Separate Flights (27 page)

Today when Lee came home Beth was peeling potatoes at the kitchen table, drinking her third gin and tonic since taking the cleaning woman home at three-thirty. When he saw the drink in her hand his eyes changed, darkened for an instant as in scolding or scorn; then he said hello and moving around the table briefly kissed her lips.

‘I picked up the tickets,' he said.

‘Who's going first?'

‘Mine's at three-thirty and yours is four-forty.'

While he was upstairs changing clothes she made two drinks, and when he came down in sport shirt and loafers he took his and started toward the living room.

‘Will I see you in Chicago?' she said.

He turned at the door.

‘My connection's right away, so I'll see you in San Francisco.'

‘Will I have to wait long?'

‘Course not. I'll meet your plane.'

‘I mean in Chicago.'

‘About thirty minutes. You're on 427 from Chicago, I'm on 502.' He was turning toward the living room when she said: ‘So if 427 goes down—or 502—we've made a mistake.'

‘Well, that's true, but it's better to gamble with losing one of us than both.'

‘Do you know what you're gambling with?'

‘It's for Peggy, you know that.'

‘No, she's the stakes. I mean what's holding the other hand?'

He looked at her for a moment; then he half-turned to the living room, standing profiled in the kitchen doorway.

‘All I know is it's sound, it's practical. Our company does it, other companies do it—' Then he stopped. ‘Anyhow—' he said, and shrugged and went into the living room; she heard him sliding the hassock, then snapping straight the front page of the
Des Moines Register
. She finished peeling the potatoes and went outside to light the charcoal. She watched it until Bucky brought Peggy home, then Lee came outside and the three of them sat in lawn chairs around the grill. Peggy held a small red water pistol and shot at steak drippings that flamed on the charcoal.

‘Peggy,' Lee said. ‘You know the last thing I did before I came home today? I made a call on a woman who buried her husband last week. He was well covered, so she's better fixed for money than she was before, but the point is she's a widow now. And you know how old she is? Fifty-five. Even if that seems old to you, it's mighty young to be a widow in 1967. She'll probably live another twenty years. And her husband: her husband was fifty-eight—'

Beth sipped her drink and watched two young squirrels darting about in the elm tree whose branches nearly touched the roof, and she wondered if she would ever see seventy-five, or if she even wanted to. Then she looked to her right, at Peggy, her blue eyes made brighter by contact lenses, her cheek concave as she drew on a cigarette, faint downy hair on her face catching the sunlight, and Beth could not imagine this child, her second and last—no: she could not imagine her living through the next sixty years. When Beth was a child the years seemed straight and simple as a road. Yet now they were wide and deep, unbounded as corn fields covered by snow, or in early spring when the fields lay bare as far as you could see and wind blew from the southwest and the sky turned black and yellow; you looked out over the blowing dust and scattered, bending trees and waited for the tornado funnel. Now she heard Lee's voice but not what he said, and the squirrels had left the elm or entered its trunk, and she was thinking of long ago when she lived in the country and spring was like that. Her hand had risen to Peggy's shoulder and was resting there.

‘What would I do with a thousand dollars?' Peggy said.

‘Two, then. I'll give you two.'

‘Oh Daddy, I appreciate it. I
really
do. I mean that you care how I die. But I don't want to quit and you know yourself if you don't really want to, you can't.'

‘I did.'

‘But you were scared enough.'

‘And you ought to be. Haven't you heard your mother, the way she breathes when she carries in groceries or climbs the stairs? The way she coughs in the morning?'

‘He's right,' Beth said, and she stood and turned over the steaks. ‘How's Marsha?'

‘Better,' Peggy said. ‘Vic comes home on leave around June.'

‘Then he goes over?'

‘He thinks so.'

‘He will,' Lee said.

‘You poor children,' Beth said, and jabbed a steak with the fork, and Peggy shot water into the flames.

