Airships

by Barry Hannah

  “Fault!” cried the judge. The crowd was horrified.

  Humble placed his high-crawling second serve to French.

  Levaster saw little of the remaining match. Under the bleachers, where they had dragged Word, Levaster and Wilbur attended to the great black peach that was growing around Word’s good eye. With ice and a handkerchief, they abated the swelling, and then all three men returned to their seats. Dr. Word could see out of a black slit of his optic cavity, see French win in a sequel of preposterous dives at the net. Levaster’s body fled away from his bones and gathered on the muscles of French Edward. The crowd was screaming over the victory. Nowhere, nowhere, would they ever see again such a clear win of beauty over smut.

  Fat Tim, Cecilia’s father, would be happy and put five thousand in French’s bank if French won this tournament, and Fat Tim would pay Levaster one thousand, as promised, for getting French back on the track of fame. Fat Tim Emile, thumbing those greasy accounts of his concessions, saw French as the family knight, a jouster among grandees, a champion in the whitest sport of all, a game Fat Tim viewed as a species of cunning highbrowism under glass. So he paid French simply for being himself, for wearing white, for symbolizing the pedigree Fat Tim was without, being himself a sweaty dago, a tubby with smudged shirt cuffs and phlebitis. “Get our boy back winning. I want to read his name in the paper,” said Fat Tim. “I will,” said Levaster.

  So I did, thought Levaster. French won.

  Dr. Levaster saw Dr. Word crowding up, getting swarmed out to the side by all the little club bitches and fuzzchins with programs for autographing in hand. Word fought back in, however, approaching French from the back. Levaster saw Word pinch French and heard Word bellow something hearty. By the time Levaster reached the court, the altercation had spread through the crowd. A letter lay in the clay dust, and Word, holding up his hand to ameliorate, was backing out of sight, his good eye but a glint in a cracked bruise, the lid falling gruesome.

  “Baby! Baby!” called French, the voice baffled. Levaster reached him. “He pinched me!” French screamed. “He got me right there, really hard!”

  Levaster picked up the letter and collected the rackets, then led French straight to the car. No shower, no street clothes.

  My Dearest French,

  This is your mother Olive writing in case you have forgotten what my handwriting looks like. You have lost your baby son and I have thought of you these months. Now I ask you to think of me. I lost my grown son years ago. You know when, and you know the sin which is old history. I do not want to lose you, my darling. You are such a strange handsomely made boy I would forget you were mine until I remembered you fed at my breast and I changed your diapers. When I saw you wearing new glasses at your wedding if I looked funny it was because I wanted to touch your eyes under them they changed you even more. But I knew you didn’t want me anywhere near you. Your bride Cissy was charming as well as stunning and I’m deeply glad her father is well-off and you don’t have to work for a living if you don’t want to. Your father tried to play for a living or get near where there was athletics but it didn’t work as smoothly for him. It drove him crazy, to be truthful. He was lost for a week in February until James Word, the bearer of this letter, found him at the college baseball field throwing an old wet football at home plate. He had been sleeping in the dugout and eating nothing but these dextrose and salt tablets. I didn’t write you this before because you were being an expectant father and then the loss of your child. Maybe you get all your sports drive from your father. But you see how awfully difficult it was to live with him? Certain other things have happened before, I never told you about. He refereed a high-school football game between Natchez and Vicksburg and when it was tight at the end he threw a block on a Natchez player. We love him, French, but he has been away from us a long time.

  So I fell in love with James Word. Don’t worry, your father still knows nothing. That is sort of proof where his mind is, in a way. Your father has not even wanted “relations” with me in years. He said he was saving himself up. He was in a poker game with some coaches at the college but they threw him out for cheating. James tried to arrange a tennis doubles game with me and your father against another couple, but your father tried to hit it so hard when it came to him that he knocked them over into the service station and etc. so we had no more balls.

