A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories

by Carlson, Ron

  At the car we could still hear the song. Steiner would play another hour for his fierce little coterie. The Phantom of the Ballpark.

  Lynn and I went to her apartment in Sugarhouse for a nightcap. Now that’s a word. Like cocktail, which I rarely use, it implies certain protocol. It sounds at first like you are supposed to drink it and get tired, take a few sips and yawn politely and then go to your room. A nightcap. I asked for a beer.

  Her apartment was furnished somewhat like the interior of a refrigerator in white plastic and stainless steel, but the sofa was a relatively comfortable amorphous thing that seemed to say, “I’m not really furniture. I’m just waiting here for the future.”

  The only thing I knew for sure about a nightcap was that there was a moment when the woman said, “Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable?” I was flipping quickly through the possible replies to such a question when Lynn came back with a pilsner glass full of Beck’s for me and a small snifter of brandy for herself. She did not ask if she could slip into something more comfortable; instead she just sat by me in the couch or sofa, that thing, and put her knee up on the seat and her right hand on my shoulder. For a moment then, it was nifty as a picture. I thought: Hey, no problem, a nightcap. This is easy.

  “How’s your nightcap?” I asked Lynn. We hadn’t really talked much in the car or parking it in the basement or riding the elevator to her floor or waiting for her to find her keys and I didn’t know how we were doing anymore. Isn’t that funny? You see a friend playing the organ in the dark, and you fall asleep at the wheel. I sipped the beer and I had no idea of what to say or do next.

  “I love baseball,” she breathed at me. She smelled nice, of brandy and a new little scent, something with a European city in the name of it, and her hand on my shoulder felt good, and I realized, as anyone realizes when he hears a woman tell him a lie when she knows it is a lie and that he is going to know it is a lie and that the rules have been changed or removed and that frankly, he should now do anything he wants to, it’s going to be all right. He’s not going to get slapped or told, “You fool, what are you doing!” It’s a realization that sets the adrenaline on you, your heart, your knees, and I sat there unable to move for a moment as the blood beat my corpuscles open.

  When I did move, it was to reach for her, slowly, because that’s the best moment, the reach, and I pulled her over toward me to kiss her, but she came with the gesture a little too fully and rolled over on top of me, setting her brandy skillfully on the floor as her mouth closed on mine.

  It had been a while for this cowboy, but even so, she didn’t quite feel right in my arms. Her body was not the body that I was used to, that I associated with such pleasures, and her movements too had an alien rhythm which I didn’t at first fully appreciate. I was still being dizzied by these special effects when she started in earnest. It wasn’t a moment until we were in a genuine thumping sofa rodeo, she on top of me, riding for the prize. My head had been crooked into the corner, stuffed into a spine-threatening pressure seal, and Lynn was bent (right word here) on tamping me further into the furniture. She did pause in her frenzy at one point, arch up, and pull her skirt free, bunching it at her waist. It was so frankly a practical matter, and her rosy face shone with such businesslike determination, that it gave me a new feeling: fear. Supine on that couch device, I suddenly felt like I was at the dentist. How do these things turn on us? How does something we seem to want, something we lean toward, instantly grow fangs and offer to bite our heads off?

  I remember Midgely at the plate during a college game, going after what he thought was the fattest fastball he’d ever seen. It was a slow screwball, and when it broke midway through his swing and took him in the throat, he looked betrayed. He was out for a week. He couldn’t talk above a whisper until after graduation. And right now I was midswing with Lynn, and I could tell something ugly was going to happen.

  Meanwhile, with one halfhearted hand on her ass and the other massaging the sidewall of her breast, I was also thinking: You don’t want to be rude. You don’t want to stand, if you could, and heave her off and run for the door. With her panties tangled to her knees like that she’d likely take a tumble and put the corner of something into her brain. There you are visiting her in the hospital, coma day 183, the room stuffed with bushels of the flowers you’ve brought over the last six months, and you’re saying to her sister Phyllis, the most ardent wrongful-death attorney in the history of the world, “Nightcap. We’d had a nightcap.”

