Flight (18 page)

Those are the pearls that were his eyes.

He remembers the lines from high school, when he had to memorize the whole poem.
Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made.
He stops thinking about that right away. He doesn’t want to think about sinking down, and he especially doesn’t want to think about what might be living in the water around him, because he keeps feeling little pricks on his legs, as if
something is nibbling on him. It’s probably pain from the break, he tells himself. Lots of guys have been picked up in the gulf. No one has been eaten yet.

The thought of getting picked up makes him grope instinctively for his radio. He must have ejected even farther from shore than he intended to, because he can’t see land anywhere. But that’s to be expected. Everything looks closer together from the air. You get a false sense of distance and scale.

He looks at the sky. He has to pee. After a few minutes he thinks,
What the hell,
and lets it go. A warm spot spreads around his crotch, and his eyes fill with tears of relief and joy. It’s over. It’s really over. He won’t be expecting to die every day, won’t have to look out the window of his plane and see the smoking remains of someone else’s world. He’ll return to his own life. He’ll see his daughter for the first time. They’ll fly him home, and Carol will hand him a tiny package, and there she’ll be.

Again the feeling comes, pinpricks like hundreds of miniature mouths. It’s things like this that can drive a guy crazy. He’s seen it happen. He breathes deeply and hauls himself farther out of the water and onto his raft. Hold the position and wait for the
chopchop
of a Spad. Those are the instructions. He can’t go anywhere now. When the pinpricks come, he stares harder into the blue expanse above. It doesn’t look like the place he came from. It doesn’t look like somewhere he ever could have been.

“Hello there, Margaret,” he says to the sky. “It’s your dad.”

There’s a strange
thunk.

“Sorry, Dad,” she says.

“Margaret?” He opens his eyes. The sky is white outside. Carol is standing in the room. No, it’s Margaret. Margaret, fully grown.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” Her voice remains soft, as if she still wants to avoid waking him. She has a ball of white in her hand. “I needed to borrow some of Mom’s socks. I’m going for a run.”

“What time is it?” He feels disoriented. Things are flying around in his head, and he tries to nail them down. Socks. Gumbo. Cathay Pacific. Chickens killed by dogs.

“It’s about seven thirty.” Margaret moves closer to the bed. “You should get some more sleep.”

“Is everyone up?” It’s all slotting into place now: Leanne’s wedding, Carol’s preparations, Margaret here without David. Something has happened between them, but she isn’t saying what.

“Trevor’s still asleep, and I think Kit is, too. Leanne and Mom are having coffee in the kitchen and planning their attack.” She picks his book up off the bedside table. “Are you reading this?”

Will squints at it.
The Great Trajectory.
Society in decline. He lifts his head. “Yeah, You know it?”

She sets it back down carefully, as if afraid of breaking it. “The guy came to Northwestern and talked. Most people think he’s kind of a lightweight.”

Will looks at the book on his bedside table, confused. It’s too early to deal with Margaret. Should he defend the book or apologize for reading it? Is he meant to come up with an excuse—
It was the only thing I could find in the airport bookstore?

“I guess I should get up,” he says, letting his head drop back on the pillow with a soft
whumph.

“No, sleep some more,” she says. “I’m sorry I woke you.” She glides to the door clutching the ball of socks to her chest. He sees now that she’s dressed in running gear: shorts, T-shirt, a pull-on windbreaker. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail.

“I’ll see you in a little while,” she says, her voice still low. She slips out the partially open door.

He rolls over and tries to go back to sleep. But now he can smell the warm yeastiness of toast, hear the low murmur of voices in the kitchen. From Trevor’s room, across the hall, comes the sound of motion on sheets, that twitchy restlessness kids get just before they wake up. From anywhere, anytime now, all hell could break loose.

Just as he thinks it, he hears shouts from downstairs. The door to the garage slams, and then Carol yells up from the bottom of the stairs.

“Will, wake up! We need you! One of the doves is hurt!”

