Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Sure.”

  Trout cleared his throat, stretched his mouth in a wide grimace. “You’d be doing me a big favor. He’s gotten it into his head that I should teach you to fly. I’m a good teacher. I promise. And I do other flying for him. Transport flying. Up north. You follow?”

  Of course. No wonder there were no seats for passengers. The plane was for bringing liquor from Canada. She shook her head at her own slowness.

  “No?” he said.

  “No, I follow. I just…feel stupid.”

  He pointed the butt of his bottle at the plane. “You can put skis on it, handy for winter. You can put on floats and land on water. What I bring back is only a drop in the bucket, but your friend is smart enough to know that you get enough drops and pretty soon you’ve got a full bucket.”

  Skis! She momentarily forgot her crisis, so thrilling was this idea. “You land on skis?”

  “Learn to fly with me and you will, too.”

  Here was a new image to ponder and burnish. Herself swooping the Travel Air low over a smooth white plain, sending up rooster tails of powder as she landed.

  “I’ve got a wife and kids. I’d owe you a big one.” He offered a sad twist of his long lips. From inside his jacket he pulled a notebook and a pencil and handed them to her. “Here. You keep track of your flights in it.”

  The logbook’s pages were ruled, and there were headings for Date, Aircraft, Aircraft Number, Engine Type, Weather, Duration, and Notes. Trout handed her the pen. “Go on and fill out the first line.” When she paused at Duration, he said, “Thirty-seven minutes. Then put ‘instruction’ under Notes. Geez, you have terrible handwriting.”

  She tried to hand the logbook back to him, but he said, “No, it’s yours. Keep it. And I almost forgot. I’m supposed to tell you happy birthday.”

  “It was yesterday,” she said.

  She and Jamie were fifteen.

  * * *

  —

  Marian drove from the airfield to the green-and-white house. She knocked at the front door, kept knocking until Sadler opened it. “He’s not here,” he said.

  “You tell him,” Marian said, “I have a condition.”

  “Oh?”

  “When I’m qualified I’ll go to work for him flying across the line. I don’t need charity.”

  “He won’t agree.”

  “That’s fine,” Marian said, “because, like I told him, I never wanted to fly anyway.”

  They stared at each other, and she intuited how much Sadler disliked her for complicating his duties. None of it was her fault, she wanted to say. Barclay could have just left her alone. “You’ll tell him?”

  Sadler rubbed his cheek as though testing his shave. “You want my advice?”

  The question exhausted Marian. “How should I know if I do without getting it?”

  He studied her for a long moment, said, “I’ll tell him.” He shut the door.

  As she drove back to Stanley’s, she pressed on the accelerator. The boxy old delivery truck swayed around the turns. Giddily she imagined pulling back on the steering wheel, feeling the tires part from the road. Barclay would agree. She knew in her gut he would. He wouldn’t mean it, would have some plan for going back on his word, but she wouldn’t let him. She was going to learn to fly, and then she was going to go to work as a pilot. A force was pressing up from under her. Lift. It was lift.

  Manifest, Manifest

  Six

  Once, when I was fifteen and on hiatus from Katie McGee, my dirtbag friend Wesley and I liberated Mitch’s Porsche in the middle of the night so we could drive out to the desert to drop acid and watch the sunrise. We’d had visions of lying on boulders under the starry sky, but it was freezing and windy, and we ended up sitting in the car with the heater on. Once the drugs kicked in, I didn’t like how his face looked. I kept trying to focus on anything except him, but his horrible face kept looming closer and closer, gray and papery and blank, as though someone were shoving a wasp nest at me. Dawn had been a red slit, night sliced open with a scalpel, with the bristly silhouettes of Joshua trees raising their clubbed arms against it.

  When I came back, Mitch, who was in one of his periods of sobriety, was lying out by our pool with the newspaper. “Where’s my car been?” he asked when I flopped onto the chaise next to him.

