Flying to America (14 page)
The husband left off singing.
“Well
of course!
” he said enthusiastically. “Who in the world would doubt it? I expected it. Why not? How else? People meet people and sweet music fills the air, as the poet Schade puts it. Of course Schade is not my favorite poet.”
“Your favorite poet is —”
“Neither here nor there,” the husband announced. “No, I am afraid I cannot give you my blessing. You understand that there is nothing I would rather give you than my blessing. But my blessing, in this case, must be withheld. I know that this is something of a disappointment for you, brash successful young riser that you are. I know that you have pictured yourself rising, with Marie-Helene on your arm as it were, to heights. Well, what can I tell you? Into each life some rain must fall. My favorite poet, if I may parenthesize, is the Mills Brothers.”
“Longfellow,” I corrected him coldly. “‘The Rainy Day’ 1842. Stanza 3.” I have a merit badge in Coldness, of which I am ashamed.
“Will you have a look at her?” the husband asked. “To make more keen the agony of bereftness?”
“Yes,” I said, for every glimpse was gold.
The husband yanked upon a bellpull.
Presently Marie-Helene glided into the room. Then she glided into the room again.
“You have two!” I cried.
“Yes,” the husband said, “beauties, aren’t they.”
They were beauties, it was a fact.
“This is Marie-Helene,” the husband said, pointing to the one on the right, “and this is Helene-Marie,” pointing to the one on the left. My love curtsied prettily twice, and went to sit upon a sofa.
“Two is a beautiful number,” the husband said, “don’t you think?”
“But if you have two —”
“I know what you are thinking,” the husband said. “You reason like the child you are. If I have two, then I could easily give you one. That would be fair. Everything would then be just ducky.” The husband moved very close to me. “You are a fool!” he said. “A child! They are
mine!
”
I remembered then that I had a merit badge in Contention.
We contended, the husband and I, for a brief time. I was bested. The weapons were cultural allusions.
He said: “Violette Leduc!”
I said: “Lightnin’ Hopkins!”
He said: “Moses ben Maimon!”
I said: “Morse Peckham!”
He said: “Howlin’ Wolf!”
I said: “Jurgen Becker!”
He said: “Myles na Gopaleen!”
I fainted.
When I revived I found his face very close to mine. “Listen!” he hissed. “I know that you already have a wife. I have seen her on the boulevards. She is very beautiful.
Give her to me!
”
“But,” I said, shrinking, “then I would have none! No wife at all! Wifeless!”
“Three!” he shrieked, bending over me. “Three, three, three!”
B
uck saw now that the situation between Nancy and himself was considerably more serious than he had imagined. She exhibited unmistakable signs of a leaning in his direction. The leaning was acute, sometimes he thought she would fall, sometimes he thought she would not fall, sometimes he didn’t care, and in every way tried to prove himself the man that he was. It meant dressing in unusual clothes and the breaking of old habits. But how could he shatter her dreams after all they had endured together? after all they had jointly seen and done since first identifying Cleveland as Cleveland? “Nancy,” he said, “I’m too old. I’m not nice. There is my son to consider, Peter.” Her hand touched the area between her breasts where hung a decoration, dating he estimated from the World War I period — that famous period!
The turbojet, their “ship,” landed on its wheels. Buck wondered about the wheels. Why didn’t they shear off when the aircraft landed so hard with a sound like thunder? Many had wondered before him. Wondering was part of the history of lighter-than-air-ness, you fool. It was Nancy herself, standing behind him in the exit line, who had suggested that they dance on the landing strip. “To establish rapport with the terrain,” she said with her distant coolness, made
more intense by the hot glare of the Edward pie vendors and customs trees. They danced the comb, the merengue, the
dolce far niente.
It was glorious there on the strip, amid air rich with the incredible vitality of jet fuel and the sensate music of exhaust. Twilight was lowered onto the landing pattern, a twilight such as has never graced Cleveland before, or since. Then broken, heartless laughter and the hurried trip to the hotel.
