Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  Anticipation hangs between them, making them awkward. The air is humid, thick with imminent rain. A man smoking in a doorway greets Barclay, and they exchange pleasantries while Marian stands off to one side, unacknowledged by Barclay. The stranger’s gaze flicks curiously over her.

  The office is actually a small house on a side street. Only two rooms, close and warm. The first contains two desks with telephones and typewriters and lamps, a block of wooden filing cabinets, and a stove and sink. Everything is perfectly tidy. Barclay goes into the next room, a bedroom, and pulls the curtains shut with a brisk snap. She follows, tentative.

  “Does someone live here?”

  “No.” He indicates a closed door. “You can go in there to clean up.”

  The bathroom is floored in white octagonal tiles. There is a claw-foot tub, a sink, a toilet with a pull chain. In the mirror she sees a wind-blasted urchin, face grimy except where her goggles had been, hair plastered to her head as tightly as a bathing cap. Clean up. She eyes the bathtub. Ought she to take a bath? Would that be strange? Would it be strange not to? She can smell oil and gasoline on her hands. They are, of course, about to go to bed together. How will she avoid starting a baby? He must have thought of that—he couldn’t want a baby.

  She turns the tub’s hot-water tap, pees under cover of the noise. When the water is a few inches deep, she gets in, splashes and dips like a bird in a puddle, tries to settle her heart. She puts her head under the faucet and does the best she can with the small cake of soap left beside the sink. She has the feeling of readying herself for a rite, a sacrifice. After she gets out, she hesitates, wrapped in a towel, debating, then puts her dirty flying clothes back on except her socks and boots, which she carries with her.

  He is sitting on the edge of the bed, but when she draws near, he gets up and goes into the bathroom, brushing past without a glance. She stands, bewildered, in the middle of the room, listening to him urinating. She goes to the window and peers through the gap in the drapes, holding her boots in front of her like an old woman with a handbag. She wants to lift the sash, let in some air, but feels she can’t. The light outside has gone gray, and the street is quiet. Now the sink runs and splashes. A black Ford trundles by. Water from her hair drips down her collar.

  Barclay’s footsteps behind her. His chest is against her back, and he is reaching around and taking her boots from her and dropping them, unbuttoning her trousers, pushing them down, turning her. He unbuttons her shirt with shaking fingers. So speedily unveiled, she covers her breasts with one arm, but he pulls her arm away and tugs down her drawers. He steps back, looking at her. The ferocity of his interest makes him appear almost scornful. Who are you? She is not the girl she’d been at Miss Dolly’s. She’d felt more exposed wearing those flimsy borrowed clothes than she does now, naked.

  On the bed, it is strange to be naked while he is still fully clothed. She feels the roughness of his wool trousers against the insides of her legs, his belt buckle scraping her belly, the buttons of his shirt against her sternum. She tries to undo them, but he pushes her hands away. He seems to want her to lie still. When she caresses his neck or back, he seems almost to flinch, and so she leaves her hands at her sides until he lifts one and uses it to squeeze his penis through his trousers. He puts a finger inside her as he had before, but when she rocks against it, he glowers, flattens his other hand hard on her stomach, holding her in place. She wants to ask how they will stop a pregnancy, but his stormy expression forbids it.

  Finally, in one abrupt chrysalis, he sheds all his clothes. His body is nearly hairless, though there are sparse dark nests in his groin and armpits. When he stands to get something from a pocket of his jacket, his penis stands out from his body like a spigot.

  With relief she sees the thing he’s fetched is a rubber. Miss Dolly’s girls had told her the most difficult part about rubbers was getting anyone to wear them. The girls preferred pessaries, which they said were not always easy to come by. Barclay crawls onto the bed, nudges her legs apart with his knee. He pauses briefly, meeting her eyes, giving her a last chance to change her mind. The first sensation is one of adjustment: her groin muscles absorbing the strain of his weight, much greater than Caleb’s, her internal architecture shifting. The feeling of him is obscure and distant, some message from a subterranean city, yet as he moves she begins to feel a gathering, a quickening, as though what they are doing is urgent and necessary, as though something important hangs in the balance.

