Emperor of the Air (9 page)

“Is the weather always this nice?” Jodi asks. We pull out onto Wilshire Boulevard.

“Almost always,” the woman says. “That’s another thing I love about Los Angeles—the weather. Los Angeles has the most perfect weather on earth.”

We drive out toward the ocean, and as the woman moves in and out of the lines of traffic, I look around the car. It’s well kept, maybe leased. No gum wrappers or old coffee cups under the seat.

“Then you’re looking for a second home?” the woman says.

“My husband’s business makes it necessary for us to have a home in Los Angeles.”

I look at Jodi. She’s sitting back in the seat, her hand resting on the armrest.

“Most of the year, of course, we’ll be in Dallas.”

The street is curved and long with a grass island in the middle and eucalyptus along its length, and each time the car banks, I feel the nerves firing in my gut. I look at Jodi. I look at her forehead. I look at the way her hair falls on her neck, at her breasts, and I realize, the car shifting under us, that I don’t trust her.

We turn and head up a hill. The street twists, and we go in and out of the shade from a bridge of elms. I can’t see anything behind the hedges.

“The neighborhood is lovely,” the woman says. “We have a twenty-four-hour security patrol, and the bushes hide everything from the street. We don’t have sidewalks.”

“No sidewalks?” I say.

“That discourages sightseeing,” says Jodi.

We turn into a driveway. It heads down between two hedges to the far end, where a gravel half-circle has been cut around the trunk of a low, spreading fig tree. We stop, the agent opens Jodi’s door, and we get out and stand there, looking at the house. It’s a mansion.

The walls are white. There are clay tiles on the roof, sloped eaves, hanging vines. A narrow window runs straight up from the ground. Through it I can see a staircase and a chandelier. In college once, at the end of the season, the team had a party at a mansion like this one. It had windows everywhere, panes of glass as tall as flagpoles. The fellow who owned it had played ball for a while when he was young, and then gotten out and made big money. He was in something like hair care or combs then, and at the door each of us got a leather travel kit with our name embossed and some of his products inside. At the buffet table the oranges were cut so that the peels came off like the leather on a split baseball. He showed us through the house and then brought us into the yard. He told us that after all these years the game was still inside him. We stood on the lawn. It was landscaped with shrubs and willows, but he said he had bought the place because the yard was big enough for a four-hundred-foot straightaway center field.

Now the agent leads us up the porch stairs. She rings the bell and then opens the door; inside, the light is everywhere. It streams from the windows, shines on the wood, falls in slants from every height. There are oriental carpets on the floor, plants, a piano. The agent opens her portfolio and hands us each a beige piece of paper. It’s textured like a wedding invitation, and at the top, above the figures, is an ink drawing of the house. The boughs of the fig tree frame the paper. I look down at it in my hand, the way I used to look down at a baseball.

The agent motions us into the living room. From there she leads us back through a glass-walled study, wisteria and bougainvillaea hanging from the ceiling, down a hallway into the kitchen. Through the windows spread the grounds of the estate. Now is the time, I think to myself, when I should explain everything.

“I think I’ll go out back,” Jodi says. “You two can look around in here.”

“Certainly,” the agent says.

After she leaves, I pretend to look through the kitchen. I open cabinets, run the water. The tap has a charcoal filter. The agent says things about the plumbing and the foundation; I nod and then walk back into the study. She follows me.

“I know you’ll find the terms agreeable,” she says.

“The terms.”

“And one can’t surpass the house, as one can see.”

“You could fit a diamond in the yard.”

She smiles a little bit.

“A baseball diamond,” I say. I lean forward and examine the paned windows carefully. They are newly washed, clear as air. Among them hang the vines of bougainvillaea. “But some people look at houses for other reasons.”

“Of course.”

“I know of a fellow who’s selling his house to buy drugs in South America.”

She looks down, touches the flower in her jacket.

“People don’t care about an honest living anymore,” I say.

She smiles and looks up at me. “They don’t,” she says. “You’re absolutely right. One sees that everywhere now. What line of work are you in, Mr. Gordon?”

I lean against the glassed wall. Outside, violet petals are spinning down beneath the Jacarandas. “We’re not really from Dallas,” I say.

“Oh?”

Through the window I see Jodi come out onto the lawn around the corner of the house. The grass is beautiful. It’s green and long like an outfield. Jodi steps up into the middle of it and raises her hands above her head, arches her back like a dancer. She was in a play the first time I ever saw her, stretching like that, onstage in a college auditorium. I was in the audience, wearing a baseball shirt. At intermission I went home and changed my clothes so that I could introduce myself. That was twelve years ago.

“No,” I say to the agent. “We’re not really from Dallas. We moved outside of Dallas a while back. We live in Highland Park now.”

She nods.

“I’m an investor,” I say.

W
HERE ARE WE GOING
? Where, I might write, is this path leading us? Francine is asleep and I am standing downstairs in the kitchen with the door closed and the light on and a stack of mostly blank paper on the counter in front of me. My dentures are in a glass by the sink. I clean them with a tablet that bubbles in the water, and although they were clean already I just cleaned them again because the bubbles are agreeable and I thought their effervescence might excite me to action. By action, I mean I thought they might excite me to write. But words fail me.

This is a love story. However, its roots are tangled and involve a good bit of my life, and when I recall my life my mood turns sour and I am reminded that no man makes truly proper use of his time. We are blind and small-minded. We are dumb as snails and as frightened, full of vanity and misinformed about the importance of things. I’m an average man, without great deeds except maybe one, and that has been to love my wife.

