A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (32 page)

“It means nothing,” he told me and then he went on in a way that reminded me of why he was my best friend. “You went out after dark and passed out in the Great Salt Lake. Come on, who can do that?”

IT’S MUCH
later into the night and I’m in the beautiful men’s room off the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel washing my hands and singing Roy Orbison’s “Crying” at about six on the ten scale and it sounds pretty good. The walls are black marble in which you can see your shadow and they polish the song so that it reverberates mournfully. This is, without doubt, the best song I’ve ever heard.

Although Katie has parachuted into sleep, the day won’t abandon me, and I have toured the grounds, walked up to the Outrigger for a drink, and returned to the hotel for a nightcap before coming in here. It is just a minute after two
A.M.

“That I’d been cry-i-ing

O-ver you . . .”

A big Hawaiian guy comes in and stands at the urinal, but I can’t stop myself. I’m drying my hands and I must finish the song: the killer rhyme of
understand
and
touch of your hand
before all the “cry-ings.” The guy stands at the sink and I recognize him as the torch dancer, my hero. He washes his hands with gusto and does the last few “cry-ings” with me. When we stop, I am as sad as I’ve been in ten years. All animals are sad after sex. This is a magnificent men’s room. Our reflections stand ten feet deep in the marble like two sad visitors from the dead. The man points at me fraternally and says with great conviction: “Roy Orbison was a giant.” He leaves.

My Hawaiian shirt is limp with sweat and I look like a guy who is just a little old to be a playboy. I consider doing “Only the Lonely,” but it’s clear that I do not have the stamina. I haul my sport coat straight and walk back out into the night. The bar is empty now, the bartender stands talking on the telephone, folding the last bar towel. I walk past the cabana through the little garden and down the cement steps to the beach. The light here is weird, the sand glowing and the sea simply a slick black space. Down along Waikiki, the hotels glimmer like ships awaiting departure. I pass the large catamaran.

“Dancing with the widows,” I say aloud. I’m not really drunk anymore, but I’m still unmoored enough to talk out loud. I’m through singing, I think. Two women whose husbands have been blown to ashes. I picture it, a warm still spring afternoon, the air full and quiet, one brother sweeping the cement floor of the empty tower, the other straightening a bent hinge in the metal door when the dust trembled and fused and it all blew. The air turning white in a dust flash as big as the town had ever seen, thumping the sides of things for two miles, and afterward only the smoking hole, a few chunks of concrete coming down six blocks away, the one brother’s pickup cartwheeling across the rail spur, blown like a wind-twisted section of the sports pages beneath a twenty-story fist-cloud of grain dust. And the men themselves, where would they be? the broom? the hammer?

I take a deep breath, my nose swollen with the mai tais, and gather the late sea smell, mixed with the damp odors of Katie, hotel soap, and—faintly—the panda. I step into the surf. These aren’t great sandals. I never met a pair of shoes that couldn’t be improved by the Pacific Ocean. The waves here are all tamed, and lip in at about four inches. The surf sucks at my heels in the sand. Some lucky tourist is going to look out his balcony and spot a guy in a blue blazer in the ocean and call the police hoping to thwart a suicide. I’d better back out.

I walk back ten feet and then just sit suddenly in the wet sand. The waves can still wash up over my waist and as they do I feel the sure mild tonic of salt on my crotch and it makes me smile. “No, he’s just drunk, dear,” the tourist is saying to his wife. “Look, he’s on an elbow in the surf.”

Actually it’s a wet journalist, some guy who wanted to his teeth to be a veterinarian, but whose allergies nearly killed him in a routine dissection a month into his first semester, and now he’s lost his column and received a bushel of hate mail from the fundamentalists, people not highly evolved enough to know when
i
comes before
e,
letters that hurt regardless of the spelling.

Oh the water feels good sloshing through my trousers. I can tell I’m getting better: the rash will be gone by Wednesday. “Go to plan B,” Cracroft had said. It makes me smile. I was already on plan B—or was it C? What a deal. How could I not smile? What would stop me there, half in the ocean, from smiling? Plan B. A person could go through the alphabet. With a little gumption and some love, a person could go through every single letter of the alphabet.

LIFE IN
a body is the life for me. That night, coming home from my high school graduation party at Black Rock Beach, Rye and I sang songs. Do you see, we sang. I’m not kidding. We sang this and that and a marathon version of “Graduation Day,” by the Lettermen, that went on and on as we made up verses until my street and Rye pulled up to the curb. We crooned the ending until our voices cracked. We sang. I plan on doing it again. Rye pointed at me when I opened the door to get out and said, “Here we go. Good luck, Chief. First night in the real world.”

