Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  I never had any father, thought Gloria, it’s useless to have a father who dies before you’re three years old. I can’t remember him. I don’t know what he looked like. There was, of course, that formal black and white photograph which Mother carried around for years, that stranger with an enormous officer’s cap. He must have had a huge head, to wear such a cap. Black tie, black shoulders, white shirt, white teeth. The picture was too mat; there were no glosses, no highlights. When you looked at it closely, it stopped being a face and became a flat arrangement of masses in black and white, and that was Father. Arrangement in black and white. Like Whistler’s Mother, and I can see what Whistler meant. Nothing human was in that picture. Mother, with her mind’s inventive eye, could see Adam Vere whom she loved, round and fleshed out, in the harmonies of black and white. All I could see were masses and edges. She looked at the water and the sky and observed the same techniques Nature imitates Matisse, she thought. He was her favourite painter and almost the only one she knew of.

  What I see are flat patches of colour. Three dimensions are a binocular trick of the eye, the chance result of having two eyes instead of one or three. If I had a single eye, the world would be a huge Matisse, flat patches of unrelated colour lying next one another. She began to feel cold and to reassure herself she looked down, pressing her chin down almost against her collarbone, and stared at the length of her body stretched in an unfamiliar perspective in front of her. Her body looked flat but she knew that it wasn’t. I’m not flat, she felt happily, I’m round but I can’t see it. I see planes and shadows. I feel round.

  She put her hands on either side of her in the cold sand and rocked gently from side to side in a movement of dazzlingly innocent sensuality. I feel that my hips are soft and round, she realized. I’ve never seen them. If I shake out my hair my scalp feels good, but I’ve never seen the top of my head. I only feel that it’s here along with the rest of me.

  She closed the useless eyes and inhaled, feeling herself from the ends of her hair to her toes. She sensed herself being here. She was simply here with a full dark warm heaviness in her middle that grew cooler towards fingers and toes and scalp. She filled her lungs with cool twilight air and felt it grow warm inside her. She could hear Arthur scratching in the sand for pebbles; he picked them up one at a time and launched them towards the water. Some must have fallen in the sand; they made no sound; others fell with a plopping noise into wet sand and water at the very edge; a few plinked into deep water. Her weight on her hands made the sand beneath grow harder and harder like a soft pillow beneath an insomniac’s head. If she leaned on her hands much longer, she would be able to feel each individual resistant speck of sand pressing upwards against her palms.

  The sun had gone down while her eyes were shut. The sea breezes began to flag, grew gentler, licked at her toes with weakening tongues and finally were still.

  After the sun goes down on the beach, as the earth loses its daytime heat, the water for a little while retaining some warmth, the air currents begin to shift. The onshore breeze flags and stops; in a few moments the offshore breeze begins. But there is always a moment of calm at the point of reversal. The sand stops moving; the water flattens and is silent; nothing and nobody moves the few grasses and weeds that grow in the sand. The soul of the world turns in on itself and is quiet, just before the dark.

  In this moment of temporary stillness, in herself, Gloria felt more a woman than she ever had before. I feel what I am, she realized, with an intense joy. I can taste myself being me. I’m this woman, No, that’s wrong. I’m me. No. I. I. I. I. There isn’t any way to say it. She fell silent in her thoughts, content to exist.

  When the offshore breeze began she found herself wondering what it was like to be a man, though she knew she didn’t care for the idea. She looked slyly at Arthur, lying disappointedly beside her, and wondered how it felt to be inside his mind, as he said his father was.

  I want your love,

  I don’t want to borrow,

  To have it today,

  To give back tomorrow.

  He had been whistling that song when he came to fetch her, a song that suited him. If there were two people, and possibly a great many more, congregated in his head, how could she possibly single out one of them, the nominal real he, to love? If she were to love him, as he wanted her to, and as she longed to, it would have to be the only genuine Arthur Merlin in captivity whom she loved. She didn’t want that crowd of others along for the ride no matter who they were, his father, her mother. She couldn’t compete for his attentions with a host of spirits, and least of all with the spirit of her mother.

