"The tides come and go," he said. "The waves keep coming."
He stored a sleeping bag in the back of his truck. Sometimes he would drive up to Big Sur. She knew where the spare key to his apartment was in case he was away. He'd come back with stubble on his face and a bag of dirty laundry.
One day she found an eviction notice on his door. She tried phoning. He never called.
Stanley was a doctor from Chicago. She'd met him on a flight to New York, where he was lecturing on breakthroughs in cardiology. He knew so much. His beeper would sound in the early hours of the morning, and she would hear his grave professional voice on the phone, the one he used with administrators, and the more sensitive tone he used with patients. He used that tone with her sometimes.
"There can be no emotions in an operating room," he said.
Jack sold insurance. At least he said he did. He had green eyes and talked about the future. Not family, but industry, society, the way things were going to be twenty years down the road. He'd spend an entire dinner discussing fuel prices and OPEC, then change the subject to electric cars and a guy he knew.
"I sell fear," he said once. "I know that's a harsh way of putting it."
"You trick people."
"No, they get what they pay for."
He was a true salesman. Everywhere they went, he always paid cash. She couldn't get over the fact. He'd pat the hood of his Cadillac and wink. "Cash!" If a dress was two hundred dollars, he'd ask, "How much if I give you cash?" The price never changed. "Never hurts to try." But she could see that it did in the way the salespeople regarded her after. She couldn't understand Jack's need to pay less than everyone, why he felt he deserved a discount. He called it "plain smarts." Then he would argue. "What do you mean it's unattractive?"
She kept seeing him, though. Perhaps because of his eyes. He had soft lips.
He left her, too.
Then she met Kurt. He had red hair and a chestnut beard that twitched when he smiled. He played professional baseball—a pitcher who had worked his way up through the farm system. The Yankees gave him his big break, then traded him to California. It was in all the papers, he said. He took her to pubs where the bartenders knew him and would give him free beers. He'd tip his cap and pretend to be throwing a ball, only he'd wind up pointing a finger at the man, mouthing exaggerated thank-yous. He'd slap the bar with relief, as though he'd come right from the plane—landed and stopped off to see his old buddies. He confided to Kim that he always forgot the bartenders' names.
"Christ," he said. "I probably know one in every state—every time we travel."
"I bet you've got a girl in every state," she said.
He grinned and didn't deny it. He'd shake hands with the men at the bar, strangers. He loved the camaraderie as much as the game, the endless stories and discussions of numbers that meant nothing to Kim.
"How those kids of yours?" she'd hear him say to the bartender, or "You still getting out to the park?"
"Yanks coulda used you this year, Kurt. Any chance ya coming back?"
He'd return to the table with two sweating bottles and roll his eyes as though to apologize for the delay, the responsibilities of fame. She figured he had money. He just didn't know what to do with it. He wore jeans and drank for free.
She asked what it was like growing up on a farm, and he told her about early morning frosts and homemade sausage, work-filled days that made dinner taste like heaven. She asked if he was religious.
"Fuck no," he said. "The closest I get to religion is pitching a no-hitter. How 'bout you?"
She couldn't understand how he went from working on a farm to playing professional ball.
"Did you have to audition? They didn't just send someone out to the farm and offer you a job, did they?"
He tipped his bottle back and wiped his beard. His eyes widened suddenly and he rolled his head back with laughter.
"I was wondering how you knew I grew up on a farm," he said. "I'm thinking, Wow, does it show that bad? I guess you don't know about the minors, do ya? We call it the farm system. Christ, you're cute."
She started to read the sports pages, to see if his name was ever mentioned. Sometimes it was. It would show up in little print. A month later she read he'd been cut. It didn't say why, only that he'd been sent back to the minors. Back to the farm, she thought.
He wouldn't call. They never did. What was there to discuss anyway? If they no longer wanted to see her, did she really need to hear their reasons? She could think of a million, but they only needed one, and that one was always the same.
She remembered as a girl finding pennies on the ground. "Heads up," her father would say. "A keeper." She'd put it in her pocket. Now she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen someone stop for a penny.
After four years, she was promoted and moved to first class. The shifts were no better, but she traveled to exotic places. She sent a postcard to her father of a giant stone Buddha with ivy growing up its belly. "Still doing push-ups?" she wrote. She sent another of Big Ben, its spire silhouetted against the moon, and wrote, "I looked for Peter Pan. Couldn't find him."
Twice she tried calling her father, maybe more, not to talk but to hear his voice. The years made her reasons for not calling him seem less real, and then, possibly, there was the chance that they might talk, that she'd find herself in conversation without having to plan it. But the times he answered, she'd freeze. "Who's this? Hello? Hello?" he'd bark, then a click, as she stood there with a shaking hand covering the receiver.
One time on a flight, she wasn't paying attention and dropped a hot towel in a woman's lap. The woman swiped at the towel as if it were a live snake.
"Hot, hot!"
"It got away," said Kim, retrieving it from the floor. "I'm so sorry."
The woman adjusted her glasses and straightened the rings on her fingers.
The senior stewardess on board waited for Kim behind the curtain. "Those towels can be tricky," she said, clucking her tongue. "You'll get the hang of it, though."
