Flying to America (5 page)
6.
Perpetua was scrubbing Sunny Marge’s back with a typewriter eraser.
“Oh. Ouch. Oh. Ouch.”
“I’m not making much progress,” Perpetua said.
“Well I suppose it will have to be done by the passage of time,” Sunny Marge said, looking at her back in the mirror.
“Years are bearing us to Heaven,” Perpetua agreed.
Perpetua and Sunny Marge went cruising, on the boulevard. They saw a man coming toward them.
“He’s awfully clean-looking,” Perpetua said.
“Probably he’s from out of town,” Sunny Marge said.
Edmund was a small farmer.
“What is your cash crop?” Sunny Marge asked.
“We have two hundred acres in hops,” the farmer replied. “That reminds me, would you ladies like a drink?”
“I’d
like a drink,” Perpetua said.
“I’d like a drink too,” Sunny Marge said. “Do you know anywhere he can go, in those clothes?”
“Maybe we’d better go back to my place,” Perpetua said.
At Perpetua’s apartment Edmund recounted the history of hops.
“Would you like to see something interesting?” Sunny Marge asked Edmund.
“What is it?”
“A portrait of Marshal Foch, a French hero of World War I.”
“Sure,” Edmund said.
The revolution called and asked Perpetua if she would tape an album of songs of the revolution.
“Sure,” Perpetua said.
Harold took ship for home. He shared a cabin with a man whose hobby was building scale models of tank battles.
“This is a
Sturmgeschütz
of the 1945 period,” the man said. “Look at the bullet nicks. The bullet nicks are done by applying a small touch of gray paint with a burst effect of flat white. For small holes in the armor, I pierce with a hot nail.”
The floor of Harold’s cabin was covered with tanks locked in duels to the death.
Harold hurried to the ship’s bar. I wonder how Perpetua is doing,
he thought. I wonder if she is happier without me. Probably she is. Probably she has found deep contentment by now. But maybe not.
7.
Perpetua met many new people. She met Henry, who was a cathedral builder. He built cathedrals in places where there were no cathedrals — Twayne, Nebraska, for example. Every American city needed a cathedral, Henry said. The role of the cathedral in the building of the national soul was well known. We should punish ourselves in our purses, Henry said, to shape up the national soul. An arch never sleeps, Henry said, pointing to the never-sleeping arches in his plans. Architecture is memory, Henry said, and the nation that had no cathedrals to speak of had no memory to speak of either. He did it all, Henry said, with a 30-man crew composed of 1 superintendent 1 masonry foreman 1 ironworker foreman 1 carpenter foreman 1 pipefitter foreman 1 electrician foreman 2 journeyman masons 2 journeyman pipefitters 2 journeyman electricians 1 mason’s helper 1 ironworker’s helper 1 carpenter’s helper 1 pipefitter’s helper 1 electrician’s helper 3 gargoyle carvers 1 grimer 1 clerk-of-the-works 1 master fund-raiser 2 journeyman fund-raisers and 1 fund-raiser’s helper. Cathedrals are mostly a matter of thrusts, Henry said. You got to balance your thrusts. The ribs of your vaults intersect collecting the vertical and lateral thrusts at fixed points which are then buttressed or grounded although that’s not so important anymore when you use a steel skeleton as we do which may be cheating but I always say that cheating in the Lord’s name is O.K. as long as He don’t catch you at it. Awe and grace, Henry said, awe and grace, that’s what we’re selling and we offer a Poet’s Corner where any folks who were poets or even suspected of being poets can be buried, just like Westminster Abbey. The financing is the problem, Henry said. What we usually do is pick out some old piece of ground that was a cornfield or something like that, and put it in the Soil Bank. We take that piece of ground out of production and promise the government we won’t grow no more corn on it no matter how they beg and plead with us. Well the government sends
a man around from the Agriculture Department and he agrees with us that there certainly ain’t no corn growing there. So we ask him about how much he thinks we can get from the Soil Bank and he says it looks like around a hundred and fifty thousand a year to him but that he will have to check with the home office and we can’t expect the money before the middle of next week. We tell him that will be fine and we all go have a drink over to the Holiday Inn. Of course the hundred and fifty thousand is just a spit in the ocean but it pays for the four-color brochures. By this time we got our artist’s rendering of the Twayne Undenominational Cathedral sitting right in the lobby of the Valley National Bank on a card table covered with angel hair left over from Christmas, and the money is just pouring in. And I’m worrying about how we’re going to
staff
this cathedral. We need a sexton and a bellringer and a beadle and maybe an undenominational archbishop, and that last is hard to come by. Pretty soon the ground is broken and the steel is up, and the Bell Committee is wrangling about whether the carillon is going to be sixteen bells or thirty-two. There is something about cathedral building that men like, Henry said, this has often been noticed. And the first thing you know it’s Dedication Day and the whole state is there, it seems like, with long lines of little girls carrying bouquets of mistflowers and the Elks Honor Guard presenting arms with M-16s sent back in pieces from Nam and reassembled for domestic use, and the band is playing the Albinoni Adagio in G Minor which is the saddest piece of music ever written by mortal man and the light is streaming through the guaranteed stained-glass windows and the awe is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
“You are something else, Henry,” Perpetua said.
