Testimony and Demeanor (16 page)

The pickup truck crossed the overpass right behind me, but we diverged just after that. I headed south and they turned east. I turned east after two miles and at the next intersection we almost collided. I now had to keep an eye on the plume of dust they threw up as well as watch Honorée.

I got east of her after another two fields, and I stopped at what I hoped would be the point she crossed the dirt road. She had shaken one wing off in order to gather up the line with her hand, but she had her eye on the pickup truck, which was beyond me to the southeast. I yelled to her to drop the line, but it fell too far away. As I ran up to it, it slithered across the fence. She gathered it back up. She had not only shed her right wing but had somehow punched her left hand through the material of her left wing.

She crossed the corner of the field. The director was running the camera in the bed of the pickup. When she drew near, it was clear she would pass astern of the truck. He yelled to the driver to back up. The driver overshot the line, which flapped past the windshield.

A new problem presented itself. The balloon was now passing just east of my house and toward the Iowa River. I knew there was no road across the river for several miles. Where the balloon would cross the river the bank was lined with tall oak trees. The river itself ran more or less to the east-southeast, so the balloon was only slowly angling toward it. I drove onto the first bridge. I saw the pickup hurtle past the turn to the bridge, a half mile away.

I now saw the balloon, still on the north side of the river. I backed off the bridge and followed it. The balloon crossed in front of the truck. Honorée held the coil of rope in her hands as she drifted over the telephone lines. She dropped it in the field beside the road. Both the director and the cameraman climbed the wire fence and ran after it, but it slithered over
another fence before they could reach it. They turned around and ran back to their truck.

I drove back to the bridge, crossed it, and drove downstream. The balloon was now over the oak trees on the north side of the river. I was relieved at this. There were no power lines for a good distance on either side of the river. I was driving slowly now, since I’d got ahead of the balloon. The pickup passed me and turned toward the river on a farmer’s road. They opened the gate and passed through. I thought perhaps they knew of a bridge, so I started to follow them. The dirt road turned into a grassy lane as it entered the woods. The pickup jounced several times and then stopped. As I drew closer I saw that the rear wheels were spinning in a deep puddle between the roots of an oak tree.

The director jumped out of the pickup bed and ran toward me. I would have let him in if he hadn’t been carrying his camera, which he’d unscrewed from the tripod. I backed away. He chased me all the way to the road. I backed onto it. As I started forward, he jumped on the hood. His rear end made a dent in it, but he slid off to one side.

I drove down the road to the next turn toward the river and reached a one-lane bridge. The balloon, sailing over midstream, was now much lower. (Honorée later explained to me that the air was cooler over the water, and this created a down-draft.) Honorée lowered the rope when she was a hundred yards upstream. It splashed into the water in a coil. The rope seemed to act as a sea anchor for a moment. I ran one way and then the other, unsure of where the line would drag across the bridge. I then was afraid the line might drag over the girders at the midpoint and be out of reach. I climbed up on the downstream girder, which was wide enough to stand on. Honorée floated toward me. I moved a step to the left. The balloon, then Honorée, passed over the upstream girder, the rope trailing behind her. She reached down with her wing, and I grabbed it.
She spun into me, and I started to fall. I grabbed her around the hips, and she grabbed the shoulder of my jacket with her free hand. We balanced for an instant. Honorée swung her knees up under my armpits and held on to me with her legs. We toppled slowly at first, then plunged into the water. My face pressed into her stomach as we splashed. I felt a second of terror. I let go, but she was still holding me in a scissors grip. I suddenly relaxed since we seemed to be floating up, and since Honorée, from the movements of her body as they reached me, appeared to be paddling with her arms—or rather with an arm and a wing.

