Emperor of the Air (11 page)

One night in February, a month after this began, she asks me to stay awake and stand guard until the morning. It is almost spring. The earth has reappeared in patches. During the day, at the borders of yards and driveways, I see glimpses of brown—though I know I could be mistaken. I come home early that night, before dusk, and when darkness falls I move a chair by the window downstairs. I draw apart the outer curtain and raise the shade. Francine brings me a pot of tea. She turns out the light and pauses next to me, and as she does, her hand on the chair’s backbrace, I am so struck by the proximity of elements—of the night, of the teapot’s heat, of the sounds of water outside—that I consider speaking. I want to ask her what has become of us, what has made our breathed air so sorry now, and loveless. But the timing is wrong and in a moment she turns and climbs the stairs. I look out into the night. Later, I hear the closet shut, then our bed creak.

There is nothing to see outside, nothing to hear. This I know. I let hours pass. Behind the window I imagine fish moving down to greet me: broomtail grouper, surfperch, sturgeon with their prehistoric rows of scutes. It is almost possible to see them. The night is full of shapes and bits of light. In it the moon rises, losing the colors of the horizon, so that by early morning it is high and pale. Frost has made a ring around it.

A ringed moon above, and I am thinking back on things. What have I regretted in my life? Plenty of things, mistakes enough to fill the car showroom, then a good deal of the back lot. I’ve been a man of gains and losses. What gains? My marriage, certainly, though it has been no knee-buckling windfall but more like a split decision in the end, a stock risen a few points since bought. I’ve certainly enjoyed certain things about the world, too. These are things gone over and over again by the writers and probably enjoyed by everybody who ever lived. Most of them involve air. Early morning air, air after a rainstorm, air through a car window. Sometimes I think the cerebrum is wasted and all we really need is the lower brain, which I’ve been told is what makes the lungs breathe and the heart beat and what lets us smell pleasant things. What about the poetry? That’s another split decision, maybe going the other way if I really made a tally. It’s made me melancholy in old age, sad when if I’d stuck with motor homes and the national league standings I don’t think I would have been rooting around in regret and doubt at this point. Nothing wrong with sadness, but this is not the real thing—not the death of a child but the feelings of a college student reading
Don Quixote
on a warm afternoon before going out to the lake.

Now, with Francine upstairs, I wait for a night prowler. He will not appear. This I know, but the window glass is ill-blown and makes moving shadows anyway, shapes that change in the wind’s rattle. I look out and despite myself am afraid.

Before me, the night unrolls. Now the tree leaves turn yellow in moonshine. By two or three, Francine sleeps, but I get up anyway and change into my coat and hat. The books weigh against my chest. I don gloves, scarf, galoshes. Then I climb the stairs and go into our bedroom, where she is sleeping. On the far side of the bed I see her white hair and beneath the blankets the uneven heave of her chest. I watch the bedcovers rise. She is probably dreaming at this moment. Though we have shared this bed for most of a lifetime I cannot guess what her dreams are about. I step next to her and touch the sheets where they lie across her neck.

“Wake up,” I whisper. I touch her cheek, and her eyes open. I know this though I cannot really see them, just the darkness of their sockets.

“Is he there?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I say. “But I’d like to go for a walk.”

“You’ve been outside,” she says. “You saw him, didn’t you?”

“I’ve been at the window.”

“Did you see him?”

“No. There’s no one there.”

“Then why do you want to walk?” In a moment she is sitting aside the bed, her feet in slippers. “We don’t ever walk,” she says.

I am warm in all my clothing. “I know we don’t,” I answer. I turn my arms out, open my hands toward her. “But I would like to. I would like to walk in air that is so new and cold.”

She peers up at me. “I haven’t been drinking,” I say. I bend at the waist, and though my head spins, I lean forward enough so that the effect is of a bow. “Will you come with me?” I whisper. “Will you be queen of this crystal night?” I recover from my bow, and when I look up again she has risen from the bed, and in another moment she has dressed herself in her wool robe and is walking ahead of me to the stairs.

Outside, the ice is treacherous. Snow has begun to fall and our galoshes squeak and slide, but we stay on the plowed walkway long enough to leave our block and enter a part of the neighborhood where I have never been. Ice hangs from the lamps. We pass unfamiliar houses and unfamiliar trees, street signs I have never seen, and as we walk the night begins to change. It is becoming liquor. The snow is banked on either side of the walk, plowed into hillocks at the corners. My hands are warming from the exertion. They are the hands of a younger man now, someone else’s fingers in my gloves. They tingle. We take ten minutes to cover a block but as we move through this neighborhood my ardor mounts. A car approaches and I wave, a boatman’s salute, because here we are together on these rare and empty seas. We are nighttime travelers. He flashes his headlamps as he passes, and this fills me to the gullet with celebration and bravery. The night sings to us. I am Bluebeard now, Lindbergh, Genghis Khan.

No, I am not.

I am an old man. My blood is dark from hypoxia, my breaths singsong from disease. It is only the frozen night that is splendid. In it we walk, stepping slowly, bent forward. We take steps the length of table forks. Francine holds my elbow.

I have mean secrets and small dreams, no plans greater than where to buy groceries and what rhymes to read next, and by the time we reach our porch again my foolishness has subsided. My knees and elbows ache. They ache with a mortal ache, tired flesh, the cartilage gone sandy with time. I don’t have the heart for dreams. We undress in the hallway, ice in the ends of our hair, our coats stiff from cold. Francine turns down the thermostat. Then we go upstairs and she gets into her side of the bed and I get into mine.

