A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (28 page)

I’ve always loved to look at women, what is that, terrible? There are moments I harbor in memory: buying my first sport coat on my own downtown in Salt Lake City at Mednicks, the tall young woman helping me, taking the coat back to the counter and then bending down and writing the slips as her white silk blouse fell open like doors of a cathedral and her breasts were revealed to me hanging there in the cool dark, draped in white undergarments as delicate and complicated as certain music. Of course, it happens all the time. When I buy a boatload of groceries at Safeway, the girl asks for identification for my check and then she bends to check the name and numbers. Who would look away from this healthy and dextrous checker, her cleavage sweet as milk. It’s as if once she has my driver’s license and is certain of who I am, she feels free to show me her breasts. I think of it and it makes buying food magical. And there have been times more raw, when driving down the hot highways I would look down into the Chevelle next to me in the jam, cars from here to heaven, and see her, some weary brunette in a skirt, legs spread, one knee cocked against the door so that the air conditioning ran into the open maw along her bare leg all gooseflesh and pinfeather right into the damp crux of my imagination.

NOW, IN
an airliner with my wife fallen into a book and the jolly boy next to her gnashing peanuts, I suck at a gin and tonic and roll my forehead against the window. Below it is all sea now, and I feel the sleepy discomfort of an erection or half an erection, some vaguely pleasant stretching, and I shift in my seat belt, and I smile. My face feels sleepy and stiff and the smile feels like some kind of little exercise. This is immaturity. This is total regression. I think. I’m half asleep and I’m remembering Ryan McBride.

WHEN WE
finally got to high school, Rye and I found the information about sex vague and imprecise. We’d been promised in the rumor and legend of junior high something more explicit. We’d heard everything. We’d heard about girls fighting in the parking lot, one girl’s bra used to choke her if not to death then into acute brain damage. We’d heard about “heavy petting,” which is exactly the kind of phrase that made Rye spit with rage. “Oh, it’s heavy,” he’d say. “Which is the heavy part?”

We were a little ready to rip the veil off anything vaguely masquerading as the unknown. We wanted to know. And it really got to Rye that people used the same phrases for everything.

“Doing it,” they’d say. So-and-so were
doing it.

“Totally bogus,” Rye told me when we heard that about our old pal Paula Swinton and student body vice president Jeff Wild. “How could two words be more wrong?
Doing? Doing?
” he’d rant, his arms presenting the words to me in circles. “Doing?” He’d shake his head and say sadly, “It? Doing
it
? Paula and Jeff are doing
it
? What is it, one thing? Done one way? I mean, is it?” Rye would let his shoulders droop. Rye was a funny guy. He had a way, a campy way with his body. One shrug could get a room to laugh, and he’d been elected as student body secretary, the first boy ever to hold the office, on his reputation as a character. Standing there at his locker looking hurt in his green-and-gray class sweater, he mugged for me and went on, “Hey, Lewis, Lewis, Lewis. This is high school. This,” he waved his book at the teeming corridor, “is secondary education.” We started off for class and he put his arm over my shoulders and leaned on me. He whispered, “I had expected more. Paula and Jeff.
Please.
This place is letting me down.”

And as an antidote for the ambiguity in which we floated, Rye became known, our junior and then senior year, as the guy who defined “heavy petting.” “It’s an ugly thing to see and if I were you I wouldn’t look” was the first line of his credo as it appeared on blackboards and in graffiti in the stairwells. It closed: “It takes place below the waist.” He said it as a student executive club meeting was breaking up, but it was noted on the blackboard in advanced English. In three weeks the phrase “takes place” could get a laugh in any sophomore class. A high school, we learned, is a three-story brick building with a jillion hormones and one trophy case.

He’d fall in step behind some junior in tight white Levi’s, her rear bobbing like a searchlight, and he’d lean to me and say, “What is this feeling? The biological urge toward procreation of the species?” Then he’d elbow me and answer the question: “Nah.”

His great and lasting fame derived, however, from planning the graduation party on Black Rock Beach and from his thesis: “Eleven,” which postulated that there were eleven different kinds of erections. I can remember these things with a clarity that quiets me.

