Authors: Paul La Farge

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Satire

Luminous Airplanes (21 page)

BOOK: Luminous Airplanes

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“I get it,” I shouted.

We sat next to an old Latino in a blue-checked shirt and a younger man who could have been his son. As we watched, the girl took off her top, exposing small white breasts which she took by the nipples and tugged in one direction then another, as if to show off their mobility. She looked like a salesclerk showing us how to use a new household object. The old man seated next to us put a five-dollar bill on the stage and the girl knelt and did the breast demonstration again. Up close, she looked older, twenty-five or even thirty, in the red light it was difficult to tell. The song ended and the woman paused, then the Guess Who’s “American Woman” came on, and she stood up, turned her back to us and dropped her underwear. Next to me, Charles was rocking back and forth to the beat of the song.

“You like this?” I shouted in his ear.

“It’s better in the wintertime,” he shouted back. “This is the off season.”

His breath steamed and I realized that it was cold in the Sphinx Club, not as cold as it was outside but much colder than you’d expect a man-made structure to be at the end of the twentieth century. I didn’t like to think how it felt to the woman onstage, although maybe she was used to it. Or maybe the Sphinx Club was having trouble getting heating oil, maybe their tanker was delayed because of the hurricane also.

“Wait till you see Barb, though,” Charles said. “She comes on later.”

The woman spun around a metal pole that pierced the tongue stage at its widest point. She climbed the pole, embraced it with her legs and let her torso fall backward so her hair brushed the floor. I shivered. How could anyone want this, I wondered, but I couldn’t look away. I was ashamed of what I’d done at Summerland. How could I have forgotten everything Yesim had told me? Why hadn’t I been able to stop myself? The woman doubled over and looked at us from between her legs. Yes, she seemed to say, that’s the riddle.—Do you know the answer? I asked. Do I know, she said, do I know? I’m the country cunt, I know everything.—OK
,
I said, what is it?—Guess, said the country cunt. Love? I said. Love
,
she repeated, don’t make me laugh. You want love, take a look at this. She reached back and grabbed her goosefleshed thighs and pulled the lips of her vulva apart for the benefit of the man beside us, whose hand lay paralyzed on top of the five-dollar bill he’d set on the stage. You feel that? the country cunt said. Brr.—Give me a hint
,
I said. It starts with the letter
h,
said the country cunt. Hope? I said. Not even close
,
said the country cunt. Guess again. But I didn’t want to play her game anymore.

“I don’t feel well,” I shouted at Charles.

“You want to leave now?” Charles asked, surprised. “But we only just got here.”

“Yes, now.”

I left the Sphinx Club. A moment later Charles came out and we stood beside his truck.

“It’s too bad,” he said, “I would have liked for you to meet Barb.”

Just then a blue Toyota raced into the parking lot and stopped, and a chubby black woman climbed out, wearing black leggings and a fur-collared bomber jacket.

“And here she is,” Charles said. “Barb, hey! Come over here and meet my nephew.”

Barb shook my hand. “He’s a lot bigger than you.”

“Aah,” said Charles, “I just shrunk.”

Barb asked if we were on our way in, and Charles said no, in fact he was taking me home. “He was in a car accident this morning.”

“Well, then,” Barb said, “you get him home, all right? You got to take care of him.” She jogged around to the back of the Sphinx Club and vanished.

“She’s a nice girl,” Charles said as we climbed into his truck. “I don’t know where she comes from, but I told her I’d take care of her, if she wanted. You know what she said? She told me she was waiting for a rich man to come along. A rich man! God bless her, but I don’t think she’s going to meet one in that place.”

“It doesn’t look promising.”

“On the other hand, maybe I’ll get rich,” my uncle said.

It occurred to me that you could never know other people, and that no matter how much you learned about them, they would always have another side that was hidden from your view, a dark bulk that made them complete but that you would never understand. By then we were back in Thebes.

“Where’s your car?” Charles asked.

“At the grocery store, but I don’t think I can drive. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

“You forget that we have a tow truck.”

“No,” I said, but it was too late, he was already pulling into the parking lot. He climbed down and hooked tow chains to the front fender of Norman Mailer’s car, which was strangely unscathed by everything that had happened. With a grinding sound, the car rose to its rear wheels, like a begging animal. We drove back to Thebes with it rolling behind us, and when we got to my grandparents’ house Charles backed the truck deftly into the driveway and lowered Norman Mailer’s car to the ground. Then: “Hey,” I said, pointing. The lights in the kitchen and one of the upstairs bedrooms were on.

