20: We Flew High For A Small Plane

"The Steward is Bolt Upright, He is Looking Towards the Galley"

Airplane wings move
Like I do, awakened in the night
By nothing:

A half-dreamed forgotten prayer,

Or my sweetheart's kicks
Which are like a filly's, spooked by thunder;
I am her wretched groom
With slick and helpless hands.

I am calmer than a child for now,
But O are children wild, wild.

19: In The Wet City

When I was young and inexperienced and wandered through the streets, and threw bouquets of flowers in the air.

I knew of no alternative to the condemnation of still air, to the misery of clinging, humid atmosphere.

I was young and inexperienced and I wandered through the streets, ignorant of the world before my eyes.

And I had sought alternatives to the humid air, to the misery of stillness that in my city is very common, and which threatens thought and pleasure.

I entered latent months where I could not love for fear and sweat, and fear of sweat. I could not go home to love; the air would be too thick. I feared the water pooling on my belly, splashing off of cheeks.

"Where are you?" friends would ask. I had been around all the time, it seemed, and then become a notion, lost my face.

"Too much work." Because that they understood there, then. They would not understand, they would never have been able to pull away, for fear of being forgotten. But they did not forget me and I did not forget them, but they feared being forgotten.

It was true that I was hideous and unkempt and could not change the case.

When I was young and inexperienced I did not know that I could lead a different life.

18: The High Ceiling (b)

Can men turn green? He seemed to.

"You. Will. Not. Succeed. You imagine a genius mind for yourself. I imagine you as mud. You are buried, a buried child."

Jonas was sinking fast, drowning. I'd brought him what I could, which was me, because he'd asked for me. Not for the first time, I didn't measure up, but behind the sullen mask I made, starting with a level gaze, I noted that this was now a circus. Not for me to join the fat men as a waif.

Keep it simple, keep it easy.

17: The Cliff (b)

We followed a non-path back to the gas shack and I kicked at some scuttling things along the way. Started sweating into my boots when we got there, to the new sounds, closed in, scuffling, rasping sand sounds on broken concrete, and my boots were too worn.

"It's an admonition Mira," he said and he slammed the wall of the shack with the pipe. "It's like stinking wind."

"And it follows you everywhere?" Thump. Dust. Now Jack was sucking wind.

"You turn around and you see it, but you can't, no matter how you crane your neck to see around or close your eyes and ignore it, you can't get it from behind you, to lose it?"

"I can't. I can't."

"I got those too. Remember that sailing trip? That trip was one of those. That baby in Seattle is one of those. And now this afternoon; now this hating you. And you hating me. One of those too."

16: The Issue

With her music playing and the framed prints, shaded house plants in various stages of life, he began to relax. He loved his dapper lady.

"What's the issue? Why are you so bothered? My unflappable fellow! Usually you are." She fixed him thin coffee. He had brought her milk from the bodega. Milk for his housebound friend. She splashed a little in his coffee and set the beading carton on the table, outside of the splay of sunlight.

"Here's the issue in this. I went to the park to relax, enjoy the sun."

"It's too humid for that."

"This I found. I left anyway after about twenty minutes. The situation was disturbing. The nurses and the wives, they roll the old men out in their knee braces in the wheelchairs and everyone sits there gasping at the sky."

"An old man. You cannot see other old men, in the sun, outside on a hot day? Are you morbid? There are worse things. You are the one who does not shudder. My strong friend."

"I did not want to see them there. It is like a splinter under my thumb nail. A splinter from an otherwise smooth surface, or I wake up and have neck pain.

She tapped on the table.

"I am glad you came here. This is a calm place for you."

15: Is It Drier In The West?

We stopped to mill around in the trees, but it was too hot, so we got back in and kept on North. We thought if we crossed the river, started in on Nebraska and the plains, it might get more bearable more quickly. Now it was coming on noon, and a barbecue stand came up on the left.

The black barrel was smoking and the stand was fully empty, but the napkins were laid out on the counter, held down by a brick, with the forks and knives other side.

