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Authors: Ethan Canin

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BOOK: Emperor of the Air
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On the street the sun’s thrashing around off the fenders and the white shirts, and it’s like walking into a wall. But I cross the street without really knowing what I’m doing and get into the car on the driver’s side. All the time I’m crossing the street I know everybody’s looking, but nobody says anything. When I get into the car I slip the seat back a little.

“How’d you get this?”

“It’s Hank’s,” she says. “It’s new. Where should we go?”

I don’t know what she’s doing with Hank’s car, but my foot’s pushing up and down on the gas and the clowns out front are looking, so I have to do something and I say, “The lake, let’s go up to Fountain Lake.” I put it in drive and the tires squeal a second before we’re gone.

The windows are up and I swear the car’s so quiet I’m not sure there’s an engine. I push the gas and don’t hear anything but just feel the leather seats pushing up under our backs. The leather’s cool and has this buttered look. The windshield is tinted at the top. After about three blocks I start thinking to myself, I’m out, and I wheel the Cadillac out Jamaicaway toward the river. I really don’t know the way up to Fountain Lake. Katy doesn’t either, though, so I don’t ask her.

We cross over the river at BU and head up Memorial Drive, past all the college students on the lawns throwing Frisbees and plastic footballs. Over by Harvard they’re pulling rowing sculls out of the water. They’re all wearing their red jackets and holding big glasses of beer while they work. The grass is so green it hurts my eyes.

On the long stretch past Boylston I put down the electric window and hold my arm out so that the air picks it up like a wing when we speed up, and then, just before we get out to the highway, something clicks in my head and I know it’s time to change the reel. I touch the brakes for a second. I count to five and imagine the theater going dark, then one of the wives in the audience saying something out loud, real irate. I see Mr. Able opening the door to the projection booth, the expression on his face just like one my father has. It’s a certain look, half like he’s hit somebody and half like somebody’s hit him. But then as we come out onto Route 2 and I hit the gas hard one of my father’s sayings comes to me, that it’s all water over the bridge, and it’s like inside my head another reel suddenly runs out. Just like that, that part of my life is gone.

By the time were out past Lincoln I’m really not thinking anything except Wow, we’re out of here. The car feels good. You get a feeling sometimes right after you do something. Katy’s next to me with her real tight body and the soft way girls look, and I’m no kid anymore. I think about how nice it would be to be able to take the car whenever you want and go up to the lake. I’m thinking all this and floating the car around big wide turns, and I can see the hills now way up the road in front of us. I look over at Katy, and then at the long yellow line sliding under the front of the car, and it seems to me that I’m doing something big. All the time Katy’s just sitting there. Then she says, “I can’t believe it.”

She’s right. I’m on the way to Fountain Lake, going fast in a car, the red arrow shivering around seventy-five in the dial, a girl next to me, pretty, smelling the nice way girls do. And I turn to her and I don’t know why except you get a feeling when you finally bust out, and I say, “I love you, Katy,” in a certain kind of voice, my foot crushing the accelerator and the car booming along the straightaways like it’s some kind of rocket.

 

 

 

 

WHERE WE ARE NOW

 

 

 

 

W
HEN I MET JODI
, she was an English major at Simmons College, in Boston, and for a while after that she tried to be a stage actress. Then she tried writing a play, and when that didn’t work out she thought about opening a bookstore. We’ve been married eleven years now, and these days she checks out books at the public library. I don’t mean she reads them; I mean she works at the circulation desk.

We’ve been arguing lately about where we live. Our apartment is in a building with no grass or bushes, only a social room, with plastic chairs and a carpet made of Astroturf. Not many people want to throw a party on Astroturf, Jodi says. She points out other things, too: the elevator stops a foot below the floors, so you have to step up to get out; the cold water comes out rusty in the mornings; three weeks ago a man was robbed in the hallway by a kid with a bread knife. The next Sunday night Jodi rolled over in bed, turned on the light, and said, “Charlie, let’s look at houses.”

