After lunch, the sleepless night caught up to her. She toppled into bed and found herself wide awake. She went over and over the scene in the airport parking lot until she convinced herself Billy was going to call her again. She told herself she did not want him to do it. The next moment, the thought of his voice on the telephone made her body dissolve. If it wasn’t love, what was it? Lust? She had been taught that lust was vile, ugly, brutal. What she had felt with Billy had been none of those things.
What was it? She had to give it a name. She finally called it freedom. She had done something daring—more daring than marrying Cliff Morris in war-torn England. There was more courage in her heart than she had suspected. Why did she like that idea? Was she a test pilot by temperament? A test pilot of the spirit?
For the first time she faced the truth about the night Cliff had been reported missing over Berlin. She had wept briefly in her mother’s arms. But in her heart she had been secretly relieved, she had felt an awful shameful gratitude. Tama and Billy were right. Why not admit it to herself? She had married a war, not a man, and she had been glad she did not have to spend the rest of her life with him. What kind of a woman was she?
English pussy, Billy whispered mockingly. He was hateful. But fascinating. Who knew what ideas he would bring back from 90,000, 100,000 feet?
She got up without sleeping, put on lipstick and went shopping for groceries in one of the new supermarkets. More American freedom. A thousand choices and no one telling her what to buy. What had she bought in the desert? Infidelity as a way of life? Could she become Billy McCall’s mistress?
She sensed something special had happened to him too. Perhaps that was part of his anger. He hated the thought of a woman having power over him, even the power of giving him pleasure.
Pleasure. Pleasure. The word was inadequate. All the words in Shakespeare’s language, her mother tongue, were inadequate to describe what she had found in the American desert. She was a wanton. She was a bitch. All the words she had read in books and never dreamt of possessing were suddenly part of Sarah Chapman Morris’s American self.
What about love? What about that supreme value in every woman’s life? Was it possible that Billy loved her? Was there a moment in a man’s soul when pleasure crossed some boundary into love? She knew so little about how a man thought and felt. Cliff was still mostly a mystery to her.
Back in the house, she noticed an anxious look on Maria’s face. “You hoos-ban’, he call. Be late,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. She had not expected Cliff until tomorrow.
Maria hesitated. “He call—this morning too. I no tell you.”
“That’s all right,” Sarah said. Sometimes Maria was too conscientious. She was so anxious to do everything right. It was almost embarrassing, the way the Americans had made the Mexicans so humble. It reminded her of stories she had heard about native servants in Kenya and India.
She ate dinner and watched television for a while. It was all so stupid—grinning game-show hosts and comedians telling fourth-rate jokes. She turned it off and read Pride and Prejudice for the third or fourth time. She adored Jane Austen’s prose. It reflected the English world her characters inhabited, also so controlled and measured. While this American world seemed to have no visible boundaries, no signposts or rules.
At ten o’clock she turned on the television news. A handsome talking head told her about American plans to counter the threat of Russia’s possession of the atomic bomb. Then came a commercial featuring dancing soup cans. Then the talking head again reporting “another tragedy in the Mojave.” A Buchanan Aircraft experimental plane had crashed, killing its three-man crew. A previous model of this top-secret bomber had plunged into the desert six months ago.
A half hour later, Cliff’s keys jingled in the front door. The sour look on his face was predictable. “How are you?” she said, kissing him briefly on the mouth.
“Lousy,” he growled.
“I just heard the bad news—another crash.”
“Yeah.”
“Will they scrap the program?”
“I don’t know. What’ve you been doing?”
“Baby tending. House running. A big market for my services.”
“Is that all?”
“What else do you think I might be doing?”
“Fucking someone!”
It was the first time he had ever used that word in front of her. The first time she had ever heard it, except once, by accident during the war, when she had overheard two pilots using it.
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“I got back from the Mojave this morning. I called the house. Maria gave me some bullshit story about you staying with friends.”
