by Joan Barfoot
Good to know there are measures, however complex. Lila would surely be stumped if she had to figure out how to put out a blaze on the wing of an airplane, not to mention deal with whatever problems the fire is a symptom of, but if there are ways to do so, it’s excellent somebody knows them.
Perhaps there’s a manual. Maybe in the cockpit, crew members are thumbing through frantically in search of the page that gives them the particular answer to this particular disaster.
“Eject,” it might say. “Give up and get out.”
The big man by the emergency exit is sitting up taller, filling the space even more than before and turning this way and that to survey what’s around him. He looks like a man who intends to look after himself. Lila has seen that kind of expression before on the faces of men: closed in, removed, hard.
Lila is not bad herself at being imposing when that’s called for; it’s not solely a matter of size. There’s no way of knowing how useful that’s likely to be, but at least it’s a skill. In fact she has plenty of talents; only, some of her most prized ones aren’t necessarily the ones that will come in most handy today.
She would say she is adaptable, fairly affectionate and a swift, cool analyst of some matters. She is pretty good at both hope and forgetfulness, which so often rely on each other. She is no use whatever at concrete skills like wiring or carpentry. She has read largely and widely, but can’t, off the top of her head, recall any literature that would very usefully apply to the moment.
If it’s not too much trouble, she tries to be nice. She also has an aptitude for ruthlessness when it has seemed to her to be required. And on and on. There is simply no way to tell what characteristics are useful today, and which may do harm to the cause of survival.
“Anyone with special concerns, such as a medical problem, should alert a flight attendant. Your crew will update you on our progress as developments occur. Thank you for your attention.” Abruptly there’s a click, and the deep, assured voice is gone. Lila feels a tick in her heart of something like grief for its loss. Others may feel this, as well. People turn to each other, and there are renewed sounds of panic.
This is the kind of event that must elicit extremes. Whatever is at the very core and root of each human here will be called out, and called upon. Someone with a cheerier view of the nature of humans might feel safe, even protected, facing crisis in the company of so many. To Lila, it feels dangerous.
It’s true not all the seats were filled for this flight, so there are slightly fewer concerns than there might have been. At least there’s no one beside her in the window seat climbing or screeching or clawing to get out. Or, for that matter, patting her hand, speaking softly. But there are nevertheless many, many people, each an unknown quantity, in a space which was adequate for its original purpose but is entirely inadequate for explosions of despair and terror, or even great bursts of generosity and goodness.
As long as they were sitting neatly in rows, facing forward, eating and drinking, talking or reading or napping, merely passing dull hours, they were just people headed in a common direction, with their own stories and for individual reasons. Now, though, it could actually make a difference if Susie’s mother’s devotion to her child were so radical it caused her to abduct her. It might certainly make a difference if the man by the emergency exit really is the sort of fellow who could have murdered his wife last night.
What if civility does vanish in bits and pieces, as on Lila’s television screen, until it ends up in some blood-drenched horror? What if she was right, that just under civility’s thin skin there’s destruction wanting out, waiting for an excuse to unleash itself, inflict revenge?
Revenge for what? For grievances, deprivations and indignities, or, in this instance, terror—all those things that boil up beneath that fragile and transparent surface.
Not yet, though. So far there is upheaval, but not real destruction. Close by, someone is moaning, or praying, “Oh God, oh God.” Some people’s lips move silently, some are fingering beads of one kind and another, and who knows what others are doing beneath beards or veils?
If they go down, it will be, Lila thinks, quite a representative, multicultural crash, demographically speaking.
There may, for all she knows, be cultural as well as individual differences in how people react to a threat to their lives. An added potential discordance. At any rate, there are dangers inside and out.
Miraculous, really, how small the world has become, so that people from practically anywhere can, with more luck than they’re having today, be practically anywhere else in just a few hours, and can speak to each other in a matter of seconds. People from practically anywhere can find themselves facing death together in a single compact, narrow space.
“What a world,” Lila says.
“What?”
This would be fascinating if one were, say, God: able to peer into these people and this singular event to see what evolves. A kind of scientific experiment controlled in one petri-dish place.
“What do you think?” she asks Tom, who is surely experienced in the careful scrutiny of nuance and sorting fact from hope—what else must politicians gauge all the time? Although as a politician he did miscalculate; in the end, he did lose.
Think, if voters had decided differently that day, Tom wouldn’t be sitting here beside her now. And there’d be no reason for her to be here either, in his absence. Imagine that. One election six years ago, and here they are now.
Many other factors are also involved, of course; it can’t be entirely the fault of Tom’s former constituents.
“What do I think about what?”
Can that be irritation in his tone? How—tiny of him.
Heavens, he looks awful. Bloodshot and shaky, as if he hasn’t slept for days. From pain, from knifing cramps, Lila has fainted three times in her life, and imagines that just beforehand she must have looked much the way he does now. Fainting feels exactly like what it is: nourishing blood rushing away from the brain, leaving airiness, absence; and down you go.
