A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (27 page)

I AM
told that one of my strengths as “Zoo Lewis,” in my column “Animals Unlimited,” is the patience I display toward obvious questions. In my eleven years I’ve received four Press Service Awards for the column, “for making the obvious interesting and the complex understandable.” I enjoy my work, sure, and most of the questions I receive are extraordinarily good, germane, challenging, and lead naturally to interesting columns. People are always surprised that the armadillo crosses a river by walking across the bottom, that the gnu can run so fast, that the marten is so small. Beyond the fun stuff—the “Where does ‘playing ’possum’ come from?” or “How are porcupines romantic?”—there are a lot of unanswerably weird letters about feathers and fur and the death of pets. I answer all my mail. I say “I don’t know” sometimes in the letters. I have even answered all of the hate mail I’ve had in the last six months about the evolution problem, even though I use a photocopied form for those. It’s not a surprise that I answer letters; Andy never wrote back to me.

THE BOYS
and I go to the airport to pick up my parents. Walking with my sons through the terminal is like magic for me, because I am a man with a secret. My parents are flying in from Michigan to stay with the boys for a week while Katie and I go to Hawaii. I’ll have to spend one day with my old prof Sorenson in his research center at the university taking notes for an article on his first panda and then half of another at the Kapiolani Zoo, looking at their arrangements for the creature, but the rest of the time Katie and I will be having sexual intercourse with short breaks to eat. And I will figure a way to tell her I’ve been fired. This will be our first trip away from the boys, and as I noted, everybody is three. It has been like three years in space, the four of us in a capsule circling and circling in the dark. Every time there is a lull, someone floats by in your face. “Hi, Dad.”

Katie and I moved our sex life later and later into the night, until it was being conducted with one of us half asleep, and then we tried the mornings, but the boys have always risen first and crawled in with us. Then we bought the VCR and used it to lure them into the living room mornings for twenty minutes of Chip and Dale cartoons while we touched very quietly in our bedroom and listened for little feet. That ploy actually worked pretty well for a while, and then we became guilty about using the TV that way.

We moved into the shower. That was always good, but it was difficult to hear in there and more than once we saw a small pink figure leaning against the frosted-glass shower doors. It was enough to take the starch out of things. Then a terrible thing happened: we became pragmatic about it. Interrupted once, we would shrug and smile at each other, rinse off, and start the day. Can I even explain how sad it made me to watch Katie pull on her clothing?

But now, I have a secret. I am one revolution of the earth away from the most astonishing sex carnival ever staged by two married people.

This is what I tell myself. And I believe it, but there’s more. Though Katie hasn’t said anything, I suspect she knows I’m not Zoo Lewis anymore. Cracroft told me I was history on Tuesday and then he’s called and tried to be helpful twenty times. The syndicate is dropping the column. We both know why, but they cite numbers. I’m down to fifty-two papers from over a hundred and seventy. The papers are dropping the column. The
Blade,
the
Register,
the
Courier,
the
Post.
They can’t handle the backlash. I’m too political. Maybe I am. It is no longer possible to write cute pieces about the dolphin, the mandrill, the Asian elephant. But this all started with four pieces on simple amphibians and what one of my hate-mail correspondents called “creeping evolutio-environmental liberal bullshit.” Cracroft says
no problem,
most of the papers will do reruns of old columns for six months, and that should give me enough time to come up with some freelance stuff of a more “general nature” and maybe pitch a book.

Zoo Lewis bites the dust. Maybe he should. I was getting cranky. I’ve enjoyed it more than I planned to, and only one other time was there trouble: after I wrote an appreciation of the wolf, a very bright, misunderstood creature who mates for life. We got two pounds of mail from Montana and lost the
Star
and the
Ledger.

Cracroft is a good guy. I don’t blame Cracroft. He called and said I could keep my modem. He said, “I’m sorry, Lewis. Your work is good. It may just be time to shake up the feature page.”

“What should I do?” I asked him. We’ve known each other for ten years.

“You’re good,” he said. “Go to plan B.”

I smiled and thanked him for the modem. Plan B. Zoo Lewis
was
plan B. I was going to be a veterinarian. I was going to doctor animals, but I couldn’t because of the allergies—they tried to kill me more than once. We can’t even have a dog or a cat or a ferret. We can have fish in a tank, but I don’t want fish. I couldn’t be a vet, so I became a journalist. I’m in plan B. And it’s not working.

