Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Couldn’t say,” said the girl. “I didn’t see him. Nancy did and told me to pass on the message.”

  “Where’s Nancy?”

  “I think she was off for Belfast. Apparently he came by this morning. Must be keen, your fellow.”

  “I don’t have a fellow. Did she say anything else? His name?”

  “Let me think.” The girl angled her eyes up to the ceiling, scouring her memory. “No, that’s it.”

  Another pilot greeted them and sat. Marian ate pensively, letting the conversation pass her by. If Ruth were at the table, she would not have allowed Marian to be so unsociable, but Ruth had been summoned to White Waltham just as Marian finished there and, after her upgrade, had been sent back to Ratcliffe. They’d fallen out of sync again, mostly just logistically, though they were also handling their prolonged separation differently. Ruth wrote Marian long letters full of coded longing and more explicit reproach for what she called Marian’s stoicism. Marian’s replies were brief and unadorned, mostly about the flying. It wasn’t that Marian didn’t miss Ruth. Rather, she took her missing and sealed it away. Her natural inclination was to carry on, to think of other things. Of course, Ruth was also burdened by worry about Eddie. Word had come eventually that he was alive in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Then a Red Cross postcard had come from Eddie himself saying nothing more than that he was in Stalag Luft I.

  After lunch, cloud came in, and around three the meteorological office washed them out for the day. Marian left on her motorbike. Most of the girls in Hamble were billeted in little brick cottages, but Marian preferred the Polygon Hotel in Southampton, seven miles away. She’d wanted space between herself and the ferry pool, some semblance of privacy.

  Puttering along toward Southampton, dodging drab green jeeps and trucks full of the Americans who’d been arriving in greater and greater numbers, she wondered if the man who’d come looking for her could have been Jamie. She thought he was in the Pacific, but, on the other hand, she hadn’t heard from him in more than a month. He’d been in Papua New Guinea when he mailed his last letter, being eaten alive by mosquitoes and rotted by mildew. So much for paradise, he’d written. He seemed to roam freely through the war. Maybe the navy had decided he was needed in the European theater, to chronicle the eventual invasion. All these Americans piling up in Britain, their camps sprawling along the south coast, were surely to be put to use before too long.

  In midsummer she’d received Sarah Fahey Scott’s manila envelope with the copy of Life inside, a paper bookmark stuck between the two pages taken up by Jamie’s painting, and a card with a brief message:

  We’ve never met, but I’m an old friend of your brother’s and have heard enough about you to wish we might be friends too. I was so grateful he looked me up when he passed through Seattle last month. He asked me to forward this on—that’s his painting in there, being seen by millions, but I’m sure you’d know his work from a mile away. My mother sends her best wishes, by the way. She called you “a force,” which is her highest praise.

  Marian had wondered why Jamie had not told her he’d seen Sarah again and whether perhaps a letter had been lost. She’d studied the painting: a P-4 landing on some godforsaken speck in the Bering Sea. The subject wasn’t his, but the execution was, the slight warp to the perspective and the sureness with which he’d suggested the clouds, the hovering white crown of a volcano, the reflections on the waterlogged runway. The airplane was well done—accurate without being fiddly. She didn’t envy the pilot. When she’d been in Alaska there hadn’t been many places to land in the Aleutians, certainly not as far out as Adak or Attu, and little reason to go. The weather was so murderous the sky there might as well have been a direct portal to the great beyond.

  When she reached the outskirts of Southampton, it was only four but already sunset. She parked her motorbike and was making her way toward the Polygon Hotel’s revolving door when someone caught her arm from behind.

  Caleb. Caleb in an army uniform. She clutched at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a war.”

  She pushed him back. “But here. It was you this morning. Why didn’t you leave a note?”

  “I left a message.”

  “The girl who took it couldn’t even remember your name, just told someone to tell me ‘a man’ had come by. Oh!” she said, interrupting herself. “Your hair.” Of course his braid would have been cut off, but she hadn’t thought about it. She plucked his garrison cap from his head and reached up to touch his short hair, saying, “I thought it might be Jamie.”

  “Ah.” He seemed to absorb her implied disappointment without offense. “Is he in England?”

  “As far as I know he’s in the Pacific. Before that he was in Alaska.” She studied him. Besides the hair and a deep tan he looked remarkably unchanged from when she’d last seen him, when they’d clung to each other in the dirt behind his cabin. She said, “I’m so glad to see you.”

  “I couldn’t remember which of us was mad at the other. I decided to chance it.”

  “Well, not me.”

  “Not me, either.”

  They smiled. The sound of an engine bulged in the sky. She craned to look. A Spit, barely discernible against the darkening sky. “Did you marry that girl? The teacher?”

  “No.”

  She absorbed the news with a nod, less relieved than she would have expected. “Come inside.” As they walked toward the hotel, she said, “Somehow I knew you were all right. Tell me where you’ve been.”

  “Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily. Now here.”

  “No wonder you’re so brown. All those places?”

  Caleb said, “What has Jamie been doing?”

  “He’s a combat artist. Did you know such a thing existed? He draws and paints for the navy.”