"Excuse me." Me in my t-shirt and jeans and a faded blue and white ball cap, sunglasses, newly post-collegiate, bristled, talking with a Yankee clip. Speaking now to a white haired white lady in round glasses and an apron who emerged from the shade in the hut, and stood straight and smiled at me. "We're headed up to cross the river at Cairo. Is that a big crossing?"

And she laughed and laughed. "You're not from around here, are you?"

"No, ma'am. We're not."

"It's a big enough crossing. It'll get ya'll across the river."

"That," I said to Nicco, getting back in the car with sandwiches, pulled pork on Wonderbread, and some pickles, "was not very helpful."

"You didn't ask the right question," he said.

"She was not very forthcoming. But I love her for it," I said.

"That's not something that I think she needs."

"Well, you fell in love in Nashville."

"And so I am entitled to be a cynic. I now have more experience."

14: A Blinding Flash (c)

"She was very distinguished."

"I know she was. I was there when you met. I was responsible for the crucial nudge. I recall jostling to the bar, and then a sweet face peering up from between a mess of elbows, and then turning my own elbow forcefully on your rib cage because you were talking to Cecy. You turned around, saw this new girl, and snubbed Cecy."

"Cecy doesn't notice things like that. She doesn't join conversations. She hovers around them like a moon, even around her own. A new orbit is easily found."

"So apart from what I already know, what drove the deadly wedge?"

"One main thing. She listened to foreign language radio in the morning, noon and night. In her underwear, putting up her hair, making an omelet, getting drunk on Carlo Rossi. But she speaks no foreign languages."

"That's dire. Foreign music is awful."

"Yes. And so are foreign languages."

"Don't you speak many foreign languages?"

"Yes. And I hate them all."

13: Becky and George Alone (c)

George's fever bloomed, spread and progressed to nausea, and the room began to rock. It was, he thought, as though he were in the hold of a rum runner navigating the Keys in a gale.

But rather than conscious torture, Becky had attempted nourishment. She might have been ridiculous about it, coddling him and cooing, but like so many times in the past, she had been well intentioned.

"This is a trial," he thought, "designed by God to test my resolve."

Downstairs, Becky had turned the volume up on the old RCA.

"George, come samba with us!"

12: A Blinding Flash (b)

We slipped past the hedges and the hedges rose and fell. Each hedge is tall like a dyke out there, and they hold in a churning, that's for sure. They are walls for secure men. Though they will not keep you out, you cannot see over them. You cannot see through them. They are for keeping in lurid swirls of paisley air.

11: The High Ceiling

"Sit down, and put your feet up, Sam. Please."

The table was glass, so I kept my feel on the rug.

"It's so fine that you are here. Don't you know that you bring such crazy ideas that I go crazy anticipating them? You possess colors. I can hear your mind sing. It is a wire. You pluck the wire when you come to visit, and I hear it, and oh my, I just wish I could sing with you. But I listen. Where have you been today?"

10: Becky and George Alone (b)

"I am, in a way, isolated," said Becky with a slump towards the andirons. On her knees before the fire, admiring the embers.

"Becks. Bexbexbexbexbex. Beckers. You are insulated. Not isolated. Insulated. Beckers."

"Like in a parka, George? Insulated from the cold?"

"Much like that. Along those lines."

"Or like bubble wrap? From violent fits and starts?"

"Close to the mark."

"And why am I not isolated instead? I think I know what you're going to say."

"What? Will I say that you have Galena?"

"Yes. I have my cat."

"You have your cat," said George, and he, too, went down on his knees from the sofa.

9: My Sister Drinks

I picked up my sister at the airport and she said, "Stop right there. At the liquor store."

I said, "It's not like that here, there are different stores for beer and liquor."

"I don't care. Stop wherever we need to to get my drinks."

So we got an eighteen pack of Coors Light. She had seven in an hour, and was hanging off my balcony. "I love New York."

I told her the next night, "Enough of that cheap shit." So I introduced her to cognac, which she pronounces "Coney-ack."

But she moved on to cheap brandy. "It's your fault," she tells me, "For introducing me to coney-ack."

8: Out and About

He went to bed with a headache and awoke with a headache, except on waking the headache was worse. A smell of exhaust came through his window. He brushed his teeth in the smell, choked through his sit-ups, and even on the subway he couldn't escape it. Downtown the same thing plagued him.

