Some Things About Flying (15 page)

She has no faith in that at all, and it sounded as if she were speaking to a child. Nevertheless. Leaning over, she kisses him lightly on the high arch of his cheekbone. “Thanks, Jimmy.” For, she supposes, giving her heart. A little hope for love, a good example.

“Hey!” comes an outraged voice from over Lila's shoulder. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Chill, Mel,” Jimmy orders.

“Chill, shit. I go away for a few minutes and you got some old broad snuggled up kissing you? Chill yourself, asshole.”

If this is Jimmy's girlfriend, Lila feels some sympathy with his parents. Or hers. Or all parents everywhere. She rises with, she hopes, some dignity. Old broad!

Although apparently a threatening one, even to this exotic young woman. Narrow, amazingly vivid, she's a jungle orchid, something wild. Her large dark eyes are outlined in black, cheeks splashed with colour, wide lips painted a deep red. Black hair falls below her waist, and she's wearing a bright blue, bright green outfit that looks like what cyclists wear on the road. Look at her bones!

If these two, Jimmy and Mel, ever had children together, they'd be stunning.

People do not, as a rule, much resemble what they do for a living, but it's hard to imagine this woman stooped over pizza ovens.

“I'm Lila,” reaching out her hand—who invented hand-shaking? It's a very disarming sort of gesture, anyway, which is likely its point—“and I have no designs on Jimmy.”

Mel looks embarrassed, drops her eyes. “Sorry. I'm Mel. Melissa. I'm kind of uptight.”

“Me too. It's like a twelve-step program, isn't it? My name is Lila and I'm kind of uptight. Uptights Anonymous?”

When Mel laughs, Lila sees what must appeal to Jimmy: an earthy young woman who can't contain herself. She is spilling out of herself; maybe she always does, not only today.

Imagine being that sort of person.

If Lila were creating herself again, she would pay utter attention. She would perform even the smallest act intently. She would be electric. She would make her own hair stand on end.

“Lila,” Jimmy offers, “was keeping me company and saving me from this Bible-thumper we met in the line to the john. She got Lila, and she was coming after me. Hey, babe, you've been a while.”

Mel shrugs. Her shoulders go very high and very low inside the skin of her outfit. “I met some people, too. Then when the announcement came on, nobody moved, everybody wanted to hear. Except nobody still knows. Do they?” she asks Lila, flinging herself into the seat Lila just vacated.

She's wearing low green leather boots. When she sits, her belly stays flat, doesn't ripple out like Lila's. She is very beautiful. Since Lila never was, even at Mel's age, this is not envy, but appreciation of a striking piece of art.

Mel has a tattoo, a match to Jimmy's, on her own left hand. “This?” she says, seeing Lila notice and waving it closer. “We got matching flowers, like, we think engagement rings are junky, so we got matching tattoos.”

“What kind of flowers are they?” Because to Lila they still look like peonies, florid and unlikely, not to mention in real life susceptible to ants.

Mel shrugs. “No kind, I guess. We never asked. We just wanted something that showed. Man it hurt, getting it on the hand. Means”—she grins—“we can't leave each other, though. Not after you go through that. It's just about the most amount of pain I ever had.”

Her face changes radically. She looks like a little girl, although an untamed, contrary one. “If we crash, do you think it'll hurt much?”

“I don't think so. If it happens, I think it'll be too fast for that. Maybe for a second or so, but that's it, I'm sure.” Lila doesn't believe that at all.

Mel nods. “I hope so. We'd die, though, right?” Jimmy has taken her other hand, the one nearest him, and is stroking it with his fingers, green-petalled at their base.

“I expect so.” How is Lila supposed to know? It must be that to these two, she could be a mother. She can see it's a role one could grow into, a presumption of wisdom, causing the head to swell. Gratifying and tempting, although also, since she has no view of herself as a mother, slightly dismaying. She could use a mother, or someone, herself.

“Good,” Mel says, satisfied. “I couldn't stand living if I was going to be all bashed up and busted. I'd really hate that.”

Funny, that possibility hadn't occurred to Lila. But what if they do get all the way but then crash low, trying to land—she might just be badly broken. Then what? Pain, paralysis perhaps, twisted limbs and organs, and who would care for her?

She should have had children. They might not have liked to, but they would have had to oblige.

No they wouldn't, what was she thinking? Children turn their backs on parents all the time, and so they should. Look at Jimmy and Mel, look at Tom's daughters, look at herself, for that matter. She did not kick over her job or her life to go and help care for her father during his last illness. She visited as often as she could, driving the few hundred kilometres there and back as his heart surged and collapsed through three attacks before the final one; but she did not stay long. She sat beside his bed in the hospital and held his hand, and they smiled at each other, but their habit of benevolent silence felt, by then, unbreakable and necessary.