  “The desert,” I said. “Wesley and I wanted to watch the sunrise. It’s not a big deal.”

  “How old is Wesley?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t actually know. Mitch turned a page of the paper. After a while, he said, quietly, “Do you think you might be getting a little out of control?”

  Ordinarily I would have bristled at his hypocrisy, but because he asked with what seemed like genuine curiosity, like he didn’t already know the answer, and because I’d never expected him to ask at all, and because I’d gone to the desert looking for awe and come away with terror, I said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He turned another page. “You don’t need to do this wild phase, you know. You could just skip it.”

  But I did need to. I didn’t see another way. I needed to spring-jab out into my life like a switchblade. “You only live once,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  Gwendolyn didn’t leak it, the sex tape, but I still got fired. I got fired so quickly I couldn’t help but be impressed by the swiftness of her vengeance.

  Gavin du Pré called me himself.

  “Do you know who this is?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you know why I’m calling?” His voice was quiet, ratcheted so tight it was a miracle any sound was escaping him at all.

  “I have a guess.”

  “Gwendolyn is threatening to leak a sex tape of you and Oliver unless I fire you. Do you know where she says she got it?”

  “From me.”

  “That’s right. From you. So you see I’m in a difficult situation here, Hadley. What would you do if you were in my position? If you’d given an actress the chance of a lifetime, and she’d repaid you by being staggeringly ungrateful and disrespectful?”

  “If I were you,” I said, “and I can’t pretend to know you all that well, but from what I do know, I would probably offer some kind of bargain that involved sucking my dick again.”

  He was silent. I recognized it as the horror-movie silence that precedes someone jumping out of the shadows and stabbing you to death.

  Finally, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and if you were to make any such slanderous insinuations publicly, you would find yourself on the receiving end of a very damaging and protracted lawsuit that would expose everything—and everyone—you’ve ever done. But, yes, you are fired, and I will make sure your career is over. You’re finished.”

  I turned off my phone and went into a windowless room downstairs in my house, a sort of Moroccan-themed screening room, and I lay on a big tasseled pillow and watched a show about a woman who fixed up decrepit old houses. She was tiny and strong and used a nail gun a lot. The houses always ended up with claw-foot tubs and wainscoting and subway tile. From the pictures I’ve seen from when I was a baby, my parents’ house outside Chicago looked like one of her projects if she’d abandoned it halfway through. There’s a photo of my mother bathing me in a claw-foot tub, but you can see the linoleum floor is peeling and discolored. In another you can see nice wood floors but also a sad-looking futon covered with a rumpled sheet. I don’t know why they didn’t fix it up nicer. They had some money, enough for the Cessna that killed them. I don’t know if they wanted to live that way or just didn’t want badly enough to change.

  Eventually I fell asleep.

  By the next morning, the news was everywhere, spreading from The Hollywood Reporter to celeb gossip sites to CNN, glee dolloped all over it like whipped cream. I had thr
ee thousand Twitter notifications. “News flash,” I tweeted. “Nothing lasts forever. Get over it.” Then I deleted my account and turned off my phone.

  Of course I’d meant to piss off Gwendolyn, to flaunt that I’d not only had what she most wanted but had tossed it away. I’d known this was the probable outcome, but still I reeled like a charred and tottering cartoon knight who’d just been flambéed in dragon’s breath.

  I was lying on the couch watching a different real estate show, one where unreasonable people shop for cheap houses in boring places, getting little endorphin rushes from random strangers making decisions, when Augustina reminded me I’d scheduled a session with my trainer. I was supposed to be getting into shape for the fifth movie, eating nothing but fish and kale, thinking only of my triceps, but that was irrelevant now.

  “You could cancel,” Augustina said. “He’d understand.”

