Separate Flights

by Andre Dubus

  ‘Are you really?’ she had said. ‘I thought only Mexicans and Indians did that.’

  He had smiled and said oh no, he did it too, although he mostly just ran things now, and once in a while made something for his wife and daughter. She asked if he had anything with him, anything he had made, and he said no but he’d send her a bracelet, and he wrote her address in a notebook. It had been a long time since she had met anyone whose work was either new or interesting. He ordered martinis and she asked questions about his work, real questions that she wanted answers to, and when he lit her cigarettes she took his hand and guided the flame.

  ‘Your husband’s a very practical man,’ he said now.

  ‘He sells life insurance.’

  ‘Oh. And what do you do?’

  ‘I don’t do anything.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘A lot of this,’ she said, and lifted her glass.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.

  ‘’Do you have children?’

  ‘Two girls. One married, one seventeen.’

  ‘So you’re alone most of the time.’

  ‘I have friends: you know, wives of my husband’s friends. And Helen—she’s my married daughter—she lives in Iowa City, so sometimes after shopping I go see her and we drink beer in her kitchen.’

  ‘It’s good you’re close like that.’

  ‘We’re really not, though. I mean we are but she doesn’t really talk to me. You know. But at least she’s there and she seems to like it when I go over and I try not to go over too often. Most afternoons I do other things.’

  ‘Bridge?’

  ‘That, and other things.’

  ‘Is it so bad?’

  ‘I hate it,’ she said.

  She was surprised she had said that; then she was glad.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Really.’ Then she turned her eyes from his and looked out the window where still there was nothing but air like wet smoke.

  ‘So many people are like that,’ he said.

  She looked at him.

  ‘But you’re not?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No: maybe I’m fooling myself, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘At least you know about other people. My husband doesn’t. He lives on routine like a soldier and that’s all he sees.’

  ‘But that can be desperation too, living like that. It’s like deep water pressure: take some fish out of it and they turn belly-up and die.’

  ‘I’ll have to pull him up some time, and see what happens.’

  They had second martinis, then the stewardess brought their lunch, chateaubriand, and poured their first glasses of Burgundy, then asked Robert if they wanted to keep the bottle. He said yes. She spoke to them as a couple rather than fellow passengers, and Beth was amused and also felt pleasingly wicked. She was watching Robert’s face; he suddenly squinted and she turned to the window: they had broken through the clouds into a glaring sky that was blue and clear as far ahead as she could see. She looked down at green and yellow and brown squares of earth.

  ‘I wonder what state that is.’

  Robert leaned toward the window, his face near her shoulder.

  ‘One of those flat ones.’

  ‘Do you feel safer when it’s clear?’

  ‘Better, anyway. Clouds are gloomy.’

  ‘And there I was, having such fun drinking with you in a cloud.’

  ‘It’ll be more fun in the blue,’ he said, and poured wine in her glass.

  ‘I wasn’t put on this plane to have fun. I was put on it so I’d die alone.’

  ‘Are you nice to your husband?’

  ‘I think so. I try to be.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But you’re pretty tough on him now.’

  ‘I guess I am. And I guess I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself just because what happens to most people has happened to me.’

  Then in a low, collusive voice, in their odd privacy that was also public so she again felt illicit, she talked about love. She did not know when she had stopped loving her husband, she said. In a way she was grateful it had happened so late because by that time she had stopped believing in love anyway. No, Robert said, it must have been the other way. She thought about that, lighting a cigarette from the one she was smoking (drinking always seemed to clear her bronchial tubes so she could smoke more) then she said yes, he was probably right. She must have stopped loving him long before she admitted it, then still deceiving herself about Lee she stopped believing in love altogether, thus arming herself to come back full circle and admit she did not love him. That way it was easier to take: you suspected something had died in your house, so you looked around and saw that it was long dead in everyone else’s house too; then you were able to return and look under your own bed and find, sure enough, a corpse.

  She accepted that death. It was as natural and predictable as a wrinkled face. She would not look under that bed again or anyone else’s, for oh she had looked too often, too often…. She told Robert of her mother, who was probably content and certainly stupid, for she firmly ignored all failures of the human heart. In her mother’s mind everyone lived a life that could be recorded on the obituary page of a newspaper: you were born here, went to school there, were married to a man with such-and-such a job, and you had children. If you asked her about someone she would say: Oh she’s doing wonderfully; she has a fine husband and two lovely children.

  ‘She told me that once, about a niece of mine. And I said: I know all that, Mother; what I asked is how is she?’

  And how could anyone be oblivious to all those signs you could see whether you were looking or not? Give me an hour in a room full of married couples, she said, and I can see their hostilities as plainly as the clothes they wear. Not that she wanted to either. But it was true, all too true, and at least once you understood this, accepted it as commonplace, it wasn’t difficult at all to admit that your own life—which long ago you believed was marked for love—had followed the general pattern of humanity. The difficult part was concealing this from your children. At Helen’s wedding she had of course cried a little, and for some of the accepted reasons: a daughter had grown, a daughter was leaving, a phase of her own life had ended. But her tears were bitter too, for she knew the rest of Helen’s life would never live up to the emotional promise of that day. Like graduation ceremonies where you heard all those words about what lay ahead, then you went out and nothing happened. Helen and Larry would end up, in a friendly way, boring each other, disliking each other. She kept thinking of that during the wedding; in the reception line, when she had to listen to those lecherous old men and tender, hopeful old women, she had to clamp her teeth on ironic replies. And now her seventeen-year-old, Peggy, was in love and she liked to talk about her plans, with this grown-up tone in her voice, and there was nothing to do but listen to her, not as you listen to a child who wants to be a movie star, but to a child whose hope for friends or happiness is so strong yet futile that you know it will break her heart.