She could not stay there with him and her mother. She felt choked, and drove away gasping for air.

When he died, her mother phoned to tell her. When her mother died, the neighbour who found her body called.

In her turn, Lila would also be alone. You can't expect even friends like Patsy or Nell to take on onerous care; that's not the sort of thing that's assumed, presumed, of friendship. She has imagined getting old on her own, trying to look after herself, and finally failing. She just didn't imagine it happening soon.

Dorothy would look after Tom. It's what spouses surely do, locked together no matter what. It's what Lila's mother did, as best she could.

If Lila were maimed and Tom were not, he would not look after her. That's a terrible difference: he would look after Dorothy in such a circumstance, but would have to abandon Lila.

Son of a bitch. Not his fault, but son of a bitch anyway.

If Tom were maimed and Lila were not, she would never get near him. Because how would they explain her attention, her devotion? How very odd, Dorothy would naturally think.

These are the kinds of things Lila and Tom know, but only remotely. Well, today's the day, isn't it?

“You okay?” Jimmy asks.

“Sorry,” says Mel, “I didn't mean to upset you.”

“It's okay.” They're nice, noticing kids, tattoos, rings, spandex and all. “I just had one of those shocks. Reality kicking in.”

Mel nods. “Yeah, it's hard to keep knowing all the time.”

“It certainly is.” She smiles. “Now I'd better get back to my companion, I've been gone long enough.” Enough? For that matter, companion? Are she and Tom companions? She would have thought so, and they've even said so often enough, but true companions look after each other, and she has clearly seen that they would not.

Already Jimmy and Mel are shifting back to each other, a psychic alteration that binds them, excludes the rest. Also Mel's left leg is beginning to jiggle, and her fingers twine nervously with Jimmy's.

Lila would love her students, if she could be with them again. She would care passionately for the dullest of them. She would embrace the most vicious, or dim, of her colleagues. She would love the light streaking through the windows of her office, slashing its walls. She would leave her door open and be grateful for the raucous traffic outside, all those people tramping firm wooden floors.

She would be more urgently attentive to Patsy and Nell, who have their own troubles. She would speak with more passion than ever about the importance of beautiful words, and would use her own words better to say what she means and what she desires. She would spring loose, leap free, every which way.

She would touch fabrics, taste foods, see shapes and colours in eternally grateful and observant ways. She would plant her feet on the earth and never lift them again.

She wouldn't miss a thing.

She would try to love with a full, unequivocal heart, and sink and swim in the soothing equivalent joy. She would touch Tom's skin as if it is a miracle; which after all it has been.

Coming up behind him, she touches his busy shoulder.

eight

He looks up, startled. “Oh,” he says, grabbing at papers. “You're back.” He shuffles sheets together and stands to let her past.

She intends to do her best. “Sorry I was so long. There was that line-up, and then I kept meeting people. You okay? What've you been doing?”

He seems uneasy, embarrassed, even guilty, as if he's had a quick fling in her absence. “Writing,” he mutters.

“What?”

“Writing,” he repeats, more clearly.

“Yes, but what?”

“A letter.”

Oh. To those left behind.

“I know it sounds stupid.”

Lila wouldn't say it sounds stupid, exactly.

So much for fine intentions, so much for full, unequivocal hearts. She could just burst—how was it Sarah put it?—like a big old watermelon, all over the floor.

Don't get sad, get mad—clever Mel. But even rage is overcome, overwhelmed—by what? Despair, maybe. A weight far heavier than sadness.

You look like a good woman, Adele said. Lila doesn't feel good. She puts her head back and closes her eyes.

“Lila,” he says. “Lila, listen.” Must she? “Please understand,” she can imagine him crying as the plane plunges, all the way to the end. His last words to her: “Please understand.”

He might want to be careful, here in this small, inescapable place.

Lila's quiet, large-handed father knotted ropes around a tree branch in the back yard and carved out a wooden swing seat for her and Don. She learned to pump and, entranced, began flying higher and higher, catching glimpses through the speeding air of greenery and fences, neighbouring gardens, and up, up until she faced leaves and sky at the moment of hovering, before the downward return. Then back, as far and high as she'd flown forward. She was tempted to try to finish the spiral, whirling right over, crashing through limbs and leaves. She never quite gained the momentum, but sometimes felt close.

Now she seems again to be flying high in one direction, hitting that moment of stillness at the top, then falling back, and up in the opposite direction, from one extreme to another.