  No, you can’t leave. It’s a nightcap, and you’ve got to do your part. You may know you’re in trouble, but you’ve got to stay.

  A moment later, Lynn peaked. Her writhing quadrupled suddenly and she went into an extended knee-squeeze seizure, a move I think I had first witnessed on Big Time Wrestling, and then she softened with a sigh, and said to me in her new voice, breathy and smiling, a whisper really, “What do you want?”

  It’s a great question, right? Even when it is misintended as it was here. It was meant here as the perfect overture to sexual compliance, but my answers marched right on by that and lined up. What do I want? I want my life back. I want to see a chiropractor. I want baseball to be what it used to be.

  But I said, “How about another beer? I should be going soon, but I could use another beer.”

  When she left the room, shaking her skirt down and then stepping insouciantly out of her underpants, I had a chance to gather my assertiveness. I would tell her I was sorry, but not to call me again. I would tell her I wasn’t ready for this mentally or physically. I would tell her simply, Don’t be mad, but we’re not right for each other in any way.

  When Lynn reappeared with my beer, I sucked it down quietly and kissing her, took my ambivalent leave. The most assertive thing I said was that I would walk home, that I needed the air. Oh, it was sad out there in the air, walking along the dark streets. Why is it so hard to do things on purpose? I felt I had some principles, why wouldn’t they apply? Why couldn’t I use one like the right instrument and fix something? Don’t answer.

  I walked the two miles back to the corner where I used to live, the lost Ghost Mansion. It was as dark as a dark house in a horror film. Was the woman I loved asleep in there? I turned and started down the hill toward my apartment. Oh, I was separated all right, and none of the pieces were big enough to be good for anything. I said Lily’s name and made one quiet resolution: no more nightcaps. At all.

  DR. SLIME

  THIS IS about the night Betsy told me she was leaving, the night that marked the end of a pretty screwy time all around. Everyone I knew was trying to be an artist, or really was an artist on some scale, and this was in Utah, so you can imagine the scale. Betsy had been almost making a living for several years as a singer, local work for advertising agencies and TV and radio, and my brother Mitchell, who loved her and with whom she lived, was an actor and model for television ads and local theater and whatever movie work came to town. I mean these were people who had consciously said, “I’m going to be an artist no matter what,” and that seemed kind of crazy and therefore lovable because it is more interesting than anything nine to five, and I found myself taking care of them from time to time over a three-year period, sponsoring meals and paying their rent two or three times a year, and hanging out with them generally, because I am a regular person, which put me in awe of their refusal to cope with daily duties, and I’ll just say it here, rather than let it sneak in later and have you think I’m a vile snake: I came to develop, after the first few months of catching midnight suppers after Mitch’s shows and lunches downtown with Betsy after her auditions or after she’d recorded some commercial or other, a condition that anyone in my regular shoes would have developed, I mean not a strange or evil condition, but a profound condition nevertheless, and the condition that I bore night and day was that I was deeply and irrevocably in love with Betsy, my brother’s lover, though as you will see i
t netted me nothing more than a sour and broken heart, broken as regular hearts can be broken, which I probably deserved, no, certainly deserved, and a condition regardless of its magnitude that allowed me to do the noble, the right thing, as you will also see, since I think I acted with grace or at least minor dexterity under such pressure.

  I am not an artist. I am a baker for a major supermarket chain and it is work I enjoy more than I should perhaps, but I am dependent on my effort yielding tangible results, and at the end of my shift I go home tired and smelling good. On the day I’m talking about here I came home to my apartment about six A.M. having baked three flights of AUNT DOROTHY’s turnovers all night—apple, peach, and raisin—I am AUNT DOROTHY—and found an envelope under the door containing fifteen twenties, the three hundred dollars that Mitch owed me. The note read “THERE IS MORE WHERE THIS CAME FROM. M.” Every time he paid me back, this same note was enclosed. It meant that he had found work. His last gig for a smoked-meat ad paid him eight hundred dollars a day for four days, the only work he had in seven months. Mitch was feast or famine.