  But I had to get out. I said I’d drive myself. M.G. rode shotgun. At the bottom of my driveway I crept slowly, carefully, mindful of lawsuits, through my rookery. They filled my windows with their lenses. Their hands suctioned to the glass like starfish. “You want me to get them to move back?” M.G. said. He only speaks when absolutely necessary, generally just hovers stone-faced in my vicinity. But I said no, it was okay. One photographer belly flopped across the hood, shooting into my face. I made a big sideways sweeping motion at him, shouted, “Get the fuck off!” Even with the windows up, the shutters made a din. A swarm of robot insects. Playing cards in bicycle spokes. A hundred old film projectors running at the same time.

  Manifest, my trainer said. Manifest. I was supposed to look in the mirror and manifest, in my mind, the body I wanted. Holding weights, I leaned forward, bent my knees, opened my arms out and up. My trainer called it the butterfly. I tried to imagine the body I wanted, but all I saw was a butterfly struggling slowly through heavy, swampy air. “Engage your core,” my trainer said.

  A while ago I had a shrink, briefly, who told me to imagine a glowing tiger every time I doubted myself, to imagine the tiger was my source of strength, my essence. I was supposed to imagine the tiger glowing brighter and brighter and a thick layer of dust settling on everything else until the whole world was gray except for my tiger. The tiger was like the vial of white light in that superhero movie. The tiger was preposterous. The tiger was me. The tiger was everything but me.

  Everyone knows Los Angeles is a city of deniers. Everyone knows this is a city of silicone and Restylane, of charismatic stationary-bike preachers and kettlebell gurus, of healing crystals and singing bowls, of probiotics and juice cleanses and colonics and jade eggs you stick up your vag and exorbitantly expensive snake-oil powder you sprinkle on your coconut chia pudding. We purify ourselves for life as though it were the grave. This is a city that’s more afraid of death than any other. I said that to Oliver once, and he told me I was being a little negative. I said it to Siobhan, and she gave me the name of a shrink. I said it to the shrink, and he asked me if I thought people were wrong to fear death. I said I didn’t think the fear was the problem as much as the struggle. I said I thought the struggle should be to accept death, not to defy it.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Imagine a tiger,” he said.

  Seven

  I floated on a raft in my pool. I felt stunned, like a critter picked up by a bird of prey and then dropped, a beating heart inside an inert, sprawled body. The insides of my eyelids glowed blood-orange.

  I must have fallen asleep, or almost, because when a very English voice called out, “You really shouldn’t sleep in a swimming pool,” I startled and tipped off the raft into a blue blur. The water stung and fizzed in my nose.

  “I didn’t think you were actually asleep,” Sir Hugo said when I surfaced. He was holding the half-empty bottle of Scotch and two glasses and had a canvas tote bag over his shoulder. “Augustina let me in.”

  I hauled myself out at the edge. “Are they still down there?”

  “The photogs? Oh, yes.”

  I wrapped a towel around myself, and we sat at the table where I’d once eaten ancient-grain bowls with Alexei.

  Hugo poured the Scotch. He held up his glass. “To an ending.”

  I clinked.

  “Now, my girl,” he said in a gentle growl. “What do you want to do? Will you take time off?”

  I imagined what I would do with time off. I would float in the pool, smoke weed, manifest the body I wanted, imagine my tiger, watch people renovate houses, wait for something to happen. It wasn’t unappealing. But, in rebuttal, the vision of myself holding an Oscar came back to me again, obliterating those laconic half thoughts like a cartoon safe crushing a cartoon cat. I was onstage, raising the statue above my head, living out the default dream of everyone in Hollywood. My arm and shoulder looked perfectly toned. A theater of people was on its feet, even Gavin du Pré. Alexei was there too, looking wistful.

  “I’d rather move forward,” I said.

  “Good.” He paused for a second and breathed in so hard his nose flattened, signaling he was about to quote something. “ ‘Men at some time are masters of their own fates; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ ”

  “Men are masters of their own fates.”

  “Women didn’t fit the meter.”

  “They never do, man.”