“I understand,” Nancy said. And looking at her dispassionately, Buck conjectured that she
did
understand, unscrupulous as that may sound.
Probably,
he considered,
I convinced her against my will.
The man from Southern Rhodesia cornered him in the dangerous hotel elevator. “Do you think you have the right to hold opinions which differ from those of President Kennedy?” he asked. “The President of your land?” But the party made up for all that, or most of it, in a curious way. The baby on the floor, Saul, seemed enjoyable, perhaps more than his wont.
Or my wont,
Buck thought,
who knows?
A Ray Charles record spun in the gigantic salad bowl. Buck danced the frisson with the painter’s wife Perpetua (although Nancy was alone, back at the hotel). “I am named,” Perpetua said, “after the famous typeface designed by the famous English designer, Eric Gill, in an earlier part of our century.” “Yes,” Buck said calmly, “I know that face.” She told him softly the history of her affair with her husband, Saul Senior. Sensuously, they covered the ground. And then two ruly police gentleman entered the room, with the guests blanching, and lettuce and romaine and radishes too flying for the exits, which were choked with grass.
Bravery was everywhere, but not here tonight, for the gods were whistling up their mandarin sleeves in the yellow realms where such matters are decided, for good or ill. Pathetic in his servile graciousness, Saul explained what he could while the guests played telephone games in crimson anterooms. The policemen, the flower of the Cleveland Force, accepted a drink and danced ancient police dances of custody and enforcement. Magically the music crept back under the perforated Guam doors; it was a scene to make your heart cry. “That Perpetua,” Saul complained, “why is she treating me
like this? Why are the lamps turned low and why have the notes I sent her been returned unopened, covered with red Postage Due stamps?” But Buck had, in all seriousness, hurried away.
The aircraft were calling him, their indelible flight plans whispered his name. He laid his cheek against the riveted flank of a bold 707.
“In case of orange and blue flames,”
he wrote on a wing,
“disengage yourself from the aircraft by chopping a hole in its bottom if necessary. Do not be swayed by the carpet; it is camel and very thin. I suggest that you be alarmed, because the situation is very alarming. You are up in the air perhaps 35,000 feet, with orange and blue flames on the outside and a ragged hole in the floorboards. What will you do?”
And now, Nancy. He held out his arms. She came to him.
“Yes.”
“Aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Not to you. But to me . . .”
“I’m wasting our time.”
“The others?”
“I felt ashamed.”
“It’s being here, in Cleveland.”
They returned together in a hired automobile. Three parking lots were filled with overflow crowds in an ugly mood. I am tired, so very tired. The man from Southern Rhodesia addressed the bellmen, who listened to his hateful words and thought of other things. “But, then,” Buck said, but then Nancy held a finger on his lips.
“You appear to me so superior, so elevated above all other men,” she said, “I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, revenge, love, and pride that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being.”
“Yes,” Buck said, for a foreign sculptor, a Bavarian doubtless, was singing “You Can Take Your Love and Shove It Up Your Heart,” covered though he was with stone dust and grog. The crowd roared at the accompanists plying the exotic instruments of Cleveland, the
dolor, the mangle, the bim. Strum swiftly, fingers! The butlers did not hesitate for a minute. “History will absolve me,” Buck reflected, and he took the hand offered him with its enormous sapphires glowing like a garage. Then Perpetua danced up to him, her great amazing brown eyelashes beckoning. “Where is Nancy?” she asked, and before he could reply, continued her account of the great love of her existence, her relationship with her husband, Saul. “He’s funny and fine,” she said, “and good and evil. In fact there is so much of him to tell you about, I can hardly get it all out before curfew. Do you mind?”