That night Beth went to bed while Lee was watching the late news. With her eyes closed she lay in the dark for thirty minutes; then Lee came upstairs and when he turned on his bedside lamp she pretended she was asleep. She tried not to be angry, tried to hold onto the little calm she had gained in half an hour of lying still while he emptied his pockets, coins clicking and ringing on the chest of drawers: if she had been asleep, that light and sound would have waked her. He got into bed, turned out the light, and she listened to his breathing as it slowed and deepened (and yes: oh yes, he was right of course about her: she breathed badly), and she wondered what he thought about in those last conscious minutes. They passed quickly: he shifted a leg, and was asleep. She lit a cigarette, knowing that if she were asleep the scrape of flint, the clicking shut of the Zippo, perhaps even the small flame would intrude as jarringly as an alarm clock or the frightful after-midnight ringing of a phone. She believed any sound would do that: a light rain, a gentle wind rustling the elm leaves, Lee or even Peggy down the hall stirring in bed. Sometimes she woke at night and there was no sound at all; she would lie there in the silence, afraid, as though she had been wakened by the presence of fog outside her window.

She had tried everything she knew of except drugs. She had talked to Polly Fairchild, who couldn't sleep either: Polly had told her that a snack before bed would take blood from her brain and help her relax. If she woke in the night she should get up and read, drink some milk, and she shouldn't smoke. Sometimes you could talk yourself to sleep:
my feet are going to sleep, my feet are going to sleep, my ankles are
—And she mustn't worry: if at nine o'clock or so she started worrying about whether or not she could sleep, she'd only make herself more tense. But none of this worked for Polly: she took a pill every night and slept soundly. She told Beth they were mild, they weren't habit-forming, and though it took her longer to feel really awake in the morning, that was an easy price for a good night's sleep.

Beth said no. When Lee suggested drugs, she said no again; she would not, she said, take a drug so she could sleep. If she couldn't do something as natural and inevitable as sleeping, she wanted to know why. So night after night she went to bed and lay awake or, after sleeping for a while, she woke again and lay smoking in the dark for an hour and sometimes more. Yet after all this time alone she still didn't know why she couldn't sleep. She knew this much, though: she was not equipped to solve a problem of this sort. Until now she had always dealt with problems that had alternatives and you weighed them and made a choice, like buying one dishwasher instead of another. But now the buyer's instinct was useless: what was needed was a probing insight into herself, and this was a bitter and unprofitable task. For when she did try to explore herself she found—oh God: she found nothing.

Now she got out of bed, went downstairs to the kitchen, and made a gin and tonic. She sat on the couch in the dark living room, lit a cigarette and exhaled quickly before a cough jerked upward from her chest. She knew it was long after midnight, but being awake down here wasn't altogether bad as long as she didn't think of getting up in the morning, and how tired she would be; she never slept in the afternoon, for she was afraid a nap robbed that much more sleep from the coming night. But if she could give up the idea of sleeping, devote herself to the moment at hand, there was an appealing secretive quality about sitting alone in a quiet and darkened house. She knew why too: because upstairs Lee slept like a child, with his clean lungs, his exercised body, and his mind that worked with the precision of numbers.

After another drink she felt sleepy. She was afraid that climbing the stairs would quicken her blood and breath and wake her again; so stretching out on the couch, she slept. She woke to the pounding of Lee's in-place running in their bedroom directly above her. Peggy came downstairs first and sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. When Lee came down, smelling of after-shave lotion, Beth was pouring buckwheat mix into a bowl.

‘What did you do, sleep on the couch?'

‘I was down here when I got sleepy, so I stayed.'

‘You were asleep when I went up.'

‘It didn't last.'

He poured a cup of coffee and sat down.

‘You don't have to stay awake,' he said.

‘I know.'

‘There's nothing wrong with taking something to help you sleep.'

‘I used to sleep,' she said.

That afternoon she drove Lee to the Cedar Rapids airport, then went back to Iowa City, picked up Peggy at school, and got to the airport in time for a quick drink in the cocktail lounge, a martini for her and a Coke for Peggy. She was not excited about going to a convention of insurance men in San Francisco, but she pretended to Peggy that she was. She told Peggy what food was in the refrigerator, reminded her to leave the back door unlocked while she was at school so the dry cleaners could deliver the clothes, and told her again the name of the hotel in San Francisco. Then she said: ‘Look, I probably don't have to tell you this, but I ought to anyway: don't have Bucky over while we're gone.'