  I put the money in the utility drawer in the kitchen; I would be lending it to him again. I didn’t know what it was this time, but Betsy had called a couple of times this week worried, asking about him, what he was doing. He had a big bruise on his neck, and a slug of capsules, unidentifiable multicolored capsules, had begun appearing in the apartment.

  “He’s an actor,” I told her. This is what I used to tell our parents when they would worry. It was a line, I had learned, that was the good news and the bad news at once.

  “Yeah, well, I want to know what part beats him up and has him carting drugs.”

  I wanted to say: So do I, that no-good, erratic beast. Why don’t you just drop him and fall into this baker’s bed, where you’ll be coated in frosting and treated like a goddess. I’ll put you on a cake; I’ll strew your path with powdered sugar and tender feathers of my piecrusts, for which I am known throughout the Intermountain West.

  I said: “Don’t worry, Betsy, I’ll help you find out.”

  IT WAS that night that she came over to my place on her scooter about seven o’clock and told me she knew something and asked me would I help her, which meant Just Shut Up and Get on the Back. She wore an arresting costume, a red silk shirt printed with little guitars and a pair of bright blue trousers that bloomed at the knees and then fixed tight at the ankle cuff. I scanned her and said, “What decade are we preparing for?”

  “Forties,” she said, locking up. “Or nineties. You ready? Have you eaten?” I had only been on that red scooter two or three times and found it a terrible and exquisite form of transportation, and the one legitimate opportunity this baker had for putting his hands on the woman who quickened his yeasty heart, in other words, Betsy, my brother’s lover, his paramour, his girlfriend, his, his, his.

  We took the machine south on State Street. It was exhilarating to be in the rushing air, but the lane changes and a few of the stops made me feel even more tentative than I already did. I held Betsy’s waist gingerly, so that at the light on Ninth, she turned and said, “Doug, this is a scooter, hold on for god’s sakes. We’re friends. Don’t start acting like a goddamned man.” And she clamped my hands onto her sides firmly, my fingers on the top of her hipbones.

  That was good, because it made me feel comfortable resting my chin on her shoulder too, as half a joke, and I could feel her smiling as we passed under the streetlights. But the joke was on me, nuzzling a woman of the future, who was I kidding? She smelled fresh, only a little like bread, and though I didn’t know it, this was the very apex of my romantic career.

  We passed through the rough darkness on Thirty-third South and could see the huge trucks working under lights removing the toxic waste dump where Vitro Processors had been, and then on the rough neon edge of West Valley City, Betsy pulled into Apollo Burger Number Two, a good Greek place. When we stopped I felt the air come up around my face in a little heat. I quickly sidestepped into the bathroom to adjust myself in my underwear; at some point in the close float out here, holding Betsy, my body had begun acting like a goddamned man.

  We ate pastrami burgers and drank cold milk sitting at a sticky picnic table in front of the establishment. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and Betsy assured me we had plenty of time. She knew where we were going because she had asked the driver of the van who had pulled up at their apartment two hours ago. He had come in looking for Mitchell and had told her: Granger High School, eight o’clock. She knew something else, but wasn’t telling me.

  “He’s got to stop taking these stupid nickel-and-dime jobs,” she said, as she made a tight ball of her burger wrapper.

  “All work has its own dignity,” I said—it was one of Mitch’s lines.

  “Bullshit, it’s exploitation. I’m through with it.”

  “You’re not going to sing anymore?”

  She stood and threw the paper into a barrel. “I didn’t say that.”

  On the scooter again, I didn’t nuzzle. The dinner and the little lesson had taken the spirit out of it for me. I just squinted into the wind and held on. Thirty-fifth South widened into a thick avenue of shopping plazas separated by angry little knots of fast-food joints. Betsy maneuvered us a mile or two and then turned left through a tire outlet parking lot and around a large brick building that I thought was a JC Penney but turned out to be Granger High. We cruised through the parking lot, which was full, and she leaned the scooter against the building. The little marquee above the entrance read: Welcome Freshmen, and then below: Friday, Mack’s Mat Matches, 8:00 P.M.