Inside, the house was dark and quiet, everyone in bed. I spent some time sitting in a wedge of light in front of the open fridge making and eating eight or nine rolled ham deals, putting different fillings in the ham each time: pickles, cheese, macaroni. I had failed with Cheryl. I had failed. I felt sad. What I felt was a kind of forlorn that when my mother saw it on my face she would say, “My aren’t we a sick chick?” I was a sick chick.

But when I finally went upstairs is when something happened. I’d left my salty shoes on the patio. At the top step, I heard a noise. It was a laugh, my mother’s laugh, but I didn’t know it was a laugh at that moment. I mean, I thought it might have been a cough or some other noise, but then I went by their room and the door was open and I saw my mother’s bare leg in the pale light from the window, the curve of her flank as she rolled, and I went right into my room without stopping and then my heart kicked in and I heard the sound again and I realized it was a kind of laughter. Well, I know all about it now, don’t I? This is an easy place from which to know things, a hundred years later a million miles at sea, but then I didn’t know and something slammed my chest in such a way that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. I’d graduated from high school, do you see, some sick chick with no sure sense of self, but as I stood at my window for the next four hours until finally some birds began to chitter and the gray light began, a new feeling rose in me. My parents were lovers. Oh sure, oh sure. I know all about it. I knew all about it then, I thought. But the idea killed me. It clobbered me. It filled me with capacity. I didn’t have the words for it, nor did I know exactly what it was, but I was certain to my soul that I had the capacity for it. I had grown up in a house with two adults who were lovers. Like wolves or swans, they had mated for life. Years later, I would too. I stood there at the window until my elbows filled with sand and I was heavy with sleep. I could see two neighbor kids walking down the alley. One had a stick and was swinging it against the fences. They were up early, the first sun orange in their hair, and they owned the day. I would give them this one. Through the stunning blue air, I could see the houses of our neighborhood floating away from me. Do you see? That was the first time my heart brimmed. The world was real.

THE HOTEL EDEN

T
HAT YEAR
the place we would go after hours was the Hotel Eden. It had a cozy little bar in the parlor with three tiny tables and four stools at the counter. You had to walk sideways to get around, and it had a low ceiling and thick old carpets, but it had a roomy feeling and it became absolutely grand when Porter was there. Over the course of the spring he told us a hundred stories in the Eden and changed things for us.

The barman was a young Scot named Norris who seemed neither glad nor annoyed when we’d come in around midnight after closing down one of the pubs, the Black Swan or the Lamb and Flag or the forty others we saw that cold spring. Pub hours then were eleven o’clock last call, and drink up by eleven-fifteen. Porter would set his empty pint glass on the whatever bar and say to Allison and me, “The Eden then?” He’d bike over, regardless of where we were, out on the Isle of Dogs or up in Hampstead, and Allison would get us a cab.

Norris would have the little curtain pulled down above the bar, a translucent yellow sheet that said, “Residents Only.” He drew it down every night at eleven; hotels could serve late to their guests. Porter had done some favor for the manager of the Hotel Eden when he’d come to London years before, and he had privileges. They became in a sense our privileges too, though—as you shall see—I was only in the Eden alone on one occasion. The curtain just touched your forehead if you sat at the bar.

We often arrived ahead of Porter, and Norris would set us up with pints of lager, saying always, “Hello, miss,” when he placed Allison’s glass. The Eden didn’t have bitter. I remember the room as always being empty when we’d arrive, and it was a bit of a mystery at first as to why Norris was still even open. But there were times when there was a guest or two, a man or a man and a woman, having a brandy at one of the tables. We were quiet too, talking about Allison’s research at the museum—she had a year in London to work on her doctorate in Art History. But it was all airy, because we were really just waiting for Porter. It was as if we weren’t substantial enough to hold down our stools, and then Porter would come in, packing his riding gloves into his helmet, running a hand through his thick black hair, saying, “Right enough, Norris, let’s commence then, you gloomy Northlander,” and gravity would be restored. His magnetism was tangible, and we’d wait for him to speak. When he had the pint of lager in his hand, he’d turn to Allison and say something that would start the rest of the night.

One night, he lifted his glass and said, “Found a body today.” Then he drank.

Allison leaned in: “A dead man?”

“Dead as Keats and naked as Byron.” We waited for him to go on. His was the voice of experience, the world, the things that year that I wanted so much.

“Where?” I asked.

“Under the terrace at the Pilot.”

“The place on the river?” Allison asked. He’d taken us walking through the Isle of Dogs after we’d first met and we’d stopped at half a dozen pubs which backed onto the Thames.

