Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  (The Bear has never explained his wartime service, if indeed it was service—only vague references to combat in mountains.)

  "I spent it eating rats. We caught them in traps we made with sticks and large stones, deadfall traps that crushed them, and sometimes because it was too dangerous to light a fire we ate them raw. Once we found a nest of newborn rats and we were so happy because even though there was much less meat, the meat was sweeter. We pinched off their heads with our fingers and ate them whole. So do not tell me you desire the life of a rat. I have pulled their bones from my teeth and wiped their blood from my lips and I have stopped myself from vomiting so that I would not lose their precious sustenance. You know nothing of rats."

  Now it was Walenty's voice that simmered. "You do not need to explain starvation to me," he said.

  "But apparently I do!"

  "You're not understanding what I'm saying," he said. "I understand that you are a man and are tired of being a man," the Bear said. "But look at you. You are still a man."

  That Walenty relents is only partly due to the Bear's badgering. (Yikes, pardon the furred word choice: The badger couldn't bear the bear's badgering.) Back at the pensione Walenty has been tutoring himself in Italian with the aid of Franca's schoolbooks, most notably a translation of Tolstoy's little parable "Three Questions," about a king whose fretting over a trio of questions—When is the right time to do things? Who is the most important person? What is the right thing to do?—gets answered by a hermit and a fellow with a belly-wound. The hermit and the wounded fellow aren't important to us, but this is:

  Remember, then,

  wrote Tolstoy (via Alojzy),

  there is only one time that is important: now. The present is the only time over which we have power. The most important person is the one beside you, for no man knows if he will ever have dealings with another. And the most important thing to do is to make the one beside you happy. For that purpose alone was man sent into this life.

  Which is really just a slightly more profound rendition of Stephen Stills's "Love the One You're With," but it's enough to convince Walenty he should grant the Bear this favor: that he should march with the communists to the Piazza Unità, that he should at least hoist a fist in the air for his new friend.

  When they assemble in the late afternoon Walenty is startled to see a homemade coffin at the head of the parade. "We are reburying one of our comrades," the Bear explains. The crowd is much smaller than the Bear had promised—fewer than a hundred—which makes Walenty feel uneasily exposed, more like a soloist than a back-row choir member, though he gleans some small comfort from his lack of the red scarf that all the other partisans are wearing. One end of a banner—Zivio Tito!—is forced into his hands, and though he tries to protest, he's quickly stifled by the movement of the crowd: They start down a hill, solemnly chanting at first but growing more raucous and unruly with every white-helmeted Allied MP they pass. If not for the banner in his hand, Walenty thinks, he would steal away; but the banner would collapse, and his absence would be noted. He tries to ignore the Triestines lining the streets to watch their passage—old men and women sizing them up in hostile silence, their arms folded stiffly against their chests. Children by their sides with hard bullets for eyes. For the first time since arriving in the city Walenty feels noticed, tangible, a player in the city's history rather than an unseen & unfelt observer, no longer an imperceptible fugitive from another life. His escape, it occurs to him, has been discovered; and a coffin is leading him home.

  At the Piazza Unità, where blinding glints of sunlight zigzag off the Palazzo del Governo's gold mosaics, the parade is intercepted by an opposing crowd of Italians, also chanting and carrying banners: a counterdemonstration of demonstrably larger size & heart. There is much shouting and fist-waving which soon deranges, up at the head of the lines, into spitting and shoving. As soon as the first punch is thrown (at or by the Bear, as it happens), an American Jeep loaded with baton-wielding New Zealand soldiers speeds toward the crowds—in reverse, for whatever reason. As the partisans scramble to avoid its path, the coffin dropping to the ground with a splintery crack and a thud, Walenty notices the man hoisting the other end of his banner fetching a long-bladed knife from a scabbard hidden beneath his coat. Taking this as his signal to flee, Walenty tosses down his end of the banner and tries to cut through the rigid line of Italian spectators massed on the perimeter. But he is tripped, then held firmly to the ground. For a moment his face is mashed into the stones until he is flipped onto his back, revealing his attacker. It is Franca's eldest brother, grinning. "Shiava," he says (Slav), and aims a loose glob of spit at Walenty's mouth. The spit smells of grappa, and it coats Walenty's nostrils and upper lip. Legs flailing, he hears his own wooden foot hammering the stones, the sound identical to the crack of the dropped coffin meeting the earth.

