by Joan Barfoot
“Even when he was beating her, she’s never seen him so furious. He turns very cold. He says if she makes a move against him, he’ll kill both her and Susie. That one way or another, she won’t keep Susie. The way he’s looking at her, she believes him.”
Tom shakes his head. “What a mind you have, Lila.”
“Well, it happens, right?”
He nods, pushes his tray away, folds his hands across his belly, closes his eyes. He knows, after all, that this is only a story. “Then what?”
“She can only think of one thing to do. She has to get away, run, hide, save Susie. She borrows more money, no idea how she’ll ever pay it back, and here they are. She doesn’t know what she’ll do or where they’ll go once they’re in England. They might be on the run through Europe for years. Till Susie’s a grown-up. But she’ll do anything, make any sacrifice, to keep Susie safe. She’s already afraid her husband has detectives on her tail and she won’t get farther than Heathrow, but she has to give it a shot.” Lila takes a deep breath.
“There. The end.”
Tom applauds. “Very good.”
“Thank you.”
It had holes, though, and flaws, Lila knows; not least of them that Susie’s mother looks much too relaxed to be a fugitive woman flying from danger into a furtive and desperate future.
“Keep going,” Tom says. “Tell me more.”
“All right.” She looks around. “How about the big guy by the emergency exit, did you notice him?” Tom opens his eyes briefly, stretches to look, nods.
“Say he murdered his wife last night.”
Tom’s eyes flare open again. “What?”
“Really. Beat her to death, broke all her bones, or stabbed her, or shot her, or put poison in her soup or her after-dinner drink. Then he threw a few things together and bolted, and now he’s trying to escape, like Susie and her mother, except for different reasons. He’s hoping nobody’s found the body yet, and he has a few hours of lead time before anybody starts hunting him.”
“Why would he do that?”
Why indeed? Lila can hardly suggest he was having an affair and decided to cut loose (imagine Tom slaughtering Dorothy for such a reason—oh, not funny). “Maybe, let’s see, she told him their children aren’t really his? Or that he’s getting too fat, or drinks too much, or that she hates how he dresses, or the sounds he makes chewing? Maybe she told him she couldn’t stand a single thing about him any more.”
“And he killed her to put her out of her misery?”
“Something like that.”
Those things happen, too.
“He’s big,” Tom says, regarding the man, “but he doesn’t look dangerous. What made you suspicious? Or is this just your day for bad, vicious men? How about if the poor guy is only off to sell, I don’t know, shady investments or swampland to unsuspecting Brits?”
“Heavens, no, that’s far too dull. Of course he doesn’t look dangerous, but that’s the point. You know, nine out of ten people who look perfectly ordinary are hiding something dreadful. I believe there are studies to show that.”
“No doubt.” Tom laughs. He hates how many studies there are proving this, proving that, proving whatever is desired.
“Also, look where he’s sitting. Maybe he figures if he slumps in a window seat, he won’t be noticeable if anyone’s on the lookout for him, but actually he sticks out, he’s obviously inexperienced. A man his size used to flying would never choose an inside seat.”
“Good point, Sherlock.”
“Ms. Marple, please. Anyway, keep your eyes open at Heathrow. Scotland Yard is bound to be on tap for one thing or another.”
That also happens. The difficulty is finding stories that do not happen. New, unlikely, unreasonable stories.
“Shouldn’t the movie be starting?”
“You’d think so. Going to watch it?”
It stars a man whose talents they both admire. From reviews, they gather it has little resemblance to old-fashioned Westerns, with their white hats and black hats, the clear good and bad which, Lila assumes, must have appealed to some people sometime. Modern moral ambiguity, she and Tom agree, is more compelling and far more realistic.
Well, naturally they agree on that. Of course they must. Moral ambiguity is practically their motto. They could wear matching sweatshirts with those words stitched front and back.
Most good stories are considerably more ambiguous than the ones Lila’s been telling Tom. Everyone has their own perspectives, their own tales, their own points of view, and the question is only whether they’re told or not, taken into account or not. If Lila’s stories were true, Susie’s father would surely have something to say for himself, and so would the man in the window seat. Not to mention his wife. Lila and Tom run into this themselves: an event she sees one way, he views quite another. They may agree both ways are reasonable, but that doesn’t mean the differences aren’t irreconcilable, and still sometimes startling.
Just a few weeks ago she discovered, for instance, that what she has regarded as lively discussions, he has sometimes viewed as arguments. Imagine how easily one could go years, decades, lives, without knowing that sort of thing—the prospects for misunderstanding are enormous.
What were they talking about? Massacres, that’s it, because they were on her sofa having an after-work drink, as they do, and watching the news on television, as they do, and there was some hideous, bloody, senseless outbreak of slashing ill will by one indistinguishable group against another indistinguishable group, sending many limbs flying, much blood spurting, many corpses lying about in dusty roads and ditches. No one on the TV news pinpointed what, exactly, had launched this, but several people sounded certain it would lead to much more and much worse.