  They passed through the revolving door. Caleb steered her toward a leather Chesterfield. “He told me something about it when I last saw him. It almost gives me hope, that Uncle Sam wants paintings.”

  “You don’t mind? Sometimes I don’t tell people because I’m worried it seems unfair.”

  “Fair and unfair—none of that means anything anymore.” He leaned toward her, his nearness lighting up her bones. “In the Med, I tried to never let myself wish to be anywhere else or even consider that anything else existed. It seemed for the best. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “But sometimes when I was waking up or falling asleep and had my guard down, I’d think of you. I’d put you out of my mind, but now…” He hesitated. The back of one long finger rested discreetly against her thigh.

  “What?” she said. “Now what?”

  “Now I have twenty-four hours left on a thirty-six-hour pass. I’d like to spend as many as I can with you.”

  She wanted to climb into his lap. She wanted to strip him naked there in the Polygon’s lobby and press against his skin. She said, “Let me change and we’ll go for dinner.”

  “Can I spend the night?” There was nothing sardonic about him, nothing teasing. He was almost pleading.

  If she went to bed with him, Ruth would see it as a betrayal, be devastated if she found out, but Marian couldn’t summon any anticipatory shame. She hadn’t stopped loving Caleb because she fell in love with Ruth. The two loves were like two disparate species coexisting obliviously in the same landscape: an elk and a butterfly, a willow tree and a trout. Neither diminished the other. Ruth had brought her back to life; she had never been infatuated with Caleb like she had been with Ruth, yet he was more essential. He was as inherent to Marian as one of her organs. “There’s someone,” she said.

  “Does that matter? It’s a genuine question. I’m not trying to be flip.”

  “That’s what I’m asking myself.”

  “I told you how I would pretend there was nothing else. That
’s what I want tonight. Nothing else has to exist.”

  “But other things—other people—do exist.” He waited. Lamely, wavering, she said, “I have to fly in the morning.”

  “I’ll let you go in the morning. You know I will.”

  “It’s as easy as that?”

  “It doesn’t matter what’s easy,” he said. “There’s just what you do and what you don’t do.”

  She stood in silence, galaxies of indecision whirling through her. Finally she said, “I can’t.”

  He must have seen her anguish because he chucked her lightly on the shoulder. “Dinner, then. Good enough.”

  South Pacific

  August 1943

  Three months earlier

  At first Jamie had asked the names of the islands, but usually the answer was that he didn’t need to know. And, true, he didn’t strictly need to know where he was: He was there regardless. But for that reason—that he was already there—how could it be a secret? To whom could he blab? Only to other men on the same ship, who were already there, too, in the same unnamed spot.

  But he had discovered that the names didn’t mean anything when he did manage to extract them, or didn’t even exist, so he stopped asking, labeled his drawings and paintings with nothing more specific than Solomon Islands.

  Most were protrusions of limestone or basalt, densely jungled, barricaded by shark-patrolled reefs, beyond which lay mangrove swamps and crocodiles and tall grass as sharp as scalpels and more mosquitoes than you could shake a stick at. Occasionally he glimpsed villages, people paddling dugout canoes, children playing on the beach. Sometimes they sailed past wrecked warships, a superstructure sticking out of the water or a hulk lying on its side like the bloated corpse of an animal. Some islands were nothing more than sandbars barely breaching the surface, a palm or two clinging on. He painted one of those, a cliché of paradise, and tried to invest it with the saturating bleakness he felt, the vulnerability of these little rafts of land in so much water. The fronds of his palm tree resembled, at first glance, a man hanging by his neck, blowing in the wind like a tattered kite.

  They hid one night against the blackness of a long-extinct volcanic cone, waiting for a group of Japanese destroyers. When they came into range, Jamie felt his ship jolt as the fish launched. The Japanese didn’t see the convoy, had no way of knowing torpedoes were speeding through the water until they hit. Jamie imagined a canvas, almost entirely black, the silhouette of a sinking destroyer lit by the yellow-white flash of exploding shells. But how to convey the hundreds of men in the water, their eerie silence? Almost all refused rescue, preferred to die. He saw their wet heads caught in the searchlights, some faces wild with silent fear, others defiantly blank.

  He had no pity for the enemy anymore. In this place, compassion would be as superfluous as an overcoat, but he wondered if, when the war was over, it would come upon him all at once, strike him as stealthily as a torpedo.

  Every time he was in port, changing ships in Cairns or Port Moresby, he sent paintings to Washington. There was no shortage of war to draw and paint, but, also, he was losing his ability to distinguish what was important. He spent hours painting a single oil drum, put that loving portrait of a rusty cylinder in the same crate as a painting of a full sea battle as though they were equals. He’d lost track, a bit, of his task: the essence or spirit of war. If such a thing existed, it couldn’t be drawn or painted. You might as well paint a picture of the earth’s molten core or of a starless corner of the night sky and say, This is the earth, this is the sky.

  He painted the sea with nothing in it, just a blue horizon, sent that, too. No word came to him about whether or not his superiors were pleased with his work, his wandering chronicle, but neither did word come that he was to be reassigned.