  ***

  On that final night of my life with the Stellas, after I'd staggered back home from the Exchange and been struck mute in the rain beneath our bedroom window, I hiked to an all-night diner on St. Charles Avenue that I'm certain no longer exists. The city health department was always on the verge of shuttering it—the famous story was that a ceiling tile broke open one night and an extended family of rats came raining biblically down upon the tables—and surely some Javert of an inspector was finally able to padlock it. The other rumor was that the overtattooed line cooks regularly slipped LSD into the eggs, but this was more of a hypothesis to explain the squeamish, loopy sensations you felt after a late-night meal there than a bona fide allegation, though anything was possible. The jukebox was stuffed with a comprehensive selection of Ernie K-Doe tunes and the waitstaff was almost entirely composed of young Russian women who in retrospect might have been imported sex slaves. They had a carnal but melancholy air about them as if sex was available but no one was going to enjoy it. I ordered some coffee but my hands were trembling so badly that I subsequently ordered some vodka with which to spike my joe. Per my usual tack when drinking, I ordered a plate of food but barely touched it. Throughout my life waiters were always asking me if something was wrong.

  At the next booth, I remember, was a skinny kid in a black t-shirt sitting with a girl who was too obviously infatuated with him. I eavesdropped. The kid was a drummer and was trying to impress upon the girl the importance and sublimity of New Orleans rhythm. She was nodding, and saying Mkay, mkay, but the kid was on a roll, his Adam's apple bouncing like a backwoods preacher's, and at one point, painfully bored with the topic but not with him, she said to him, with a fluttering of eyelashes, "You're crazy, do you know that?"

  I turned around to face them. "No, he's not crazy," I said to the girl. "He just can't love two things at once."

  I was just trying to help. Or something. In New York I would've been told to mind my own fuggin bidness or worse the kid might've awarded me a cool shiner. But this was genteel New Orleans where even the strung-out drummer-boys were gracious. "Thank you," he said, with just enough sarcasm to gild the lily. After turning back to my uneaten eggs, which looked up at me with poignant yellow eyes, I heard the girl call me a "creep" and convince the kid who was "crazy" to relocate to another booth. I waved my fingers at her and said, "Toodleloo."

  The creep stayed there until dawn but never stopped shaking. The morning might have felt cleansing had I ever ceased drinking, but I hadn't, and when the sunlight hit me on the sidewalk it felt like falling glass shards. I ended up at Felix's apartment. He was annoyed to be awakened but was otherwise hospitable, though not enough to put his teeth back in. He was wearing the kind of oversized t-shirts that coeds sleep in and I couldn't help wondering where a shopper might locate such an oversized-oversized t-shirt and what sort of mythically large sasquatch the Filipino textile-factory worker who sewed the shirt must have imagined she was dressing. It was a white t-shirt that was only a half-shade lighter than Felix's pasty skin; he resembled a snowman in mid-melt. Felix didn't ask any questions and immediately fixed me an Orange Blossom—what these day
s in New York is called a "gin-and-juice"—because he didn't stock vodka. His apartment was legendarily revolting (a former bar-keep at the Exchange had anonymously telephoned the aforementioned health department to report it), with a rusted and trash-filled oil drum in the center of the kitchen over which three or four ugly tomcats fought for access, and porn strewn everywhere. There was nowhere you could sit without a glossy vagina or breast staring you vacantly in the face. These did not strike me as happy vaginas but then I was never any expert.

  Always on the cutting edge of technology, Felix the Fat was eager to exhibit his new prize, a "videocassette recorder," and to demonstrate the pinnacle of its utility he popped in a video he'd just scored via mail-order from California. It was a compilation of scenes of men ejaculating on women's faces. "One hundred percent cumshots," said Felix, pulling a chair close to the television set in order, in those pre-remote control days, to control the action. Proudly noting the Fast Forward feature, he said, "Watch this one. In her hair! Oh, man. Genius." I noticed his teeth resting on the coffee table; they were aimed at the television, as if watching alongside us, and I feared they might come chattering to life to provide the play-by-play to Felix's color commentary. Some of the cumshots made Felix laugh and others struck him as tragic ("What a dribble. Lookit that. She's disappointed"). Others angered him and others filled him with awe and admiration. "You know," I finally said to him, in an inappropriately reflective tone, "it's never even occurred to me to do that to a woman." Felix guffawed and said, "That's why you got a baby and I don't," which struck me as the loosest possible interpretation of that difference between us.