"It's really time to go," he thought in his office, far from a window, high in the sky.

But the next day was clearer, and the day after that too. He turned back to ideas and to waiting.

7: The Cliff

It failed, and failed spectacularly. When the whole thing had evaporated, I looked up at Jack. He was standing on the cliff looking straight out, arms on his hips. You never know what a man is thinking. He might well have been thinking about his first steps, or what his wife looks like when she gets out of the shower and smiles at him in the steam. Behind his black sunglasses he might even have had his eyes closed, where the event might have been scrolling over and over, in sepia or red. I suspect though that he was looking at that patch of desert, thinking about what he had put there, and what was gone, and what might he might put in its place.

6: Becky and George Alone

When Becky drew her hands back from the fire, she reached with her right towards the cat, Galena, and with her left moved towards her drink. The cat moved away. The glass wasn't where it had been.

"George, did you take my drink? George?"

He replied from behind the Chinese screen, brushed with an emperor on his throne, all layers of silk, his heavy hat a winged capital, and his eyes half closed.

"Got it. yup. Just topping you up, Becks." Galena sat and looked at the screen.

"Just a topper for you, Becks," continued George. "Want to keep you irrigated."

"I'm not a cash crop."

"Maybe not. Maybe more camel?"

When Becky laughed, she shivered, but was silent, and George had to look from behind the screen to know that she was not upset at him. She turned her head and leaned in a curve. Gave him a smile.

"Does a bourbon and rocks have to take so long?"

5: A Miracle and Worse

"You saw what? A miracle? You simple twat, you saw coincidence."
"I saw something you can never see, that will not be seen again."
"You saw your dreams."
"I saw what I wanted to see, but that made it no less true."

4: Where to Sit

Sarah had her ticket and her schedule, and she had a book to read, and a banana. Her train didn't leave for a half hour though, and she had no where to sit. The meager benches were full and if she sat at the lunch counter they would expect her to buy something. Looking around her she saw a number of travelers sitting on the floor.

"That's disgusting," she thought. "There's no dignity anymore."

There were businessmen in suits, suburbanites (she thought) in white sneakers, and what looked and sounded like a youth theater group, all sitting cross legged or with their knees up to their chest, in the dust and the dragged-in sidewalk grease.

"I want to read my book."

3: The Cafe

“I can only remember three things from those times,” she said. “That ugly baby at the market. The intense crowds of foreigners. And you, in that blousy scarf. Where did you find it? And, oh,” reaching out to touch his wrist across the table, “you were so tolerant. Among all our friends, you held the fewest grudges.”

“I had few to hold. I have more now.”

“I know you do. But travel again. That may relieve you,” she said, removing her fingers from his fist, where he had loosely clutched them.

2: The Culling

The man with the roseate nose emerged from his little mansion, and looked around. He had a garden in which he had planted radishes, good for the liver, and (he had sometimes chuckled over this), potatoes, good for very little. The original design of the place was not so evident now, but could be faintly seen in the garden’s borders which ran down the hill toward a little creek. Down there, he thought, I ought to go and clear up the grass.

Further up the road, past the horse shed and the field-stone farm house, about 30 people and their animals were quickly abandoning a village. Roosters were flying to the roofs of cottages. Rabbit hutches were crowded into the trunks of little cars.

1: A Blazing Flash

“It’s not a marriage of convenience if you find it inconvenient,” I said, quickly becoming aware of the redundancy. “Let me clarify: they can’t apply the label if at every step you run into another barrier which prevents you from committing youthful indiscretions. That’s inconvenient.” We are seldom at our best, or it wouldn’t be our best, I thought, mulling my last statement.

“They’ll find another for it, won’t they? Won’t they simply continue to apply labels as long as she and I share a roof?” He leaned back with the casual sangfroid of his class. “I have so many labels already, and I use so many regardless. Where’s that French girl of yours?”

“She’s Nebraskan,” I said. “And she isn’t mine anymore. I went and made myself unacceptable.”

“That took too long. You weren’t cruel, were you? It goes quicker if you’re cruel.”