The older stewardesses stuck together. She'd see them in the airport coffee shops—tight uninviting circles. One said to Kim, "They're talking about a revised mandatory hair length. If I had your hair, I'd just hate to have to cut it."
Her hair only came down to her shoulders. If need be she could pin it up under a hat. There was nothing she could do or say that would warm them to her, and she hardly wanted to make herself look less desirable.
She'd flown an extra shift. The terminal was deserted by the time she got off, and her feet throbbed. She couldn't wait to sit on the bus. She passed the bar, which was still open, and saw the stewardess who'd made the comment about her hair sitting over a drink. The woman spotted Kim and waved her over before she could look away. They were alone, save for the bartender and a janitor, who was cleaning the tiled entrance to the rest rooms with a bucket of water and a mop. The bartender was drying glasses, stacking them on a shelf behind the register. The woman's face powder had dried and caked around the eyes, and she looked as though she hadn't slept in days. She gestured to a chair, but Kim remained standing. She pointed at Kim with a half-smoked cigarette and blew smoke and tapped ash in an amber-colored glass ashtray.
"I've been watching you," she said, as though she'd been waiting for a reason to report Kim. "You don't want to sit?"
Kim knew to be careful. "It's late, ma'am."
"Ma'am?" The woman's lips curled. They were faded. Her lipstick had rubbed off on the glass before her. "You're like the rest of them," she said, slurring slightly. "What is it you want?"
"I don't—"
"What are your plans, goals?"
Kim shook her head. The woman smiled again, only the smile quickly disappeared. She ground out her cigarette.
"I've been in this business twenty years."
She signaled the bartender for another drink and took out a cigarette. She lit it and shook the match out and leaned across the table.
"You don't mind that you're a blank sla
te for men to write on?" She stared at Kim. "You want to be like the rest of them?"
"No, ma'am," said Kim.
"I'm sure you have your excuses."
The bartender came around with her glass and took the empty one. "Fifteen minutes, Pat."
She thanked him.
"Bit of advice," she said, turning back to Kim. "I've never relied on anyone but myself."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Why do you keep calling me ma'am? I'm not some dowdy schoolteacher. Let me guess: Don't speak unless spoken to, right?"
Kim didn't say anything.
"This is your first job, isn't it? Did you go to college?"
"No."
"All the excuses." She sipped her drink. "You do have a plan, though. Yes, you do."
"It's late."
"How do you live with yourself?"
Kim shook her head. What had she done for this woman to single her out? Who was Pat to tell her how to live or to presume that something was lacking from her life? Did she really believe that anything she could say might lessen a void or fill some sense of another woman's emptiness? No, it was pure spite, she told herself. She never wanted to see the woman again. She tried to stare as blankly as possible.
"You make me so angry," said the woman. "Hell, it's your life."
Kim nodded.
She took off her shoes on the bus and leaned her head against the window. When she got home, she hung up her uniform and put on a nightshirt and sat in bed. There was a note pad by the phone, and a pen, and she tore off a sheet and wrote:
Father once said, Women have caused wars, but none have stopped them.
She tried to think of one. She looked at the words on the page, then wrote:
Lemon rinds and pumpkin seeds.
She thought some more and added:
The second greatest commandment wasn't even a commandment.
She folded the piece of paper twice, got out of bed, and went to the closet. She dug through layers of shoes to get to the shoe box in the back, lifted the lid, and stuck the piece of paper inside. She went back to bed, set the alarm on her clock, and turned off the light. She had to get up in four hours.
It was summer, 1976. On the news one night she watched footage of square-rigged sailing ships in New York Harbor. They were honoring the country's bicentennial. She sat on her bed and ate salad from a bowl, the dressing sweet, puddled deep in the bottom, and thought how beautiful the tall ships were, their masts like stacked crosses rising to the sky, sails fat with wind, straining against their ties. "All the way from Norway," said the announcer about one. "That's a long trip home." The ships seemed displaced as they slipped silently past navy destroyers, tugboats, and modern fireboats vigorously spuming water hundreds of feet, soaring arches that wowed the commentators. The camera helicoptered up for a closing shot. It was far above the harbor, looking down, and all the boats seemed the same except for the sailing ships, which were still discernible because of their masts—quiet, prickly islands drifting. For one day they had their time in the light. Afterward they'd be put away like magnificent obsolete toys.
For weeks she thought about those ships, their melancholy stillness amid so much commotion. Nothing could touch them. Was it perhaps all they could do to stay afloat, to get through the day?
She turned twenty-three and then twenty-four. The senior stewardesses still considered her young. Her father sent birthday cards. Twenty-four came attached to a slim package. She opened the card first: a glossy photo of a cake that read For my little girl. There were five hundred-dollar bills taped to the inside, and she peeled the tape off carefully and put the money in her purse. Then she tore the wrapping paper off the package. It was her mom's leather photo album. She flipped it open to a sepia picture of a group of men and her father, shirtless, pants rolled, piling sandbags around a bunker. He was smiling, as though he were really enjoying himself, a cigarette tucked behind his ear. She stuck the card in the album and closed it. Then she took it back out. She went to the phone and dialed her father and stared at the shiny card as the line rang.
