On the tenth day the trifler will be nibbled at by bald eagles. On the eleventh day . . .
Then I had a slosh and then another slosh and then another slosh. Then another slosh and another slosh and another slosh. A total of six, in a quarter of an hour. Then I skittered and skated and bounced and danced, in my mind, and felt myself kin to Zeus the immortal whose breath makes the waves mount even to the height of the mast of a tall ship and whose breath makes the dust of the earth leap up and form into whirlwinds and whose frown makes the high-reaching many-branched trees split asunder showing their marrow and whose frown makes the white-terrible snow rush from the mountaintops in house-destroying rushes and whose smile is never seen, but rather hid behind his hand, because it roasts the eyes. Then the mood changed and I felt not kin to Zeus the well-feared but rather myself, Thomas — Thomas the fuddled, Thomas of the putty spear, Thomas of the fell-short arrow, Thomas the kithless, Thomas of the gnashed teeth, Thomas the ricked wrenched twisted and maimed, Thomas the marrowless, Thomas the reduced, Thomas of the overdraft, Thomas of the last legs. I was, in fine, depressed.
I thought: Perhaps I drink too much?
20 April
Perpetua smiled at me today. Why?
I asked her if she wanted to have a drink after we finished shooting.
“Sure,” she said.
In the bar she asked: “Are you going to give them the money?”
“Who told you?”
“Ezra.”
“I don’t have the money.”
She thought about this. Then she said: “I like people who are struggling with dark malefic forces.”
25 April
No shooting for three days. It’s been raining and I don’t have any interiors scheduled. That is to say: No ideas.
I wanted to film everything but there are things we’re not getting.
The wild ass is in danger in Ethiopia — we’ve got nothing on that. We’ve got nothing on intellectual elitism funded out of public money, an important subject. We’ve got nothing on ball lightning and nothing on the National Grid and not a foot on the core-mantle problem, the problem of a looped economy, or the problem of praxis vs. theory. I wanted to get it all but there’s only so much time, so much energy. There’s an increasing resistance to antibiotics worldwide and liquid metal fast-breeder reactors are subject to swelling and a large proportion of Quakers are colorblind but our film will have not a shred of material on any of these matters.
Tonight I got rid of my rocking chair. It was a bentwood rocker made by Thonet in 18-something and of all the physical objects I once owned I liked it best. I had it recaned nineteen times. I carried it down the stairs and set it in front of the building and hurried back to the window of the apartment to see who the lucky legatee would be.
It was not two seconds before a young couple paused in front of my rocker. They could not believe their eyes, peered all about like thieves, and then were off down the street with it, the girl in front and the boy in back. Looking for all the world like a Siberian sleigh pursued by wolves.
26 April
A day of crises.
Then did the umbrage of the gods fall upon Thomas son of Titus, Thomas the unbuckled, Thomas the not-together, Thomas the weeper of night-weeps, Thomas the bald-someday. As when sacrifice is made incorrectly not according to custom, as when Father Zeus’ fair-wrought altar is affronted by a goat not fresh-killed but killed many days before and sending forth a foul odor, as when guests disposed about a feast board neglect to pour upon the ground the sweet-souled wine in offering to Athene, so calamities arose.
The crew festered and fought. Marty said he’d rather go to jail than work one more day on the film, and Mitch said the same thing vis-à-vis the asylum. Joan began sending things through the mail again — nude photographs of herself together with a spurious Annual Report suggesting a considerable net worth. Marcello approached Ezra with a garrote in one hand and an oubliette in the other.
And Brewers’ Natural slapped a lien on the film.
They sent a lien officer around for the purpose. Ezra gave him a drink, and then another drink, and then many more drinks. But the lien officer had a head as clear as the decimal system, as clear as capitalism.
“How can you tell anything about the film until it’s finished and cut?” Ezra asked the lien officer, and the lien officer said, “I can tell.” He slapped the lien.
Pew Associates called and said they were no longer interested in coming aboard and would we please send the black spot back.
Perpetua remained warm and beautiful. She sat in the cutting room near the Moviola and looked over my shoulder at the soft, shrunken lengths of film and said, “Probably the music will help it a lot.” That is the worst thing you can say in the film business.
She placed a hand on my arm.
“I like that part of the film where the genius says, ‘It is difficult to do anything right, the first time,’” she said. “That was really inspiring.”
I looked at her.
“And I liked that part where the counterman looks at the groupie and says, ‘You with the band?’ And I like the part with the magic bone.”
I looked at her, amazed. Parts of the film had remained, had stuck, in her memory — not even her own parts. The film was able to move from the screen into a human mind.
I thought: But what more do I want?
27 April
Votes of no confidence on every side. The principal American distributor does not wish to distribute the film. Suggests that we have it dubbed into Mandarin and approach again, from the East. Well and good. The lab will not make additional prints without additional money. Can’t blame them. The networks are not interested in a film that runs for four hours and cannot be interrupted for commercial announcements. That’s sensible. The university and art-house circuits say that the film, what they’ve of seen it, is not “relevant.” That’s true. The overseas exhibitors have said “No” in all major languages. Quite properly so. Most of our equipment has been repossessed by Brewers’ Natural. As is only natural. The film itself is in a vault with the lien liening against it. I am forbidden by injunction to enter the vault or even the building. Well, yes.