  He stood up and walked to the edge of the water, putting a toe forward to test the temperature. Then he recoiled.

  “When the sun goes down,” he exclaimed, “it’s impossible. Do you want me to take you home?”

  “We’ve only just come!”

  “We’ve been here over an hour,” he said, “it’s nearly nine-thirty.” She wished he weren’t so acutely conscious of the passage of time. It hadn’t touched him. She scrutinized his legs and arms and waist as he walked awkwardly back across the sand. He might be any age, she thought. Except for an almost invisible accretion of fat over his kidneys, he looked like a boy her own age. He’s young, she realized with surprise. He was part of her present; he had always been around, but then so had she. She wished that he would stop mumbling and stumbling and tell her that he loved her. She was sure that he did. What else could all the fussing be about? And he was as good a man as she’d ever known, and part of her scene, her life. Of course she would love him, if only he would come out towards her instead of manufacturing these smokescreens.

  “Do you remember how you used to bounce up and down on my back?”

  A crazy notion. “On your back? When?”

  “When you were small.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Arthur, I’m not small now. Do you take me around because, once upon a time, I was small? I’m a grown woman. Why don’t you treat me as one?”

  He was gathering up towels and sandals and stuffing them in the basket. He knelt on his knees beside her and his kneecap touched her thigh. It felt cold. Put your arms around me, she thought, there’s nobody here to see, give me a kiss and then we’ll have something to go on. But he lingered and did nothing, kneeling and looking at her. What could she do, she wasn’t a man.

  “It isn’t right,” she said, “to love a girl because of what she was when she was small.” But he was gone again, gone back inside, she could tell from his eyes. They glazed and grew opaque as they always did when he was thinking of something else. She wanted to slap him to bring him out of it.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m not just a hundred and seventy-five pounds of flesh and bone dropped out of nowhere into the twentieth of June. I’ve a whole life behind me that I love and that I wouldn’t want to lose. I’m everything that I’ve ever been, I’m what’s happened to me, not what’s happening this instant, not just that.”

  “If I prick you with a pin, you’ll bleed.”

  “That’s not me, that’s not me. You think that anything that happened more than a year ago simply doesn’t exist.”

  “Well, it doesn’t,” she said deliberately.

  It made him groan. “You can’t live like that,” he declared, “have you no respect for the past? What about your parents?”

  Very patiently she began to explain things to him. “I loved them when they were here. But they aren’t here anymore. They’re dead, Arthur, they’re gone. I don’t believe in ghosts.” It was quite dark on the beach; it was time to go.

  “Gloria, Gloria,” he moaned.

  “Oh, God,” she ejaculated, “didn’t you bring me here tonight to tell me that you love me and that you want me to love you? Wasn’t that what you meant to do?”

  He said nothing.

  “I know it was,” she said, “I’m certain of it, and I
’m proud. It means something to a woman, when a man tells her he loves her and wants her. And, don’t you see, here I am. I’m all right here! Oh, you poor dear idiot, can’t you see how much I’m here? I’m what they call a beautiful girl, a hundred and twenty pounds of flesh and bone dropped from Heaven, not from nowhere. I bloom, can’t you see? Damn you, Arthur, I’m packed full of sensation, I ache with it, you … you exorcist! Just come and get me!”

  “It’s wonderful,” he said, stuttering slightly, “it’s unbelievable!”

  “What’s unbelievable?” She had a horrid presentiment of what it might be.

  “You’re the heiress of every past beauty,” he said exultantly. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re your mother over again perfectly, to the last detail, but more than that, you’re surrounded by the past. The way you cock your head, your gestures, your words, everything that you do is fixed by the tradition, and that’s what makes you a beauty. Your inheritance.”

  “Damn it,” she swore, meaning it, “are you in love with me or with my mother?”

  “With all of you, with the whole great gang!”

