by Joan Barfoot
It’s sunny up here above the clouds. Exhilarating. “Look,” and she nudges him. “It’s like a separate universe, isn’t it? So detached. A temporary unreality, I always think. A happy respite.”
In the classroom she never sounds so disjointed; nor in meetings, nor in conversations with Patsy or Nell. But more and more with Tom, she hears herself lapsing into an odd, worrying, staccato inarticulateness. This may just be what happens when people have been together so long they let their concentration relax, attention loosening like old elastic.
Or it may be, either more or less seriously, a sort of untalent, ungift she is cultivating, like being a reverse alchemist, turning gold thoughts into lead words. She would like to ask him about that, because the idea amuses her and because it might also appeal to him.
In their early days they talked for hours, leaping ahead as if topics were rocks in a river they were trying to cross.
“Yeah,” he says. “A happy respite for sure.” He touches her hand. So that’s okay.
“What are you most looking forward to?”
“You, of course.” He is smiling. “Just being with you.”
Beyond indulgence, does he know how urgent these days are? Although she can also see hurdles. Planning and packing, she didn’t entirely take them into account. Shut up, Lila. She supposes that partly it’s nerves. They’ve been away together before, of course, but never so far for so long. These two weeks are a promise, but also a test.
It’s three years since Lila’s been to England, that time travelling alone to a conference, a dull but necessary one to do with methods of teaching literary analysis. It was in the north, in Leeds, and just for a week. It’s a light kind of feeling, being so distant from regular life, whatever that is: able to look back—of course she missed Tom—but freed of connection.
In that week, she took a rather appealing, passionate man into her bed. This, she considered at the time, had to do with distance, experiment, playfulness, random pleasure. It had to do with her, not with Tom, or for that matter with love, or with faith. The man was forty, a few interesting years younger than Lila. He was at her conference, but his academic interests were not hers, leaning as they did towards certain French philosophies of content and language. She has, she thinks, sufficient grip on these theories, but finds them by and large tedious and unbeautiful.
His ideas—Paul’s, his name—were hardly what appealed. What appealed was that he was inventive, and a stranger, and was drawn to her for his own reasons, into which she had no grounds to inquire. He did mention his age often enough that she supposed he might simply be having trouble being forty. She enjoyed his large hands and the sensation of his beard on her skin. She thinks there is sometimes a special generosity, or abandon, with lovers who are mainly strangers: who know they have nothing to sustain.
This sort of event, not unknown in other, previous journeys and conferences, is entirely delicious: all loose ends, free desire. Same for Paul, of course. They both said at the end, each heading towards different homes, his in the south of England where a wife and two young children were doing whatever they did in their lives, that it had been glorious and would be gloriously remembered. They said goodbye with affectionate and grateful smiles.
Is that sort of thing heartless? Lila thinks it’s more like going to a good movie, or reading a good book: an event set apart, and if there are effects, they are mainly benevolent, adding scenery, some knowledge, even some depth to a life.
Tom, of course, might not have agreed. “Did you have a good time?” he asked when she returned. “I missed you a lot.” They fell into bed. His skin was smooth. She was not nostalgic for beard or lean flesh.
“Tell me all about it,” he said. Instead, she told Patsy and Nell. So, after all, it did mean something: a small, flailing last gasp.
She wonders vaguely how Paul is now, and what he’s doing, if he still has a beard, if he’s still lean, if he still gets all he can out of conferences. Some of his literary theories are falling out of fashion, so he will have to adapt swiftly or become suddenly, sadly old, at least in the academic world.
Dear Tom. She supposes he would think her faithless; although it’s not how he sees himself, heading home each night to the crafty Dorothy.
The flight attendant is coming their way with her rolling, clattering cart. She looks to be in her early twenties; about the age of Tom’s daughters. “What would you have thought if one of your girls had wanted to do that for a living?” Lila nods towards the young woman whose name, according to the tag on her military-blue bosom, is Sheila. Blue jacket, demure matching blue skirt to the knees, pale yellow blouse—stuffy colours broken by a vivid red scarf at her throat. How many experts met for how many hours to come up with this uniform, with its message of stern dependability, but also a hint of flamboyance?
Lila’s own experience of meetings suggests many, many hours indeed.
“The truth?” Tom looks at her seriously. “I’d have been disappointed. Unless it was just for a while, for the sake of travelling or getting some kind of experience of the world. But not as a career.” One of his daughters is married, stays home and provided Tom with his grandson; the other’s a graduate student in math. “I wouldn’t like the idea of them having to serve people like me and smile for a living.” He grins. “But I don’t expect what I thought would have made a blind bit of difference. They’ve always done what they want.”
Not unlike their father.
“Sir? Something to drink?”
“Scotch and water, please. And one for the lady.” Lila snorts—the lady! But Tom’s sense of humour can be unpredictable, and briefly he looks wounded. “Sorry. Order what you want. I’ll drink your Scotch.”
“No, no, it’s fine. Just right.” She takes a sip, to demonstrate her willingness, benevolence towards him.
