Separate Flights (20 page)

In the morning he wakes first; early sunlight comes through the window and he goes to it and looks out at the bright snow on the hemlock branches that nearly touch the frosted pane. He gets back in bed. After a while Miranda begins to wake; he feels her watching him, and he turns his head. She is staring at him, the way his children used to stare from their baby beds; he would pass the bedroom door and see Kathi lying on her back, plump fingers rubbing the satin border of her blanket, her eyes staring wide and blank as though her mind were still asleep. Miranda is the only adult he's ever seen wake that way. He is about to speak to her but she closes her eyes and is asleep. When she wakes again he brings her grapefruit juice and they lie warmly and drink.

‘Let's eat lobsters tonight,' he says. ‘I'll cook them.'

She looks away. Her eyes do not leave his but she looks away. It's talent she has.

‘I won't be able to,' she says.

‘Oh. Well, maybe tomorrow night.'

‘I don't think I'll be able to then either.'

‘I thought we had plans for tonight. A movie.'

‘Did we?'

‘I guess we didn't.'

This is the way they end up talking. Miranda has a fiancé; Peter doesn't know why. That is, he doesn't know why, having a fiancé, she began making love with him; or, making love with him, still has a fiancé. Now he knows, and she knows he does, that her fiancé is making some demand; perhaps he called yesterday and asked her to come to Connecticut today. Probably he did, and probably that pressure is why she smoked last night. But Peter can only work with probabilities, with guesses, for the centrifugal force of their evasion takes them further and further from the center of themselves. He lies quietly, feeling the weekend stretching out before him and now in the room demons are about and he turns to Miranda, his touch is gentle and she believes it is gentle, for that is what she needs now; she wants forgiveness and she believes he is giving it to her, but he is not. Not now. He has done that long ago, forgiven her in advance for every betrayal he had already decided to take. It is not forgiveness now, it is not even tenderness, his gentle fingers are wily, they don't show how desperate he is, they stroke away her fear, they draw love to her warm surfaces, joyfully she takes him and he has what he wants: the demons are gone. Yet there is more: demons gone are demons forgotten, and now he is free to watch her face and love her, and she is free too, she feels absolved, her eyes are uncluttered, they are passionate and profound, and she says: ‘I love you, Peter, I love you—'

That moment carries him through the rest of the day; or it helps him do what he must do to get through a winter Saturday. He is a disk jockey and five afternoons a week his voice leaves him and goes into ears he will never know. When he was younger he was an actor. Then he had a son and named him David, and then a daughter and they named her Kathi, and he went into radio. For a while he hated his life, and at night he drank. Then after a couple of months he started feeling good. He started feeling very good. His work was not exciting, but he liked making money and bringing it home to Norma and David and Kathi. He liked having money to go see plays, and he liked not having to worry about being in one. He put on weight and made friends who came over on Saturday nights. This happy adjustment to the possibility of peace coincided with his admission that he had no more talent than thousands of others, and he would have spent his life trying to do
TV
commercials while he looked for work on the stage. For a long time he enjoyed those pleasures that money and family love can bring. But now his family is in Colorado and Norma is married to an affluent man and, though he sends money for the children, they don't need it.

They left last summer and on that morning he woke with a heart heavy and dead, as if waking for the funeral of his dearest friend, and he drank juice and took bacon from the refrigerator and laid three strips in a skillet, but he was trembling and his stomach fluttering and he put the slices back in the package, shoving them curved and folded under the cellophane. He would have had a drink but he didn't want their memory through the years to smell and taste again booze on their father's morning lips. Then he was faint with fear and he breathed deeply several times and got into the shower, his heart no longer grieving as if for another's death: it was his own execution he cleansed himself for, scrubbing under the hot spray, trying to feel and see nothing but his hand and the bar of soap and his lathered and dripping flesh, but he saw himself driving there and he saw them coming out of the house with love and goodbye in their faces and he raged aloud
No No No
, eyes closed and fists swinging at air and spray and then he slipped: his feet gone and arms reaching, one against the flat wet wall, the other toward the handle of the glass door, clutching at it and missing as his head struck the back of the tub and he lay gazing up at the spray that now hit his belly and groin; then he closed his eyes and waited to be knocked out. After a while he opened his eyes and touched his head. A swelling; no blood. He stood up: he was able to. He would be able to shave now, to put on clothes, to drive there, to do it all. Before leaving the bathroom he looked once at the tub where he wanted to lie bleeding while the water struck him hot, then warm, and finally cold while he slept.