  “I have something for you. It’s out of print, so don’t be careless with it.” He pulled a book out of his tote bag and handed it over. An old, slender hardback, with a mustard-colored dust jacket crumbling at the edges. On the front cover was an illustration of an airplane flying over the ocean, the sun behind it and a few stretched-out shallow M’s scattered around to suggest birds. The title was in elegant italics: The Sea, the Sky, the Birds Between: The Lost Logbook of Marian Graves. The smell of the Van Nuys public library came back to me, and I could almost feel the sweaty vinyl embrace of the beanbag chair in the children’s reading corner.

  “I’ve read this book.”

  Hugo’s box-hedge eyebrows flew up. “You have?”

  “Don’t look so stunned. I read.”

  “You do?”

  “Ha ha. It made a big impression on me when I was a kid. Orphan solidarity, you know. Team Raised-by-Uncles. I thought it would be full of hidden messages, like tarot cards or something.”

  “Ah.” Hugo nodded. “I can imagine it. Wee Hadley the bibliomancer, consulting the text for signs and omens. It’s the perfect sort of book for that, isn’t it? Mostly cryptic bits and pieces. What did it tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, well, that’s not surprising. Really I’m most intrigued by the question of whether or not she intended it to be read at all. I think the fact that she left it behind at least suggests she couldn’t bear to destroy it. What do you think?”

  I considered bluffing but instead admitted, “I don’t remember it very well. I think I was ten or eleven when I read it.”

  “Reread it. And then read this.” He took another book from the bag, a paperback. On the cover was a soft-focus photo of the back of a woman’s head as she gazed toward a silver airplane parked on a flat expanse of white. A fur collar stood up against her neck. Apparently People magazine had used the words Irresistible…dazzling…high-wire in relation to it somehow.

  I read aloud, “Wings of Peregrine: A Novel. By Carol Feiffer.”

  “To be honest, it’s”—Hugo teetered his hand—“not the best. It doesn’t have the depth one wishes for, and the prose is sometimes quite dreadful. But it’s the basis for this.” From the tote bag he took a sheaf of paper clamped together with a binder clip and tossed it onto the table. A script. Its title page was stamped diagonally with the name of Hugo’s production company. “The Day brothers brought it to me with Bart Olofsson already attached to direct,” he said. “They’ve done something quite unexpected, gone for almost a Coen brother
s vibe, a little antic but not as dark. Just the tiniest bit camp but still quite affecting, I think.”

  “So many brothers. You don’t have anything else in that bag, do you? No more homework?”

  He turned the empty bag upside down and shook it. “Not a page.”

  I pulled the script closer.

  PEREGRINE

  written by

  The Day Brothers

  based on the novel Wings of Peregrine

  by Carol Feiffer

  I knew about the Day brothers. Kyle and Travis, blond twins with Nazi haircuts who vaped on the red carpet. They weren’t even thirty but had created a quirky, violent limited series for HBO set in Reno. They were having a moment. And Bart Olofsson had made one talky indie movie that was the darling of Sundance and then like three superhero movies, so he was probably ready to do the reverse sellout. These people were considered cool, and working with them might make me seem cool. “Whose idea was this?”

  Hugo grimaced. “It gets a little complicated. The Days were commissioned by the son of the woman who wrote the book.”

  “That couldn’t have been cheap.”

  “No, but they wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t like the project. Which they do. The guy’s name is Redwood Feiffer. He wants to be a producer. And he already knew the Days from being young and hip and extremely rich. He’s a Feiffer Feiffer.”

  “What’s a Feiffer Feiffer?”

  “Like the Feiffer Foundation. Like the Feiffer Museum of Art. The father died—Redwood’s father; his parents have been divorced for ages—anyway, he died, and Redwood came into a major share of the family fortune. It’s from oil, I think? Chemicals? Something ghastly. His mother, Carol, wrote this novel, and—here’s the really interesting part—his paternal grandmother not only published Marian’s book in the fifties but paid for her flight. The family’s all knotted up with this story. And Redwood’s a do-gooder-slash-creative-type. Very enthusiastic.”