The din of dancing in Cleveland was now such that many people who did not know the plan were affronted. “This is an affront to Cleveland, this damn din!” one man said; and grog flowed ever more fiercely. The Secretary of State for Erotic Affairs flew in from Washington, the nation’s capital, to see for himself at firsthand, and the man from Southern Rhodesia had no recourse. He lurked into the Cleveland Air Terminal. “Can I have a ticket for Miami?” he asked the dancing ticket clerk at the Delta Airlines counter hopelessly. “Nothing to Miami this year,” the clerk countered. “How can I talk to him in this madness?” Nancy asked herself. “How can the white bird of hope bless our clouded past and future with all this noise? How? How? How? How? How?”
But Saul waved in time, from the porch of Parking Lot Two. He was wearing his belt dangerously low on his hips. “There is copulation everywhere,” he shouted, fanning his neck, “because of the dancing! Yes, it’s true!” And so it was, incredibly enough. Affection was running riot under the reprehensible scarlet sky. We were all afraid. “Incredible, incredible,” Buck said to himself. “Even by those of whom you would not have expected it!” Perpetua glimmered at his ear. “Even by those,” she insinuated, “of whom you would have expected . . . nothing.” For a moment . . .
“Nancy,” Buck exclaimed, “you are just about the nicest damn girl in Cleveland!”
“What about your wife in Texas?” Nancy asked.
“She is very nice too,” Buck said, “as a matter of fact the more I think of it, the more I believe that nice girls like you and Hérodiade
are what make life worth living. I wish there were more of them in America so that every man could have at least five.”
“Five?”
“Yes, five.”
“We will never agree on this figure,” Nancy said.
2.
The rubbery smell of Akron, sister city of Lahore, Pakistan, lay like the flameout of all our hopes over the plateau that evening.
When his aircraft was forced down at the Akron Airpark by the lapse of the port engines, which of course he had been expecting, Buck said: “But this, this . . . is Akron!” And it was Akron, sultry, molecular, crowded with inhabitants who held tiny transistor radios next to their tiny ears. A wave of ingratitude overcame him. “Bum, bum,” he said. He plumbed its heart. The citizens of Akron, after their hours at the plant, wrapped themselves in ill-designed love triangles which never contained less than four persons of varying degrees of birth, high and low and mediocre. Beautiful Ohio! with your transistorized citizens and contempt for geometry, we loved you in the evening by the fireside waiting for our wife to nap so we could slip out and see our two girls, Manfred and Bella!
The first telephone call he received in his rum raisin hotel room, Charles, was from the Akron Welcome Service.
“Welcome! new human being! to Akron! Hello?”
“Hello.”
“Are you in love with any of the inhabitants of Akron yet?”
“I just came from the airport.”
“If not, or even if so, we want to invite you to the big get-acquainted party of the College Graduates’ Club tonight at 8:30
P.M.
”
“Do I have to be a college graduate?”
“No but you have to wear a coat and tie. Of course they are available at the door. What color pants are you wearing?”
Buck walked the resilient streets of Akron. His head was aflame with conflicting ideas. Suddenly he was arrested by a shrill cry. From the top of the Zimmer Building, one of the noblest buildings in
Akron, a group of Akron lovers consummated a four-handed suicide leap.
The air!
Buck thought as he watched the tiny figures falling,
this is certainly an air-minded country, America! But I must make myself useful.
He entered a bunshop and purchased a sweet green bun, and dallied with the sweet green girl there, calling her “poppet” and “funicular.” Then out into the street again to lean against the warm green façade of the Zimmer Building and watch the workmen scrubbing the crimson sidewalk.
“Can you point me the way to the Akron slums, workman?”
“My name is not ‘workman.’ My name is ‘Pat.’”
“Well, ‘Pat,’ which way?”
“I would be most happy to orient you, slumwise, were it not for the fact that slumlife in Akron has been dealt away with by municipal progressiveness. The municipality has caused to be erected, where slumlife once flourished, immense quadratic inventions which now house former slumwife and former slumspouse alike. These incredibly beautiful structures are over that way.”
“Thanks, ‘Pat.’”