It was one in the morning. From the fourth floor, through the night haze, I could see part of West Hollywood, a sliver of the observatory, lights from the mansions in the canyon.

“There,” I said, pointing through the window. “Houses.”

“No, let’s look at houses to buy.”

I covered my eyes with my arm. “Lovebird,” I said, “where will we find a house we can afford?”

“We can start this weekend,” she said.

That night after dinner she read aloud from the real estate section. “Santa Monica,” she read. “Two bedrooms, yard, half-mile to beach.”

“How much?”

She looked closer at the paper. “We can look other places.”

She read to herself for a while. Then she said that prices seemed lower in some areas near the Los Angeles airport.

“How much?”

“A two-bedroom for $160,000.”

I glanced at her.

“Just because we look doesn’t mean we have to buy it,” she said.

“There’s a real estate agent involved.”

“She won’t mind.”

“It’s not honest,” I said.

She closed the paper and went to the window. I watched a muscle in her neck move from side to side. “You know what it’s like?” she said, looking into the street.

“I just don’t want to waste the woman’s time,” I answered.

“It’s like being married to a priest.”

I knew why she said that. I’m nothing like a priest. I’m a physical education teacher in the Hollywood schools and an assistant coach—basketball and baseball. The other night I’d had a couple of other coaches over to the house. We aren’t all that much alike—I’ll read a biography on the weekend, listen to classical music maybe a third of the time—but I still like to have them over. We were sitting in the living room, drinking beer and talking about the future. One of the coaches has a two-year-old son at home. He didn’t have a lot of money, he said, so he thought it was important to teach his kid morality. I wasn’t sure he was serious, but when he finished I told a story anyway about an incident that had happened a few weeks before at school. I’d found out that a kid in a gym class I was teaching, a quiet boy and a decent student, had stolen a hat from a men’s store. So I made him return it and write a letter of apology to the owner. When I told the part about how the man was so impressed with the letter that he offered the boy a job, Jodi remarked that I was lucky it hadn’t turned out the other way.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He could have called the police,” she said. “He could have thanked you for bringing the boy in and then called the police.”

“I just don’t think so.”

“Why not? The boy could have ended up in jail.”

“I just don’t think so,” I said. “I think most people will respond to honesty. I think that’s where people like us have to lead the way.”

It’s an important point, I said, and took a drink of beer to take the edge off what I was saying. Too much money makes you lose sight of things, I told them. I stopped talking then, but I could have said more. All you have to do is look around: in Beverly Hills there’s a restaurant where a piece of veal costs thirty dollars. I don’t mind being an assistant coach at a high school, even though you hear now about the fellow who earns a hundred thousand dollars with the fitness truck that comes right to people’s homes. The truck has Nautilus, and a sound system you wouldn’t expect. He keeps the stars in shape that way—Kirk Douglas, the movie executives. The man with the truck doesn’t live in Hollywood. He probably lives out at the beach, in Santa Monica or Malibu.

But Hollywood’s fine if people don’t compare it with the ideas they have. Once in a while, at a party, someone from out of town will ask me whether any children of movie stars are in my classes. Sometimes Jodi says the answer is yes but that it would violate confidentiality to reveal their names. Other times I explain that movie stars don’t live in Hollywood these days, that most of them don’t even work here, that Hollywood is just car washes and food joints, and that the theater with the stars’ footprints out front isn’t much of a theater anymore. The kids race hot rods by it on Thursday nights.

Hollywood is all right, though, I say. It’s got sun and wide streets and is close to everything. But Jodi wants to look anyway.

 

Next Sunday I drive, and Jodi gives directions from the map. The house is in El Segundo. While I’m parking I hear a loud noise, and a 747 flies right over our heads. I watch it come down over the freeway.

“Didn’t one of them land on the road once?” I ask.

“I don’t remember it,” Jodi says. She looks at the map. “The house should be on this block.”

