Separate Flights

by Andre Dubus

‘It’s not love,’ she said that night at the party. We had gone to the front porch to breathe and watch the snow. ‘It’s marriage. We have a good home for Sharon. We respect each other. There’s affection. That’s what I wish you could have: it’s enough. It’s sad, watching you two. She loves you and you never touch her, you don’t look at her when you talk. Last summer, after we stopped seeing each other, I went to the zoo that week, I took Sharon to the zoo; and we went to see the gorilla: he was alone in his cage, and there were women with their children watching him. They’re herbivores—did you know that? They’re gentle herbivores. I don’t like zoos anyway and I shouldn’t have gone but it was such an awful week, finding out how to live this time, I’d been through that in May and then there was you and then in July there wasn’t, so I took Sharon to the zoo. And I looked in the gorilla’s eyes and he looked so human—you know?—as if he knew everything, how awfully and hopelessly and forever trapped he was. It’s not like watching a flamingo. He was standing there looking at us looking at him, all the young mothers in their pants and skirts the colors of sherbet and the jabbering children. Then he reached down like this and shit in his hand. He was watching us. He held up the handful of shit—’ and she held her hand up, shoulder-high, palm toward me ‘—and then he brought it to his mouth and licked it. His eyes were darting from side to side, watching us. They were merry and mischievous, his eyes. Then he licked it again. Around me the mothers were gasping and some of the children were laughing; then they all hurried away. Murmuring. Distracting their children. But I stayed, and he looked at me like he was smiling and then he showed me his shit again and then he licked it and then he showed it to me again; he almost looked inquisitive; but by then I was squeezing Sharon’s hand and looking in his eyes and I was crying, standing there weeping on a sunny afternoon in front of a gorilla, and he watched me for a while, curious at first, and then he lowered his hand with the shit and we just stood looking at each other, he was looking into my eyes, and he knew that I knew and I knew that he knew, and if he could have cried he would have too. Then I left. And after a few weeks when I was able to see someone besides myself I’d see you and I’d think of that trapped gorilla, standing in his cage and licking his own shit. And I wanted to cry for you too—not just me, because I love you and can’t touch you, can’t be alone with you, but I wanted to cry for you. And I did. And I still do. Or at least I feel like it, I cry down in my soul. Oh Jack—are you trying at all?’

  ‘There’s nothing to try with.’

  I could not look at her eyes, for I wanted to hold her and there was no use in that now. I moved to the window and looked in; from the couch Terry looked up and smiled; she held the smile when Edith moved into her vision and stood beside me. I turned from the window. Around the streetlight the falling snow was lovely. Terry had stopped watching us after the smile; she was talking ardently with Hank and Roger, and I thought poised like that—a little high on bourbon, talking, being listened to, being talked to—she was probably happy. I raised my glass to the snow and the night.

  ‘Here’s to the soul of Jack Linhart: it has grown chicken wings and flaps near the ground.’ I drank. ‘I shall grow old and meek and faithful beside her, and when the long winter comes—’ I drank ‘—and her hair is white as snow I shall lay my bent old fingers on her powdered cheek and—’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Do you still?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘And live with Hank.’

  ‘He’s my husband and the father of my child.’

  ‘And he’s got a Goddamn—All right: I’m sorry. It’s bitterness, that’s all; it’s—’

  ‘I don’t care if he has a girl.’

  ‘You really don’t?’

  ‘Some women take up pottery, some do knitting.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess I didn’t want to know that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ, I really didn’t want to know that. Course there’s no reason for you not to have someone, when I can’t, when I—Jesus—’

  I went inside and got drunk and lost track of Terry until two in the morning, when she brought my coat. I told her I was too drunk to drive. In the car I smelled her perfume, and I thought how sad that is, the scent of perfume on a rejected woman.

  ‘Edith has a lover,’ I said.

  ‘I know. She told me a month ago.’

  ‘Do we know him?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We don’t anyway.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t want to talk about it. I think it’s sad.’