  Strangely, I found some solace in the video. Compared with the men on the tape, I was almost Lancelot. Even after Felix left in the afternoon, to open the Exchange, I watched the video—over and over again, actually. Not in the rub-a-dub way Felix watched it, the way it was intended to be watched—a Captain Kangaroo rerun would have been more arousing to me. Rather, it said to me: Yes, I was a lout, a ne'er-do-well lush, a narcissistic chaser of vainglory (What did I hope for, mailing my poems out to the world? Just who did I envision reading them? A crusty committee of award judges debating whether to hang a medal around my neck? No, I imagined a woman in full swoon, a brunette for whatever reason, clutching my poems to her chest and overcome with the sweltry desire to rescue me from myself ), a man forever on the hunt for the easy way out, with an eye perennially cocked toward the exit. But I wasn't a beast, I told myself, I wasn't evil. Look at those bastards on that tape, I thought, just look at them. There wasn't hope for them but there was for me.

  Later that afternoon I went back to our house. I'd showered and shaved though was unfortunately still dressed in the same clothes as the night prior, and I was more or less sober or perhaps to be accurate not drunk. I had a single slug of gin before I left, to steady my nerve. Or maybe it was two slugs, to reflect that my body was threaded with more than one nerve. The key was still missing so demurely I knocked on our door. I'd considered flowers but that struck me as such a wormy Andy Capp maneuver. Nevertheless I had everything in mind to say—the outlines of a Marshall Plan for my own reconstruction. I'd go light on the drinking, stick only to beer. I'd quit the Exchange, and get a better, real job—maybe at a bookstore, that sounded nice. I'd write only on the weekends, like a hobbyist. Stella had once suggested I "see somebody," as in a psychiatrist—what in those days we called a "shrink." Sure, why not. I'd need to reserve a few demons for my poems, I thought, but certainly I had enough that I wouldn't miss those a shrink might slice away. I'd even take up jogging if that's what it required: me with a sweatband on my head, huff-puffing down Magazine Street. Anything, I could do it.

  No answer. "Stella?" I said. "Stella?"

  From the bottom of the stairs I heard my name called. It was Robbie, our downstairs neighbor. He was a chef at a French Quarter restaurant, a turtle-soup joint favored by midwestern tourists. Wide-eyed folks wearing Mardi Gras beads in August, that crowd. Robbie was married to a painter named Sally, a languid, too-gentle woman who was difficult to converse with because negativity seemed to mentally bruise her. If you complained about, say, the rain, she'd note how it was all part of the wonderful ecological cycle. Nevermind that you'd left the windows down on the Caprice—blessed Gaia was having a bath. She actually enjoyed reading Thoreau—yeah, exactly—though I'm certain she never caught his jokes. Stella adored the two of them, however, and pointed to them as a model couple, as a condition to aspire to. "You should talk to Robbie sometime," she'd once suggested. "He's such a great husband, you could learn something." I noted to her that when I passed their doorway I almost always heard Kenny Rogers on the hi-fi. Case closed, so far as I was concerned.

  "I've got the key for you," Robbie said.

  "Oh," I said, jaunty-like, and padded down the stairs.

  He disappeared into his apartment, leaving the door cracked enough for me to catch a couple of verses of an Anne Murray song. This was not a moment to be rolling my eyes but I rolled them anyway. When he handed me the key he said, "I'm really sorry about everything."

  About what everything?

  "Stella going out to California," he said. "She was pretty, um, distraught and, you know, I'll bet this is really hard for you. I mean, of course it is. Women, jeez-us"—slight cognitive dissonance, him saying "Women, jeez-us" with Anne Murray's voice backing him. "But look," he said, "these things happen. I'm sure you'll work it out."