“I think it was in Dallas. I think it came right down on top of a car.”

I think about that for a minute. It shakes me up to see a huge plane so low. I think of the people inside the one that landed on the road—descending, watching the flaps and the ailerons, the houses and automobiles coming into view.

“The ad says there are nice trees in back,” says Jodi.

She leads us to the house. It’s two stories, yellow stucco walls, with a cement yard and a low wire fence along the sidewalk. The roof is tar paper. Down the front under the drainpipes are two long green stains.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Just because we look doesn’t mean anything.” She knocks on the door and slips her arm into mine. “Maybe you can see the ocean from the bedroom windows.”

She knocks again. Then she pushes the door a little, and we walk into the living room. There are quick footsteps, and a woman comes out of the hallway. “Good afternoon,” she says. “Would you sign in, please?”

She points to a vinyl-covered book on the coffee table, and Jodi crosses the room and writes something in it. Then the agent hands me a sheet of paper with small type on it and a badly copied picture. I’ve never shopped for a house before. I see two columns of abbreviations, some numbers. It’s hard to tell what the picture is of, but then I recognize the long stains under the drainpipes. I fold the sheet and put it into my pants pocket. Then I sit down on the couch and look around. The walls are light yellow, and one of them is covered with a mirror that has gold marbling in it. On the floor is a cream-colored shag rug, with a matted area near the front door where a couch or maybe a trunk once stood. Above the mantel is a painting of a blue whale.

“Do the appliances and plumbing work?” Jodi asks.

“Everything works,” says the agent.

Jodi turns the ceiling light on and off. She opens and closes the door to a closet in the corner, and I glimpse a tricycle and a bag full of empty bottles. I wonder what the family does on a Sunday afternoon when buyers look at their house.

“The rooms have a nice feel,” the agent says. “You know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure I do,” I say.

“It’s hard to explain,” she says, “but you’ll see.”

“We understand,” says Jodi.

In the marbled mirror I watch Jodi’s reflection. Three windows look onto the front yard, and she unlatches and lifts each one.

“I like a careful buyer,” says the agent.

“You can never be too thorough,” Jodi answers. Then she adds, “We’re just looking.”

The agent smiles, drumming her fingers against her wrist. I know she’s trying to develop a strategy. In college I learned about strategies. I worked for a while selling magazines over the phone: talk to the man if you think they want it; talk to the woman if you think they don’t. I was thinking of playing ball then, semi-pro, and the magazine work was evenings. I was twenty-three years old. I thought I was just doing work until I was discovered.

“Why don’t you two look around,” I say now to the agent. “I’ll stay here.”

“Perfect,” she says.

She leads Jodi into the next room. I hear a door open and shut, and then they begin talking about the floors, the walls, the ceiling. We aren’t going to buy the house, and I don’t like being here. When I hear the two of them walk out through the back door into the yard, I get up from the couch and go over to look at the painting above the mantel. It’s an underwater view, looking below the whale as it swims toward the surface. Above, the sunny sky is broken by ripples. On the mantel is a little pile of plaster powder, and as I stand there, I realize that the painting has just recently been hung. I go back to the couch. Once on a trip up the coast I saw a whale that the tide had trapped in a lagoon. It was north of Los Angeles, along the coastal highway, in a cove sheltered by two piers of man-moved boulders. Cars were parked along the shoulder. People were setting up their cameras while the whale moved around in the lagoon, stirring up the bottom. I don’t like to think about trapped animals, though, so instead I sit down and try to plan what to do tomorrow at practice. The season hasn’t started yet, and we’re still working on base-running—the double steal, leading from the inside of the bag. Baseball isn’t a thing you think about, though; baseball
comes
. I’m an assistant coach and maybe could have been a minor league pitcher, but when I think of it I realize I know only seven or eight things about the whole game. We learn so slowly, I think.

BOOK: Emperor of the Air
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