-------------------

The door shuts behind Margaret with a satisfying thud. She stops on the porch to kneel and tighten one of her laces. She doesn’t have her running radio with her; she wasn’t that organized, but this morning she will be happy to enjoy the silence. The house is always so full of her mother’s activity. Buzzing—that’s the only word she can think of for it. Her mother is always buzzing.

Margaret straightens her legs and keeps her hands on the ground for a minute, stretching her hamstrings. Then she stands up and surveys the sky. A light mist is falling. It won’t be bad to run in.

No one else in her family ever works out. Margaret works out four days a week, alternating between running and going to the gym to lift weights, but at her parents’, she runs every day. It’s partly because it makes her less tense, helps her maintain a sense of calm in the midst of her family’s chaotic inefficacy, but also she feels she should set a good example. Her mother and father, for instance, should be taking brisk walks every day. At their age, they’re risking heart trouble by being inactive. And Leanne could probably use some strength training. She’s always been thin and willowy, but she doesn’t look as if she could pick up a sack of potatoes with those arms, let alone a baby if she should have one.
Strike that thought,
Margaret tells herself. That’s her mother’s job, planning Leanne’s future for her.

She heads down the road, scanning it for cars. There’s one in the distance, and she squints at it, trying to make out its shape. As it draws nearer, she makes out a small pickup. She veers left to stay well out of its way.

She will run down to the first east crossroad, then turn around and go back to the first western one. Michigan’s back roads were laid out by surveyors before anyone really lived there. They’re set down in a grid, with half a mile between them. Ten laps back and forth between the two roads will be five miles, as accurately as on a treadmill, and she’ll never leave sight of the house. She’ll be back before Trevor even wakes up.

She assesses the visit as she runs. So far, so good. There has been
no word from David, which could mean that he’s still angry, or that he’s taking this time to calm down. She hopes it’s the latter, and that he’ll interpret her not calling as giving him some space to cool off. When she goes back, they can sit down and talk things over in a reasonable way. That’s what they’ve always been good at, being reasonable.

As for the family visit, that’s going okay. The whole shrimp thing could have been a disaster, but Carol seemed happy with the gumbo. Who cares if she didn’t eat her shrimp, leaving it lying at the bottom of the bowl like an affront? Will is crashing around, preoccupied with God knows what, and Leanne is acting vague, but they’re always like that. Leanne probably has pre-wedding nerves. Margaret remembers crying a lot in the weeks before her wedding. Two weeks before the scheduled date, she had to fly to Irvine and find them an apartment. She had chosen Irvine for grad school over Princeton because David had a two-year visiting appointment there. When she got home, David confessed that in her absence, he had picked up the hostess at the Denny’s out by the expressway.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” he said, wearing an expression of pleased contrition that would become all too familiar. “We just went to my car for a blow job.”

“The
hostess?
” Margaret remembers saying, as if that were the hard part to believe. Not the manager, not even one of the ugly-uniformed waitresses, but the hostess, the girl who sits at the cash register cracking her gum and checking her nails, her jaw pausing with the difficulty of calculating change for a twenty.

Why did I marry him?
she asks herself. The question thuds along with the beat of her sneakers on the roadside:
why, why, why, why, why.
She has reached the first cross street and turns around to head back in the other direction.

She always kept a mental list of things that were right about David. He was smart—that was first. People called him brilliant. He was attractive. He had a good sense of humor, and he got along well with her friends. His was one of those East Coast Waspy families in which everyone seemed to be a lawyer or a judge, but they liked her.
And David was ambitious. He wanted what she wanted: a successful academic career, a nice home, kids. He had an idea of the kind of wife he wanted that fit Margaret, just as he fit her ideas about what a husband should be.

His inability to be faithful she saw as a glitch, though he assured her it was actually a strength.

“People have ridiculous expectations,” he told her. “I’m not saying I’m going to spend our marriage sleeping around. I’m just saying that as soon as you tell me I can’t do something, it’s all but guaranteed I’ll want to do it.”

