Bird's-Eye View

by J. F. Freedman

  I’m sure the man is sincere, but I’m irritated with this. It’s the same old Red Scare, in new clothing. But these old folks, for whom the fear of Communist domination hung over their lives like a thunderhead from the end of World War II to Reagan, are hanging on his words.

  “The Russians can’t even feed themselves, let alone worry about stirring up mischief in the rest of the world,” I interrupt.

  Roach stares at me coldly. “I agree about the poverty. But you’re wrong about causing trouble. They’re too proud to admit they’re a second-tier power, as Britain has been for decades.”

  I don’t want to argue anymore, but I can’t help taking another dig. “So what’re we supposed to do, go into Russia and take over their nuclear sites? We don’t even know where they are. They don’t even know where some of them are.”

  “My point exactly,” he responds with a ferocious smile. “We don’t know and they don’t know. But somebody does. And we have to be prepared to make sure that whoever that might be never gets to activate them.”

  I can feel Johanna’s heat as she stands beside me. It’s turning her on, my engagement with Roach. She’s just on that edge of drunk-high that she thinks I’m doing this to impress her. “And how do we do that?” I ask.

  “By creating alliances with democratic forces within Russia and other nuclear powers who believe as we do. So that if a rogue element does decide to play with fire, we have the means to stop them. From within.”

  “What do you mean by means?”

  “Sufficient organization and arms to combat them, if it comes to that.”

  The old folks don’t understand where Roach is going with this, but I do. “We’re arming a rebel faction inside Russia, is that what you’re saying?” I ask. Jesus, this is a cocktail party out in the boonies. What kind of loose talk is this?

  Roach laughs indulgently. “Of course not. Russia is a legitimate government. It’s all theoretical. We have to be ready for any eventuality. Strategic planning and vision—that’s what we do. If you don’t anticipate the future and plan for it, you have another Hussein or bin Laden. It’s better to take preemptive steps before there’s a real conflict. If we’ve learned nothing else over the past decade, we’ve learned that—hopefully.” He puts a friendly arm around my shoulder. “We don’t interfere in the internal affairs of other governments. We don’t cowboy out there like we used to in the old days. We’re just a bunch of old boy scouts now. We want to be prepared.”

  • • •

  The party’s over. I kiss my mother good-bye. Outside, walking to my car with Johanna Mortimer, my brother stops me, pulls me aside. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Like how?” I don’t enjoy getting into discussions of my life with Sam.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I’m giving this woman a ride home.” I point over to Johanna. “Her mother had to leave early.”

  “I’m not talking about her, numbnuts. I mean with your life. Your career.”

  “My so-called career?”

  “You’ve got to make amends.” He’s forceful, right in my face. “You can’t throw a career away.”

  “Right now there’s not much I can do.”

  “You’ve got to do something. It’s killing mother.”

  That was low, although I know it’s true. “She’s tough,” I say, feeling blue about our mother. “She’s been through worse. She doesn’t have to worry about me, I’m a big boy.”

  “Then start acting like one. Do what you have to do and get back on track. You’re a Tullis. Don’t disgrace our name. More than you already have.”

  He walks away. Emily stares at me as they get into their Mercedes and drive off. I know what their conversation on the way home will be about.

  “Big brotheritis?” Johanna asks as I walk her to my mud-spattered Jeep.

  She is smart, even half-looped. “Family business,” I explain. “Ongoing. You ready?” I open her door for her like a proper gentleman.

  “I’ve been ready for hours.”

  I get in and start the engine. “How do I get to your mother’s house?”

  She laughs, then stops. “Are you shitting me? You’re shitting me, right?”

  “I didn’t say immediately.”

  Under normal circumstances, my mother’s meddling in my affairs of the heart would’ve been a bull’s-eye. Johanna Mortimer is smart, pretty, financially in good shape. But I’m not living a normal-circumstances life these days.

