—“he came to me and told me he lay down with men. He wanted me to meet the man he was living with. He said we were all his family. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't bear it. All those years I loved him, and then never to see him again.”

“What?” Lila must have missed something; there seems to be a large gap in the tale. “Did something happen to him?”

Adele looks irritated. A rather impatient evangelist, it seems. “I said: he lay with men. And that idea of his, being a family, it was disgusting. I said to him, ‘How could you do this to me?' I begged him to change. I said I would forgive him if he'd only change, but if he wouldn't, he wasn't my son. After all those years, suddenly the person sitting at my kitchen table wasn't my son. He left. I didn't miss him exactly, since he was no longer my son, but I mourned my little boy.”

Lila shivers.

“And I asked God, too, ‘How could You do this to me? All of it, my husband, the boy—what did I do to deserve such troubles?' For the longest time, I couldn't hear an answer. Then I went to one particular church and found people to talk to, to ask about these things, and do you know what they said?”

Lila shakes her head. It's beyond her.

“They told me God must love me very much. That He gives special burdens to those who are strong enough, and even though I didn't know I had a great longing for Him, He knew, and these trials He sent were intended to bring me to Him. So you see, I had sinned by my attention to earthly matters, and He took them away and showed me the true path.”

Adele smiles happily up at Lila. “He can do the same for you, it's not too late, and it's so terribly important. The wrong kind of love, that's what it is. That's what I learned, and I was saved.”

“I see.” Lila nods. It's hard to think of what else to say. “Do you wonder about your son? Do you know how he is?”

“Oh, heavens, all that was twenty-five years ago; he could be anywhere. I suppose these days, he might be dead.” How content she sounds. “We've never heard from him again. My husband tried to tell me what happened was my fault. He simply hates my faith. I wish I could have saved him, but he's been so angry, so”—Adele shrugs—“I have to go on, knowing it's only another test on the road to eternal glory. That gives me such joy!” She beams even harder.

She is completely nuts.

Imagine seeing other people's lives merely as hurdles for her own salvation. Imagine being so distant from heartbreak and brutality, her son's or her husband's, not to mention her own, that she tucks them away as God's will.

“That's quite a god you have there,” Lila says.

“Oh yes, indeed, exactly. I'm so glad you see that.”

“And do you see me as another test of your faith?”

Adele's forehead crinkles. “Yes, I suppose, in a way. It's never been easy for me to approach strangers, although I've had to many times; it's part of what we do. I always have to make myself strong enough by saying it's what God wants. Sometimes it can even be frightening, because people don't always know what they need, and they aren't always ready to hear. They can be angry, but then I think, really they're just frightened by the truth. Facing up to God's judgment is hard. But of course when I heard you speaking with that other young woman, I knew there was no choice. It's a God-given opportunity, do you see? You have a chance for repentance, and if the worst happens you're saved just in time, and if it doesn't, your life takes a new path anyway, and you're separated from sin.”

Interesting concept, being separated from sin. Like a fence, with sin on one side, Lila on the other. She pictures herself scrambling over in fairly short order.

A peculiar word, too: sin. She understands good and bad in quite a different way. Good is respect, care and affection—what her grandmother and Aunt June called decency, mainly. And bad is the opposite. Simple enough.

Lila's mother and father were bad, together, because they lacked respect, care and affection for each other. Their bad act was staying together. Tom and Dorothy, also, may be bad in a similar way, although that's an assumption; Lila doesn't know enough about their life together to be entirely certain. Lila and Tom, on the other hand, have generally, with the critical exception of recent moments and a few others along the way, been good.

This is not, however simple, a perspective Lila will undertake to explain to Adele. They are unlikely to have a meeting of the minds.

“Your husband?” she asks. “You stayed with him?”

“Goodness yes. Of course. It hasn't been easy, but the Lord gives me courage. Remember, marriage vows are really vows to God, not man. I'd like to talk to your friend; he needs to be reminded as well.” Wouldn't Tom be pleased if Lila returned with Adele in tow; wouldn't he enjoy a natter about the divine importance of marriage vows? That would be a really good punishment.