  The reason I sent this by James is because I thought if it was right from his hand you would see that it was not just a nasty slipping-around thing between us but a thing of the heart. His stroke has left him blind in one eye and without sure control of his voice. But he loves you. And he loves me. I believe God is with us too. Please take us all together and let’s smile again. I am crying as I write this. But maybe that’s not fair to mention that. James has mentioned taking us all, your father included, on a vacation to Padre Island in Texas, him paying all the expenses. Can’t you please say yes and make everything happy?

  Love,

  Mother

  “It was his fingers pinching me,” whined French. “He pinched me all the time when he was coaching me.”

  Levaster said, “And if he hadn’t coached you, you wouldn’t be anything at all, would you? You’d be selling storm fencing in Vicksburg, wouldn’t you? You’d never have pumped that snatch or had the swimming pool.”

  Back at his clinic, Levaster slept on a plastic couch in the waiting room. The nurse woke him up. He was so lonely and horny that he proposed to her, though he’d never had a clear picture of her face. Months ago he’d called her into his office. He’d had an erection for four days without rest.

  “Can you make anything of this, Louise? Get the Merck Manual. Severe hardship even to walk.” She had been charming. But when he moved to her leg, clasping on it like a spaniel on the hot, she denied him, and he had since considered her a woman of principle.

  She accepted his proposal. They married. Her parents, strong Methodists living somewhere out in New Mexico, appeared at the wedding. They stood in a corner, leaning inward like a pair of sculling oars. Levaster’s mother came too, talking about the weather and her new shoes. Someone mistook her for nothing in one of the chairs and sat on her lap. French was best man. Cecilia was there, a dress of lime sherbet and titties, black hair laid back with gemlike roses at the temples. She made Levaster’s bride look like something dumped out of a ship, a swathed burial at sea. Cecilia’s beauty was unfair to all women. Furthermore, Levaster himself, compared to French (nugget-cheeked in a tux), was no beau of the ball. He was balding, waxen, all sweat, a small man with bad posture to boot.

  Levaster expected to lean on the tough inner goodness of his bride, Louise. He wanted his life bathed and rectified. They resumed their life as doctor and nurse at the alley clinic, where Levaster undercharged the bums, winos, hustlers, hookers, artists and the occasional wayward debutante, becoming something of an expert on pneumonia, herpes, potassium famine and other diseases of the street. He leaned on the tough inner goodness of Louise, leaning and leaning, prone, supine, baby-opossum position. Levaster played tennis, he swam in the Edwards’ pool, he stuck to beer and wine. In the last whole surge of his life, he won a set from French at the Metairie Club. This act caused Dr. Levaster a hernia and a frightful depletion of something untold in his cells, the rare it of life, the balm that washes and assures the brain happiness is around the corner. Levaster lost this sense for three months. He became a creature of the barbarous moment; he had lost patience. Now he cursed his patients and treated them as malingering clutter. He drank straight from a flask of rye laced with cocaine, swearing to the sick about the abominations they had wreaked on themselves. At nights Levaster wore an oversized black sombrero and forced Louise into awkward and nameless desecrations. And when they were over, he called her an idiot, a puppet. Then one morning the hopeful clarity of the mind returned to him. He believed again in sun and grass and the affable complicity of the human race. But where was his wife? He wanted to lean on her inner goodness some more. Her plain face, her fine mus
cular pale legs, where were they? Louise was gone. She had typed a note. “One more week of this and you’d have taken us to the bottom of hell. I used to be a weak but good person. Now I am strong and evil. I hope you’re satisfied. Good-bye.”

  At the clinic, his patients were afraid of him. The free-loaders and gutter cowboys shuddered. What will it be, Doc? “French. It was French Edward who . . . took it away from me. It cost me. I suppose I wanted to defeat beauty, the outrage of the natural, the glibness of the God-favored. All in that one set of tennis. Ladies and gentlemen, the physician has been sick and he apologizes.” He coughed, dry in the throat. “It cost me my wife, but I am open for business.” They swarmed him with the astounded love of sinners for a fallen angel. Levaster was nursed by whores. A rummy with a crutch fetched him coffee. Something, someone, in a sputum-colored blanket, functioned as receptionist.