  Maybe she had known this would be the consequence of turning the plane upside down.

  “Are you all right?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “A bit.”

  “You haven’t done this before, have you?”

  “No.”

  He stares at her. She can’t tell if he believes her. Brusquely, he pulls out, turns her over so her face is engulfed in pillows and pushes into her unceremoniously from behind. After a moment he rolls over, pulling her on top of him. Then he is pressing her onto her back again, pushing her knees up against her shoulders.

  As he arranges her limbs first one way and then another, he radiates itchy dissatisfaction, and she surrenders to the role of startled, silent bystander. What does he want from her? He doesn’t quite seem to know. She wonders if all his encounters are like this, if all his girls feel like dolls in the hands of an impatient, tyrannical little boy.

  He turns her over restlessly, puzzling at her body as though it contains the key to something he wants but is not itself that thing. To her surprise, she finds his impersonal manipulations exciting, but he, fussing over the position of her arms, is beginning to have difficulty maintaining an erection, a possibility she hadn’t ever considered. Placing her arms above her head and pushing them firmly into the mattress as though telling them to stay put, he takes his softening member in hand and attempts to stuff it into her.

  “Shit,” he says, rolling off. He hunches on the edge of the bed, trying to chafe himself back into hardness.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she says.

  The movement of his arm ceases. “I don’t know how to trust you,” he says.

  “What should I do?”

  “Promise not to be with anyone else.”

  “I have. But what should I do now?”

  He turns and looks at her until he seems to reach a decision. Drawing a long breath through his nose, he swivels to lie beside her. Holding her gaze, he fits his hand carefully around her throat. He does not squeeze, but her pulse flutters like a trapped butterfly.

  What follows is not entirely different from what had come before, but he is more decided. He holds her by the head, the hips, the wrists. He puts his penis in her mouth, something Caleb had never done. She is lost in a state of perpetual transition: exhilarated then nauseated, fearful then reckless, debased then venerated. He seems to want so profoundly. She thinks he might destroy her, break her like some small animal and not even notice because what he wants is not actually in her but beyond her, somewhere else, or perhaps doesn’t exist.

  When he comes, it is with a terrible grimace.

  At some unnoticed point it had begun to rain. He gets up to open the window, letting in the dusty smell of a summer storm.

  “Are you all right?” he says, returning to bed.

  “Yes.”

  “I meant to be gentle. I’m sorry.”

  She doesn’t know whether or not he wants her to say it was fine.

  “There’s no blood anyway,” he says, uneasy.

  “I spent a lot of time on horseback,” she says.

  He seems to accept this. He asks, “Do you know what a rubber does?”

  “It’s so I don’t get pregnant.” She pauses. “You thought to bring one along.”

  “I’ve been carrying it around, just in case. How did you know about rubbers?”

 
“From Dolly’s girls. Lucky that didn’t fall out of your pocket and land on someone’s head.”

  He is on his side, close to her. He rests his fingertips on her clavicle. “Someday, of course, we’ll want a baby.”

  Marian is taken aback. “I’ve never thought about it.” This is the unadorned truth—never once has she imagined herself cradling an infant.

  “All girls want babies.”

  “How would I fly if I had a baby?”

  He looks confused. “You wouldn’t.”

  She is equally confused. For months he’d listened to her talk about what she wanted. She’d never said anything about babies. “I have to, though,” she says.

  They look at each other in dismay. He puts one hand on her belly. “Not yet. Someday.”

  “I don’t want to stop. Not ever.”

  “You’re young,” he says in a patient tone. “What makes you happy now is different from what will make you happy later. You must know that I love you. I’ll take care of you. I’ll marry you.” These last are not posed as questions.

