Some Things About Flying (3 page)

Naturally she wouldn't like her life to be constantly out of her hands, but these occasions when it must be are relaxing. Almost blissful, in a disconnected sort of way.

“You ever make love in an airplane?” she asks lazily.

She loves the way his lips and the lines around his eyes fly upward. “Nope, never have. You?”

“No, but I'm wondering how it's done. It would have to be in the washroom, wouldn't it, with so many other passengers around? But I understand people do manage.”

“Want to try?”

Sometimes they get themselves caught in a whirlpool of challenge neither is willing to be first to abandon; so they have found themselves in some bold and disgraceful positions. Necking in parking lots after late faculty meetings, steaming up the windows of cars, for heaven's sake! It's hard to believe no one has noticed, but that's what they do insist on believing.

“Is that a dare? An invitation?”

Tom looks behind them, a little nervously, Lila thinks. And she thinks also there's relief in his tone when he says, “Oh well, too bad. There's a line-up.”

“Damn. Just when I was feeling frisky.”

“Wait till tonight. And tomorrow, and the night after that. You'll be a weary old woman by the end of this trip, you'll be rolled back on the plane in a wheelchair.”

“And you'll be on a stretcher, smart guy. Wearing splints.”

Lila has no idea any more what she would do without him. Her mind goes blank with the thought, and she is a woman whose mind is usually busy with one thing and another. It is terrifying, really, that addiction may have grafted itself to the original fondness and to the consequent, subsequent desire.

No wonder she sometimes flounders, arms and fists churning, trying to get free and creating a little damage in the process. She is horrified by the thought that this might be among the feelings that get called love.

“Christ,” she says, stretching. “Couldn't you just die laughing?”

“At us?”

“What else.”

Flying in the hands of a stranger isn't scary at all, compared with the two of them.

“My ass is getting sore,” he says, also shifting. “Talk to me. Make the hours fly as true and fast as this plane.”

“My man of the golden tongue.”

“I'll show you that later, too.”

Well, who would not grow addicted to a man with lines of laughter and concentration around his eyes and mouth, who says, “Talk to me,” and then by and large, more or less, listens? This man who is right now touching his long, light fingers to her thigh, tapping out in code their many happy prospects?

two

Tom isn't the only one whose ass hurts in these narrow, false-tweed seats. In business class they could both have been stretching out, extending themselves.

Never mind. In just a few hours she'll be able to stretch out every which way.

Lila has learned such patience in the past five years, such restraint—she still is sometimes amazed by her own silences. She could have argued for comfort, after all, could have risked a discussion of the prior and more essential claims on Tom and his resources. Is this another of the disquieting definitions of love? That a person lets little things slide?

Lost things accumulate, binding themselves into large, rock-hard grievances.

She has almost forgotten how it feels to eat fearlessly in a restaurant with a lover, or stroll openly down a street, or enter a gallery, a movie, a play, without watching out warily. She feels this keenly, although Tom insists he does too. “I don't like it any more than you do,” he claims, and she knows that he means it, as far as it goes.

For these two weeks they can eat freely in restaurants, embrace whenever they want, go anywhere at all without looking around. Already they're on an airplane together, it's begun. A little stiffness is nothing.

When this trip is over, will they be able to go back to their old ways?

Her complaints, she knows, would not be met with widespread sympathy.

She catches the occasional talk show, like anyone else, and has witnessed the script for these matters. “We went through a bad patch,” a couple will tell television cameras and audiences of millions, about infidelities and tests of trust. “We're working to put it together again. We're getting counselling, we're trying hard.”

“I'm so sorry,” the straying partner insists, repentant and abject and guilty. “I'm grateful she's willing to give us another chance. I've learned my lesson. I hope she can forgive me, and I can earn back her faith.”

A touching tableau. One, Lila always observes, with a character missing.

“Hey, hold on!” she imagines that anonymous, abandoned third figure crying, wagging a finger at the TV screen, reeling from her own betrayal. “What the hell just happened? A minute ago I was a huge, important secret, not to mention the love of his life, and now I'm a penny that fell through his pocket? Wait just a minute here.”

Well, there's nothing to do, really, but laugh. Or give up.

“What are you smiling about?” Tom asks.

“Talk to me,” he says in warm times; and in sturdy times. “You can tell me anything.” Well no, not always.