That had a certain logic that Margaret couldn’t help but acknowledge. That was one thing you could say about David—he was logical. She had always liked that in men. She was logical herself. David was not the kind of man who would pack up his family and move to the country on a whim, when it would clearly make his wife miserable and hobble his children’s education. He saw marriage as she did—as a partnership, one conducted in a sane and rational manner by two intelligent people. They would approach the institution as adults, he told her, not like lovesick kids. She agreed. How could she not? David was brilliant and worldly. He was a man who was going places.

Besides, the wedding date was approaching. She had seventy-five people arriving in Chicago to see her get married. She had made up a basket to be delivered to each of their hotel rooms with a bottle of wine and a typed list of attractions they might want to visit. She had handed over eleven thousand dollars in checks from her father for the wedding and banquet at the University Club, and she and David had paid a thousand for a cocktail reception at the Drake. She had reservations for a family breakfast and a rehearsal dinner for twenty. She had appointments for a manicure, a pedicure, a facial, and for a stylist to sew pearls into her hair.

Her father was going to walk her down the aisle, and then this impressive, ambitious man was going to stand in front of all those people and agree to be her husband. What was a blow job here and there, she reasoned, compared to that?

It had gone fine for a couple of years, while they were still delighted with each other, and then for a few more while they were each too busy worrying about their work—Margaret’s dissertation, David’s first book—to have time for other concerns. When they both landed interviews at Northwestern and managed to get their departments to urge each other’s appointments, everything seemed to be going even better than they could have expected. Getting two academic jobs in the same place was an almost unheard-of coup. They laughed and toasted their good fortune, though secretly they both knew it wasn’t luck but hard work and determination paying off.

It was in Evanston that things started going wrong. After they had achieved exactly what they both set out to do, a strange dissatisfaction set in. When David started an affair with a woman who taught in the art department, Margaret couldn’t turn her head anymore. They fought, and the result was that they decided it was time to have a baby.

Margaret reaches the other road and turns around again. She finds it so hard to think about Trevor in the context of her own unhappiness. She hates to admit that not only was the child she adores conceived in a desperate attempt to save her marriage, but he contributed to its decline. Once Trevor was born, everything changed, and the change seemed to be to David’s advantage and her disadvantage. He spent more time at his office, citing the difficulty of concentrating with Trevor around. He suggested they hire a nanny so she could do the same, but Margaret couldn’t bring herself to do that. Even as she resented the baby’s demands on her, she couldn’t find it in her to hand him off to someone else.

Physically she was exhausted, and mentally she felt drained. The baby required so much attention, so much love and care, that it seemed there was nothing left after giving it. And yet the worst of it—Margaret finds it difficult admitting this even to herself—was the strange transformation in desirability they both underwent. David, as a father, became more attractive. Margaret saw it in women’s eyes as they walked across campus, David carrying Trevor
in the backpack. Even the undergraduate girls oohed and aahed, and their admiration moved easily from the baby to the father. It was as if, in some cold calculus of sexual partnering, David’s stock had gone up.

Margaret’s, meanwhile, had fallen. Even after she began working out again and lost the pregnancy weight, even when she cleaned the milk stains and strained carrots off her blouse and put on a nice outfit and heels, walking down the street with a stroller, she had become another sort of creature. No longer a desirable female, she was absorbed into the sentimental landscape of maternity. It felt like a black hole.

This is what you have always wanted,
she told herself. She had ticked off everything on her list: degrees, job, husband, child. Why, in the flush of such fulfillment, should she regret losing something that had never been important to her? She found herself feeling angry when construction workers saw her with Trevor and only nodded politely. How could she miss attention that had been unwelcome?

It was all too predictable that she would turn to someone else to make her feel attractive again. That it was one of David’s colleagues causes her to cringe in embarrassment and self-recrimination. But the ground rules of their marriage had been clear: no strings attached when it came to sex. And even as she acknowledges that what she feels for Vasant Devaraj is qualitatively different from what David seemed to have felt in his many dalliances, she can’t help but feel that he applied an unfair double standard when he became so furious about it.