Here there’s no room to fall, except slightly forward or gently sideways.
“Tom? What’s the matter?”
Funny how even in extraordinary situations, common, daily sorts of questions pop out. As if he’d just shown up at her door looking wan after a tough day of classes.
Most weeknights they’re both free; they recover from their days in Lila’s cool and quiet living room, its pale greys-blues-greens broken by fat flashy cushions, strokes of red and yellow vividness, rather like Sheila’s flamboyant scarf with her military-style uniform.
It’s a small house, Lila’s, but it’s her own, and dear lord she’d like to be in it right now. It’s a little messy upstairs in her office, scattered with papers and essays and lists of marks, but otherwise it is mainly serene, and safe, within reason.
Tom, on the other hand, does go on sometimes about his mortgage, and repairs, and alterations. Naturally his place is bigger than hers; it has had to contain more.
“It’s gauche, I expect,” he has told her, “but I’ve always picked up some small thing from every trip I’ve been on, and I have a whole room of stuff now, with just a couple of chairs. All the walls and shelves have sketches and carvings and bits and pieces to remind me of a particular event. So I can go into that room and see my whole life. The travelling parts, anyway.”
Many tales in one crowded room, evidently.
And what would he take back for that room from this trip? What, someday, might he see on a shelf to remind him of Lila?
“Hardly gauche,” she said. “It sounds rather nice. I have things from my travels, as well, but nothing so determined.” She has tended to count on memory—of Paul’s lean limbs, of the spot Virginia walked into the water weighted with stones, of egg sandwiches on a French train, of chanted echoes in vaulting cathedrals, of smells and colours, crowds and companions and moments o
f solitude—rather than memorabilia; but who knows if that was wise?
If they survive this, it will not have been a trip requiring a souvenir to keep it vivid.
“I see myself as an old man sitting in one of those chairs, looking around and remembering everything and being grateful for so much.” Lila wondered if he pictured his wife in the other chair. She wondered if his wife also collected memories of journeys, in the form of, say, carvings, or tapestries. Perhaps that’s what got her interested in crafts in the first place.
In Tom and Lila’s earlier days, they closed her front door behind them and steamed to her bedroom, tossing off covers and clothes. More recently, having become sedate (or regrettably accustomed), they’ve been as likely to sit on her pearly-grey sofa discussing their days over drinks, exchanging work worries, offering suggestions and tactics. On good days Lila has set out cheese and biscuits, but after ones spent watching ideas and words ricochet off particularly impenetrable students, she might just dump chips into a bowl. Tom mixes drinks.
Once, she called this time “a sort of picture frame around each day,” and he nodded. Still, it was different from clutching at each other in cars and barely making it home. There were some startled moments in those days, catching sight of steamed windows. Surprised by herself, she’d said, “This is very bad.”
“Positively adolescent.” He grinned.
“If we get caught, people will think we’re ridiculously old to be necking in cars.”
“If we get caught, they’ll be extremely impressed.”
She was rather impressed herself. And skittish, as he must have been, too, because really, jokes aside, getting caught would be awful. Some people would be thrilled, a few gravely injured. Mainly, events would unfold and occur that would be out of their hands.
There are serious consequences to desire, although it isn’t easy always to keep them in mind.
There must be rumours. In the close, peculiar setting of the campus, neither affection nor hostility goes unnoticed. Tom and Lila have counted on the many possibilities for misinterpretation, and the unlikelihood of proof. Except for when they’ve been overcome, they’ve been tremendously clever.
Now this, though.
They have continued to be overcome sometimes, but mainly in private. They might spend hours on her sofa discussing their respective days, their work, their students, their frustrations and their different fields of interest, and drinking, watching television, commenting on this and that (like massacres, like blood), but they also continue to slide into her dark, muffled bedroom, to tear, carefully, at each other’s clothes, and to fall around each other with happy lust. They have been attentive to each other’s desires, in Lila’s view. Not all her lovers have been as clever as Tom.
Eventually he has roused himself to drive into the night, home to what remains of his family. To the no-longer-depressed Dorothy, that handy, surprisingly capable businesswoman. In high school, where Tom and Dorothy met, she was apparently a cheerleader named Dot, but it wouldn’t be fair, years later, to hold that against her. Only it’s been hard not to take silent jabs; just to let some of the air out.
“The thing is, Lila,” Tom explained (or tried to explain, she wasn’t a very sympathetic listener), “she and I have known each other so long and been through so much. A lot of feelings may be different now, but I can’t throw out a whole history.” A kind of amputation, Lila supposed, not a surgery happily undertaken even for the sake of substantial rewards.
Naturally, the words “have cake, eat it too” sprang to mind, but then, many words came to mind.
Anyway, it’s necessary to give attention to what is, not always what is not; if for no other reason than to avoid becoming one of those people who moan and grieve about flawed parents, faulty childhoods, rotten teachers, crazy bosses, blaming and blaming, no mercy at all.
