I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Mendelsohn, Jane

  •

  She does not concern herself with being rescued. Her only interest seems to be in dismantling the Electra to furnish her house and in the meticulous record of her experiences, which she continues to write, lying in her hammock, in her pilot’s logbook. She does not try to talk sense into Noonan, or to save him. She establishes her own daily routine, and sometimes she and Noonan run into each other while they are fishing at dusk amidst the sharks, or getting water at dawn from the collection tanks, but she does not wait for him in the jungle or go to his end of the island at night. She cannot even allow herself to dream of that.

  Sometimes she goes for walks on the beach, her dark shadow trailing behind her like the train of a long black dress.

  She realizes that she is alone on the island, in spirit at least, and she takes it for granted that it will remain that way, if not forever, for many years to come. This certainty fills her with her first hope of accepting her circumstances. It was during this time that she let her hair grow again, weaving it into the long, thick braid that she would keep for the rest of her life.

  •

  She develops habits that seem incredible in someone like herself, focused and driven and ambitious. She stops waking at dawn and sleeps until noon. She forgets to bathe for days. She lets animals roam her lean-to, and sometimes she falls asleep with a monkey by her feet and a bird perched on her stomach. She walks the beaches in search of truths that had never troubled her in their absence: she thinks about death and miracles and solitude. These were the days when she became reacquainted with herself, without hoping for anything except the satisfaction of knowing that she had explored an unknown sensation or feeling. This was her only object, and in its pursuit she discovered that she knew only a small portion of the vast landscape that was her soul. It was as if what she had considered to be her self all these years was only a magnified detail of an enormous painting whose entire composition and narrative she had never before known existed, let alone seen. And in this way she began to view the universe differently.

  The sky, however wide and smeared with thick, painterly clouds, now seems to her only one square inch of an infinite fresco of the world.

  She thinks about her past, her family. She remembers that it was her father who first took her to see an air show.

  •

  By the time we moved to Los Angeles, my father was a broken man. He spent his luxuriously empty days wandering the streets like an old cowboy. My mother was already sick, and he was in the habit of attending circuses and flea markets. He initiated me into the secrets of his favorite pastime. The Winter Air Tournament was held on Christmas Day. The show included races, aerobatics, and wing walking, all performed by handsome young men who wandered the grounds with their leather jackets unbuttoned and their sweaty hair plastered to their brows in dark scars. I was still demure enough to attend an event such as this wearing a strand of my grandmother’s heirloom pearls and a pair of embroidered gloves.

  Now, when she tries to remember her first excursion in an airplane, she can’t distinguish it from the heavenly beauty of California in 1921. It was a few months after the air show. The spring came suddenly: the rains stopped, the days grew noticeably longer, and the afternoon light felt powdery, as if it might blow away. She doesn’t remember that maiden voyage, but she remembers walking across the airfield when she stepped out of the plane. Strong, fresh skirts of breeze brushed against her face and body as she walked across the landing strip. Strands of her long, honey-blond hair swept into her line of sight. She looked out past the hangars, over a field of tall, dry grass, and in the buttery light, with the wind grazing past her, she thought she could see forever. She had the sensation of seeing a length of time stretch out in front of her, endlessly, effortlessly, on an invisible wing. She felt as though an experience she had always anticipated were about to take place, as if a tender, unearthly feeling were finally going to reveal its secret to her. The vision came so vividly that she imagined her father—he had come to watch her flight—had seen it too. But when she turned around, her hair blowing now in the opposite direction, he was looking down, stubbing a cigarette out with his foot, smiling over something with one of the airfield mechanics.

  Love is so transparent that if you are unprepared for it you will see right through it and not notice it.

  One night, Noonan took refuge in her house because his living area had been infested with rats. It was he who took control of the situation and made up a blanket for himself on the floor under the pretext that he couldn’t stand the scrambling of the rats at his place. In this situation it seemed obvious to her that he should sleep at the far end of the lean-to, behind the little stove. But he had already made the decision for both of them. He spread his blanket down beside the hammock in which she had been writing frantically in her pilot’s log, not knowing how to behave in the face of his presumed madness, and he began to speak to her about the changes on his end of the island, in the meantime removing his threadbare trousers and his glasses, both of which he folded carefully and placed gingerly at the foot of his new bed. He took the garland of flowers that he always wore now from around his neck and hung it from the mirror, he removed the necklaces woven from roots and placed them on the table beside the dictionary of pidgin English, with one graceful gesture he slipped off his bracelets carved from coral, his shark’s-tooth earring, and his monkey-hair anklet, and he spread everything out around the lean-to until the room was decorated with the accoutrements of his dementia. He did it all with so much piety, and with such meaningful pauses, that each of his removals seemed sacred.

  She tried to help him untie the feathers from his hair, but he took her fingers and kissed them and put them in his mouth, all the while working on the feathers himself, until they were strewn around him like the colorful remnants of a pillow fight among concubines in a harem.