  * * *

  —

  In October, Jamie landed on an atoll recently reclaimed from the Japanese and stayed for a while in the tented camp there. He painted a row of Corsairs out on the baking-hot runway that had been made by crushing and smoothing coral, millions of years of work by tiny animals, into a flat, hard surface. When he swam in the sea, he wore sandals made from tires salvaged off crashed Japanese planes so the living, uncrushed coral didn’t slice up his feet.

  In November, he went to Brisbane, stayed in a vast camp of tents and huts set up in a public park, purple with blooming jacaranda and pungent with eucalypts. He sat in cinemas and bars and didn’t draw or paint anything at all. Several letters from Marian found their way to him there, all from back in the summer. She had a friend. She liked London. She liked the flying. She wrote:

  I’m ashamed to say I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’ve always needed to feel I had a purpose, and now I have an undeniable one. Is this why people have wars? To give themselves something to do? To feel a part of something?

  He thought he might eventually tell her about seeing Sarah in Seattle, but for now he preferred to keep their encounter inside a shell of privacy, away from judgment or any need to explain what it had meant, or not meant. He struggled to write anything meaningful at all to Marian. What could he tell her? That the war had crushed and smoothed him into a different substance entirely, something hard and flat? Apparently he was a person who could watch men drown and feel no pity. He’d been present for every minute, every second of his own life, and he hadn’t known himself. He’d thought he could paint the war and not belong to the war. He’d fancied himself an observer, but there was no such thing here.

  A few times he started a letter to Sarah but gave up. One evening, he went to a brothel, chose a small, redheaded girl. The next night he went back, chose a different girl, fleshy and blond. It didn’t help. He didn’t go back.

  After the war, he thought, he would know what he wanted to tell Marian. After the war, he would find Sarah again.

  * * *

  —

  A few days before Christmas, as dawn broke, he was asleep aboard a troop transport in a convoy, crowded in with Marines being sent to make a landing somewhere.

  Six miles away, a man—the commander of a Japanese submarine—looked through a periscope. He had been following the American convoy for most of the night. Through the periscope he saw a disk of dim sky and black sea, the faint shapes of ships. He focused on a destroyer, relayed the bearing and angle to an officer. He must aim not at where the ship was but at where the ship would be. The trajectory of the destroyer was one line sketched across the blank indigo ocean. His submarine’s course made another line; the torpedoes would connect the two with elegant yet unpredictable geometry.

  Though dawn had broken, the water was still saturated with night when the three torpedoes passed through it. They all missed the destroyer (the captain’s range was slightly off), but two hit Jamie’s transport. The initial impact didn’t kill him, nor did the explosion that broke through the hull, pulling up a geyser of water. He survived long enough to feel a sudden crush and violent churn of salt water, the other bodies against his, the pressure that squeezed his lungs, broke his eardrums. Heat billowed past like a wind. He thought he was swimming toward the surface, that the rippling pane of sunlight was almost within reach, that he was about to burst up into the air. And he did see light coming closer, but it was only the blooming glow from the exploding boilers. He didn’t quite feel terror as he died—there wasn’t enough time. Nor did he feel anything resembling acceptance, nothing like peace. He didn’t think of Marian or Sarah or Caleb, or of his paintings or Missoula, though he might have, if he’d lived a few more seconds. No satisfaction came to him at having found, at last, the spirit or essence of war. He was almost as bewildered as if he were still an infant on the Josephina, plunged into an incomprehensible world of fire and water.

  England

  December 1943

  A few days later

  “Is there still the someone?” Caleb asked Marian one night as they danced. It was an accidental Londo
n rendezvous, lucky timing. The dance hall was decorated for Christmas.

  “Yes.” In the month since Caleb’s arrival, Marian’s life would have been much simpler if she had seen a way to introduce him to Ruth, but she knew Caleb would intuit that Ruth was the someone, and Ruth would be jealous and territorial no matter how many assurances Marian offered. So the weeks had been dominated, in large part, by logistical concerns: how to spend time with each of them without alerting the other and how to avoid ATA gossip. The complexity of her schedule and the general wartime hecticness provided some cover, but there had been close calls. Caleb’s camp was in Dorset, nearer to Marian than Ruth’s posting at Ratcliffe, and so she saw him a bit more often, though occasionally Ruth got assigned a taxi flight to Hamble or a delivery to the Spitfire repair depot and showed up unexpectedly.

  Only in the air did Marian ever fully relax. Flying, she was where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to do. No one could reach her or ask anything of her.

  On the other hand, she had made the unexpected discovery that the contrast of a present lover with a past one actually amplified her tenderness for each. What was the harm in being loved by both? Who was she to turn her back on such abundance after never before having quite enough love? Who knew how long any of them had to live, anyway. Caleb would go to Europe whenever the invasion happened, and ATA pilots died at about the same dismal rate as those in the RAF.

  He found a pocket of space in the crowd to spin her out and pull her back. “If he’s so important, why can’t I meet him?”

  The song ended, and a new one began, a swell of woodwinds, brass shimmering on top. They turned mostly in place, cocooned by other couples.

  “Why do you want to?” she said.