My answering service refuses to speak to me.
30 April
I am being bothered by doves.
Walking down the street, I notice a white dove (out of the corner of my eye) making an approach at three o’clock.
The dove dives, then shears off. He hovers for a bit, then begins to descend, then shears off again. This has happened today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday.
I thought: Doves.
Ezra and Mitch have gotten very tight. Ezra has explained to Mitch his feelings about Dreyer and Mitch has described to Ezra the inner workings of the Maryland Motherhouse of Our Lady of Perpetual Chagrin. The patients there, Mitch said, were tied to trees, in good weather. In bad weather they were allowed to act out historical pageants, such as the winter at Valley Forge.
“Real blood,” Mitch said. “Our blood.”
“I am better than he is,” Perpetua told me.
“Than who?”
“Waverly Branch. Our first-desk man.”
“I believe you.”
“But he is a man,” Perpetua said. “Therefore —”
“I see what you mean,” I said.
“There was nothing the matter with Harold that is not also the matter with all of you,” she said. “I am thinking of becoming a fanatic.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Give us time.”
“Time!” she said. “You’ve had centuries.” And then: “Why is that white dove making passes at your head?”
“It’s something that’s been happening to me lately.”
I thought: It could not be. I am not worthy.
“For food,” Mitch said to Ezra, “we had gruel. One oat per bowl.”
“I am tempted to bust Waverly in the mouth,” Perpetua said, “definitively.”
I thought: What are the preconditions fo
r being splashed with grace? I’ll have to look it up.
1 May
Now we are shooting “Flying to America.”
The one hundred and twelve pilots check their watches.
If they all turn on their machines at once . . .
Flying to America.
(But did I remember to —?)
“Where is the blimp?” Marcello shouts. “I can’t find the —”
Ropes dangling from the sky.
I’m using forty-seven cameras, the outermost of which is posted in the Dover marshes.
The Atlantic is calm in some parts, angry in others. This will affect the air.
A blueprint four miles long is the flight plan.
Every detail coordinated with the air-sea rescue services of all nations.
Victory through Air Power! I seem to remember that slogan from somewhere.
Hovercraft flying to America. Flying boats flying to America. F-111s flying to America. The China Clipper!
Seaplanes, bombers, Flying Wings flying to America.
A shot of a pilot named Jellybelly. He opens the cockpit door and speaks to the passengers. “America is only two thousand miles away now,” he says. The passengers break out in smiles.
Balloons flying to America (they are painted in red and white stripes). Spads and Fokkers flying to America. Self-improvement is the big theme of flying to America. “Nowhere is self-realization more a possibility than in America,” a man says.
Perpetua watching the clouds of craft in the air . . .
Gliders gliding to America. One man has constructed a huge paper airplane, seventy-two feet in length. It is doing better than we had any right to expect. But then great expectations are a part of flying to America.
Rich people are flying to America, and poor people, and people of moderate means. This aircraft is powered by twelve rubber bands, each rubber band thicker than a man’s leg — can it possibly survive the turbulence over Greenland?
Is this the end of the film? Or is it rather the beginning? I can’t decide.
Long thoughts are extended to enwrap the future American experience of the people who are flying to America. . . .
“Sit down,” Perpetua says. I look at her. She is holding my rocking chair!
“Where did you get that?”
“Sit down,” she says again. “Relax. Watch the sky. Let Ezra do the rest.”
I sit down in my rocking chair. I rock and watch the sky. Ezra does the rest. He is waving his hands in the air and shouting into a walkie-talkie.
“Why don’t we have a child?” I say to Perpetua. “Or something.”
“Good God,” she says. “You are optimistic. What’s got into you?”
“Once in a while I say something spontaneously. Something ill-considered.”
“Flying to America,” she says.
“Well, yes.”
Perpetua
Now Perpetua was living alone. She had told her husband that she didn’t want to live with him any longer.
“Why not?” he had asked.
“For all the reasons you know,” she said.
Harold’s farewell gift was a Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance policy, paid up for one year. Now Perpetua was putting valve oil on her trumpet. One of the valves was sticking. She was fourth-chair trumpet with the New World Symphony Orchestra.
Perpetua thought: That time he banged the car door on my finger. I am sure it was deliberate. That he locked me out while I was pregnant and I had to walk four miles after midnight to my father’s house. One does not forget.
Perpetua smiled at the new life she saw spread out before her like a red velvet map.
Back in the former house, Harold watched television.
Perpetua remembered the year she was five. She had to learn to be nice, all in one year. She only learned part of it. She was not fully nice until she was seven.
Now I must obtain a lover, she thought. Perhaps more than one. One for Monday, one for Tuesday, one for Wednesday . . .
2.
Harold was looking at a picture of the back of a naked girl, in a magazine for men. The girl was pulling a dress over her head, in the picture. This girl has a nice-looking back, Harold thought. I wonder where she lives?
Perpetua sat on the couch in her new apartment smoking dope with a handsome bassoon player. A few cats walked around.