  Before we jumped into bed I gave her the nickel tour of the place. My prints of the birds blew her away. I didn’t show her any of Ollie, of course. That’s my secret, not to be shared, even with a lover.

  Now her fingertips idly caress my flaccid penis. We’re lying on top of the soggy sheets, passing a bottle of blue agave tequila back and forth.

  “Do you mind if I smoke? That old nasty habit again.”

  “On the porch, please.”

  She props herself up on her elbows, looks around. “This place is kind of a tinderbox, isn’t it?” she comments. “All this dry wood and exposed wiring.”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re not concerned?”

  I shrug. “As long as I’m not asleep in my bed, not really. It’s not a permanent dwelling place. The only thing I give a shit about is my equipment and my pictures.”

  She heaves up from the bed, crawling across me to go fetch her cigarettes from her evening bag. Her small, firm breasts brush my chest. She’s easy to be with, which was a surprise. Of course, we’re on first-time behavior.

  I roll a joint and join her outside, bringing the bottle. The dark humidity brings forth strong nighttime aromas, sweetness of honeysuckle and pungency of marsh water. A choir of bullfrogs is singing a loud call and response. We sit in battered Adirondack chairs that are set at 45 degree angles, facing each other. Her bare feet, long and slender, so milk-white they’re almost translucent, are perched in my lap.

  “This is a neat place,” she says, flicking her cigarette ashes into a coffee cup ashtray as she looks out through the screen into the darkness. “And private. Who knows about this?”

  “My mother, my brother and sister. A few friends, not many.”

  “You enjoy your solitude,” she observes, missing the mark.

  “It’s where I am for now.” Enjoy is the wrong word. Endured would be closer to the truth. A self-imposed exile while I sort my life out.

  I pass her the joint. She takes a hit, passes it back. Some cactus juice to wash it down.

  “So you’re on sabbatical,” she throws out, probing delicately. On the drive over, and then post-lovemaking, she told me about herself. Her age—thirty-five; where she went to school—Williams, Harvard MBA, which is why she’s living in Boston, actually Cambridge, she owns her house; the sports she enjoys—skiing and tennis; the music she likes—classical and jazz, but she basically “digs” all kinds of music; that she’s never been married, but has had two long live-in situations, the last one ending a year ago; and that she’s great at what she does and makes a shitpile of money, but isn’t career-consumed.

  The personal résumé, in other words, of an accomplished woman who is now ready to fall in love, get married, and have kids. Oh, and she’s also a gourmet cook, it’s her passion, she loves to cook so much she’s taken cooking school vacations in Provence and Tuscany.

  “Kind of,” I parry in response to her probing about my career status. “I don’t know if I’m going back or not.”

  “You don’t want to teach anymore?”

  “It’s not that. I love teaching, most of the time, anyway. It’s the place—I don’t know if it and me are the right match.”

  We aren’t—that’s already been decided. I’d like to change the subject, but I don’t know to what. I don’t want to get personal, even though we just made love and are now sitting nude next to each other in easy contentment.

  This woman would be a catch. In another life.

  “Have you ever been marrie
d?” she asks. She’s getting personal, she knows she shouldn’t, she can’t help it. She just gave one of the most special parts of herself to me on what wasn’t even our first date. There’s commitment there, already. And she can sense my goodness.

  It’s true. I’m a good guy. Sometimes too good for my own good, I don’t say no, don’t hurt people’s feelings when I should, so that later on, they’re hurt much worse. It’s a distaste for conflict, sweeping-the-dirt-under-the-rug, which is always never more than a short-term solution to a long-term problem. That’s normal, I know, human beings are better at avoidance than at confrontation, but I’ve left too many bodies lying in the dust. Not that I haven’t been hit and run over myself.

  Johanna here doesn’t know any of this. She knows she likes me, is liking me more by the minute, especially naked and sated like we are now.

  “No. Never have been,” I answer.

  “Not the marrying kind.” Spoken as a teasing joke, but she can’t mask the seriousness. I like her even more because of that.