8.
Perpetua and André went over to have dinner with Sunny Marge and Edmund.
“This is André,” Perpetua said.
André, a well-dressed graduate of the École du Regard, managed a large industry in Reims.
Americans were very strange, André said. They did not have a
stable pattern of family life, as the French did. This was attributable to the greater liberty — perhaps license was not too strong a term — permitted to American women by their husbands and lovers. American women did not know where their own best interests lay, André said. The intoxication of modern life, which was in part a result of the falling away of former standards of conduct . . .
Perpetua picked up a chicken leg and tucked it into the breast pocket of André’s coat.
“Goodbye, André.”
Peter called Perpetua from his school in New England.
“What’s the matter, Peter?”
“I’m lonesome.”
“Do you want to come stay with me for a while?”
“No. Can you send me fifty dollars?”
“Yes. What do you want it for?”
“I want to buy some blue racers.”
Peter collected snakes. Sometimes Perpetua thought that the snakes were dearer to him than she was.
9.
Harold walked into Perpetua’s apartment.
“Harold,” Perpetua said.
“I just want to ask you one question,” Harold said. “Are you happier now than you were before?”
“Sure,” Perpetua said.
E
dward looked at his red beard in the tableknife. Then Edward and Pia went to Sweden, to the farm. In the mailbox Pia found a check for Willie from the government of Sweden. It was for twenty-three hundred crowns and had a rained-on look. Pia put the check in the pocket of her brown coat. Pia was pregnant. In London she had been sick every day. In London Pia and Edward had seen the Marat/Sade at the Aldwych Theatre. Edward bought a bottle of white stuff for Pia in London. It was supposed to make her stop vomiting. Edward walked out to the wood barn and broke up wood for the fire. Snow in patches lay on the ground still. Pia wrapped cabbage leaves around chopped meat. She was still wearing her brown coat. Willie’s check was still in the pocket. It was still Sunday.
“What are you thinking about?” Edward asked Pia and she said she was thinking about Willie’s hand. Willie had hurt his hand in a machine in a factory in Markaryd. The check was for compensation.
Edward turned away from the window. Edward received a cable from his wife in Maine. “Many happy birthdays,” the cable said. He was thirty-four. His father was in the hospital. His mother was in the hospital. Pia wore white plastic boots with her brown coat. When Edward inhaled sharply — a sharp intake of breath — they
could hear a peculiar noise in his chest. Edward inhaled sharply. Pia heard the noise. She looked up. “When will you go to the doctor?” “I have to get something to read,” Edward said. “Something in English.” They walked to Markaryd. Pia wore a white plastic hat. At the train station they bought a
Life
magazine with a gold-painted girl on the cover. “Shall we eat something?” Edward asked. Pia said no. They bought a crowbar for the farm. Pia was sick on the way back. She vomited into a ditch.