  ‘You expected too much,’ Robert said. ‘Why don’t you tell her not to expect too much? Not to stake her whole life on marriage. It’s part of her life, but not all.’

  ‘What does your wife do?’

  ‘She’s a teacher. Fourth grade.’

  ‘That makes a difference.’

  They were finishing the wine when the pilot announced their approach to Chicago.

  ‘I’ve had fun,’ Beth said.

  ‘Do you have a layover?’

  ‘An hour.’

  ‘I have two and a half. We can have a drink.’

  ‘We’ll be drunk.’

  ‘Well, you like to be and for the flight home I need to be.’

  ‘We’ll have a drink.’

  ‘Take-offs and landings are the worst,’ he said. The plane had begun its descent; he took her hand.

  In the airport they drank standing at a crowded bar
. A clock looked at them from above the rows of bottles. Twenty-five minutes before her flight Robert ordered second drinks; she was about to say there wasn’t time, but then she didn’t. She turned and watched two Air Force lieutenants come through the door and go to the bar. She was looking at their silver wings when her plane was announced. She turned back to her drink. It was half-finished; she picked it up, then instead of drinking she stirred it with a finger.

  ‘Two pilots just came in,’ she said. ‘All that time with you on the plane I had forgotten the war.’

  He turned and looked at them.

  ‘It’s not their fault,’ he said. ‘They’re just kids.’

  ‘I guess so, but pilots—’ Sipping her drink she glanced up at the clock. ‘We voted for peace in sixty-four, for Johnson.’

  ‘So did we.’

  ‘For peace?’

  ‘Yes. And my son graduates from college this month.’

  She touched his wrist.

  ‘Oh, you poor man. Will they get him?’

  ‘Sure they will, sooner or later.’

  ‘I’m glad I don’t have a son.’

  ‘I’d like to keep mine. He’s—’ Then he frowned and shook his head, his eyes somewhere else now, in New York, on his son’s face, in Vietnam. ‘Wasn’t that your plane?’

  ‘I don’t know. What did they say?’

  ‘Two twenty-three to Cedar Rapids.’

  ‘My God, yes.’

  She looked at the clock, drained her glass, and they walked quickly down the corridor to her gate.

  ‘Could’ve missed it,’ he said.

  ‘Another couple of minutes.’

  They found her gate number and walked faster against a crowd of passengers who had just got off a plane.

  ‘Maybe I did,’ she said. ‘No one’s going this way.’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Three minutes,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed it.’

  ‘So did I.’

  At the gate the clerk grabbed her ticket and shook his head.

  ‘You almost missed it, lady.’

  ‘She’s here,’ Robert said. ‘Just do what you’re paid for.’

  Hurrying beside her across the small lobby he took her elbow and said: ‘I’ll send you a bracelet.’

  ‘Good.’

  He pressed her hand and she slowed for a moment.

  ‘If you ever get to New York—’

  ‘Right,’ she said, then turned and walked as fast as she could out into the warm sunlight. The uniformed man at the foot of the ladder motioned for her to hurry; at the hatch the stewardess, who was annoyed, smiled and said something, and Beth lowered her face so the girl wouldn’t smell gin. She sat in an empty seat at the rear. The plane was small, with propellers; the air conditioning wasn’t working and the air was stale. Beth was tight. As the plane took off she wondered if Robert was standing at the door, watching. Then she unbuckled her seat belt and lit a cigarette and looked out the window at the flat earth.

  Lee and Peggy were waiting at the airport. She kissed them and asked Peggy if everything was all right. Then Lee said: ‘Well, it worked.’

  ‘What worked?’

  ‘The planes.’ He was grinning. ‘Neither one of them crashed.’

  3

  ON THE WAY HOME they stopped at a restaurant for dinner. In a high, delighted voice Beth told Peggy about the fun they had had in San Francisco (she had not had fun in San Francisco), about the Top o’ the Mark and Fisherman’s Wharf, while all the time, eating her steak, she sat huddled around her warm secret. That night she took it to bed with her and after Lee was sleeping she lit a cigarette and thought of Robert Carini and a hotel in Chicago; she pulled her nightgown above her hips; she moved slowly so Lee wouldn’t wake, and the threat of his waking excited her, and thinking of Robert Carini excited her; she felt wicked, and her fingers holding the cigarette trembled. Then she slept.