  ‘It makes her happy.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Oh, you can’t tell.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ she said. She was leaning forward, looking into the snow in the headlights. ‘I know you don’t love me. Maybe someday you will again. I know you will. You’ll see, Jack: you will. But please don’t talk like that, okay? Please, because—’ Her voice faltered, and she was quiet.

  While she took the sitter home I sat in the dark living room, drinking an ale and looking out the window. In the falling snow I saw a lover for Terry. I went to bed before she got home and next morning I woke first. The sky had cleared and the snow was hard and bright under the sun. While I drank tomato juice in the kitchen Natasha and Sean came downstairs.

  ‘Get dressed,’ I said. ‘We’ll go buy a paper.’

  ‘We should go sledding,’ Sean said.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Before breakfast?’ Natasha said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’ve never gone first thing in the morning,’ Sean said. ‘It’ll be neat.’

  ‘Okay,’ Natasha said. ‘Is Mom awake?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll write her a note.’

  ‘Okay. You write it. And be quiet going upstairs.’

  ‘We will,’ Sean said, and he was gone up the stairs.

  ‘What should I write?’

  ‘That we’re going sledding at nine and we’ll be back about eleven, hungry as hell.’

  ‘I’ll just say hungry.’

  I got my coat and filled its pockets with oranges, then went outside and shoveled the driveway while they dressed warmly for the cold morning.

  Over the Hill

  1

  HER HAND was tiny. He held it gently, protectively, resting in her lap, the brocaded silk of her kimono against the back of his hand, the smooth flesh gentle and tender against his palm. He looked at her face, which seemed no larger than a child’s and she smiled.

  ‘You buy me another drink?’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’

  He motioned to the bartender, who filled the girl’s shot glass with what was supposedly whiskey, though Gale knew it was not and didn’t care, then mixed bourbon and water for Gale, using the fifth of Old Crow that three hours earlier he had brought into the bar.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said to the girl.

  She nodded and he released her hand and slid from the stool.

  ‘You stay here,’ he said.

  ‘Sure I stay.’

  He walked unsteadily past booths where Japanese girls drank with sailors. In the smelly, closet-sized restroom he closed the door and urinated, reading the names of sailors and ships written on the walls, some of them followed by obscenities scrawled by a different, later hand. The ceiling was bare. He stepped onto the toilet and reaching up, his coat tightening at the armpits and bottom rib, he printed with a ballpoint pen, stopping often to shake ink down to the point again: Gale Castete, Pvt. USMC, Marine Detachment, USS Vanguard Dec 1961. He stood on the toilet with one hand against the door in front of him, reading his name. Then he thought of her face tilted back, the roots of her hair brown near the forehead when it was time for the Clairol again, the rest of it spreading pale blonde around her head, the eyes shut, the mouth half open, teeth visible, and the one who saw t
his now was not him—furiously he reached up to write an obscenity behind his name, then stopped; for reading it again, he felt a gentle stir of immortality, faint as a girl’s whispering breath into his ear. He stepped down, was suddenly nauseated, and left the restroom, going outside into the alley behind the bar, where he leaned against the wall and loosened his tie and collar and raised his face to the cold air. Two Japanese girls entered the alley from a door to his left and walked past him as if he were not there, arms folded and hands in their kimono sleeves, their lowered heads jabbering strangely, like seagulls.

  He took out his billfold, which bulged with wide folded yen and tried unsuccessfully to count it in the dark. He thought there should be around thirty-six thousand, for the night before—at sea—he had received the letter, and that morning when they tied up in Yokosuka he had drawn one hundred and fifty dollars, which was what he had saved since the cruise began in August because she wanted a Japanese stereo (and china and glassware and silk and wool and cashmere sweaters and a transistor radio) and in two more paydays she would have had at least the stereo. That evening he had left the ship with his money and two immediate goals: to get falling, screaming drunk and to get laid, two things he had not done on the entire cruise because he had had reason not to; or so he thought. But first he called home—Louisiana—to hear from her what his mother had already told him in the letter, and her vague answers cost him thirty dollars. Then he bought the Old Crow and went into the bar and the prettiest hostess came and stood beside him, her face level with his chest though he sat on a barstool, and she placed a hand on his thigh and said Can I sit down? and he said Yes, would you like a drink? and she said Yes, sank you and sat down and signaled the bartender and said My name Betty-san and he said What is your Japanese name? She told him but he could not repeat it, so she laughed and said You call me Betty-san; he said okay, I am Gale. Gale-san? Is girl’s name. No, he said, it’s a man’s.