In another instant we were at the surface, moving downstream in the smooth muddy current. The balloon was floating ahead of us, slightly collapsed. Honorée was trying to undo the strap of her bosun’s chair. I thought it would be better to get to shore first, so I swam, pulling two of the shrouds. We were by now a hundred yards downstream of the bridge, entering a curve of the river. The balloon floated into the branches of a tree leaning over the water. The webbing around it snagged, and we drifted by, as though we were skaters at the end of a snap-the-whip line. Honorée floated on her back, held in place by the taut shrouds and her chair. We’d been swung in toward shore, so I could now touch bottom, though the water was up to my shoulders. Honorée held me in place against the current while I unbuckled the canvas strap around her waist. She slid out of the chair and bumped into me again, as she had on top of the bridge. We turned once and I swung her toward the steep mud bank, which she grabbed by plunging her fingers in, up to the first joint. It was very hard to move, and I realized I was terribly cold. Our mouths were drawn so tight that neither of us could speak for a moment. We crawled up the crumbling bank, dislodging black clods. We reached the top and lay full length in the green weeds.

Honorée was shivering. I took off my jacket and held it
out for her. She raised herself on her elbows and said, “I’m too stiff to move. I can barely talk.” She rubbed her mouth and jaw with one hand.

I got to my knees and floundered around to her other side to pull off her wing. Struggling with the wing revived us both. She sat up and I handed her my jacket. She got to her knees and wrung it out. There was something so domestic about the gesture that it was even more modest than if she’d put it on. She squeezed the water out of the loose hem of her gym shorts too. She put the jacket on. It covered her shorts, right down to the Wapsi Valley High School insignia. She rolled the jacket sleeves up and lifted her hair from inside the neck.

Honorée said, “Mr. Hendricks, your mouth is blue.”

I said, “Honorée, you’re wonderful. You are a heroine. You are a—”

“Oh, shsh,” she said. “Oh, just hush.” I didn’t understand. She didn’t say it crossly. I felt exhilarated inside my daze. In fact, we were both dazed. I felt the sphere of my attention condense around us, as though we were in a grove of feelings, flowering to celebrate Honorée’s rich, thick body. She was innocent of its fact, of its appeal. The disconnection between her submissive fondness for me and her suddenly triumphant beauty was wonderfully mysterious. But the beauty itself was even more mysterious: all that I knew about other women’s beauty was now chaos, and her sweet chunkiness became the only true form.

This mystery and excitement seemed to hold me immobile and timeless, and my sensation was one of power. It lasted until I heard the pickup truck drive onto the bridge.

Honorée laughed and raised me up—I had fallen to my knees and embraced her lower half, pressing myself against the perfect ovals of her knees, and against the plump swelling of thigh muscle. I hugged the firm square of her hips and buttocks, two full volumes tightly shelved.

Let it stand. I recognized then and there the absurd mixing of genres. For the instant it was an amazing liberty.

Honorée and I picked our way through the brush to the road. The director and his cameraman were standing behind my car. They were relieved to see Honorée unharmed, but they immediately asked us to help them retrieve the balloon. I said we were too cold and wet to help. Honorée and I got in my car and drove off.

We drove through the countryside. We grew steamy in the blast of the car heater. It was dusk. We passed a farmhouse. Honorée said it looked like her house. Its clean white porch was lit by a simple yellow “no-bug” light. It suggested a cell, not one in a jail or an asylum, but a chamber in which to be subject to visions. This chamber of artificial light stood against the dark house and the darkening violet sky, the bare bulb standing in for the missing moon.

Honorée said, “Why can’t every day be like today?” She paused. “It
could
be.”

“Weren’t you frightened?”

“No; not too bad except once or twice,” she said. “I was more excited.… I could see for miles. I don’t mean that I want everything to be
that
exciting all the time. I just mean—oh, I don’t know exactly.”

I realized her ecstasy had been impersonal—that when I’d called her a heroine she’d been beyond praise of herself. That was why she’d hushed me.

“I was going to untie myself even if they hadn’t let me go. Once I got up I didn’t want to just be pulled down.”

“Weren’t you embarrassed?”

“Oh, no. We’d done, you know, scenes like that before. It doesn’t matter so much what you do if it’s for a part; you don’t mind if the
character
does things, because that’s not you. You can even look ugly or stupid and not mind.” She added with a sudden brightness, “Otherwise actors wouldn’t ever play villains.”

“Oh, Honorée,” I said.