"Daddy," she said, "it's me."
There was surprise in the silence.
"I got the money."
"Oh, the money," he said.
"I miss you."
"That's for savings, now."
"I'm holding the card in my hand. Dad, do you have something to write with?"
"Are you listening to me?" he said.
"Dad, I want you to have my phone number."
She could hear grumbling, a drawer opening.
"Do you have a pen?" she said.
"Yes. Go, go, go."
She said the number and repeated it.
"What about the album?" he said.
"Yes, Dad. I love you."
She hung up and went to the refrigerator for ice cream. She sat on her bed with a spoon and a paper towel. She didn't need the approval of the older stewardesses. Or, if she had at one point, she knew she didn't need it now. At the end of the day, if a new stewardess approached her in the airport bar, starched from college, an unwrinkled smile, she would invite her to sit. The older stewardesses—they were bitter because they'd been at their jobs too long. She couldn't become like them.
An hour later her father called.
"Six years," he said. "Six years without a goddamn phone call. If your mother were alive—"
Kim didn't say a word. She just listened.
She met Sam in '79 on a flight to Paris.
"I'm from Paris," he said with a heavy drawl. "Paris, Texas."
At first she didn't like his laugh. It drew attention. He had a way of working his fingers when he talked, as though he were playing the piano. It wouldn't have been so noticeable if his hands weren't so large.
"He flies this route regularly," said one of the other stewardesses.
"I don't feel like talking to him," Kim said.
"He's one of the richest men in Dallas."
Kim peered back through the curtain. He'd stuffed his napkin into his shirt collar and was eating. His chin was soft, undefined.
"Suit yourself," said the stewardess. She was putting on fresh lipstick, staring at her reflection in the door of a stainless steel cabinet. "But if I were you . . ." She blotted her lips on a napkin and took one last look. "Remember, we're the next best thing to movie stars."
After lunch, Kim went to remove the Texan's tray. He reached out slowly and touched her hand. "They're nice," he said, taking her other hand.
For some reason she didn't pull away.
"I always thought you could tell a person by their hands," he said.
She found herself listening to the rhythm of his accent and his deep, soothing voice. He turned her palms up.
"Sad, though. Darling, I can tell. They're fragile and need looking after. Are these sad hands?"
She found her eyes filling with tears.
"This picture's all twisted around here. You should be sitting and it's I who should be serving you."
He smiled.
Their first date was in New York. He took her to a restaurant on the Upper West Side. She told him she liked lobster, and he ordered a seven-pounder to share. They drank salty dogs and split four desserts. Sam did all the ordering. They kissed in the back of his limousine.
He liked to say he'd made his money "drilling in all the right places." A little luck never hurt. He regaled her with stories using terms he'd grown up with, odd phrases involving cats in tall grass, and porches, and piss and rain, and hot kitchens, that she couldn't keep straight—a hundred Texas ways of saying "bullshit."
"You've never heard that one before?" he'd say. "Missy, I thought you lived in Texas?"
"Only for a short time," she said. "And no one ever talked like you."
He would call a few days ahead of his arrival to make sure she'd be in town. She would wait for him in the lobby of his hotel, and he would take her shopping at Macy's and Bloomingdale's. She would fill a dressing room with clothes and try them on and he would point at the
ones he liked with his half-smoked cigar. He'd grin as he paid, and she'd hang off his arm and rub his stomach. As soon as they got outside he would relight his cigar and wave for the limo. He would drop her off with a tip of the hat and an hour or two to get ready for dinner. She'd lay the garment bags out and try on everything again, posing before the mirror on tiptoes, calves tensed, her image approaching, receding, looking back over the shoulder—the allure of the clothes and the curious reflection of herself in them.
The first time they slept together was in the Waldorf-Astoria. He was always smiling, but on top of her, with his hands moving down her sides, his face was all business. His eyes and lips clenched shut. He had hair on his shoulder blades and the back of his neck. His movements were jerky, disconnected. Yet there was something soothing about him, forgivable.
"Anything you ever need, darling, just call ol' Sam."
Months passed. The relationship was easy, until the first time she couldn't meet him. Then he was angry.
He shouted at her over the phone. "I make myself available to you when I come. You think you could do the same? Should I just not bother calling?"
They talked again later.
"I didn't mean those things," he said. "I was disappointed, that's all."
The next time she saw him he lavished her with gifts. "Give ol' Blue Skies a hug," he said, and she wrapped herself in his thick arms.
A month later, he stunned her by paying her rent. He never said anything. The landlord returned her check and she called to find out the problem.
"Your rent's been paid for the year," he said.
She called Sam and demanded he stop. He became obstinate.
"I told you. Trust ol' Sam."
"No one's ever been so kind to me."
It was only a matter of time before her schedule conflicted again with his visit. She waited until the last minute and called in sick. That night they made love on his hotel balcony. They were so high up, she was unashamed. She stood naked by the rail looking down on the city.
"Sweet child," he said, coming up behind her, "I could almost marry you."
Because She Is Beautiful Page 5