“Right, lady. Spoiled my lunch, he did, floating under there like that.”

Allison was lit by this news. We both were. And there it was: the night kicked in at any hour, no matter how late. When Porter arrived, things
commenced.
We both leaned closer. Porter, though he’d just sucked the top off his pint, called Norris for another, and the evening was launched.

We always stayed until Porter leaned back and said, “It’s a night then.” He didn’t have an accent to us, being American, but he had the idiom and he had the way of putting his whole hand around a glass and of speaking over the top of a pint with the smallest line of froth on his upper lip, something manly really, something you’d never correct or try to touch off him, that was something to us I can only describe as being
real.
He’d been at Hilman College years before Allison and me, and he knew Professor Mills and all the old staff and he’d even been there the night of the Lake Dorm Fire, the most famous thing about Hilman really, next to Professor Mills, I suppose. I spent a hundred hours with him in the Eden that spring, like Allison, twelve inches across that little round table or huddled as we were at the bar, and I memorized Porter really, his face, the smooth tan of red veins running up under his eyes, as if he’d stood too close to some special fire, and his white teeth, which he showed you it seemed for a purpose. His nose had been broken years ago. We played did you know so-and-so until Allison, who was still a member of Lake Sorority, brought up the fire.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I was there. What’s the legend grown to now? A hundred ghosts?”

“Six,” Allison laughed. “There’s always been six.”

“Always,” he protested. “You make it sound ancient. Hey, I was there. February.” Then he added with authority and precision: “Fifteen years ago.”

“Someone had stopped the doors with something; the six girls couldn’t get out.”

Porter drew on his beer and looked at me. “Hockey sticks. It was a bundle of hockey sticks through the door handles.”

“That’s right.”

“Oh.” He looked from me to Allison. “It was awful. A cold night at Hilman, and you know, it could get cold, ten degrees, old snow on the ground hard as plastic, and the colossal inferno. From the quad you could see the trapped figures bumping into the glass doors. A group of us came up from town, the Villager had just closed, you ever drink there?”

“It’s now a cappuccino place,” Allison said. “The Blue Dish.”

“Ah, the old Villager was a capital dive. That bar could tell some tales. It’s where I met our Professor Mills. Anyway, they closed at one, and when I stepped out into the winter night, there was this ethereal light pulsing from the campus like a heartbeat, and you had to go. There was no choice. I knew right away it was Lake, fully engaged, as they say, a fire like no other, trying to tear a hole in the world.” Allison and I were mesmerized, and he finished: “It singed the sycamores back to Dobbs Street, and that’s where a group of us stood. It hurt to look. In the explosive light, I could see figures come to the glass, they looked like fish.”

When he’d finish talking like that, telling this story or that—he’d found a downed ultralight plane in the Cotswolds once on a walking tour and had had to secure the pilot’s compound leg fracture—Allison and I would be unable to move. It was a spell. It’s that simple. You see, we were graduate students and we weren’t used to this type of thing. I’d tell you what we were used to but it all seems to drop out of memory like the bottom of a wet cardboard box. We were used to nothing: to weeks at the library at Hilman in Wisconsin and then some vacation road trips with nothing but forced high jinx and a beach. There was always one of our friends, my roommate or Allison’s roommate, who would either read Dylan Thomas aloud all the way to Florida and then refuse to leave the car or get absolutely drunk for a week and try to show everyone his or her genitals as part of a discussion of our place in the universe. We were Americans and we knew it. I was twenty-three and Allison was twenty-four. We hadn’t done anything, we were scholars. I’d finished my master’s degree in meteorology at Northern near Hilman and was doing what—nothing. Allison got her grant. Going to England was a big deal for us. She was going to do her research at the British Museum. I was going to cool out and do London. Then we met Porter.

Allison’s mentor at Hilman, the famous Professor Julie Mills, had given us some telephone numbers, and after we found a flat in Hampstead and after Allison had established a routine with her work, we called the first guy. His name was Roger Ardreprice, the assistant curator of Keats’s House, and he had us meet him over there as things were closing up one cold March night. He was a smug little guy who gave us his card right away and walked with both hands in his jacket pockets and finished all his sentences with “well um um.” We walked over to the High Street and then down to the Pearl of India with him talking about Professor Mills, whom he called Julie. Evidently he’d met other of her students in former years, and he assumed his role as host of all of London with a kind of jaded enthusiasm; it was clear he’d seen our kind before. It was at the long dinner that we met two other people who had studied at Hilman with the famous Professor Julie Mills. One was a quiet well-dressed woman named Sarah Garrison who worked at the Tate, and the other was a thirtyish man in a green windbreaker who came late, said hello, and then ate in the back at a table by the kitchen door with two turbaned men who evidently were the chefs. This was Porter.

