Now that I thought I’d found it, I saw it wasn’t just the external circumstances which made things so different with Cassiel. At thirty-one—seven years older than me—he was older than my previous lovers, and there was no escaping the fact we had come together in the overwhelming context of the war; but, far more significantly, I had never before encountered a man like him. Unique yet unassuming, intelligent, physically powerful but reserved—someone, in short, who was attractive to me in every way. Drawn to him with a pull I could neither explain nor control, I realized this was the real thing, which I had never known before. There was one other quality about him, crucial to me, to which I became particularly sensitive because of the war. Cassiel was a warrior and a man of action, and though I had known hundreds of such men in Vietnam, I sensed something in him that few of the others possessed. Cassiel had been seasoned and scarred by experience long before he arrived in Southeast Asia, but somewhere along the way he had learned the rare and difficult skill of allowing himself to be gentle—with himself and with others—when caught up in the brutal machinery of this world. Even at twenty-four, I knew that this can only happen with those who suffer much and do not absent themselves when witnessing the suffering of others. But I certainly had never expected to find such gentleness in a member of that elite group who guided the B-52s and their fearsome cargo of destruction to their targets.
On the Repose a pilot I had to x-ray several times, who was stationed with Cassiel on Guam, gave me the only facts about him that I would have from an outside source. He told me that Cassiel was well-liked by the other fliers, but was a loner. Given to poring over celestial charts in his free time and listening to the keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons and William Byrd. An expert parachutist, to the astonishment of his comrades Cassiel liked to unwind by going up on training runs to jump with the paratroopers. He preferred free-falling until the last possible second before pulling the cord.
My cabinmate Sharline noticed at once that there was no telltale band of pale skin on Cassiel’s ring finger. And she let me know that she very much admired his rugged good looks. “But since he’s the first guy over here you’ve shown any interest in,” she had added with a sigh, “he’s all yours, honey.” Indeed, just entering his prime and in top physical condition, Cassiel was a very handsome man. When I asked him during one of our bedside chats if he’d ever been married, he replied no. A girl back home? Again, no. “Anyway,” he had added as I adjusted the pillows propping him up, “there is no ‘back home’ for me anymore in the States. And I don’t just mean Nevada. Except for brief stays in Washington and Honolulu, I was posted abroad for six straight years. When I went on leave from Iceland or Germany, I traveled around the rest of Europe. I’ve been to Tokyo, Bangkok, and Djakarta. Guam is the first piece of U.S. territory I’ve lived on for so long.”
So there was no sweetheart. But I would also come to know firsthand that he was highly sexed, and while he might be a loner in the barracks, he didn’t seem to be the celibate type. Nor did I think, after living on a ship with three hundred men myself, that Cassiel was the sort that came on to every woman who crossed his path. In Tokyo and Bangkok—and certainly in Guam—I imagined him seeing to his sexual needs in the countless brothels he could choose from. As for love, I was sure there were plenty of women who were attracted to him to whom he didn’t give a second look. Maybe I was just flattering myself. But when, the first time we slept together, he pulled me close to say that he loved me, I believed him and was deeply moved. I could tell he had been in love before, seriously so, but my instincts told me it had been a long time ago.
Cassiel told me he loved me again at the end of that long lazy afternoon at the beach near Orion as we embraced in the water. Then he picked a leaf from a bush he called a “playing-card tree.” He said sailors used to illustrate the leaves and play cards with them in lieu of a conventional deck. With a ballpoint pen we each drew on the leaf: he a pair of stars, and as the #1 song of 1968, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” blared from our transistor radio for the third time, I inscribed our names, GEZA & MALA. Cassiel rolled the leaf up carefully, promising me that he would save it. As we left the beach, he lifted a starfish wriggling from the surf and held it up to me, flashing in the sun.
Needing so little sleep myself, I had found out on our first night at the Hôtel Alnilam that Cassiel was an insomniac. At first I thought his wounds might still be causing him pain, but it wasn’t that. Earlier, running my fingertips over the line of shrapnel scars, I felt as if I were gazing beneath them, studying one of my own X rays, and I could see that he had healed well. It was four o’clock when he turned to me, his eyes gleaming, wide open in the darkness.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“You’ve been awake too,” Cassiel said. “What were you thinking about?”
“You,” I said, laying my hand on his chest.
He put his hand over mine. “But what else?”
I had been thinking about Loren. That night he had been on my mind even more than usual. It was the first night in three years, after all, that I had felt so safe. And it had been even longer than that since I had last made love. When I went to bed alone, in a motel or furnished room or my cramped bunk at sea, and closed my eyes, I couldn’t get it out of my head that Loren was still out there. In the most treacherous seas. Maybe, miraculously, he had landed safely, on some islet; more than likely, he was anything but safe. I wondered whether he was still alive. And, if so, whether he was more lonely and afraid than I could ever imagine. I tormented myself spinning out scenarios of what might have happened to him and, worse, what could still be happening. That first night in Cassiel’s arms, warmed and softened by pleasure, feeling his hands and lips at last touch every part of my body, and touching every part of him, and feeling him push inside me and release all of himself, it was less my fears about Loren, but their constant companion, my guilt, that filled my head. Alongside the rush of happiness, the exhilarating release, I experienced in that hotel room, I would remember that my stay there also marked the first occasion on which the most poisonous torment of all took root in me: that I had deliberately—not carelessly, or innocently—lost Loren. This was the twisted punishment I dished out to myself for having finally taken respite from my grief: guilt with a vengeance.