AT THE
gate, I am surprised. When my parents emerge, I have to look twice. It’s not that I don’t recognize them; it is that I recognize them too well. They haven’t changed in a year. Why don’t they look older? My mother wears her sure-of-herself grin, having gone out into the world once again and found herself still every bit the match for it. The interactions of men and women have always amused her. “Society,” she used to tell me, “is not quite finished. Don’t
ever
fret and stew about your place in it.”

My father comes forward beside her, carrying his small valise in which there will be four or five pads of blue-lined graph paper already bearing the beginnings of several letters and drawings. He will have seen something from the window of the plane, where he always sits, that has struck him as worthy of improvement and he will have begun the plans. He works on half a dozen projects at a time. When he retired from General Motors four years ago, the grid pads just continued. He has fourteen obscure patents and is always working on two or three more in far-flung fields: a design for a safety fence for horse racing; a design for pressure tanks containing viscous liquids; a tennis racket grip. He writes me every week on the beautiful paper describing his projects and his current concerns. Most recently he’s been considering the rules and statistics of baseball and has in mind several revisions. I watch my father approach with his easy stride and calm smile and I am paralyzed. He doesn’t look older at all. He looks, and this has my mouth open,
just like me.
It took them almost forty years, but my genes have jelled. No wonder my three-year-old sons leap away, weaving through the travelers, to grab the hands of my mother and my father.

When I join them, my mother has already pulled two dinosaurs out of her bag and awarded one to each of the boys. I kiss my mother and when I step back she runs her hand up over my ear through the white in my hair and smiles. My father hugs me, letting his hand stay across my shoulder as he always has since my Little League days. Ricky has examined his toy, feeling the snout and counting the claws, and finding it authentic, he is very pleased. “Isn’t it great?” I say to him. “A brontosaurus.”

“Dad,” Ricky corrects me. “It’s not.”

“It’s an allosaurus,” my mother says. I look at her and she gives me the look she’s always had for me, the sweet, chiding challenge:
You can catch up if you’d like. None of this is beyond you.
But I’m not so sure. It may be beyond me, and if not, I’m not sure I want to catch up. It no longer surprises me that everyone is ahead of me. My parents are keeping up on dinosaurs.

AT HOME
, my father helps me start the barbecue and we stand on the patio in the early dark. He is drinking one of Katie’s margaritas and looking around at the sky as if listening for something.

“We won’t have a night like this until June,” he says.

“I know. February is a bonus here. June is a hundred and ten.” I am arranging the chicken pieces on the hot grill. I’d like to tell my father about what is happening, that my job is over, but there is really no need. He knows already. My mother let it slip on the phone that my column wasn’t running in the
Journal
anymore. My parents have always been mind readers. He can tell that change is at hand by the way I use the tongs on the chicken. This mode of communication is actually a comfort. It spares our talking like people on television.

Years ago, I called home the night I knew I was leaving veterinarian school. I was in the hospital in Denver and when my mother answered she said, “It’s your allergies, isn’t it, Lewis? Are you in the hospital right now?”

Ricky comes out and loops an arm around my father’s leg. “Granpa, Granpa, Granpa,” he says and points at the chicken sizzling on the grill. “The barbecue is very hot. You must be very careful.”

Ricky’s head falls against my father’s leg and as my father cups the little boy’s head, I know how it feels. The two stand in that kind of hug and watch me as I begin to turn the chicken. This is who I am, some guy with a spatula at twilight. I write about animals. I won’t get the big adventures, page-one stuff; I’ve stood on a lot of patios with my father and I’ll stand on quite a few with my son. That is what I’ll get.

Later, in our bedroom, Harry is helping Katie pack. She’s got both big suitcases open on the floor and Harry sits in one with his binoculars. He’s emptied my shaving kit and is sorting through the goodies. I reach down and try to find my razor. “I already put it on the bureau,” Katie says. “Do you want your Hawaiian shirt?”

“What’s the protocol? I don’t think you take your Hawaiian shirt to Hawaii, do you?” It’s a turquoise shirt with little red and white guitars and orchids printed all over it.