It is dark. We lie there for some time, and then, before dawn, I know she is asleep. It is cold in our bedroom. As I listen to her breathing I know my life is coming to an end. I cannot warm myself. What I would like to tell my wife is this:

What the

imagination

seizes

as beauty must be truth. What holds you

to what you see of me is

that grasp alone.

But I do not say anything. Instead I roll in the bed, reach across, and touch her, and because she is surprised she turns to me.

When I kiss her the lips are dry, cracking against mine, unfamiliar as the ocean floor. But then the lips give. They part. I am inside her mouth, and there, still, hidden from the world, as if ruin had forgotten a part, it is wet—Lord! I have the feeling of a miracle. Her tongue comes forward. I do not know myself then, what man I am, who I lie with in embrace. I can barely remember her beauty. She touches my chest and I bite lightly on her lip, spread moisture to her cheek and then kiss there. She makes something like a sigh. “Frank,” she says. “Frank.” We are lost now in seas and deserts. My hand finds her fingers and grips them, bone and tendon, fragile things.

T
HE DAY AFTER
Thanksgiving my mother was arrested outside the doors of J. C. Penney’s, Los Angeles, and when I went to get her I considered leaving her at the security desk. I thought jail might be good for her.

I wasn’t surprised—I’d known all along she was a thief. Small things: a bath towel if she stayed in a hotel, a couple of Red Delicious in her purse when she walked out of Safeway. “Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “Who else is going to take care of us?” Since my father died eleven years ago in a lawn chair, she’s been saying this to us. Since then there have been airplane tampons in our bathroom, hotel soaps in our tub. “No one’s going to take care of you, either,” she says to me now.

It’s my first day home, two days before Thanksgiving, and already she has begun her warnings. “The world’s an ugly place,” she said at breakfast. “You’ve got to bait your own hooks.” Now it is afternoon. “Susan B. Anthony,” she calls to me out the kitchen window while I sweep the back yard walk. “Jane Austen.”

“What are you saying, Mother?”

“I’m reading you my list of great women,” she calls. “Emily Brontë. Maria Callas.”

“What about
Charlotte
Brontë?” says my sister, Tessa.

My mother opens the window wider. “Charlotte was a lesser talent, honey.” She smiles at Tessa. Tessa is a heart surgeon. “Marie Curie,” says my mother.

“Don’t forget Lizzie Borden,” I say. I am a waitress.

Tessa and I are home because my mother thought it would be a good idea for all of us to spend Thanksgiving in our house in Pasadena. Tessa works in Houston and arranged to visit some conferences on the Coast in order to be here. I’m a print maker and a waitress in Burlington, Vermont, and came to California because there was a plane ticket and forty dollars for taxi fare in the envelope my mother sent me. I haven’t been home in two years. My mother has called me almost weekly, sent me postcards asking when I planned to start my life. “The world won’t wait for you,” she said. “I can name other examples. Amelia Earhart, Beverly Sills—the world didn’t have to wait for them.” Over the phone she read me other lists: Virtues, Pitfalls, Courageous Decisions. She wrote me letters with the addresses of my father’s old friends—lawyers and insurance brokers—and now and then these men have stopped on their business trips to telephone me from Vermont Holiday Inns.

“Your mother,” said one, “is concerned about what you’re doing with your life.”

As soon as I stepped into my old room the first night, I knew she was stealing again. The box of Kleenex on my table said American Airlines; the vase on my dresser held a silk rose. I put down my bag and stepped into the bathroom, where I closed and locked the door. In the cabinet below the sink were stacks of paper towels, industrially wrapped, dozens of soap bars, sample size. I flushed the toilet, ran the tap, opened the door. My mother was standing there.

“Welcome home,” she said.

“Thanks,” I answered. “The house seems to be well stocked.”

Her stealing started after my father died, though he had bought plenty of life insurance and had already made the last mortgage payment by the time his coronary artery closed up one Friday evening after work. That day became the meridian of my mother’s life. For a year she wept at red lights and at drawers that didn’t close. She began coaching my sister and me about the viciousness of the world, and she began feeding us a whole new kind of diet. She filled a cookie jar with vitamins, then distributed them every morning—a bloom of colors, a halo of pills that she set in a circle at our breakfast plates. It was a new series of associations. C, we learned, was for colds—or even cancer, according to the scientists she believed; E was for the elasticity of the skin, and D for the strength of our bones; B, we knew, was for the disposition—as if a pill would help—and for sleep, so my mother took it double dose. Still she had problems sleeping. For years I heard her go downstairs in the middle of the night. In the mornings her face was wax-yellow; her fingers tapped on the table top. Instead she dozed in the afternoons, in movie theaters or on the front room sofa, where the sunlight made her dreams bad, and she started stealing.

My father was a horn player when he was in the army, and on the bureau there are photos of him with trumpets, bugles, even a clarion. There he is in the photographs, a young man in uniform, and in the cellar of our house there are the instruments—maybe the same ones—hanging from a row of nails on a corkboard. My sister and I played them when we were in grammar school. As we were growing up our house was a litany of brass noises. My mother was a musician also, a pianist, and she taught my sister and me to play. Tessa could pick things up right off the radio, dance tunes that boys and then men tapped their feet to. When a new song came on the radio she leaned her ear right up against the grille of the speaker, and when the song was finished she went to the piano and played it, straight through, both hands. I don’t know what she listened for when she put her ear so close to the radio. I tried it too, even tried going straight to the piano after and letting my fingers run over the keys without thought, imagining that was how Tessa did it. But whatever it was eluded me. Instead I practiced harder than my sister—major scales, minor scales, arpeggios, blues scales, chromatic scales. I could trill notes she barely had time to reach, but whatever she heard when she put her ear against the radio grille was as insensible to me as a dog whistle.