  Which is not a good thing, for her. “No, I wouldn’t say that. I’m not against it.” With the right woman goes unspoken.

  I don’t know. This might be the best woman I’ll ever meet in my entire life, and it isn’t going to happen. I’m not ready for emotional involvement, and that’s all there is to it.

  “It’s late,” I say. “I’d better be getting you home.”

  She sits bolt upright. “What?”

  I play dumb. “To your mother’s.”

  “I don’t need to go home. I’m a grown woman. My mother isn’t waiting up for me.”

  “Yeah, it’s just . . .” Shit.

  She stands, her body touching mine. No more trying for cool now. “Don’t you want me to stay?”

  Here comes the lie. Fuck, I hate this. But I’m going to do it. “I’d love it. But I have to go down south tomorrow morning before six, which is the opposite direction from your mother’s place.”

  She wants to believe me. “Where are you going?”

  “Sussex.” The first town that pops into my head. Sussex is a sleepy burg at the far southern end of the Eastern Shore. There’s a ferry that crosses over, one of the few still running. “An Audubon Society meeting,” I improvise off the top of my head. “Regional.”

  “I like bird-watching,” she says with grit. “I could go with you. If you don’t mind my tagging along,” she adds, not able to let go.

  Don’t, please, I’m thinking. I have too much respect for you for this.

  “It’s a board meeting, boring as hell.” I pause, as if considering her supplication. “You’re not dressed for it.”

  She looks down at her nude body. “I’m not dressed at all.” Trying to lighten up a heavy situation.

  “What you wore last night.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not trying to get rid of me.” Her eyes are searching my face for clues.

  “Of course not.” Which is both the truth and a lie—I can’t have her here any longer, but I am attracted to her, in spite of myself.

  She swallows the bitter pill. “Okay, then. As long as you’re not bullshitting me.”

  “I don’t bullshit.” What’s one more lie? I bullshit myself all the time. I’m doing it right now, even as she throws her ego out the window. I wish I had the guts to do that. And the character.

  • • •

  It’s four o’clock in the morning now. I’m sitting alone on my back porch. The bottle is two-thirds empty. It was full when sweet Johanna and I started in on it earlier in the evening.

  We said our good-byes on her mother’s doorstep (all the lights were out inside the house, her mama’s no fool), and I was smart enough to remember to ask her for her phone numbers, here and in Boston both. That took the edge off the tension I knew she was feeling.

  It’s not like she’d fallen irrationally in love with me off a one-night stand. She’s a mature, grown woman, real grown-ups don’t do that. She simply liked me, and wanted to get to know me better. More important, she didn’t want to be rejected. That she’d fucked me our first time together, maybe the only time she’d done that her entire life, certainly since she was old enough to know better—she’s an attractive, desirable woman, she doesn’t need to be chasing tail—wasn’t as meaningful as that she’d given of herself, spilled some emotional blood. I hadn’t, and we both knew it.

  Which is why I need to go celibate for a while, because the way it’s working now isn’t working. It isn’t about sex, or sexual conquest, or good sex, or any of that. The fucking’s inconsequential, compared to feeling. Which is how it should be, because sex, in and of itself, is transitory. It’s love that’s real, feeling something. I’m not ready for that, not after what I’ve been through. I used to think I knew what love was, but I’m not sure anymore. And until I am, I shouldn’t be screwing decent women around.

  Sex coupled with misunderstood love is the reason I’m living in a sharecropper’s shack on my mother’s property instead of toiling at my profession, which is teaching college students. Sex with the wrong women, at the wrong time. Particularly one.

  Actually, that isn’t true. That’s me bullshitting myself again. Sex—having sex—is the manifestation of the problem, the tip of the iceberg. The real issue was, and still is, my inability to grow up and be a responsible man. All this skating around my tenure situation, watching my poor mother covering my sorry ass because I can’t, is chickenshit. I’m a grown man, my mother’s apron and the strings that tie them on her bony hips should have been rolled up and stuck in a drawer long ago.