“If you don’t take it, we may buy another.”

“Take it,” I say. “Let’s take it.”

Harry has pulled the lid down now and he’s inside the suitcase. In twenty minutes, when my mother has taken Rick in to bed and read him a book and he’s flopped over on his stomach aggressively for sleep, I will come back in here and find Harry asleep in my suitcase and carry him to bed.

Of course, when you have children, all your bedtimes come back to you. Not all at once, but from night to night, pieces of your earliest nights appear. It will be the sound of a sheet or the feel of a blanket and the dark in the corner or the way the light from the hall falls on the far wall and there you are being carried to bed by someone who must have been your father or there is your mother with her hand in your hair and your head on the pillow. Some nights I lie in their room with the kids and listen to their nursery-rhyme tapes and I listen to them as they swim in the sheets, Ricky diving down first into sleep, the same way he eats, hungrily, no sense wasting time, and Harry as he turns sideways on his back and then kicks the wall softly with his heels as his blinking grows longer and longer and then his eyes shut for good and I hear the motor of his breath even out in a perfect sine curve.

When Katie comes to bed it is just about midnight. I’ve been listening to some guy on Larry King’s radio show talk about the economy. He is advising people to keep gold under their mattresses. Katie hits the pillow with a blow-out sigh, throwing her right arm up over her eyes. “Are we actually going on a trip?” she says. “Are we going to sleep for four days or what.”

“Depends on what you mean.”

She turns her head my way and smiles. “You monkey. ‘The coast is clear.
’
” That’s the line we’ve used for fifteen years. Petting in her front room, one or two o’clock in the morning, I was always whispering: “The coast is clear.” Once on her dining-room floor as close to putting something on the permanent record as we’d ever been, everybody’s pants to the knees, brains full of fire, we heard her father ten feet away in the kitchen drawing a glass of water. And now we’d been living like that again. It makes a person dizzy.

The length of her body is the simple answer to what I am missing. It’s an odd sensation to have something in your arms and to still be yearning for it and you lie there and feel the yearning subside slowly as the actual woman rises along your neck, chest, legs. We are drifting against each other now. Sex is the raft, but sleep is the ocean and the waves are coming up. Katie’s mouth is on my ear and her breath is plaintive and warm, a faint and rhythmic moan, and I pull her up so that I can press the tops of my feet into her arches. I run my hands along her bare back and down across her ribs and feel the two dimples in her hip and my only thought is the same thought I’ve had a thousand times: I don’t remember this—I don’t remember this at all. Katie sits up and places her warm legs on each side of me, her breasts falling forward in the motion, and as she lifts herself ever so slightly in a way that is the exact synonym for losing my breath, we see something.

There is a faint movement in our room, and Katie ducks back to my chest. There is someone in our doorway. It is a little guy without any clothes on. He has a pair of binoculars.

WHO CAN
remember sex? Who can call it to mind with the sensate vividness of actuality? I sit in the window when we lift off from Los Angeles. Katie sits in the middle and next to her a high school kid with a good blitz of pimples across his forehead. Katie speaks to him and I see he has braces. Beneath us I see the margin of the Pacific fall away. I can see all the way up to the Santa Monica Pier and the uneven white strip of sand separates the crawling blue sea from the brown urban grid of the city. We have just left something behind. We have now been released from mainland considerations. Tonight Harry is going to pad west in his bare feet, looking for us with his glasses, but the surf is going to stop him. He’ll be mad for a moment at the Pacific Ocean, it’s a big one, but then he’ll turn and go back to his room.

I love to fly. I always sit in the window and press the corner of my forehead against the plastic glass. I can feel the little bumps in my skull which are full of ideas and I move my head slightly. It kind of hurts in a nice way. Today my skull is full of sex. I’m trying to remember sex. I don’t even try to resist by making notes for Sorenson or looking at the magazine,
Inflight.
The fact that I have lost my job and may lose our house, the Buick, the VCR, seems to have sharpened everything, and I feel edgy, alive. The sun is clipping through my window and falls in a square on my wrists and lap. I hear the stewardess come by, her clothing whispering, and I glimpse her tight maroon skirt, seamless and perfect as it passes.