To Cassiel I finally said, “I’ve lost things too. But, as you know, in another way those become the very things that never leave you.”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“No, I’m sticking to our agreement.” I knew that if I began telling him about Loren, it would never end, it would overwhelm me and take over our time together. After two years of solitary wandering, I only had those few days with Cassiel and I wasn’t about to share them with my ghosts—not even with Loren, I thought with a shudder. So I pressed my body against Cassiel’s and put my lips to his ear. “There’s just this moment—remember?”
Our second night together, tanned and hot still from being in the sun all day, we ordered dinner in our room. Just cold lemon soup and prawns and fruit salad. We bathed, taking turns in the deep claw-foot tub, soaping one another down. And then, right after we made love, we fell asleep on top of the sheets, holding hands. The night birds were singing outside the shuttered window and the piano music was faintly audible in the next room and Cassiel’s breathing, from his lips to deep in his lungs, resonated softly in my ears.
On our third night, we went out on the town in Manila and enjoyed a seven-course meal of poached bass, crab, eel, and other seafood I had never heard of, on a floating restaurant in the middle of a lake to which we had to row ourselves. Through a skylight we saw the half-moon glowing gold. And all around the lake parrots chattered in the trees and bats swooped through the steamy air. Later, in the cluttered downtown streets that were bright as day with neon arcades and flashing marquees, we found ourselves in a nightclub called The Galaxy. There were a number of naval aviators at the bar, drinking alone, and a large group at a table, each with a prostitute, throwing back
shots of vodka. Unlike us, these officers were in uniform. Two of them were dropping coins and pineapple wedges down the girls’ dresses; the pineapple they fished out with their fingers, the coins the girls kept.
We had had champagne with dinner, followed by brandy, and now Cassiel ordered us another bottle of champagne. He was watching the table of officers absently. On a small stage, a band was accompanying a young woman in a silver dress who sang Filipino love songs. She had a thin soprano voice. A girl in a miniskirt and boots was circling the room, selling cigarettes from a basket. Having grown increasingly subdued, Cassiel bought a pack of Camels from her and lit up, the only time I ever saw him smoke. “Hashish, too,” the girl murmured, pointing to the bottom of her basket, but he waved her off. Then, though we had made love most of the afternoon and spent our meal discussing the sights of the city, he suddenly picked up our conversation of the previous day, at the beach near Orion, as if we had just left off.
“You know that because I was wounded I can end my tour a few months early. I’ve already put the paperwork in motion.”
“When did you do that?”
“Before we left Subic.”
I froze. Ending his tour meant leaving combat, which couldn’t have made me happier; but it also meant being shipped out of Southeast Asia, and where would that leave the two of us, at least in the near future?
The waiter brought our champagne and uncorked it and Cassiel tipped him with a twenty-dollar bill. “Think this stuff is really French?” he muttered, studying the label.
“Where will they send you?” I asked, keeping my voice even.
He shrugged. “First I’ll have to return to Guam. Then I’ll get my orders.”
“Can you go back to the mapmaking flights?”
“I didn’t make any requests.”
I sipped some champagne, which was barely chilled. Or maybe it was just me. My lips and hands were particularly dry and hot that night. “Will you resign your commission?” I said.
“That’s a separate issue.” He glanced at the officersȗ table, where the din was increasing, and put down his glass. “Definitely not French,” he said.
“Do you want to go to another club?”
He seemed surprised. “No, why?”
“Geza, look at me.”
His hair combed back, shining, he was wearing a sky-blue sports shirt and white slacks. His arms and chest were darkly tanned. I had on an ankle-length, flowered green dress which I had gone out and bought that morning while he was asleep. When I modeled it for him, he took it off me slowly, kissing my shoulders, my breasts, and then down my sides, before pulling me onto the bed. Later at a stall near the hotel he picked out and bartered for a pair of triangular jade earrings to go with the dress.
“You’re telling me things,” I said, “without telling me anything at all.”
His eyes locked on mine. Refilling our glasses, he said, “All right,” and then drained his glass.
It wasn’t the drunken officers that was bothering him. Or even that he had put in for a transfer. After one more glass of champagne, he brought up the subject which, even on the ship, he had been holding in.