  I’m not on sabbatical. I was permanently let go. Fired.

  I am the third and last child in my family. My parents, who were comfortable financially, going back generations, were well along in years when I was born; I was an accident, no one’s ever made any bones about that—my mother was forty-six when I came along, my father fifty-two. My siblings, Sam, the Baltimore lawyer, and my sister, Dinah, a gynecologist who lives in New York, are seventeen and twenty years older than I am, respectively. Both departed from home ere I barely saw the light of day, they’re more like uncle and aunt to me than brother and sister. We never knew each other well, and since my fiasco at Austin they’ve washed their hands of me. I don’t blame them.

  I grew up privileged and wild. My parents couldn’t handle me, they were too old, I was an entire generation removed from my siblings, on which they’d based their understanding of kids. I plumb wore them to a frazzle, so they boarded me out, starting in the seventh grade. I moved from one minor league prep school to another before I landed at Andover for my last three years.

  Besides having money and little parental control, I was smart, a jock, tall—six feet two, broad-shouldered—and better than okay-looking. Women were attracted to me before I even knew why, and once I did, around the tenth grade, I started making hay. I was golden, and I was just beginning.

  I went to Yale, where I did well—I was getting my shit together by then, at least academically and socially. I rowed varsity crew, was a member of the debate society, played trumpet in the university orchestra and several impromptu jazz groups, and graduated with high honors, Phi Beta Kappa. A demonstrably bright boy.

  From Yale I traveled cross-country to Stanford, where I racked up my doctorate in American History in three and a half years, which is flying. My doctoral thesis, The Confederacy Within the Union (inspired by incidents that took place in my own backyard—a lucky accident of place and time that informed my desire to choose the teaching of history as a profession), was picked up by a mainstream publisher and subsequently has done very well—many universities and high schools use it as a primary text.

  While waiting for my thesis to be published, I instructed at Northwestern for a couple of semesters and followed that with a two-year stint at the University of Wisconsin as an assistant professor. Then Texas beckoned. I went in as an associate professor: good salary and benefits, fine choice of
courses to teach, the whole nine yards. Three years later, I was granted tenure—they knew I was the real goods, a serious scholar who was also popular with students, the best combination a teacher at my level could have.

  I was thirty-one years old, and I was set for life in the world of academia. I could stay forever at UT in Austin, the coolest city in Texas, a great school with a huge endowment, they pay fabulously and attract top-notch talent in their faculty—or, if something in the crème de la crème category came along, Harvard or back at Yale, I’d have that option, too. I could mature into being a beloved university professor, get married eventually, have kids, live a great life.

  The settling-down part of my life-style fantasy was in the future—I wasn’t ready for that yet, I had too many wild and crazy things I wanted to experience. I have always had a tendency—some would call it an obsession—to take risks, which took full flower at this time. In my circle of friends I got a reputation as a daredevil who sometimes exhibited more guts than brains—their conclusion, not mine, I always felt I had things under control. As I said, I was a wild child, and this reckless streak stayed with me into manhood. Teaching is a sedentary profession, and I had the need to test myself physically—I’ve always been a physical animal, I get antsy if I sit too long. I developed a compulsion to push the envelope further and further, taking risks for the sake of taking risks, for the heart-stopping joy of going to the precipice, trying to see how far out on a limb I could go without breaking it off. I became an avid solo rock-climber, traveling around the country to various mountain ranges whenever I had some time off to test my skills on some of the hardest faces in mountaineering. I also indulged in bungee-jumping from spectacular heights, free-falling thousands of feet at times, watching the ground get close and closer until, just before shattering my bones on the rocks below, I would be jerked back to safety. Hang-gliding, another wild ride, virtually became an obsession with me. Soaring high in the air, catching thermals and staying aloft for long periods of time, was one of the most exhilarating things I had ever tried (which may be the reason I’ve become so enamored of birds and all things related to birds—flying on your own, lord of the skies).