Flying to America (6 page)

Pia slept on the couch. She had pulled the red-and-brown blanket up over her feet. Edward looked in the window of the used-radio store. It was full of used radios. Edward and Pia drank more sherry. “What are you thinking about?” he asked her and she said she was wondering if they should separate. “You don’t seem happy,” she said. “You don’t seem happy either,” he said. Edward tore the cover off a book. The book cover showed a dog’s head surrounded by flowers. The dog wore a black domino. Edward went to the well for water. He lifted the heavy wooden well cover. He was wearing a glove on his right hand. He carried two buckets of water to the kitchen. Then he went to the back of the farmhouse and built a large wooden veranda, roofed, thirty metres by nine metres. Fortunately there was a great deal of new lumber stacked in the barn. In the Frederiksberg Allé apartment in Copenhagen he stared at the brass mail slot in the door. Sometimes red-and-blue airmail envelopes came through the slot.

Edward put his hands on Pia’s breasts. The nipples were the largest he had ever seen. Then he counted his money. He had two hundred and forty crowns. He would have to get some more money from somewhere. Maurice came in. “My house is three times the size of this one,” Maurice said. Maurice was Dutch. Pia and Edward went to Maurice’s house with Maurice. Maurice’s wife Randy made
coffee. Maurice’s son Pieter cried in his wooden box. Maurice’s cats walked around. There was an open fire in Maurice’s kitchen. There were forty empty beer bottles in a corner. Randy said she was a witch. She pulled a long dark hair from her head. Randy said she could tell if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl. She slipped a gold ring from her finger and, suspending the ring on the hair, dangled it over Pia’s belly. “It has to be real gold,” Randy said, referring to the ring. Randy was rather pretty.

Pia and Edward and Ole and Anita sat on a log in France drinking white Algerian wine. It was barely drinkable. Everyone wiped the mouth of the bottle as it was passed from hand to hand. Edward wanted to sleep with Pia. “Yes,” Pia said. They left the others. Edward looked at his red beard in the shiny bottom part of the kerosene lantern. Pia thought about her first trip to the Soviet Union. Edward sat at the bar in Le Ectomorph listening to the music. Pia thought about her first trip to the Soviet Union. There had been a great deal of singing. Edward listened to the music. Don Cherry was playing trumpet. Steve Lacey was playing soprano sax. Kenny Drew was playing piano. The drummer and bassist were Scandinavians. Pia remembered a Russian boy she had known. Edward talked to a Swede. “You want to know who killed Kennedy?” the Swede said. “
You
killed Kennedy.” “No,” Edward said. “I did not.” Edward went back to Frederiksberg Allé. Pia was sleeping. She was naked. Edward lifted the blankets and looked at Pia sleeping. Pia moved in the bed and grabbed at the blankets. Edward went into the other room and tried to find something to read. Edward had peculiar-looking hair. Parts of it were too short and parts of it were too long. Edward and Pia telephoned friends in another city. “Come stay with us,” Edward and Pia said. “Please!”

Edward regarded Pia. Pia felt sick: “Why doesn’t he leave me alone sometimes?” Edward told Pia about Harry. Once he had gotten Harry out of jail. “Harry was drunk. A cop told him to sit down. Harry stood up. Blam! Five stitches.” “What are stitches?” Edward looked it up in the Dansk-Engelsk Ordbog. Edward had several manuscripts that were designed to have an effect on Pia. One of them was washing the dishes. At other times he was sour for several
hours. In Leningrad they visited Pia’s former lover, Paul. The streets in Leningrad are extremely wide. Paul called his friend Igor, who played the guitar. Paul called Igor on the telephone. Pia and Paul were happy to see each other again. Paul talked to Edward about South Vietnam. There was tea. Edward thought that he, Edward, was probably being foolish. But how could he tell? Edward wanted more dishes. Igor’s fingers moved quickly among the frets. Edward had drunk too much tea. Edward had drunk too much brandy. Edward was in bed with Pia. “You look beautiful,” Edward said to Pia. Pia thought: I feel sick.