“When we were hit on Christmas Eve,” he began, tapping out another cigarette and tearing off a match which he didn’t light, “the missile exploded right up through the belly of the ship. The pilot and three airmen were killed immediately. In the back, the bombardier was screaming that his legs were gone. In the cockpit, Corelli the copilot and I were covered with blood, but I couldn’t find my wounds. Then I saw that the pilot’s midsection had been blown open. We were going down fast. We couldn’t make Saigon, and crash-landing a B-52 in the jungle is suicide, pure and simple. Suddenly we were being strafed by antiaircraft guns. Corelli was hit and the cockpit filled with smoke, but he still managed to bring us in level, skimming the treetops. Then we hit the ground, there was an explosion, and we skidded in flames through the trees. The wings were sheared off. And somewhere in there I caught that shrapnel, which knocked me facedown. The noise was deafening. I could barely breathe. I didn’t feel anything. I was waiting for another explosion. Then we stopped. Corelli was dead and I thought I must be dead too. But I could still move, so I crawled to the back and rolled out with that one remaining airman. When search and rescue found me in the bush, I had blacked out. If the NVA had found me first, I’d be a statistic now too.”
Cassiel lit the cigarette, took a drag, and stubbed it out. Crushing the rest of the pack, he signalled the waiter for the check.
“That was my twenty-eighth run out of Guam, Mala,” he went on, “and my last. This much I knew already: carpet-bombing, killing by the acre, from eight miles up is obscene. But watching my whole crew get it like that, up close and dirty—gagging on it—that’s something else. Tasting shrapnel yourself is a lot different than watching six tons of bombs spin down on the radar screen like confetti.”
I drained my own glass, though, as usual, the alcohol was having no effect on me.
He leaned forward. “That X ray you took, where the shrapnel looked like the stars the X-ray telescope had photographed: that was a message to me.”
“A message?”
He tossed another twenty onto the table and pushed his chair back. “If all my stars are lined up that straight, I should go with it. I joined the Air Force just before I turned twenty. I had a whole other life I had to escape. And I needed to fly—I mean really fly—which only they could teach me. But that was in peacetime. Now it’s time to move on.”
Back at the hotel, we undressed completely and he fell asleep as soon as he stretched out on the bed, his head in my arms. The room was stifling, and I had to remind myself that the heat was much harder on him than on me. The ribbon was fluttering on the fan’s cage, but again I could barely feel the effects of the blades. In the courtyard, one of the macaws was complaining. Motor scooters were whining by on the street. A truck backfired. And from the hotel bar I heard glasses and bottles clicking onto shelves as the bartender closed up for the night. After a swift downpour, it was drizzling, and a fine green mist was seeping through the venetian blinds.
Stirring in my arms, Cassiel might as well have been in another world. Of the four nights we spent together, this was the only one on which he slept through until dawn. So I was able to gaze upon his face, and his body, uninterrupted and unself-consciously. Lightly I stroked his shoulder and arm. His skin, over firm muscles, rippled like water under my fingertips. I ran the back of my index finger over the stubble on his cheek. His natural scent—like salt and honey—was unlike any I had experienced, on a man or a woman. The dark hair on his chest and legs was so soft I could barely feel it. I had never known a man with stronger hands, more sensitive in their movements even than those of the surgeons on my ship.
We had come together so naturally, and seamlessly—under the most unnatural and fragmented of circumstances—that it spooked me, first on the Repose, and now, even more so, in Manila. If Cassiel was spooked, he didn’t let on; my feeling was that, for whatever reason, very few things in life held the power to surprise him anymore.
Suddenly my thoughts were broken by a small red spider that scurried across the sheets and up the wall to the ceiling. I recognized it from my days in Zaren Eboli’s basement, a female Uloborus, a master weaver of orb webs, huge concentric constructions which she completes in a matter of minutes.
Immediately the spider began spinning out such a web, and watching her at work, going round and round, had a hypnotic, dizzying effect on me. My palms had grown hotter and my lips felt numb and parched. Bits of color, bright shavings, began breaking away from objects and swirling into my field of vision—like a kaleidoscope. When I closed my eyes the colors disappeared, so I kept them closed. And from cradling it in my arms, I gently shifted Cassiel’s head into my hands. At once my own head filled with images, flickering by as they did when I scanned the remoter byways of my memory. But these images were alien to me. There were no half-familiar guideposts—a name, a face, a piece of
clothing—to let me in on what part of my past life I was reviewing.
I saw a whirling sheet of sand sweep across the base of a mountain range that glowed red. From one of the peaks a red hawk with a tremendous wingspan and fiery talons sped toward me, streaming a shower of sparks.
Then a woman running through a dry riverbed. She wore a yellow bandanna and a red dress. Coming to a pillar of boulders, she raced into its long purple shadow and never reemerged.
And then a red car with a sand-coated windshield rolling toward the edge of a ravine in the last rays of the setting sun. One of the car’s headlights was burning, the other was smashed. Suddenly the car burst into flames. Through the windshield I could make out a shadow slumped behind the wheel just before the car, a fireball, plunged into the ravine.
Finally I saw an impenetrable ceiling of slate-colored clouds through which I was ascending in a plane. I was in the rear of the cockpit. The green and blue lights of a radar screen danced before me. Finally the plane leveled off. The pilots’ seats were topped by two white helmets which I saw from behind. All at once the windshield lit up with fire and the plane lurched hard before plummeting, down and down, and smoke poured in, filling my mouth. Then those two seats spun around and under the helmets were slumped what was left of two men in blue uniforms, one of them cut in half floating in his own blood and the other with a gaping hole in his chest.
A Trip to the Stars Page 10