Maria had been trying to warn her.
“I—I had a call from an old school chum. She’s in town doing a movie. We sat up so late talking I decided to stay with her rather than drive home half-asleep.”
She could not believe the intensity of her deceit. She launched it without a moment’s hesitation. Why didn’t she just tell him she was playing the infidelity game? Remind him it was the twentieth century.
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t ask you these questions.”
“What’s her name?”
“None of your business!”
It was outrageous. She hated him. He was invading her desert idyll with his vulgar jealousy. “Let me rephrase the question. What’s his name?”
“Billy McCall!”
She did not see the hand. It seemed to come from nowhere. He seemed to be standing too far away to hit her. But the hand came whirling to smash her in the face and send her hurtling across the living room. Her head struck the rug with a terrific thud and she lay there, unable to move, engulfed by a new emotion: shame.
She had known from the moment Billy propositioned her on the dance floor. She had known by the pool in the desert. This was the one man her husband could not tolerate as his rival. Cliff’s choked raging words were superfluous. “Anybody else—I wouldn’t give a fuck—anyone—anybody.”
He stood over her, berserk. She wondered if she was about to die. She felt strangely indifferent to that possibility. She almost welcomed it. Would it even the score for her unholy gratitude at the news of his death over Berlin?
That had been a sin. It was a sin to secretly rejoice over the death of a man she had promised to love. She had sinned again last night with Billy.
She wanted Cliff to hit her again. She would welcome a beating that would reduce her to a pleading blob. It would clean her slate, it would leave her empty and calm in another kind of freedom, the opposite of Billy’s soaring. The inward calm of the penitent prisoner in her cell.
Something completely unexpected began to happen. Her husband was kneeling beside her, saying “Oh, Oh, Sarah. Oh Jesus, Sarah.” He picked her up and carried her to the couch.
Something even more amazing began to happen. Kneeling beside the couch, Cliff began blubbering. Tears and sobs. This six-foot-four hunk of masculinity was crying like a two-year-old.
The room was still spinning. A shrill telephone seemed to be ringing inside Sarah’s head. “Stop. Stop, please,” she said. “You hurt me so much I just wanted to hurt you back.”
He wiped his streaming eyes with his handkerchief. “My career’s going down the tubes with that goddamn plane. Isn’t that enough hurting? Were you going to tell me he’s better than I am?”
A terrible understanding gathered force in Sarah Chapman Morris’s soul. Part of it was guilt, part of it was painful wisdom. This tower of male muscle and bone, this Charles Atlas who could knock a woman twenty feet with a swing of his mighty arm, was a psychological ninety-seven pound weakling. In a world without a sense of sin, it was still possible to acquire a misshapen soul.
“He isn’t as good,” Sarah said. “The whole thing only made me realize I love you. I was sorry I tried it.”
She was saying farewell to as
cent, farewell to little deaths on the edge of the unknowable. Farewell to Billy McCall, who thoroughly deserved it. She hoped it would be a long time before he found someone able to climb as fast. She was accepting a substitute for love—pity.
No. That was too brutal. She was going to create a different kind of love, a blend of sympathy and nostalgia and honor. Especially honor. That was the best part of it. She had made a pledge to this man in the country church outside Rackreath Air Base in 1943. She was honoring that pledge now—with this lie.
It was better than Billy’s way, better than his uncaring freedom. Sarah had to believe that part of it. Billy did not care. If Billy cared she was forever undone. She was still enough of a romantic, enough of a Catholic, to disapprove of uncaring freedom, in spite of its enormous temptation.
Cliff was carrying her upstairs to their bedroom. It was a sad parody of Billy carrying her into the pool where she had been baptized in his new lonely faith. Her husband was pressing a cold washcloth on her face. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I was out of my mind.”
