White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  Luggage off the Titanic.

  As if I’d picked up every last thing I could find that was bizarre, offbeat, ill-omened and was trying to drag it bodily with me through the sacraments of Christian Grace.

  Tim appeared at the door, just after dark, and behind him four giggling black-leather guys. Black caps, black jackets, black jodhpurs, jack boots. A matched set. I’d seen them all severally at his shop, but not together, and not in uniform: Richard, Neil, Danny, and Cody. They were carrying my wedding dresses.

  Tim had another shirt-box-sized package, done up in white rice paper shot with silver foil. “For you, blushing bride,” he kissed my cheek, “To be opened on the morning of your wedding, before you put your stockings on.”

  He rolled on past me into the suite. Utter shock. He walked with two canes, those metal orthopedic kind with braces up the forearm. I’d only seen him moving around his shop. No wonder his arms and chest were so built up; his lower body was crippled: thoroughly, and miserably. I cornered Harlan when I could.

  “Shot through the hips at Pork Chop Hill,” he whispered. “Pelvis largely reconstituted from bone chips and bits of metal—”

  How embarrassing, that I hadn’t seen, or realized or asked. And Harlan obviously had.

  Harlan boxed most of his stuff, including the guitars, for Kit to mail at leisure. Some, like the orange juicer and coffee machine, he simply gave him. Also in Kit’s pocket: (quasi indefinite loan?) the pink slip, maintenance log, and keys to the green Porsche.

  ———

  At last it was time.

  Pulled up grandly at the curb before the revolving doors, was an antique London taxi, huge, upright, and black as death. Kit and the boys strapped my steamer trunks into the open cargo bay. Driving was a guy I hadn’t seen before, an amiably weird old German by the name of Constantine.

  Kit crammed inside with the rest of us, holding Tim’s sticks respectfully. The leather boys hopped on motorcycles and we pulled away, tight formation.

  Halfway to SFO Harlan said, “I like your entourage.”

  Tim sniffed. “Footmen on the running boards are a nice touch too, but it tends to get the CHP a skosh excited.”

  He left us at the airport curb. “You’ll pardonnez-moi for not walking with you? Just remember me, Lord, when you enter into your kingdom.” He kissed Harlan on both cheeks.

  He did the same for me. Kit stayed with him, holding his sticks. The boys took my trunks and Harlan’s to the counter.

  First Class. First time in my life. In the front door of the plane, and turn left instead of right. I feel like the newly made archbishop who said, “Gentlemen, from now on I expect never to eat a bad meal, nor to hear an honest opinion.”

  Still a stifling metal womb. The womb begins to move.

  Look down from a window seat by day, you see a variegated pavement taxi by gray and black, green and yellow islands set with little lights. But now it’s night.

  Noise swells from soft ventilation to a whine, a shriek, a whistling roar. Wheels lope purposefully over the cracks in the pavement; tires take the rhythm of the cracks, faster and faster. Pause at the end.

  A sense of incredible muscle, gathering up behind the small of my back and hurling forward: a walk, a trot, a lope, a gallop, freeway speed. Now faster than any freeway ever. The plane rears back on titanic pneumatic haunches and lofts itself. Thousands of tons of steel and glass and rubber and plastic and carpet, compressed air, fabric and jet fuel, bad food, magazines and human flesh. The rapid-fire stutter of tires along the pavement is gone. And so are we from San Francisco. The fog below us is a wrinkled sea. I see a ring of small islands, the tips of the Coast Range, Mt. San Bruno, Tamalpais, the Berkeley Hills—all the rest of San Francisco Bay lies in between, submerged, invisible.

  Food arrives, not very good and too much of it. Temptation is to eat it, because, like Mt. Everest, it’s there. Harlan looks at his with undisguised contempt. I eat all of mine. I’m riding warm and passive in my airline seat as that other unseen passenger inside me.

  Most of my girlfriends’ parents spent two years of middle school and four years of high in a permanent screaming flap their daughters’d get pregnant. (None did.) My friends were fought with, mistrusted, grounded, locked up, stuffed through family counseling, shipped off in tears to distant boarding schools. Nobody gave me any of that stuff. Had me worried for a while, whether it was an insult or a compliment.

  Imagine Papa engaged in his favorite occupation, “Monkeying with the Computer”: brooding in a darkened room, over the little green terminal screen, Palantir fashion. I’ve been filling him in (unsolicited) on the vicissitudes of my friends’ home lives, leading up to the real, intense question: “Why aren’t you ever scared that I’ll get pregnant?” I figured he hadn’t heard.

  A few more thoughts got punched into the PDP-11. Then he said, “I don’t believe in abortion.” In agreement so far: neither did I. Then he said, “So should you get pregnant, guess you’ll just have to share your room.”

  That was the only lecture on the subject of teen sex I ever got at home. Now here I am, sharing my most intimate inside room. Some other minute stranger alive and well inside me. My pelvis a living cradle of delicate arched bone to rock it in. Her in. Him in. Seems that I should know this person, thrown together in a lottery of Tom’s dear stuff and my stuff. But I don’t know anything. What a jolly comic miracle: do-it-yourself build-a-person. Here we go, there’s one from you, and one from me, and one from you—and one from me—

  I learned human reproduction off of educational TV.

  Channel 9. NOVA.

  Body fluids. His stuff, part of him. Think about how he is, all composed of swift energy. His sperm a jostling horde, so many microscopic marathoners at the start of that great race, each one carrying all his information.

  And the course? Where Alph the Sacred River ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. Such caves, not Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad, or any other famous cavern could vie with them in beauty, if only they were big enough for guided tours—my female insides. Think of that. More beautiful than any National Park. Stalactites, stalagmites, alabaster grottoes, passages, translucent walls and curtains, hanging traceries of every hue.