The day was blue and warm, the breeze from the east: a beach day. They were waiting on the front steps of the house he had left: plump, red-haired Kathi, her eyes excited and green and troubled with love, eight years old yet Peter knew that as well as her fatherless Colorado mornings and nights and the shyness of stepfather suppers she saw every moment of his waking and preparing which now he mustered himself to conceal. His son was ten, his light brown hair over his ears and down close to his shoulders, near blond from their days at the sea, bony once but now muscles too, his shoulders broad and sloping, and his hand in Peter's was loving, but Peter could feel in it too his separate peace and he knew that because Kathi was a girl he would live in a different way in her memory than in his son's. When Peter left home, David would not help Kathi and Norma help him load the car, and when Peter went inside and kissed him, holding his turning face, he would not leave the house, so Peter went out with Kathi and Norma and kissed them both and started the car; then David came running, it was dusk and in that light he ran gray and without features, then he stooped and picked up something from the dark lawn, he was close to the window now, arm lifting as he ran, his face clear now, crying, shouting
You bum You bum You bum
and throwing something that missed as Peter fled. When they saw each other two days later the boy had accepted Peter's betrayal; he moved back into Peter's love, accepted that too, but his acceptance had about it an aura of manly decision, and Peter could feel his eyes and his touch saying:
You have chosen to go. All right. Then I must grow without you and since there's nothing I can do but accept it, I might as well do better than that: I choose it
. So on the front steps as the three of them sat, the car in the driveway to their right packed for the trip west, David's blue eyes were pained for his father and for himself, yet that pain was muted by his resolve to endure. Holding him, Peter tried very hard to be grateful for that resolve.

Then Norma came out and when she saw them she turned her head and stood wiping her eyes, then faced them and pressed Peter's hand and started for the car. He rose and pulled Kathi and David up with him. They followed Norma to the car. She turned and, looking at some point on his neck or chest, she reached for him, hugged him very hard, patted his back, whispered, ‘Take care,' and had turned and was gone even as he whispered the ‘You too' she never heard. She circled the car and got in and he couldn't see her face till he crouched between David and Kathi, only a glance at her profile, her fingers brushing quickly at her eyes, then he was looking into their faces, and then long hugs and many kisses, tight squeezes till they all gasped, and saying again and again, ‘At Christmas you'll fly out,' then he asked who had first turn in the front seat, it was Kathi, and he picked her up and put her on the seat and buckled her in and while he was doing that David got into the back and buckled his belt. Norma had mercifully started the engine and he leaned in and kissed David and then stepped back smiling, waving, calling out to their mournful and smiling faces to have a good trip, to write him about the trip, to paint pictures of the trip, to send him pictures of the trip, giving them that final image as they drove away, their arms waving out the windows: their father standing erect and smiling in the morning sun, wishing them well.

Then he drove home through tears and again tried to prepare a meal and again could not eat; then he lay on his bed and submitted with curiosity and hope to the rape of grief. He lay there for an hour while the faces of David and Kathi assaulted him. Then he gave up: he could neither die of a broken heart nor go crazy. He got up from the bed, smoothed the wrinkles he had made, took off his clothes, laid them neatly on the bed, put on jockstrap and gym shorts, his heart still heavy as he tied his white leather running shoes, but his blood quickening with challenge and hope; he tied a red handkerchief around his forehead to keep sweat out of his eyes and went outside, and he ran.