But good grief. The day they met, he’d introduced himself at the end of a long and tedious session of the university senate to do mainly with hiring policies. Tom himself, for all she knew, was among the aging, irritable white men intent on their grievances.
“I was watching you,” he said. “You obviously feel strongly, but you keep composed, and when you speak, you’re calm and to the point. You stopped me from disgracing myself. Honest to God, for a while there I thought I’d have to get up and howl, go running out. What century do those guys think they’re living in? Who do you figure they think they are?”
Her surprise must have shown, because he frowned slightly before he grinned. She loves how fast his face can change; and has also, at times, been unnerved. “You made an assumption, didn’t you?” he asked. “Well, you’re wrong. I earned my job, and I deserve it, and I’m extremely good at it. That’s what I wonder about those guys: are they scared they’re not good enough to survive a little competition? Screw that.”
He’d touched her elbow to get her attention when he introduced himself. He leaned slightly towards her when he spoke, but not so close that he intruded. They said their names as if they didn’t know who each other was. They went to the faculty lounge together. Ordering drinks, he said approvingly, “Not a whole lot of women like Scotch. Why is that?”
“Too corporate for most of us, probably. Too much like, oh, getting strapped into pinstripes. We’d really rather sit around in our nightgowns drinking wine and eating chocolate, that’s our idea of a good time.”
“But not yours?”
“Oh yes, mine too, absolutely. This,” and she waved her Scotch, “is just for when there’s no chocolate, and a nightgown is out of the question.”
Maybe if he’d been wildly attractive, or particularly available, she wouldn’t have mentioned nightgowns. Even five years ago, Tom wasn’t those things: wildly attractive or, certainly, particularly available. Even then he was slightly balding and slightly pot-bellied. There were lines of laughter and concentration around his eyes and mouth, though; a keenness to his bones, a sha
rpness to him.
Sometimes Lila has been able to spot an ally or a friend right off the bat. Sometimes a lover, too, but not this time.
“Are you attached?” he asked.
“Not any more.”
“Tell me. But let me get us more drinks first.”
She was forty-two. She loved a few friends and relatives. Now and then she could be excited by a student or a thought, but she’d spent so long with so many of her colleagues that familiarity had, by and large, with the exception of Patsy and Nell, toppled into disinterest or contempt. She studied and researched, wrote papers and two critical books on her specialty, which is Anglo–North American women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century. People tend to say, “Oh yes, Virginia Woolf,” as if that’s all there is to it, as if words were never written by Ethel Wilson, or Mary McCarthy, or Sara Jeannette Duncan, or Zora Neale Hurston, or for that matter by Zelda Fitzgerald, not only Scott.
She stood regularly in front of rows of dazed faces, seeking out the ones that might be dazzling. She rolled words and glorious sentences off her tongue, watching to see where they might land.
“‘Come and stand in my heart,’” she recited, “‘whoever you are, and a whole river would cover your feet and rise higher and take your knees in whirlpools, and draw you down to itself, your whole body, your heart too.’” Once, she also spoke those Eudora words to Tom; telling him something, as well.
She felt in middle age, when they met, not beautiful, she never was that, exactly, but as if she might age well. She considered her history lively and eventful and not, compared with many others, tragic. She couldn’t quite tell, looking into mirrors, just how she was changing, or was likely to change, except for grey showing up here and there in her hair. Her eyes, pale blue-grey and large, were her best feature, in her view. They still gave an impression of innocence, but she couldn’t count on that continuing. At some point experience would start to show up in the gaze. Or she would come to need glasses.
And then Tom.
“Tell me,” he repeated when he’d returned with their drinks. The table was small and round. His hands circled his glass. He had a scattering of brown hair on his knuckles, but nothing excessive. His long fingers looked capable.
“My last lover,” she began, “had fat, godawful sausage fingers.”
His solemn, attentive expression collapsed.
“No, really,” she protested, laughing also. “I could picture myself going into a butcher shop in a big tweedy coat and a flowery scarf, hair up in curlers, carrying a shopping basket and standing at the counter pointing at a tray of Geoff’s fingers, saying, ‘I’ll take those, they should fry up real nice.’”
That, of course, was very near the end.
“My God, you women.” Tom was still laughing. “You’re cruel.”
“Yes,” she said. “We can be.”
Five years later, she is here on a plane with that laughing man. This still seems to her a kind of miracle.
Lila likes two things about flying. One is that it is virtually a non-experience, merely a bridge between one circumstance and another one, but almost nothing in itself. The other is that just for a little while, her life is out of her hands, and there’s not much point in wondering just whose hands it’s in, and whether they are nervous or steady or belong to someone she’d like well enough, say, to invite into her home. She is particular about who enters her home.
Naturally she wouldn’t like her life to be constantly out of her hands, but these occasions when it must be are relaxing. Almost blissful, in a disconnected sort of way.
“You ever make love in an airplane?” she asks lazily.
She loves the way his lips and the lines around his eyes fly upward. “Nope, never have. You?”
“No, but I’m wondering how it’s done. It would have to be in the washroom, wouldn’t it, with so many other passengers around? But I understand people do manage.”