  So he had never believed her. He had been indulging a child’s make-believe. A long blade of rage cuts through her, but she stops herself from reacting by remembering flipping him upside down, making him afraid. He’d thought he was reclaiming something when he put her face in the pillows, turned her body over and over like a pebble he was worrying in his pocket, but really he was only accepting what she’d offered. He’d needed her to give him the imperative of reclaiming his dominance, and she had. Could there be power in submission? She will probably have to marry him, she knows; he will win their game of push-pull, but if she agrees now, she will lose too much.

  She says, “Not yet.”

  * * *

  —

  She flies to Canadian farms and brings back cases of premium brands, learns more about the business. Barclay’s interests and supply chains are diffuse and diverse. He buys from middlemen who buy legally from boozoriums scattered around Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba. He has relationships with whiskey exporters in Scotland, with importers in Canada, with lawmakers and law enforcers. He has lawyers in Helena and Spokane and Seattle and Boise who cover his tracks and help out the little guys when they get caught.

  One afternoon when they are in bed in the green-and-white house, he says, “I don’t feel right about this.”

  “You seemed to enjoy yourself.”

  “That’s not the point.” Petulantly: “I wish you’d just agree. If you’re going to eventually, why wait?”

  A pessary snugly cups her cervix. She thinks of the device as her small but stalwart ally. Cora from Miss Dolly’s had gotten it for her at a steep price, of which Marian assumed a good chunk was commission. “Like this,” Cora had said, pinching it between her fingers. “Then you shove it up yourself and let go. It’ll pop into place.”

  To Barclay, Marian says, “Only if you promise I can keep flying forever and never have any babies.” She speaks lightly, but he doesn’t smile. She tries again: “Why can’t we go on as we are? Eventually you’ll get tired of me, and you’ll be glad I’m just your pilot.”

  He is serious, almost grim. “I have to hide almost everything I do. I want this to be on the up-and-up, respectable and official, and I want you to be respectable, too.”

  “I’m not respectable?” The sting surprises her.

  “I want you to be more secure, to have some kind of status in the world.” He touches her cheek. “I don’t want anyone ever to see you the way I first saw you.”

  “I thought you said I fascinated you.”

  “You did. You do. But that was something private between us. If anyone else had seen you like that at Miss Dolly’s, there would have been a simple, sordid misunderstanding, but I saw through your little outfit.” He props himself on an elbow. “It had to be me who saw you. I know it. I saw someone out of place, who needed me but didn’t know it yet. At first I was relieved you were a whore because I thought I could have you, but then I was so much more relieved when I realized you weren’t. I didn’t want anyone else to have you.” He rolls onto his back, pulls her against him with her arm over his chest, her leg over his thigh. “And what did you see? When you first saw me?”

  “A stranger.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Not quite.” She doesn’t want to talk about Miss Dolly’s anymore. She wishes the memory didn’t loom quite so large for him. Her hand moves to his groin, and his breathing deepens.

  “What else?” he says.

  “I saw a man who would let me fly his biplane as much as I wanted forever and ever.”

  “Yes,” he says, but he means the motion of her hand.

  She had thought he might lose interest in her once she was plucked, no longer a figure of fantasy, but he hasn’t. If anything, her enthusiasm for sex has made him more fixated on marriage. He seems jealous of the act itself. The first time she’d clenched and pulsed around him, when they were in their second day of being trapped by rain and cloud in the Kalispell house and had gotten the hang of each other, he had stared at her in frank astonishment. He’d asked how she’d known how to do that, and she’d lied and feigned surprise and said it had simply happened. He’d told her not all women were capable of climax and, more important, not all men were capable of inspiring such phenomena. She was fortunate on both counts, he’d said.

  He’d asked her again if she’d been with anyone else, told her it was all right if she had, he only wanted to know the truth. No, she’d said. Only you. There could be no other answer.