Katie has put her book on her lap and her head against my arm. It is sweetly warm here now, sunny with the kind of sleep that closes your eyes from the bottom up. The plane rides the white shell of air over the ocean, splitting silence into broomstraws, and I interlace my fingers carefully so as not to disturb my wife Katie. If you think I don’t love her, you’re not catching on. I close my eyes in the bright rushing world. I move my lips. So, what is this, more than it should be? I don’t know. The truth: I’m praying.

The next: it doesn’t last long. I move my lips carefully around the few important things I have to say and then use the bundle of my ten fingers to adjust the knob in my trousers. The walrus has a genuine bone in its penis that ranges in length between ten and twenty inches. The bone is an evolutionary device that is a great help in cold water. Eskimos save these bones, called “ooziks,” for good luck. A sperm whale’s penis, when erect, is nearly fifteen feet in length. The grizzly bear, more closely related to man, has erections that average four inches and require greater willing or unwilling cooperation from a mate. My watch tells me I’ve had this tumescence half an hour. It’s the kind of erection Ryan used to call number three, the kind you get about ten in the morning in third period, a wonderful extension that makes you slide down in your seat and stretch your legs. It’s related to number one, the one you wake up with, stiff as a clothespin. Number two was what? It was also a morning deal, the one that comes up between class, pointed down, trapped in your shorts pointing at five o’clock. Number two was the one you used your chemistry book to straighten out. What were the others? Eleven. We laughed our heads off, but we all knew he was right. There are eleven, minimum.

I remember the larky randiness of those days and my decision finally to push the point with a girl named Cheryl Lockwood at the graduation party. I wasn’t really out of the mainstream in high school, most of our class were virgins, but I’d had a couple of relationships that had just dried up and blown away and I couldn’t figure it out. I worried a little, I remember, about being unqualified for the real world of men and women. Who doesn’t? My parents, of course, could read my mind, but I could not read theirs. I lived in a kind of dread that my father would take me aside one evening or my mother would try to open the topic. As it was, we lived an uneasy truce. If we were watching television at night together and there was a kissing scene, I would always leave the room, glass of water, homework, something. I was out of there.

Cheryl Lockwood was a cutie. I wasn’t going with Cheryl, a smart-looking girl with short brown hair and a nice bosom, but she was my chemistry partner, and whenever we talked, we flirted. Her favorite phrase was “What you going to do, huh? Huh?” It was all smile-smile stuff, but the undercurrent was there. The way we flirted was that I would tell her she had to put on some weight and she would moan about it,
oh, no, no,
like that, and then we’d light the Bunsen burner and melt something down. When I think of her I still smell sulfur.

My decision to make serious moves on her was a result of our being sent to the principal’s office together for staining Mr. Welch’s hands. Our teacher, Mr. Welch, of course, deserved it, because he understood chemistry and wasn’t that willing or able to let the rest of us in on the secret. He was a terrible teacher. We did learn that sodium nitrate stains human skin, however, and we spread a thin layer on our counter just before asking him over to explain something about liquid sulfur. The next day his palms were gray and he sent me and then Cheryl (because she laughed) to the office.

On the way down there I was a little high, you know, from being kicked out of class and the halls were empty and there was Cheryl in step with me and we were kind of bumping together and I said, “There is something so sexy about empty hallways, don’t you think?” I put my arm around her shoulder and she put her arm around my waist and squeezed, saying, “Absolutely. What are you going to do about it?” And I said, “I’m going to get you alone at the graduation party and have my way with you.” She squeezed me tighter and said, “Good. I hope you enjoy it as much as I plan to.” We met with Mr. Gonzalez, the principal, and he tried to be mad about what we had done to Mr. Welsh, but he had a little trouble.

And that was that. Cheryl and I didn’t flirt for the last two weeks of school. I didn’t try anything because I didn’t want to break the spell. We had made some kind of deal that day in the hallway and we both knew it.

WE LAND
in Honolulu. I’m on the wrong side of the plane to see Waikiki, but I look down and see the water change, the seven layers of turquoise. When the wheels touch down, the plane bumps once in a soft, unreal way, and instead of thinking
we’re really here,
I think: This seems unreal. And nothing that will happen for hours will dissuade me.