  We stood in a little line of casually dressed Americans at the door and paid four-fifty each for a red ticket which let us into the crowded gymnasium. A vague whomp-whomp we’d been hearing in the hall turned out to be two beefy characters in a raised wrestling ring in the center of the gym slamming each other to the mat.

  “Wrestling,” I said to Betsy as she led me through the crowd, searching for seats.

  “Looks like it.”

  I followed her, stepping on people’s feet all the way across the humid room. There were many family clusters encircled by children standing on the folding chairs and then couples of slumming yuppies, the guy in bright penny loafers and a pastel Lacoste shirt, and sprinkled everywhere small gangs of teenagers in T-shirts waving placards which displayed misspelled death threats toward some of the athletes.

  Betsy and I ended up sitting well in the corner of the gym right in the middle of a boiling fan club for the Proud Brothers. Two chubby girls next to me wore Proud Brothers Fan Club T-shirts in canary yellow (the official color) and on the front of each was a drawing of a wrestler’s face. The whole club (twelve or so fifteen-year-olds, boys and girls) was hot. They were red in the face and still screaming. Over in the ring, one man would hoist the other aloft and half our neighbors would squeal with vengeful delight, the other half would gasp in horror, and then, after twirling his victim a moment, the wrestler would hurl his opponent to the mat and ka-bang! the whole room would bounce, and the Proud Brothers Fan Club would explode. The noise wanted to tear your hair out. Finally, I noticed that one of the participants had entangled the other’s head in the ropes thoroughly and was prancing around the ring in a victory dance. The man in the ropes hung there, his tongue visible thirty rows back, certainly dead. The referee threw up the winner’s hands, the bell gonged about twenty times, and the Proud Brothers Fan Club screamed one last time, and the whole gym lapsed into a wonderfully reassuring version of simple crowd noise.

  The two girls beside me had fallen into a sisterly embrace, one consoling the other. One girl, her face awash in sweat and tears, peered over her friends’ shoulders at me. “Were those the Proud Brothers?” I asked her.

  She squeezed her eyes shut in misery and nodded. Her friend turned around to me fully in an odd shoulder-back posture and pulled her T-shirt down tight in what I
thought was a gesture meant to display her nubby little breasts, but then she pointed beneath the distorted portrait on the shirtfront to the name below: TOM. Her friend, the bereaved, stood and showed me her breasts too, which were much larger and still heaving from the residual sobs so much that it was difficult to recognize the face on her shirt as human, but I finally read the name underneath: TIM.

  “And it was Tim who was just killed?” I asked. She collapsed into her friend’s arms again.

  Betsy nudged me sharply. “What’d you say to her?” She tapped my arm with her knuckle. “You’re going to get arrested. These are children.”

  By now they had carried the body of one brother away and the other brother had finished his prancing, and the announcer, a little guy in a tux, crawled into the ring with a bullhorn.

  “Ladies and gentlemen . . .” he began and before he had finished rolling gen-tull-mn out of his mouth, Betsy turned to me and I to her, the same word on our lips: “Mitch!”

  We both sat up straight and watched this guy very carefully. It was Mitchell all right, but they had him in a pompadour toupee, a thin mustache, and chrome-frame glasses. What gave him away was his voice and arrow posture and the way he held his chin up like William Tell. He had a good minor strut going around the ring, blasting his phrases in awkward, dramatic little crescendoes at the audience. “Wee are pleeezd! Tooo pree-zent! A No! Holds! Barred! Un-Ree-Strik-Ted! Marr-eeed Cupples! Tag-Team-Match! Fee-chur-ring Two Dy-nam-ic Du-os! Bobbie and Robbie Hansen! Ver-sus. Mario and Isabella Delsandro!”