“Uh-oh,” said Charles.

I knew without being told that Kerem was inside, waiting for me. Or else he was vandalizing the house, ruining it, as I had—so I thought—ruined his sister. As if to confirm my fears, Charles opened the glove compartment and took out a .45 automatic. Holding it with its muzzle pointed at the sky, he slipped from the cab of the tow truck and motioned for me to wait. I sat helplessly in the passenger seat, sick with guilt and fear, imagining my uncle surprising Kerem in the living room. Kerem had a short temper; my uncle hated the Regenzeits. I was sure one of them was about to kill the other, or that they would both be killed, and that it was going to be my fault, and when, a moment later, a woman screamed, I thought, Yesim! and came running out of the truck to see what terrible thing had happened.

Charles stood on the porch, the pistol dangling at the end of his limp arm. He turned to me, his face pale, and grinned irritably. “It’s your mothers,” he said.

LOW-FLYING STARS

When I left Stanford, with only the most confused of explanations, four years into my doctorate, the Celestes said they loved me as much as ever, and wanted me to be happy as much as they always had, but they became noticeably remote, as though my decision had revealed something about me that they did not understand and could not embrace. We talked every week, but their questions about my job at Cetacean were pro forma; the days of Celeste’s puzzled interest in computer programming were long gone. I tried to understand their disapproval. They wanted me to be poor but noble, like them, I thought. They didn’t like the idea that I was making money in the
business world
or, worse, that I might, by some ordinary standard, be more successful than they were. My Christmastime visits to New York became strained, then stopped completely.

But when I saw the Celestes sitting side by side on my grandparents’ sofa, their lower bodies covered by an afghan, their faces still animated by the shock of nearly being shot by their own brother, I realized that this had all been illusion. My mothers weren’t poor. Marie wore a deep-gray cashmere turtleneck set off with a wide gold necklace; austere Celeste wore a blue denim shirt and fleece vest specked with white paint. Four brand-new hiking boots stood in a line by the kitchen door. My mothers must have bought them for this trip, as though they were going into the wilderness, and not back to their childhood home.

“We took a cab from the train station,” Marie was saying. “We thought you’d gone out to dinner, so we let ourselves in. I didn’t know Thebes was so dangerous!”

“We thought you were burglars,” I said.

Celeste looked at me sternly and asked, “What happened to your head?”

“Car accident,” I said. “I got rear-ended.”

Charles said nothing.

“Oh, dear,” said Marie. “Were you wearing your seat belt?”

“Yes. I’m fine. It was a low-speed collision.”

My mothers felt bad about having sent me off to Thebes to pack up the house on my own. For several weeks they’d wanted to come up, but New York was so busy in the early fall, they’d had to wait for the Columbus Day weekend. They’d called me to say they were coming, but got no answer. “We thought you might be camping,” Celeste said, a little maliciously.

“We were just having a beer,” I said.

“Before the accident, or after?” Celeste asked.

“After.”

“Just a nightcap,” my uncle said, as if this were the normal course of things: accident, drink.

“Well, we’re glad you didn’t shoot us,” Marie said.

Sure, now, that they would be staying, Celeste carried their bags upstairs. Marie made tea. Changing the subject, she told us she’d been promoted. Now she was the style editor at
S
. “It’s an almost meaningless distinction,” she said, “but I do get to travel. Milan in October, Paris in January. Celeste is jealous.”

“She’s not coming with you?” I couldn’t imagine one of them going anywhere without the other.

“She has a show. You should ask her about it, she’s been making the most incredible …”Then her phone rang. “Hello? Just a sec.” Marie went into the parlor.

“Thanks,” I said to Charles.

“Thanks for what?” asked Celeste, coming downstairs again. She poured herself a mug of tea, and when neither of us answered her question, she went on, her voice expressing surprise and possibly disapproval, “How nice of you to leave our room the way it was.”

My mothers stayed for two days. It was the first time since I was in high school that we’d spent so many hours together, and I found them different than I remembered: gentler, less insistent on their own apartness.

“It’s too bad you didn’t come to the funeral,” Celeste said, on Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in the parlor while Marie circled the house, her telephone pressed to her ear. “You would have heard some stories about your grandfather. Did you know, he went to visit Gabby Thule when she was in the hospital, and he brought her wildflowers? He was a generous spirit, that was the phrase one of his friends used.”

I didn’t point out that
generuz de son esprit
meant something different. “It sounds like you miss him.”