It poured out, his fear and hatred of Billy, the certainty that he was going to resign from the Air Force eventually and join the company, where he would have Buzz McCall’s backing—and Frank Buchanan’s. Adrian Van Ness would die or retire and Billy would demolish his boyhood enemy. “All my life I’ve tried to be nice to the bastard. He goes right on despising me.”
Sarah tried to convince her husband he was allowing himself to be haunted by a myth. “You have more brains than he has, more personality. He can only do one thing. Fly a plane.”
“In the business we’re in, nothing else matters.”
“He could get killed next week.”
“He won’t. The bastard’s got a charmed life.”
“So do you,” she said. “Forty-nine missions. Doesn’t that prove something? You’re lucky too.”
“You’re not lying? He wasn’t better?”
“I’m not lying. He wasn’t better,” she said, the edge of mockery enabling her to tell the lie without a tremor. “I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t made me so angry about other women.”
Romantic in spite of everything, she was still yearning for fidelity. “You don’t know what it’s like in this business—people think you’re queer or henpecked if you walk away from it.”
He was his stepfather’s son. Buzz McCall had put his mark on Cliff Morris as profoundly as if he had implanted him with his genes. Why wasn’t Billy marked in the same way? Where did he get that incredible desire to explore the unknowable? Why was he so endowed with freedom and its corollary, courage?
While this man, her husband, chased women into bed because he did not dare to defy the conventions of the plane business. For a moment an awful sadness sucked at Sarah’s soul. She was learning too much. She wanted to drown her mind in blankness. She resisted the impulse. She was not going to despair. She had proven to herself and Tama that she had willpower. Now she would prove she had another kind of power. If Tama could change herself from a Mexican washerwoman’s daughter into Adrian Van Ness’s mistress, maybe Sarah could change Tama’s son from a spoiled playboy to a serious husband and a successful executive.
“I want you to walk away from it for my sake,” Sarah said. “I want you to promise me you’ll try. If you want my love, you’ve got to make that promise.”
There was a long silence. Was he saying farewell to someone he cared about? Someone he loved more than this demanding English bitch? “I promise,” Cliff said.
She kissed him and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Do you want me?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said.
Were they crossing a boundary? Sarah wondered. One of those unmarked American zones just beyond the erogenous where love began? She could only hope so. “I want you most when you want me,” she whispered. “It’s like music. Two instruments playing. You meant so much to me in England. Make me feel the same way here in America.”
They were both naked now. Cliff’s fingers were deep in her English pussy. Sarah’s breath came faster and faster. My God, maybe he was better than Billy! She kissed the pulsing tip of his penis, something she had never done before. Willfully, powerfully, she rolled him onto his back and mounted him, a position they seldom used—and never on her initiative.
Cliff rotated his palms on her nipples until they were as erect, as erotic as his penis. “You’ve been my luck from the start,” he said. “No matter what I did with anyone else, she never meant anything to me. You’re the only one I ever cared about.”
Some antenna in her mind, perhaps stirred by a tremor in his gaze, made her suspect that was a lie. But it was a loving lie. As loving as the lie she had told him about Billy. It was enormously confusing. Love on a bed of lies.
“From the start I saw us as a team,” he said, stroking her as he spoke, sending surges of pleasure through her body. Sarah summoned pity, she summoned hope. “We are, we are,” she said.
From somewhere deep in her soul a caustic voice whispered. You’ll do your part. He won’t even try. Was it Billy McCall? Go to hell—or heaven—you smiling bastard, Sarah replied while her husband clutched her to his chest and came with a shuddering rush.
Power. The word whispered in Sarah’s soul. She had just exercised, demonstrated, her power over this man. He had prostrated her with a swing of his mighty hand. Even that humiliation had become part of the power she had just acquired. Sarah lay in her husband’s arms wondering if once a wife tasted such power, she could ever let it go.
“By the way,” Cliff said. “You’re not sending those letters to Tama, are you? The ones signed Califia?”
“No.”
“They’re driving her nuts.”