  “They’re dead,” she shouted, “they’re underground. You!” She felt a physical revulsion. “You’re haunted! You’re a ghost-ridden man, you’re a horror!” She wanted to run. “I don’t know where you get to, when you disappear inside yourself, but you won’t come out, oh, you’ll never come out.” She turned and strode along the beach towards the car.

  He watched her go; and as she began to merge with the twilight and the firm outline of her figure wavered, she seemed to him to be one, only one, of a long file of daffodil girls marching out of the past and into the future, girls he’d read about in story books, girls he’d known, girls he hoped still to meet some day. Multitudes forever young, beautiful golden girls long dead and others unborn, the descending heirs of Eve, all going out of the light through the twilight and into the dark. Away up the beach her form quivered in his sight, and then his eyes lost her and he was standing alone in a sandy place. I’d rather be lonely, he thought.

  I’d rather be lonely

  Than happy with somebody new.

  O Happy Melodist!

  Yet sport they on in Spring’s attire,

  Each with his tiny fire

  Blown to a core of ardour …

  — Walter de la Mare, “The Children of Stare”

  A few days after her thirty-sixth birthday, it struck Alexandra Ellicott that nobody had given her anything lately; she exempted her birthday presents from this dismal inventory, for there had, in fact, been the customary observances, an enormous black stiff leather purse from her brother-in-law, with her initials on it. It had been advertised in the Sunday Times and the initials were included in the price.

  And there had been those three books from Jim Savitt whom she could visualize on a shopping trip in Accra or New Haven, vainly trying to empathize with her, and at last settling for books, which he knew something about.

  She was honestly not disturbed about birthdays, how they came and went, but brooded instead about the absence of the casual presents which she was accustomed to receive. Looking around her apartment she counted dozens of tributes to her attractiveness, gifts from men who made no claim to the status of lover, pillows that elderly lonely ladies in neighbouring apartments had urgently pressed her to accept (for she attracted all kinds). That armchair in the corner. She had simply bought a piece of batik and pinned it on, and she had used the chair for three years. It looked perfectly fine in its corner and a married couple two floors down, whom she hardly knew, had given it to her on the pretext that they were replacing it, and they hadn’t replaced it but she had their chair and used it with vague compunction and small regret. They had so much wanted her to take it, had wanted her to have something of theirs, but she hadn’t seen them lately.

  She had that damned inconvenient floor-lamp shaped like a spear, the kind of thing that you might see in a production of Macbeth in Central Park. Wrought-iron, last-century, right out of a bachelor apartment beside a moosehead and a set of Owen Johnson — Alexandra had a perverse sense of parody — and a pipe-rack and a humidor and panelling and Fellowes On Torts — and here she began to let her imagination sport and play, furnishing the room in which the lamp belonged.

  It had been a gift from a boy’s admiring uncle; she used it to read by as she loyally used her extensive catalogue of presents. She had bought no furniture in the twelve years she had been living in the city, but her apartment had filled and overflowed repeatedly. She had had to make a personal signature of eclecticism and nobody could say that her place looked like a page layout in Signorina.

  Which was what it ought to look like! She was Assistant Fiction Editor at Signorina but she avoided all designers and decor­ators and concentrated on people who could read. Her friends across the hall in layout, in the magazine’s offices, were a flossy crew who couldn’t read. They could peer and stare and look but they obviously didn’t know how to read, else why was the fiction locked in that crowded bunched-up unreadable type face? Her place should not aggressively take the eye, as decorators’ contrivances did. It should simply look like her, should have her charm, the aggregate of the things other people had offered her. Armchair, floor lamp, the small but important Hopper, qualities her friends’ imaginings had bestowed on her.

  Those who knew her casually and thought they knew her well called her “Sandy.” There were degrees. She smiled, looking around her apartment, thinking of the steep gradient of familiarity. Those who didn’t know her and wished they did spoke of her as “Alexandra Ellicott” in tones which certified that Alexandra Ellicott was a person whom it must be simply sheer Heaven to know, to be in with. This Alexandra Ellicott was a pure mere fiction, a holy of holies or Castle Perilous, a test for the uninitiate.