“Isn’t that right, Mr. Hendricks? Or are you thinking about
something else? Wasn’t today pretty good for you too? Was it interesting? I mean, maybe this thing will be a really good film. I feel that there is that possibility. We don’t have to be geniuses to just be good. I really felt I was in the middle of something.” Honorée stretched her toes toward the heater. She put her hands under her legs to hold them off the seat. I stopped the car at an intersection. I wasn’t sure where we were.

Honorée said, “Go left. Town’s somewhere that way.” She continued. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I used to think I could but now I can’t. Of course, maybe when you get closer to someone, they get blurred.”

I felt myself almost coaxed into simplicity, but I foresaw that it would be an impersonation. The immediate counter-stroke, unfortunately, was that I saw the care and patience of my habitual frame of mind as contrivance. I thought—although only for a short while—that I might be keeping accounts for a phantom enterprise, that Elizabeth Mary was right in saying that there was no true center to any age or culture, and that there was therefore nothing but one’s own adventure, one’s own passage through human thought, which was as trackless, formless, and all-receiving as the sea.

One would always find America and not the Indies. And one could never return to the mother country—the mother country was as chimerical as the Indies. Only adventure. I hated that idea. I’d thought that was Elizabeth Mary’s existential contrivance to keep her own courage up.

I thought of Feste the jester, speaking to the
DUKE
: “…  for thy mind is a very opal! I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere; for that’s it that always makes a good voyage of nothing.”

When we got to the edge of town, Honorée said she’d prefer to go to my house since I had a bathtub, and her place only had a shower. When we got to my house she became silly, and not very funny. All my exuberance had waned, and I could
tell she was disappointed in me. But she kept on pushing, as though she had to make absolutely sure I was not everything she’d thought me. I recognized the grim determination to wreck an idol. I’d felt the same urge when faced with cousin Josie’s foolish backing away.

Honorée kept saying, “Come on—just be yourself.” In nervous reaction to this slogan, I found myself spewing bits of quotations. She thought I was doing this as a joke, as a caricature of my own manner. I discovered that she became nervous in the face of detailed praise of her looks. I couldn’t help persisting in it. She finally said, “Look, I’ve had to talk about my elbows, my nose, my everything with all those guys. So it’s not so much fun. And I don’t really believe it. No, I believe it sort of, but it feels like I’m being teased.”

She added later, “You never say things to Miss Chetty about her looks. She’s too beautiful.”

She burned her hand cooking supper. I said to put butter on it, and she contradicted me flatly. By the time we finally embraced, we’d both been cross and we were both grieved. I’m not sure what her awareness of her feelings actually was, but I sensed that she was still toppling her idea of me.

Much later that night, just as I was falling asleep, Honorée said, “Oliver, now I am embarrassed.” I think she meant she was sorry, but I was too thinly there to respond.

I don’t remember our several subsequent meetings. I do remember going to see Elizabeth Mary the day after the balloon ascension. That was when she told me she thought she’d had a stroke. The doctors had told her there was no evidence of it. Elizabeth Mary said she had two clear symptoms. One was a slight stutter that occurred occasionally and unpredictably. The other symptom was that on one occasion she hadn’t been able to add numbers. She’d been playing a card game by herself that required adding up the numbers of little piles of cards. She’d
tried and tried but found that she couldn’t even add, say, four and seven. She said that she knew the words for numbers but couldn’t
see
their numerical value. She wished the doctor to consider whether this might be at least a symptom of transitory cerebral ischemia. The doctor had said he was considering every possibility and that she should stop arguing with him because that seemed to make her restless and that she needed rest.

Elizabeth Mary had first noticed her stammer when she had five of her seminar students in to see her. She said she was now terrified of giving a lecture. She had only four left before review week (what we used to call reading period). She wished the doctor to send for a speech pathologist. She knew that the University of Iowa had a very advanced speech pathology center. The doctor had said he’d look into it.

I tracked down Elizabeth Mary’s doctor. At first he wouldn’t talk to me, but finally I prevailed on him. What he told me, and what she hadn’t told me, was that he had tentatively diagnosed her problem as an anxiety attack. He thought her dizzy spells came from hyperventilating, and that her hyperventilating was caused by anxiety.