Wasn’t it astonishing that these people who were now slaughtering each other had, for a fairly long time, been living peaceably as neighbours, as communities, sometimes even as families? Lila thought it was. She wondered what stories, frequently terrible but not always, must lie behind all this.
Surely Tom, the former politician and current historian, would have an enlightening perspective. History as he describes it is mainly a narrative of conflict; rather like news, although he doesn’t like the comparison, having been burned on occasion and feeling as he does that news is fleeting and uninformed, and very likely to turn out to have been inaccurate, and certainly lacking in the long view. Whereas history is precisely the long view.
“How do you think a thing like that happens?” she asked. “Can you imagine doing those things? Hacking your neighbours to pieces? And little children? Well, look at that, little children on both sides, hacking and being hacked. Whatever will happen to them? How could their hearts ever recover? Would we be capable as well? I bet we could. I bet it’s right beneath everyone’s surface. What do you think brings it out?”
He frowned slightly and began to speak of arbitrary imperialism, colonialism, rough boundaries that failed to take inhabitants into account. “It happened everywhere. Africa, Europe, especially Eastern Europe, here and there in South America, even in North America, to a degree. There are always ancient tensions and rivalries, and we probably can’t begin to understand them now.” He shrugged. “Probably those people can’t either, any more. Now it’s perpetual revenge, back and forth. In the bones. Or the blood. I don’t know.”
This was puzzling. What was the point of pursuing politics or history if he could only shrug and regard some matters as hopeless? Anyway, it wasn’t quite what she’d been asking.
“I realize,” she said carefully, “all that. But what I was wondering, is there something in everyone’s bones and blood? Whatever the history, is there something vicious inside humans, and it only takes a scratch on the skin of civility for it to splash out?” Because for all her own relatively peaceful, unviolent life, this is Lila’s suspicion.
“Oh, Lila.” He sighed. “I
don’t know. It’s been a tough day. Let’s not argue about it. You ready for another drink?”
What a surprise.
Mightn’t it be interesting to track back their words together and compare how they each meant and heard them? Tom would call that pathological; not in the mad sense (although maybe that, too) but in the morgue-laboratory way of close, intent analysis and scrutiny.
In her work, dissecting texts and stories, Lila’s intention is not to ruin, not to be left staring hopelessly at a heap of unreplaceable parts. It’s to see the whole more clearly, with an eye to its complexity. To see how even entirely unfamiliar emotions can be felt, and unlikely circumstances experienced.
To have many more lives than her own, and make them, however briefly, imaginable and touchable.
Naturally she and Tom have some different opinions and perspectives, but shouldn’t differences be opportunities? Shouldn’t they make the two of them bigger, at least prevent them from shrinking? One of the hazards of a safe middle age is the lure of getting little. Lila imagines it gets easier and easier to curl up like old lettuce, turn brown at the edges and wilt into decrepitude. She does not care for that idea at all.
She glances towards him, and sees that he has evidently lost interest and now, for heaven’s sake, has fallen asleep—does she have to go on making up stories to keep him awake? And how can he be tired when their journey has barely begun? Some exhaustion from his other life, perhaps, that Lila has no way of knowing about. She has very little idea how his private hours away from her are spent. Perhaps he’s had large, unspeakable events on his calendar.
It’s rather nice, though, and trusting, the way his head tilts towards her.
Usually when Lila goes to Europe, it’s on a flight leaving at night, heading into the sunrise. This is different, flying into the dark. People lulled by a plane’s sturdy, tedious sound and the immobility of waiting may fall asleep, like Tom; but won’t they be disoriented when they get where they’re going?
It’s possible he’s dozing for no other reason than to store energy for their time together. When he told her once that busy people should be able to grab quick naps whenever they can, she was reminded of something she’d read about the queen: “Her Majesty never passes up a discreet opportunity to use facilities”; which must account for why she is never caught going knock-kneed about her public chores. “You sleep,” Lila told Tom, “the way the queen pees.”
“No doubt I’d agree, if I knew what it meant. A regal sort of compliment, is it?”
Tom met the queen on one of his overseas political jaunts. “Well, not to say met her exactly, not the way I met you, for instance.”
“I should hope not.”
“More that I was actually present with a thousand or two other suitably impressed people on palace grounds when she drifted very close by. It’s possible she might not recall the occasion.”
“Oh, I’m sure she does. Who could forget you?”
“Could you?”
“No, not ever.” Which of course, however their story goes, must be true (unless she comes down with one of those forgetting diseases). What isn’t exactly clear is just what would be remembered, and how.
I want, she thinks. “Want” is a verb that requires an object, but she can’t find the word.
Well, she wants Tom, whose head is nodding closer and closer to her shoulder.
This, she thinks, is how it feels being with him: as if roots have shifted and nudged deeper and deeper, coiling and pushing until they have tendrils in every limb, organ and vein. Important parts of her have come to feel held together by these roots; like shallow land at risk of losing its topsoil if it isn’t protected by growth.
Oh dear, another image gone over the top—she keeps, in her enthusiasm, going too far. She shakes her head.
Coming awake with her movement, Tom shakes his head, also. “My ears feel strange. Think there’s something funny about the pressure?”