  Now he buttoned his collar and slipped his tie knot into place and went inside.

  ‘You gone long time,’ she said. ‘I sink you go back ship.’

  ‘No. S’koshi sick. Maybe I won’t go back ship.’

  ‘You better go. They put you in monkey house.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  He raised his glass to the bartender and nodded at Betty, then looked at the cuff of his sleeve, at the red hashmark which branded him as a man with four years’ service and no rank—three years in the Army and eighteen months in the Marines—although eight months earlier he had been a private first class, nearly certain that he would soon be a lance corporal, then walking back to the ship one night in Alameda, two sailors called him a jarhead and he fought them both and the next day he was reduced to private. He was twenty-four years old.

  ‘I sink you have sta’side wife,’ Betty said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘You all time quiet. All time sink sink sink.’

  She mimicked his brooding, then giggled and shyly covered her face with both hands.

  ‘My wife is butterfly girl,’ he said.

  ‘Dat’s true?’

  He nodded.

  ‘While you in Japan she butterfly girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How you know?’

  ‘My mama-san write me a letter.’

  ‘Dat’s too bad.’

  ‘Maybe I take you home tonight, okay?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Bar close soon.’

  ‘You’re very pretty.’

  ‘You really sink so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She brought her hands to her face, moved the fingertips up to her eyes.

  ‘You like Japanese girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Very much.’

  2

  NOW HE COULD NOT SLEEP and he wished they had not gone to bed so soon, for at least as they walked rapidly over strange, winding, suddenly quiet streets he had thought of nothing but Betty and his passion, stifled for four and a half months, but now he lay smoking, vaguely conscious of her foot touching his calf, knowing the Corporal of the Guard had already recorded his absence, and he felt helpless before the capricious forces which governed his life.

  Her name was Dana. He had married her in June, two months before the cruise, and their transition from courtship to marriage involved merely the assumption of financial responsibility and an adjustment to conflicting habits of eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom, for they had been making love since their third date, when he had discovered that he not only was not her first, but probably was not even her fourth or fifth. In itself, her lack of innocence did not disturb him. His moral standards were a combination of Calvinism (greatly dulled since leaving home four and a half years earlier), the pragmatic workings of the service, and the ability to think rarely in terms of good and evil. Also, he had no illusions about girls and so on that third date he was not shocked. But afterward he was disturbed. Though he was often tormented by visions of her past, he never asked her about it and he had no idea of how many years or boys, then men, it entailed; but he felt that for the last two or three or even four years (she was nineteen) Dana had somehow cheated him, as if his possession of her was retroactive. He also feared comparison. But most disturbing of all was her casual worldliness: giving herself that first time as easily as, years before, high school girls had given a kiss, and her apparent assumption that he did not expect a lengthy seduction any more than he expected to find that she was a virgin. It was an infectious quality, sweeping him up, making him feel older and smarter, as if he had reached the end of a prolonged childhood. But at the same time he sensed his destruction and, for moments, he looked fearfully into her eyes.

  They were blue. When she was angry they became suddenly hard, harder than any Gale had ever seen, and looking at them he always yielded, afraid that if he did not she would scream at him the terrible silent things he saw there. His memories of the last few days before the cruise—the drive in his old Plymouth from California to Louisiana, the lack of privacy in his parents’ home—were filled with images of those eyes as they reacted to the heat and dust or a flintless cigarette lighter or his inability to afford a movie or an evening of drinking beer.

