I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) (7 page)

They leave the plane. She’s put on her silk scarf, knotted it loosely around her neck, and powdered her sunburnt nose. She knows she’s behaving with a comic degree of civility, but it’s the way she’s always responded to disaster. There’s a new lightness to her actions now, a desperate comedy.

He sees it and he says, Your nose looks fine.

The first couple of days have gone by and I’ve forgotten how angry I was at him. I’m still in shock. He’s very kind to me. He seems to feel he owes me his life because somehow I was able to land the Electra on a reef flat. I, on the other hand, I blame him for our situation. If not for him, I think, we would be home. But then when I think that, I’m not sure whether to blame him or to say, No, it’s you who saved my life. But I don’t feel that yet. I don’t thank him. I won’t feel that for quite a while.

I ask him to tell me about his life. I don’t really know anything about him. He says he’s spent so many years trying to forget it, he’s not sure he can tell his story. It started when he went to sea, at fifteen; he was a kitchen boy. He went around the world in ships, many times. Once he was held in Madagascar for forty-five days. He grew up in those forty-five days, fell in love, had love, fell
out of love. He learned about the stars in his years at sea, he knows how to read the stars.

That’s all you really need to know about me, he says, I know how to read the stars.

I ask about the stars, if he can tell us where we are. He has some idea, but his calculations don’t make sense. He was passed out for so much of our last leg that he lost track of where we were. He was drunk when we took off. He was certain we were going to die. When we left, the wind was blowing the wrong way. He says that on the airfield, when we unloaded the plane, my scarf dancing hysterically in the air, he says then he knew we were going to die. He says it as if he had been right, as if his fear were a legitimate excuse.

You were afraid, I say, but you were wrong.

I wasn’t wrong to be afraid, he says. It was the wind that did us in.

Suddenly I feel sick. It’s a slight dizziness, a subtle unbalancing. It’s my heart, sinking, when I realize that I am alone. He’s so afraid, I remember, and all the anger returns. I don’t have time to feel compassionate. Here I am, alone again, alone but not completely by myself, alone without the freedom of not having to think about someone else. Suddenly all the anger that washed away
in the trance of our landing reappears, and I wish that Noonan had died. I don’t hear what he’s saying, I just watch him talking, and instead of his dark beauty, I see his eyes: they’re filled with fear. He sees that I’m seeing him and he stops talking, but I recover, pretend I’m listening. He says he thinks maybe he can use the engine to charge up the radio and try to make contact with passing ships, or something like that. I say it wasn’t the wind that did us in. He doesn’t seem to have heard me.

This is how we talk to each other now, in overlapping monologues. We’ve been separated by fear. Fear has set in, and memory, and blame. I’m awake most of the night, waiting for a ship to see our fire, hearing in the wind the voice of the radio operator, hearing the scratch of his breath in the shifting leaves, comforting myself in my anguish with memory traces, the agonizing moments before I lost contact with the world.

Then I dream of my Electra and wake up shaking.

It’s always this way: the worst times are when I’m reminded that I can no longer fly. When I wake up, when the tide is out, when Noonan is asleep, I go and sit in the cockpit whose every inch I know by heart. I sit under the light of a starry sky, illegible to me but sparkling so clearly it seems a different sky than the ones I’ve known before, written in an intricately beautiful foreign language,
and the flights that I have made in the past retain their original magic when I reenact them in my mind.

She sits, her fingers touching the familiar dials, her body shaking slightly in response to an imaginary motion, her mind projecting scenes of deserts and cities on the screen of her closed eyes.

After these flights she’s overcome by an unbearable sadness. And then in the morning, her anger at Noonan returns.

O
UR DAILY LIFE
revolved around the dinners on the beach. When he tells me that he started off as a kitchen boy on a ship, I tell him that he has to cook me dinner, and he does, every night, on the beach.