“I was thinking,” Lila says instead, “about what people look for in each other. Like magazine surveys, you know? What do women want in a man, what do men prefer in a woman? Women always say things like humour, kindness, intelligence, tenderness. And probably that he has a decent salary and won't be a burden. What would you say? What would you look for?”

“In a woman?” He pauses, waits a beat, grins. “Enormous breasts and a brain the size of a walnut. That's pretty much it. Why? What do you want in a man?”

“Huge penis. Tiny chick-pea of a brain.”

“Ah, Lila.” They're laughing. “I love you to death.”

“And isn't that just like a man.”

There. That's why she loves him. Exactly that: laughter.

And intelligence, kindness and tenderness. And his impatience. Also his patience. His salary is not her concern, except when she ends up spending a transatlantic flight in the cheap seats.

And she likes that, in fairness, he cannot say anything like, “Where were you?” or “I don't want you to do that.” There is much to be said for this variation of love. Nell's second husband caused trouble that way. “I think,” she told Patsy and Lila, “I'm divorcing him just so I can get out to a movie with you guys without a big hassle. Although of course you can't exactly say that to the lawyers.”

Here are other pleasing pictures: Tom's intently loving face above hers, her fingers reaching to his cheekbones. He can hover in bed like a whirlybird, so attentive only the two of them and the moment exist.

Is that overwrought? Stylistically excessive and, more seriously, quite unrealistic?

He has most tender eyes, a very dark blue. Even darker when he is ardent or, for that matter, angry.

Playing badminton in her back yard on a windless hot day, both of them taut to win, because they are people who like to win, but laughing also at their own determination. Behaving like children; which may be the point, or at any rate the theme. Tom, sweating, taking off his T-shirt, baring his pot-belly, with its narrow trail of dark hairs, to the light. Men can do that and think nothing of it.

She likes that belly, silhouetted here and there in various circumstances in her memory. It's like an extra warm presence, something more to embrace, and rather endearing. She hopes he feels the same about hers.

Also, really, she adores his penis, his fingers, his tongue. She is entirely happy in his hands, which is not something she can say about all the hands she's been in.

Who knew that at forty-seven her imperfect body would still be turning in clever hands? And that her own hands (Tom says) are clever in return. And (Tom says) her tongue, breasts and other very sensitive parts. Who knew she'd be lucky enough to find, at this advanced stage, such an adept and clever lover?

“Advanced stage” has its piquancy, which perhaps adds zip. There is awareness of bodies changing, winding down, time running out.

“Come on, Lila,” Tom says again. “Tell me.”

She grins more broadly. “I was thinking how much I like fucking you. How much I'm looking forward to a whole lot more of it.”

“Lila! People can hear!” He's laughing too, though. He is tickled, at least when they're safe, by mischief.

Usually, she must be more discreet. “I guess,” mock-wistful, “ripping off your trousers to give it a go in public will be as illegal in England as it is at home.”

“Only in the streets, where the horses might be frightened. But we may find a deserted moor, who knows, if we look.”

“My Heathcliff.”

“My Cathy.”

Lila's back yard is no deserted moor, but they have made love out there, forgetting, or ignoring, the perils. Well, fresh air and danger—pretty exhilarating, pretty heady. And here's another of his appeals: because he asks, “Remember when we made love in the grass? I'd never done anything quite like that before.”

It's a grand thing, having a history that contains so many views and memories, just the two of them. Lila feels greedy for shared visions, possibly because with Tom she feels deprived of them. Heroin to an addict, booze to an alcoholic, chocolate to a child—Lila wants more and more and more.

“I surely do. Stuffy hot night and mosquitoes. I got bites, and grass stains on my butt. Loved it. Just loved it.”

“I got the grass stains on my knees. Do you think any of your neighbours saw? I wondered about somebody getting up for a piss and glancing out the window. Made me hope my ass held up okay in moonlight.”

“Your ass
is
moonlight. Anyway, they'd more likely have heard us, but they'd be too polite to mention it. And what could they say? ‘Next time you're going to have enormous orgasms outside at midnight, could you please keep the noise down, we have jobs and need our sleep'?”

They are giddy with giggling, like children at recess, heads together, talking nonsense.

What did she expect when they started? She guesses she expected herself to be cooler, less involved, less volatile and vulnerable. It may also be that she expected to be more vital to him. She may have imagined she would outweigh everyone else.

As if it were a matter of weights and measures.