  At last he was home. He lived in a room of the clinic. On his thirty-fourth birthday, they almost killed him with a party and congratulations. The Edwards came. Early in the morning French found Levaster gasping over his fifth Cuban cigar on the roof of the clinic. The sky over New Orleans was a glorious blank pink.

  “We’re getting older, Baby.”

  “You’re still all right, French. You had all the moves at Forest Hills. Some bad luck, three bad calls. But still the crowd’s darling. You could’ve beat Jesus at Wimbledon.”

  “I always liked to play better than to win,” said French.

  “I always liked to win better than to play,” said Levaster.

  “But, Baby, I never played. First it was my father, then Word. I don’t know what kind of player I would be like if I truly played when I play.”

  “But you smile when you play.”

  “I love the game, on theory. And I admire myself.”

  “You fool a lot of people. We thought you were happy.”

  “I am. I feel like I’m doing something nearly as well as it could ever be done. But it’s not play. It’s slavery.”

  “A slave to your talent.”

  “And to the idea of tennis. But, Baby, when I die I don’t want my last thought to be a tennis court. You’ve got people you’ve cured of disease to think about. They’re down there giving you a party. Here I am, thirty-two.”

  “I’m thirty-four. So what?”

  “I want you to tell me, give me something to think about. You’ve done it before, but I want something big.” French pointed to the sky.

  “I won’t do that. Don’t you understand that the main reason you’re a star is the perfect mental desert you’re able to maintain between your ears for hours and hours? You memorize the court and the memory sinks straight to your muscles, because there is nothing else in there to cloud the vision.”

  “Are you calling me stupid?”

  “No. But a wild psychic desert. I’m sure it works for artists as well as jocks.”

  “You mean,” said French, “I can’t have a thought?”

  “You could have one, but it wouldn’t live for very long. Like most athletes, you’ll go straight from glory to senility with no interlude of thought. I love you,” Levaster said.

  French said, “I love you, Baby.”

  Dr. Levaster could no longer bear the flood of respect and affection spilling from the growing horde at the clinic. The Times-Picayune had an article about his work among the down-and-out. It was as if Levaster had to eat a tremendous barge of candy every day. The affection and esteem bore hard on a man convinced he was worthless. He had a hundred thousand in the bank. No longer could he resist. He bought a Lincoln demonstrator, shut the clinic, and drove to New York, carrying the double-barreled .410 shotgun/pistol with cherrywood handle paid to him in lieu of fee. He sifted into Elaine’s, drunk, Southern and insulting, but was ignored. By the time Levaster had been directed to a sullen playwright, some target frailer than he, on whom he could pour the black beaker of his hatred of art, the movement of the crowd would change and Levaster would be swept away to a group of new enemies. Idlers, armchairers, martini wags, curators of the great empty museums (themselves), he called them. Not one of them could hold a candle to Willum Faulkner, Levaster shouted, having never read a page of the man. He drove his Lincoln everywhere, reveling in the hate and avarice of the city, disappearing into it with a shout of ecstasy.

  Then Dr. Levaster met V.T., the Yugoslav sensation, drinking a beer at Elaine’s with a noted sportswriter. Forest Hills was to begin the next day. Levaster approved of V.T. Heroic bitterness informed V.T.’s face and he dressed in bad taste, a suit with padded shoulders, narrow tie, pointy shoes.

  “Who did you draw first round?” asked Levaster.

  “Freench Edwaird,” V.T. said.

  “Edward won’t get around your serve if you’re hitting it,” said the sportswriter. V.T.’s serve had been clocked at 170 mph at Wimbledon.

  “Ees always who find the beeg rhythm. You find the beeg rhythm or you play on luck.”

  “If you beat Edward tomorrow,” Levaster said, “I will eat your suit.”

  But the two men had turned away and never heard.