The evenings are long and empty. He prepares fish when he can catch them, but he hasn’t found the best spots yet, the fertile inlets, and so some nights he comes up with nothing, not even a crab, and we’re so hungry in our desperation that he cooks what he can find. One night it’s a rat. The meat is thin and stringy, tasteless, and he waits awhile to tell me that it’s a rat, as if I haven’t noticed it isn’t a fish. He tries to make conversation with me, but I’m furious. Not about the rat, but about the flight, about his fear. I think that I’m angry at him because he’s afraid, as if that’s something to be angry about.
I blame everything on him and it makes it worse for me. He can’t hold all my anger. After dinner, I clear away the bones, the ashes, in a silent and inexplicable rage. He seems wounded, not surprisingly, and he tries to tell the story of his adventures at sea, or on the Mississippi as a riverboat captain. I’m inconsolable. I treat him more brutally than I’ve ever treated anyone.

Later, he keeps talking to me, trying to make conversation.

You know your husband, he says.

G.P.? I say.

Yes, well, him. You know I never liked him, he says.

Oh really, why not?

I thought he was silly, he says. I thought that he didn’t understand you.

Well he didn’t, I say to the ocean. But you don’t either.

He drinks. He rations his liquor. He pours it out into a coconut shell. I watch him. The first time, I remember, he measured and measured, and then he filled the shell up to the top. I almost started laughing, after his careful measurements.

How did you get to be such a stinking drunk? I ask.

Two ways, he says. Gradually and then suddenly.

•

He drinks it all. He doesn’t offer me any. I don’t thank him for dinner, he doesn’t thank me for cleaning up. We are like prisoners, convicts.

Eventually, I stop saying anything about his drinking. I don’t feel that I can; I’ve maintained some obscure sense of etiquette, because my life no longer depends on his ability to keep sober and do his job. Although now, in a sense, it matters more. We have to keep the fires burning and stay on the lookout for passing ships, always the dream of passing ships. We are still expecting to be rescued. We don’t say anything about it to each other, but it is the religion that gives our days direction. It’s taken for granted that we will survive this, that we’ll be home one day, away from each other, released, that we have separate futures, that we can treat each other however we please, it doesn’t matter, we don’t matter to each other. This is because we are still dreaming, still falling. We haven’t yet landed. We barely speak to each other anymore, except to exchange factual information. One night after dinner, when he’s drinking, by now he’s already drunk, he tells me that he’s seen a plane. At first I pretend I haven’t heard. He doesn’t repeat what he’s said, and I don’t ask. These are the rules of our bloodless warfare. We’re silent for a while, long enough for me to forget what
he’s said, and then, once I’ve written it off as a drunken slur and forgotten it completely, only then, only then do I hear something terrifying. It’s a faint, unnatural, mechanical hum. It’s a painfully familiar yet utterly foreign sound. After I hear it, there’s a second of silence. Everything seems to stop. I remember what Noonan said. I hate him more than ever. We put more wood on the fire. We wait on the beach. It’s dark, and we don’t see anything.

In the middle of the night I go to the Electra for one of my midnight voyages. But by the time I get there, I’ve woken up completely, I’m no longer in a trance. I’m awake and I walk into the navigator’s cabin. In my bare feet I walk on our charts, our maps, scraps of paper covered with calculations. Noonan’s shoes are lying in a corner. I open up one of the drawers in his table and I find that it is filled with bottles of rum. I don’t even try to stop myself. I take out the bottles, I leave the Electra. I walk down to the beach. It’s very dark, the moon is dim, and I walk to the edge of the water. I look out into the darkness. I’m looking for a plane, a sign, a glimmer, anything. It’s completely dark. The air is heavy, and hot, it won’t rain yet. I open the bottles. I take a sip from one of them. Then I turn them upside down, one by one, and I pour them into the ocean.

He won’t speak to me at all now.

•

In the morning I see a speck appear on the horizon, a black spot the size of an insect.

The point of blackness, which at first appears to be nothing more than a gnat, keeps coming closer, heading directly toward the island, and I tell myself that it must be a figment of my imagination. But after two minutes it assumes the form of a plane to such perfection that I need a moment to recognize what it is. It is an ideal plane: silvery blue, it winks at me with flashes of sun-struck metal like a plane in a vision. At first I take off my scarf and gesticulate furiously, but as the plane appears to lose altitude, I begin to relax and wave to it calmly, welcoming it ashore. Everything about this plane conveys purpose and assurance, as if it had been designed solely to rescue us. I find the promise of its shape more beautiful than anything I have ever seen, but strangely lost to me, although I don’t understand why until it comes closer and I am able to determine that despite my wish it is not coming toward the island at all. It looked as if it were heading directly at me, but as I watch it grow larger I see it pass overhead, high above, too far to see me as I desperately shake my scarf. It circles once—for an instant I imagine that it is heading toward the water and I think I can make out black pontoons for landing—and then it makes a wide turn, points back toward the mysterious place from whence it has come, and flies away. It hasn’t seen me at all.