  His body is lean but still strong, and his skin is surprisingly soft, worn smooth by the salt and sand, like a stone. He’s gentle with her, and when he looks at her he smiles, and then his smile, not the smile of the gambler but the smile of the gentleman, the wild gentleman, his smile turns to tears.

  She’s afraid of him at first, but then she realizes that like herself, he too has changed. They are still the pilot and the navigator, but they’ve forgotten their parts, their professions. They don’t have names, or memories, or words.

  I want to tell you everything without saying anything, he says. And she agrees. And they do that, from now on, they tell each other everything.

  That night, he stopped talking to the animals, although he continued to wear the feathers and the bracelets and the earring, and he began to share his body with her whenever she asked for it. He built himself a cabin on the more gentle, western end of the island, with a terrace that overlooked the sea and where the surf would sing itself to sleep on velvet winds. This was his hideaway, as he called it, where he would receive his visitor at any hour of the day or night, without asking questions or expecting anything in return because in his opinion it was the least he could do for the woman who had saved his life. Sometimes he would accept a gift from her, a poem or some fried banana, but he never liked to feel that they were involved in any kind of barter. Only once did he refuse her, when he was feeling sick from eating too many handfuls of fish eggs, but otherwise he never turned her down, even if he wasn’t in the mood.

  Ten

  HE VISITS ME at night in my house by the lagoon. We are lovers. We love each other all night.

  Sometimes he comes to me in the middle of the night, and we drench ourselves in the slick and perfumed waters of the lagoon, making folds in the wetness as if we are moving through a timeless and moonlit cave of space.

  After so much loneliness, so long, so alone, the sound of another person’s voice or just their breathing is a feeling unto itself. It’s a deep joy in the body, like having water run through you. The sound of his breathing keeps me asleep for hours.

  With all his experience, he tries to teach h
er the tricks he has performed or seen performed on others, but the lessons are unnecessary. She isn’t looking for drama, she just wants to be satisfied. The truth is that she was bored by the limited coupling she had with her husband and she enjoys the unencumbered sex with Noonan, but in both cases she takes it lightly. She thinks of it like eating: sometimes she has a good meal, sometimes she has a bad one, but usually she’s just hungry and she eats. For a long time Noonan lives under the delusion that because she seems untheatrical in bed she is frightened or uncomfortable. But little by little he comes to understand that she can enjoy herself without telling him about it. In this way he comes to trust her. And he believes that they will be able to please themselves forever because they don’t protect each other from their selfishness.

  They weren’t expecting or forcing themselves to be in love. He had given her the gift of an unconventional freedom, which she deemed more precious than love.

  It happens at night, by the lagoon on the desert island. Every night the great heroine gives herself to the navigator, and every night he gives himself back. The rest of the world will never give up on them, will never stop looking for them. But there they are, alive. They’re living for each other now.

  During the day she looks at the horizon, suspiciously. She doesn’t say anything about it to Noonan. She goes on loving him, receiving him at night. She watches for him and waits. Neither of them will break their unspoken rule. Neither of them will talk about the future. But she has premonitions. She has nightmares.

  With love come the deepest fears of dying.

  At night, under the moon, the cool slippery water, the wet salty bodies, the famous silk scarf, and there they go, into an atmosphere of their own, where they splash each other, sing songs to each other, please each other, slowly, with all the time in the world, then on the raft, floating like a leaf on the water, then to the bed stuffed with feathers and leaves, their bodies leaving dark wet impressions behind them, and they’ll be there all night, with the Electra on the beach watching over their island in the darkness, unafraid for themselves as long as they are together, oblivious to the world they have left behind, reminded of it only in their dreams.

  It was late, almost morning, when he first saw the silver speck on the horizon, lit by the moon. She was asleep. Then dawn came, played tricks with his eyes. Then, with the sun, it flashed in and out of sight. He doesn’t dare wake her. But she will wake up. Later, by the time the birds have taken their midday naps, she will have made him so happy he will have forgotten all about the silver speck on the horizon.

  Eleven

  ON THE OCCASION of their first anniversary on the island, they prepared a celebration for themselves, the climax of which was a gigantic shark the color of slate which turned on a spit over a roaring fire, some seven hours simmering in its own juices. Half the animals on the island gathered to express their wonderment. She and Noonan had spent the weeks beforehand plotting how to lure a shark into a trap of coconut and wire, and they were celebrating their catch as much as their anniversary. They had carried the beast from one end of the island to the other, and now they felt they knew it well enough to eat it. When they opened him up, they found a solid gold cigarette case in his stomach.

  Lost in the aroma of sizzling sharkskin which gained pungency as the day wore on, she felt herself in agreement with the world, whose calm pulse could be felt over the din of the animals and the fire. Everything was perfect, or perfectly imperfect. The shark fell into the fire and its skin burned to a crisp. It was too rare. They ate very well. Noonan’s fin soup was a success, but the birds got most of the meat.