She learned to get off the swing by letting it slow gradually; by digging hard into the ground with the soles of tough shoes; or by letting go and leaping dangerously free.

“Listen, Lila,” he says again in that voice, and she braces herself. He will say first something like, “You know I love you.” His pledges of affection, whether he has noticed or not, are too often a prelude to some unhappy announcement.

“You know I love you.” And it's true, he does. Love isn't clear as glass, however. And surely he hasn't confused it with romance, a far more transparent matter.

Still, he must have a heart that's simply huge, to contain as much as it does. Imagine wishing for a man to have a smaller heart!

He may think her smile is for him. “The thing is, Lila, if you're right and this plane does go down” (did she say that? Not recently, she thinks, if ever. And it's hardly a matter of her opinion. If that counted, much would be different, and not just up here), “if it happens, it puts me in a terrible position.”

No kidding. If dead is a terrible position, he'll be in one for sure. Along with her, and everyone else here.

“You know what I mean.” She sighs. Yes, she does. “And you were gone for a long time, and you seemed so angry.” Yes, yes, her fault, no doubt, with her messy, negative emotions. She hears herself snort.

It's true she can be disruptive and annoying at important moments; it's not that she doesn't feel for him.

His voice hardens. “I have to think about them, Lila, be fair! Think how it'll feel for Dorothy, not just finding out she's a widow, but all this, too, and the girls—what will they be left to imagine? And I have a grandson, you know. I don't want him growing up with the idea his grandfather was an asshole.” He is very concerned about what people will think of him, it seems to Lila. He is as intent on his place in history as any ambitious politician.

“So I've been writing a letter to them.” She knows that. “I realize it's almost impossible anybody would find it, or be able to read it if they did, but I needed to try.”

“To what?”

She feels his shoulders rise and fall beside her. “To explain, I guess. To leave word of some kind. A message. I know it doesn't make sense, but it's stupid just sitting here, and I hate what they're going to think.”

They have returned to his regret at dying with her.

Look at it this way: if he were sitting in a doomed plane beside his wife or either of his daughters, the chances are remote that he would open his briefcase, pull out paper and pen and start writing a last letter to Lila. Telling her just how this happened; knowing what she would think, how she would feel, needing to make clear his affections.

He would never be able to explain such an activity.

Opening her eyes, she finds him regarding her anxiously, little crinkles in his forehead. “So?” she asks. “What do you want me to say? Do what you need to do, I don't care.”

Evidently he wants more than for her not to care. His mouth tightens the way it does when her reverence for his family fails, as it always naturally does, to match his. When she comes up short of his hopes.

His family is their most dangerous territory. Now they are on this most dangerous territory in a most dangerous circumstance. It seems there are different kinds of radiance. This one creates quick, bright sparkles of electricity between them.

There's enough fire outside, without starting interior conflagrations as well.

“You seem to have found a lot to say.” There are pages of writing—is he planning to hurl his explaining, pleading eloquence into the sea in a very large bottle?

“No.” He looks defeated. “There aren't any good words. Only, at least if it was ever found, they'd know I tried. But of course all of it's hopeless. I can't say what I mean, and nobody'll find it anyway.”

“Have you finished?”

“Almost. A few more minutes? Look, Lila, I know it's a lot to ask, but for me? A few more minutes?”

What the hell. “Go ahead. Desperate times for you, apparently, so I'm sure you require desperate measures.”

Her voice is dry as a desert, but he hears, it seems, what he wants to. “Thank you.” He no longer looks even faintly angry. “I'm so grateful for you, Lila.”

Yes, she'd have to imagine he's pretty lucky, all right. And he doesn't even know the extent of his good fortune. He appears to have no idea how close he has come to the perilous, unsturdy edge of tolerance, her capacity for absorbing blows and keeping more or less silent.

Or she could have brought Adele along to chew at him over holy promises.

Where's Adele gotten to? Looking around, Lila can't spot her, or Sarah for that matter. Jimmy and Mel, she sees, stretching to look back, are holding each other, limbs twined till they look like a single person. Or a single peony.

Some people pray, curse or cry, some stare into space. Lila supposes she herself is one of the space-starers. Behind those still faces, thoughts and pictures must simply be racing.

Tom looks to be one of the few actually doing something. It must be another habit that dies hard; or it might be accounted for by a historian's impulse to leave a record of events, and to summarize meanings. Shouldn't a lover of literature have a similar inclination, although more likely to leave a sonnet, or a meditation, a sharp thought on last moments? A mordant, Anne Sextonish taunt? Anne Sexton spent her whole life journeying towards death, though, before she simply stopped waiting and grabbed it. Ill prepared in comparison, Lila might only be able to come up with a bit of doggerel, catchy, brittle and bright.