Pia and Edward walked the streets of Amsterdam. They were hungry. Edward wanted to go to bed with Pia but she didn’t feel like it. “There’s something wrong,” he said. “The wood isn’t catching.” “It’s too wet,” she said, “perhaps.” “I
know
it’s too wet,” Edward said. He went out to the wood barn and broke up more wood. He wore a leather glove on his right hand. Pia told Edward that she had been raped once, when she was twenty-two, in the Botanical Gardens. “The man that raptured me has a shop by the Round Tower. Still.” Edward walked out of the room. Pia looked after him placidly. Edward reentered the room. “How would you like to have some Southern fried chicken?” he asked. “It’s the most marvelous-tasting thing in the world. Tomorrow I’ll make some. Don’t say ‘rapture.’ In English it’s ‘rape.’ What did you do about it?” “Nothing,” Pia said. Pia wore green rings, dresses with green sleeves, a green velvet skirt.
Edward put flour in a paper bag and then the pieces of chicken, which had been dipped in milk. Then he shook the paper bag violently. He stood behind Pia and tickled her. Then he hugged her tightly. But she didn’t want to go to bed. Edward decided that he would never go to bed with Pia again. The telephone rang. It was for Fru Schmidt. Edward explained that Fru Schmidt was in Rome, that she would return in three months, that he, Edward, was renting the flat from Fru Schmidt, that he would be happy to make a note of the caller’s name, and that he would be delighted to call this note to the attention of Fru Schmidt when she returned, from Rome, in three months. Pia vomited. Pia lay on the bed sleeping. Pia wore a red dress, green rings on her fingers.
Then Edward and Pia went to the cinema to see an Eddie Constantine picture. The film was very funny. Eddie Constantine broke
up a great deal of furniture chasing international bad guys. Edward read two books he had already read. He didn’t remember that he had read them until he reached the last page of each. Then he read four paperback mysteries by Ross Macdonald. They were excellent. He felt slightly sick. Pia walked about with her hands clasped together in front of her chest, her shoulders bent. “Are you cold?” Edward asked. “What are you thinking about?” he asked her, and she said she was thinking about Amboise, where she had contrived to get locked in a chateau after visiting hours. She was
also
thinking, she said, about the green-and-gold wooden horses they had seen in Amsterdam. “I would like enormously to have one for this flat,” she said. “Even though the flat is not ours.” Edward asked Pia if she felt like making love now. Pia said no.
It was Sunday. Edward went to the bakery and bought bread. Then he bought milk. Then he bought cheese and the Sunday newspaper, which he couldn’t read. Pia was asleep. Edward made coffee for himself and looked at the pictures in the newspaper. Pia woke up and groped her way to the bathroom. She vomited. Edward bought Pia a white dress. Pia made herself a necklace of white glass and red wood beads. Edward worried about his drinking. Would there be enough gin? Enough ice? He went out to the kitchen and looked at the bottle of Gordon’s gin. Two inches of gin.
Edward and Pia went to Berlin on the train. Pia’s father thrust flowers through the train window. The flowers were wrapped in green paper. Edward and Pia climbed into the Mercedes-Benz taxi. “Take us to the Opera if you will, please,” Edward said to the German taxi-driver in English.
“Ich verstehe nicht,”
the driver said. Edward looked at Pia’s belly. It was getting larger, all right. Edward paid the driver. Pia wondered if the Germans were as loud in Germany as they were abroad. Edward and Pia listened for loudness.
Edward received a letter from London, from Bedford Square Office Equipment, Ltd. “We have now completed fitting new parts and adjusting the Olivetti portable that was unfortunately dropped by you. The sum total of parts and labour comes to £7.10.0 and I am adding £1.00.0 hire charges, which leaves a balance of £1.10.0 from your initial deposit of £10. Yours.” Yours. Yours. Edward received a letter
from Rome, from Fru Schmidt, the owner of the flat in Frederiksberg Allé. “Here are many Americans who have more opportunities to wear their mink capes than they like, I guess! I wish I had one, just one of rabbit or cat, it is said to be just as warm! but I left all my mink clothes behind me in Denmark! We spend most of our time in those horrible subways-metros which are like the rear entrance to Hell and what can you see of a city from there? Well you are from New York and so are used to it but I was born as a human being and not as a —” Here there was a sketch of a rat, in plan. Kurt poured a fresh cup of coffee for Edward. There were three people Pia and Edward did not know in the room, two men and a woman. Everyone watched Kurt pouring a cup of coffee for Edward. Edward explained the American position in South Vietnam. The others looked dubious. Edward and Pia discussed leaving each other.