As if it were not.

“We'd better shape up,” he says. “We'll get kicked off the plane.” This makes them laugh more: the picture of being hurled, strapped into parachutes if they're lucky, into the freezing air and down, expelled for misbehaviour.

“I keep wondering how a nice English professor got to be so vulgar.” He uses the word “vulgar” as if it's one of those chocolates that splash cherries and cream into the mouth; as if it's delicious. “Was it something you read?”

“Absolutely. That, and a few other pleasures.” It is true, stories are not insignificant in a life, wherever they come from. Television also, Lila expects, although more, say, for her students than for herself. But what goes in comes out somehow; nothing is wasted or entirely lost, either to the keen observer or to the porous personality.

This has little to do with vulgarity, but Tom, for instance, might be unnerved to know how alert she is to shifts of his limbs and to his alterations of tone. The alertness he does discern has sometimes annoyed him. She supposes it can make him feel exposed, or burdened. She supposes she might feel that way also, faced with acute attentiveness.

But a smart child, and Lila was a smart child, keeps an eye, which is not a trick that gets unlearned, although it doesn't necessarily get much sharper, either. She can sniff tension and identify camouflaged joy or distress, but that does not particularly help to track causes or ways to repair.

“I learned practically everything I know from stories,” she tells him. “Reading them or watching them.” He will assume she is referring only to fiction, but she is not.

A child has no way of knowing the origins of adult tensions, but a wise child knows they're there, and when they're dangerous. Not, for Lila, physically dangerous, not like that kind of terrible story, but with a kind of thick-aired, mysteriously grown-up resentment that could make it hard to breathe around the house.

Whatever did this, a single, dramatic, huge event or a series of smaller, unforgivable, unforgettable sins, is beyond Lila, even now. But something between her mother and her father threw a silence like a sheet of glass between them.

It couldn't have been money; her father was in charge of a bank branch's loans and mortgages and certainly earned enough for comfort. Not a woman, women, either: he was too perpetually, when not at work, around the house. A man? Surely not. Not her mother, a woman dedicated to doing good, if not exactly to goodness itself.

Something sexual, then, between the two of them? Something profoundly passionate, at any rate, and secret.

Could Lila have asked? After she became an adult and could have inquired as an adult, would they have answered her?

If they had little to say to each other, they also had little to say about each other. In their different ways, they were ferocious, clasping their shared passionate secret tight to themselves.

Lila and her brother Don endured painful dinners during which their father seldom spoke, and their mother chattered about her days, and Don's and Lila's days, her voice so falsely, brightly high that Lila's teeth could ache by the end of a meal.

At night her parents went separately to her room to tuck her in, and then to Don's. Her father leaned down to kiss her forehead; her mother tugged the covers up and gave them a brisk, efficient pat. Then what did they do with the rest of their evenings, with no children between them? Supposing despair, Lila still cannot bear to imagine.

She felt pulled between them like a rope. She felt she and Don held them together like a rope. The children of divorce, she thinks now, too often lack appreciation for their circumstances.

Beginning school, she stared uncomprehendingly at Dick and Jane and their beaming, encouraging parents. From the bookshelf at home,
A Child's Garden of Verses
didn't echo with any vagaries of love she could recognize. Could her parents ever have resembled the Romeo and Juliet of her children's version of Shakespeare? She wondered what would have happened to Romeo and Juliet if they had lived. The bitter secrets of
A Girl of the Limberlost
felt more familiar, and for a while, she was quite at home in the fraught dramas of the Brontës.

She read as if her family were more than the humans involved, but were also a set of stories she wasn't advanced enough to grasp.

Don had his own ways. He stayed out a lot and denied an interest in thick air. Perhaps associating Lila, too, with gloom, he avoided her as well. None of this is a subject he will discuss; or maybe, it occurs to her, it's not one he can bear. He and Lila still don't have much in common except the colour of their eyes, affection for his children, and one terrible event.

He's on his second marriage, though. He must at least have learned not to stick around once something irretrievable has occurred.

It is now Lila's view that her parents went wrong for reasons that do not concern her; that had only to do with adults, not their children. This can happen. There is nothing about marriage, or well-intentioned promises, that prevents it from happening.

It is necessary to be able to get free when it happens.

“You okay?” Tom asks, and Lila realizes she has put a hand to her throat, as if she feels sick, which she doesn't.

She nods. “You?”