Of course, we didn’t talk to him until afterward. Roger Ardreprice ran a long dinner which was half reverential shoptalk about Julie Mills and half sage advice about life in London, primarily about things to avoid. Roger had a practiced world-weary smile which he played all night, even condescending to Sarah Garrison, who seemed to me to be a real nice woman. It was a relief when we finally adjourned sometime after eleven and stepped from the close spicy room onto the cold sidewalk. Sarah took a cab and Roger headed down for his tube stop, and so Allison and I had the walk up the hill. I remember the night well, the penetrating cold wind, our steps past all the shops we would eventually memorize: the newsdealer, the kabob stand, the cheese shop, the Rosslyn Arms. We were a week in London and the glow was very much on everything, even a chilly night after a strange dinner. Then like a phantom, a figure came suddenly from behind us and banked against the curb, a man on a bicycle. He pulled the goggles off his head and said, “Enough curry with Captain Prig then?” He grinned the most beguiling grin, the corners of his mouth puckered. “Want a pint?”

“It’s after hours,” I said.

“This is the most interesting city in the world,” he said. “Certainly we can find a pint.” He stopped a cab and spoke to the driver and herded us inside, saying, “See you in nineteen minutes.”

And so we were delivered to the Hotel Eden. That first night we waited in front on the four long white stone steps until we saw him turn onto the street, all business on his bicycle, nineteen minutes later. “Yes, indeed,” he said, dismounting and taking a deep breath through his nose as if sensing something near. “The promise of lager. Which one of you studied with Julie Mills?”

Allison said, “I did. I do. I finish next year.”

“Nice woman,” he said as he pulled open the old glass door of the hotel. “I slept with her all my senior year.” Then he turned to us as if apologizing. “But we were never in love. Let’s have that straight.”

I thought Allison was going to be sick after that news. Professor Mills was widely revered, a heroine, a goddess, certainly someone who would have a wing of the museum named after her someday. Then we went into the little room and met Norris and he drew three beautiful pints of lager, gold in glass, and set them before us.

“Why’d you eat with the cooks?” Allison asked Porter.

“That’s the owner and his brother,” Porter said. His face was ruddy in the half-light of the bar. “They’re Sikhs. Do you know about the Sikhs?”

We shook our heads no.

“Don’t mess with them. They’re merciless. Literally. The man who sat at my right has killed three people.”

I nodded at him, flattered that he thought I’d mess with anyone at all, let alone a bearded man in a turban.

“I’m doing a story on their code.” Porter drank deeply from his glass. “Besides, your Mr. Roger Ardreprice, Esquire, has no surplus love for me.” He smiled. “And you . . .” He turned his glorious smile to Allison, and reached out and took her shiny brown hair in his hand. “You’re certainly a Lake. We’ll have to get you a tortoiseshell clip for that Lake hair.” Lake was the prime sorority at Hilman. “What brings you to London besides the footsteps of our Miss Mills?—who founded Lake, of course, a thousand years ago.”

Allison talked a little about the Egyptian influence on the Victorians, but it was halfhearted, the way all academic talk is in a pub, and my little story about my degree in meteorology felt absolutely silly. I had nothing to say to this man, and I wanted something. I wanted to warn him about something with an exacting and savage code, but there was nothing. I wasn’t going to say what I had said to my uncle at a graduation party, “I got good grades.”

But Porter turned to me, and I can still feel it like a light, his attention, and he said, with a kind of respect, “The weather. Oh that’s very fine. The weather,” he turned to me and then back to Allison, “and art. That is absolutely formidable.” He wasn’t kidding. It was the first time in the seven months since I’d graduated that I felt I studied something real, and the feeling was good. I felt our life in London assume a new dimension, and I called for another round.

That was the way we’d see him; he would turn up. We’d go four, five days with Allison working at the museum and me tramping London like a tourist, which I absolutely was, doing only a smattering of research, and then there’d be a one-pound note stapled to a page torn from the map book
London A to Z
in our mailbox with the name of a pub and an hour scribbled on it. The Flask, Highgate, 9
P.M.
, or Old Plover, on the river, 7. And we’d go. He would have seen the Prince at Trafalgar Square or stopped a fight in Hyde Park and there’d be a bandage across his nose to prove it. He was a character, and I realize now we’d never met one. I’d known some guys in the dorms who would do crazy things drunk on the weekend, but I’d never met anybody in my life who had done and seen so much. He was out in the world, and it all called to me.