  It became one of her rituals: at first she told herself she was doing it because her heart was unfaithful and in this way she was having her night with Robert (he did not send a bracelet; after ten days she gave up, with more disappointment than she had expected), but after a few nights she didn’t really think of Robert, or of anyone else. Later she told herself she was doing it to help her sleep, though usually she slept just as badly. Then she saw the truth: lying beside Lee, moving and breathing in secret passion, she made her loneliness and dislike for him active: she thought of him beside her, knowing nothing of his own wife, of how little he mattered. Afterward she felt guilty, and she treasured that guilt because it was new. But soon enough guilt faded; next the act itself grew boring; yet she clung to it, forced herself into the only emotions that remained: her heart, beating rapidly toward orgasm, felt mean and vengeful.

  Which was not enough. Guilt had been the proper ending for those minutes at night: it had made her feel she was returning home after committing a sin. Now, with the loss of guilt, her nights were changed: her passion took her nowhere, returned her from nowhere. It was merely an extension of the bitterness of her days. She did it less frequently.

  What she wanted was not so much to sin but to be able to sin. She started thinking of Robert Carini again. She didn’t imagine making love with him. She thought of the guilt: phoning Lee from Chicago to say she had missed connections and would fly to Cedar Rapids tomorrow, then tingling with lies she would have gone to dinner with Robert; after that, in the hotel lobby and elevator and corridor, surely her conscience would have gone to work on her, making her think of Peggy and Helen and Wendy and Billy; and even Lee. And perhaps in the morning she would have opened her eyes to fear and remorse. She might even have returned tender and compassionate to her ordered, disciplined, cockolded Lee.

  But maybe she would have felt nothing except a natural apprehension when she first looked at Lee’s face, and when he asked where she had spent the night, was there any trouble finding a room, did she have enough money. Because in order to sin you had to depart from something you believed in, and she had no assurance that being a mother, a grandmother, and a wife would flavor that one night with wickedness. And if that were so, if a night with Robert would have been no more sinful than her private minutes beside Lee, it was better that he had not let her miss the plane.

  Yet where had it gone? She had been reared a Catholic, then at some time between starting college and marrying Lee she had stopped being one. She had stopped as unconsciously as your face tans in summer and pales in winter. There had been no iconoclastic teacher, no agnostic roommate: it had been largely a matter of sleeping late on Sunday mornings. Remembering now, she thought there must have been something else, some question on a point of dogma, some dispute with a priest, some book or philosophy course. But there was not, and she was ashamed: not because she had no religion but because she had changed her life without thinking about it. And she had not thought of it since then, except when a friend or relative died (and Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe and Hemingway and Gary Cooper), and for a while she wondered if they were immortal.

  But that was all. She assumed there was a God, but maybe there wasn’t; worse still, it didn’t seem to matter. She didn’t know whether Lee believed or not. She could not remember ever talking about God. You didn’t do that, sit around talking about God. You talked with frustration about things outside your life, like Johnson and the war; or you talked about the surfaces of your life: the children and grandchildren and school for Peggy and things you had done and things you had to do:—had all the groceries there and then I looked in my purse and no wallet, I had left it in the other purse, and no checkbook either, so she had to wait while I went to the courtesy counter and used one of their checks; what should we get Peggy for graduation? a watch? you take the VW to work then, and they can pack the wheel bearings on the Lincoln while I’m shopping; a watch, do you think? You scheduled these things, got them done between the hands of the clock, and at night they gave you conversation. Maybe late some night when Peggy was asleep she ought to make Lee sit down with her and
a bottle of gin and she would tell him what she did at night and why, tell him of Robert and how she had waited for a bracelet in the mail, and tell him that on those nights when he made love to her she was eager and hot, but only for herself, and a hand covered her heart and would not yield it to him.

  As the summer grew hotter, the idea of such a conversation enticed her. If her belief in God had changed passively, her marriage could change in one violently quick night. The frightening and appealing thing was she could not predict what would happen. Separation, divorce, a marriage counselor—even something new and good, both of them with painful and productive honesty voicing all their dislikes, their secrets (she recalled the moment in San Francisco when she had thought of his plane crashing), and after that maybe they could stand among the fallen roof and exploded walls of what they had called their marriage, and wounded and trembling and alone they could hold hands and start from there. But such a dream was nonsense, and she knew it, and the days of summer went on.

  Then one night in mid-July she woke and lay smoking and listened to the hum of the air conditioner in the window. She didn’t know what time it was, nor did she want to: she knew she would be awake for at least an hour, probably more. Her hand moved down, then stopped; she didn’t want that, it was boring and it took too long and didn’t even help her sleep. She got up and put on a summer robe; she would drink gin and tonic in the living room and talk to herself until she was sleepy. Tomorrow was Saturday, so she had no reason to get up; going downstairs she thought of living a nocturnal life when Peggy went to college. She could stay up most of the night until she was truly sleepy, wake up long enough to fix breakfast for Lee, then go back to bed and sleep into the afternoon. Insomnia was only bad if you had to go to sleep and wake at certain times. A bizarre solution, simply to throw away schedules, but you couldn’t deny it was a solution; and crossing the kitchen floor in the dark she was pleased, thinking how Lee would despise a life of that sort. He would find several reasons against it but he would never admit his real objection: that people were supposed to be awake in daylight and asleep at night.