Good, Sarah thought, delighted to hear her chief rival was faltering. Was she on her way to becoming an evil woman, in spite of her repentance? Life in America was incredibly complicated.
VORTEX
High above the Mojave Desert, a new version of the Talus roared through its latest tests, looking more than ever like an illustration from a science fiction novel. The entire plane was now a wing. Not a trace of a fuselage remained. Around Cliff four Air Force generals shook their heads in disbelief. “Give me three hundred copies and the Russkies won’t say boo for twenty years,” one said.
Three hundred copies at a million a plane was three hundred million dollars. With spare parts and the usual overrides in a cost-plus contract, they were talking about a half billion dollars. Cliff Morris, project manager of the Talus, could claim a lot of the credit for pumping that much money into Buchanan Aircraft. It was incredible the way his life had turned around in the last three months.
In Cliff’s mind it was all connected to an amazing event. He had fallen in love with his wife again. The feeling seemed part of a current suddenly swirling through him and around him since their night of rage and reconciliation. Everything had been clicking, flowing, flying.
Frank Buchanan had switched to jet engines and solved most of the Talus’s stability problems. The plane zoomed through one checkout after another, demonstrating speed, maneuverability, endurance—and its greatest asset, its phenomenally low drag-to-weight ratio. No other plane in existence could match it as a weight lifter.
The rest of Cliff’s life seemed to reshape itself in the same magical way. A nervous Cassie Trainor told him she did not want to see him anymore. She was going to move in with Dick Stone. Two months ago he would have been furious. Now he just patted her on the behind and wished her well.
Sarah had shut off that stupid phonograph. She said she wanted to make her own music. She greeted him every night with ravenous eyes. After they made love they lay in bed, talking about the company, his ambitions, the Talus, Frank, Buzz, Adrian. He told her everything.
Sometimes she helped him see things he had missed. Mostly she told him how good he was at this project manager’s job. He was good at bridging gaps between people. Maybe it was because he was big and looked like he had the answers. People trust
ed him. He was a war hero.
Each day he went to work without the old crawling anxiety in his belly. It was amazing. Was Sarah some sort of sorceress? At times the wartime hunch that she was his luck swelled to cosmic proportions. She was his guide, his priestess, his goddess. The boyish devotion he had once felt for his mother was transformed into something close to adoration of his wife.
There was only one thing wrong. Up there at the controls of the Talus was Billy McCall. Every time Cliff saw him, a flicker of his old fear revived. Beneath the fear was a cold unforgiving rage. It was one thing to play sex games with chippies like Cassie Trainor. Billy had seduced his wife. Yet Cliff had to pretend he knew nothing about it, he had to go on exchanging jokes and taunts with Billy in the same old way.
Billy was flying the plane that could make Cliff the crown prince of Buchanan Aircraft. Sarah told him again and again that this was cause for glee, not grief. But something dark and sullen at the bottom of Cliff’s soul refused to accept it. He did not want Billy McCall to give him anything, even by accident. He did not want to owe even a shred of gratitude to the arrogant bastard.
Sarah did not understand how men hated each other. How deep it went, how impossible it was to forgive because to ask it or offer it would be a confession of weakness. He could forgive her, of course. He had forgiven her as she had forgiven him for that murderous slap.
Down, down came the Talus in a beautiful approach, not a hint of a yaw or a wobble. The tires kissed the runway as lightly as the wheels of a Piper Cub. It was hard to believe they were watching a thirty-ton plane carrying eight tons of simulated bombs. Cliff thought ruefully of how many times he had thumped the Rainbow Express onto the runway at Rackreath.
The generals murmured admiringly. Buzz McCall and Frank Buchanan accepted another round of congratulations. Cliff could see nothing but Billy and Sarah on a couch or bed somewhere engulfed in a green mist. The gleaming silver plane, the empty mocha desert, the distant mountains, vanished. He stood there, paralyzed until General Scott clapped him on the shoulder.
Conquerors of the Sky Page 40