  And somewhere, waiting like the pirate’s treasure in the very inmost recess of that maze of little twisty passages all alike, my own genetic contribution. Round, smooth, pearly, featureless. Motionless, unmotivated. Helpless. The junction of all riches and all poverty. The future is in eggs.

  In the midst of death

  we are in life—

  The Lord taketh away

  and the Lord giveth—

  Blessed be the Name of the Lord—.

  Baby and me, and Harlan makes three. We flash over the top of the world toward a bright sunrise.

  L’envoi

  Saturday, September 6

  After our two-hour layover in New York. Still flying.

  They set the in-flight movie up, and it was Drake, of all things. Harlan looked so smug, I wondered if he’d arranged it. He whipped his little white guitar and dubbing deck out of the garment bag he’d carried on and patched it all together so we each had an earphone to the movie and an earphone to his toys. Imagine the last third of an intercontinental flight spent listening to Harlan Parr play rock continuo to the whole soundtrack of Drake. Easily, as if that witty jazzy rollick of music was the machine language of his mind, and everything else, even his English speech, was a poor translation.

  When the movie was over he packed it all away and silently showed me his watch. The flight was on time, an hour out of Heathrow.

  My failure of nerve began and ended: I couldn’t deplane in Levis. With my little portmanteau from under the seat, I went and found an even smaller metal womb to hide in. A restroom, bright Formica-colored, well lighted and coffin-small. I washed my gray and smudgy face, drew on raccoon eyes. Wondered about Theda Bara. Out of the Levis and T-shirt and jacket, into the streamlined little white silk ’40s dress an
d much-despised white heels.

  I stuff my real clothes in the bag: amazed at how it feels to give in, sell out, be intimidated this way. I consider keeping out the Levi jacket. No, if I freeze my ass in Heathrow airport, I can at least hate Harlan for it.

  Back at the seat now. Watch him never glance up.

  The airy whine, which has grown natural, lowers pitch. “Ladies and gentlemen, would you please return to your seats. Please make sure your seat belts are securely fastened—”

  Sense of lagging, dragging, holding back, deceleration, like a dropping elevator, only diagonal, interminable. Look out the window. Nothing. White. Cut off from all the living in a featureless world of cloud, we could meet another speeding plane in this pale secrecy, and never see it. Death would come faster than fear.

  No warning. The fog shredded. We were scudding out beneath it. Night; and the ground a thousand feet below, jeweled and ablaze with lights, as far on every side as I could see. Hung here and there among the strings and ropes of diamond light were huge flaming-green brilliant oblongs, like unimaginable emeralds.

  “What are those? Harlan? The green things?”

  “Football matches, love,” he said brightly, craning to see. “Bread and circuses, and all that. Those would be the circuses. Pretty from the air, what?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated. We are beginning our approach to Heathrow International Airport; seat belts must remain fastened until etc. etc. Thank you for flying Pan Am to the British Isles, and enjoy your stay in London. Before leaving the aircraft, please check your immediate area for items you may have brought onboard with you.”

  Harlan went again into the garment bag where all his music electronics were stowed, and pulled out three more orderly packages. First: the Marines ROTC dress jacket, folded neatly. He put it on. Then the Knights of Columbus cocked hat, boxed to save the plumes. He put that on too. Some deft hand, I noted, had hot-glued Belshangles patches over the KoC emblems. Okay.

  The third bundle he plumped into my lap.

  “Heathrow is notoriously frigid.”

  Inside the Gump’s logo cloth bag was the ermine bomber jacket with the flippety-floppety tails.

  ———

  “Mr. Parr, sir—”

  “Have we problems disembarking?”

  “I understand there’s a small crowd—”

  “Is my partner—ah. Yes. Are the—? Oh God, the police as well? But they are on the other side of customs? Of course. So ought we to go first and let the rest get on with their lives?”

  “‘We understand there’s a small crowd—’” he mimics as we take the gray baize tunnel hand in hand. “Should hope there’s a bloody great riot with that much advance notice, or it’s time we cashed our winnings and retired to the South of France—”

  Customs sized up Harlan and shunted us to a private room. He seemed to expect it as his due. When their drug-sniffing dog turned up her nose at us, they started on our clothes.

  Out of the bag came Harlan’s black leopard coat.

  He flipped it open. Inside the left front, exquisitely made into the lining, was a clear vinyl window. Inside that, a document certified that the leopards went to glory in India, 1933–34, well before the establishment of protected status. Their pelts were exported to France, and in 1939 became a full-length coat, made to order for a Frau Anna Davidoff of Berlin, who, due to circumstances beyond her control, never took delivery. The coat hung, black but beautiful as the tents of Kedar, in Parisian cold storage through war, invasion, liberation, and efforts to locate living heirs of Frau Davidoff. Almost forty years later it was auctioned and recut to the specs of a Mr. H. Parr of London.

  Wow. To what shall I be compared, O Lord? I think about Saint Ann walking in her garden. I could collect ill-omened treasures for a lifetime and never equal that.

  The customs guys, crestfallen, nearly frog-march us out, past rows of the mundane explaining away their liquor and their cigarettes. Then we hit the main concourse, and I can see Tom’s face—

  His head is as the most fine gold—

  —His hands are as gold rings set with beryl—

  His legs are as pillars of marble—

  His mouth is most sweet:

  yeah, man, altogether lovely—

  The crowd breaks over us like a flashbulb sea.

  About the Author

  Susan Altstatt has degrees in theater from Stanford and UCLA. She has since been acclaimed as a painter of the California wild lands; see artist’s website at www.altstatt.com. White Leather and Flawed Pearls is the sequel to her first novel, Belshangles, a semifinalist in the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards competition.