  His arm is around her; he is gripping her backside. “You saw the man you’d marry,” he says, his eyes half closed.

  “But only maybe,” she says, “and not for a very, very long time.”

  From there, the negotiations continue silently and are understood differently by each of them.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes she thinks she should accept Barclay and have done with it. There are worse lots than a husband who excites her body, a husband with money, a husband who is the reason she can fly an airplane. But the question of children makes her balk—that, and a more general disquiet.

  He goes away for a few weeks in August. When he returns, he asks how her considerations are going. She says well enough. He asks how much longer she will need. She says she doesn’t know.

  She has come to be grateful for Jamie’s absence. Without him around to worry and disapprove and with Caleb making himself scarce, she can more easily tell herself there is nothing to worry about, nothing to disapprove of. Wallace seems oblivious to the nights she is away from home. He spends most of his time in his studio, drinking and listening to the phonograph.

  She wishes Jamie would come home but also that he would stay away.

  Yes and No

  Nine

  It took me three days to read Marian’s book, Carol Feiffer’s book, the Day brothers’ screenplay, and Marian’s book again. I didn’t have a lot else to do, and I was tired of reality TV. Mostly I read in bed, though I took a bath each morning and another each night and read in the tub, too, ignoring my guilt about the drought. Being swallowed up by something—by Marian’s thoughts, by Carol’s breathless prose, by bathwater—was pleasant and primal, amniotic. One way or another I would need to emerge from this particular moment, but the question was into what? Limbo was comfortable as long as I could convince myself it never had to end, as long as I could hide in the unknown, be the Schrödinger’s cat of casting decisions, both Marian and not Marian.

  Hugo came by on the second afternoon on the pretense of wanting to “discuss” the books and the script, but I knew he was there to persuade, and he knew I knew, and he probably also knew how flattered I was and how hungry for flattery. “The character is an actor’s dream,” he said about Marian, casually, as though this observation were unrelated to an
y business between us. “There’s a foundation of fact but still an abundance of freedom.” Hugo had excellent intuition, so he surely knew I would balk if he applied too much direct pressure. But he also knew that, deep down, I was desperate to be told what to do. I’m not sure why he bothered. There were better actresses, more reliable actresses, actresses who looked more like Marian Graves. I think he got a kick out of getting people to do what he wanted while simultaneously doing exactly as he pleased, staging little subversions like hiring the recently disgraced.

  Siobhan called on the third afternoon, having gotten wind of what was brewing and having decided she was opposed. “I don’t want us to rush into any decisions,” she said. “I think we should let the dust settle a little more.”

  “It seems like a good project, though, doesn’t it? And a good part?” I said, wheedling. It wasn’t so much that I felt confident it was a good project, just that I didn’t want to have to weigh Siobhan’s opinion against Hugo’s. I wanted a consensus. I wanted a voice from on high.

  “My hesitation has more to do with the timing,” she said. “I don’t want us to leap at the first opportunity and then end up being stunt casted. I don’t want you to be a spectacle.”

  “Hugo says we’re always spectacles. He says the point is to be a spectacle. Are you against it because I’d barely get paid?”

  “No.” The word popped out too quickly. She paused, and I sensed her recentering herself. “It just feels—to me, from what I know—like maybe too many people already want too many things from this project. The vision of it feels scattered.”

  “So you think I shouldn’t do it.”

  “I think you should ask yourself what you want from this. Why this project?”

  I saw myself flying a plane over the ocean. I saw myself gazing out over a wasteland of ice. The version of Peregrine I imagined was good, even great, but I could only conjure fragments, only flashes of myself with swelling music in the background like the clips they edit together in movie trailers to make any crappy, pretentious drama look Big and Important. I saw myself raising my Oscar. But if that actually happened, what would be left for me to want? Or what if Siobhan was right and I was just being needy, letting myself be taken advantage of, throwing away my one chance at redemption? The future felt like a blindfold.