In Copenhagen Edward bought
The Penguin English Dictionary.
Sixteen crowns. Pia told a story about one of the princesses. “She is an archeologist, you know? Her picture comes in the newspaper standing over a great hole with her end sticking up in the air.” Pia’s little brother wore a black turtleneck sweater and sang “We Shall Overcome.” He played the guitar. Kurt played the guitar. Kirsten played the guitar. Anita and Ole played the guitar. Deborah played the flute. Edward read
Time
and
Newsweek.
On Tuesday Edward read
Newsweek,
and on Wednesday,
Time.
Pia bought a book about babies. Then she painted her nails silver. Pia’s nails were very long. Organ music played by Finn Viderø was heard on the radio. Edward suggested that Pia go back to the university. He suggested that Pia study French, Russian, English, guitar, flute, and cooking. Pia’s cooking was rotten. Suddenly she wished she was with some other man and not with Edward. Edward was listening to the peculiar noise inside his chest. Pia looked at Edward. She looked at his red beard, his immense spectacles. I don’t like him, she thought. That red beard, those immense spectacles. Saab jets roared overhead. Edward turned off the radio.

Pia turned on the radio. Edward made himself a dry vermouth on the rocks with two onions. It was a way of not drinking. Edward felt sick. He had been reading
Time
and
Newsweek.
It was Thursday. Pia said to Edward that he was the only person she had ever loved for this long. “How long is it?” Edward asked. It was seven months. Edward cashed a check at American Express. The girl gave him green-and-blue Scandinavian money. Edward was pleased. Little
moans of pleasure. He cashed another check at Cook’s. More money. Edward sold Pia’s farm for eighteen thousand crowns. Much more money. Pia was pleased. Edward sold Pia’s piano for three thousand crowns. General rejoicing. Klaus opened the door. Edward showed him the money. Pia made a chocolate cake with little red-and-white flags on the top. Pia lay in bed. She felt sick. They plugged in an electric heater. The lights went out. Herr Kepper knocked on the door. “Is here an electric heater?” Edward showed him the money. Pia hid the electric heater.

Edward watched the brass slot on the door. Pia read to Edward from the newspaper. She read a story about four Swedes sent to prison for rapture. Edward asked Pia if she wanted to make love. “No,” she said. Edward said something funny. Pia tried to laugh. She was holding a piece of cake with a red-and-white flag on top. Edward bought a flashlight. Pia laughed. Pia still didn’t want to go to bed with Edward. It was becoming annoying. He owed the government back home a thousand dollars. Edward laughed and laughed. “I owe the government a thousand dollars,” Edward said to Pia, “did you know that?” Edward laughed. Pia laughed. They had another glass of wine. Pia was pregnant. They laughed and laughed. Edward turned off the radio. “The lights went out,” he said in Danish. Pia and Edward laughed. “What are you thinking about?” Edward asked Pia and she said she couldn’t tell him just then because she was laughing.

The Piano Player

O
utside his window five–year–old Priscilla Hess, square and squat as a mailbox (red sweater, blue lumpy corduroy pants), looked around poignantly for someone to wipe her overflowing nose. There was a butterfly locked inside that mailbox, surely; would it ever escape? Or was the quality of mailboxness stuck to her forever, like her parents, like her name? The sky was sunny and blue. A filet of green Silly Putty disappeared into fat Priscilla Hess and he turned to greet his wife who was crawling through the door on her hands and knees.

“Yes?” he said. “What now?”

“I’m ugly,” she said, sitting back on her haunches. “Our children are ugly.”

“Nonsense,” Brian said sharply. “They’re wonderful children. Wonderful and beautiful. Other people’s children are ugly, not our children. Now get up and go back to the smokeroom. You’re supposed to be curing a ham.”

“The ham died,” she said. “I couldn’t cure it. I tried everything. You don’t love me anymore. The penicillin was stale. I’m ugly and so are the children. It said to tell you goodbye.”

“It?”

“The ham,” she said. “Is one of our children named Ambrose? Somebody named Ambrose has been sending us telegrams. How many do we have now? Four? Five? Do you think they’re hetero-sexual?” She made a
moue
and ran a hand through her artichoke hair. “The house is rusting away. Why did you want a steel house? Why did I think I wanted to live in Connecticut? I don’t know.”

“Get up,” he said softly, “get up, dearly beloved. Stand up and sing. Sing
Parsifal
.”

“I want a Triumph,” she said from the floor. “A TR–4. Everyone in Stamford, every single person, has one but me. If you gave me a TR–4 I’d put our ugly children in it and drive away. To Wellfleet. I’d take all the ugliness out of your life.”

“A green one?”

“A
red
one,” she said menacingly. “Red with leather seats.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be chipping paint?” he asked. “I bought us an electronic data processing system. An IBM.”

“I want to go to Wellfleet,” she said. “I want to talk to Edmund Wilson and take him for a ride in my red TR–4. The children can dig clams. We have a lot to talk about, Bunny and me.”

“Why don’t you remove those shoulder pads?” Brian said kindly. “It’s too bad about the ham.”