‘I didn't plan to.'

‘Well, I trust you, and if it weren't for the neighbors I wouldn't care. But you don't want gossip.'

‘No.'

‘So tell him goodnight on the front porch, okay?'

Peggy did. For the next three nights, after making love in her bed (and they had never had a bed) she told Bucky goodnight on the dark front porch, the living room behind them darkened too, so he could slip out and across the lawn to his car parked down the street.

2

‘N
O,' BETH SAID
, on the plane from San Francisco to Chicago, “I'm really not afraid.'

Her seat was next to the window, and now she looked out, testing what she had just said. They were flying through clouds so thick that she couldn't see the wing behind her. She thought of the pilot flying by instruments, she thought of human error, she imagined a midair collision. Then she turned back to Robert Carini, the silversmith from New York, who a moment ago had lifted his glass in salute and said he was afraid of flying so he was glad he had someone to talk to.

‘My husband would get twenty thousand dollars, though. I don't like that.'

‘That's not so much. I took out sixty-five.'

‘Oh, I don't mean those slot machines. He told me to get some of that, but I didn't. No, he has a policy on me for ten thousand, with double indemnity.'

‘That's an expensive funeral.'

‘It's not to bury me. He says women are worth more these days, and it'd cost that to hire someone to do what I do.'

Then they were smiling at each other.

‘Cooking,' Beth said.

‘Where is he now?'

‘Flying to Chicago. We took separate flights.'

‘Oh, I see. So—'

‘Yes. So we won't die together.'

Two hours ago she had been drinking coffee with Lee in a lunchroom at the San Francisco airport. At a table to their left a young soldier and his wife were finishing lunch, talking quietly, their eyes shifting and lowering with that distraction of transitional conversations. In the lobby there were soldiers without girls: at the magazine rack, the tobacco counter, sleeping in chairs; as Beth and Lee walked through she said: ‘If I were young and single I'd be a soldier's girl.' Relighting his pipe, he glanced at her. He walked too fast, and she was short of breath when they reached the gate. She went through the lobby with him, to the door. He looked up at the sky, said, ‘Still cloudy,' then kissed her and said, ‘I'll see you in Cedar Rapids.' She stood in the doorway until he boarded the plane, then she found a bar. There were two men sitting apart from each other at the bar, and a young naval officer with a girl at a small table. Beth sat at the end of the bar and ordered a Bloody Mary.

Waiting for a separate flight made her feel she was involved in a childish ruse. But with her second drink she thought of her plane crashing, a death so much quicker than her actual dying would be. A violent death like that would be an awful shock for Peggy, and now she felt sorry for Peggy and Helen and Helen's two children, Wendy and Billy, who would wonder if it hurt Granma when the plane crashed; and she even felt sorry for Lee, who was sentimental and would therefore believe he was burying something, and next year when Peggy went to college he would be lonely in the house at night. And all this time, sipping her drink and thinking of her own death, there was something else in the back of her mind, something desperately mean, and now with a guilty catch of her breath she let it out: what if his plane crashed? She finished her drink in a swallow and left the bar.

She boarded her plane; tall Mr. Carini with his thick white hair and lined dark face was already there, in the aisle seat. The stewardess brought champagne cocktails, and before take-off Beth knew his name and that he was a silversmith.

‘Are you really?' she had said. ‘I thought only Mexicans and Indians did that.'

He had smiled and said oh no, he did it too, although he mostly just ran things now, and once in a while made something for his wife and daughter. She asked if he had anything with him, anything he had made, and he said no but he'd send her a bracelet, and he wrote her address in a notebook. It had been a long time since she had met anyone whose work was either new or interesting. He ordered martinis and she asked questions about his work, real questions that she wanted answers to, and when he lit her cigarettes she took his hand and guided the flame.