It is what he is doing now, wearing a nylon running suit, a windbreaker, mittens, and a ski cap. He is now two miles from home on a road going east from his apartment. He lives in a small town, so already he is out in the country; he runs past farmhouses, country homes, service stations. There are not many cars and most of the time he has the privacy of his own sounds—his steady breathing, his feet on the wet plowed and sanded blacktop—and, more than that, the absolute privacy of his body staking its claim on a country road past white hills and dark green trees, gray barns, and naked elms and maples and oaks waiting for spring: his body insisting upon itself, pumping blood and pounding up hills. Running is the only act in his life that gives him what he pays for. It is as simple as that.

Two and a half miles from his house, at the top of a hill, he looks across the sparkling white meadows, shadowed by trees and barns, and sees the Merrimack and chunks of ice flowing to the sea. Then he turns and starts back. Sweat has turned to ice on his handlebar moustache, he is running against a cold wind that has now frozen a drop of sweat on his freeze-burning cheek, he can see the droplet of ice at the bottom of his vision, one nostril is frozen partly shut, the temperature is around nineteen but the wind hits him with a chill below zero, his jockstrap is frozen hard as a shield at his crotch, and its edges chafe his legs. He approaches a man walking, a man over sixty, beneath his clothing he is wiry, he is walking briskly on the side of the road in boots and corduroys and sweaters and mackinaw, his face is red in the cold, and somehow Peter knows he is not walking to someplace, he is walking to walk, and when Peter is close enough they smile at each other and the man says, ‘I wish I could do that,' and Peter says, ‘You don't need to.' The man's eyes are good ones, and Peter waves and runs on, feeling light-hearted at the sight of the old man with a smile and a fast walk and bright eyes; and against and through the cold wind he runs happily home with aching lungs.

Dusk comes to his rooms before it comes to the sky. He turns on the lights and goes outside and stands on the shoveled and icy sidewalk and watches it come. He is drinking a hot toddy. On the common across the street, where stoned kids sprawl in the warm seasons, pines and bare maples and elms cast their final shadows on the snow. Beyond the common is a white church whose lighted steeple rises above the trees, above everything in the town, and stands against the darkening sky. There is a wide strip of light to the west, but all color has gone with the sun and as he sips and shivers and watches, the light fades and dusk is here, the worst time for the lonely, when sounds are louder and silence has a shape Peter can feel as he walks through it, and when death on a cold wind touches the windows. Then dusk is gone too, night has come dark and cold, Peter looks up at the stars and tries to recall this morning with Miranda, but the memory is cerebral and nothing against the dark. He goes inside and, like his children, he is wary of turning corners and opening closet doors, and he wants to tell his children they are right, that long ago when he told them it was only their imagination he was right too but not right enough, for what they saw yet couldn't see frightened them, and it was real.

He makes another drink and turns the records over, he is listening to Brubeck and Mulligan, and he sits on the bed, looking at the yellow phone on the bedside table. His body is vibrant from his run, he feels strong and able, and he'd better be, for now the demons are here, they are moving in the room, they are waiting. They won't come and get him. Always they watch and keep their distance; when he feels strong they watch quietly, like prone dogs; when he weakens they grow restive, and he can almost hear them. He has learned the rules: they are powerless to close that final distance, they cannot seize him unless he opens his own gates. He picks up the phone and dials the area code of loss, then the numbers of where they live. Norma answers.

‘Are you all right?' she says.

‘Yes,' and he tightens his closed eyes and pictures her in the house in Colorado. She has not changed with the times: her brown hair is cut short, she uses lipstick, she smokes Luckies. She is wearing slacks and a tight sweater, showing the good curves of her body that finally he could no longer touch. He has not seen the house; probably he never will. The children have written to him that it is new and big and has large windows and from the kitchen window they look at mountains. Kathi painted a picture of the house and sent it to him; it seems to be a ranch house. She drew her own face grinning out her bedroom window. Beyond the house a smiling sun shone over the mountains, and a grinning dog stood on the green lawn.