“I loved that ham,”
she said viciously. “When you galloped into the University of Texas on your roan Volvo, I thought you were going to
be somebody.
I gave you my hand. You put rings on it. Rings that my mother gave me. I thought you were going to be distinguished, like Bunny.”

He showed her his broad-shouldered back. “Everything is in flitters,” he said. “Play the piano, won’t you?”

“You always were afraid of my piano,” she said. “My four or five children are afraid of the piano.
You taught them to be afraid of it.
The giraffe is on fire, but I suppose you don’t care.”

“What can we eat,” he asked, “with the ham gone?”

“There’s Silly Putty in the deepfreeze,” she said tonelessly.

“Rain is falling,” he observed. “Rain or something.”

“When you graduated from the Wharton School of Business,” she
said, “I thought
at last!
I thought
now we can move to Stamford and have interesting neighbors.
But they’re not interesting. The giraffe is interesting but he sleeps so much of the time. The mailbox is
rather
interesting. The man didn’t open it at 3:31
P.M.
today. He was five minutes late. The government lied again.”

With a gesture of impatience, Brian turned on the light. The great burst of electricity illuminated her upturned tiny face. Eyes like snow peas, he thought. Tamar dancing. My name is in the dictionary, in the back. The Law of Bilateral Good Fortune. Piano bread perhaps. A nibble of pain running through the Western World. Coriolanus.

“Oh God,” she said, from the floor. “Look at my knees.”

Brian looked. Her knees were blushing.

“It’s senseless, senseless, senseless,” she said, “I’ve been caulking the medicine chest. What for? I don’t know. You’ve got to give me more money. Ben is bleeding. Bessie wants to be an S.S. man. She’s reading
The Rise and Fall.
She’s identified with Himmler. Is that her name? Bessie?”

“Yes. Bessie.”

“What’s the other one’s name? The blond one?”

“Billy. Named after your father. Your Dad.”

“You’ve got to get me an air hammer. To clean the children’s teeth. What’s the name of that disease? They’ll all have it, every single one, if you don’t get me an air hammer.”

“And a compressor,” Brian said. “And a Pinetop Smith record. I remember.”

She lay on her back. The shoulder pads clattered against the terrazzo. Her number, 17, was written large on her chest. Her eyes were screwed tight shut. “Altman’s is having a sale,” she said. “Maybe I should go in.”

“Listen,” he said. “Get up. Go into the grape arbor. I’ll trundle the piano out there. You’ve been chipping too much paint.”

“You wouldn’t touch that piano,” she said. “Not in a million years.”

“You really think I’m afraid of it?”

“Not in a million years,” she said, “you phony.”

“All right,” Brian said quietly. “All
right
.” He strode over to the piano. He took a good grip on its black varnishedness. He began to trundle it across the room, and, after slight hesitation, it struck him dead.

Henrietta and Alexandra

A
lexandra was reading Henrietta’s manuscript.

“This,” she said, pointing with her finger, “is inane.”

Henrietta got up and looked over Alexandra’s shoulder at the sentence.

“Yes,” she said. “I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist.”

There was a moment of contemplation.

“I have been offered a thousand florins for it,” Henrietta said. “The Dutch rights.”

“How much is that in our money?”

“Two hundred sixty-six dollars.”

“Bless Babel,” Alexandra said, and took her friend in her arms.

Henrietta said: “Once I was a young girl, very much like any other young girl, interested in the same things, I was exemplary. I was told what I was, that is to say a young girl, and I knew what I was because I had been told and because there were other young girls all around me who had been told the same things and knew the same things, and looking at them and hearing again in my head the things I had been told I knew what a young girl was. We had all been told the same things. I had not been told, for example, that some wine was
piss and some not and I had not been told . . . other things. Still I had not been told a great many things all very useful but I had not been told that I was going to die in any way that would allow me to realize that I really was going to die and that it would all be over, then, and that this was all there was and that I had damned well better make the most of it. That I discovered for myself and covered with shame and shit as I was I made the most of it. I had not been told how to make the most of it but I figured it out. Then I moved through a period of depression, the depression engendered by the realization that I had placed myself beyond the pale, there I was, beyond the pale. Then I discovered that there were other people beyond the pale with me, that there were quite as many people on the wrong side of the pale as there were on the right side of the pale and that the people on the wrong side of the pale were as complex as the people on the right side of the pale, as unhappy, as subject to time, as subject to death. So what the fuck? I said to myself in the colorful language I had learned on the wrong side of the pale. By this time I was no longer a young girl. I was mature.”