Still, under the circumstances, even that much should impress whoever she addressed it to. And just who would that be?

Tom has spoken highly of the miracle of offspring. “They change your life in astonishing, entirely unpredictable ways.” So it seems.

By now any children she'd had would be like Tom's, grown up and out of her hands, off in their own lives, like Jimmy and Mel. By today she could have had twenty-odd years with people she can't, at this point, begin to imagine.

What is he telling his loved ones, scribbling away on his pad of lined paper? Something like, “You changed my life in astonishing, entirely unpredictable ways”?

If he weren't here beside her, Lila might want to write Tom. But which words? Different ones under that circumstance than under this one. “I want you to know I adored you,” she might have said, “and loved and enjoyed you.” Or “You helped me to be better and stronger. Much stronger.” She could say, “I've had astounding pleasure from your skin and bones.” She might want to say, “Thank you.”

She could do that now, for that matter; could pass scrawled notes to him, also throwing in, “You bastard,” perhaps, for some abusive balance.

This must be why people weep and cry out. Words aren't enough. Even raw sounds aren't enough; there's nothing so loud or so fierce it can capture the volume of grief or pace of emotion in this space.

Does anyone at all look content? Is anyone thinking, “Hey, I did my best, it was a pretty good run, it's okay if it's over”? People always want more. Lila does, too.

She hasn't been a cruel or violent or particularly vicious person. She hasn't caused any grave disasters or told many huge lies, or injured puppies and kittens. Equally, though, she has not committed many large or deliberate kindnesses, only the kind any remotely sane and humane person would perform. The time, say, leaving a drugstore, she found a child alone and frightened on the sidewalk, sobbing for “My daddy” and “My mummy.” He was little and very damp and so scared he was choking on his own breath. Naturally Lila stopped—who wouldn't?

She knelt and hugged him, although she was a bit nervous about touching him. “It's okay, we'll take care of you, don't worry, everything will be fine.” Holding his hand, she went back into the drugstore, called the police, bought the child a small chocolate bar to eat while they waited together outside.

First the police came, then finally a frantic parent pelted around the corner. “Oh my god, oh my god,” the father said, “I don't know how to thank you. I was terrified, what might have happened.” Lila couldn't help noticing he spoke first of his own terror, not his son's. He hugged the little boy, then shook him. “Don't you ever, ever do that again,” he said in a voice menacing with the rage of relief. “My god, you're a mess. What're you doing with that chocolate?”

Lila's own small act contained no particular goodness, though. It was performed at least partly in her own interests, just as her mother carried out her far more numerous and habitual kindnesses. Lila's mother's good works kept her very busy. They also gave her the power not only of a great deal of sorrowful information, but also of having gained it through incontrovertibly virtuous methods. Lila's kindnesses have simply allowed her to sleep at night. She would never have been rid of pictures of harm to that little lost boy if she'd walked past him because, if she paused, she'd be late for a class.

Indeed, she missed a class. There were complaints.

Don't all kinds of apparent goodness consist partly of self-interest? Because one can't bear to picture the alternatives? Tom calls this view cynical, although she can't think how the word applies. They had rather a brisk discussion—argument—one night over how they each regard acts of seeming altruism.

And see, even now he may think she's concerned for his desires at the expense of her own, sitting here quietly, letting him write. Saint Lila of the Nurturers.

She could write Patsy and Nell, or Don or his children, but what would she say? Something like, “I'm really glad to have known you, and I hope you will think of me, too, with affection. I'm scared, but I guess I would have been scared at the end anyway. I'm also in an extremely bad mood at the moment, but it's nothing to do with you.

“I'd like to have been better, but you never know, do you? More or less, I've enjoyed myself, and by and large I've done what I wanted. I might have some bigger ideas now that I've had this day, but I guess it's too late, so what can I say except that I'm terribly frightened but not, as it turns out, vastly unhappy, if you see what I mean by the difference. If I'd known and felt before what I know and feel now, I might have done differently or better, but I didn't, so that's that. It was grand to know you, you added much to my time with you, and I hope your lives go well. You might want to consider last moments. They're actually quite interesting.”

Even fashioned into iambic pentameter, these have no chance of becoming stirring greeting-card words.

Tom's pen is moving swiftly; he must have lots to say. Does he find himself baffled by the banality of his emotions when they're set down flat on paper?

Perhaps he is more eloquent than she, or wants to discuss specific events more than she would. She does hope he isn't writing a confessional; even by her standards that would be disgustingly selfish, self-conscious, self-absorbed.