“Miss him?” Celeste said. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like he’s still here, and sometimes it’s like he was never here at all. Although I had a dream about him the other night. He had sent me a pair of wool socks, and I called to say thank you. Wool socks!” she repeated, smiling. “It’s very strange.”

Celeste fell silent. I asked her about her show, and she said it wasn’t her show, it was a group show, organized by an arts council in Lower Manhattan. “You know who had a big show, though? Guy Anstine.”

“The white box guy?”

“That’s him. Only now he’s tied his boxes together with string, and people are saying they represent some kind of network,
a hermetic system of historical reference
, what bullshit. Of course, Guy is a man.” Celeste tapped her finger on her knee. Cautiously, as though she didn’t know how her words would be received, she began to indict the system that elevated guys like Guy to the heavens while she was left somewhere in between, not obscure but not brilliant, ascending with infinite slowness. As she spoke I understood that Celeste didn’t care whether I was an artist or an intellectual or a computer programmer: all she wanted from me was to know that I wasn’t part of the system she was constantly fighting against, the one that wanted her to be unfamous, unknown. If Celeste had seemed to withdraw from me, it was because she worried that I wouldn’t care so much about
her
.

That evening at dinner I mentioned that Yesim and Kerem were back in Thebes. I didn’t say anything about having seen them, but Marie saw through my feigned casualness. “What a coincidence,” she said, “that you should all come back here at the same time! It must be nice for you not to be alone.”

“Didn’t you used to like the Regenzeit girl?” Celeste asked.

I had no idea that she’d known. “Sure,” I said. “I liked both of them.”

“What’s she like now?” asked Celeste.

“Older,” I said, and the conversation went tactfully on to other subjects.

The next morning Marie went for a run and I had coffee with Celeste. We talked about New York and San Francisco, then suddenly Celeste turned to me and with a sweet, sad smile, said, “I remember the first time I fell in love. It was with a Thebes boy, Vaughan Oton, Mo’s son. I don’t think you ever knew him. He was your uncle’s age, and very good-looking. He and Charles used to ride their bicycles all over town. Vaughan! Vaughan! I’d chase after them, but they never stopped. So one day I waited right outside the house, here, and when I saw them coming up the hill, I lay down in the middle of the street. Like I was one of the perils of Pauline. Help me! I might even have shouted. Help me!”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Vaughan ran me over,” Celeste said. “I’d like to think that he didn’t see me, but I’m not sure. I was in the middle of the road.”

“Were you hurt?”

“Not physically. I did become more cautious, though.”

This was the first time Celeste ever voluntarily spoke to me about her life in Thebes. At first I didn’t understand why she had told me about Vaughan, then I realized she had somehow intuited the connection between my mentioning Yesim and the cut on my forehead. The story was her response. A lesson, maybe. Be careful who you fall in love with. I felt that Celeste and I were in rare sympathy. It was like we were really what we seemed to be, more and more, as we got older, not mother and son, not aunt and nephew, but people of the same generation. Two old friends talking in the kitchen on a gray Sunday morning. “Why did Marie fall in love with my father?” I asked.

Celeste hesitated. “Freedom is very attractive,” she said at last. “To us, as girls in Thebes, in the sixties, Richard was freedom. He was the first person who told us it was all right to do what we wanted.”

I couldn’t help noting that she’d said
us.
“Were you in love with him, too?”

Celeste made a face. “I never trusted Richard.”

“Why not?”

“It’s hard to put into words. It wasn’t how he dressed or what he said, or even what he did. But there was always this feeling of there being something else that we should have known about but didn’t. As if he had cancer, or a family somewhere.”

“Did you find out what it was?”

“I’m not sure there was anything to find out, really. It was just my feeling about him.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“You may not believe it,” Celeste said, “but I was too shy to interrogate grown-ups back then. Why all these questions?”

Impulsively, I got my father’s letter from the pile of things to keep. Celeste read it and put it down. “I always thought there must have been something like this,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

“In Oliver’s files.”

“How sad,” Celeste said. “None of us could bring ourselves to throw his letters away.”

We went up to her old bedroom. Celeste took
Being and Nothingness
off the shelf, opened it to the last page, and removed the letter that had been folded there for thirty years. “Kind of a morbid hiding place, don’t you think?” she said.

“I had a strange sense of humor when I was seventeen.” She glanced at the letter, then passed it to me. “You know, when I called you, to ask if you wanted to come here, I think I was hoping you’d find this.”

“I would never have found it. This room freaks me out.”

“Yes,” Celeste said, “it is a little weird.”

BOOK: Luminous Airplanes

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