  After dinner he took out his harmonica and we made music, the way we had when we first landed on the island, familiar songs from our past, and radio hits that we remembered. We sang ballads and cowboy tunes, and advertising jingles, anything that we knew. There was a new sweetness to our singing, because the songs reminded us of a life we had lived a very long time ago, a life that we remembered but did not miss.

  We sang long after the arrival of the last few stars, thrown about in their lunatic patterns, each with a color and shape of its own, suspended in the clear black sky.

  We sang to the dark, mysterious ocean, whose silence reached us like a mystical vapor.

  We shared a smoke from Noonan’s tortoiseshell pipe.

  Excited by the lingering smell of the shark and by the singing, hundreds of fireflies electrified the beach, like Christmas lights dangling around invisible trees.

  An hour later we were lying in each other’s arms, on the edge of the foaming sea, and we made love almost as an afterthought on the broad, damp carpet of sand. The night insects were out in full force, with nothing to stop them from devouring our unprotected limbs, the sand snaked its way into every conceivable crevice, and the hermit crabs scuttled through our tangled hair, which by now had grown so long it was remarkable that the rats hadn’t already nested in it. We both wanted to keep going till sunrise, we had never felt such a cascade of passion, but we had to stop abruptly because Noonan was stung by the six-foot tentacle of a jellyfish. We hobbled our way back to the fire, which was by then a pile of ashes and shark’s teeth, and we dragged ourselves inside the shack, where I fell asleep for thirteen hours. Noonan told me he stayed awake, he had a hard time not waking me, but instead he watched the breath flow in and out of my nostrils, with a concentration that he had not devoted to anything since he had tried to watch a flower grow when he was a child. When I woke up he was able to tell me all about my dreams.

  Three days later, after a supper of the last of the shark fin soup, they went for a midnight swim in the lagoon, where they were both struck at the same moment with the realization that they had never been so happy. Implicit but unspoken in their epiphany was the understanding that they had never been happy before at all. Each of them had known pleasure, and triumph, and satisfaction, but they had never really tasted happiness. They said nothing of this to each other, not only because it wasn’t necessary to say out loud, but also because to say it would have made them both inconsolably sad. Instead they performed tricks for each other in the water, and Amelia pretended to be a bareback rider like the women she had seen in circuses as a child. She stood high on a rock with her body three quarters exposed and she held out her arms in a soaring gesture as if she were floating in the air. She had flowers in her hair and the water dripped from her neck over her breasts and down her stomach. She looked like a statue come to life: part woman, part fountain, part tree.

  That, along with so many other images of her captured in the course of their long association, will suddenly appear to him at the whim of fate, and disappear just as quickly when he sees her real face, lined and tan and intent on something. But the images, they live a life of their own in his mind, and he measures the passage of time less in terms of his own experience than in the changing expression of her form.

  When she is old, gray-haired, he will love her for all of the seasons she contains.

  One day, while she was napping, he went to catch fish in his favorite spot, a wild inlet where the coral reef teemed with tropical life, and he sat down to meditate before he worked. All at once, in the bright blue mirror of the sky, he caught a glimpse of an airplane barely visible on the horizon. It grew clearer. It developed before him as if it were a picture of a plane, coming to life in a chemical solution. It moved with a speed that he had not witnessed in so many months that it seemed supernatural, and it appeared to be heading directly toward the island. He watched it with a calm detachment at first, because he assumed it was a hallucination.

  Holding his breath, he observed the machine at his leisure. He saw it grow large as if seen through time-lapse photography, and he saw it glide stealthily over the island, in wide circles, like a shark. From his solitary position he watched the plane as if he were watching an episode from his past or his future fly by, and he lingered, for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, escaping history. Then he caught six yellow fish for dinner and smoked a li
ttle on his pipe to pass the time until he saw the plane sweep around in one last arc and disappear into the slowly fading blue. It passed close enough above him so that he thought he could make out black pontoons for landing on the water.

  It isn’t until two hours later, over dinner, that he tells her about the plane.

  You know what, she says, I was right. You’ve been smoking too much of that stuff.

  •

  She is heading to check the water collection tanks, making her way through jungle still redolent of last night’s rain, when she looks up through the canopy of leaves. She has to repress a trembling unlike anything she has ever experienced when she sees the image of her dreams and her nightmares crawling across the space of sky delineated by a cluster of shiny green leaves. It is very far away, but it is so dazzling, a glint of pure silver sliding like mercury through the blue, that it seems close enough for her to touch.

  She thinks about many things when she sees the plane. She thinks that she’s seeing things. She waits a long time for the vision to disappear. She splashes her face with water from the collection tank. But the plane is adamant, it doesn’t go away, so she chooses to believe that it is more than a dream. She does not, however, fully accept its presence; it is too much of a shock for that. All at once she is catapulted into thoughts of rescue, and then to thoughts of capture.