•

I don’t feel despair when this happens. I don’t feel disappointment or rage when the plane disappears, I feel only a bleak contempt for myself. I am fallen, earthbound, undeserving. What moves me is that the plane makes such a lovely sight, that it negotiates the sky with so much grace that it seems to exist in an atmosphere above reality. It’s so beautiful it takes my breath away.

We couldn’t have foreseen what would happen to us as a result of witnessing our own abandonment. It seemed impossible that the plane hadn’t seen us, but equally impossible that it had and then just flew away. We never understood the meaning of the plane. It abandoned us. It was too terrible to believe, that our only hope, our one salvation, that the messenger we had been waiting for, the protection we had expected, was out there, it existed, but not for us. So at first we did not lose hope. We did not even worry. But gradually, in the hours and days to come, our hope abandoned us too, and all that was left was the memory of that plane. Like children, we adored the plane that abandoned us. We sat on the beach for a long time, waiting, cultivating our separate vivid images of the plane. We loved the plane even more after it left us, as if that might bring it back.

W
E DIDN’T SPEAK
to each other for a long time. We were angry and we blamed our anger on each other. There were no more planes, no ships on the horizon. At first we kept track of the dates, counting the days, and then we stopped doing even that.

It lasted a long time, and then finally we couldn’t be angry anymore. We abandoned hope, then worry, and then even our anger. It was easy: we never tried to do it, we just did, finally, because we had no choice.

We named the island Heaven, as a kind of joke, and we set about making it home. Noonan built himself a bungalow on the eastern end of the island. It was a shack with a veranda and a hammock made from a fuel cover. I
built myself a lean-to by the lagoon, because the nights were cooler there, and the air was tinged with the scent of oleander. We set up a communication system using smoke signals and chimes fashioned from seashells. He would invite me over to his place for dinner, which he still prepared. He considered himself a chef. On a typical evening, he would collect fish from the inlet on the southern end of the island, small fish that swam so lazily they seemed to pause in the center of his palms and let themselves be scooped up by the dozens. Then he picked fruits and berries and made a salad which looked poisonous but was in fact delicious. He stole petals from the flowers and boiled water and herbs for a medicinal-tasting tea. Even if he had had the resources to cook the richest sauces, he would have preferred making do with the island vegetation because he liked the challenge of living by his wits.

His one luxury is simple: a mildly narcotic root he has discovered and which he smokes in a long, irregular pipe that he has fashioned out of tortoiseshell. I say
his
luxury, but the truth is I liked to smoke from it too. He used to smoke after dinner, and I would usually join him, but not until he cajoled me, out of habit, so I could have the pleasure of declining and then giving in. When we smoke I have visions of past flights: I feel my Electra, its vibrations, I see the landscape change below. Other times I imagine the outside world, what’s happening to the world without me.

•

At that time, the time of Heaven, of the island, of our splendid isolation, Noonan has occasional fits of jealousy. He knows nothing of my visions, of my midnight flights. But I can see he’s observing me, he suspects something. He knows her, his only friend, and there’s a new remoteness about her, a separateness, that unnerves him, makes him jealous. She’s distracted, absentminded, her expression has lost some of its openness. She’s alert, but only to herself, to some inner fixation, and she’s become an observer too, of herself, of their abandonment. It’s as if she were a spectator to everything, even the secret dramas taking place in her own mind. What they are, he can’t know. He has his own terrors, but he’s consumed by hers, by wondering about her, being jealous of whatever it is that’s taking her away from him. He has fits of jealousy in which he accuses her of all kinds of things: of purposely misleading him to this godforsaken nowhere, of wanting to kill them both, of being crazy. He’s not angry, he’s just trying to get her attention. He says he can see in her eyes that this was her plan all along, to bring him down with her. But when she doesn’t defend herself, he starts to cry. What can he do, he’s helpless without her.