  He took her home because in Alameda she had lived with her sister and brother-in-law (she had no parents: she told him they were killed in a car accident when she was fifteen, but for some reason he did not believe her) and she did not like her sister; she wanted to live alone in their apartment, but he refused, saying it was a waste of money when she could live with her sister or his parents without paying rent. They talked for days, often quarreling, and finally, reluctantly, she decided to go to Louisiana, saying even that would be better than her sister’s. So he took her home, emerging from his car on a July afternoon, hot and tired but boyishly apprehensive, and taking her hand he led her up the steps and onto the front porch where nearly five years before, his father—a carpenter—had squinted down at him standing in the yard and said: So you joined the Army. Well, maybe they can make something out of you. I shore couldn’t do no good.

  3

  STRANGE FISH and octopus and squid were displayed uncovered in front of markets, their odors pervading the street. The morning was cold, damp, and gray: so much like a winter day in Louisiana that Gale walked silently with Betty, thinking of rice fields and swamps and ducks in a gray sky, and of the vanished faces and impersonal bunks which, during his service years, had been his surroundings but not his home.

  They walked in the street, dodging through a succession of squat children with coats buttoned to their throats and women in kimonos, stooped with the weight of babies on their backs, and young men in business suits who glanced at Gale and Betty, and young girls who looked like bar hostesses and, like Betty, wore sweaters and skirts; men on bicycles, their patient faces incongruous with their fast-pumping legs, rode heedlessly through all of them, and small taxis sounded vain horns and braked and swerved and shifted gears until they had moved through th
e passive faces and were gone. Bars with American names were on both sides of the street. Betty entered one of the markets and, after pausing to look at the fish outside, Gale followed her and looked curiously at rows of canned goods with Japanese labels, then stepped into the street again. Above the market a window slid open and a woman in a kimono looked down at the street, then slowly laid her bedding on the market roof and, painfully, Gale felt the serenity of the room behind her. Betty came out of the market, carrying a paper bag.

  ‘Now I make you sukiyaki,’ she said.

  ‘Good. I need some shaving gear first.’

  ‘Okay. We go Japanese store.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Not far. You sink somebody see you?’

  ‘Naw. Everybody’s on the ship now. They’ll be out this afternoon.’

  ‘What they do when you go back? Put you in monkey house?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘When you go back?’

  ‘Next week. Before she goes to sea.’

  ‘Maybe you better go now.’

  ‘They’d lock me up anyhow. One day over the hill or six, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Here’s store.’

  ‘You buy ’em. They wouldn’t understand me.’

  ‘What you want?’

  ‘Shaving cream, razor, and razor blades.’

  He gave her a thousand yen.

  ‘Dat’s too much.’

  ‘Keep the rest.’

  ‘Sank you. You nice man.’

  She went into the drugstore. He waited, then took her bags when she came out and, walking back to her house, treating her with deference and marveling at her femininity and apparent purity and honesty, he remembered how it was with Dana at first, how he had gone to the ship each morning feeling useful and involved with the world and he had had visions of himself as a salty, leather-faced, graying sergeant-major.

  4

  —and she was gone for a week before we could even find her and even when we got out there she told us she wasn’t coming with us, she was going to stay with him and it took your daddy about a hour to talk her into coming with us and you know how mad he gets, I don’t see how he didn’t whip her good right there, that’s what I felt like doing, and it’s a good thing that boy wasn’t there or I know your daddy would killed him. I don’t know how long it was going on before, she used to go out at night in your car, she’d tell us she was going to a show and I guess we should have said no or followed her or something but you just don’t know at the time, then Sunday she didn’t come home and her suitcase was gone so I guess she packed it while I was taking a nap and stuck it in the car. I hate to be writing this but I don’t know what else a mothers supposed to do when her boys wife is running around like that. We’ll keep her here til you tell us what your going to do, she don’t have any money and daddy has the car keys. Tell us what your going to do, I hope its divorse because she’s no good for you. I hate to say it but I could tell soon as I seen her, theres something about a girl of her kind and you just married too fast. Its no good around here, she stays in your room most of the time and just goes to the kitchen when she feels like it at all hours and gets something to eat by herself and I don’t think we said three words since we got her back—