Unless actual crimes are involved, Lila has little patience with that. Her own parents were flawed, and her own childhood faulty, and exactly whose isn’t? But look at what became of her; at what, good and bad, they helped her become.
As Tom quite properly and frequently says—although not, as it happens, in these circumstances today—“We should enjoy what we do have, not regret what we don’t.”
For the most part, it seems to Lila, he is, stubbornly and unreasonably, an optimist. Unlike her, he doesn’t often, on the road to cheer, get tripped up, waylaid, by a dissenting and unruly mind.
They may have different outlooks, but nevertheless they do have much in common: their talents, for one thing, which lean more towards consuming than creating. Lila has laboured over two books of textual scrutiny and no broad fascination—who in the larger world especially cares about comparative influences of rural and urban geographies in particular novels by English and North American women?—although they were interesting enough to her, and excellent exercises. Tom tosses off (although he does not, he crafts them slowly and scrupulously, sometimes phoning her in search of just the right verb) his political analyses for various media, but she doesn’t think either of them could say they’ve actually made much of anything, not from scratch, starting from nothing.
Also, they both live by their wits. Their hands are smooth, their bodies relatively unmuscled, but Lila imagines their brains toughened and calloused and wiry with regular and strenuous use.
At the moment she’d like to be able to shut off her mind, let it go limp, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.
Tom’s mind is another matter. Here’s something she’s never seen before: his eyes open so wide the white shows all the way around the irises. He looks like descriptions she’s read of terrified horses trapped in a barn fire. Horses apparently panic and don’t know how to escape. They lose their heads in smoke.
Perhaps she should slap him. She owes him one.
What will she do if he turns out to be one of the people here who fall apart, come unstuck, implode, explode, whatever?
On the other hand, she hasn’t begun to imagine how to be, herself. Some previously unknown, unfamiliar aspect may well, for all she knows, tap-tap its way to the top.
Leaning towards him, she puts a hand on each of his. At least they’re together. They’ve had their ups and downs, and it’s each other’s fault they’re here in the first place, but if there’s any comfort at all, it’s that he’s beside her.
Sort of beside her. Beside her in his fashion. “Sorry,” he says finally. A faint flush of blood is returning, and he’s losing that ridiculous pop-eyed look. He looks towards her; not quite at her, though. As if he is embarrassed by something that just occurred in his own private life, his eyes are cast down and shifting.
Well. She certainly knows that expression, and this is really, seriously, not a good time for it. Her own eyes narrow, she removes her hands, but perhaps, since he isn’t looking directly at her, he doesn’t catch the warning.
Or doesn’t care. Other interests may be overriding. For instance: “I have something to tell you,” he said cautiously one evening as they sat on her sofa doing that picture-frame thing around their day. “I’m going to be away all next week.” He was looking down at, possibly, her knees.
This was a Thursday. “When? What for?”
“On the weekend, I guess. A little tour to visit the girls, a quick family whip-round.”
“You guess? What does that mean? When did you decide?” His little surprises have often been blows to her heart, leaving her bruised and breathless in the first moments after impact.
“I didn’t, actually. Decide, I mean. Only, Dorothy misses the girls, and she thinks Angela has some trouble she won’t talk about on the phone, so she decided we ought to go see her, and while we were at it we could fit Peggy in, too, with a bit of extra driving.”
Angela is the daughter who made Tom a grandfather; another family time, bitter for Lila (and it would be banal, if accurate, to note that shortly afterwards she was
flying to her own conference in England and the surprising, temporary embraces of the academic Paul).
Peggy is at university, studying something incomprehensible to do with mathematics, although, as Tom says, “I have no idea where she would have gotten such a mind. It’s very pure and abstract, her sort of math. I don’t even know if it’s proper to call it math, or if it’s something far more rarefied than that. At any rate it involves a great many numbers and odd symbols, and I haven’t a clue. She speaks of doing something with computers. It’s very strange, Lila, to feel your children going places you can’t imagine. You take them so far, and then you just stare at their backs while they tear off into a whole different universe.”
Certainly Angela has the more comprehensible life. Or, as Tom put it, “She’s a lot like her mother.”
Bite your tongue, Lila.
“And this trip was decided on when?”
He waved one hand vaguely. “Oh, just recently. The last few days, I guess. Dorothy organized it. She talked to them.” Sometimes he has made himself sound so helpless, so much a pawn in the hands of powerful women, including herself, that Lila could kick him.
She could also have wept, but mainly, and she thought men didn’t often understand this, out of rage. Maybe women didn’t understand all that often, either, that when they cried, it was more as an alternative to hurling glasses or fists than as an expression of grief. And that grief and anger often dance together in the heart.
So he would spend a week in the company of his wife, visiting the two young women they had created and raised. They would hear the same words, see the same views, and would speak later in the car, in bed, of what they’d heard and seen. Tom feigned surprise that any of this should upset Lila. His crafted gestures of amazement were, she thought, extremely chilly and very clever.