I have been more or less faithful to Francine since I married her. There has been one transgression—leaning up against a closet wall with a red-haired purchasing agent at a sales meeting once in Minneapolis twenty years ago; but she was buying auto upholstery and I was selling it and in the eyes of judgment this may bear a key weight. Since then, though, I have ambled on this narrow path of life bound to one woman. This is a triumph and a regret. In our current state of affairs it is a regret because in life a man is either on the uphill or on the downhill, and if he isn’t procreating he is on the downhill. It is a steep downhill indeed. These days I am tumbling, falling headlong among the scrub oaks and boulders, tearing my knees and abrading all the bony parts of the body. I have given myself to gravity.

Francine and I are married now forty-six years, and I would be a bamboozler to say that I have loved her for any more than half of these. Let us say that for the last year I haven’t; let us say this for the last ten, even. Time has made torments of our small differences and tolerance of our passions. This is our state of affairs. Now I stand by myself in our kitchen in the middle of the night; now I lead a secret life. We wake at different hours now, sleep in different corners of the bed. We like different foods and different music, keep our clothing in different drawers, and if it can be said that either of us has aspirations, I believe that they are to a different bliss. Also, she is healthy and I am ill. And as for conversation—that feast of reason, that flow of the soul—our house is silent as the bone yard.

Last week we did talk. “Frank,” she said one evening at the table, “there is something I must tell you.”

The New York game was on the radio, snow was falling outside, and the pot of tea she had brewed was steaming on the table between us. Her medicine and my medicine were in little paper cups at our places.

“Frank,” she said, jiggling her cup, “what I must tell you is that someone was around the house last night.”

I tilted my pills onto my hand. “Around the house?”

“Someone was at the window.”

On my palm the pills were white, blue, beige, pink: Lasix, Diabinese, SIow-K, Lopressor. “What do you mean?”

She rolled her pills onto the tablecloth and fidgeted with them, made them into a line, then into a circle, then into a line again. I don’t know her medicine so well. She’s healthy, except for little things. “I mean,” she said, “there was someone in the yard last night.”

“How do you know?”

“Frank, will you really, please?”

“I’m asking how you know.”

“I heard him,” she said. She looked down. “I was sitting in the front room and I heard him outside the window.”

“You heard him?”

“Yes.”

“The front window?”

She got up and went to the sink. This is a trick of hers. At that distance I can’t see her face.

“The front window is ten feet off the ground,” I said.

“What I know is that there was a man out there last night, right outside the glass.” She walked out of the kitchen.

“Let’s check,” I called after her. I walked into the living room, and when I got there she was looking out the window.

“What is it?”

She was peering out at an angle. All I could see was snow, blue-white.

“Footprints,” she said.

I built the house we live in with my two hands. That was forty-nine years ago, when, in my foolishness and crude want of learning, everything I didn’t know seemed like a promise. I learned to build a house and then I built one. There are copper fixtures on the pipes, sanded edges on the struts and queen posts. Now, a half-century later, the floors are flat as a billiard table but the man who laid them needs two hands to pick up a woodscrew. This is the diabetes. My feet are gone also. I look down at them and see two black shapes when I walk, things I can’t feel. Black clubs. No connection with the ground. If I didn’t look, I could go to sleep with my shoes on.

Life takes its toll, and soon the body gives up completely. But it gives up the parts first. This sugar in the blood: God says to me: “Frank Manlius—codger, man of prevarication and half-truth—I shall take your life from you, as from all men. But first—” But first! Clouds in the eyeball, a heart that makes noise, feet cold as uncooked roast. And Francine, beauty that she was—now I see not much more than the dark line of her brow and the intersections of her body: mouth and nose, neck and shoulders. Her smells have changed over the years so that I don’t know what’s her own anymore and what’s powder.

We have two children, but they’re gone now too, with children of their own. We have a house, some furniture, small savings to speak of. How Francine spends her day I don’t know. This is the sad truth, my confession. I am gone past nightfall. She wakes early with me and is awake when I return, but beyond this I know almost nothing of her life.

I myself spend my days at the aquarium. I’ve told Francine something else, of course, that I’m part of a volunteer service of retired men, that we spend our days setting young businesses afoot: “Immigrants,” I told her early on, “newcomers to the land.” I said it was difficult work. In the evenings I could invent stories, but I don’t, and Francine doesn’t ask.

I am home by nine or ten. Ticket stubs from the aquarium fill my coat pocket. Most of the day I watch the big sea animals—porpoises, sharks, a manatee—turn their saltwater loops. I come late morning and move a chair up close. They are waiting to eat then. Their bodies skim the cool glass, full of strange magnifications. I think, if it is possible, that they are beginning to know me: this man—hunched at the shoulder, cataractic of eye, breathing through water himself—this man who sits and watches. I do not pity them. At lunchtime I buy coffee and sit in one of the hotel lobbies or in the cafeteria next door, and I read poems. Browning, Whitman, Eliot. This is my secret. It is night when I return home. Francine is at the table, four feet across from my seat, the width of two dropleaves. Our medicine is in cups. There have been three Presidents since I held her in my arms.

The cafeteria moves the men along, old or young, who come to get away from the cold. A half-hour for a cup, they let me sit. Then the manager is at my table. He is nothing but polite. I buy a pastry then, something small. He knows me—I have seen him nearly every day for months now—and by his slight limp I know he is a man of mercy. But business is business.

“What are you reading?” he asks me as he wipes the table with a wet cloth. He touches the saltshaker, nudges the napkins in their holder. I know what this means.