She shrugs. “It never quite suits me on a plane. That and the air. I always get some awful combination of dried out and puffed up, if a flight’s any length at all.”
He laughs. “Sounds attractive. You must be a treat by the end.” He looks at his watch. “Sorry for tuning out. It wasn’t you, it’s just that after a while planes always send me unconscious.” She didn’t know that about him; a good thing to find out, that his doze wasn’t personal. And what will he learn about her in these two weeks? Not everything, for either of them, will be pleasing or virtuous, and thank goodness for that.
Now a couple of kids from heaven knows what part of the plane are running up and down the aisle. Susie is watching them, looking shy but willing. Lila hopes shy overcomes willing, because two youngsters playing some antagonistic game this close are already too many.
Adults are also stirring, cramped muscles kicking up trouble. Some people stand and stretch, creating a cabin-wide rustling of cloth that sounds, over the rhythm of engines, like a great flurry of moths’ wings.
Somewhere towards the front, a baby is starting to howl.
Tom raises his eyebrows. “Still no movie?”
Lila shrugs again. “Not yet.”
“I could use another drink. How about you?”
“Sure. Whenever. She should be around again soon.”
He twists to peer down the aisle, turns back, frowning. “There’s a bunch of them in the galley, just talking, it looks like. Four of them.”
Kind, tender-hearted Tom, and this surprised Lila in their early days, balks at casual service in restaurants and stores. He has been known to toss items he intended to buy on a counter and stalk out if he hasn’t been able to get help fast enough, and he can be snappish in restaurants if he thinks the service is not properly attentive. By and large, when they’re together he saves Lila the trouble of saying similar crisp words, or making similar crisp gestures herself.
And by and large, that’s something to be careful about. She can’t afford to start assuming, or depending; falling into roles, like husbands, like wives: men who automatically drive, women who automatically don’t drive. That kind of thing. It can get too easy; like letting him order her drink for her.
“Listen,” he says more urgently. “Hear that?”
His face has the strangest expression. Unfamiliar, almost scary. What the hell is it?
He is looking beyond her, over her shoulder. His eyes are huge, his mouth hangs open.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says softly, with something like awe. “Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.”
four
Oh Jesus, indeed, oh sweet Jesus Christ.
Lila doesn’t believe it. Then she almost laughs out loud—imagine even for an instant that her belief or disbelief makes any difference. Imagine a giggle bubbling up at a moment like this.
She is staring, gape-mouthed, at Tom, who is still staring past her, past the empty seat, out the window. How can he?
She has already turned and looked, and turned back to him, just as fast as she could.
That’s fire out there. Fire and space; something terribly present and equally terribly empty.
No.
No, these things happen, but not really. On the news, yes, or in movies, but not to Lila. It’s only—what?—a scene. She thinks, No wonder they don’t show airplane disaster movies on airplanes, and another giggle bubbles up. They probably don’t sell airplane disaster books in airport bookstores, either.
Tom’s gaze remains locked on the flame-licked wing. He must have a different way of disbelieving than she does. Although fire dances in front of her anyway, between her face and his. She is watching his eyes through a flaring red curtain.
Lila prays for a suspension of event, right now. For anything but the heart-clamping terror against which she is instantly constructing this false, unsteady barricade. She is surprised to find herself praying. Or pleading, actually, the extent of her eloquence
reduced to, “Oh please,” not even addressed anywhere in particular. Like a scared child: too few words, and too small ones, for very large events.
But it was just a little bit of fire, wasn’t it? More hinting than real?
Airplanes must be built with this sort of possibility in mind, there must be mechanisms and manoeuvres. Well, what? Do the people flying this thing, who understand its mechanisms and manoeuvres, even know they have a problem yet?
She and Tom haven’t said a word except for his exclamation, although maybe he gasped at first sight, Lila doesn’t recall, but knowledge is spreading around them, rippling from seat to seat, row to row, until there’s a rising, rumbling tone of horror. Some shouting. Shrieks here and there.
Some kinds of knowledge are explosive, too big to contain. That may be why hands fly up to faces, covering ears, covering eyes: trying to prevent minds from collapsing in on themselves with this new understanding.
Shared terror is far too real, multiplying itself automatically and uncontrollably in some wild formula maybe Tom’s younger, clever mathematical daughter could explain.
Lila’s grandmother, telling June of some upheaval, had words for this feeling: “I’m all turned inside out,” she’d say, hands fluttering in distress like butterflies.
Tenderly, tentatively, Lila reaches a hand to the side of Tom’s jaw, feeling bone. Gristle under the skin.
She can’t quite feel her own skin, though. An awful, high scream rises from somewhere behind them, and Lila admires how alert that woman must be, absorbing the impact of disaster so swiftly she can scream like that.
People are starting to move, some trying to run. Some, scattering possessions and wits, are even climbing over seats—where do they think they are going? What do they suppose they are doing? “Be still,” she wants to shout. “Everybody, shut up, please, till I can understand this.” She can’t say just what “this” is. If she could say, would that fix it, or cause it to vanish? Is her faith in words so great she believes the right one could repair?