Our cab driver, for instance, is the same guy who took us to the airport in Phoenix. I lean back sleepily in the car and feel the strange air, moist and full of orchids and exhaust, and I see the back of his head. He must be working two shifts. He lets us off in the circular drive of the Royal Hawaiian and here the air wants to wake us, sweet with salt, in the dappled shady imbroglio of trees. I give the driver a big tip. He’s going to need it to get back to Arizona by dawn. Here it is full afternoon, sunny but broken, and Katie stops me amid our suitcases on the steps of the hotel and kisses me. Just a little kiss. What am I going to do, make more of it than it is? No, some woman kisses you on an island.

When we register, there are two messages—one from Sorenson at the university, the other from Katie’s friend from Tokyo, Mikki. While Katie makes the arrangement for our rental car, I step back from the majestic registration counter, smooth as marble and big as a boat. The wide Persian runners down the lobby’s arcade are four inches thick. Down at the end through the glass atrium, I can see the lawn and a cluster of umbrellas around the bar, and further—through the palms—just a wedge of the fake blue sea. Katie takes my arm and says, “Let’s go up and make our calls.”

I smile as the boy bumps our old luggage into the elevator because I am thinking of Harry in my suitcase. He could be in there right now. You take your children everywhere.

I call Sorenson and he says to forget the zoo, to come directly to the university. He says to come
now
and gives me directions. In the tropical heat, I can feel my rash. Kate and I are in the room, fourth floor, and she has opened the shutters onto the beach and I can see a thousand bodies at their ease. The large catamaran nods in the sand in front of the hotel, its large green-and-white sail seems the flag of health. I ask a few questions, but Sorenson says, “We’ll talk. I’ll fill you in when you get up here.” I can smell something wrong.

Katie has heard me on the phone. There is no need for us to talk. I’ll be back later. “Are you okay?” I ask. “You’re going to see Mikki?”

“I’ll call her, meet her for a drink this afternoon.”

It should be now that I bring it out—I lost my job—tell her. I can’t do it. I’d end up defending something. I’ve still got six months’ pay, residuals. She’d rail against the forces that have got me fired. I’d say something generous about the situation. I don’t have it to be generous. Something crawled out of the sea two hundred million years ago, took a breath, and liked it. That guy has lost me my job.

I take a deep breath and then another, trying not to sigh, and take Katie’s hand. “Let’s kiss in front of the window,” I say. “Be part of this place.” When she comes to me in the sunlight, we kiss like two people in a movie, and I realize her arms are the reason I have a neck, an evolutionary device.

Then when I open my suitcase to grab a new shirt and find my powder, Harry’s not in there. But the boys have left me a souvenir. I find the rental videocassette case and open it.
The Land of the Lost.
Harry’s done a little packing for me. There’s going to be a late fee on this classic.

AT SORENSON’S
lab there’s a little confusion. I take my bag and notes in our rental Toyota up the hill to the university and find his block building hidden among the million-year-old trees behind a little cemetery.

“The bear isn’t here,” he tells me.

“You moved it.”

“No. It hasn’t exactly arrived.” Sorenson was one of my professors at Stanford and now, like everyone else, he’s not getting any older. He’s still got all his hair; he isn’t any heavier; and he’s still wearing the same wire-rims. It confuses me that I’m the same age as all these old guys. As always when things are working out, he seems unconcerned, peaceful. I think he was in physics before zoology, and he found out how fast the universe is expanding. It cooled him out about all the small stuff.

“Where is the panda, Phil?” I say. “Should we go see it?”

“There’s a guy coming.” He smiles. “He wants to meet Zoo Lewis.”

I feel the plane ride humming in my sinuses. I sit on one of the metal stools. “There’s a guy coming?”

“Right.”

“Phil. Whose panda is this?”

Sorenson smiles and pours us each a cup of thick laboratory coffee. I’m glad to be here even if he’s being mysterious. He got me my first assistant editorship right after I left veterinary school. He was the second one I called from the hospital after the allergy attack, and like my parents, he wasn’t surprised.