“Our art contributes nothing to the revolution,” the bassoon player said. “We cosmeticize reality.”
“We are trustees of Form,” Perpetua said.
“It is hard to make the revolution with a bassoon,” the bassoon player said.
“Sabotage?” Perpetua suggested.
“Sabotage would get me fired,” her companion replied. “The sabotage would be confused with ineptness anyway.”
I am tired of talking about the revolution, Perpetua thought.
“Go away,” she said. The bassoon player put on his black raincoat and left.
It is wonderful to be able to tell them to go away, she reflected. Then she said aloud, “Go away. Go away. Go away.”
Harold went to visit his child, Peter. Peter was at school in New England. “How do you like school?” Harold asked Peter.
“It’s O.K.,” Peter said. “Do you have a light?”
Harold and Peter watched the game together. Peter’s school won. After the game, Harold went home.
3.
Perpetua went to her mother’s house for Christmas. Her mother was cooking the eighty-seventh turkey of her life. “God damn this turkey!” Perpetua’s mother shouted. “If anyone knew how I hate, loathe, and despise turkeys. If I had known that I would cook eighty-seven separate and distinct turkeys in my life, I would have split forty-four years ago. I would have been long gone for the tall timber.”
Perpetua’s mother showed her a handsome new leather coat. “Tanned in the bile of matricides,” her mother said, with a meaningful look.
Harold wrote to the magazine for men asking for the name and address of the girl whose back had bewitched him. The magazine answered his letter saying that it could not reveal this information. The magazine was not a pimp, it said.
Harold, enraged, wrote to the magazine and said that if the magazine was not a pimp, what was it? The magazine answered that while it could not in all conscience give Harold the girl’s address, it would be glad to give him her grid coordinates. Harold, who had had map reading in the Army, was delighted.
4.
Perpetua sat in the trumpet section of the New World Symphony Orchestra. She had a good view of the other players because the sections were on risers and the trumpet section sat on the highest riser of all. They were playing Brahms. A percussionist had just split a head on the bass drum. “I luff Brahms,” he explained.
Perpetua thought: I wish this so-called conductor would get his movie together.
After the concert she took off her orchestra uniform and put on her suede jeans, her shirt made of a lot of colored scarves sewn together, her carved-wood neck bracelet, and her D’Artagnan cape with its silver lining.
Perpetua could not remember what was this year and what was last year. Had something just happened, or had it happened a long time ago? She met many new people. “You are different,” Perpetua said to Sunny Marge. “Very few of the girls I know wear a tattoo of the head of Marshal Foch on their backs.”
“I am different,” Sunny Marge agreed. “Since I posed for that picture in that magazine for men, many people have been after my back. My back has become practically an international incident. So I decided to alter it.”
“Will it come off? Ever?”
“I hope and pray.”
Perpetua slept with Robert in his loft. His children were sleeping on mattresses in the other room. It was cold. Robert said that when he was a child he was accused by his teacher of being “pert.”
“Pert?”
Perpetua and Robert whispered to each other, on the mattress.
5.
Perpetua said, “Now, I am alon
e. I have thrown my husband away. I remember him. Once he seemed necessary to me, or at least important, or at least interesting. Now none of these things is true. Now he is as strange to me as something in the window of a pet shop. I gaze into the pet-shop window, the Irish setters move about, making their charming moves, I see the moves and see that they are charming, yet I am not charmed. An Irish setter is what I do not need. I remember my husband awaking in the morning, inserting his penis in his penis sheath, placing ornaments of bead and feather on his upper arms, smearing his face with ochre and umber — broad lines under the eyes and across the brow. I remember him taking his blowpipe from the umbrella stand and leaving for the office. What he did there I never knew. Slew his enemies, he said. Our dinner table was decorated with the heads of his enemies, whom he had slain. It was hard to believe one man could have so many enemies. Or maybe they were the same enemies, slain over and over and over. He said he saw girls going down the street who broke his heart, in their loveliness. I no longer broke his heart, he said. I had not broken his heart for at least a year, perhaps more than a year, with my loveliness. Well screw that, I said, screw that. My oh my, he said, my oh my, what a mouth. He meant that I was foulmouthed. This, I said, is just the beginning.”
In the desert, Harold’s Land-Rover had a flat tire. Harold got out of the Land-Rover and looked at his map. Could this be the wrong map?
6.
Perpetua was scrubbing Sunny Marge’s back with a typewriter eraser.
“Oh. Ouch. Oh. Ouch.”
“I’m not making much progress,” Perpetua said.
“Well I suppose it will have to be done by the passage of time,” Sunny Marge said, looking at her back in the mirror.
“Years are bearing us to Heaven,” Perpetua agreed.
Perpetua and Sunny Marge went cruising, on the boulevard. They saw a man coming toward them.
“He’s awfully clean-looking,” Perpetua said.
“Probably he’s from out of town,” Sunny Marge said.
Edmund was a small farmer.
“What is your cash crop?” Sunny Marge asked.
“We have two hundred acres in hops,” the farmer replied. “That reminds me, would you ladies like a drink?”
“I’d like a drink,” Perpetua said.
Flying to America Page 3