“Want to try?”
Sometimes they get themselves caught in a whirlpool of challenge neither is willing to be first to abandon; so they have found themselves in some bold and disgraceful positions. Necking in parking lots after late faculty meetings, steaming up the windows of cars, for heaven’s sake! It’s hard to believe no one has noticed, but that’s what they do insist on believing.
“Is that a dare? An invitation?”
Tom looks behind them, a little nervously, Lila thinks. And she thinks also there’s relief in his tone when he says, “Oh well, too bad. There’s a line-up.”
“Damn. Just when I was feeling frisky.”
“Wait till tonight. And tomorrow, and the night after that. You’ll be a weary old woman by the end of this trip, you’ll be rolled back on the plane in a wheelchair.”
“And you’ll be on a stretcher, smart guy. Wearing splints.”
Lila has no idea any more what she would do without him. Her mind goes blank with the thought, and she is a woman whose mind is usually busy with one thing and another. It is terrifying, really, that addiction may have grafted itself to the original fondness and to the consequent, subsequent desire.
No wonder she sometimes flounders, arms and fists churning, trying to get free and creating a little damage in the process. She is horrified by the thought that this might be among the feelings that get called love.
“Christ,” she says, stretching. “Couldn’t you just die laughing?”
“At us?”
“What else.”
Flying in the hands of a stranger isn’t scary at all, compared with the two of them.
“My ass is getting sore,” he says, also shifting. “Talk to me. Make the hours fly as true and fast as this plane.”
“My man of the golden tongue.”
“I’ll show you that later, too.”
Well, who would not grow addicted to a man with lines of laughter and concentration around his eyes and mouth, who says, “Talk to me,” and then by and large, more or less, listens? This man who is right now touching his long, light fingers to her thigh, tapping out in code their many happy prospects?
two
Tom isn’t the only one whose ass hurts in these narrow, false-tweed seats. In business class they could both have been stretching out, extending themselves.
Never mind. In just a few hours she’ll be able to stretch out every which way.
Lila has learned such patience in the past five years, such restraint—she still is sometimes amazed by her own silences. She could have argued for comfort, after all, could have risked a discussion of the prior and more essential claims on Tom and his resources. Is this another of the disquieting definitions of love? That a person lets little things slide?
Lost things accumulate, binding themselves into large, rock-hard grievances.
She has almost forgotten how it feels to eat fearlessly in a restaurant with a lover, or stroll openly down a street, or enter a gallery, a movie, a play, without watching out warily. She feels this keenly, although Tom insists he does too. “I don’t like it any more than you do,” he claims, and she knows that he means it, as far as it goes.
For these two weeks they can eat freely in restaurants, embrace whenever they want, go anywhere at all without looking around. Already they’re on an airplane together, it’s begun. A little stiffness is nothing.
When this trip is over, will they be able to go back to their old ways?
Her complaints, she knows, would not be met with widespread sympathy.
She catches the occasional talk show, like anyone else, and has witnessed the script for these matters. “We went through a bad patch,” a couple will tell television cameras and audiences of millions, about infidelities and tests of trust. “We’re working to put it together again. We’re getting counselling, we’re trying hard.”
“I’m so sorry,” the straying partner insists, repentant and abject and
guilty. “I’m grateful she’s willing to give us another chance. I’ve learned my lesson. I hope she can forgive me, and I can earn back her faith.”
A touching tableau. One, Lila always observes, with a character missing.
“Hey, hold on!” she imagines that anonymous, abandoned third figure crying, wagging a finger at the TV screen, reeling from her own betrayal. “What the hell just happened? A minute ago I was a huge, important secret, not to mention the love of his life, and now I’m a penny that fell through his pocket? Wait just a minute here.”
Well, there’s nothing to do, really, but laugh. Or give up.
“What are you smiling about?” Tom asks.
“Talk to me,” he says in warm times; and in sturdy times. “You can tell me anything.” Well no, not always.
“I was thinking,” Lila says instead, “about what people look for in each other. Like magazine surveys, you know? What do women want in a man, what do men prefer in a woman? Women always say things like humour, kindness, intelligence, tenderness. And probably that he has a decent salary and won’t be a burden. What would you say? What would you look for?”
“In a woman?” He pauses, waits a beat, grins. “Enormous breasts and a brain the size of a walnut. That’s pretty much it. Why? What do you want in a man?”
“Huge penis. Tiny chick-pea of a brain.”
“Ah, Lila.” They’re laughing. “I love you to death.”
“And isn’t that just like a man.”
There. That’s why she loves him. Exactly that: laughter.
And intelligence, kindness and tenderness. And his impatience. Also his patience. His salary is not her concern, except when she ends up spending a transatlantic flight in the cheap seats.
And she likes that, in fairness, he cannot say anything like, “Where were you?” or “I don’t want you to do that.” There is much to be said for this variation of love. Nell’s second husband caused trouble that way. “I think,” she told Patsy and Lila, “I’m divorcing him just so I can get out to a movie with you guys without a big hassle. Although of course you can’t exactly say that to the lawyers.”