  I climbed the stairs in a hot muddled daze. At first glance the apartment looked the same. Robbie was off his fucking rocker! Or a sick joker. There were my books, here was our TV on its cinderblock throne, there were the framed photos scattered throughout the living room. Almost all of them showing Stella and Speck—as the photographer, I was always excluded from the recorded memories. For a moment I was relieved; I half-expected to encounter the symbolic whoomph of an empty apartment, stripped of even its meager furniture. But then I looked closer. Stella had emptied the bedroom closet of most of her clothes, save the despised maternity wear. Speck's drawers were vacant except for the onesies she'd outgrown. Her storybooks were still there, and her toys littered the floor (there was that voodoo doll, lying facedown like a shooting victim), but her very precious, must-have Baby Bear was absent from the crib. That absence was like the period at the end of an awful sentence congealing slowly into view: They're gone. Stella must have packed them up that night, after we'd fought, while I was at the Exchange slumped against B. B. Mike with a tiara on my head, and caught a redeye out to L.A., to camp with her parents. Maybe it was even an American Airlines flight she booked—a chancy stab at grim coincidence. For a while I wandered the apartment, conducting a stupefied inventory of what she'd taken and what she'd left, as if to ascertain the degree of her seriousness, the quantifiable finality of it all. Could she truly desert her copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel? She adored Plath. Her scribbled little annotations flowered the book's every other page. Was life with me so terrible that she would abandon all her shoes? I put one to my nose, as if to capture a last fading trace of her, but it smelled only of ripe new leather. Plus I couldn't help wondering what I was doing: Feet repulsed me, even hers. Then in the nursery I noticed a little poop stain on Speck's changing-table cover, a narrow little butterscotch skid mark, and for whatever reason the sight of that snapped me, twig-like, in two. Clutching the edges of the changing pad, I shook with sobs—weeping over my daughter's crusted shit.

  "Bennie?" It was Robbie.

  "Yeah," I called back to him. I wiped away my tears with my shirtsleeve which smelled alarmingly of vomit. I searched for stains but saw nothing and all I could figure was that I'd drunk so hard the night before that even my pores had puked. For God's sake, was all this really happening? "Coming," I called.

  He was standing in the open doorway with Sally beside him. He looked concerned; her expression, on the other hand, was decidedly prosecutorial. Owing to Sally's earth-mother garb—a blocky dress of batiked and embroidered cotton; a mutant variety
of footwear falling somewhere between house slippers and garden clogs; and a rainbow-striped hairband—I was reminded of that old tagline from the Chiffon margarine commercials: "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature." Mother Nature looked pissed. I don't think she'd ever forgiven me for passing out in the bushes once and crushing some of her pansies. The broil of her current visage made me wonder if she'd helped Stella pack. "We just wanted to make sure—we just wanted to see if you were okay," Robbie said.

  "Sure," I said.

  "These things happen," he repeated. "Things will work out."

  "Of course," I said.

  Things didn't work out.

  ***

  Not a chance. I placed a call to California forthwith. Stella's father, Frank, who was some sort of midlevel state judge and taught political science on the side, fielded the call. "Ben," he told me, full of sighs, "my daughter has been through a great deal and can't speak to you right now. To be realistic, I think it's going to be a while. I understand that there's a child at stake so this is not a simple matter, but I can assure you that Little Stella is getting the best of care. You're going to have to accept the responsibility for this and give Stella the time she needs to sort out her life. I happen to love my daughter"—the compare/ contrast implication made vivid by his emphasis—"and I don't intend to see her suffer one bit more."

  What I wanted to say, in response, went like this: You love your daughter? Well, how about this, Frank—she hates you, she fucking abhors you. Here, you want proof ? Look, right here, Plath's Ariel. (Christ, how could she have left that book? And me with it.) Right here, [>], "Daddy." Plath's best poem, so far as I'm concerned. See how the page is marked up? With three shades of ink, three. And here, take a look at what's underlined: There's a stake in your fat black heart. (Did you say a child was "at stake," Frank? Tragic word choice.) Oh Daddy you old bastard you. Come on, Frank, let's talk about your oh-so-tender affair with your graduate assistant. Who caught you, Frank? That's right, Stella, and she was eleven, and the grad student was blowing you, Frank, sucking you off in the family sedan. Here come da judge, how cute. Stella was just looking for her bike in the garage, that dainty pink Schwinn with the pompoms on the handlebars, you remember it. She was supposed to be at a friend's house, of course. I know everything you said that day, Frank, everything you promised her and all the spidery ways you begged her not to squeal to Mommy after you'd zipped up your trousers and told the grad student—what, to "stay put," to "hold on," to give you "a minute"? Yeah, she told me the whole story, Frank, and you probably don't want to hear why & how but it was one night in bed early on when her reluctance to perform oral sex had reached the point of noteworthy awkwardness and we lit up a joint with our backs to the headboard and it all came streaming out, a sad tale but one so coldly, coldly related. I liked the detail of the grad assistant reapplying her lipstick in the rearview mirror while you were pleading with your own little Stella. Niiiice, Frank. A classy bitch. What was that line of Plath's? Something about where Daddy put his "root." Well we know where you put your fucking root, Frank, right into that polluted, lipsticked inlet, into that cheap mouth that bit my pretty red heart in two.