  He took the Lincoln out to the West Side Tennis Club and tore his sweater clambering over a fence. He slept in a blanket he had brought with him, out of the dew, under the bleachers. When morning came, Levaster found the right court. The grass was sparkling. It was a heavy minor classic in the realm of tennis. The crowd loved French Edward and V.T., the both of them. When Edward hit one from behind the back for a winner off an unseen overhead smash from V.T., the crowd screamed. V.T. was in his rhythm and knocking his serve in at 160 mph. The crowd adored this too. French, who had always had a big, very adequate serve, took up the velocity of it to match the great bullet of V.T. At the end, they were men fielding nothing but white blurs against each other. Edward won.

  For a half second the crowd was quiet. They had never imagined the ball could be kept in play at such stupendous speed. Then they roared. French Edward leaped over the net. Levaster swooned. His head sailed and joined the head of French Edward, rolled and tossed in the ale-colored curls. Then Levaster saw Dr. Word run out onto the grass, his bellowing lost in the crowd’s bellowing. The old man, whose beret had fallen off on the churned service court, put his hand on French’s back. Word looked frail, liver spots on his forearms, his scalp speckled and lined. Levaster saw French turn in anger. Then the both of them were overrun by a whirlpool of well-groomed tennis children and mothers and men who rode trains to work, half of their mental life revolving around improvement of the backhand. Levaster wished for his elegant pistol. He left, picking fights with those who looked askance at his blanket.

  A few years passed and Levaster was almost forty. He opened the clinic in New Orleans again. Then he closed it and returned to New York. Now Levaster admitted that he languished when French Edward was out of his vision. A hollow inconsequence filled his acts, good or evil, whenever Edward was not near. He flew with Edward to France, to Madrid, to Prague. He lay angry and mordant with hangover on hotel beds as French Edward worked out on the terrible physical schedule Levaster had prescribed—miles of running, sit-ups, swimming, shadow-boxing.

  Edward was hardly ever beaten in an early round, but he was fading in the third and fourth day of tournaments now. He had become a spoiler against high seeds in early rounds, though never a winner. His style was greatly admired. A Portuguese writer called him “the New Orleans ace who will not surrender his youth.” The Prague paper advocated him as “the dangerous happy cavalier”; Madrid said, “He fights windmills, but, viewing his style, we are convinced his contests matter.” Yes, thought Levaster, this style must run its full lustrous route. It cannot throw in the towel until there is the last humiliation, something neither one of us can take.

  Then it occurred to Levaster. French had never been humiliated in a match. He had lost, but he had never been humiliated. Not in a single match, not a single game. The handsome head had never bowed, the rusting gold of French Edward’s curls stayed high in the sun. He rema
ined the sage and brute that he was when he was nineteen. There was still the occasional winner off his racket that could never have been predicted by the scholars of the game. Levaster felt his soul rise in the applause for this. In Mexico City, there was a standing ovation for the most uncanny movement ever seen on the court. El Niño de Merida smacked down an overhead that bounced high and out of play over the backstop. But Edward had climbed the fence to field it, legs and one arm in the wire, racket hand free for the half second it took to strike the ball back, underhanded. The ball took a boomerang arc to the other side and notched the corner of the ad court. My Christ, thought Levaster, as the Mexicans screamed, he climbed the fence and never lost style.

  When they returned from this trip, Levaster read in the paper about an open tournament at Vicksburg. Whitney Humble had already been signed up. The prize money was two thousand dollars, singles winner take all. They called it the Delta Open.

  “I know Word has something to do with this. Nobody in Vicksburg ever gave a damn about tennis but him, you Baby, and me,” French Edward said.

  “You should let the home folks finally see you. Your image would do wonders for the place,” said Levaster. “They’ve read about you. Now they want to see you. Why not? I’ve been wanting to go back and put a head-marker on my mother’s grave, though it would be false to what she was. I’ve got all this money hanging around. I get sentimental, guilty. Don’t you ever?”