  It certainly is odd, isn’t it, how one is able to sense how other people speak one’s name when one is out of hearing. Something like the way one’s peripheral vision assures one that one is being looked at when, dear me, one gives not the slightest sign that one is aware that one is even seen. How lucky to be one! Then there would regularly come those days when some of the uninitiate succeeded in forcing themselves around the peripheral curve of one’s hooded vision, managing to make themselves known. These people would begin to call her “Sandy” and oh, the bliss of it.

  “Sandy wants to see the dummy before it goes across the hall.”

  At this, a freckled girl from Sarah Lawrence stares angrily at the speaker. “So now it’s Sandy, is it?” She is the last new girl in the office and painfully aware of it.

  “Shut up, Betsy,” orders the department head cheerlessly. Then to the exultant girl on the first-name basis: “I’ll get it in to her in ten minutes. I’ll slide along with it myself. Will you tell her that?”

  The first-namer scuttles the length of six cubicles and whispers the message as disappointed Sarah Lawrence cranes her neck.

  “Knock it off, Betsy!”

  The fun of the thing is that her twenty intimates call her “Alix.” It’s the difference between the doctorat de l’Université and the doctorat d’Etat. The Fiction Editor, poor chic brainless thing, calls her “Sandy” and Audrey Wood calls her “Alix.” And it always comes as such a shock to the Sandy’s to meet the Alix’s. One has worked and worked to establish terms of intimacy, only to discover like a traveller in the Himalayas that there is a further higher range of un­suspected intimacy beyond. Do the Alix’s ever wonder what she calls herself to herself? But to herself she is nameless.

  What is charm, anyway, she wonders to herself, looking around the room, forgetful that she is thirty-six and worrying slightly about the stemmed flow of tribute, not permanently damned really, somebody will be along with a parcel in a minute. In its roots it must have something to do with magic or at least the fundamentally irrational, the thing as well as the word. For all of her life, without the least exerti
on, like an instinctive artist — a natural — she has been able to watch the other person and smile and be perfectly true to herself, never flattering, never lying, never putting herself to the least trouble, never saying what she doesn’t think, with her adorable candour, and like a cat lazily stretching sleepy legs, wind herself into the other person’s heart, not wanting love or affection or respect, asking nothing, but charming, charming, and in the end having him or her, that suppliant other.

  But she doesn’t want to have anybody, doesn’t care to use anyone, the notion is repellent. And yet a look, a smile, an undulation of tone in her unquestionably beautiful voice, any of these things brings people on the dead run.

  So here she is just past thirty-six and not precisely a promising young woman any longer, at the point where her adolescent promises must be redeemed. But she can’t write, she knows, though she can tell good writing from bad, and she will never enter the theatre now, as her admirers have been advising her for two decades. Alix, Alix, Alix, with your talents! What talents? Only the gift of pleasing uncontrollably with her person: but not sexually. She feels her clothes on her skin, like the expression of herself, tight around her and beautifully fitted, assuring her that she will be the sought-after Sandy Ellicott for a long time yet.

  She can look down upon Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park from her windows, so now she stares the length and breadth of the charming little park, noting the clumps of trees, the children’s swings and slides, the rivers on the other side and a red and black Moran tug hauling a bargeload of boxcars up towards the bridge. Up from La Guardia swims a DC-6, a silver sliver in the sunny haze, the river is a network of ripples and currents and the shouts of the children float to the tenth floor and swim in her ears, the frail frolic limbs of the children tiny ten floors down, tender and new in the haze. She remembers last weekend in Fairfield, can you imagine, Fairfield, not the county, the town itself, where her brother-in-law is General Counsel for a manufacturer of heat controls for gas stoves. One needn’t be ashamed about Fairfield, and she and her sister Helen and Helen’s husband Bob are all Waterbury kids anyway and it is quite a display of upward mobility from the side of the hill in Waterbury to Fairfield, the town, not the county. In her poor way, Helen has managed as big a jump as she.